The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Günter Grass

  Title Page

  The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself

  The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

  The Uprising of June 17, 1953. Documentary Report by Uta Gerhardt

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A full-length play by the Nobel Prize-winning Günter Grass, dealing with the German intellectuals’ abandonment of the East German workers during the rebellion in 1953.

  About the Author

  Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

  ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS

  Novels

  THE TIN DRUM

  CAT AND MOUSE

  DOG YEARS

  Poetry

  SELECTED POEMS

  The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself

  Address given at the Academy of Arts and Letters, Berlin, April 23, 1964, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth

  Let’s assume that there was such a man—complete with goatee and earrings as in the Chandos portrait. Let’s further assume that a quarrel with his wife or some trouble over poaching drove him from Stratford, and that he went to London, where, as the titles of the Complete Works would have us believe, he wrote more than thirty plays and pursued the career of an actor. If it amuses us, we can fancy him taking female roles: did he play the part of Goneril, or was he Cordelia? But this much is certain: the Globe Theater burned down on June 29, 1613, after his return to Stratford. Still, I should find it easier to regard him as an arsonist, a man who deliberately destroyed the evidence of his existence, than to honor Queen Elizabeth as the true author of his plays, especially as Sir Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton may have written them. It is amusing to speculate on halfway documented anecdotes and to conclude that his friend and rival Ben Jonson, who belabored him with advice at the Mermaid Tavern (for instance, that he should not accede to every whim, but should file and polish more and pay more attention to art), that Ben Jonson, who addressed him in a poem as “gentle Shakespeare,” though refusing to take his word for it that Bohemia was situated on the seacoast, murdered him in 1616, in the course of a drinking bout. Be that as it may, we know for sure that in his last will and testament he bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife. We are not so sure that on April 23, 1564, he was born like common mortals and that he wrote twenty-seven or twenty-eight, or perhaps only twenty-one plays. He learned from Marlowe, Nashe, and Greene. He lifted plots and whole scenes from Holinshed, his bedside chronicler, from Plutarch, and from fellow playwrights, living and dead. He took material from Kyd and ideas from Montaigne. Falstaff and the puritan Malvolio are indeed his own brain children, but like all so-called original creations they were begotten by other fathers. For without Marlowe’s Jew of Malta there would be no Merchant of Venice. It was a period of give and take. This practice was to become popular: all subject matter is free; let other owners fence in their property, the real estate of the mind is fair game for all. Bertolt Brecht had in common with William Shakespeare not only an aptitude for becoming a classic but also a deep-seated indifference to claims of literary ownership. Brecht once said to Kerr, the critic, who was rather a stickler in such matters: “Obviously the basis of just about every great age in literature is the force and innocence of its plagiarism.”

  But it is not easy to steal, and it is even harder to “adapt.” There was lightness of touch in Brecht’s borrowing from Marlowe and Lenz. But while he was transforming the tragedy of Coriolanus into the didactic play Coriolan, the god who protects all thieves of literary property was far away.

  The preface to my edition of Shakespeare says: “Because of its antidemocratic character, the play is seldom produced.” It is this antidemocratic bias and its reversal that I wish to discuss here—“The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself.” Presumption has the floor!

  When Shakespeare was nineteen years old, an English translation of Plutarch appeared in London. He took the plot of his Coriolanus from Plutarch’s life of the Roman hero. It is safe to say that he did not read the Greek original, because the English translator’s mistakes came to roost in his play. A few years later he moved to London and his Plutarch went with him.

  The bare plot is as follows: The plebeians of Rome are about to rise against the patricians. Their grievances are the price of grain and Caius Marcius—the future Coriolanus. A war breaks out with the nearby Volscians. To induce the plebeians to join the army, the patricians agree to the appointment of tribunes, empowered to defend the cause of the people before the Senate. In the course of the war, the plebeians prove to be cowards intent on loot, while Caius Marcius, the enemy of the people, shows himself to be a noble hero, who declines any share in the spoils. Thanks to his intrepid courage, the Romans take the city of Corioli, after which he is surnamed Coriolanus. On his return to Rome, he is applauded by the formerly hostile plebeians. Though he continues to mock and revile them, they even wish to elect him consul; but his election is blocked by the intrigues of the tribunes and by his own mounting arrogance. The old antagonism between plebeians and patricians revives. Coriolanus’ vituperation provokes violence. The patricians are no longer able to defend him. Banished by the people, he leaves Rome and goes over to the enemy. The Volscians welcome him, their victorious enemy, as an ally against hated Rome: at the head of the Volscian army he threatens his native city. When none of his patrician friends can persuade him to turn back, his mother goes out to the Volscian camp. Her words have the desired effect. Because his mother has dissuaded him from betraying his native city, he becomes a traitor to his allies: he is murdered, but his murderers, the Volscian commanders, respect his greatness and honor his memory.

  In the Coriolanus legend events that took place at the end of the Roman kingdom and others which occurred down to the end of the Gallic Wars are lumped together as if they had all taken place somewhere around 500 B.C., and as if the installation of tribunes of the people, which Livy describes as a gradual development, had occurred from one day to the next. According to Mommsen, the legend sprang from the desire of two plebeian families to prove their antiquity. According to Livy, the wife and mother of Coriolanus came of these families, the Volumni and the Veturi. Shakespeare gives no inkling of this; his play mentions no ties of kinship between the contending forces: the ancient nobility and the faceless plebeians.

  Tersely puncturing any attempt to harness this tragedy to partisan aims, Heine wrote: “Sometimes one inclines to think that Shakespeare is a modern poet, living in present-day London and aiming to portray the present-day Tories and Whigs in Roman masks.”

  This play is fated to be looked upon at all times as a reflection of modern conditions, for at the time when it was written, contending parties confronted one another on the streets of London in very much the same way as the patricians and plebeians, the Tories and the Whigs. Innovators, sectarians, and rebels made the island acquainted with the world, for in England the destruction of the Spanish Armada ushered in the seventeenth century. The East India Company was founded; expeditions marked out the spheres of future English power. While Shakespear
e’s contemporary Cervantes was creating the “knight of the mournful countenance” out of his own defeats and those of Spain, the Elizabethan theater was putting colossal conquerors on the stage, from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

  Between 1605 and 1608, in the four years during which Shakespeare conceived and wrote his tragedy, a number of political events gave him first-hand knowledge of what we today call the class struggle: in 1607 the peasants revolted because of the confiscation by the nobles of communally held lands; in 1604 the Gunpowder Plot was discovered: papists had tried to blow up the predominantly Puritan Parliament; in 1606, the plague began once again to assume serious proportions in London, and it seems likely that all the theaters were closed while Shakespeare was writing Coriolanus.

  Plays, books, even poems, which timid souls today like to call “timeless,” were being written by men who, even if ancient Rome provided the backdrop, were looking out the window at their own times and listening to what was going on in the streets. Coriolanus’ uncouthness, to be sure, comes from Plutarch, who attributed it to his fatherless upbringing, but it was Shakespeare’s London that provided the coarse, lewd idiom, the rich vocabulary of vilification he puts into the mouths of Coriolanus, of the patrician Menenius, and of Volumnia, the hero’s mother; and indeed, the character of Coriolanus is largely portrayed through the crude outpourings, rising in intensity from scene to scene, of his monstrous arrogance. And once we conclude, with good reason, that Shakespeare had a living model for this portrait, we come upon the obvious, if undocumented, theory which assigns that role to Sir Walter Raleigh, the imperious pirate, a knighted and distinguished patriot. For the fate of Raleigh, a friend of Ben Jonson (so why not of Shakespeare?), was not unlike that of Coriolanus: After he had captured a silver fleet from the Spaniards, fought for the Queen of England in Cádiz and the Azores, and conquered vast regions in America—as Coriolanus had conquered his Corioli—he was almost killed by the mob in 1604, while being arrested on the order of King James I. Formerly idolized, Raleigh had made himself unpopular, while to the victorious Coriolanus the plebeians had given their votes only to retract them shortly afterward. In the tragedy, as in London, we hear of the hero’s contempt for the poor. Raleigh controlled the wine monopoly; Coriolanus controlled all the grain ships coming from Sicily. While in Rome the enemy of the people prevented captured grain stores from being distributed among the indigent, in London the naval hero bitterly opposed a bill before Parliament which provided for the sale of cheap wine. Both heroes forfeited the favor of the people when, no longer contenting themselves with their trades of war and piracy, they carried the ways of the warlord and pirate into commerce and tried, the one in the grain, the other in the wine market, to fix prices, that is, to keep them high.

  This is not to say that Coriolanus is an outright drama à clef, but there is no doubt that the period when the Puritans were on the rise and the recently knighted soldiers of fortune on the wane finds its reflection in the play. When for the one hundredth time the Puritans tried to shut down the Globe Theater as a breeding place of sin and pestilence, the insults which Burbage, its director, heaped on the fanatical petits bourgeois may well have been as colorful as those with which in Rome, according to Shakespeare, the plebeians demanded modesty and democratic bearing of Coriolanus. Even if the reactionary—from a historical point of view—character of Coriolanus has paled with time, it was then glaringly obvious and stood in the way of the play’s performance; for—and not least in the interest of his theater—the author warns the king and nobles of the rise of the artisans and the common people, that is, of the Puritans and of Parliament, three quarters of whose members were Puritans. History has spoken twice against Shakespeare’s play: Livy tells us that thirty-six years after the election of the first tribunes, their number was increased to ten: the People’s Tribunate, Rome’s greatest achievement, an achievement valid to this day, had prevailed. And in England, forty years after the completion of Coriolanus, Cromwell, the Lord Protector, was at the helm. Shakespeare’s theater was closed even earlier. What has remained, along with a good deal more, is this bothersome play, in which Rome’s plebeians, like London’s artisans, are cowardly rats and ignorant dogs, in which Roman patricians, like English nobles, are noble lords and heroes without taint.

  These antagonisms and the cold light in which they are displayed have to this day barred Coriolanus from the stage. True, the play is not lacking in poetry—“Anger’s my meat …” says Volumnia—but this poetry strides along in frosty passion. It feeds on arrogance, presumption, injured pride, intrigue born of hate, and time and again on quickly mounting anger. There is no room for tenderness, for Shakespeare puts no lovers, not even mild madness in the shape of woman or fool, in the path of the inevitable action. No ghosts or sprites, no meeting of witches, no fantastic exposition—as in King Lear—allow the language to soar above the earthly. On earth there is no possibility other than standing or brawling. The heavens are impenetrable. The gods are far away and take no part. And even the colossal figure of Coriolanus, he who has the stuff for a god of war, is not permitted to stand dispassionately aside, building up the momentum for a soaring soliloquy. He is always hemmed in by plebeians or their tribunes, by supporters or enemies, and, in his most solitary movements, by his family; for when his arrogance rises to a blasphemous pitch which, if no one disturbed him, might develop into a monologue, he is immediately interrupted by a tribune, or his friend Menenius tries to appease him: “Come, come, you have been too rough, something too rough.”

  It is not the all too familiar ambiguity of the hero that has stood in the way of this play from the first; rather it is his brutal outrightness that sets him between plebeian and patrician and prevents him from arousing the faintest sympathy or applause in either a proletarian or a conservative audience. What even a monster like Richard III succeeds in making us believe—namely, that his daemon drives him to give us the shudders and so entertain us—the earthly and unintellectual Coriolanus fails to accomplish in a single scene. And even his few virtues, such as his modesty, his unwillingness to show the plebeians his wounds and scars, his selfless bravery, are obscured by his compulsion, whenever he encounters a plebeian, to proclaim his truth: scorn, contempt, and hatred. Richard can be led by guile to slip into contrasting roles: Coriolanus is a hero who can only be as he is and not otherwise. The patrician Menenius and Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia persuade him, against his better judgment, to be crafty, to proceed with diplomacy. But in the presence of the detested plebeians, his efforts to be gracious turn, after the first exchange of words with the tribunes, into new provocations. Only once, when he has all the power in his hands and stands at the walls of Rome with the Volscian army, does he relent and then, quite consistently with the logic of the situation, he comes to grief. Volumnia and the two other women confront the unyielding colossus as a monumental group. Volumnia’s words move him more than they convince him: this man, almost a god of war, becomes an obedient son, who spares his native city, allowing his hatred and lust for vengeance to seep away; he acts in opposition to his nature and is lost; for even in his downfall Coriolanus is irretrievably what he is. Though he gives in to his mother, he plays out his part incorrigibly to the end, and no party can claim him for itself by putting a new interpretation on him, because he is not the least bit ambiguous, and in addition, because the other characters of the play, patricians, plebeians, and Volscians, cluster around him, mirroring and multiplying his unambiguousness. For this reason I wish here to show, on the basis of the Coriolan adaptation, why Brecht’s attempt to salvage this play for himself and his Berliner Ensemble was doomed to failure. As for Jan Kott, his attempt to interpret this as a modern play on the ground that its indigestibility makes it modern—to call its fate class struggle—puts him historically in the right if we lean more toward Livy than toward Plutarch. But it is a misinterpretation of Shakespeare the Elizabethan, who even strips Plutarch, his source, of his last whiff of class struggle: mu
ch as he numbers himself among the patricians, Coriolanus stands between the two classes; tribunes and consuls are more likely to get together—and later they do—than is the colossal exception to come to terms with the senate.

  I have never been privileged to see Shakespeare’s Coriolanus on the stage; and I am almost willing to make a bet with any and all of our distinguished producers that none of our subsidized theaters will find either the time or the appetite, during this Shakespeare year, to include this forever green, hence sour apple in its program. Only in the fief of our second Shakespeare Society, in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm,fn1 has the play gone into rehearsal, and I am curious to find out whether the Berliner Ensemble will select Brecht’s unfinished adaptation, Lenz’s Storm-and-Stress translation, the traditional Shakespeare text translated by Dorothea Tieck, or a conglomeration of all three. But regardless of which toboggan slide they choose to risk, the crucial question remains: What is your attitude toward the tribunes of the people? How are you going to handle Act I, Scene 1, the uprising of the plebeians? And once the switches are set: Does the play end as a tragedy with obligatory funeral march after the murder of a giant named Coriolanus; or, in accordance with Brecht’s wishes, do the tribunes have the last word in a didactic play? For in Shakespeare these tribunes are pusillanimous rebels from the first; in Brecht they are reeducated, not in the course of the action but before they so much as appear on the stage, into staunch revolutionaries, who in the final scene are expected to prove that—as Livy intimates—the class-conscious plebeians are assured of victory. His tribunes behave in accordance with this thesis: while Shakespeare displays two interchangeable zeros, both cowardly schemers, Brecht gradually transfers the power to two shrewd and progressive functionaries. While Shakespeare makes his Coriolanus a man of the highest merit, whose tragic end is brought about by slight failings, pride swelling to arrogance and a sense of class verging on priggishness, Brecht reduces his Coriolan to the level of an efficient specialist, who, though useful in time of war, oversteps his functions in peacetime and is therefore dismissed by the people and its elected tribunes. Shakespeare’s hero comes to grief first over his own passion and then, outwardly, over the pettiness of the plebeians; Brecht’s Coriolan is swept aside because he behaves like a reactionary and fails to understand the signs of the times, the springtime of the young Roman Republic. Shakespeare did everything in his power to bring out the dark, tragic greatness of his hero, quite consistently portraying the plebeians as tawdry petits bourgeois and the two tribunes as mediocre schemers, and even stripping the patrician Menenius Agrippa of his aura, attested both in Livy and in Plutarch, as a sage and friend of the plebeians, to make him a comic slyboots à la Polonius. Brecht’s self-appointed task, from the very start, was to endow the plebeians with class consciousness and the tribunes with persuasive power. But where were these qualities to be found when not only the original, but even the historical sources and the reality outside his own windows, refused to provide them? Indeed, if a single tribune had been an antagonist comparable in weight to Coriolanus—and Plutarch tells us that one of them, Sicinius, was the “more energetic”—the play might have been titled “Sicinius and Coriolanus”; but even in Shakespeare’s day word had got around that officials like best to operate in pairs and to state their business two-by-two and interchangeably. Actually the Senate had granted the plebeians five tribunes, and Shakespeare too speaks in passing of five: Coriolanus, however, can remember only the names of two: