Comparative Drama

Drama, Politics, and the Hero: Coriolanus, Brecht, and Grass Martin Scofield I want to look at Brecht's adaptation and criticism of Shakespeare's Coriolanus^ and at Gunter Grass' creative response to these in his play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand) ;2 furthermore, I want to raise some questions about the role of the hero in all three plays. Brecht's attitude to the cult of the hero in "bourgeois" drama is well known: it was his contention that the emphasis on the hero, particularly in Shakespeare, was a large part of what was wrong with current drama both socially and aesthetically . The conventional way of seeing the hero led in his view to an over-romanticizing, an exaggerated stress on audience identification with the hero, and a resulting lack of critical detachment. From a political point of view, this in turn had dangerous affinities with the cult of hero worship and led in the direction of fascism. What I want to suggest by looking at Brecht's version of Coriolanus is that, in addition to more obvious psychological dimensions which Brecht was expressly content to omit, there are important political dimensions of the play which the Brechtian version cannot accommodate— and that some of mese are illuminated with striking wit and subtlety in Grass' play. Behind my discussion there also lie questions concerning the conflicting claims of adaptation and interpretation of Shakespeare . By the term 'adaptation' I mean the substantial changing of Shakespeare's text, amounting virtually to a new play, which takes place in Brecht's Coriolan, and by 'interpretation' I mean the critical or directorial drawing out of implication, or MARTIN SCOFIELD, who teaches at the University of Kent at Canterbury, is the author of The Ghosts of "Hamlet" and T. S. Eliot: The Poems as well as of articles on Shakespeare, Keats, Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin. 322 Martin Seofield323 the stressing of one aspect of a play, which nevertheless respects the play's wholeness. There is, I think, in current criticism (or, in any case, in critical theory) a tendency to blur the distinction between the two: theories of deconstruction or ideas like Roland Barthes' "readerly text" put a premium on the reader's or critic's power to re-create the text, to collaborate with the author to the extent of realizing a work which may not only go beyond what the author might have conceived of it but may even run counter to his likely intentions. This is what happens, legitimately enough, in Brecht's adaptation. But it would be a pity, I think, if in reading, watching, or performing Shakespeare's plays themselves we lost the idea of "the play itself" or "the spirit of the play" or "what the author was trying to do." Indeed, if we do lose this entirely, we lose Shakespeare as an independent creator, writing in another time and with a unique power of dramatic creation and insight, against whom we may to some degree measure our own contemporary creations and our own sense of life. So there is, in my view, a point in comparing Brecht's and Shakespeare's two plays—not with the predictable aim of arguing Shakespeare's general superiority (though I confess that from time to time that note may creep in) but in the hope of bringing out the strengths and differences of both and also of suggesting a political dilemma about leadership which is at the heart of Shakespeare's play and which Brecht's play tries to resolve in a way rather different from Shakespeare's. As a starting point, I will examine some of the things that Brecht had to say about Shakespeare in his critical writings in order to set the scene for his adaptation of the play and see with what kind of assumptions he was working. In such an approach, I think, one will find in his general criticisms a slightly wider and more accommodating sense of Shakespeare than one might assume the author of the German Coriolan to possess. At the same time one will find a healthy corrective to uncritical or overly romantic views of...