Ideological Appropriation: The Tragedy of Coriolanus

• Thesis title in Czech: Ideologická apropriace: Tragédie Coriolana
• Thesis title in English: Ideological Appropriation: The Tragedy of Coriolanus
• Key words: adaptace|apropriace|Coriolanus|William Shakespeare|divadlo|film|adaptační proces|ranně novověké divadlo|Anglická revoluce|20. století|PTSD|fašismus).
• English key words: adaptation|appropriation|Coriolanus|William Shakespeare|stage|film|adaptation process|early modern theatre|English revolution|20th century|PTSD|facsism
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2021/2022
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 16.05.2022
• Date of assignment: 16.05.2022
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 19.05.2022
• Date and time of defence: 06.09.2023 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 10.08.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 06.09.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Helena Znojemská, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Proposal for “Ideological Appropriation: The Tragedy of Coriolanus”
William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus certainly belongs among the lesser known of his tragedies in the same way the figure of Coriolanus is less widely known than other titular characters of the Bard’s plays. However, since its publication in the First Folio, the play has developed a history of political appropriation and ideologically aimed adaptation, pointing to a maintained relevance within various political landscapes. The proposed thesis aims to analyse these attempts to appropriate the original text in terms of strategies used in them, the resulting messaging for the landscape in which the attempt was made and the subsequent retroactive assignment of new meanings to the appropriated text. For each attempt, it aims to answer the question of what aspect of the original text attracted the appropriator to it, what changes to the text were made or what conclusions were drawn from it in order to fit the appropriator’s purpose. To this end, the thesis will primarily utilise adaptation theory as delineated by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation to analyse the individual processes of adaptation. The term “appropriation” will be used in both the context of literary and theatre studies, as in claiming a text for one’s own purposes, as well as in terms of cultural appropriation outside the sphere of artistic production.
The thesis is to be split into three chronologically sequenced chapters grouping adaptations by time period and shared characteristics, the first chapter dealing entirely with the English context of the 17^th and early 18^th century, the second with vast ideological appropriations primarily prevalent in the mid-war period of the 20^th century, and the third with instances of assigning the play’s messaging a universal humanist aspect outside of the political system. The innovation of the thesis lies in the treatment of the source material as possessing a plausibly continuously evolving interpretation despite being textually fixed and therefore it is necessary to treat individual processes of adaptation and appropriation as neither isolated nor limited to the timeframe in which they occurred, which is the usual mode of analysis of ideological appropriation. Leaving the possibility that those appropriating the text were simultaneously dealing with the previous attempt at appropriation allows for individual alterations to the text or fixations on aspects of it to be recontextualised as parts of larger prevailing tendencies and strategies which should make themselves apparent during the application of the outlined method on the three selected surges of efforts to appropriate the play.
The examination of the play’s use during and following the reign of the Stuarts can be seen as a prelude to the much more complicated era of attempts at appropriation in the pre-WWII years. At this point in time, the efforts to appropriate the play were still geographically limited to the British Isles and a political system still close to that of Shakespeare’s own time, although highly influenced by the English revolution and development of representational politics. Ideologically, adaptations of the text exist within the bipartisan framework of the English parliament, however it is exactly the fact that opposing ideologies were able to reinterpret the original as supporting their cause which makes this essay a necessary foundation for the examination of the following surges of appropriative efforts. The main sources of this section, apart from the original text, would be Nahum Tate’s Tory rewriting of the play titled The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth and the Whig version The Invader of his Country by John Dennis. This examination also works with theories of the character of Coriolanus being modelled after James I or Robert Deveraux by Shakespeare, as interpreting Coriolanus as a stand-in for a real-life figure might be an influential factor on the adaptational process. Secondary sources discussing this theory are Shakespeare and Tyranny: Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond, edited by Keith Gregor, and Thomas G. Olsen’s article “Apolitical Shakespeare; Or, the Restoration Coriolanus.” Ultimately, it is the play’s conflict between its central character and the people of Rome which is expected to be the attracting factor relevant to the time of appropriation, and which side of the English political spectrum the author of the examined adaptation supported then probably informed whose account of struggle the text presented to him.
The inter-war years are significant due to the sheer number of ideologies attempting to claim the play as belonging to them and, perhaps even more so, due to the arguable success of one of those ideologies, fascism. The question is no longer simply what attracted these contradicting ideologies to the play, but what caused the fascist interpretation to be accepted by their opposition. The answer is expected in the way the diverse ideologies attempted to claim the play as Communists and Marxists, the second most active group of appropriators in this time period, went the route of criticism, which can be seen in the work of A.A. Smirnov, while the Nazis and Fascists implemented it into their culture as evident by incidents like the 1934 Action Française’s attempt at a coup and as discussed by essays like Laura Nelson’s “Appropriating Shakespeare: Coriolanus as Twentieth Century Propaganda.” This section also includes Berthold Brecht’s unfinished adaptation of the play which attempted a Marxist reimagining in the post-war era, when the proto-fascist interpretation was already the widely approved one and thus it had to be taken into accord when adapting.
A tendency which has perhaps been at its most prominent lately is to depict and interpret Coriolanus as politically inactive and to place the source of his tragedy elsewhere which leads to the political system of the play losing its relevance while focus is placed on other features. Today’s interpretation of this protagonist is also far more complex given the newly acquired knowledge of PTSD, as assigned to Coriolanus by psychoanalysts like Richard Waugaman, and recent military conflicts in the Middle East and the Balkans. It is to these conflicts that contemporary adaptations and productions refer to in their visual style as is the case with the Donmar Warehouse production with Tom Hiddleston in the titular role or the Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation. The film version is the only adaptation to be examined in this thesis which is also a result of a transfer between mediums, assigning new meaning to the adapted text, which is left largely unchanged, through the use of language of a war film. However, these recent interpretations have their roots in the adaptation written, but never staged, by John Osborne under the title A Place Calling Itself Rome which, despite being decisively right-wing, introduces certain aspects of identifiable commonality, most prominently the modernisation of stage combat to create a recognisable image of current conflict is traced to this play. Beyond that, mention will also be made to Jonathan M. Sewall’s version from the time of the American Revolution in this section as it can be contextualised as a precursor to the current portrayals as, although Sewall was on the side of the revolutionaries, he used the play as a call to support of the troops and the character of Coriolanus as a human source of sorrow. Ultimately, it is this line of adaptations and interpretations which assign the play a new resonance independent of the ideological discourse which led to the tainting of its reputation do to the fascist’s successfully claiming it.

References

Bibliography
Primary source
Brecht, Bertolt. “Coriolanus” in Collected Plays, Vol. 9: Adaptations. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Random House, 2000.
Coriolanus. dir. Ralph Fiennes. The Weinstein Company, 2012.
Dennis, John. The Invader of his Country. J. Pemberton and J. Watts, 1720. https://books.google.cz/books?id=I5gNAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=cs&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Osborne, John. A Place Calling Itself Rome. London: Faber & Faber, 1973.
Sewall, Jonathan M. “Epilogue to Coriolanus” Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: Library of America, 2014.
Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Edited by Peter Holland. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967.
Tate, Nahum. The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth. Oxford: Text Creation Partnership, 2003.

Secondary sources
Auden, W.H. Lectures on Shakespeare. Edited by Arthur C. Kirsch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Blackwell, Anna. “Adapting Coriolanus: Tom Hiddleston’s Body and Action Cinema. Adaptation 7, no.3 (2014): 344-352. https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apu021.
Brecht, Bertolt. “Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus” in Brecht on Theatre. Edited and translated by John Willett. New Delhi: Radha Krishna, 1978. https://ia601601.us.archive.org/14/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.150164/2015.150164.Brecht-On-Theatre.pdf.
Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Emma Jacobson, The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2019.
Garganigo, Alex. “Coriolanus, the Union Controversy, and Access to the Royal Person.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 42.2 (2002): 335-359. www.jstor.org/stable/1556118.
George, David. Coriolanus: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, Volume 1. London: Continuum, 2004.
Gregor, Keith. Shakespeare and Tyranny: Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge Library Collection. 2009.
Hutcheon, Linda. Theory of Adaptation. Milton Park: Taylor & Francis, 2012.
LaPietra, Diana Marie. “Brecht and Shakespeare: The Coriolan Adaptation.” ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254627973_Brecht_and_Shakespeare_The_Coriolan_Adaptation.
Makaryk, Irena and Marissa McHugh. Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Martin, Randall. Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill Levenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Nelson, Laura M. “Appropriating Shakespeare: Coriolanus as Twentieth Century Propaganda.” ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265625367_APPROPRIATING_SHAKESPEARE_CORIOLANUS_AS_TWENTIETH_CENTURY_PROPOGANDA.
Olsen, Thomas G. “Apolitical Shakespeare; Or, the Restoration Coriolanus.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no.3 (1998): 411-425. https://www.jstor.org/stable/451055
Ormsby, Robert. Coriolanus. Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2015.
Pittman, Monique L. “Heroes, Villains, and Balkans: Intertextual Masculinities in Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus.” Shakespeare bulletin 33, no.2 (2015): 215-244. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26355107.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2015.
Waugaman, Richard M. “A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Character of Coriolanus: The ‘Hen’ is Mightier that the Sword.” American Shakespeare Center. https://americanshakespearecenter.com/app/uploads/2013/10/coriolanus-blackfriars-2013.pdf.