• The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric
• Jaspreet S. Tambar (bio)

It is the sad lot of the tragic hero that he is essentially misunderstood. His pride and failure to engage the vicissitudes of vulgar society and its inclinations to deceit and vice are met with a hard misapprehension of malice in his stubborn resolution to absolute moral clarity. What's more, the tragic hero's pretension, born out of the greatness and simplicity that define his mind, of having comprehended his place and the place of others in the world ensures that tragedy is rife with misinterpretation. Hence the prominent acts of misinterpretation and misrecognition across the history of tragic drama, from Herodotus's story about King Creon having misinterpreted the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, who told him to his ruin that if he attacked the Persians a great empire would fall; through Brutus's conflation of patrician Republican ideals with popular support; to Wotan's refusal to forfeit the absolute power of the ring despite the warnings of the Rhinemaidens in Wagner's Ring tetralogy. And especially in Coriolanus, a play obsessed with voice and understanding, such misinterpretations serve as a constant source of anxiety, and ultimately tragedy.

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a colossus, imposing in the weight of his stature and the hard finish of his resolutions. As strong as stone and as terse as its plinthed inscriptions, Coriolanus is the living embodiment of Roman virtus, the predicates of which include strength, fidelity, courage, and, most importantly, the Stoic principle of homologia, otherwise known as constancy. The ideal of Roman virtus tends toward uniformity and regularity in action and feeling, like a marble curve. Critics have noted the deep current of Stoicism running through the play, though some have also asserted its absence in the protagonist, arguing that Coriolanus's ostensible constancy is no more than what the Dutch Neo-stoic Justus Lipsius called "obstinacy or frowardness"; or else claiming that Coriolanus's disturbance by public honor and domestic affections proves him to "not have a drop of Stoic blood in his veins."¹ Indeed, T.S. Eliot ridiculed Stoic [End Page 27] pretensions in Shakespeare as nothing more than "self-consciousness and self-dramatization."² In Eliot's post-classical world, pride is opposed to the Christian virtue of humility, and Coriolanus's virtus thus easily reads as obstinacy and arrogance. But his intense regard for constancy, in both the domestic and public spheres, is in fact mistaken by critics for a failure in Stoicism. Nowhere is the play's fascination with the complexities of Stoicism and the hero's remarkable determination to virtus more apparent than in the pivotal scene in the marketplace when theatrical performance threatens Stoic constancy.³

By constancy is usually meant a kind of steadfastness, uniformity, and fidelity. Being constant implies virtue in remaining true to one's self, to be an unmoving rock upon which opinion and influence break like water. Geoffrey Miles argues that constancy is not merely local Roman coloring but the necessary question of the play, that "in a paradox characteristic of this intensely paradoxical play, the passionate traitor Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most self-consciously 'constant' character."⁴ In both antiquity and the Renaissance there are however two conflicting traditions of constancy, and the near impossibility of negotiating them contributes to Coriolanus's ruin. These conflicting traditions derive from the writings of two major classical authors: Seneca and Cicero. The Senecan ideal celebrates the kind of constancy to which has been referred above, which is primarily reflective and ethical. Seneca says in De constantia sapientis that such constancy is a rational imperative to moral conviction, and its wisdom should be exercised even in the face of tyrants who threaten torture as well as fortune's reversals.⁵ By contrast, the Ciceronian ideal, which is often described in theatrical metaphors, demands social propriety and thus a public responsibility to act according to a certain part. In the first book of De officiis, a treatise on duty, Cicero decidedly identifies social virtue with moral virtue, each a demonstration of constancy in either action or word.⁶ For Cicero, propriety is key...

• 科里奥拉努斯的伤口修辞；或者是文艺复兴时期修辞的悲剧
• Jaspreet S.Tambar（生物）

本质上被误解的是悲剧英雄的悲哀。他对粗俗社会的变迁及其欺骗和恶行的自负和失败感，使他对顽固地坚持绝对道德清晰的顽固态度深深地误解了恶意。更重要的是，悲剧英雄的自负来自于定义他的思想的伟大和朴素，理解了他在世界上其他人的位置，这确保了悲剧充斥着误解。因此，在希拉多德斯关于克雷翁国王误解了德尔菲先知的预言的故事中，希罗多德斯在整个悲剧史上的重大误解和误解举动使他毁灭了自己，如果他攻击波斯人，一个伟大的帝国将会灭亡；通过布鲁图斯 将贵族的共和党理想与民众的支持相结合；尽管瓦格纳（Wagner's）的莱茵少女（Rhinemaidens）发出警告，但Wotan拒绝放弃该戒指的绝对力量环四部曲。尤其是在科里奥拉努斯（Coriolanus）中，一种痴迷于声音和理解的剧本，这种误解一直是焦虑症的源头，并最终成为悲剧。

莎士比亚的《科里奥拉努斯》是个庞然大物。科里奥拉努斯坚如磐石，刻骨铭刻，简直是罗马维特斯的活生生的体现，其谓词包括力量，忠诚，勇气，最重要的是，斯多葛学派的同源原理，也就是不变性。罗马维特的理想趋向于在动作和感觉上趋于均匀和规则，例如大理石曲线。批评者注意到剧本中斯多葛主义的深刻潮流，尽管有些人还宣称主角中没有斯多葛主义，他们认为科里奥拉努斯表面上的坚定性不外乎是荷兰新门徒贾斯图斯·利普修斯所说的“固执或愚昧”。或者声称科里奥拉努斯受到公众荣誉和家庭感情的干扰，证明他“在他的血管中没有一滴斯多葛血”。¹的确，艾略特（TS Eliot）嘲笑斯多​​葛（Stoic）[第27页]在莎士比亚中的自夸，无非是“自我意识和自我戏剧化”。²在艾略特的后古典世界里，骄傲与基督教徒谦卑的道德相对立，因此，维特斯很容易被解读为固执和狂妄。但是，他在国内和公共领域对保持不变的高度重视，实际上被批评家误认为斯多葛主义的失败。当戏剧性表演威胁斯多葛的恒定性时，在市场上最关键的一幕中，这出剧本对斯多葛主义的复杂性的迷恋和英雄对维特斯的杰出决心比以往任何时候都更加明显。³

恒定性通常是指一种坚定性，均匀性和忠诚度。保持恒常意味着对自己的忠贞不渝，这是一颗坚不可摧的石头，意见和影响力像水一样在其上破裂。杰弗里·迈尔斯（Geoffrey Miles）认为，恒定性不仅是罗马人的本地色彩，而且是剧本的必要问题，“在这种强烈自相矛盾的剧本的悖论特征中，热情的叛徒科里奥拉努斯是莎士比亚最自觉的'恒定'人物。” ⁴然而，在古代和文艺复兴时期，都有两种相互冲突的恒定性传统，几乎不可能进行谈判，这导致科里奥拉努斯的毁灭。这些矛盾的传统源于两位主要的古典作家的著作：塞内卡和西塞罗。Senecan的理想庆祝了上面提到的那种稳定，这主要是反思性和道德性的。塞内卡在《君士坦丁堡》中说，这种坚守是道德信念的理性必要，即使面对暴君威胁要折磨和逆转财富的暴君，也要行使其智慧。⁵相比之下，通常在戏剧隐喻中描述的切塞罗尼理想要求社会责任感，因此要求公众有责任按照特定的部分行事。西塞罗（Cicero）在第一本《值班论文》（De officiis）中，明确地将社会美德与道德美德相提并论，每一个都体现了行动或言语的持续性。⁶对于西塞罗来说，礼节是关键...