Patricians and Plebeians

one of the questions that's left unanswered in Korea. Elena's

is how much corn there really is in Rome.

The play starts with food riot by the common people, the Libyans.

They are convinced

that the city Garner's contain enough to feed them all.

What authority surf it's on

would relieve us

if they would yield us. But the superfluidity, while it was wholesome,

we might guess. They relieved us humanely.

In other words,

the city's oligarchic rulers.

The patricians have been holding more than they need,

and the corn they keep from the people just rots uneaten

or so the rabble rousers claim

for the patricians themselves tell a different story.

When Mignini asse Agrippa defuses the situation with the fable of the belly,

unfairly accused of gluttony by the bodily members,

which to which it provides sustenance, he makes the implicit claim

that there is no musty superfluidity of corn,

that the Senate has justly distributed what supplies there are.

Even if the division has not been entirely equitable by our modern standards,

it is the gods,

not the patricians, who are responsible for the dearth,

he says.

So

either there is enough corn to go around

as the first citizen says,

or there isn't

as many, Nea says. One of them must be mistaken

or lying,

but it is never definitively established

which of them it is.

It's partly this unresolved quality

that has made the politics of Corey Elaina's such a disputed issue.

The play's critical and theatrical history shows how

deprived of the lazy certitude of facts,

readers and playgoers will often fall back on the even lazier certitude

of political preconception.

The political right has cited the play as

evidence that Shakespeare was on the right,

believing in rigorous control of the unruly lower orders.

Those on the left have used it as a manifesto for revolution.

Coriolanus has proved to be a kind of glass,

wherein politicians do generally find their own faces.

What I want to suggest, however,

is something closer to Samuel Coleridge is view of the play.

He saw what he described as a philosophic impartiality

in the way it treats the political conflict.

Not being told. The contents of the granary

means that we cannot honestly make a snap judgement

about the rights and wrongs of the situation.

We can only keep an open mind,

but even if we were told,

we shouldn't be able to engage our sympathies absolutely with one side or the other.

By obliging us to reserve judgement

and attend closely to the details of the political interaction.

The play activates a scepticism

which is applied to both patricians and plebeians alike.

For instance,

even if we could know for certain that the patricians were hoarding corn,

it wouldn't necessarily follow that we should accept

the rest of the first citizens claims,

he says.

They think we are too dear.

The Leanness which afflicts us

the object of our misery,

is as an inventory

to particular arise their abundance.

Our sufferance is again to them.

In other words, he alleges that the patricians are being actively malicious

in promoting poverty, the more to appreciate their own wealth.

And his suggestion that the Libyans are thought to dear,

not worth the price of their upkeep

even carries the chilling subtextual suggestion

that unnecessary starvation is seen as an acceptable means of population control.

It's the perfect speech

with which to inaugurate

an anti government insurrection.

It presents the patricians as

monstrous tyrants who are all too clearly incapable

of negotiation and compromise,

and this means that riot, not reason,

must be the remedy for the people's grievances.

But by the same token,

the speech is also a highly melodramatic version of

class conflict whose relation to reality is inherently suspect

even before we meet our first patrician

soon afterwards.

And this

is the amenable Mignini's

known as one that hath always loved the people,

and he presents the rule of the Senate

differently as a kind of benevolent despotism.

But this position is undercut, in turn, in much the same way

by the entry of a further character who again stands in contradiction.

Most charitable care have the patricians of you,

Meninas reassures the mutinous citizens.

But chaos Macias, who will soon win the surname of Corey Elaina's

who now Arrives,

is not the best illustration of the point.

In his first few seconds on the stage, he calls the plebeians, dissensions, rogues,

scabs

and curs.

He says that they are cowardly,

stupid

and unreliable.

He says that it would be abhorrent flattery

to say anything good about them.

This goes on

for 25 verse lines. So in the theatre we have to listen for more than a minute

to a speech that consists solely of rancorous insults

at a minute is a long time in the theatre

masseuses angry to be sure he's angry about the uprising,

and he's angry about the concessions that have been granted,

unbeknown to many areas to quell it.

But even so, his uncontrolled in politics hatred

cannot but stand in support of the first citizens position,

which had previously seemed so extravagant.

So the basic structural spine of the opening

scene is a short series of character entrances,

with each new arrival providing a fresh slant, which serves to qualify

and complicate what has gone before.

The effect is not to push our sympathies around in a circle

frump, Libyans to patricians and back.

That would be to write off Martinez altogether.

The effect is, instead, to prevent us from having any settled sympathies at all.

We are not shown that one side or the other is right

in any absolute sense.

We are shown that both perceptions of the situation are partial,

and that means

it's important for us not to take sides

as we watch this play,

and I'll be talking more about that

next time