Coriolanus (1924) Yale/Appendix B
APPENDIX B
History of the Play
Coriolanus is the latest in date of Shakespeare's tragedies. The evidence of style and several unusually persuasive internal allusions[1] point to its composition in 1608 or 1609, immediately after Antony and Cleopatra. Of the stage history of the play before the Restoration we have no knowledge whatever.[2] Indeed the earliest positive allusion to it is found in the licensing notice of previously uncopyrighted Shakespearean plays, entered on the book of the Stationers' Company by the publishers of the Shakespeare Folio, November 8, 1628. Here Coriolanus is named first among the eight tragedies 'not formerly entred to other men.' In the Folio of 1623, and the three following Folio editions of Shakespeare, Coriolanus is accordingly printed between Troilus and Cressida and Titus Andronicus. These, with the exception of Tate's alteration, are the only texts of the play published during the seventeenth century.
The manuscript upon which the Folio text of Coriolanus was based appears to have been pretty carefully prepared. The play is accurately divided into acts, though not into scenes, and contains rather full and explicit stage directions. The text is certainly faulty in certain places and the lines are frequently misdivided, but the proportion of error will seem small if one considers the alarming syntactic and metrical peculiarities (those of Shakespeare's last period) with which the printer had to deal. No reason has been found for doubting that the play is wholly Shakespeare's. The text, then, as we have it, would seem to represent a theatre manuscript fully completed by Shakespeare and doubtless occasionally acted by his company, but lacking evidence of the careful revision, abridgment or amplification which popular plays usually received.
Our actual knowledge of the production of Coriolanus in any form begins with 1682, when Nahum Tate adapted the tragedy for the Theatre-Royal under the title, The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth: or, The Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus. Tate attempted to inject contemporary interest into the work by giving it an application to the political troubles of the last years of Charles II. 'Upon a close view of this Story,' he says, 'there appear'd in some Passages no small Resemblance with the busie Faction of our own time. And I confess, I chose rather to set the Parallel nearer to Sight than to throw it off at further Distance.'
Through his first four acts Tate follows Shakespeare with reasonable fidelity. The lines are mainly Shakespeare's, though frequently refashioned, and the chief alteration, apart from very drastic cutting, is the quite new presentation of Valeria as 'an affected, talkative, fantastical Lady' after the Restoration mode. The fifth act is almost pure Tate. It develops Aufidius' Lieutenant (Coriolanus IV. vii.) as a melodramatic villain and renegade under the name of Nigridius, makes Aufidius an unscrupulous though unsuccessful lover of Virgilia, and closes in a riot of horror. In the final scene at 'Corioles' Menenius, Virgilia, and young Martius are all horribly slain, as well as Nigridius, Aufidius, and Coriolanus, while Volumnia goes furiously mad. It is pleasing to remark that Tate's version does not appear to have been a success.
On November 11, 1719, the Drury Lane Theatre produced an adaptation of Coriolanus by John Dennis, which was printed in 1720 with the title, The Invader of his Country: or, The Fatal Resentment. This bad play appears to have been acted but three times. Dennis prefaced the printed edition with an indignant letter in which he expostulated against the unfairness with which the management of the theatre had treated him; but the cast, headed by Barton Booth as Coriolanus and Mrs. Porter as Volumnia, was an excellent one, and the failure of the piece to please is well accounted for by the dulness of the adaptation. The play contains extremely few lines recognizable as Shakespeare's, far fewer than Tate's revision, though it shows less than Tate's originality in inventing new plot devices. Dennis opens with the battles at Corioli and closes with a scene in which Coriolanus slays Aufidius and dies in spectacular combat with four Tribunes of the Volsci to an accompaniment of shrieks and lamentations from Volumnia and Virgilia. The most interesting scene is that of the consular election, where adherents of the candidates, Coriolanus and Sempronius, respectively, act out a lively imitation of an English electoral rally.
The theme of the play was next brought upon the English stage by James Thomson, author of the Seasons, whose Coriolanus was acted at Covent Garden some five months after the poet's death. Thomson's play is independent of Shakespeare's and follows different sources in its treatment of the legend: ignoring Plutarch, Thomson goes to the Roman historians, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for his material. Consequently some of the characters appear with different names. Aufidius is called Attius Tullus, Coriolanus' mother Veturia, and his wife Volumnia. The mere fact that such alterations were possible shows how little the Shakespearean figures were known to the English public of the day.
Thomson's Coriolanus was first acted January 13, 1749, and was repeated some ten times by a very notable cast. The famous Quin took the title-rôle and Ryan the hardly less prominent or heroic part of Attius Tullus, while Peg Woffington played Coriolanus' mother and Mrs. Bellamy his wife. Thomson was the first capable English poet to touch the theme of Coriolanus since Shakespeare. His rhetorical tragedy, presenting various types of nobly sensitive souls as the eighteenth century liked to fancy them, seems to us lacking in reality and in dramatic force; but it is a worthy poem of its peculiar kind. It nowhere challenges comparison with Shakespeare, and would hardly come into the history of the latter's play, if the taste of later producers had not brought upon the stage several strange blends of Shakespeare and Thomson.
The earliest of these is ascribed to Thomas Sheridan, manager of the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, From thence it was transferred to Covent Garden in London, where it was produced first on December 10, 1754. There was more of Thomson than of Shakespeare in this, and Thomson's names of characters were retained. Coriolanus was played by Sheridan; Attius Tullus, Veturia, and Volumnia by the same distinguished performers who had supported those parts in the 1749 production of Thomson's tragedy. The blend of Shakespeare and Thomson, which had proved decidedly successful in Sheridan's version, became yet more so when John Philip Kemble staged at Drury Lane, February 7, 1789, another adaptation in which the greater part of the material was drawn from Shakespeare. 'In this alteration,' the European Magazine said at the time, 'the best parts of Shakespeare and Thomson are retained, and compose a more pleasing drama than that of either author separately.' Kemble's first three acts are wholly from Shakespeare, though much condensed; in acts four and five there is a predominance of Thomson. This piece was many times repeated. Kemble's Coriolanus and the Volumnia of his sister, Mrs. Siddons, are rated among their greatest parts; and it was in Coriolanus that Kemble took his leave of the stage on June 23, 1817.
On June 24, 1820, Coriolanus, with Shakespeare's text restored (as was a little falsely asserted), was performed at Drury Lane by Edmund Kean, whose success in this too statuesque rôle did not equal that of Kemble. Rival performances were given at Covent Garden (beginning November 29, 1819) with the title-rôle in the hands of W. C. Macready, who long continued to act the part. John Vandenhoff (from 1823) gave many successful performances of the play throughout England and Scotland, and Samuel Phelps (from 1848) at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. Other productions of some note in England have been those of James Anderson (from 1851), Sir Henry Irving (1901), and Sir F. R. Benson; but since the middle of the nineteenth century Coriolanus has had no such significance on the British stage as it enjoyed before. It was the special degree in which this play (particularly with the interpolated borrowings from Thomson) fitted the statuesque acting of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons which gave it its impetus. Its stage value suffered when the Kemble ideal of acting gave place to more romantic and perhaps more subtle conceptions.
Thomson's Coriolanus was played at the Southwark Theatre, Philadelphia, on June 8, 1767. The Shakespearean play—that is, presumably, the Kemble version—was first acted in the United States by the Philadelphia Company, June 8, 1796. During the latter half of the nineteenth century the American actors Edwin Booth, John McCullough, and Lawrence Barrett all distinguished themselves as Coriolanus; and the Italian Tommaso Salvini interpreted the part in Boston and other cities during the season of 1885–1886. The American actor who most identified himself with the rôle was, however, Edwin Forrest (1806–1872), whose Coriolanus was perhaps his favorite character and whose statue represents him dressed for that part.
The most notable French production of the play was that of M. Joubé at the Odéon in Paris in 1910. German performances have of late been characteristically numerous, but apparently not otherwise remarkable. In 1920 the tragedy was acted seven times in Berlin and twice at Lübeck. A total of 103 performances in different German cities has been collected for the period between 1911 and 1920.[3]