Customer Reviews

Coriolanus (Shakespeare, Pelican)

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This is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy in my opinion. Everybody talks about Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, but Coriolanus for some reason is mostly, and unjustly, ignored. I feel that Coriolanus is the only pure tragedy among Shakespeare's works. Macbeth was a sociopath who brought all his troubles on himself; Hamlet was a confused young man who couldn't make a decision and who waited too long to get the job done; King Lear was an old fool who played games with his daughters and brought most of his problems on himself; Othello could have avoided his problems if he simply sat down and had a real conversation with his wife; and Romeo and Juliet were just a couple of immature kids who simply needed a few hard kicks in their butts. Coriolanus is different. Coriolanus was simply an honest, hard-working soldier who got the job done and told the truth, but was brought down by the guile of his enemies. That, in my opinion, is the greatest tragedy of them all.

It seems that people either love or hate this play. Many consider Coriolanus to be a very unlikable character because he is supposedly arrogant, but I disagree. Coriolanus just worked hard, told the truth, was a straight shooter, and refused to play silly games by telling people what they wanted to hear. I guess I see something different in this play than most critics and readers of Shakespeare.

+++++

This play, written circa 1608, is the last of William Shakespeare's (1564 to 1616) eleven (some say ten) known tragedies. Even though it is known as a "Roman" or "political" play, serious readers will discover that it so much more. I found that it stayed with me long after I read it.

This play is set in ancient Rome. It is essentially the story of warrior Caius Marcius (later known as "Coriolanus") whose honor, pride, and sense of social rank dominates his life and interferes with his ability to function effectively when he's not on the battlefield.

One of the great attributes of this play is that it does not have many characters and thus is easy to follow. The major characters are as follows:

(1) Coriolanus (originally Caius Marcius): a valiant warrior and patrician (nobleman) with a non-overbearing wife. "A soldier to Cato's wish" and a modest hero who "hath deserved worthily of his country" but who lacks tact and refuses to placate "the mutable, rank-scented many."
(2) Volumnia: his overbearing mother. "In anger, Juno-like."
(3) Menenius Agrippa: "a humorous patrician" and an old and true friend of Coriolanus who is trusted by the plebeians (lower class)
(4) Titus Lartius and Cominius: fellow generals with Coriolanus.
(5) Sicinius and Brutus: tribunes (representatives of the plebeians) of the common people and Coriolanus' political enemies. "A pair of strange ones."
(6) Tullus Aufidius: general of Rome's enemies and rival in glory to Coriolanus.

This "Shakespeare PELican" book (published by Penguin in 1999) has some interesting material before the play proper. I found the introduction to the play especially informative.

I would recommend, in order to get the full impact of this play, to either see it on film (the BBC production is excellent) or to see it on the stage.

Finally, I cannot understand why this play has been overlooked as one of Shakespeare's great works. (It was, in fact, written during Shakespeare's greatest period, 1599 to 1608.) The story itself is interesting with many subtle themes. The only thing I can think of is that there are some terms that you must know to properly understand the play (such as patrician, plebeian, tribune, etc.). These terms can be easily looked up in a good dictionary.

In conclusion, this play, in my opinion, is an overlooked gem. This book published by Penguin is an excellent resource for students, teachers, theatre professionals, and anyone interested in discovering this great play!!

+++++

This inexpensive volume is a fine edition with very readable text, good notes, and a nice introduction. Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, though it has its partisans. As with several of Shakespeare's best plays, it is an attempt to combine an investigation of the nature of power with a psychological portrait. The nature of power or kingship was one of Shakespeare's great themes, featured in some of the great tragedies like MacBeth or Lear, and this theme runs through many of his history plays. In Coriolanus, however, this theme is handled less well. It is interesting to speculate why Shakespeare, who dealt with this theme so well in many plays, doesn't do such a good job in Coriolanus. The action in Coriolanus is set in a republic, not a monarchy. The structure of republican politics is not one Shakespeare would have known well and the problems of politics and authority in a republican are different than those of a monarchy. Particularly for modern audiences, whose intrinsic understanding of republican politics is much greater than Shakespeare's, the clumsy handling of the tension between the aristocratic Coriolanus and the plebes rings false. In addition, the psychological portrait of Coriolanus is not nearly as rich as Shakespeare's analysis of quite a few of his other protagonists. Much of the language in Coriolanus is powerful but it lacks the dramatic movement and insight of his best work.

Shakespeare's last and greatest tragedy, *Coriolanus* dramatizes the conflict between pride and envy--those two antagonists which were the favorite characters of ancient myth.

Coriolanus is a man of Virtue, when virtue meant 'manliness' not 'modest chastity.' Above all, he had the virtue of pursuing virtue, which he refused to compromise and which he refused to hide. In contrast, the aristocracy and the mob whom they serve despised Coriolanus precisely because he was good and refused to be otherwise.

*Coriolanus* is Shakespeare at the height of his powers, and the real tragedy is that this work is not better known.

I never understood why this play is so unpopular. Coriolanus is a very striking figure. He is a brave and valiant soldier. Yet, he has contempt for the people he protects. In all honesty this is very common. Shakespeare never allows the intensity of this play to drop for a moment. At first Coriolanus fights to the extreme for Rome. Then he fights to the extreme against Rome. His reconciliation with his former enemy Aufidius in 4.5 is a very memorable scene. Only when he is confronted by his mother, wife, and son does he go through a crisis of conscience. It is interesting that because he begins to see the world in terms other than himself, his downfall becomes inevitable. To be sure, this play is not a masterpiece like "Julius Caesar," "Hamlet," "King Lear," or "Richard III." But it is A LOT BETTER than some of his popular plays like "Othello" or "Romeo and Juliet." I highly suggest it!

"Thy valientness is mine. Thou suckest it from me." That would be Volumnia's (Coriolanus' mother) quote -- and one of my favorites. "Coriolanus" is an intriguing story and the characters are marvelous. I have yet to see a better portrayal of a suffocating mother. Volumnia will live in my heart forever.

With its scenes of war and mobs, CORIOLANUS is a work best expirienced on the stage, of course, being one of his least popular plays, it doesn't get produced too often.

The only killing Coriolanus does is on the battle field, but he still comes off as a much less likable character than the murdering Hamlet or Macbeth because Coriolanus spends much of the play berating the citizens of Rome. CORIOLANUS has often been called Shakespeare's manifesto against democracy because of this, but the play is much more complex than that. Yes, it's a play about the fickleness of the masses, but it's also about leaders who don't perform their responsibilities either.

The play is much more political than emotional, and therefore not one I'll return to often, but its political statements are as timely today as they were 400 years ago, if not moreso.

This is a pretty decent political tragedy. The book has a great inroduction that helped lay out the themes of the play. While this was a good work, it wasn't my favorite by Shakespeare.

Any Shakespeare play that leaves people with totally different interpretations regarding the nature of the lead character can't be all bad. That said, "Coriolanus" suffers from its ambiguity.

The first time I read it was in college. My kindly professor laid out the case for seeing Coriolanus as a kind of fascist strongman brought down by his contempt for the people, and I went away comforted in my small-L liberalism. This time, however, reading it on my own, it was hard not to see Coriolanus as something else entirely, a deserving elitist brought down by an envious, parasitic mobocracy who couldn't bear to see him succeed. In short, John Galt in a toga.

A more disturbing realization with this second reading was that as a play, "Coriolanus" doesn't hold together. It's considered likely to be Shakespeare's last tragedy, written in 1608-09, but lacks for the vitality or singular inspiration you expect from the seasoned tragedian of "MacBeth" or "King Lear."

It has a fantastic first act as I read it, brimming with great dialogue, highly charged scenes, and a well-extended battle sequence. Act I also sets up the core issue of the rest of the play. "He that trusts to you,/Where he should find you lions, finds you hares/Where foxes, geese," is how the bold patrician Marcius puts it to the rabble rousers at the play's start. "He that depends/Upon your favors swims on fins of lead/And hews down oaks with rushes."

Marcius will later be renamed Coriolanus, after conquering the city Corioles. Rome proves more of a problem, where he's rejected by an easily-led and ungrateful mob. They have a point about Marcius' coldness when it comes to their need for corn, but he's not a dangerous character. Yes, he's more than a trifle haughty and dominated by a glory-hungry mother with vicious tendencies, but he is no threat to their young republic. He prefers to fight and leave the power trappings to others. He even declines booty he took from an enemy city.

Coriolanus being neither villain nor sympathetic hero is a problem with the play. So is the cast around him. There are two types of characters in "Coriolanus": his loyal but impotent patrician friends and the weaselly plebs who oppose him for largely obscure reasons. The characters lack depth, even Coriolanus's mother who goes from diabolic to dishwater in a few scenes.

The last four acts mix affecting scenes and great lines with a very choppy storyline. Coriolanus is always turning on a dime. Coriolanus vows not to wear humble robes in order to appeal to public favor, then does. He promises not to lose his temper in a key moment, and then does anyway with gusto. He tells his mother to go away one moment, and the next kneels before her. Coriolanus famously offers fewer soliloquies than any of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, perhaps because he doesn't have an inner self worth knowing.

I liked this play more as a Shakespeare buff. It's the flip side of his "Richard II." Richard II fatally overplays his sense of divine right as his subjects prove better than he deserves. Here, the title character is deserving but undone by common men who act in uniformly baser ways. The yin-yang idea of noblesse oblige in Shakespeare's day seems on display in these plays when considered together, presenting a kind of cultural bubble level that tilts depending on the angle of the viewer.

On its own, "Coriolanus" is occasionally gripping but ultimately frustrating reading, in need of an inspired director with a properly skewed take to give it the cohesion on stage it lacks on the page.

Incredible story with lots of plot lines and hidden meanings. For many, the nuances cannot be grasped when read, but easier to see when the play is acted out. Historical knowledge of the pre-republican Rome is also a requirement before you can fully understand the motivation of the Tribune characters.