Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994 (review)

Coriolanus is a notoriously difficult play to stage successfully. In John Ripley's thoroughly researched and richly detailed history of the play in the theater, we are allowed a glimpse into why as he walks the reader through almost four hundred years of performances. The fact that the book exists at all is a monument to meticulous and laborious archival scholarship, scholarship that reveals at least as much about the history of theatrical taste and trend as it does about Coriolanus. It is perhaps because of the extent to which past productions were shaped by the political and aesthetic mores of their times that by the end of the book one is left with the distinct sense that all those painstakingly depicted performances were largely inadequate. What makes them inadequate, says the author, varies but seems ultimately to reside in failing to balance the three key elements of the play as he reads it: the political (which is, he contends, pointedly ambiguous), the martial (which defines the title character in ways underscoring his political ineptitude), and the psychological (most conspicuously in the relationship between Martius and his mother).

The play's stage history is, at least in broad terms, fairly straightforward. We know nothing concrete about Coriolanus in the theaters of the Jacobean and Caroline period, and Ripley's chapter on this era is largely a speculative reading of Shakespeare's text. The Restoration through to the midpoint of the eighteenth century staged the play in radically political adaptations, brutally unambiguous and sentimentally heavy-handed, some fanatically Tory (Nahum Tate's Coriolanus: or, The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth), some equally fanatically anti-Jacobite (John Dennis's The Invader of his Country: or, The Fatal Resentment), some less shrill in their politics but even more heavily adaptive of the Shakespearean text (such as James Thomson's "painterly morality" [82], which owed "next to nothing to Shakespeare" [83]). Under Thomas Sheridan and John Philip Kemble, the play eschewed political polemic (though the assumptions underscoring most pre-twentieth-century productions remained distinctly conservative), becoming instead a neoclassical pageant of epic heroism and beau ideal values portrayed by statuesque actors in front of carefully researched antiquarian sets. Sheridan's alternative title, The Roman Matron, indicates the extent to which he shifted the play's focus onto Veturia (Shakespeare's Volumnia) in a production characterized by Ripley as "'rococo classicism'" (97) and by a contemporary critic as "'Shakespear, put into his Night-Gown by Messire Thomson; and humm'd to Sleep by Don Torpedo [Sheridan]'" (108). Kemble became the most dominant actor ever to take the role of Martius, playing opposite the equally monumental Mrs. Siddons as Volumnia for much of his career; and an idealized Rome (complete with triumphal processions featuring hundreds of extras), grand-style acting, and star-centered heroism became the rule for subsequent productions. Apart from an iconoclastically Romantic production by Ralph Elliston and Edmund Kean in 1820, which ran for only four performances, it was this notion of the play—or what it had become—which commanded the stage until the First World War. William Poel's explorations into "Elizabethan Methodism" (240-43) led to several modernistic productions in the early-twentieth century, each utilizing a fuller text and a ludic playing space that strained to escape the ubiquitous proscenium, each attempting to evade the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century as the Impressionists had done in visual art. From the 1930s to the 1950s the play became more conspicuously Romantic (particularly with Olivier in the title role), embracing character (sometimes in overtly Freudian ways) over politics, though some critics interestingly saw familiar faces, such as Churchill's, in Martius's failed attempt to survive in postwar politics. Ripley presents the play as it has been portrayed from the sixties onward as the realm of the antihero, all Romanticism abandoned, most...