Coriolanus : A Natural Born Warrior

In 1994, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Coriolanus at Stratford with Toby Stephens playing the role of the eponymous hero[1]. Outside the theatre, huge posters showing Stephens’ bloodied face, bore the words, «He too was a natural born killer». This was an obvious publicity ploy to attract spectators by linking the production to Oliver Stone’s mass-audience film Natural Born Killers released earlier that year. More recently, Kate Bassett, in her Independent review[2] of Dominic Dromgoole’s 2006 production of the play at the Globe Theatre in London, wrote that the protagonist, as played by Jonathan Cake was «a crowd-pleasing action-hero (...) some full-scale version of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible CDXIII BC». The link thus made by reviewers between the play on the stage and the cinema is a curious one. Coriolanus is the only one of Shakespeare’s Roman plays not to have been made into a major feature film[3], and yet the Coriolanus-type character is today omnipresent on cinema screens. Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), featuring an uncompromising, tough, unyielding cop in the title role was a precursor and has, over the past thirty-five years, spawned numerous other films with a similar kind of hero. One pictures Sylvester Stallone on cinema posters as Rambo[4], the Vietnam veteran and urban warrior, loaded down with weaponry, a cartridge belt slung across his chest, striking out alone to wage his own personal war on a society that rejects him; or the policemen-hero of Die Hard[5], abandoned by his hierarchy in the Los Angeles police department, dealing with crises single-handed. Coriolanus’ words, «Alone I did it» spring to mind (5.6.116). Such heroes are loners, uncommunicative and unsociable and what they share is a tendency to resort to the unrestrained use of violence in the righting of wrongs. It is not at all my intention to place Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and these somewhat flat, modern offshoots on the same