If is just as well the frailties and fickleness of human nature are so constant. It has meant that Shakespeare has not dated.
This week Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus is being performed in Canberra by the Bell Shakespeare Company. Coriolanus is perhaps one of Shakespeare’s least performed or read plays. In it Coriolanus, a Roman, wins a great victory against the Volscians and is persuaded by the upper class patricians to stand for the consulship which requires approval by the plebeians. The plebeians’ nominal leaders, the tribunes, successfully urge the plebeians to give their approval. But Coriolanus becomes arrogant, causing the plebeians (at the urging of their tribunes) to seek his death. Coriolanus is utterly obstinate and refuses to compromise despite the pleadings of his fellow patricians. The plebeians banish him. Coriolanus then joins the Volscians a leads them successfully to the gates of Rome. At the last minute he is dissuaded by his mother from the final assault and a peace is made, which does not last long because the Volscians kill Coriolanus in revenge.
It was the last of the Roman plays, and set the tone for Shakespeare’s lesser known Australian play _ Costello.
In Costello, the hero wins a great victory for a patrician confectionery company against the invading union hordes. The patricians persuade him to stand for Parliament. There he obstinately demands all his measures be passed exactly as presented and threatens war if they are not. He ignores the lessons of a fellow patrician who, using compromise, negotiation and charm, achieves great statutes and in doing so shows how women are great catalysts for peaceful negotiation.
Alas, the play is unfinished.
Shakespeare’s other Australian plays _ Hughes and Keating _ also resemble Coriolanus. Hughes, like Coriolanus, swaps sides after being rejected by the fickle masses.
The Bell production of Coriolanus sets the play in the 1930s with fascist overtones _ Gestapo leather coats and tough young men dressed in black and the two tribunes who sway the masses for and then against Coriolanus are portrayed as a couple of 1950s pressmen, but the text is exact. The political constants are there. How does a ruler get anything done in the face of a foolish and fickle mass led on way and then another by an opportunistic media and mass thinking? If rulers have too much power and do not embrace broad opinion they becomes arrogant and achieve nothing, but if they compromise they do not achieve their goal.
The dilemma of Howard, Costello and Reith with the Senate was written about 400 years ago using themes laid out two thousand years ago. The masses are awful, but absolute power is worse and the politician _ whether Roman, Elizabethan or Australia _ who does not recognise it is doomed.