A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare - V Is For Volumnia, Virgilia, Valeria

 

Volumnia and Coriolanus. Public Domain

In my C post I wrote about the play Coriolanus, mentioning the hero’s mother, Volumnia. 

Volumnia is one of Shakespeare’s more powerful women, though the play is not performed as often as others such as Hamlet or the Scottish Play. She has to be, with a son who is a general and for whom she has ambitions.

Volumnia has brought up her boy to believe that the lower classes are scum, who don’t deserve to be looked after. Unfortunately for him,  those people have a vote! So, if it takes showing them the wounds he got defending them to get their support, something he considers baby kissing, too bad. He isn’t going to do it. And Volumnia is a part of that. 

She lives vicariously through him. In her first scene she tells her daughter in law, Virgilia, that while other mothers were worried about what would happen to their sons, she was sending hers off to war, and he came back a hero! When Virgilia asks what she wild have done if he had died, Volumnia replies, “Then his good report should have been my son.” In other words, she would rather be the mother of a dead hero than a live son who was nothing special. She confirms this in the next few lines, saying she would rather have had eleven of a dozen sons die as heroes than have one who was a wimp. 

She wants him to be wounded, which proves his hero credentials, when Virgilia is worrying for her man. Early in the play, she proudly announces that he has twenty seven wounds.

The scene in which she, Virgilia, their friend Valeria and her grandson turn up at the enemy camp can be interpreted differently. She tells her son that if he carries on with his attack on Rome, nobody is going to win; either he will be dragged through the streets as a prisoner or his family will suffer. In the production I was in at university, our Volumnia was a local TV star who had given up her TV show to study English. She performed it proudly, never suggesting that she had done anything wrong. 

I am still watching the film version with Vanessa Redgrave in the role, so I’m not sure how she will do that scene, but in the National Theatre production, directed by the wonderful Josie Rourke(who also did that Tate/Tennant Much Ado About Nothing), it was interpreted differently by Deborah Findlay. She had her hair hanging loose after wearing it up. She lowered her eyes and spoke softly, as someone who knew that in the end, all this was her fault and he was going to die. But she still had to persuade him. I rather liked that interpretation- doing it the other way just makes the viewer say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, she just doesn’t get it!”

There are two other women in the play. One is Valeria, a chirpy, cheerful family friend who arrives at their home to ask Volumnia and Virgilia to go out for the afternoon. Valeria has a similar attitude to Volumnia’s, and describes with great relish how she saw Volumnia’s grandson chasing a butterfly and tearing it with his teeth, saying - in Shakespearean language - that he is a real chip off the old block. 

Volumnia says happily that “he had rather see the swords and hear a drum than look upon his schoolmaster.”

Virgilia drily calls her son “a crack, madam,” meaning a young rogue. She refuses firmly to go out while she hasn’t yet heard from her husband. 

She is the gentlest of the women in this play. She is not crazy about the idea of her husband being wounded, and worries for him, while her mother-in-law thinks of it as proof of his manliness - and a chance to win the job of consul.

But Coriolanus loves her; she is the only one to whom he shows any tenderness or gentleness, calling her “my gracious silence.” 

She doesn’t get many lines, but she makes the most of them and in the scene in which Coriolanus’s women go to the enemy camp to beg him to stop, she and Volumnia are in accord. 

Tomorrow- The Winter’s Tale!