Words, Acts, and Things: Visual Language in Coriolanus

Abstract

W O R D S , A C T S , A N D T H I N G S : V IS U A L L A N G U A G E IN C O R I O L A N U S JEAN MACINTYRE University of Alberta \Joriolanus is not performed as often as other plays of Shakespeare’s matur­ ity and often it is cut, and then costumed, without great heed to its explicit directions about clothes and the actions that go with them. Perhaps this is why its use of costumes, properties, and stage movement has not received much critical attention, nor has its extensive clothing vocabulary. Yet in Coriolanus Shakespeare prescribes costumes and properties meticulously, making them part of the play’s action and expression and calling for more costume changes than is usual for him.1 The reader who ignores the costume directions and the clothing language, or the producer who cuts or alters them, deprives the play of important facts about characters and their deeds that come through dress and properties and the stage movement these require. To be sure, Shakespeare’s directions for costumes do not fully detail style and colour, though he must have written with a wardrobe inventory in his mind. But directions and dialogue do call for specific costumes and prop­ erties — a “gown of humility,” unfinished sewing, cushions, mourning gar­ ments, cloaks, hats, caps, and a garland. They also call for attire not strictly clothing, such as helmets and other pieces of armour, and the nameless Roman loot at Corioles. Many of these articles are connected with values, either what they are worth in themselves or the kind of worth they express. In the first class are the “Irons of a doit,” the doublets that hangmen would / Bury with those that wore them,” some object a looter “took. . . for silver”2 by mistake. These indirectly value the person who carries them, and echo later when Coriolanus, in exile, meditates on the worth of human attachments: “a dissension of a doit,” “some trick not worth an egg” (rv. iv. 17, 21). Such language, the play’s omnipresent “fiscal imagery,”8 extends well beyond clothing, but it remains merely verbal; we do not see doits and groats and eggs, but we do see garments and armour put to practical, often spectacular, use on the stage. In Coriolanus clothing becomes part of the “plot,” not just part of the “thought,” for the gown of humility and the oaken garland not only express value but cause action. Without these garEnglish Studies in Canada, x, i, March 1984 ments the play could not go forward. The same thing goes for the move­ ments of actors on stage; who moves, when, and how, at times causes action and, following patterns more familiar in the imagery of plays, communicates to the audience in ways usually reserved for the spoken word. In Coriolanus the most important class of garments is headgear. What a character wears on his head and what he does with it instantly shows his standing (or value) in Rome, and, it seems likely, in Corioles and Antium as well. Much of the language and action of headgear is likely to be cut in acting versions, usually because our conception of ancient Romans sees them bareheaded, except for heavy helmets with plumes that can hardly be used to gesture with. But to Shakespeare’s audience, headgear and its shape and fabric signaled the wearer’s status in his community; wearing, doffing, or gesturing with it expressed status relationships between the high and the low; and a crown (as many plays prove) held power bordering on the magi­ cal. Accordingly, Shakespeare incorporates the familiar associations of Eliza­ bethan headgear into the political and personal struggles of Coriolanus because of what they would automatically communicate. The social importance of the form and fabric of headgear shows in legis­ lation which we would call industrial or protective. “An Act for Uttering of Caps” (1566) includes a section declaring that “no man under the degree of a knight, or of a lord’s son, shall. . . wear any hat or upper cap of velvet, or covered with velvet.” 4 Another act...