If you think the 1 percent are bad now, check out Rome in the fifth century BC. “You common cry of curs!” the aristocratic Coriolanus of the Shakespeare play addresses the people of the city, “whose breath I hate / As reek o’th’rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air.” So much for noblesse oblige. The play takes place around 490 BC, when Rome had become a republic but not yet a true democracy, and elections are controlled by rich patricians who court the approval of the hardworking plebeians. Caius Martius—honored with the name Coriolanus after his victory over the neighboring Volscian city of Corioles—is a venerated battlefield commander promoted by the patricians as a civic leader, the David Petraeus of his day. But his contempt for the people turns them against him. After they finger him as a dictator and banish him from Rome, he throws in with the Volscians.
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In short, he’s a fink, which is what has always made Coriolanus such a difficult play. “Coriolanus complains of the fickleness of the people,” wrote the British critic William Hazlitt, “yet, the instant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expense, he turns his arms against his country.” Shakespeare wrote the play late in his career, around 1608, and no one knows if it was ever performed in his lifetime. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, the figure on whom it’s based, may not have existed, so Coriolanus is classed among not the histories but the tragedies. T.S. Eliot famously (some would say perversely) proclaimed it Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy—better than Hamlet. George Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, decided the play was not a tragedy at all but “the greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies,” a political satire about a power-hungry leader. An odd duck to be sure, Coriolanus has rarely been staged, though in the last century it’s become popular as a political parable about civilian control of the military.
He has more regard for Aufidius, the Volscian commander, than for his own people. There’s a chilling scene in the movie where the Roman council and military commanders, meeting in some bunker-type room, watch a handheld video of Aufidius (Gerard Butler) interrogating and executing a Roman prisoner. Coriolanus has fought alongside Aufidius before and grandly informs the council, “He is a lion I am proud to hunt.” Nowadays we would probably just take the guy out with a drone, but Fiennes contrives to stage their face-to-face battle from the play, Aufidius’s men standing down in a shattered office building as the two antagonists duel with daggers (in a cool exterior shot, they crash through a plate glass window to the ground, which allows Aufidius to fight another day). After Coriolanus is banished from Rome, he sneaks into Volsces and presents himself to Aufidius, asking for either death or a uniform: “I will fight / Against my cankered country with the spleen / Of all the under fiends.”
Directed by Ralph Fiennes
