Coriolanus

Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s final Roman play, and his final tragedy (it’s often grouped with Antony and Cleopatra in this regard), and though it represents a continuation of his abiding Roman interest, it’s also a significant departure from the structure of his previous tragedies.

The character of Coriolanus is an interesting one, and almost unique among Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists: he is an able military commander who can not (or will not) master the demagoguery of popular rule, and Shakespeare uses him to ask questions about the nature of democratic rule, questions which, not long after the accession of James I, were at the front of his contemporaries' minds.

Coriolanus' taciturn nature (we can contrast the ever-verbose Hamlet) brings him closer in spirit to the heroes of Ancient Greek tragedy, Agamemnon and Achilles, than the post-Senecan rhetorical monsters of the bulk of Shakespeare’s tragedies. T.S. Eliot would find in Coriolanus a powerful achievement of dramatic unity, and would deem it superior to Hamlet in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”. Eliot seems to demand we study the inscrutable Coriolanus as closely as he did.

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