Coriolanus and the Urban Experience
"The people are the city!" — words oft quoted by those who study the city. While many know the source, the Shakespearian tragedy, Coriolanus (Act 3, scene 1), I wonder how many who quote the Bard have actually read or seen the play? As it has been quite a few years since I last turned the pages of Coriolanus; I decided another reading was called for. I had intended to use these words to discuss a particular idea – one popularized by many who quote Shakespeare to support their ideas about city planning – a rereading of Coriolanus sent me in an entirely different direction.
The Shakespearian director, Mark Cabus, describes Coriolanus as a play about two circles in his notes for the upcoming performance Nashville Shakespeare Festival performance of the play; that it is, two circles, and within those circles, circles within circles. It is these circles that speak to the contemporary city. It is also what makes Coriolanus a play that everyone who is involved in the urban experience should know and explore.
First, however, a quick summary of the play: Set in ancient Rome in the aftermath of a famine which gives rise to the common people demanding the right to set their own price for the city's grain supply. In response the ruling aristocracy, the patricians, grant the plebeians five tribunes, or representatives. This decision provokes the ire of the proud patrician soldier, Caius Martius; a soldier with both contempt for the common class and an aloofness from his own aristocratic class.
While the common people are making their demands, war breaks out with the neighboring Volscians, led by Martius' most hated enemy, Tullus Aufidius. In the campaign against the Volscians, Martius defeats them and takes the Volscian city, Coriolanus. In honor of his feat, Martius, upon his return to Rome, is given a hero's welcome and granted the name "Coriolanus." The Roman Senate offers him the position of Consul, however, to achieve this position, Coriolanus must go out and secure the plebeian vote, something he is not all that keen about doing, although he does do it.
At first, the common people viewing him as their hero-savior gladly agree to give him their votes. Later, though, through the prodding of the two jealous and clever tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius, who consider Coriolanus the enemy of the people, the votes are reversed.
Never having been a very temperate person, Coriolanus is driven to a fury by the reversal and lashes out against the very notion of common rule. Brutus and Sicinius, using Coriolanus' own words against him, declare him a traitor to Rome and drive him into exile. Desiring revenge, Coriolanus makes peace with Aufidius, his former enemy, and joins him in a new campaign against Rome.
The Volscian army marches on Rome, Rome's armies are helpless to stop them, and soon the Volscians are encamped around the city. Rome falls into a panic and sends two of Coriolanus' oldest and dearest friends to plead for mercy before him. When Coriolanus refuse them, his mother, Volumnia, to whom he is devoted, begs him to make peace. Coriolanus relents and the common people of Rome hail Volumnia as the savior of Rome; the very title, ironically, once held by Coriolanus.
Having made peace with Rome on Volscian terms, Coriolanus returns to Antium, the Volscian capital, where he is given a hero's welcome. Aufidius, ever jealous and feeling slighted, declares that Coriolanus' failure to take Rome is treachery. During the subsequent argument waged between the two, some of Aufidius' men assassinate Coriolanus.
It is in the campaign waged by Brutus and Sicinius against Coriolanus that Sicinius prodding the people asks, "What is the city but the people?" To which the people respond, "The people are the city!" — These are words uttered by people rising up against those who would rule over them.
In context, the words of Shakespeare are not some generic statement about the city, or even about the oft suggested idea that the city is a stage upon which citizens display themselves (Allen Jacobs and Donald Appleyard, "Toward an Urban Design Manifesto," Journal of American Institute of Planners, 1987).
Louis Mumford comes close to putting the words in the proper context when he writes, "The city is a theater of social action." Everything else – art, politics, education, commerce, daily activity – he goes on to say, functions only to make "social drama … more richly significant as stage set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the actions of the play (The City in History, 1961)." Yet, even here, the city is the theater, not the people. Jane Jacobs perhaps gets a bit closer with her notion of "street ballet." However, for Jacobs, the performance, rather than the dancers, is the city.
Although commenting about the play itself, Cabus, I think, comes the closest to understanding what the city is all about when he describes Coriolanus as a play about circles within circles. Did not perhaps Shakespeare hint of cities being circles within circles – the people themselves – when both the conquered city and the conqueror, Shakespeare's renamed protagonist, Coliolanus, have the same name?
The circles formed in Coliolanus, while about security, are the people themselves, both in their minds and in their social groupings. Two main circles stand in opposition, the first keeping the forces out; the second, keeping the forces out. This is most obvious when war threatens; nevertheless, they exist between those who are above and those who are below. They also exist between those who give power and those who are in power. In each instances forces standing in a circle on opposite sides of the circle … literal and psychological. Each circle, each side of the circle, is a world unto its self that brokers no compromise.
Coliolanus is also a man. A man who caught in the middle of both circles, struggling with divided loyalties, holds his wife and son close by while seeking to keep outside forces at bay, even to the point of disdain, and in so doing creates his own circles within circles. Ultimately, Coliolanus is Everyman – each of us – caught up in circles of, and not of, our making.
Coliolanus is a play about people who are the city, not people who happen to live in the city. The city – the people – are uneasy. They are disenchanted with the state of the city. They are disenchanted with their leaders. The plebeians are disenchanted with the aristocrats. The aristocrats are disenchanted with the plebeians. All are disenchanted with themselves. Nothing – no thing, no person – is any longer satisfying. Each reacts, driven by whims.
The scholar-monk Desiderius Erasmus comes to mind here. Erasmus caught up in affairs of the city claimed that the city was like a monastery, an ordered existence. Shakespeare's Rome was anything but an ordered existence. There are those today, who like the Roman Senate and Erasmus who would believe that order is imposed from outside rather than from within; that solutions are imposed upon the city, e.g., the people, rather than flow from the masses.
Shouts of "To the Rock! To the Rock with him!" accompanied Coriolanus' exile from Rome. The end of the play arrives with shouts of "Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!" as Coriolanus met his death at the hands of assassins. The danger for us is to hold ourselves aloof, as did Coriolanus, from the struggles of people, of the city.
What lessons are to be learned from Coriolanus? I would suggest the following:
• The ills of the city – the people – cannot be solved by imposing order from without as Erasmus suggests. The patrician attempt to establish a tribunal for the plebeian class only created more chaos.
• The ills of the city cannot be solved through manipulation. The manipulation of the plebeian class by Brutus and Sicinius created nothing but turmoil, even to the of Rome by the Volscians under Coriolanus, the former hero-savior of Rome.
• The ills of the city cannot be solved by the demands – by a sense of entitlement – of the populous. The demands of the Plebeian class only set into motion further problems.
• The ills of the city will not be solved with master plans. The Roman Senate had a plan both for the city and for Coriolanus, neither worked.
• The ills of the city cannot be solved by a hero-savior, whether a person, organization, or Silver Bullet. Although acclaimed as "hero-savior Coriolanus fail, both from his own fault and from the antagonism of others.
• The ills of the city – and this is the most significant one for you and I – cannot be solved by separating ourselves from the city. The ills of the city will not go away because we think, as did Coriolanus, that we are above it all, or worse yet, better than the common folk who are really the city. Beware of doing so; remember how Coriolanus ended up— dead!
Each of these solutions has one thing in common, someone is telling someone else what to do, or expecting others, to solve the problem for me. Even Coriolanus in his aloofness is saying "let others deal with it."
The question remains, is there an answer to the ills of the city to be found in Coriolanus? There is, but it is not to be found in what is there, but is not there:: common concern. In Coriolanus solutions are looked everywhere but within the common need of all the populous, both aristocratic and plebeian. The ultimate solution to the ills of the city will come about only when people who are city, those above and those below, find the will to work together for common cause. Only the people who are the city have the will – and the power – to solve the ills of the city.
Ultimately, the solution begin with me.
©Frank A. Mills, 2009