Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

The fourteen-year gap at the center of Pericles, like the similar gap of sixteen years between acts 3

and 4 of The Winter's Tale, thus marks the cycle of events, and the redeeming function of the second generation. The plays of romance are cyclical—they celebrate the recurrence of events:

In Shakespearean romance the apparently awkward gap of time allows for the infant to come to maturity.

And what relevance can Freud have to Shakespeare, since he lived so long afterward? Freud read Shakespeare with great attention and interest. He wrote about Macbeth and King Lear and Richard III and The Merchant of Venice and, most famously, about Hamlet. Freud himself is an allegorist and a mythographer, who used Shakespeare's characters as

case studies for his observation of what he came to believe was human nature. It is not, that is to say, so much that Shakespeare is “Freudian” as that Freud was a Shakespearean.

A historicist reading of Pericles would take note of its celebration of the family as a political concept—a concept that glorifies King James and the Stuart royal family, seen as a fertile, “natural” family after the reign of a sterile, “unnatural” Virgin Queen, as the site of authority. The bad family structure of the incestuous Antiochus and his nameless daughter is displaced and replaced through the reunion of the good father and daughter, Pericles and Marina, and the reunion of the good husband and wife, Pericles and Thaisa.

(Followers of the Shakespeare biography trail may wish to note that by this time, in 1609, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna had married and had produced a daughter, the playwright's grandchild.)

the state of mind of the character can almost magically produce “real” effects in the plot. So it is that Pericles, musing on his situation, in effect wishes his father back into existence:

What is perhaps most important to note is that these early scenes set forth the raw material

for what Shakespeare will make of this fable: a tale of rebirth, transformation, and reconciliation.

As in all romances, Marina has an innocent childhood that resembles a pre-fallen state.

As Gower reports in scene 20, the prologue to scene 21, she is a paragon, an almost supernatural woman, with an air of the domestic, who is the

counterpart of the heroic knight of romance:

Like Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Marina is a creator whose arts rival those of Nature. Fittingly, the final stage in the fulfillment of her romantic quest will be the retelling of her own tale to the unknown figure who is discovered to be her father, Pericles. The tale retold is the romantic quester's final task, like—once again—the task of a knight of the Round Table.

The romances often seem to cite earlier plays, and Pericles, a character legendary for his suffering and forbearance, is especially close to King Lear.

“Ooze” is a word that recurs only in the late romances, and in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.

He's father, son, and husband mild; I mother, wife, and yet his child. 1. 111–112

Pericles solved the riddle, and although we may not find it particularly difficult to do so, all those severed heads of failed suitors remind us that, by comparison, he is a good analyst and a good quester.

In Pericles, as in The Winter's Tale, the Proserpina myth is presented in a very straightforward, poetic, dramatic form.

Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget … 21.182

The descended god is never wholly at home in Shakespearean drama, which always takes as its model the human rather than the superhuman. But the Diana episode is both moving and appropriate, and it takes the action where it needs to go—to Ephesus, the place of magic and rebirth.

O my lord [says Thaisa, waking], Are you not Pericles? Like him you spake, Like him you are. Did you not name a tempest, A birth and death?

22.51–54 The simplicity and evocativeness of this bare but eloquent formula are difficult to describe. It is the whole plot of the play.

Coriolanus

Play 33

Like all Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus tells several different kinds of stories at once, depending upon which set of characters and issues is placed in the foreground. In this play the various levels are exceptionally clear, and exceptionally evenhanded, which is one reason why the play has been so successfully staged and appropriated across the political spectrum.

One reading might concentrate on Coriolanus, or Caius Martius, himself, the lone aristocrat, the heroic individual; another might take up the narrative of the common people, the hungry, disempowered “voices;” a third might emphasize the roles of the women in the play,

What has been especially striking about productions and citations of this play is the way it has been appropriated, consistently over the years, as a commentary on a current political

situation, and on issues of morality, ethics, social responsibility, and individual virtue in politics.

In an analogous fashion the corn riots of Coriolanus's own time, 491 b.c.e., feelingly described by Plutarch and cited within the play as a chief complaint of the people, were paralleled, during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, by corn riots in Oxfordshire (1557) and the Midlands (1607).

Pity is an essential Aristotelian element of tragedy, and glory is the fundamental attribute of the heroic history play. The play thus concludes by offering the audience a bifocal choice of sympathies, points of view, and genres.

The play ends in death and in victory, in the ambush and murder of a man whose final flaw was his first yielding to human feelings, who was safe so

long as he regarded himself as a monster without kin or a lonely dragon in his fen.

For this act of simple human recognition he is murdered. It is as if he had to become human so that he could die.

Menenius's fable is central to the play in many ways. It suggests and introduces the language of fragmentation, of dismembering and body parts, that will continue throughout as an emblem of the diseased condition of Rome.

What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent” (257–258). Coriolanus will later address the citizens as “you fragments”—and he himself will be summarily fragmented, banished from Rome.

The play's attitude toward various social stations and ranks—patricians, plebeians, tribunes, consuls, generals—is so deftly managed that, as we have noted, the play is capable of being produced successfully from both

“the right” and “the left,” even though a partisan reading would necessarily be a reductive one. The citizens, whether Romans or Volscians, are portrayed as self-regarding, self-righteous, and vacillating, however just

They are interested only in looting and in spoils. Not only are they cowardly, they are also changeable. First they give Martius their voices, or votes, to be consul, and then, guided by the canny tribunes, they withdraw their support.

I go alone, Like to a lonely dragon that his fen Makes feared and talked of more than seen…. 4.1.30—32

A lonely dragon—a heroic, belated, socially isolated survival of another world. Coriolanus is neither commoner nor political senator. He is often spoken about, seldom speaking.

Coriolanus trusts a code, not an individual, but his trust is similarly misplaced and outdated. He is purer than the world that contains him, a lonely dragon, the repository—for all his

faults and flaws—of a lost set of Roman virtues.

Aufidius feels more passion for this “noble thing” than he did for his bride on their wedding night. Once more, this is rhetoric, not sexual invitation. Yet the line between them is a thin one, as Aufidius's servants note, perceiving the way their master flirts with his guest at the dinner table:

The deepest passions of generals are for their colleagues, and perhaps even for their enemies.

Coriolanus is a complicated dramatic character, the more so because he seems to have uncanny ahistorical similarities with embedded social types of a much later era, like the products of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century British public schools: he is repressed; devoted to authority; committed to male bonding, fellowship, risk, and danger; slightly overpunctilious; impatient or condescending toward perceived social inferiors;

awkward and even unhappy in situations that require small talk, gracious manners, accommodation, compromise, and a show of feeling.

Coriolanus has also been effectively analyzed through the lens of Freudian theory; as Volumnia herself will say, “There's no man in the world / More bound to's mother” (5.3.159–160).

Volumnia, who is the terror of the tribunes, terrorizes Coriolanus's wife, too. Like her son, she is a surprisingly “modern” type as well as a recognizable classic and classical figure: the ambitious mother behind a successful son (who may wind up consulting an even more successful analyst).

In Coriolanus the dyad is not father-daughter but mother-son, and the consequences of obedience, rebellion, and reunion in this case are equally significant. Volumnia urges her son to display his wounds to the people in the marketplace, and he retorts stubbornly: “I will not do't” (3.2.120). Eleven lines later he yields to her will:

he reinstates the filial bond, reconciling himself to his mother in one of those striking scenes of child-parent reunion, like that of Lear and Cordelia, that seem so close to the center of the Jacobean Shakespeare.