2 - Blood: Enter Martius, Painted
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
The play's style is bare. It holds little of the undulating, heaving swell of Othello's music, the fireworks of Julius Caesar, the fine frenzies of Lear or Macbeth … Rather there is here a swift channeling, an eddying, twisting, and forthward-flowing stream; ice cold, intellectual, cold as a mountain torrent and holding something of its iron taste … There is little brilliance, little colour.
G. Wilson Knight, 1951The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has an invariably public dimension.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life (2004)In Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1608), Caius Martius makes a play for the consulship of Rome that fails when he refuses to show the Roman crowds his wounded body. This reluctance is original to Shakespeare. According to Plutarch by way of Sir Thomas North (1579), the historical Martius complied with custom and ‘shewed many woundes and cuttes apon his bodie, which he had receyved in seventeene yeres service at the warres’. Shakespeare's Martius, however, shrinks from this type of exhibition. It is a part he would ‘blush’ in acting: ‘I cannot / put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them / For my wounds' sake to give their suffrage’ (2. 2. 133–5).
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- Information
- Inventions of the SkinThe Painted Body in Early English Drama, pp. 49 - 86Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013