“The Stamp of Martius” - Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression inCoriolanus

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Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2017-03-01
Journal	Renaissance Drama
Authors	Harry Newman
Institutions	Royal Holloway University of London

Abstract

Previous articleNext article Free“The Stamp of Martius”: Commoditized Character and the Technology of Theatrical Impression in CoriolanusHarry NewmanHarry NewmanRoyal Holloway, University of London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWho’s yonderThat does appear as he were flayed? O gods,He has the stamp of Martius, and I haveBeforetime seen him thus.(1.6.21-24)1Speaking in response to the spectacular entrance of Martius during the battle of Corioles, the amazed General Cominius recognizes the enigmatic antihero of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—so bloody that he appears “flayed”—because of his “stamp.” Here “stamp” could mean “physical or outward form,”2 or it may be a reference to Coriolanus’s characteristic stamping of his feet (1.3.34).3 The word, however, also evokes the image of an imprint, casting his wounds as newly stamped impressions.4 Coriolanus’s identifiable “stamp” is the blood that covers him: earlier he enters “bleeding, assaulted by the enemy” (1.4.65SD). The analogy between wounding and imprinting persists in the play, encouraging the idea that Coriolanus is a kind of technological entity.5 In his tribute to Coriolanus following the battle, Cominius refers to “His sword, death’s stamp, / Where it did mark, it took” (2.2.105-6), representing a warrior who efficiently imprints his victims with death. The image corresponds with the protagonist’s later boast that Aufidius “wears my stripes impressed upon him” (5.6.109). But Cominius’s recognition of the “stamp of Martius” indicates Coriolanus also has wounds impressed upon him, violent imprints that mark Martius out as Martius, apparently rendering legible a character that often seems more machine than man.Cominius’s onstage reading of the wounded Coriolanus’s “stamp” provokes questions about what makes a character impressive in early modern theater. Largely ignored in criticism, the play’s persistent language of impression—invoking technologies of sealing, coining, medal-making, and printing—urges a reassessment of the tragedy and especially its dominant main character, whose power to impress in the theater rests heavily on the fleshly imprints he later refuses to show the people in the marketplace. Critics have traditionally focused on Coriolanus’s wounds as interpretable (if unstable) signs of his elusive identity and humanity as a character, whether analyzing the protagonist in psychosexual, sociopolitical, or theatrical terms.6 In an influential essay, Cynthia Marshall focuses on Coriolanus’s wounds to analyze “the specifically theatrical effects that produce an impression of subjective identity and of its fullest dramatic achievement, character depth.”7 For Marshall, “subjective identity” is the operative term, but how might we theorize and historicize the enduring idea that theater works to produce in audiences an “impression” of subjectivity, interiority, or character depth? What is the relationship between Coriolanus’s identity as an inhuman killing machine who stamps and is stamped with wounds, and his theatrical impressiveness as a character capable of conveying an internal as well as an external “stamp of Martius” to audiences? And what might focusing on the transmission of this imprint in the playhouse tell us about the commoditized emotional and cognitive transactions involved in the early modern commercial theater?This article investigates how Coriolanus negotiates the value of the characterological imprint, focusing on its protagonist and his wounded body in order to analyze the technology of theatrical impression in the early modern commercial theater. I argue that the technological concept of the imprint in Coriolanus, inflected by its connections to discourses of character, psychophysiology, and Plutarchan narrative, is integral to the play’s metatheatrical self-reflection on the commoditized human transactions involved in commercial theater, and the formative pressures exerted on dramatic characters by market forces. Through violent resistance to his identity as a reproducible and marketable product of the theater, Coriolanus’s characterological value in performance is paradoxically generated by his refusal to participate in forms of imprinting, exchange, and transaction that gesture toward the theatrical processes necessary for his very existence as a character in the theatrical marketplace. In making these arguments, I show that the play sheds light on critical language surrounding characterization—a term etymologically linked to technologies of engraving, imprinting, or inscription8—and the widespread belief that Shakespearean “character” is a unique brand that both takes and gives the universal imprint of humanity.The article is divided into two parts. The first demonstrates that the play’s engagement with “character” as a word and concept—despite its modern associations with humanity and interiority—is inextricably tied to the impressions involved in material, technological, and commoditized transactions. My argument that Coriolanus participated in a complex discourse of imprinting and character in the seventeenth century sets up the second part of the article, where—focusing on the role of Richard Burbage—I show that the play’s metatheatrical elements force the audience to reflect on an economy of theatrical impression that depends on both Coriolanus’s resistance to characterization and the performance of that resistance by the actor playing him. Looking first at the technology of wounds, and then at the functions of silence during the intercession scene, I suggest Coriolanus’s impressiveness as a character lies not in the revelation of his humanity but in the play’s metatheatrical negotiation of our knowledge that he is a creature marked by his cultural production, an artificial entity crafted to make an impression on audiences conditioned to think they are paying to receive the “stamp of Martius” as part of a contracted transaction.I. Valuing the Imprint of “Character”: Theater, Charactery, CriticismIn this section, I investigate the treatment of character in Coriolanus, by both critics and the play itself, in relation to the historical intersection between the discourses of character and impression. My focus is on the moment of the play’s inception in the early seventeenth century, when—I suggest—character was a new technology of impression in a theatrical culture still coming to terms with its commodification. But that moment needs to be analyzed in light of the larger, ongoing history of character and its relationship to ideas of impression, which started long before the rise of English commercial theater and continues today as critics locate the value of Shakespearean characterization in its capacity to “imprint” minds, hearts, and souls. Addressing critical attitudes to characterization in Coriolanus before turning to the philology of “character” as a term that connects theater to imprinting technologies, psychophysiology, and Theophrastan charactery, I show that the play challenges modern definitions and valuations of character in relation to humanity and subjectivity, and in opposition to materiality, technology and commodification. This contextualization of character in Coriolanus will later be crucial to my argument about what makes the play’s protagonist and his wounds “impressive” in the theater. In particular, it lays the foundations for my claim that Coriolanus’s wounds are not—as is so often claimed—signs of a universal humanity lying just beneath the surface,9 but rather signs of his identity as something other than human, a character conspicuously subject to market forces of early modern commercial theater and especially the imperative to make an impression on paying audience members.All dramatic characters are something other than human in that they are not people but heavily mediated representations, collaborative products (often lucrative ones at that) brought about not just through the technical labor of dramatists and actors, but also “the emotional, cognitive, and political transactions … between actors and playgoers.”10 While it would be a mistake to say that dramatic character has nothing to do with being human, certain scholars have conceptualized characterization in early modern theater as a material and technological phenomenon. Douglas Lanier has argued that in performance, character depended on “the mechanics of exteriority” as the actor worked “to craft and display a set of physical marks … legible to an audience,” and Justin Kolb has addressed “the technical and quasi-scientific process of character creation … as text, properties, and actors were combined in theatrical space to create an automaton, a complex, quasi-human artefact that performs humanity.”11 Our understanding of Coriolanus needs reassessing in light of these ideas, and more broadly the emergence of “new character criticism,” whose productive attention to the philology and historical contingency of character has started to reestablish it as a useful critical concept.12The way in which Coriolanus performs humanity has long failed to impress traditional character critics. Strongly influenced by A. C. Bradley, Harold Bloom laments that “inwardness … vanishes in Coriolanus, and never quite makes it back in later Shakespeare.”13 A few critics have suggested, however, that what Coriolanus seems to lack as a character (whether “inwardness” or something else) is essential to a play that—as Emma Smith puts it—“subjects the notion of character itself to sustained, ironic analysis.”14 Michael Goldman and Cynthia Marshall have interpreted Coriolanus’s inscrutability and unlikability as engaging with questions about how far a character’s “inner dimensions” can be known or accessed by an audience in performance, and Stephen Orgel has shown the protagonist’s relevance to our understanding of the extent to which a character—whether or not he expresses a desire to be “author of himself” (5.3.36)—is bound by his play-text.15 Like Marshall’s concern with the “impression of subjective identity,” Goldman’s conclusion unintentionally brings into play Coriolanus’s language of impression and character’s etymological origins in the imprint: “The communicability of character—as an internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater, something which possesses us, in mind and in body, as an actor’s body possesses us—this is the basic currency of all great drama.”16 Goldman’s metaphors of impression and currency are part of a long, ongoing history of critical efforts to articulate what is impressive about Shakespearean characterization: since at least the Romantics, Shakespeare’s dramatis personae have been identified as making “impressions” on audiences or readers, and even as bearing the “stamp” or “hallmark” of the people and frameworks involved in their creation or enactment.17Ironically, this kind of language may have its roots in antitheatricalists’ descriptions of the effects of performance following the rise of commercial theater in the 1570s, as they decried poetry’s transformation “into a commodity to be traded on the market.”18 Alert to the psychophysiology of playgoing,19 antitheatrical tracts represented actors as characters in a very literal sense: players perpetrated and suffered moral corruption because—like Coriolanus on the battlefield—they had the capacity to impress and be impressed, to wound and to be wounded. In The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Philip Stubbes observes that plays influence audiences because “what thing we do see opposite before our eyes, do pierce further, and print deeper into our hearts and minds, than the thing, which is heard only with the ears.”20 Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) links two kinds of counterfeiting in the “markets of bawdry” that were theaters, acting and producing false impressions: “vice is learned with beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked, and those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to the gazers, which the players do counterfeit on the stage.”21 John Rainolds’s Overthrow of Stage-Plays (1599) asserts that actors were also at risk of wounding and imprinting themselves: playing immoral parts “worketh in the actors a marvelous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate,” and “often repetition and representation of the parts … engrave the things in their mind with a pen of iron, or with the point of a diamond.”22 In other words, actors are characterized by the parts they play as well as vice versa, and all for the profit of theatrical “markets of bawdry.”Whether celebrated or condemned, the technology of impression in the early modern commercial theater is best understood in relation to the history of “character” as a word and a concept, which also illuminates Coriolanus’s remarkable uses of the term in around 1608 when it was first performed. In the early seventeenth century, the figures represented on stage were not “characters” but “speakers” or “persons,” a word derived from the Latin persona, literally a mask used by a player.23 It was not until the 1660s that John Dryden explicitly used “character” to mean a “personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a … dramatist,” although—as I will show—this sense had been gradually emerging for a long time.24 For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, characters were primarily things created through technologies of inscription, engraving, and impression.25 These senses were rooted in the ancient Greek kharaktêr (χαρακτήρ), variously used to mean an instrument for engraving, stamping, or branding, the distinctive marks stamped onto coins or seals (and sometimes wax tablets) to identify types or values, or—by metaphorical extension—distinguishing marks or features of human bodies and language that signified morals and attitudes.26 The term was applied to the literary genre of character writing, pioneered in the fourth century BC by Theophrastus.27 Theophrastus’s Kharaktíres (Χαρακτήρες) was a collection of brief sketches (or “impressions”) of inappropriate social behavior embodied by human examples, such as “the miserly man” or “the flatterer,” not individuals but—like stamps on seals or coins—reproducible types whose “actions are infinitely repeatable, their stories iterative narrations.”28The various meanings of kharaktêr were eventually carried forward into the English “character,” although the word was by no means semantically stable in the early modern period, not least because writers—including Shakespeare—were experimenting with its figurative potential.29 Sensitive to a performance’s “mechanics of exteriority,” dramatists used the word to explore concepts of personhood, particularly the notion that outer marks can signify inner qualities. Early commercial playwrights made much of what could be impressively “charactered” in faces through a combination of verbal description and the actor’s countenance and expression.30 Thus in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part 1, Tamburlaine reads Theridamus’s valiantness in “Characters grauen in thy browes.”31 At first sight, the shipwrecked Viola’s use of “character” in Twelfth Night has a similar function. She makes a moral judgment of a sea captain based on his appearance and behavior: “I will believe thou hast a mind that suits / With this thy fair and outward character” (1.2.46-47). Apparently tautological, “outward character” posits the concept of “inward character,” the invisible imprints made on the mind, heart, and soul by God, nature, experience, and education, like the precepts Polonius instructs his son Laertes to “character” in his memory (Hamlet 1.3.57-58), or indeed the “forms” and “pressures” impressed upon the “table of [Hamlet’s] memory” (1.5.98-101).32 The use of “character” as a metaphor to negotiate between legible external marks and veiled internal impressions suited the theatrical project, a commercial enterprise that often involved projecting psychological depth through a play of verbal and physical surfaces.When Coriolanus was first performed in around 1608, “character” was already being used to mean “the face or features as identifying a person; personal appearance as indicative of something.”33 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is used in this sense in Coriolanus. “I paint him in the character” (5.4.26), Menenius assures Sicinius after his description of the vengeful Coriolanus as a godlike war machine: “The tartness of his face sours grapes. When he walks, he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell and his hum is a battery” (5.4.17-21). As Karen Newman observes, however, Menenius’s prose description is also an allusion to the newly revived literary genre of character writing.34 Early modern character sketches generally consisted of “witty epitomes of representative individuals in relation to their professions, nationalities, idiosyncratic beliefs or presiding temperaments” (e.g., the courtier, the puritan).35 Characters were distinctly printed commodities, both because they were viewed as reproducible impressions of human identity and behavior (“stampes or impressures, noting such an especiall place, person, or office”36) and because they owed their commercial success to the technology of printing. Overbury’s Characters went through four editions in 1614 alone,37 but it was the publication in 1608 (the year Coriolanus was probably first performed) of Characters of Vertues and Vices, Joseph Hall’s translation of Theophrastus’s that the ancient genre and the of In his this kind of as as he on the of character sketches or by ancient character to be known as their in out the of and so that who the might the The metaphor of in new technology in etymological connections to and but it also with the to dramatists as well as what is by features in however, can be to Aufidius to the Coriolanus in although he in his and the point is by the that between who claim they by his face that was something in him” Menenius the idea that a face can be for character when and claim that he is well known to be a and that a of with not a of to be something in the first and upon that more with the of the than with the of the What I I and my in my … And I be to with those that say are they that tell have see this in the of my it that I known well What can out of this character, I be known well “character” refers both to Menenius’s the of my and to his character of as an audience can from of these actor’s face and his of the of Menenius’s something from their and his embodied of and when he a character of “character” to the stage in a way that in the of the word in dramatic the etymological and relationship between Theophrastan and dramatic but it is that early modern dramatists were influenced by the of The for in was the of because it in types with and psychological Coriolanus, however, is of a of plays from before the publication of Overbury’s that to charactery, and onstage through of the word “character,” to its both and John a is particularly for the way he into his plays prose and with great to the of and show of the by in terms of and and characterization and but they also suggest a of between the of and those of dramatists and actors as they worked to legible dramatis personae through performed during the rise of English and the of the language of character, Coriolanus participated in the of “character” in the theatrical to it currency in the this however, was an and dramatists of the material and technological the with humanity and what A. C. “the we metaphorical of “character” to dramatis personae had the to their as technological or inhuman to make critics have to the philology of “character” and the widespread use of the language of impression in critical (whether or not in response to the etymological to is in of the concepts which this has shown at the of the history of character and its by early commercial materiality, The of Goldman’s may have value in a critical market that the “impression of subjective we to from their early modern dramatic characters were commodities, things by their value in the theatrical from the and of commercial by what Douglas the of early modern and in their technological capacity to mark and be marked through as they are stamped by those who into being actors, and make impressions on those that readers, In order to that Coriolanus is an of this and to my of the character’s value the play’s economy of impression, I to his in and from of in a discourse of character and impression sheds light on the play’s relationship to Plutarchan narrative, to an role in the value of the characterological imprint in and in the theatrical that Coriolanus as I have been Coriolanus’s as a character is by his identity as who stamps and is then it can also be linked to the play’s text, translation of of the and probably in its second of Marshall posits as crucial to “the of the early modern concept of character or that Shakespeare’s of Plutarchan of character as that is at and our of character” is not only and but also then and of character in early modern of are figures were not identified as being or “characters” in Shakespeare’s for Coriolanus and the are rather or terms that theatrical But translation of on the of his at the of the of the us to ideas of is not to but the do not but a light a word, or makes more then the … For like as or of which make no of other of the body, do of the face and of the in the which the of their and so they to out the and of the term as did not to be as “characters” until much But the of out “the and of the with plays that negotiate the relationship between and outward “character” on the and the analogy of or with attention to “the face and of the the of In John translation of the of lies not in the signs and but and the and of the like the Shakespeare being by Dryden in the seventeenth century, a with to the of human had an mind, which all Characters and before Dryden may have for during the of Shakespeare’s he was involved in collaborative translation of the first of which was by of This the effects or impressions could produce in the of Dryden that is to because “the and of … upon our a and more impression, than the of and For way of sets a moral stamp on that they in And the lies in the of the are into the of the see him in his and are made with his and … see the as as made of character he is in a a of knowledge that the of and this is what makes it It is no that this process of an inner or is what Shakespeare celebrated for in the century and or indeed that the Coriolanus of Shakespeare’s play seems so to that The “stamp of Martius” and make its mark on us through a process of this is not the language of impression in Shakespeare’s play is from the of Martius but like of the in it is by a the is an of an by the the see image of Coriolanus at the of the of Martius in the second of translation of The of the and The by as part of Early English with of is printed of a or and his would a a for the character Cominius recognizes as the

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/691201

References

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