The Stripes of Coriolanus: A Democratic Appropriation of Roman Republicanism

Abstract

Inspired by the scholarly work of Paul Cantor and David Lowenthal, this paper argues that the 1981 war-comedy, Stripes, constitutes a democratic appropriation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Drawing on what is arguably Shakespeare’s most political drama, Cantor and Lowenthal argue, respectively, that both Rome and its martial warrior tragically aspire to a wholeness that will always elude them; Rome’s republic depends on a mixing of political classes that presume to be distinct from and independent of the other while the work’s eponymous figure believes he can exist above and apart from the city he alternately seeks to save and to destroy. Because tragedies show the self-defeating flaws that plague their protagonists, they allow us to see the impossibilities such characters represent as absurd. But, in seeing them as absurd, they should also appear as the proper subjects of comedy. Viewed as a democratic reworking of this Elizabethan tragedy, Stripes shows us how the wisdom that allows us to appreciate both the need for and the shortcomings of republican politics, as the scholarship of Cantor and Lowenthal reveal them, may yet be made available without leading us to despair of the possibility a genuinely free and healthy civic life.