Coriolanus Versus Hamlet Redux

When the film version of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, came out last year, an old controversy rose to the surface. In 1920, T.S. Eliot declared, much to his contemporaries’ disbelief, that Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra, as opposed to Hamlet, constituted the Bard’s greatest work.

Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works, is about Caius Martius, a Roman general whose acts of valor in suppressing the Volscians win him a consulship and the new name Coriolanus. His impolitic manners inflame the tribunes and the people to immediately withhold the title from him. In exile, he joins his old Volscian foe Aufidius and sets about conquering Rome, his former home. Victorious in  battle once more, his fortunes change yet again, leading to the bloody end we expect from a Shakespearean tragedy.

In “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot lists what he believes are Hamlet’s shortcomings, proclaiming the drama an “artistic failure.” He starts with “superfluous and inconsistent scenes,” says “the versification is variable,” and then moves on to his biggest criticism:

“The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence . . . The Hamlet of [Franco-Uruguayan poet] Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.”

Upon the release of Coriolanus last year, Slovenian philosopher and irrepressible movie buff Slavoj Zizek took Eliot’s side in the argument. In "Sing of the New Invasion," Zizek says that while interpretations of Coriolanus have tended to favor right-wing militarism, Fiennes breaks the play out of this box by making the titular character a left-wing radical. I would agree that this extra space for Coriolanus helps, but perhaps it is too little to stand against Hamlet.

Coriolanus has plenty of virtues. It is a fast-paced, action-packed drama that cries out for Hollywood treatment, yet it is also character-driven, raising it a notch above most of what we can expect from cinema today. Every reversal of Caius Martius’s fate is the result of an action unfolding from within his twisted psyche. His mother Volumnia raised a raging soldier with a whimpering little boy inside. Despite the manipulators around him, Caius Martius’s fate is one he largely chooses.

Yet the play, while powerful at times, never soars. It remains firmly fixed to politicians and soldiers, none of whom are particularly sympathetic. Even Volumnia is just another unlikable power-player. The dramatis personae of Coriolanus, while sometimes powerful, present a narrow array of ambitions. Like the politicians and generals of our own day, they are not very likable, so it should come as no surprise if Coriolanus often fails to move its viewers.

Hamlet, on the other hand, never fails to move. The drama tears off in all directions, covering a myriad of human experiences--thirst for revenge, lost love, existential angst--and presenting a staggering array of spectacles--ghostly apparitions, plays within plays, and even a mother-son bedroom scene. Hamlet himself is such a bewildering patchwork of qualities that critics can never pin him down. His play moves us because it contains great space within which the viewer may move, and its loose ends merely serve to heighten the sense that the dramatic action is open rather than closed.

The debate over Coriolanus and Hamlet reminds me of aging rockers. When fans criticize their newer work, the rockers usually defend themselves by saying that time has made them more proficient in their instruments and more skilled in song-writing--all of which is probably true, but the older albums are often still better, because of the untamed inspiration fueling them. Perhaps--and this is mere speculation--Shakespeare’s craft had waxed in the years between Hamlet and Coriolanus while his Hamlet-like frenzy waned.

Yet I hesitate to take the side of consensus in this obscure controversy, for Coriolanus is indeed strong, and Fiennes’s film adaptation shows it off. It seems a bit silly, anyway, to seriously ask which of Shakespeare’s plays is the greatest, much less to argue over it, when they are all so good. In the end, I can only say that Coriolanus and Hamlet are each the better in their own ways, and we might very well expect that in other ways, other plays would prove the victor--Romeo and Juliet in romantic passion, for example, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream in imaginative creativity.