Skin Narratives: Speaking about Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Nyffenegger-Staub, Nicole Andrea (2023). Skin Narratives: Speaking about Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (In Press). In: Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World. Penn State UP

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Critics have argued that skin is a site where identities are negotiated; I will argue here that such negotiations actually revolve around the marks on the skin. Significantly, Shakespeare’s eponymous war hero Coriolanus is the only one to refer to his previous battle marks as scars. In line with the Renaissance ideal of the contained male body, he conceptualizes his marked skin as a canvas. In contrast, the Roman community constantly refers to his marks as wounds, thus keeping his body open to their “semantic appropriation.” Coriolanus’ marks are thus of an unstable nature and, as any other mark on skin (as I have argued elsewhere) are continuously reshaped by the narratives they trigger. When the plebeians want to “put [their] tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (2.3.7), they seek to narratively appropriate Coriolanus’ marks; not to do so, they say, would be monstrous ingratitude. For Coriolanus, however, the community’s craving for the spectacle of his wounded body entails the danger of becoming a monstrosity of self, wound, words, and boundary-transgressing other. Consequently, Coriolanus refuses to show his wounds in public (in contrast to Plutarch’s Coriolanus) and relegates their display to the intimacy of a private encounter. I propose to close with some observations on our present-day appetite for wounded bodies by discussing the staging of the relevant passages in some recent productions of the play.

Item Type:	Book Section (Book Chapter)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures
UniBE Contributor:	Nyffenegger-Staub, Nicole Andrea
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures 900 History
Publisher:	Penn State UP
Language:	English
Submitter:	Nicole Andrea Nyffenegger-Staub
Date Deposited:	27 Feb 2023 14:46
Last Modified:	27 Feb 2023 23:24
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/122665