Gunter Grass's Rehearsal Play

Abstract

English translation of Giinter Grass's updated Coriolanus, Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising appears in a format widely used in modem editions of Shakespeare's history plays: the text preceded by a critical essay and followed by extracts from sources. In place of a selection from Plutarch or Holinshed, the volume includes a documentary report of the East German uprising of June 17, 1953; and instead of a preface by a Frank Kermode, Grass provides his own delightfully parodic contribution to Stoffgeschichte, The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself. This trifocal arrangement points up Grass's free borrowing from literary and historical sources in a virtuoso display of montage and reportage. Having in his early works, such as Tin Drum, emulated the imaginative plenitude of a Moby-Dick, Grass in Plebeians finds his challenge in working with minimum invention and maximum manipulation of material culled from Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Brecht's adaptation of and commentary on Shakespeare's play, biographical information about Brecht and the Berlin Ensemble, Brecht's plays and poems, and eyewitness reports as well as other documents on the East German uprising. In his Shakespeare lecture that ends with a sketch of his own Coriolanus, Grass defends the theft of literary as practiced by Shakespeare and Brecht: all subject matter is free; let other owners fence in their property, the real estate of the mind is fair game for all. And he quotes Brecht's remark, Obviously the basis of just about