Don't forget to duck

"My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
this enemy town. I'll enter: if he slay me,
He does fair justice; if he give me way,
I'll do his country service."

                                             Coriolanus     IV, iv

Earlier this year, a film adaptation of Shakespeare's last tragedy, Coriolanus, was released to great critical acclaim, with Ralph Fiennes directing and acting the title role, and Gerard Butler as Aufidius, his sworn enemy in blood. In Coriolanus' words, Aufidius is "a lion I am proud to hunt."

But the film does not recreate Shakespeare's imagined Rome but rather a strife-torn Balkanized state, much like the crumbling Yugoslavia that so dominated headlines a while back (the film was shot in and around Belgrade). In this setting, the relevance of Shakespeare's work to the world we live in today becomes all the more obvious.

A remarkably tense scene comes when Coriolanus, banished from his home city despite his martial honors, breaks into the stronghold of his foe Aufidius. Security has been breached; Aufidius demands to know the identity of the intruder, and comes to find it's his deadliest enemy, offering to turn against the city that had once honored him.

What might be called a rather low-tech security arrangement, quite common in Shakespeare's day, can be seen in Agecroft Hall's wicket gate. It is centuries old and can be seen in nineteenth-century photographs of Agecroft when the building stood in Lancashire, England.

The basic idea was simple: a small, awkward-to-step-through gate was cut into a larger gate.
The larger gate could be swung open to allow entrance to a rider on horseback. But if there was any question as to the visitor's intentions, that person had to dismount and step through the wicket gate, so small that it necessitated an awkward attempt at both stooping over and stepping up at the same time, to come through the opening.

That is an extremely vulnerable position in which to make an entrance; a man defending the premises could club an intruder over the head if need be. At least that was the idea. Perhaps a wicket gate would have stopped the intruding Coriolanus, but then Shakespeare would have had to change his ending.