`Coriolanus' on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994.

`Coriolanus' on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994. By John Ripley. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 1998. 431 pp. 45 [pounds sterling].

John Ripley begins with the remark that Shakespeare's Coriolanus `is not a comfortable play' (p. 13). On the same page he quotes Eric Bentley: it is `the struggle of wrong and wrong'. `The stage history', he writes, `is driven by the theater's conviction that the play is flawed' (p. 334). Coriolanus is, however, a play that is unusually able to reflect cultural sub-texts. Productions of Shakespeare always make a commentary on the ideologies of the times: the Augustans re-wrote the plays wholesale to rescue the Bard from barbarism: Edwardians, using fuller texts, found Freud everywhere. Shakespeare's even-handedness with politics in this play, Ripley shows, was too much for most theatres and critics down the centuries, who relieved their difficulties by making the drama speak for one or other political wing. Interacting with that was a desire to make it theatrically satisfying. He is riveting on the importance of John Philip Kemble, whose lavish production values and portrayal of Martius (with Mrs Siddons as a great Volumnia) dominated English and American productions for a century. He gives forty pages to Kemble's production, though he understands that it was governed by the `beau ideal grandeur' (p. 339) of the nineteenth-century ideas of Rome.

The history is well done. Modern understandings of Martius stem from A. C. Bradley's second thoughts, which showed him as a mother-dominated child, and led to new character analysis. Two of the most valuable elements of this book, however, are first, the `performance score' which Ripley gives in sixteen pages in Chapter 2: and an afterword, where in short space he does something of unusual importance. In spite of the outstanding successes of Kemble's Coriolanus as history painting, or Olivier (twice) as Martius, or Alan Howard's `epic conception' of Martius prompting `a response little short of awe' (p. 322), maybe, he remarks, the play `is defective, the product of the playwright's failing powers, an [sic] miscalculated attempt to stretch the resources in theater and audience too far' (p. 334). Yet he yearns for some management's assumption, for once, `that the play has a calculated aesthetic, however unconventional' (p. 334), and the devotion of the resources of a major company to its exploration. Play-goers, he notes `will not go home happy at curtain fall' (p. 334), but that does not mean that they will be dissatisfied. Working from a recognition that the play `privileges overdeterminacy and indeterminacy' (p. 335), he outlines possibilities of production which could show how much Shakespeare knew what he was doing, beyond a recognition yet achieved. These dense pages are some of the best work on the play yet done, especially as they show how delicate the balances are, and how disastrous even minor cuts or bits of stage business can be. He observes, interestingly, that alterations, however slight, generally tend to give the politics a `patrician coloration' (p. 338). A central understanding here is about the importance of battlefield conflicts, into which context the mother-son theme, and other things, have to be set. Martius is a `man in blood', and must be shown so, not simply with a tasteful stain on one cheek.

That the play has always been a puzzle may indeed mean that Shakespeare was greater than any interpreter since. This is a salutary insight, and it makes this thoroughly well-documented and readable book more compelling than stage-histories sometimes are. His solid and thorough survey of the theatrical and critical history of the play from 1605 is the best that we have to date: but the book is more than the sum of these parts.

DAVID DANIELL
HERTFORD COLLEGE, OXFORD