랄프 파인즈 <Coriolanus> 속 군사적 수사의 재조명

Abstract

Many aspects of military and political dimensions in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus have been extensively studied to show the extent to which the play reflects the social, military, and political upheavals of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. An important contribution to our understanding of the play and its adaptation (Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus) comes via Hee-won Lee’s “A Clash if Contrasting Linguistic Ideas in Coriolanus” (2011), which argues the whole dramatic tension of the play grows from the discrepancy between Coriolanus’s natural abhorrence of eloquence and the community’s view of language as social convenience, and Yae-ri Kim’s “General Martius on Screen: Contemporizing a Shakespearian Question in Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus” (2012), which explores the military dimension of the narrative and the use of modern media. These two articles encourage me to look at the ways in which language (speech) and action (image) are interconnected in the play as well as the film. The two critics show how military rhetoric as language, or image, played an important role in the play, and the film, but their argument needs further development in terms of the importance of military rhetoric in Shakespeare. To address this issue, I take Hee-won Lee’s observation on Coriolanus’s linguistic idea and then apply it to Fiennes’ adaptation. Both genres remind us that danger of death and mutilation is the pervading medium of combat and it is well reflected in Shakespeare’s expression “put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them” in Act 3 as well as in the beginning and the ending of Fiennes’ film. We never fathom Coriolanus’ grief and anger if we do not know what makes him changed. Coriolanus seems more comfortable with the idea of being killed by an enemy’s sword than with the idea of gaining voices fed by the citizens. Using the image of stabbing, Shakespeare allows us to open wound that represents military honor, but he also tell us that it ceases to speak honorably when we open it, associating stabbing or putting tongue into the wound with sexual penetration or emasculation. This paper argues in conclusion that Fiennes’s Coriolanus, molded by his experience as a Stoic soldier, appears to the world seized up inside because he longs for expressing his courage, but only feels that language is not enough to (re)present the pain of the war experience. Speaking for himself therefore only recalls him the brutal reality of war.