Spectacular Theatre/1608 Food Riots

- these are just excerpts from my notes, although they may be a bit here and there; I think you all might find them helpful...

Spectacular Theatre -

... in any case, there is a role for theater to play (Tragedy of Coriolanus); particularly focusing on the auditory experience… what happens to theatre as we move into the early 17th century is in some ways the birth of theater that is more spectacular, a theater driven by spectacle… as contrasted to a theater driven by the auditory… the play is THEN critiquing this shift of plays from the AUDITORY AND THE SUBSTANTIAL to the SPECTACULAR AND INSUBSTANTIAL… he maps this out through Coriolanus and the poplulous and how they want to participate in this spectacular culture, a theater driven by show and tell… thus, starts to come a much more impotent form of theater itself… We see Shakespeare pushing the play against what the populous wants in this play, events come to us choral form; little is actually seen… much is taking place in story telling… one of the biggest moments of this is when Coriolanus still named Martius goes to the gates of the city and they shut the gates of the city off… people are killed off stage… we don’t get to see this big action scene in the play. We see Shakespeare getting into King Lear, all characters die off-stage except for King Lear… thus, we see him taking it step up… lets stage the barge scene but now show it… talk about it… then, take it up a notch… then to Coriolanus where we show nothing… the audience experiences this feeling of literally being shut up… instead what we keep getting is a play that keeps turning to the use of the chorus… underscoring the sense of the theatrical, Rome will not be turned into a spectacle… we don’t see his wounds, we don’t see him as an action hero; thus, the play by denying us access to spectacle… the play is critiquing our desire for it! What we see in that is this shift of theater itself from being far more substantial to some that entertains us and provides us with visual sport… cheapening of the power of theater itself… it’s highlighting that shift…

The play critiques the populous… by demanding spectacle, we are denying ourselves food… there is substantial social and political role theatre more play… the more we demand spectacle the more undermine the power inherent in auditory theater.

There is this sense of CONFUSION, it is not simply that people want the spectacle, it is what we have done to theater and the art of story telling… story telling and listening is a form of empowerment and the fact that theater is becoming a spectacular sport, this is quite dangerous.

Big pint here is the play can be thought about as rescuing the theater from the spectacular… Coriolanus gets banished from Rome and turns around bands Rome from himself, Coriolanus reminds James I of Basilikon Doran as he talks about himself as a little god..


Food Riots of 1608

One of the notions of senate is that men share power equally, Coriolanus does nothing on equal terms with other figures around him. How does Rome produce such a strong character like Coriolanus and then how do they assimilate him into the civic fold?

One of the issues that was referenced last time was the issue of the MID-LANDS… one of the approaches to this play is to think of it as a response to what was happening in the MID-LANDS… food riots of 1608 outside of Stratford, what happened in those riots was essentially what happened in the play itself… the gentry to negotiate the price of corn were holding back food, thus, the general population endured much starvation… the riots were to force the gentry to turn over the corn and stop manipulating the food supply for economic aid… then we have the people uprising… exactly what happens in the play.

Here… we must think of the play as Shakespeare’s response to the food riots, then it raises questions of theatricality in the play… it raises a serious question of ‘what is the role of theater in relation to these food riots…’ If we take Shakespeare to be on the side or against the riots, Little suggests Shakespeare is supporting the people and not the gentry. What is the role that theatre can play and does play in relation to starvation and rioting… of what use, politically, socially is theater…. When we are speaking about issues of rioting and starvation… Shakespeare’s argues then that theater comes across an impotent, that is doesn’t have a serious contribution to make… we can see this played out in the beginning of the play when the straving people come in and Menninius decides to tell them a story… What is the relationship between story telling and food, can we feed the masses with theater, or if we talk about theater as a kind of food or nourishment ten what is its relationship to food? One of the critiques here, not what happens with the Plebians in the beginning; they hear the story… Menninius substitutes story-telling for food, then as we go on… the story moves on to the body of Coriolanus… we move from the auditory, a shift from listening and speaking to showing.. this comes particularly in the form of Coriolanus…

What everyone wants Coriolanus to do is to show his wounds… to put his wounds on display which Coriolanus is refusing to do, something very feminizing about that whole process… talk about the terms in terms of immasculization… If we are starving as people are in the play and the Mid-Lands there is potentially a role for theater to play because it not only there for entertainment but it maybe even more so there as part of instruction and part of the socio-political process… this is why theater was so regulated in Shakespeare’s day…

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Still don't have 'Blood Tragedies' in my notes... anyone else have this?! If so, please post!!!

James Steel
Dis 1D