“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression inCoriolanus

Abstract

Previous articleNext article Free“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression in CoriolanusHarry NewmanHarry NewmanRoyal Holloway, University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWho’s yonderThat does appear as he were flayed? O gods,He has the stamp of Martius, and I haveBeforetime seen him thus.(1.6.21–24)1Speaking in response to the spectacular entrance of Martius during the battle of Corioles, the amazed General Cominius recognizes the enigmatic antihero of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—so bloody that he appears “flayed”—because of his “stamp.” Here “stamp” could mean “physical or outward form,”2 or it may be a reference to Coriolanus’s characteristic stamping of his feet (1.3.34).3 The word, however, also evokes the image of an imprint, casting his wounds as newly stamped impressions.4 Coriolanus’s identifiable “stamp” is the blood that covers him: earlier he enters “bleeding, assaulted by the enemy” (1.4.65SD). The analogy between wounding and imprinting persists in the play, encouraging the idea that Coriolanus is a kind of technological entity.5 In his tribute to Coriolanus following the battle, Cominius refers to “His sword, death’s stamp, / Where it did mark, it took” (2.2.105–6), representing a warrior who efficiently imprints his victims with death. The image corresponds with the protagonist’s later boast that Aufidius “wears my stripes impressed upon him” (5.6.109). But Cominius’s recognition of the “stamp of Martius” indicates Coriolanus also has wounds impressed upon him, violent imprints that mark Martius out as Martius, apparently rendering legible a character that often seems more machine than man.Cominius’s onstage reading of the wounded Coriolanus’s “stamp” provokes questions about what makes a character impressive in early modern theater. Largely ignored in criticism, the play’s persistent language of impression—invoking technologies of sealing, coining, medal-making, and printing—urges a reassessment of the tragedy and especially its dominant main character, whose power to impress in the theater rests heavily on the fleshly imprints he later refuses to show the people in the marketplace. Critics have traditionally focused on Coriolanus’s wounds as interpretable (if unstable) signs of his elusive identity and humanity as a character, whether analyzing the protagonist in psychosexual, sociopolitical, or theatrical terms.6 In an influential essay, Cynthia Marshall focuses on Coriolanus’s wounds to analyze “the specifically theatrical effects that produce an impression of subjective identity and of its fullest dramatic achievement, character depth.”7 For Marshall, “subjective identity” is the operative term, but how might we theorize and historicize the enduring idea that theater works to produce in audiences an “impression” of subjectivity, interiority, or character depth? What is the relationship between Coriolanus’s identity as an inhuman killing machine who stamps and is stamped with wounds, and his theatrical impressiveness as a character capable of conveying an internal as well as an external “stamp of Martius” to audiences? And what might focusing on the transmission of this imprint in the playhouse tell us about the commoditized emotional and cognitive transactions involved in the early modern commercial theater?This article investigates how Coriolanus negotiates the value of the characterological imprint, focusing on its protagonist and his wounded body in order to analyze the technology of theatrical impression in the early modern commercial theater. I argue that the technological concept of the imprint in Coriolanus, inflected by its connections to discourses of character, psychophysiology, and Plutarchan narrative, is integral to the play’s metatheatrical self-reflection on the commoditized human transactions involved in commercial theater, and the formative pressures exerted on dramatic characters by market forces. Through violent resistance to his identity as a reproducible and marketable product of the theater, Coriolanus’s characterological value in performance is paradoxically generated by his refusal to participate in forms of imprinting, exchange, and transaction that gesture toward the theatrical processes necessary for his very existence as a character in the theatrical marketplace. In making these arguments, I show that the play sheds light on critical language surrounding characterization—a term etymologically linked to technologies of engraving, imprinting, or inscription8—and the widespread belief that Shakespearean “character” is a unique brand that both takes and gives the universal imprint of humanity.The article is divided into two parts. The first demonstrates that the play’s engagement with “character” as a word and concept—despite its modern associations with humanity and interiority—is inextricably tied to the impressions involved in material, technological, and commoditized transactions. My argument that Coriolanus participated in a complex discourse of imprinting and character in the seventeenth century sets up the second part of the article, where—focusing on the role of Richard Burbage—I show that the play’s metatheatrical elements force the audience to reflect on an economy of theatrical impression that depends on both Coriolanus’s resistance to characterization and the performance of that resistance by the actor playing him. Looking first at the technology of wounds, and then at the functions of silence during the intercession scene, I suggest Coriolanus’s impressiveness as a character lies not in the revelation of his humanity but in the play’s metatheatrical negotiation of our knowledge that he is a creature marked by his cultural production, an artificial entity crafted to make an impression on audiences conditioned to think they are paying to receive the “stamp of Martius” as part of a contracted transaction.I. Valuing the Imprint of “Character”: Theater, Charactery, CriticismIn this section, I investigate the treatment of character in Coriolanus, by both critics and the play itself, in relation to the historical intersection between the discourses of character and impression. My focus is on the moment of the play’s inception in the early seventeenth century, when—I suggest—character was a new technology of impression in a theatrical culture still coming to terms with its commodification. But that moment needs to be analyzed in light of the larger, ongoing history of character and its relationship to ideas of impression, which started long before the rise of English commercial theater and continues today as critics locate the value of Shakespearean characterization in its capacity to “imprint” minds, hearts, and souls. Addressing critical attitudes to characterization in Coriolanus before turning to the philology of “character” as a term that connects theater to imprinting technologies, psychophysiology, and Theophrastan charactery, I show that the play challenges modern definitions and valuations of character in relation to humanity and subjectivity, and in opposition to materiality, technology and commodification. This contextualization of character in Coriolanus will later be crucial to my argument about what makes the play’s protagonist and his wounds “impressive” in the theater. In particular, it lays the foundations for my claim that Coriolanus’s wounds are not—as is so often claimed—signs of a universal humanity lying just beneath the surface,9 but rather signs of his identity as something other than human, a character conspicuously subject to market forces of early modern commercial theater and especially the imperative to make an impression on paying audience members.All dramatic characters are something other than human in that they are not people but heavily mediated representations, collaborative products (often lucrative ones at that) brought about not just through the technical labor of dramatists and actors, but also “the emotional, cognitive, and political transactions … between actors and playgoers.”10 While it would be a mistake to say that dramatic character has nothing to do with being human, certain scholars have conceptualized characterization in early modern theater as a material and technological phenomenon. Douglas Lanier has argued that in performance, character depended on “the mechanics of exteriority” as the actor worked “to craft and display a set of physical marks … legible to an audience,” and Justin Kolb has addressed “the technical and quasi-scientific process of character creation … as text, properties, and actors were combined in theatrical space to create an automaton, a complex, quasi-human artefact that performs humanity.”11 Our understanding of Coriolanus needs reassessing in light of these ideas, and more broadly the emergence of “new character criticism,” whose productive attention to the philology and historical contingency of character has started to reestablish it as a useful critical concept.12The way in which Coriolanus performs humanity has long failed to impress traditional character critics. Strongly influenced by A. C. Bradley, Harold Bloom laments that “inwardness … vanishes in Coriolanus, and never quite makes it back in later Shakespeare.”13 A few critics have suggested, however, that what Coriolanus seems to lack as a character (whether “inwardness” or something else) is essential to a play that—as Emma Smith puts it—“subjects the notion of character itself to sustained, ironic analysis.”14 Michael Goldman and Cynthia Marshall have interpreted Coriolanus’s inscrutability and unlikability as engaging with questions about how far a character’s “inner dimensions” can be known or accessed by an audience in performance, and Stephen Orgel has shown the protagonist’s relevance to our understanding of the extent to which a character—whether or not he expresses a desire to be “author of himself” (5.3.36)—is bound by his play-text.15 Like Marshall’s concern with the “impression of subjective identity,” Goldman’s conclusion unintentionally brings into play Coriolanus’s language of impression and character’s etymological origins in the imprint: “The communicability of character—as an internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater, something which possesses us, in mind and in body, as an actor’s body possesses us—this is the basic currency of all great drama.”16 Goldman’s metaphors of impression and currency are part of a long, ongoing history of critical efforts to articulate what is impressive about Shakespearean characterization: since at least the Romantics, Shakespeare’s dramatis personae have been identified as making “impressions” on audiences or readers, and even as bearing the “stamp” or “hallmark” of the people and frameworks involved in their creation or enactment.17Ironically, this kind of language may have its roots in antitheatricalists’ descriptions of the effects of performance following the rise of commercial theater in the 1570s, as they decried poetry’s transformation “into a commodity to be traded on the market.”18 Alert to the psychophysiology of playgoing,19 antitheatrical tracts represented actors as characters in a very literal sense: players perpetrated and suffered moral corruption because—like Coriolanus on the battlefield—they had the capacity to impress and be impressed, to wound and to be wounded. In The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Philip Stubbes observes that plays influence audiences because “what thing we do see opposite before our eyes, do pierce further, and print deeper into our hearts and minds, than the thing, which is heard only with the ears.”20 Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) links two kinds of counterfeiting in the “markets of bawdry” that were theaters, acting and producing false impressions: “vice is learned with beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked, and those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to the gazers, which the players do counterfeit on the stage.”21 John Rainolds’s Overthrow of Stage-Plays (1599) asserts that actors were also at risk of wounding and imprinting themselves: playing immoral parts “worketh in the actors a marvelous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate,” and “often repetition and representation of the parts … engrave the things in their mind with a pen of iron, or with the point of a diamond.”22 In other words, actors are characterized by the parts they play as well as vice versa, and all for the profit of theatrical “markets of bawdry.”Whether celebrated or condemned, the technology of impression in the early modern commercial theater is best understood in relation to the history of “character” as a word and a concept, which also illuminates Coriolanus’s remarkable uses of the term in around 1608 when it was first performed. In the early seventeenth century, the figures represented on stage were not “characters” but “speakers” or “persons,” a word derived from the Latin persona, literally a mask used by a player.23 It was not until the 1660s that John Dryden explicitly used “character” to mean a “personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a … dramatist,” although—as I will show—this sense had been gradually emerging for a long time.24 For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, characters were primarily things created through technologies of inscription, engraving, and impression.25 These senses were rooted in the ancient Greek kharaktêr (χαρακτήρ), variously used to mean an instrument for engraving, stamping, or branding, the distinctive marks stamped onto coins or seals (and sometimes wax tablets) to identify types or values, or—by metaphorical extension—distinguishing marks or features of human bodies and language that signified morals and attitudes.26 The term was applied to the literary genre of character writing, pioneered in the fourth century BC by Theophrastus.27 Theophrastus’s Kharaktíres (Χαρακτήρες) was a collection of brief sketches (or “impressions”) of inappropriate social behavior embodied by human examples, such as “the miserly man” or “the flatterer,” not individuals but—like stamps on seals or coins—reproducible types whose “actions are infinitely repeatable, their stories iterative narrations.”28The various meanings of kharaktêr were eventually carried forward into the English “character,” although the word was by no means semantically stable in the early modern period, not least because writers—including Shakespeare—were experimenting with its figurative potential.29 Sensitive to a performance’s “mechanics of exteriority,” dramatists used the word to explore concepts of personhood, particularly the notion that outer marks can signify inner qualities. Early commercial playwrights made much of what could be impressively “charactered” in faces through a combination of verbal description and the actor’s countenance and expression.30 Thus in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part 1, Tamburlaine reads Theridamus’s valiantness in “Characters grauen in thy browes.”31 At first sight, the shipwrecked Viola’s use of “character” in Twelfth Night has a similar function. She makes a moral judgment of a sea captain based on his appearance and behavior: “I will believe thou hast a mind that suits / With this thy fair and outward character” (1.2.46–47). Apparently tautological, “outward character” posits the concept of “inward character,” the invisible imprints made on the mind, heart, and soul by God, nature, experience, and education, like the precepts Polonius instructs his son Laertes to “character” in his memory (Hamlet 1.3.57–58), or indeed the “forms” and “pressures” impressed upon the “table of [Hamlet’s] memory” (1.5.98–101).32 The use of “character” as a metaphor to negotiate between legible external marks and veiled internal impressions suited the theatrical project, a commercial enterprise that often involved projecting psychological depth through a play of verbal and physical surfaces.When Coriolanus was first performed in around 1608, “character” was already being used to mean “the face or features as identifying a person; personal appearance as indicative of something.”33 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is used in this sense in Coriolanus. “I paint him in the character” (5.4.26), Menenius assures Sicinius after his description of the vengeful Coriolanus as a godlike war machine: “The tartness of his face sours grapes. When he walks, he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell and his hum is a battery” (5.4.17–21). As Karen Newman observes, however, Menenius’s prose description is also an allusion to the newly revived literary genre of character writing.34 Early modern character sketches generally consisted of “witty epitomes of representative individuals in relation to their professions, nationalities, idiosyncratic beliefs or presiding temperaments” (e.g., the courtier, the puritan).35 Characters were distinctly printed commodities, both because they were viewed as reproducible impressions of human identity and behavior (“stampes or impressures, noting such an especiall place, person, or office”36) and because they owed their commercial success to the technology of printing. Overbury’s Characters went through four editions in 1614 alone,37 but it was the publication in 1608 (the year Coriolanus was probably first performed) of Characters of Vertues and Vices, Joseph Hall’s translation of Theophrastus’s Kharaktíres, that rejuvenated the ancient genre and diversified the lexicon of “character.” In his preface, Hall styles this kind of writing as “charactery” as he reflects on the moralistic nature of character sketches or “characterisms” composed by ancient character writers (soon to be known as “characterists”): “[They] bestowed their time in drawing out the true lineaments of euery vertue and vice, so liuely, that who saw the medals, might know the face.”38 The metaphor of forging portraits in medals (a relatively new technology in England) reinforces charactery’s etymological connections to engraving and imprinting,39 but it also engages with the concept—essential to dramatists as well as characterists—of what is revealed by features charactered in faces.Faces, however, can be difficult to read. Aufidius fails to recognize the shabbily dressed Coriolanus in Antium, although he sees “a command” in his face, and the point is reinforced by the comic exchange that follows between servants who claim they “knew by his face that there was something in him” (4.5.62–63, 156–61). Menenius mocks the idea that a face can be read for character when rebuffing Brutus and Sicinius’s claim that he is “known well enough” (2.1.44):I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine, with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t; said to be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint, hasty and tinder-like upon too trivial motion; one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning. What I think, I utter, and spend my malice in my breath. … And though I must be content to bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet they lie deadly that tell you you have good faces. If you see this in the map of my microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too? What harm can your bisson conspectuities [blind sight] glean out of this character, if I be known well enough too? (2.1.45–63)Here “character” refers both to Menenius’s own face, the supposed “map of my microcosm,” and to his provocative character sketch of himself as “a humorous patrician.”40 Whatever an audience can glean from either of these characters—the actor’s face and his spoken characterism—will inevitably fall short of the unknowable true nature of Menenius’s identity. However, something emerges from their combination, and his embodied performances of charactery (both here and when he “paints” a character of Coriolanus) translate “character” to the stage in a way that participates in the semantic reshaping of the word in dramatic contexts.Scholars debate the etymological and conceptual relationship between Theophrastan charactery and dramatic characterization,41 but it is clear that early modern dramatists were influenced by the work of characterists. The most obvious place for charactery in drama was the comedy of humors because it dealt in stock types with fixed physiological and psychological dispositions.42 Coriolanus, however, is one of a generically diverse cluster of plays from circa 1606–14 (i.e., before the publication of Overbury’s Characters) that seem to link charactery, satire, and onstage personation through variants of the word “character,” contributing to its development both linguistically and conceptually.43 John Webster, himself a characterist, is particularly notable for the way he creatively incorporates charactery into his plays (in prose and verse) with great sensitivity to the semantic range of “character.”44 Shakespeare, Webster, and others show awareness of the differences—often noted by critics—between charactery (seen in terms of fixity, reproducibility, and reducibility) and characterization (depth, development, and uniqueness),45 but they also suggest a degree of fluidity between the rhetorical performances of characterists and those of dramatists and actors as they worked collaboratively to inscribe legible dramatis personae through authoritative semiotic acts. First performed during the rise of English charactery and the attendant diversification of the language of character, Coriolanus participated in the recoinage of “character” in the theatrical marketplace, helping to give it currency in the playhouse. Underlying this process, however, was an acute and shared awareness among dramatists of the word’s material and technological meanings. Despite the term’s post-Romantic association with humanity and what A. C. Bradley called “the stuff we find within ourselves,”46 dramatists’ metaphorical application of “character” to dramatis personae had the potential to highlight their status as technological entities or inhuman automata designed to make money.Although critics have highlighted conceptual advantages to investigating the philology of “character” and related terms,47 the widespread use of the language of impression in critical discussions (whether or not in response to the etymological link to kharaktêr) is rarely in service of the concepts which this section has shown lie at the heart of the history of character and its appropriation by early commercial dramatists: materiality, technology, and—most significantly—commodification. The “currency” of Goldman’s “internal imprint” may have value in a critical market that privileges the “impression of subjective identity.” However, we need to recognize that, from their inception, early modern dramatic characters were commodities, things inscribed by their exchange value in the theatrical marketplace and—as entities inextricable from the form and content of commercial drama—thoroughly “conditioned” by what Douglas Bruster calls the “representation market” of early modern England.48 Characters’ inexhaustible value—economic and aesthetic—rests in their technological capacity to mark and be marked through transactions, as they are stamped by those who bring them into being (dramatists, actors, editors, and—of course—printers) and make ever-new impressions on those that encounter them (audiences, readers, critics). In order to demonstrate that Coriolanus is an emblem of this process, and to anticipate my analysis of the character’s value within the play’s economy of impression, I want now to consider his “coinage” in and from translations of Plutarch’s Lives.Translating Plutarch, Coining CoriolanusCoriolanus’s participation in a discourse of character and impression sheds light on the play’s relationship to Plutarchan narrative, which—I want to show—has played an important role in the perceived value of the characterological imprint in Shakespeare, and in the theatrical marketplace that Coriolanus self-reflexively represents. If, as I have been suggesting, Coriolanus’s status as a character is reinforced by his identity as one who stamps and is stamped, then it can also be linked to the play’s primary source text, Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (1579), which—as Peter Holland observes—Shakespeare probably consulted in its second edition of 1595.49 Marshall posits Plutarch’s Lives as crucial to “the evolution of the early modern concept of character or subjectivity,” claiming that Shakespeare’s dramatization of Plutarchan narrative established “our culture’s prevailing model of character as one that is at once intensely performative and putatively interiorized.”50 However, if our “prevailing model of character” is not only performative and interiorized but also impressive, then linguistic and visual manifestations of character in early modern translations of Plutarch’s Lives are revealing.Plutarch’s figures were not identified as being or having “characters” in Shakespeare’s lifetime: for North, Coriolanus and the others are rather “persones” or “personages,” terms that suggested theatrical potential. But North’s translation of Plutarch’s reflection on the nature of his project at the beginning of the life of Alexander the Great returns us to ideas of character:My intent is not to write histories, but onely liues. For, the noblest deedes do not alwayes shew mens vertues & vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sporte makes mens naturall dispositions [êthos] & manners appeare more plaine, then the famous battels wonne. … For like as painters or drawers of pictures, which make no account of other partes of the body, do take resemblances of the face and fauour of the countenance, in the which consisteth the iudgement of their manners and disposition: euen so they must giue vs leaue to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde onely.51The term North translates as “naturall dispositions,” êthos, did not come to be translated as “characters” until much later. But the stated mission of seeking out “the signes and tokens of the minde” resonates with plays that negotiate the relationship between inward and outward “character” on the stage, and the analogy of painting or drawing portraits with special attention to “the face and fauour of the countenance” anticipates the project of characterists.52 In John Evelyn’s 1693 translation of the life of Alexander, Plutarch’s aim lies not in seeking the mind’s signs and tokens, but “penetrating into, and describing the secret Recesses, and Images of the Soul.”53 Plutarch here sounds like the Shakespeare being groomed by Dryden in the late seventeenth century, a dramatist with privileged access to the depths of human nature: “Shakespear had an Vniversal mind, which comprehended all Characters and Passions.”54 Shortly before Dryden may have provided editorial services for Henry Herringman during the production of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio (1685),55 he was involved in Jacob Tonson’s collaborative translation of Plutarch’s Lives, the first volume of which was prefaced by Dryden’s own “Life of Plutarch” (1683). This prefatory biography highlights the powerful effects or impressions Plutarch’s penetrative characterizations could produce in the minds of readers. Dryden explains that biography is superior to historiography because “the vertues and actions of one Man … strike upon our minds a stronger and more lively impression, than the scatter’d Relations of many Men, and many actions.” For Dryden, Plutarch’s way of writing sets a moral stamp on readers that they take pleasure in receiving. And the pleasure lies in the intimacy of the encounter: “Here you are led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe: you see him in his undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations … you see the poor reasonable Animal, as naked as ever nature made him.”56 Plutarch’s method of character construction, he suggests, is in fact a stripping away, a voyeuristic intimation of knowledge that oversteps the bounds of privacy, and this is what makes it impressive. It is no coincidence that this process of laying bare an inner or private life is what Shakespeare became celebrated for in the eighteenth century and beyond, or indeed that the Coriolanus of Shakespeare’s play seems so passionately to resist that process. The “stamp of Martius” should emerge and make its mark on us through a process of penetrative characterization, yet this is not the case.The language of impression found in Shakespeare’s play is absent from the “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus,” but like each of the lives featured in North’s book, it is “prefaced by a coin-like portrait.”57 Printed below the title is an elaborately framed numismatic profile of an armored man encircled by the legend “CORIOLANVS PA[TRICIVS] RO[MANVS]” (Coriolanus the noble Roman; see fig. 1).Figure 1. An image of Coriolanus at the beginning of the “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus” in the second edition of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1595), 235. RB 21400, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. www.proquest.com. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThis printed woodcut of a coin or medal stamp—what Plutarch and his contemporaries would call a kharaktêr—provides a visual context for the character Cominius recognizes as having the