‘[T]his painting / Wherein you see me smeared’: Blood, Character and Metatheatre in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
To what extent did stage blood function as an agent of characterisation on the early modern stage? How instrumental were bloody displays in the construction of dramatic identities, and what roles were they expected to play in the cognitive transactions that took place between actors and playgoers? This paper addresses these questions by focusing on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, a persistently metatheatrical play that explores the ways in which the identities of characters and actors can – and I hope to show the pun isn’t gratuitous – bleed into one another.
Blood is ostensibly a marker of character for the war-like Coriolanus; it is the recognisable ‘stamp of Martius’ (I.vi.23) on the battlefield when the warrior appears before Cominius as ‘a thing of blood’ (II.ii.107). And yet we are repeatedly reminded that the blood we see is just a special effect which allows Coriolanus to perform a part: it is a cloak that has ‘mantled’ him (I.vi.29), ‘painting’ that has been ‘smeared’ on him (I.vi.68-9), a vizard that has ‘masked’ him (I.viii.11). Coriolanus revels in the theatrical agency of blood, but the same cannot be said of his scars, those permanent material traces of the drops he has shed for Rome. Cynthia Marshall has convincingly argued that the protagonist’s refusal to show his scars to the people is a key part of the process by which the play makes the audience complicit in constructing his characterological ‘interiority’ or ‘subjectivity’. We might question, however, Marshall’s contention that his bloody exhibitionism on the battlefield grants us a ‘visual intimacy and hence, in the play’s terms, a knowledge of Martius that is subsequently denied to the plebeians in the marketplace’.[1] The character’s bloodiness is arguably alienating rather than revelatory, and the figure who ‘appears as he were flayed’ (I.vi.22) is actually engaged in a self-conscious illusion that frustrates knowledge instead of facilitating it.
This paper suggests that Coriolanus’ stage blood represents the fluidity between the identity of the character and that of the actor playing him, the boundaries between which are ruptured by the play’s metatheatricality. In doing so, it aims to address the relationship between blood, character and metatheatre in early modern drama more generally, paying particular attention to the role of the audience, whose apprehending souls – according to the antitheatrical tracts with which Coriolanus was in dialogue – could be wounded and made to bleed by what they saw and heard on stage.
[1] Marshall, “Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: CUP, 1996): 93-118; 107.