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VOL. X

25

B

DRAMATIS PERSONE

CAIUS MARCIUS, afterwards CAIUS MARCIUS CORIOLANUS.

TITUS LARTIUS, } generals against the Volscians.

COMINIUS,

MENENIUS AGRIPPA, friend to Coriolanus,

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VOLUMNIA, mother to Coriolanus.

VIRGILIA, wife to Coriolanus.

VALERIA, friend to Virgilia.

Gentlewoman, attending on Virgilia.

Roman and Volscian Senators, Patricians, Ediles, Lictors, Soldiers, Citizens, Messengers, Servants to Aufidius, and other Attendants.

SCENE: Rome and the neighbourhood; Corioli and the

neighbourhood; Antium.

INTRODUCTION

Edition.

CORIOLANUS was first published in the Folio of 1623. The First No quarto edition ever appeared, and the text, printed directly from a MS., abounds in inaccurate punctuation and blundering verse-division.

tion.

External evidence of date is wholly wanting. Date of There is no record of its performance, and the in- Composi genuity of the 'Allusion' hunters has detected no further traces of its influence than an apparent reference in Fletcher's A King and No King (1611), and another in Jonson's Silent Woman (1609). But style and metre assign it clearly to the close of the tragic period, i.e. to the years 1608-10. The metrical innovation of 'weak endings,' first employed freely in Antony and Cleopatra, gains ground; extra syllables impede or complicate the flow of the line; melody is harsher and rarer; nowhere has Shakespeare's verse less of lyric manner. These changes were in part prompted by conscious art. But they were also symptoms of a decaying sense of form. Declining freshness of dramatic invention is betrayed too by the preponderance of typical traits in most of the characters. Volumnia is certainly not sufficiently defined as the typical 'Roman mother,' or even Virgilia as the 'devoted wife'; but the individual and personal traits of both are, for Shakespeare, slightly pronounced. Coriolanus alone among the Roman plays

Source of the Plot.

has affinities with the Roman tragedies of Jonson. Its political animus is significantly easy to read: no other work of Shakespeare can be so excusably mistaken for a treatise on government. Shakespearean imagination triumphs less clearly over the raw material of biography than either in Cæsar or in Antony. We have to do with highly intellectualised prose breaking fitfully into poetry of astonishing magnificence, rather than with work fundamentally and securely poetical. All these characteristics confirm the conclusion that Coriolanus belongs to the closing years of the tragic period.

Shakespeare's sole source was Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus, as translated by North (1579). Thus Plutarch was here dealing with a story as legendary as those of Hamlet or Macbeth, but steeped in sentiment quite foreign to Holinshed or Saxo. A blurred picture of the early struggles of the Republic formed the background of a patriotic myth, which represented a Roman mother saving the State by an appeal to the mercy of her son. Plutarch was the very man to do justice to this triumph of humanity over bruteforce, of the tie of kinship over the passion for vengeance; and he described the great scene in Coriolanus' camp before Rome with a moving eloquence to which Shakespeare himself added little. But Volumnia's sway over Martius was purchased, in Plutarch's view, by grave defects in his upbringing. Martius is for him the type of 'a rare and excellent wit untaught'; his 'natural wit and great heart did marvellously stir up his courage to do and attempt notable acts'; but for lack of education he was so choleric and impatient that he would yield to no living creature ; which made him churlish, uncivil and altogether unfit for any man's conversation. So, still more severely : He was too much given over to self-will and opinion,

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