To clinch his election as a Roman consul, Coriolanus has only to master a bit of political theater. Shakespeare's warrior has the support of the patrician class and the military leaders; he has proved himself fearless in battle, magnanimous in victory and unimpressed by flattery. Now all he must do is perform a pro forma ritual: don a "gown of humility" and stand before the plebeian populace, responding to the questions of their delegates, courting their approval, displaying the scars of his many war wounds as testimony to his worth. This public encounter, an early form of the political convention, involves far less theatrical posturing and far fewer inflated balloons than its more recent counterparts. But Coriolanus so scorns Rome's common people that he is powerless on the political playing field. He doesn't just fail, he flails.
The reasons for that failure seem particularly resonant in this political season, which is why it may not be an accident that Shakespeare's rarely produced tragedy is attracting unusual attention. Tonight the Almeida Theater Company of London will present "Coriolanus" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning a two-week run. And it is still fresh in my mind from a strikingly focused staging last month by Tina Packer, the artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Mass.
Ms. Packer has, over the years, created an extraordinary company of players (which will in a few years be acting on the stage of a newly planned replica of Shakespeare's own Rose Theater). She used only nine actors for this production (some playing multiple parts), staging battles and crowd scenes in a small room that was once Edith Wharton's stable. Stripped of pomp and circumstance -- and with a sharply etched performance by Dan McCleary in the title role -- the play became an elegant Shakespearean demonstration of what happens when patrician and plebeian collide, when a world based on breeding and heroism must answer to a world based on equality and representation.
Shakespeare may have been drawn to this subject in the early years of the 17th century because this was precisely the situation developing in England. More and more people were surpassing the minimum income required to vote, while James I was trying to retain the perquisites of royalty. Riots erupted over grain shortages and high prices. A citizen in "Coriolanus" mocks the notion that the patricians are concerned about the common people:
"They ne'er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more statues daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will."
In such a context, it becomes all too clear what an insufferable prig Coriolanus is, scorning the citizenry, comparing plebeians to crows pecking at patrician eagles. And if the crowd does seem a bit fickle at times, or goes too far in demanding Coriolanus's death, he is, after all, a representation of nobility's perversions, a heartless killing machine presuming to fight for honor and nation. The tragedy is that he can't recognize the power of the people for whom he fought.
This interpretation of "Coriolanus" may be the most tempting one for contemporary directors because it most suits our own democratic sentiments. There were times when Ms. Packer, despite her larger vision, italicized these messages, and it will be surprising if the Almeida Theater wields a different political brush.
But the play also has antidemocratic elements, which so endeared it to the Nazis that it was banned in postwar Germany by American occupation forces. In this reading, the "garlic eaters" among the scabby rabble, easily swayed by petty concerns, bring down a virtuous man who is a "flower of warriors," whose nature is, as a friend proclaims, "too noble for the world." The tragedy here is that the worst of the people topple the best of the nobility.
We may tend to recoil from this view, yet perhaps we should not just bury this noble Caesar but also praise him. For both of these visions of "Coriolanus" are true. Indeed, the play is about tensions that continue to exist between democratic taste and elite sensibility in American culture. Coriolanus's bravery, his lack of selfishness, his allegiance to an ideal of nobility are inseparable from his contempt for the commonplace. The people's human needs and just claims are inseparable from their wary distrust of higher aspirations. This is one reason the issue of political theater becomes so crucial in the play: in a democratic universe, it is a way in which each pole grants recognition to the other.
This is vastly different from the political imagery in Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, written just a few years earlier: "King Lear," "Hamlet," "Macbeth," even "Anthony and Cleopatra." In those plays, the characters are still nestled in patrician worlds. The issues are not the nature of nobility in a democratic world but the nature of political power in a patrician one. How is authority to be wielded? How is succession to be guaranteed? How can private desires be reconciled with public responsibilities? But with "Coriolanus," Shakespeare has moved on. The populace here is not the crowd of "Julius Caesar"; for all its flaws, it possesses a powerful voice in the future state.
This may also be a reason that Shakespeare's conception of character changed. Harold Bloom, in his recent "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," points out that in the great tragedies Shakespeare created the modern soul, racked by internal debates and mercurial sentiments. Yet the hero in "Coriolanus" seems to have no inner life whatsoever. It is almost irrelevant what he feels or thinks; the only issue is how he acts (and acts in all senses). The conflict is no longer internal to the character but external; the boundaries of the political universe have changed.
For better and worse, that universe is also our own. We require theater but expect sincerity, seek equality but long for nobility, disdaining what we also demand.