ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the things that Brecht had to say about Shakespeare in his critical writings in order to set the scene for his adaptation of the play and see with what kind of assumptions he was working. The point that Grass makes about Brecht-and incidentally about Brecht's Coriolan is that as leaders or "exceptional men" they are necessarily involved in a potentially tragic paradox in relation to politics. Heinemann quotes Brecht on the bourgeois emphasis on the naked individualism of the tragic hero: It is a drama for cannibals presumably because people witness, as it were, the ritual dismemberment of the hero and perhaps because people become mere consumers of the spectacle of his suffering. Ronald Hayman, in his biography of Brecht, declares that Unlike Brecht's variation on Measure for Measure, Coriolan stays respectfully close to its original.
