The Oxford Shakespeare: Coriolanus ed. by R.B. Parker

Abstract

meaning as if it were the “grand old game” (121) of baseball, shades into the melancholy clown, a mischievous Mephistophilis. Notwithstanding The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Marx having the stronger grip on Pechter’s imagi­ nation may be Groucho, with whom, when it comes to ideology, he “stand[s] proudly ... as Professor Wagstaff, breaking into song” with ‘“ Whatever it is, I’m against it’ ” (145). Groucho does not float to the surface in the in­ dex, and so — unlike the precisely paginated Karl — presumably lives on, hie et ubique. The “game” may be only a show, as Pechter’s title seems to insinuate: this is not jeopardy but Jeopardy, nor is he out of it. r ic h a r d h illm an / The University of Western Ontario R.B. Parker, ed., The Oxford Shakespeare: Coriolanus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). ix, 388. Illustrated. $107.00 cloth. Coriolanus did not make it into the charmed circle of Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). “[It is] not one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations,” Bradley declared in 1912, lacking the power to make us ask “whether it is not the equal of the four great tragedies.” We “may feel this doubt as to Antony and Cleopatra, but not as to Coriolanus.” Twenty years later, Eliot pronounced the play “with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success,” notoriously offering Hamlet, with its presumed lack of objective correlative, as a contrast. Yet from Bradley’s perspective, it was just this Hamlet-like refusal to explain itself that defined the “major four,” and just this aura of supernatural mystery that Coriolanus lacked. Eliot’s slyly outrageous inversions of Bradley helped reconfigure the canon. He didn’t displace Ham­ let but didn’t have to: always room for one more inside. Shakespearean commentary now focusses consistently on what Bradley saw as a “scarcely popular” and “seldom acted” play. Following hard upon Brockbank’s Ar­ den edition (1976), and heralding two substantial stage histories promised soon, R.B. Parker’s magisterial edition is bound to consolidate Coriolanus’s position at or near the centre of Shakespeare studies. The play’s current popularity may have more to do with Brecht than with Eliot; Coriolanus rides high on our interest in the historical specificity of Shakespearean drama, its involvement in contemporary social and political conflicts. Where Brockbank smiled in passing at such matters under the rubric of “Date of Composition,” Parker reserves substantial space for re­ flecting upon the play’s “Contemporary Background.” He rounds up the usual suspects — the Midlands uprisings of 1607-08, analogies to Essex and Raleigh — but also focusses our attention on hot debates about extending the franchise and changing electoral procedures. The abundance of detail 373 Parker brings together makes a strong case for Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s most insistently topical play. At the same time, Parker never loses sight of the theatrical situation in which such resonances functioned: not to express the dramatist’s politics, but to engage the interests of an audience likely to bring diverse opinions into Blackfriars (the venue for which Parker speculates the play was originally composed) and even more diverse into the Globe. This responsiveness to the play’s theatrical setting is a sturdy presence throughout; as the (here entirely reliable) dust jacket blurb says, “The thorough commentary pays special attention to the needs of the actors and directors.” But more than this, Parker shrewdly connects the play’s theatrical vitality to its verbal power and structural features. Hence the furious intensity yet misdirections of the play’s verse, the action’s obses­ sive reiterations, at once overly and anti-climactic, and the oddly stuttering, stop-and-go exits — all these are shown to be inflections on different regis­ ters of the same dramatic purpose. At a time when textual and theatrical Shakespeareans are trying once again to connect with one another, Parker’s commentary provides exemplary encouragement. Whatever the local accuracy of Bradley’s phrase “seldom acted,” Parker’s discussion of the play’s theatrical afterlife makes it clear that Coriolanus has manifested a remarkable capacity for self-renewal as a stage commodity: “a considerable and very varied stage history, enjoying about two-thirds as many revivals as the...