Play Reading Roundup: Dark Underrated Shakespeare I Won't Shut Up About
Tom Hiddleston & company in the 2014 Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus.
Live entertainment and mass social events are returning, which means that people I haven’t seen in 18+ months are asking me “What did you do during the pandemic?”, or even “What positive thing came about for you because of the pandemic?” Fortunately, I have a pretty convenient answer to these questions (even if it sometimes feels glib): “I read the complete works of Shakespeare.” Unfortunately, the follow-up to that is usually “Oh, so what’s your favorite Shakespeare play?”
And then that’s where I pivot the conversation and say “Actually, can I tell you what I think are his most underrated plays? The plays I read for the first time because of this project and now want to discuss with everybody I meet?”
Because, look, we all know that plays like Hamlet and Much Ado are brilliant, culture-defining, genre-defining, trope-defining works; we’ve all been exposed, perhaps even overexposed, to their genius. But I’ve come out of my Shakespeare-reading project with the blazing conviction that not enough people have been exposed to the dark, complex, conflicted genius of Coriolanus and Measure for Measure, and now I just want to shout about them with long-lost friends and blog-reading Internet strangers alike.
(And for those of you whose follow-up question is instead “Oh, so what’s his worst play?” — I do like this question and I like the way you think. Also, the answer is either Two Gentlemen of Verona or Henry VIII depending on how I feel that day.)
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My first-ever exposure to Coriolanus came early in the coronavirus pandemic, when I streamed the NT Live/Donmar Warehouse production. At that time, I empathized with the plebeians and their plainspoken tribunes, who recognize that Coriolanus is an arrogant jerk and seek to prevent him from gaining power. But reading the play in early February 2021, lines like “To th’ Capitol, come. / We will be there before the stream o’ th’ people, / And this shall seem, as partly ’tis, their own, / Which we have goaded onward” were suddenly chilling. The tribunes are inciting violence and seeking to overturn a free election! Could I sympathize with them anymore? Is there anyone in this play to sympathize with?
The grim, morally murky atmosphere of Coriolanus probably explains why it is not a very popular play, despite its many strengths. (Come to think of it, “not very popular, despite his many strengths” is a great description of Coriolanus himself.) Though one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, it is nicely paced and tightly focused on its central character. (Contrast this with other long, late-career plays like
Cymbeline
and
Troilus and Cressida
, which suffer from an excess of subplots.) It’s very much the work of an experienced playwright in command of his material.
It may seem paradoxical, then, that Coriolanus does not have the psychological depth we expect of the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy. But then, that’s the point: Coriolanus is not given to reflection because he was programmed from birth to be an indomitable fighting machine. He knows no emotion but anger and is only happy when he has something to kill. So, instead of focusing on Coriolanus’ thoughts or feelings, the play emphasizes his body. Many other Shakespearean heroes are skilled warriors, but we don’t hear about Henry V’s or Macbeth’s physical strength and battle scars to the extent we hear about Coriolanus’. The play’s almost fetishistic obsession with the male body thus seems to lay the groundwork for Coriolanus’ love-hate relationship with his enemy Aufidius and the extremely homoerotic speech that Aufidius delivers to him in Act 4.
Another paradox of Coriolanus is that it’s a male-dominated play about masculinity, yet it also offers one of Shakespeare’s best roles for a middle-aged actress. Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia is a fierce Roman matron whose influence seems to have made Coriolanus the man he is, for better and for worse. My Shakespeare discussion group joked that
The Manchurian Candidate
feels like a modern re-write of Coriolanus, and it seems we’re not the first to make that comparison.
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Measure for Measure is a troubling play, a “problem play,” everyone knows that. When asked what’s troubling about it, most people will cite the scene where Angelo tells Isabella that he will only pardon her brother Claudio if she sleeps with him (Angelo)… and when Isabella refuses, vowing that she will publicly denounce Angelo, he thwarts her with a “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” It is a grimly recognizable account of how powerful men abuse their power and how women’s stories of sexual violation are too often dismissed.
But honestly, I am even more troubled by the Duke than by Angelo. After all, the play knows that Angelo is a villain and a hypocrite, and Isabella gets some fiery speeches attacking him. (I also loved how Lucio acts as Isabella’s “hype man” in the initial scene where she pleads for mercy for her brother. It made me more sympathetic to Lucio than I think I’m supposed to be!) Also, while Angelo’s motivations are despicable, they are comprehensible, explained to us in soliloquy. But what are the Duke’s motivations? Why does he cede his power to Angelo and hang out in Vienna disguised as a friar? If he doesn’t like having power over people, why does he spend the second half of the play manipulating all the other characters like they’re his puppets? Why does his plan require so much unnecessary cruelty and emotional whiplash for Isabella? As the Friar, he persuades her that her brother has been killed; as the Duke, he publicly humiliates her by pretending not to believe her story. Then, less than 100 lines from the end, he reveals that Claudio is still alive and proposes marriage to Isabella—and the poor young woman, so eloquent earlier in the play, is speechless. In short, the play makes clear that Angelo is problematic but does not acknowledge that the Duke is problematic, and that is infinitely more troubling… and intriguing.
In his podcast episode on Measure for Measure, Isaac Butler says “Writing or thinking about this play can feel a bit like trying to escape a black hole.” That’s an apt simile, especially because so much of Measure for Measure involves confinement and darkness. Many of its scenes take place in a prison; Isabella wants to become a cloistered nun; Mariana has spent the last five years self-sequestered in a “moated grange”. Significantly, the final scene takes place at the Vienna city gates: it’s like the characters almost break free before retreating back inside the walls of the city and the bonds of marriage. But I would argue that the biggest reason the play (and its version of Vienna) feels like a black hole is because its central character is an endless enigma. At one point, Lucio refers to him as “the duke of dark corners,” and though he says this in jest, the title could not be more fitting.
P.S. You may be asking, if I’m so obsessed with these two plays, why did I rate them only 4 stars? Because they’re recent obsessions: I haven’t lived with them long enough to judge beyond a doubt how they stack up against the famous 5-star Shakespeare classics. But I could see myself giving them a star upgrade in the future. And we definitely should discuss and produce them more.