9 - The Roman Plays on Film

Summary

This chapter is a close reading of Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus and Ralph Fiennes’s 2010 Coriolanus.Both films challenge the stock image of historical Rome in Taymor’s case by extensive allusion to other iconic films, costumes and settings; in Fiennes’s case by updating the film’s action to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.In these differing ways, both films insist on the omnipresence of violence. The chapter concludes that this apparent rejection of a stereotypical or immediately recognisable Roman setting is actually closer to the ambiguous sense of the classical seat of empire that Shakespeare’s first audiences may have harboured.Rome is less a physical place and more of an idea but it is an idea riddled with contradictions.Neither film attempts to erase these contradictions; indeed, their stress on anachrony causes both to recapitulate the uncertainties, regarding Rome, of the plays’ early audiences.