Coriolanus (1 of 3)

okay then let me sum up what I said last time with one line from Shakespeare I am more an antique Roman than a Dane those words are spoken by Hamlet's friend Horatio Hamlet is dying in an act that we will eventually discuss and maybe a kind of form of suicide but he's very concerned that his name go down in history untarnished and so essentially as Horatio to stay alive and tell a story and what Horatio says in response to that is I am more an antique Roman than a Dane now what Horatio is saying there is I'm going to commit suicide and he says it by saying you know if I have the spirit of an ancient Roman and the ancient Romans committed suicide in situations like this that's very interesting because obviously Horatio is not a couple of thousand years old he's not an ancient Roman he is a Dane was born in Denmark he grew up in Denmark even though he went to school in Germany college in Germany at Vidhan Bern but he's basically making a point that I'm claiming is fundamental to Shakespeare that there are differences among regimes and what you are is a product of the regime you come from so here's a very fundamental issue and we will examine it a lot of this course suicide and Shakespeare understands that what your attitude towards suicide is is not what we today would call a simple personality trait it's not that some people are suicidal and others are not it's not that some people are depressed and so prone to suicide and other people are optimistic the ancient Romans had a fundamentally different attitude toward suicide you're going to see this all over the place especially at the end of Julius Caesar where they kind of line up to commit suicide you'll see these ancient Romans they're there eager to do it for them it's a matter of Honor there are circumstances in which the continued to live would be disgraceful and it's very much part of the regime it's bound up in their political beliefs it's bound up obviously in their religious beliefs and by the same token Christianity forbids suicide and and and it's we were gonna see Hamlet's fundamental problem almost the first thing he says in the play is that the everlasting had fixed his Canon gainst self-slaughter god forbid suicide you'll see a failure cannot be buried in church ground because people think she's committed suicide so the this very fundamental human issue to be or not to be to coin a phrase hinges in many ways on what Plato and Aristotle would call the regime and the ancient pagans have a very different attitude towards the issue of suicide than modern Christians you will see Macbeth say why should I play the Roman fool and die upon my own sword there - a Shakespearean character saying I'm not an ancient Roman so I'm not going to commit suicide and so this is what I have in mind my approach to Shakespeare Shakespeare is often offered as a universal genius as the man with the most comprehensive understanding of the human condition and therefore of human universals and I would not dispute that but I'll just modify it in this way that for Shakespeare one of the universal principles of humanity is that we all live in particular circumstances there is no such thing as the universal human condition simply and there is a difference between ancient Rome and a modern Christian monarchy and that to understand human nature you have to understand those differences of regime and that's why I'm placing the political at the center of my understanding of Shakespeare in the course it's not gonna limit us I hope it's gonna open up a lot of from perspectives and what I find most remarkable about Shakespeare is his awareness of these differences this awareness is almost what we can define as the Renaissance when you look at medieval paintings of the Nativity for example there's baby Jesus and the wise man and Mary and snow you know it's Bethlehem December so these Flemish primitives think oh yeah must have been snowing it's December and so they put snow in Bethlehem that's not to understand the difference in the human condition what do you put simply as a kind of Geographic difference in the human condition when medieval painters tried to imagine the scenes from the life of Jesus they placed them in something that looked a lot like Bruges or Ghent or some medieval city we can see when people do make that error and my claim is that Shakespeare does not make that error now it is true you'll see in Judah Caesar at one point a clock strikes and there were no mechanical clocks in ancient Rome the Roman pavilions have caps in Shakespeare and they did not in ancient Rome there are trivial anachronisms like that in Shakespeare's plays but on an issue like suicide for example a major ethical issue he understands how the ancient Romans thought about the issue and how they thought about it differently and that's the kind of phenomenon we really examine in this course so we're turning first the Rome plays and let me we've got enough time here for me to give you a good introduction to Rome today and get started on Coriolanus in the course of doing so again to repeat expand a bit what I said last time room loom very large in Shakespeare's world it still looms in our world we have a United States Senate we're gonna be looking at the Roman Senate and Coriolanus many of our institutions still have Roman names a lot of newspapers call them selves The Tribune the Chicago Tribune the New York Herald Tribune a lot of newspapers fashioned themselves as speaking up for the people the way the tribunes did in the ancient Roman Republic our our vocabularies to this day is saturated with Roman concepts this was even truer in Shakespeare's day I mean again we we can still appreciate the immense achievement of Rome in so many different areas but it it looms even larger in Shakespeare's day in terms of architecture people had finally just surpassed Roman architecture in shaykhs in the Renaissance no dome had been built in Western Europe larger than the dome of Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome until the Cathedral of Florence and Brunelleschi's great achievement with that Duomo people were just beginning to surpass Rome in terms of literature again it's hard for us to imagine Greek literature ancient Greek literature looms more in our imagination than ancient Roman literature I would say we today respect Homer more than Virgil generally speaking but in Shakespeare's day Greek was had just been introduced into Western Europe with the fall of Byzantium 1453 Shakespeare probably knew the Ennead the original Latin he would not have known homer in the original Greek the first translations of Homer in English were appearing in Shakespeare's day the ancient Roman playwrights plowed us and Terence the poets Virgil Horace Katella say they were thought of as the pinnacle of literature indeed it was not until Dante wrote the Divina Commedia which is around 1300 that people could offer anything at a modern literature that they felt equaled the greatness of Latin literature a geek comes as something of a shock to us but but as late as the 1590s people were wondering is anyone ever gonna write great literature in English you know okay Dante has done it in Italian but people were actually worried about the English language such an ugly language how can you ever write anything great in English and this is just when Shakespeare is coming along and indeed there's a guy I think his name was Francis Mears who some time in the 1590s wrote a piece worried he kind of showed play-by-play that Shakespeare's plays could equal some of the achievements of the Ancients so Rome loomed large in so many ways culturally linguistically again you could see the grandeur of Roman ruins all over here but above all Rome's political achievement seemed unprecedented this vast empire that the Roman Republic had put together and that the Roman Empire had maintained it seemed extraordinary there were efforts to imitate it this strange institution the Holy Roman Emperor Empire which was kind of a loose confederation of German states under the head of an elected Emperor but it seemed almost inconceivable that one country country had put together an empire of this size the Roman roads were still visible some of them are still visible today some of them were still in use today there were bridges the ancient Romans built that are still in use today so this was the beginning of what we think of as the age of empire against Spain was that the pinnacle of its power during Shakespeare's day the we'll be talking about the Ottoman Empire later in the course when we get to Henry the fifth and especially when we get to a fellow there's no British Empire yet 1607 is the founding of a British colony in Virginia but people are thinking Empire already and when they think empire they think of Rome that's why Rome was very much at the center of political discourse in the Renaissance really at its foundation and that's why again Machiavelli is so important why I'm having to read the discourses on Livy so the great question people are asking and I think Shakespeare is one of them is why was Rome so great and that means fundamentally politically and militarily and the understanding was it was the Republic that it conquered the world now again things are a little confusing in this course because of the ambiguity of the term Empire the Roman Republic created what we call the Empire that is it's the Roman Republic that conquered most of the territory that went to comprise the the Empire so we can talk of the Empire of the Roman Republic the Roman Republic was an imperial power it went and defeated other imperial powers and emerged Wow as they put a turn of the Mediterranean into a Roman lake the other sense of the term Roman Empire is regime of form of government this Roman Republic eventually turned into an empire we're gonna trace that process and the three plays we're reading so Empire would with a small II the Roman Republic had an empire of the small II the Roman Empire with a large II that's the change in government from a government in which many people participated in rule to the one-man rule we're gonna see emerge under Octavius Caesar so I'll give you some rough sense of Roman history here again this is not a course in Roman history in the famous words this will not be on the final we're not gonna ask you questions about Roman history and expect me to have Roman dates in mind and again I'll stress I've no expert on Roman history some of you probably know more about Roman history than I do and feel free in a polite way to correct me if I'm totally wrong on something but I just want to give you a rough sketch of Roman history insofar it bears on these planes and it wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened to you to learn something about ancient Rome if anything it's I think one of the virtues of this course that I think Shakespeare is very useful for us because he was an artist to set out who set out to represent the real world and he did a very good job of it and one of the best ways of studying Rome was to study his roman plays but we'll fill in some background to make that a little easier for you so it took the reef is sketch of Roman history the thing to understand the the two great eras the era of the Republic and the Empire that the Republic is conventionally dated from 509 BC the events and Coriolanus are taking place around 494 BC that's when the tribunes were granted to the people and the Republic lasted roughly 450 years the assassination of Julius Caesar is 44 BC that's where we're gonna make a huge jump from Coriolanus 494 BC to do the Caesar 44 BC but in the sense that we're jumping from the moment when the Republic is founded to the beginning of its end when Caesar comes close to one-man rule in Rome and the conspirators try to stop that and again the beginning of the Empire it's a controversial point some dated from 31 BC which is the date of the Battle of Actium which we'll see at the center of handing Cleopatra some data from 27 BC when the Senate granted what amounted to imperial powers because you don't have to worry about that but again the Republic lasted 450 years roughly the Empire then lasted another 450 years or so on again people debate when to date exactly the fall of Rome in the West but it's sometime around the middle towards the end of the fifth century AD of course then the Roman and already in 330 ad they go off to Byzantium and found these found the eastern empire in some sense the Roman Empire survives to 1453 when Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Turks Gibbons famous book most people think it's the rise and fall of the Roman time it's the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and he traces the Byzantine empires a simple comp as a continuation Rome anyway we're not gonna get much past 31 BC in this course but do understand that roughly two years 450 to 500 years the Republican era and the Imperial era now Rome manufactured for itself a mythical history which pushes its origins back into the 8th century BC I mean if you know Virgil's Aeneid the Romans manufactured the idea that they were descended from the Trojans they wanted to be impressive and so they created a myth that Trojan refugees had found in Rome now it seems historically speaking that criminal refugees founded Rome Rome is famous for Seven Hills to this day the reason people lived on the hills is the rest of the place was a swamp well into the 19th century Rome was a city plagued by malaria and certainly in the earliest days of Rome you basically had these marshes and people lived up on the hill because the air was halfway-decent there and a lot of Roman history is draining those marshes Rome had a fantastic sewerage system early in its history and really the founding of Rome has often been traced to the building of the sewers but anyway what I'm getting at is this was not exactly prime real estate when people happened upon and it does seem as if this this community was a refuge that people went to when they had to escape other places Venice had similar a similar founding again Venice is still part of a swamp and the areas that people were treated to because no one else wanted them so the origins of room are probably pretty low and gods probably were not involved Trojan heroes were probably not involved in the founding the goddess Venus probably didn't have much to do with it but that was their myth but the reality was that it was a kind of a refugee camp and this is of course what toughened up these people and again they made they may basically have been brigands robbers of some sort now for the immediate background of the period we're looking at the key thing is to understand that rome was ruled by the Etruscans now again this is not something they wanted to popularize and their myths and they kind of down downplay the degree but this guy Tarquinius Superbus Tarquin the proud the the king of rome who is expelled in the memory of our characters and Coriolanus he was an Etruscan and it's very important for understanding these plays that rome associated kingship with foreign rule that as we're heading in to the founding of the republic here rome is ruled by foreign kings and the expulsion of Tarquin was not just the expulsion of kingship but a foreign rule of these Etruscan rules now the Etruscans how many youth ever looked at anything Etruscan you know it's it's a fascinating civilization unfortunately there we can't read their writing so that really limits our knowledge of them but there's a great deal of Etruscan sculpture pottery their tombs have beautiful wall painting they're all over Tuscany that's more or less where we're at RIA was focused at his little northwest of what rome room was the southern the more southerly point of Etruscan rule they had beautiful statuary if you're in Rome - great Etruscan museums the villa Giulia and then the Vatican as a magnificent collection of Etruscan are very beautiful bronzes so there's for example the famous capital line Woolf this is the image of the wolf suckling what the Romans called Romulus and Remus that is almost certainly an Etruscan statue which the Romans appropriated to Roman mythology and indeed Roman architecture began as Etruscan architecture that temple on the Capitoline hill which is no longer there it's been replaced by something by Michelangelo so even even trade but but that original temple of that the Romans called the temple of Jupiter that was undoubtedly an Etruscan temple so the the Romans of course like any people invented a mythology that made them look good they didn't want to make it clear how derivative they were from Etruscan culture so I kind of played it down and one thing we're gonna be seeing especially when we get to do the Caesar is that the name of King is hated it wrong you'll see that Caesar toys with the idea of becoming the king of Rome Marc Anthony some of you may know famously offers him a crown a kingly crown and Caesar knows he's going too far that the one thing the Romans will not tolerate is a king now put up with an emperor as it turns out and this is a lesson by the way that Machiavelli picked up on sometimes just rename a thing and you can get away with it but remember the the events of Julius Caesar on more than 450 years after the expulsion of the Kings from Rome but because those were Etruscan kings the sense the monarchy was not just a bad regime to the Romans it was a foreign regime and the hatred of kingship is very much rooted in this historical fact that the Romans in freeing themselves from kingship were also freeing themselves from Etruscan rule any questions thus far okay again I will pause period ah yes well they you know the question is who were the Etruscans I'm repeating this for the TV audience here's the they were another people you know today we say everyone that lives in Italy as an attack Italia in those days there were dozens of tribes or different people's living in the area we call now call Italy and the Romans eventually defeated them all and created a whole out of what's now Italy and indeed defeated just about every other power in the Mediterranean so I don't know how else to describe them they were people they had their own language but we don't know what it is they had a mythology very similar to Greek and Roman mythology they had an Athena figure they had a Venus figure and so on they probably were actually influenced by the Greeks one thing most people don't know is for much of Roman history Greeks lived in what's now the boot of Italy southern Italy was and Sicily were largely Greek during the first three centuries at least of the Republic so there were Greeks living on the Italian peninsula than - they were there were the Samnites and all sorts of different people and so they did have very distinctive form of sculpture and pottery and so on that answer your question yeah yeah yes I yes I don't think there's too much written in Etruscan which is the problem but I know that no one can read trusk it and this is very frustrating it's very know just as an example we have a lot of wall paintings and one thing that's very striking in their wall paintings is women are banquets with men there's a form of etruscan tomb that is man and wife women apparently had at least a somewhat higher status and Etruscan Society than they did in Greek or ancient Roman society and that we can tell from you know images and it's again very striking but we there's not a single 'trust in text that I know of we don't have at Ruskin poetry we don't have the great Etruscan epics and anything like that it's very frustrating but there's a great deal of statuary and wall painting they painted their tombs very beautifully okay again we're not reading Shakespeare's Etruscan plays but there are fascinating people and again if you ever get to Rome or Florence the Florence archaeology museum has a wonderful Etruscan collection the bronzes are extraordinary they are you know full-size bronzes various deities they're almost as good as Greek bronzes so where I lie I we're expelling the turquoise oh so let's talk now about this Roman regime the Republican regime and what made it distinctive and the reason Shakespeare was interested in it and why other people at this time like Machiavelli we're interested in it is this regime is so potent politically and above all it seems to direct human beings towards politics towards political life it's as if you were you're saying if you want to see what brings out the political and human beings check out Rome that indeed is why I think Shakespeare devoted so much of his work this dramatic world to Rome four of his tragedies are actually set in Rome we're not doing Titus Andronicus for reasons I may eventually go into but anyway four out of his 10 tragedies are set in ancient Rome so when the Romans expelled the Etruscan Tarquin Kings they kind of put together on the spot a regime which emerged is what we call the Roman Republic now the Roman Republic was largely an aristocracy to be honest it was largely an oligarchy that is it was ruled by these Nobles men like men idiots and cominius and Coriolanus from families that own land that were wealthy they were noble in the sense that they were noble warriors they were the most prominent men in the community and in many ways at the center of the Roman Republic was this institution we call the Senate so Rome was ruled by a small number of prominent men from noble families the the nasty way of describing it would be it was ruled by a lot of rich people that's why I say you know you can aristocracy means rule of the best in many ways Rome may have been more a plutocracy rule of the wealthy that's certainly the way the plebeians view it in Coriolanus and Shakespeare allows for that view but any case it's the center of the Roman Republic is this Senate you were born into these families these senators are not elected as they are the United States they that's the aristocratic principle that being a senator is something you inherit and people had long family lines you'll see when you get to Judas Caesar Marcus Brutus is still thinking of himself as a descendant of the Brutus who helped expel the Turin Kings back in the fifth century BC or the early 6th century BC and in that sense you can call Roman aristocracy but the way Rome operated was to create consoles or the institution that we call the console eight and so Rome had in the history of the Republic two consuls at any given moment Coriolanus is trying to become counsel in the course of this play it's the central political issue for him and in many ways this institution goes to the heart of what distinguished the Roman Republic these consoles were chosen in effect nominated by the Senate and then they as you see in Coriolanus they had to pass approval by the plebeians they were the executive officers of the Republic and noticed the key here there were always two of them here's the hostility to monarchy and one-man rule the the Roman notion was one-man rule is bad it results in Tarquin the proud and his son raped a Roman maiden Lucretius Lucretia who danke who then killed herself one-man rule produces tyranny we want to man rule we don't want to be dependent on only one ruler now these consoles could veto each other they as magistrates they alternated month by month and they served only one year this if you will was the genius of the Roman Republic especially as Machiavelli understands it you need executive rule there are situations where someone has to make a decision it's a little risky to say they both have to agree remember either one can veto the other but they you can see they wanted to avoid arbitrary rule but they still wanted some form of executive rule and fundamentally the consuls were military generals that's what they had lots of civic functions they convene the Senate they preside all of the Senate things like that but their most fundamental role again as you can see in Coriolanus is military Coriolanus is put up his console because he's such a great military leader and that was the idea this is what Rome enid now again we got Etruscans we had samnites we got Latins we had all sorts of crazy people running around Italy and Rome's got to defend itself and so they need these great generals and that's what qualifies you and that's what you do is council on notice the idea here you got only one year as consul and you can't succeed you can be reelected consul maybe later but not immediately so it puts enormous pressure on the consuls to do something fast to go out and beat somebody beat the vole skis beat up on the Etruscans win some battles so you can become a famous console and so there was a tremendous pressure in this system on the individual consuls to do something big for Rome and that usually meant do something militarily big though it could also be some public works project as well so the system is set up so that it rewards military excellence you want to become consul you got to prove in battle and see that the story of Coriolanus it also puts enormous pressure on the consoles to achieve something fast and of course they're in competition with each other in terms of achieving something militarily the notion behind the consulate was that Rome wanted to have a large stock of experienced executive leaders so would never become too dependent on one man you can already see in Coriolanus the great fear of becoming too dependent on one man it's what the tribunes worried about that everybody's flock and I after Coriolanus now we're gonna be back to one-man rule this way and we'll see how Julius Caesar eventually achieves that by playing the game better than anyone else I had but basic basically the regime is founded on fear of one-man rule having this consulate this dual rule as an alternative to this this was not unique in the ancient world the Spartans had to executive rulers so-called ephors at any given moment the Roman regime was often compared the ancient world to the Spartan regime it's an interesting solution to the political problem and it it both impels individuals to achieve a lot but it also leaves Rome with alternatives and any given moment there'll be lots of men who have been console Ronald Syme in his great book on Roman history called the Roman Revolution I mean he charts the health of the Roman regime by the number of living ex-con souls now you know we make a big deal of it when we have a photograph with five living presidents in it how many living presidents anyway you know they have this picture with Nixon and Carter and forth and you know well that would have been enough to roll and that's what happens when you have only one man as president and it can serve for eight years you don't have that many people who were president around at any given moment the Romans pry themselves right you know it's sometimes upwards of twenty five sometimes forty men who been console and you sort of know well we don't they don't have to do with this council says because there's a good backlog of people we can react this council later this is Machiavelli talks about this a number of points but here this is on page 68 of a tradition it's book one chapter thirty a very important chapter but he's talking about how the Roman Republic is a model for since the whole city both the nobles and the ignoble was put to work and were so many virtuous men emerged in every age decorated from various victories that the people did not have cause to fear any one of them since they were very many and guarded one another there were so many virtuous men emerged in every age decorated from various victories that the people did not have cause to fear any one of them since they were very many and guarded one another that is Machiavelli's understanding the key to the Roman Republican regime you can see how Coriolanus is already threatening it in Coriolanus we will see how Julius Caesar ends this many ruler regime and produces a one rule regime so this institution channels human effort into politics it rewards political effort it rewards it very greatly and it rewards it for many different people it gives you something to strive for it rewards it now Machiavelli though that passage stresses Nobles and ignoble and let me say now something on behalf of the plebeians the the the nobles the the men in the Senate where they work all the patricians but Rome also has this class of the plebeians that the first characters we meet in Coriolanus they are the poor people of Rome they are not slaves I want to stress that Rome had slaves but the plebeians were free people they were in many cases freed slaves but basically they were poor people they were the tradesmen the farmers you know were like a cobbler shoemaker people like that the patricians by and large were the landowners the plebeians were by and large people who didn't low on land now by the way these what I'm saying largely characterizes the early republic again it had 450 years of history over the centuries the plebeian individual poby UNS became very wealthy and you had the paradox of extremely wealthy poor people but do understand the original beginning it's it as you see it in Coriolanus the distinction between patricians and plebeians is the distinction between rich and poor people and especially the distinction between landed wealth and a kind of urban populace who are engaged in the various trades but the plebeians have a role in the government - and that - according to Machiavelli is part of the genius of the Roman Republic for example they get to pass on the men in effect nominated by the Senate to be consul and as we see in Coriolanus he blows it and if you don't treat the pavilions with at least a minimum of respect you will not get to be consul this means that the poby UNS have a say in the regime and of course they then get this institution of the Tribune aid which gives them even a more more of a say they get their own representatives these Tribune's the tribunes against very very complicated exact details of it but the tribunes could on their own convene the Senate they could overrule they could veto the actions of Roman magistrates basically they became the defenders of the people if a person with a plebeian was treated unjustly a Tribune could intervene on his behalf again that's why American newspapers start calling themselves the Tribune because they saw their role as defending the common people of America so yes they were Anisha initially plebeians for much of the history of Rome a patrician could not become Tribune and a plebeian could not become console over hundreds of years that changed and it's one of the ways in which the the Roman Republic was corrupted when beings were eligible to become consul in some ways even more when the the Patricia's were able to become tributes just to jump ahead a bit and we won't look at this in Shakespeare but Octavius Caesar this man who became Augustus Caesar one of his great tricks was having himself made Tribune which sounds like you know why would this great patrician wanna be Tribune but then he could veto things that other aristocrats did and so one of the Roman Emperor to some extent emerged through using the tribunal power but again at the beginning again we're talking about a four hundred fifty year history so it's very complicated but in the period we're looking at which is really the beginning of all this only Patricia's can be consuls only pipiens can be tributes but that's an excellent question thanks for bringing that up so what we're looking at here is participation in politics what's characteristic of this Republican regime is the way it allows everybody to participate in enrollment politics and of course that does not mean slaves and let's never forget that this was a slaveholding society it does not seem to mean women although Shakespeare shows women very prominent in these plays and very prominent in the operation of Rome and Volumnia being a good example of that so technically women couldn't be consul or being Tribune and I we shouldn't forget bad but but so in a way when I'm talking about full participation you know I'm talking about the men in ancient Rome but in any case what you see here is it's not democracy in the modern sense the Roman province after all they have a very limited choice they can't elect one of their own they're dependent very much on who the Senate puts up for consul still there's some sense that they have a say in it and the Tribune is given more of a say of it what I'm looking at here is a system in which every Roman has some stake in the regime again it's not democratic they don't have an equal stake in the regime a lot of people talk about Coriolanus as if it portrays a democracy and that's not at all true it portrays a regime with a democratic element in fact the Roman regime was famously understood in the ancient world as a mixed regime this idea that you can find in Aristotle's politics that is and there's a a Greek historian named Polybius who wrote the most famous account of the Roman regime in antiquity and the way he put it he said if you looked at this and Machiavelli picks up on this and the discourses if you look at the Senate you would think Rome was an aristocracy if you look at the consuls you would think it was a monarchy if you looked at the trivia you'd think it was a democracy but the point was no it has elements of all three regimes it's a mixed regime therefore it's superior see this is again this interesting if you know how many of you know Plato's Republic good sign so you might take a look at that in the course of the semester if you have a chance famously the sequence of regimes in that that monarchy degenerates into tyranny and then you get aristocracy and aristocracy into degenerates an oligarchy and then you get democracy and that generates in the marble the the pure regimes one man ruled many man rule all men rule they were seen as unstable and one of the ideas was a mixed regime might supply the stability lacking and that's sparta was an example that in ancient thinking and rome was held up as a model because it seemed to solve this problem of the degeneration of regimes because it had an element of ease and it had an island an IRC had an element of monarchy had an element of democracy rome is a good example of checks and balances and separation of powers it's why people like Montesquieu thought so much in terms of wrong it's why the founding fathers as you can see in the Federalist Papers were thinking so much in terms of Rome these ideas again separation of powers checks and balances they seem to be worked out in terms of this Roman regime again people are trying to figure out why did this what started out as a little group of robbers in a swamp end up conquering the whole of the Mediterranean world and they looked at this regime and it had a certain functioning power and Shakespeare seems to understand that he he has all these institutions indeed he shows the founding of the tribunes here in this play any questions about that thus far okay let me go now a little bit more into Shakespeare's analysis of these parties enrolled the patricians and plebeians and their relations now again the patricians are what we think of as the nobles they manifest themselves fundamentally as noble warriors Coriolanus seems to be the one they most look up to if you look at page 51 in the great speech that committee Asst gives in praise of Coriolanus this is act 2 scene 2 about line 85 it has held that valour is the chief just chiefest virtue and there you have it I mean this is a community in which valour is held to be the cheapest virtue that is not true of all communities I would be very surprised to hear an American politician get up and say that valor is the chiefest virtue in the United States as opposed to say Compassion's politician would have a lot of problems making that claim unless was that a military funeral this is close to being here but it says something about this Roman community that that that it looks up to its soldiers as the peak of humanity it's one reason it produces men like Coriolanus they're courageous they're almost fearless they're almost foolhardy as we see here and they're dominated by quality alcohol spiritedness it's a translation of a Greek word we need to know to understand Shakespeare's Romans Tomas how many of you have ever seen that term okay we got one here this is are now using Plato's Republic here to understand Shakespeare Owen plays the psychology of that the understanding the soul that Shakespeare presents excuse me that Plato presents in the Republic the Republic talks about three parts of the soul one is reason the rational faculty what as soon as the other is eros now how many of you have seen that word aha this is the problem with our modern world the underst we understand dear us but not Dumas now I can contrast the two and define them that way eros is desire it's the desiring part of the soul it's our appetites it's our sexual desire it's our desire for food it's all the things that we want all the things that we desire the erotic component it's all very strong part of the soul su mas and again I'm gonna try to use the word spirited this to translate it that's the part of the soul that makes people courageous that makes them get angry that makes them get indignant over things it's what soldiers feel in battle it's what athletes feel in competition it's also irrational like eros because it sometimes makes us do crazy things like go into a battle and stay there or run a marathon till we fall over dead at the end that's that's the mas for you and one of the ways you can understand through MOS is this the part of the soul that counter zeros we have desires very powerful desires but sometimes people negate their desires now sometimes that's because rationally they decide to control their desires but sometimes it's quite different look at page 100 in Coriolanus this is the end of act 4 scene 2 it's page 100 about 150 millennia says to Volumnia you'll sup with me and she replies anger is my meat i supper pie myself and soul shall starve with feeding that's FAMAS notice by the way a woman has it there's a certain connection between Tomas and a lot of activities we associate with man like battle and athletics but there are now women warriors and there's certainly a lot of women athletes and Tomas can appear in women just as in men and Shakespeare makes has very thematic women among his Roman women and here's her point anglers my meet she's gonna starve with feeding she rejects this what we think with this very human desire II enjoy yourself have some fun she rejects it because she's indignant and notice she's indignant over a political matter her son has been mistreated he's been politically mistreated and thew boss is very important in Plato it's very important in Shakespeare because it's the part of the human soul that attaches people to cause us at its best or its most useful to mas becomes public spiritedness it's what gets people attached to political causes and again people actually react irrationally in politics you just have to look at some of these convention demonstrations to understand that that's Tomas manifesting itself that is people and that's why politics is so frequently characterized by indignation and anger indignation over injustice again Tomas is at its best or its most useful when people get angry over unjust things and it's very again Shakespeare doesn't use the word though he does use the word spirit quite a bit it is the sense what what makes these Romans so political is their spiritedness and all the institutions they have that direct spiritedness towards politics in some ways the whole Roman Republic is set up so the channel of the thumos of its men and some of its women in political directions now again this is a very interesting contrast in the play if you look at 125 with this is act 5 scene one man it is his speech about going to see Coriolanus this is what he's going to try to persuade him not to destroy Rome what he says seems so odd this is line fifty in Act five scene one he was not he's trying to explain to himself why cominius Coriolanus his old friend wouldn't listen to him he was not taken well he had not dined the veins unfilled our blood is cold and then we pout upon the morning or a nap to give her to forgive but when we have stuffed these pipes and these conveniences were blood with wine and feeding we have suppler Souls than in our priests life fast therefore I watch him till he be died into my request and then I'll set upon him and he's this really sticks with him when he shows up at the Volsky in camp this is the top of page 128 if I've seen two about line 35 he asked the soldiers has he dined canst I'll tell for I would not speak with him till after dinner now man India should have learned a lesson from coral anuses mother from Volumnia who says anger is my meat like mother like son Coriolanus is chock full of blue moss and so you're not going to solve your problem by having a nice dinner with him and serving in wine this is as far I say this platonic psychologies actually stands behind Shakespeare's Roman Plains especially Coriolanus he really does understand characters in terms of weather eros prevails in them or through moss prevails and the thematic characters are the Warriors now well any questions about that yes oh oh yeah logos reason yeah no wonder you forgot that yeah input they're the three parts of the soul or reason or logos you know some to loss by the way in the Greek Shakespeare does not Plato does not use the word zero-sum to Moses episode B and through my days but don't don't worry about that I mean these are just words that make it somewhat clearer and closer to modern English okay now let me show you how this applies to Rome it would be very tempting to say that the plebeian Tsar the party of Eros and the patricians or the party of thumos in rome and in some ways that is largely true but it's ultimately untrue when I'm corrected but let's start with the the false generalization that is generally speaking the plebeians seemed to be the character of characters who are interested in their desires when we see them at the beginning of the play they're complaining about a dearth a famine that they don't have enough grain they say corn at that time and grain it was a general term for grain it wasn't what we now call corn but and they didn't have our corn in ancient Rome and they didn't even have in Shakespeare's England but anyway they're there they're really interested in food and the when they serve in the Army they're very prone to loot they like to pick up stuff after the battle they're very acquisitive or appetitive and of course it's the patricians who seem to be the party of thumb also in the city some ways Coriolanus is their highest representative the patricians think of themselves as warriors as courageous men who ride off into battle and do courageous and even foolhardy things like try to conquer the city single-handedly and so in some ways the conflict between Patricia's and pavilions of the play is the conflict between the spirited thematic Nobles and these erotic plebeians but I just cited Menenius as an erotic character minetti's is the one who's so worried about eating and so worried about whether the body is well-fed and of course it's minetti's who tells the fable of the belly in the story which portrays the senate in a sense in very physical almost physiological terms that the senate is where all the food ends up and this is the subtle aspect of the play that I think it's one way in which I think Shakespeare's very insightful is understanding of the Roman regime you can see the point I think best on pages 38 and 39 so this would be act 2 scene one of Coriolanus now let me stress first of all that this is a conversation between my Nennius the patrician and sicinius and brutus the tribunes and therefore plebeians and this is a very important scene because in a way we see how the Republican regime functions here in a sense we see what greases the wheels of the Roman Republic here and it is the fact that at least one patrician can sit down and talk to a couple of Libyans you're not going to see this again in Julius Caesar and Cleopatra it is a feature of the early republic that this kind of conversation can take place and the political turns it's a healthy conversation it means that patricians and plebeians despite their differences can communicate and in some ways deliberate and in particulars we see in this scene may it try to arise arrive at some kind of compromise now what's interesting is that here the nature's of the characters cut across what appear to be their party divisions that is look at the top of page 39 this is about line 47 Menendez says himself I've known to be a humorous patrician and one that loves a cup of hot wine with not a drop of a laying Tiber in it again when he goes to define himself it's in terms of his appetites by the way as you may know the ancients diluted their wine they mix it with water and they didn't even have distilled liquor so I mean they're diluting alcoholic beverages that are maybe twelve percent alcohol to begin with so when you read about these great drunken orgies in the ancient world nothing compared to the modern world with with hundred proof scotch without ice but anyway so it's but but he doesn't he doesn't dilute his wine but how curious here's a patrician member of what we think is the party of thermo Sonny and he speaks to herself in in terms of eros and then look what he says of sicinius and brutus 969 I'm still on page 39 you know neither me yourselves nor anything you were on Bish's for poor days caps and legs now he's trying to demean their ambitions here but it still means they're ambitious that's the mas again what makes people ambitious is that Dumas you know it's when you beat your chest that the ancient Greeks imagined to Mouse as right in the chest actually in some ways the best translation of the word would be heart or especially guts the ancient Greeks particularly see this in Homer had the sense of whatever the sumo says it's inside your chest and it boils over it wants to get out and anger you know when you when you draw a line in the sand say step over that line that's too much speaking and these Libyans are somatic they're pint-sized through Moloch according to many is but now they are ambitious now it seems to me this is very subtle on Shakespeare's part and shows in a sense how this Roman regime functions it's a mixed regime in another sense that the parties are internally mixed that is if you had a pure party of euros and a pure party of thumos they could never speak to each other the erotic people would be so concerned where their appetites they'd never risk their lives in battle the thematic people will be so concerned with glory and winning battles that like Coriolanus they wouldn't worry about life and limb like Volumnia they wouldn't bother eating achilles is the great image of Thomason ancient Greek literature and his wrath his anger is the greatest Dumas is the great bane of the Iliad by the way thumos is a Homeric word it appears all over the Iliad The Odyssey there's a great dialogue between Odysseus and his tomas when he comes home and is about to fight the suitor is he thinking it out he has a little dialogue with this fool knows how to handle it not to let it go completely and do something crazy anyway what you see here is there are as it were through monic members of the erotic party the tribunes among the people beans and there are onic members among the thematic party the patricians Leichman inea's and that's where the dialogue occurs by the outliers in the party it's I think this is very subtle on Shakespeare's part that the thematic men among the plebeians can talk to the erotic men among the patricians as again without that dialogue the Roman regime is simply at odds with each other so we get a situation here where in a way it's lucky that the parties aren't rationally organized that we didn't say automata guys get over here all erotic eyes get over here because then we'd have an unbridgeable gulf between them on that same page 39 it is interesting in line 55 Bolivia says to the tribunes I cannot call you like kyrgyz's anybody know who Lycurgus was what yeah it was the the lawgiver the founder of Sparta and it is interesting that Shakespeare brings that name up here because what we see in this play is in a sense the fundamental difference between Sparta and Rome that Rome has no lawgiver it has no Lycurgus the way Sparta did as Sparta was famous for having this regime laid out by Lycurgus this constitution in a way spelled out and it was a mixed regime in fact and it was against Sparta was militarily very successful and the regime lasted for a long time what struck people already in antiquity and what especially struck Machiavelli is that Rome managed to have a mixed regime without a Lycurgus now again there's all these legends of the founding of Rome didn't Nia's found Rome did Romulus found Rome kinda sounds it sounds like it the nameless City but that's all legend and in fact what Shakespeare portrays in this play is the truth about the founding of Rome namely that the regime was jerry-built it was thrown together without planning that it involved a number of spur-of-the-moment decisions there was not a constitutional convention after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings and an attempt to sit down and write out a constitution indeed Rome did not have a written constitution and indeed the Constitution by the way cut this Greek word Paulo ter from which we get the word regime can also be translated Constitution the Roman Constitution changed over the centuries and it was always in response to events can you see here the patricia's are not really thinking through the creation of the Trib unit there's a riot rooms faced with foreign problems the prospect of war they feel like gotta get the plebeians back in line and so they grant them this institution of Tribune's notice a very interesting aspect of it the plebeians begin rioting for food and they accept a political institution in place of it does show that there's food moss and all these plebeians in some ways they're more concerned about their dignity than their bellies that's something that gives them a stake in the regime like a tribute that does answer to what's upsetting them so it was very clear to people and thinking about Rome that it did not have the kind of carefully planned regime that Sparta did with a single founder who laid out a constitution this in fact from Machiavelli's point of view was the strength of the Roman Constitution that it responded to events it changed it was adaptable and that's one of the reasons Rome survived for so long and indeed as I've already mentioned you know after several centuries plebeians could become consuls you know imagine if Rome and a written constitution that said nope Levine could ever become consul fundamental what looked like fundamental Roman institutions changed and the Republic still prevailed now by the way the fable of the belly points in this direction I don't know about this diagram here logos is my office phone eros is my phone number and the most is my email address I don't I don't quite mean to put it that way but but in turn this this diagram is pretty good in terms of understanding Plato that in Plato logos is above eros and thermos logos reason is supposed to control the two irrational forms of passion so that in Plato the head reason rules over the body and its passions it's very odd that Menenius offers this fable of the belly it shows something about him it shows something about the Senate it shows something about wrong now the fable is in shakes for your source Shakespeare did not make this up it's right there and Plutarch's life of Coriolanus you can see in the back or your signet addition for that matter it's in Livy's history of Rome Shakespeare had several sources of this fable more elaborate ones that he seems to drawn upon because the account in Plutarch is a very brief of the fable of belly so it's not as if Shakespeare made this up himself but he does dwell on it at length and it it does seem to be a very strange image of politics you would think that in an image of who rules in the body it wouldn't be the ballot it would somehow be the head or maybe the heart the some of the plebeians advertently offer that but from the beginning we see in Shakespeare's portrait of Rome that logos is not exactly the ruling power of the Roman Republic that in fact we've got a city in which eros and through most jostling against each other and in which the institutionalization of the passions is what makes them work not a single governing principle of reason no philosopher kings in Shakespeare's Rome that's not surprising but again it's worth noting that there isn't even a philosopher king at the founding of this role there isn't a a rational planning of this regime we would say it evolves over time yes yeah yeah you see it well again this is a matter of semantics I would try not to say the desire to rule I would try to say the ambition to rule to keep the two things separate now it's complicated and I mean I've you know I've drawn these lines and I've blurted that in many cases already many people are ambitious to rule for the erotic benefits thereof that is all the things you can get once in a ruler and this was very strong in the ancient understanding of tyranny for example that the tyrant was the guy who could sleep with anybody in the city Oedipus being the most famous example thereof and remember that play is called Oedipus Taryn Ellis in Greek so it gets a little complicated because you can say in many people that there's an ambition that really is rooted in eros because what they what they really want is the things that come with rule on the other hand there is a pure form of ambition which you see in people like Coriolanus who say I don't want the spoils from the battle you know I don't want to have a big banquet I just want honor and so again our language can get a little confusing on this and the phenomenon itself can be confusing let's face it you know probably there are an example pure innocent people through Mollison that that especially a lot of people are ambitious for the desires they can still fulfill does this that help you with that yeah yeah again it's largely a question of which words use yes okay that's so much yeah yeah because the other kind of love of the fatherland takes a long time that is yeah the idea that you love your father and you know it's fundamental manifestations you will fight for it it's the classic case of drawing line the sand and it's my country right and wrong and all all those things as well it's not an erotic love now again we you know agree if you could call it Philly in Greek there's another Greek word that's different than that isn't love in the sense of physical desire there I guess the way I mean the pure sin love of the fall Anna's arrow is not eros because you don't wish to mate with your father yeah I wonder which worded use in Greek though is it it is is it oh that's interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah again I you know the way I would try to draw the line is to say that love of the fatherland isn't a desire to mate with it but maybe Pericles had something else in mind I mean yeah yeah okay okay that's a good base there's a real connection between euros and the desire for some form of immortality okay I mean again these are very complicated issues and mere words that kind of just counters an understanding this but in general patriotism is one of the clear expressions of thumos and the goal of most regimes is to attach their citizens to malls to love of the fatherland and to fight for it very guys I'm gonna guess question ah not quite now that's getting a little too philosophical if I could maybe we could talk after class about that because so we really there are in my view both of these have connections to the ideas but that's that's that's gone beyond what we need to do in this in this class I'm afraid okay let me just try to finish up on this point so again in a classic platonic understanding of the regime you would have logos ruling over heroes and through most in in Shakespeare's Roman Machiavelli's Rome you do not the most you do is try to have institutions that can channel these irrational parts of the soul which are necessarily parts of human nature in ways that are politically efficacious or at least not politically catastrophic here's a way it was Shakespeare illustrates this in the difference between the vole skis and the Romans at first you know Coriolanus objects to the creation of the Trib unit he sees it as introducing an irrational element in the regime and it doesn't work out too well for him but it sure works out worse for him in a country that doesn't have Tribune's that is when he goes to the vole skis it's one of the ironies that the play we'll talk about that he claims to be going to a world elsewhere in many ways he goes to a world that's a mirror image of the roaming left and when he finds there is just what he found in Rome and I'm angry mob that ain't him and they tear him to pieces because there are no Tribune's it's not as simple as that it really does not help to be Coriolanus in court it hurts out but but you know it's an interesting fact that the anger of the mob in Rome is channeled in some ways through a political institution through having this Tribune aid which for one thing allows the ambitious men among the plebeian to have an office they can aspire to which allows them to direct the mobs fury in some ways they misdirected they create a lot of problems from Rome but still there's a sense of some element of institutional channeling of this irrational part of the soul worsen in in the land of the vows keys for all its similarities to Rome but has senators for example they do not have Tribune and in some ways you see the danger of that Rome is you know it doesn't have philosopher kings it doesn't try to educate that citizens into philosophers philosophers in many ways it just lets them have their irrational motions but it does the regime does try to channel them in some kind of institutional way it's very again Shakespeare sources are clear using Plutarch's life of Coriolanus and as some of you may know Plutarch's lives are often called the parallel lives and what he does is Paora greek in a Roman Plutarch was a Greek historian writing under Roman rule and he rather cleverly always makes his Greeks look better than his Romans in his lives and it's interesting that the parallel life to Coriolanus is the life of Alcibiades and we don't have time to go too much into how somebody's though we may refer to him but as so you may know Plato wrote a dialogue called the Alcibiades and Alcibiades was the pupil of Socrates and so it is interesting at parallel points in these parallel lives where Plutarch stresses that Coriolanus lacked in education and by the way notice he he has no father Minh India says the best he has we're told several times in the play he was just bred for the wars where where you Tariq stresses the minimal character of Coriolanus and education we had Alcibiades in the parallel life being taught by no less than Socrates now that didn't work out so great in terms of Alcibiades life if you know about him but it does perhaps point to some of the differences between ancient Rome and ancient Greece which Shakespeare may have had mine so just to sum up and we'll end here I'll take a final question so but but what we've been seeing here is the ways in which this Roman regime draws upon human nature the impulses in human nature and channels them in political directions indeed tries to get them to work in positive ways for the city that's why Rome turns out to be so political why political life dominates in the city and why the political life of the city generates this particular form of greatness which is marshal gradeless military greatness channeling the the souls of its citizens in the direction of military conquest okay I'll do any final questions ok we'll stop here you

Channel: Shakespeare and Politics

Views: 14,106

Rating: 4.8167939 out of 5

Keywords: Coriolanus (Play), William Shakespeare (Author)

Id: -76VX0q-Eo4

Length: 80min 9sec (4809 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 19 2014