Shakespeare's Coriolanus Research Articles

Parallel lives in contrast: Scars in the Roman Republic versus English hereditary monarchy.

Scars are a visible part of the political forum in the Roman Republic and in English hereditary monarchy. Coriolanus's scars are celebrated by Romans in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus; in contrast, an absent record of King Richard II's skin ever breaking is part of the collective fiction of hereditary monarchy in Shakespeare's Richard II. For democracy in Rome, the symbology of scarring may be a practical element in ratifying the office of the consul: as a reminder of Rome's experience with the Tarquin kings they had expelled and to avoid the concentration of power in any one man. Consuls would serve only one year, and there were two consuls each year. Scars demonstrated that these politicians were not gods like kings wished to be. In parallel, scar-free, impenetrable skin preserves King Richard II's symbolism as an anointed monarch. Henry Bolingbroke and his son, Prince Hal and future Henry V, face the psychologic and political consequences of stripping the kingship of this aura, by demonstrating that a king's skin can be penetrated on the battlefield by any of his subjects.

The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric

The Rhetoric of Wounds in Coriolanus; or, a Tragedy of Renaissance Rhetoric Jaspreet S. Tambar (bio) It is the sad lot of the tragic hero that he is essentially misunderstood. His pride and failure to engage the vicissitudes of vulgar society and its inclinations to deceit and vice are met with a hard misapprehension of malice in his stubborn resolution to absolute moral clarity. What's more, the tragic hero's pretension, born out of the greatness and simplicity that define his mind, of having comprehended his place and the place of others in the world ensures that tragedy is rife with misinterpretation. Hence the prominent acts of misinterpretation and misrecognition across the history of tragic drama, from Herodotus's story about King Creon having misinterpreted the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, who told him to his ruin that if he attacked the Persians a great empire would fall; through Brutus's conflation of patrician Republican ideals with popular support; to Wotan's refusal to forfeit the absolute power of the ring despite the warnings of the Rhinemaidens in Wagner's Ring tetralogy. And especially in Coriolanus, a play obsessed with voice and understanding, such misinterpretations serve as a constant source of anxiety, and ultimately tragedy. Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a colossus, imposing in the weight of his stature and the hard finish of his resolutions. As strong as stone and as terse as its plinthed inscriptions, Coriolanus is the living embodiment of Roman virtus, the predicates of which include strength, fidelity, courage, and, most importantly, the Stoic principle of homologia, otherwise known as constancy. The ideal of Roman virtus tends toward uniformity and regularity in action and feeling, like a marble curve. Critics have noted the deep current of Stoicism running through the play, though some have also asserted its absence in the protagonist, arguing that Coriolanus's ostensible constancy is no more than what the Dutch Neo-stoic Justus Lipsius called "obstinacy or frowardness"; or else claiming that Coriolanus's disturbance by public honor and domestic affections proves him to "not have a drop of Stoic blood in his veins."1 Indeed, T.S. Eliot ridiculed Stoic [End Page 27] pretensions in Shakespeare as nothing more than "self-consciousness and self-dramatization."2 In Eliot's post-classical world, pride is opposed to the Christian virtue of humility, and Coriolanus's virtus thus easily reads as obstinacy and arrogance. But his intense regard for constancy, in both the domestic and public spheres, is in fact mistaken by critics for a failure in Stoicism. Nowhere is the play's fascination with the complexities of Stoicism and the hero's remarkable determination to virtus more apparent than in the pivotal scene in the marketplace when theatrical performance threatens Stoic constancy.3 By constancy is usually meant a kind of steadfastness, uniformity, and fidelity. Being constant implies virtue in remaining true to one's self, to be an unmoving rock upon which opinion and influence break like water. Geoffrey Miles argues that constancy is not merely local Roman coloring but the necessary question of the play, that "in a paradox characteristic of this intensely paradoxical play, the passionate traitor Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most self-consciously 'constant' character."4 In both antiquity and the Renaissance there are however two conflicting traditions of constancy, and the near impossibility of negotiating them contributes to Coriolanus's ruin. These conflicting traditions derive from the writings of two major classical authors: Seneca and Cicero. The Senecan ideal celebrates the kind of constancy to which has been referred above, which is primarily reflective and ethical. Seneca says in De constantia sapientis that such constancy is a rational imperative to moral conviction, and its wisdom should be exercised even in the face of tyrants who threaten torture as well as fortune's reversals.5 By contrast, the Ciceronian ideal, which is often described in theatrical metaphors, demands social propriety and thus a public responsibility to act according to a certain part. In the first book of De officiis, a treatise on duty, Cicero decidedly identifies social virtue with moral virtue, each a demonstration of constancy in either action or word.6 For Cicero, propriety is key...

‘She done Coriolanus at the Convent’: Empowerment and Entrapment in Teresa Deevy's In Search of Valour

This article explores the gender politics of a neglected one-act play by Teresa Deevy, first staged at the Abbey in 1931, that revolves around the young female protagonist's recollection of a convent production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in which the title role was taken by a young woman. This role model offers inspiration for a character confined as a domestic servant and defiantly seeking an alternative to the stultifying circumstances of life in rural Free State Ireland. While Ellie Irwin resembles other spirited Deevy heroines, the doubling of the young servant with her memory of Charlotta Burke as a non-cross-dressed Coriolanus adds a different dramatic dimension and raises questions of gender performance that the play's critical reception has not always acknowledged.

General Retaliation Against The Roman Empire as Seen in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

This reseacrh is titled "General Retaliation Against The Roman Empire As Seen In William Shakespeare's Coriolanus. In this research the author will discuss several issues, namely (1) How is Coriolanus's struggle in defending Rome's empire from enemy attacks? (2) What did Coriolanus do to avenge himself at the Roman empire? (3) What is the story of Coriolanus at the end of the story? the objectives of this research are (1) To analyze Coriolanus' life at the beginning of the story (2) To explain the cause of coriolanus to avenge his Roman empire (3) To study and explain how much Coriolanus's grudge to Rome to the tragic story he experienced. The theory used in this research is literary psychology theory according to Sigmund Freud. This research uses a qualitative method. The object of research is the drama Coriolanus by William Shakespeare. Data sources are divided into two, namely primary data sources and secondary data sources. The primary data source is the drama script itself. Secondary data sources are text texts and several references related to research. The data collection technique is taking notes. The technical analysis of the data is descriptive analysis. The results of the study show the following conclusions. First, the responsibility of a general in maintaining the sovereignty of his kingdom. Second, feelings of resentment arise when a struggle is not properly appreciated. Third, someone's revenge towards others can have fatal consequences and can even end in a tragic death.

Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson's Coriolan/us

Becoming the MobMike Brookes and Mike Pearson's Coriolan/us Penelope Cole (bio) People milling about, chatting. Drizzly rain. The bang of port-o-potty doors. The rustle of paper. Smells of beer, wet earth, water. Huge blue doors. More people. Headphones? Laughter. Excitement. Disquiet. Wonder. Brrrr. And then, pushing from behind, WHAT? A horn honking, WHERE? Swiveling our heads to see . . . a Van?! driving through the assembled masses? OUT OF THE WAY! Blue doors sliding open, visions of a throng of people on movie screens football fields away. That's US! And then we're in. The "play" has begun. Hangar 858, RAF St. Athan, in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, was the site of Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson's 2012 production Coriolan/us, produce?d by the National Theatre Wales in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, commissioned for the World Shakespeare Festival. A conflation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Brecht's adaptation titled Coriolan, the action of the play (both dramatic and physical) is located predominantly in public spaces replete with crowds of supporters and/or detractors. From the beginning, the principle concept driving the production was the mobs embedded in the architecture of the two texts, which informed the scale and scope of the site and, in turn, determined the use of multimedia within the production. In this article, I explore how the aircraft hangar and installed scenic elements as well as the collective movement through the space by the audience/viewers and the performers, combined with projected images and sound piped through headphones, invited us to reimagine our (the audience/viewers') place and identity in Pearson and Brookes's world of Coriolan/us.1 The crowds of people prominent in both Shakespeare's original text, appearing in twenty-five out of twenty-nine scenes, and Brecht's adaptation, wherein [End Page 104] "the people" are the focus of the action, spurred Brookes and Pearson's interest in the plays. In the Coriolan/us program, Mike Brookes explains how this central image of the masses influenced the production. "In our imaginings, from the inception of this work, Coriolan/us was always going to unfold amongst a crowd, as it moved and flowed around the open public space of this event."2 Mike Pearson, in his article "National Theatre of Wales's Coriolan/us: A 'Live Film,'" noted how crowded the world of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is and remarked on the multiplicity of generalized public locations (battlefields, streets, marketplaces, and the like) required by the text.3 Based on these and other features found in the texts of the plays, Pearson recounts that the "decision was made . . . to regard the audience from time to time and unwittingly perhaps, as citizens, army, bystanders, film extras, etc., and to achieve the production . . . with only two Citizens and two Tribunes . . . No massed supernumeraries, no rioters, no foot soldiers to hinder the momentum of the events."4 Thus, the audience/viewers were, from the first, cast in the role of the populace of Rome, the body politic, citizens, soldiers, and rioters, to occupy, inhabit, and define the public spaces within and upon which the action takes place. Additionally, the movement of these multitudes figured in the imagining of the production. In the program notes, Brookes articulates a dynamic movement flowing through an open space, "act following act, one then leading another, the rolling consequences of our choices and reactions accumulating as they ripple on through the body and structure of a social forum constituted by all those present" (emphasis mine).5 This social forum, the various peoples of ancient Rome, was to be created, in theory and in practice, in large part by the choices in movement the audience/viewers made as they negotiated the site, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in response to the production choices, the complex choreography of the performers, and the architecture of the aircraft hangar. To accommodate the flowing movement of the imagined crowds of Rome as well as the scope of the action of the play, Brookes and Pearson sought a large, wide-open space that could be easily traversed. Brookes states, "It was always going to happen to scale. A large open place...

Continental Scope and Its Discontents

Continental Scope and Its Discontents Ankhi Mukherjee (bio) In a memorable scene in Orange is the New Black, the web television series created by Jenji Kohan for Netflix, the inmate Suzanne Warren, aka "Crazy Eyes," played with manic and poetic fury by Uzo Aduba, recites a Shakespeare monologue to hapless teenage visitors to the prison: You common cry of curs! whose breath I hateAs reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prizeAs the dead carcasses of unburied menThat do corrupt my air, I banish you{And here remain with your uncertainty!… thus I turn my back.There is a world elsewhere} (Shakespeare 2013, 316–17) This occurs in season 1, episode 11 of the popular television series. A group of juvenile delinquents is visiting Litchfield, a minimum-security federal prison in upstate New York, and the inmates have been asked to "act tough" to scare the girls away from leading a life of crime. Suzanne is aggrieved that other prisons get to do "Shakespeare and shit" and seizes this as an acting opportunity. Suzanne suffers from mental illness, aggravated now by stressors associated with the degrading conditions of prison life. She receives no care in captivity and is terrified of being returned to "Psych" or the psychiatric unit of [End Page 814] the prison, widely acknowledged to be more tormenting than SHU, or solitary confinement. An adopted child of white middle-class parents who are loving but obtuse to Suzanne's emergent mental health needs, the flashbacks show a jagged process of identity formation marked by painful social alienation, attachment disorders, and borderline personality traits. The adoptive mother does not engage with the pain caused by Suzanne's inarguable blackness in a predominantly white circle of family and friends: in a rare moment of haptic connection experienced by the child Suzanne, we see an African-American nurse calm her down at hospital by offering to fix her hair. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Act III, scene iii begins at the Forum in Rome, addressing the howling crowd to whom Coriolanus has been appealing for the title of Consul, and who have demanded his banishment in ungrateful response. The words lend themselves surprisingly well to Suzanne Warren's improvised theatre. She is the tragic wounded hero to the plebeians, alone (another Coriolanus watchword) in the forced intimacy of a crowd of common people. Suzanne delivers the lines with aplomb, the intense alliteration of common/cry/curs or reek/rotten building up to the exhalation of "my AIIIR." The curious displacement whereby Coriolanus's "I banish you" becomes the coerced and choiceless self-banishment of "I turn my back/There is a world elsewhere" adds poignancy to this mock assumption of sovereign power in Litchfield's ongoing drama of the dispossessed. For this reader, this scene proleptically posits some of the meditations put forth in Thinking Literature Across Continents, by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller (2016): on why literature matters; on its transnational mobility and lability as well as its transcultural knots and glitches; on the unstable and often self-cancelling relationship between pedagogies and performance; on literature as the ground of comparison between disparate entities, whose placeholders, in this instance, are Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Orange Is the New Black's Suzanne Warren. The authors, however, do not discuss Orange is the New Black or any cultural form of literary transmission remotely relatable to this prison drama. And therein lies a glaring oversight of work. Let me clarify that I am not holding Ghosh and Miller responsible for not watching Orange Is the New Black or Netflix or even popular television entertainments (Miller, for one, openly decries the fate of literature in "an age of prestidigitalization" {68}). I will, however, begin my critique of the book by asking why, given the excursive as well as inclusive pedagogies informing this unique transcontinental collaboration, do we end up discussing (again) "The [End Page 815] Daffodils" and Derrida, Beckett, Arnold, Tagore and Wallace Stevens, Sanskrit literary theory and Chinese classics, not undiscovered or non-credentialised authors, texts, and literary milieu? Why does a mode of critique that proudly identifies itself as the "(in)fusion-transnow thesis" (7) not engage with...

Filming Shakespeare's Rome:

Abstract Despite dramatically different approaches to mise-en-scène, Julie Taymor's Titus (1999) and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus (2011) both use Rome in a way reminiscent of what Susan Bennett and Pascale Aebischer term the ‘contemporary Jacobean.’ The films locate the violence, pain, and politics of the Shakespearean texts simultaneously in an ancient past and a vaguely timeless present, creating a preposterous contemporary Rome. In Taymor's Titus, even scenes filmed off-location are designed to play to audiences’ preconceived notions of Rome through references to history, literature, and pop culture. While the production is site-specific, the time period is both universal and conflated; every historical or fictional Rome seems to exist in the same moment in the film. Fiennes establishes a Rome that is more time-specific by making costumes and setting distinctly contemporary, but the site of the Roman setting becomes universal, suggesting that the Rome of Shakespeare's Coriolanus can be anywhere and everywhere. The disordered Romes presented by Taymor and Fiennes suggest that Shakespeare can be understood through a reading of contemporary warfare, and contemporary civil strife can be understood and even predicted through Shakespeare's Rome. This cyclical reading of human brutality establishes both films as nostalgic readings of Shakespearean texts.

“Ancient Volscian Border Dispute Flares”

Reception of the 2012 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, dealt with two particular themes: the homoerotic relationship between Fiennes' Coriolanus and the rebel leader Aufidius whose forces he eventually joins, and the choice to shoot the film in Serbia and Montenegro. While south-east Europe has become an increasingly popular location for Anglophone filmmaking, the promotion and reception of Coriolanus foregrounded the significance of Belgrade and the Balkans as a site of recent conflict. Moreover, the film constructs the world of Coriolanus and Aufidius through simulating or even re-using images of “Balkan” space with which viewers have already become familiar through news media, and it therefore draws on and contributes to representative practices that constitute the Balkans as a violent and warlike zone. Yet Aufidius' rebel force resembling militias from the Yugoslav wars is opposed to a highly disciplined “Roman” military equipped for urban warfare in 2000s Iraq. This article contends that the film achieves this contrast primarily through evoking different military masculinities associated with each force, which have been widely disseminated through still and filmed war photography, and secondarily through its use of specific ex-Yugoslav landscapes and cityscapes. The complex relationship between images of the Balkans, masculinity and military discipline in Coriolanus shows that images of military masculinities juxtaposed with a post-Yugoslav material environment continue to operate as symbolic resources in a contemporary western imaginary of war.

‘Seeking (The) Mean(s)’: Aristotle's Ethics and Shakespeare's Coriolanus

Shakespeare's Coriolanus bears the stamp of Aristotelianism in ways affecting ethics, drama and politics. Steering a course between excess, defect and the mean enables Shakespeare to experiment with a new dramatic geometry; concerns with character excellence develop into questions of character types, and the political model of Aristotle is measured against that of Machiavelli. Coriolanus' quarrel with Aufidius harbours a conflict of doctrines in which virtus is eventually superseded by virtù. The mean is lost in the sense of ‘virtuous midpoint’ to assume that of ‘contrivance’, valued so far as the end is valued, regardless of ethicality.

A Re-reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus through Réné Girard's Theory of Mimetics

This paper uses Rene Girard's theory of mimetics as a means of rereading Shakespeare's tragedy, Coriolanus, and shedding...

Renaissance eloquence and female exemplarity: Coriolanus and the matrona docta

This article argues that Shakespeare's Coriolanus draws on the powerful exemplary figure of Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, in its ambiguous depiction of the relationship between eloquence and femininity. By looking at ideas relating to the example, and at a range of depictions of Cornelia, the essay suggests that the manipulation of these images represents a response to emergent discourses relating to femininity, as well as an engagement with the reception of classical rhetoric. As the figures of Cornelia and her counterpart Volumnia demonstrate, female exemplars are integrally involved in the formulation of ideas about style, rhetoric and ethics, and can be seen to figure centrally in the Renaissance's understanding of relationships between private and public, as figured in the polis, the household and in historical narrative. Shakespeare both addresses and complicates the standard equation between maternal virtue and eloquence by critiquing the incursion of feminine rhetoric into the public realm of politics and governance.

Review of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (adapted for film and directed by Ralph Fiennes)

Coriolanus is an intriguing but comparatively unpopular tragedy; audiences have frequently found both play and protagonist profoundly unsympathetic and alienating. This eagerly awaited adaptation i...

Coriolanus and I

This essay argues that Shakespeare's Coriolanus theorizes the complex terrain of identity in ways that allow us to read the play as a queer text. In particular, I argue that Coriolanus theorizes the desire that attaches to the category of the fag-hag. This may seem an odd claim to make about a play that not only includes no character whom we might identify as a fag-hag but also predates the emergence of the fag-hag as a category in the twentieth century. Yet the problems of ontology and temporality that my claim touches on are very much theorized by Coriolanus. The play thinks through questions of desire – who does the fag-hag desire, and how does that desire form her identity? – and temporality – does the fag-hag's desire for a gay man cancel out possible prior desires for a straight man? It also engages with current articulations of queer theory in asking whether or not we can describe desire using terms that do not have temporal “legitimacy” – can a current term be used as a heuristic with which to engage a text written over 400 years ago? And finally, can we think of Coriolanus itself, not as an object for queer theory's analysis, but rather, as itself a queer theoretical intervention that thinks through the kind of relationality the fag-hag assumes?

Coriolanus : Inordinate Passions and Powers in Personal and Political Governance

For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living ... --William Butler Yeats, Blood and Moon Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, defines moderation as a disposition to choose the just mean between excess and deficiency emotion and action as a response to varying circumstances and relative to each particular person. (1) As a situational ethic, moderation can only be limned in outline and not precisely, (2) but that did not stop the golden mean from becoming a powerful cultural commonplace early modern England. (3) Despite its ubiquitous invocation as an ideal, there was a great divergence how this ethical principle was to be construed or applied to the various spheres--economic, religious, social, amorous, convivial--of early modern life. (4) Shakespeare distinguishes himself from most of his contemporaries, Who pitted passion against moderation, excess against what they considered a lackluster Aristotelian mean. Given his complexity of thought, Shakespeare, throughout his corpus, presents diverse representations of moderation, reflective of various contemporary views: for example, self-restraint with regard to common pleasures, discipline politics, virtuosity self-advancement, and feminine modesty. Among Shakespeare's various depictions of the mean, however, none, I believe, is as innovative and potent as virtuous moderation, deploying rather than decrying passion toward salutary and excellent ends. Shakespeare throughout his plays vividly dramatizes a conception of moderation faithful to Aristotelian ethical theory of the mean as a situational virtue, which comprehends excessive affect and action. Moderation is, value, a virtuous extreme and, practice, an instrumental mean that involves the entire range of excessive and moderate passion and action: an excellence of disciplined passion. (5) In Aristotle's famous illustration of moderation as the action of a skilled archer aiming at his target, (6) the mean and the extreme converge literally the bull's eye. As Aristotle suggests, even discerning the target real life is much more complex than archery that the just mean is a moving target--not a simple arithmetic mean--varying by person, by circumstance, by emotion. As Shakespeare so richly shows, this perfective moderation, harmonizing passion and reason, fuses effective strategy with virtue. The virtuous mean comprehends rather than eschews the sometimes extreme measures required of prudence; affectively, moderation, depending on the situation, might entail an intense expression of passion or a submerged one, without ever extirpating it. Entailing rational deliberation implemented effective action--all fueled by a noble end--virtuous moderation presupposes psychologically complex, well-developed characters. It is no surprise then that the plays of Shakespeare, through their wealth of nuanced characters engaged psychologically complex action, are so congenial for examinations of the passions and their virtuous governance. This ethico-political study examines Shakespeare's Coriolanus how the lack of virtuous moderation the eponymous hero, Rome's first citizen, reflects the collective immoderation of the entire polity: the state's inability to bring its various parts into salutary corporate balance, thus overturning its pro-republican advances. This tragedy has intrigued audiences at two levels--characterological and political. Its title character, herculean his strength and moral integrity, continues to baffle and provoke ambivalence us. The play, a dramatization of Rome as an emergent republic, has also garnered critical attention recently the effort to recuperate early modern texts as pro-democratic documents. (7) The personal and political strands merge the interlinked fates of Coriolanus and the state. In this play exploring governance, Coriolanus's incontinence contributes to and is emblematic of Rome's constitutional imbalance as an incipient republic. …

Sacred Life and Sacrificial Economy: Coriolanus in No-Man's-Land

In these lines we might trace a precursor for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the military hero of the early Roman Republic who turns his back on his own city to join forces with its enemies. First Citizen speaks the first line of Coriolanus (ca. 1608—9): Before we proceed any further, hear me speak (1.1.1).2 The opening lines of the play thus link the shifting status of republican citizenship to rights, and rites, of public speech and popular representation, issues again foregrounded in the election scene of act 2, scene 1. Often considered the most political of Shakespeare's plays, his last tragedy has long provided fodder for those who speculate about Shakespeare's own political affiliations, particularly his attitude toward absolute monarchy, on the one hand, or some sort of protodemocratic populism, on the other. Recently, Andrew Hadfield takes up the issue in a series of books and articles.3 In his latest book, Hadfield identifies his critical task as an exercise in historical recovery or archaeology, com mencing with the provocative query was Shakespeare a Republican? Unlike Hadfield, in the argument that follows do not overtly engage this question. Rather, as A. C. Bradley said nearly a century ago, I do not propose to join this dance, or even to ask whether any reasonable conjec ture as to Shakespeare's political views and feelings could be formed from

“How apply you this?” Conflict and consensus in Coriolanus

The tense political debates that dominate the first three acts of Shakespeare's Coriolanus shed valuable light on a little understood feature of early modern political discourse that is pivotal to the tragic action. In the increasingly heated exchanges that precede the banishment of the play's titular hero political languages of custom, duty and consent are used not only to forestall violent political rupture, as we might anticipate, but also to trigger it. In so doing the play illuminates a vital paradox that has wider implications for early modern studies: the conservative, even reactionary tenor of the appeals to consensus that are a characteristic feature of political discourse in early modern England as in Coriolanus and their potentially radical effects. For in Shakespeare's last Plutarchan Roman play appeals to consensus do not just co-exist with ideological conflict, at a crucial juncture their use by common citizens transforms the aristocratic city-state into a republic with a mixed constitution. The subsequent banishment of Coriolanus as a “traitorous innovator” further illustrates how, in a culture of consensus, defenders of a pre-existing political settlement can find themselves branded traitors should a new accord take shape to which they remain publicly opposed. It also attests to the skill with which the newly created tribunes employ a language of consensus to isolate their political adversary

Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Aristotle's Great-Souled Man

This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare's Coriolanus in light of Aristotle's account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus's similarity to Aristotle's magnanimous man allows us to harmonize two apparently discordant elements of the magnanimous man's character: his seriousness about the good, on the one hand, and his apparently status-oriented intolerance of insult, on the other. Nevertheless, Coriolanus falls short of Aristotle's standard; reflection on his defects reveals that genuine magnanimity requires prudence and a philosophic detachment from the city's moral convictions that Shakespeare's hero lacks.

Spirit, soul, and city: Shakespeare's Coriolanus

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Act One Chapter 3 Act Two Chapter 4 Act Three Chapter 5 Act Four Chapter 6 Act Five

The Hawthorne Aspect of T. S. Eliot's Coriolan

Allusion is generally understood as a textual maneuver that calls into play remembered fragments and transfigured motifs in literature. While pursuing an allusive trail, readers sometimes neglect to consider the detours, certain errant trips a narrative prompts them to make in memory. This essay reads T. S. Eliot's Coriolan fragments alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ both texts featuring young men's errancy and rebellion leading to their respective realities of life. On an allusive trail a reader is a quester; allegory aligns readers and characters in fiction in their common pursuit for the meanings they seek. While parallels, correspondences, and repetitions are remarkable, readers are not always obliged to seek the arresting ground of an empirical ‘‘source.’’ The reading here shows how Eliot appears to have reworked a large Hawthornian paradigm involving American colonial history and an individual American's progress in life. It illustrates further how allusion is both a tribute to tradition and a repudiation of its authority, a detail we remark both in Robin and the ‘‘hero’’ of Coriolan fragments. Both Eliot and Hawthorne before him have been, therefore, sensitive to the burden of paternal inheritance, an aspect Eliot's allusive practice in particular makes clear when he draws upon Hawthorne. Eliot's ‘‘Hawthorne aspect’’ thus enables us to see for once the advantage of looking away from a professed allusive lead in the title (Shakespeare's Coriolanus) but towards another paternal link the poet appears to have suppressed (Hawthorne's American tale).

Review of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (directed by Dominic Dromgoole for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre) at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre London (May–August 2006)

Review of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (directed by Dominic Dromgoole for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre) at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre London (May–August 2006)