Coriolanus

Coriolanus (/kɒriəˈleɪnəs/ or /-ˈlɑː-/[1]) is a tragedy by William

Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and
1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader
Caius Marcius Coriolanus. Shakespeare worked on it during the
same years he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, making them the last
two tragedies written by him.

Coriolanus is the name given to a Roman general after his military

feats against the Volscians at Corioli. Following his success he
seeks to be consul, but his disdain for the plebeians and the mutual
hostility of the tribunes lead to his banishment from Rome. He
presents himself to the Volscians, then leads them against Rome.

Contents
Characters
Synopsis
Sources John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus in
"Coriolanus" by William
Date and text
Shakespeare, Thomas Lawrence
Analysis and criticism (1798)
Performance history
Adaptations
Parody
References
Further reading
External links

Characters
Romans

Caius Marcius – later surnamed Coriolanus

Menenius Agrippa – Senator of Rome
Cominius – consul and commander-in-chief of the army
Titus Larcius – Roman general
Volumnia – Coriolanus' mother (historically, Veturia)
Virgilia – Coriolanus' wife
Young Martius – Coriolanus' son
 Valeria – chaste lady of Rome and friend to Coriolanus' family
Sicinius Velutus – tribune
Junius Brutus – tribune
Roman Citizens
Roman Soldiers
Roman Herald
Roman Senators

Volscians

Tullus Aufidius – general of the Volscian army

Aufidius' Lieutenant
Aufidius' Servingmen
Conspirators with Aufidius
Adrian – Volscian spy
Nicanor – Roman traitor
Volscian Lords
Volscian Citizens
Volscian Soldiers

Other

Gentlewoman
Usher
Volscian senators and nobles
Roman captains
Officers
Messengers
Lictors
Aediles

Synopsis
The play opens in Rome shortly after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings. There are riots in progress, after
stores of grain were withheld from ordinary citizens. The rioters are particularly angry at Caius Marcius,[2]
a brilliant Roman general whom they blame for the loss of their grain. The rioters encounter a patrician
named Menenius Agrippa, as well as Caius Marcius himself. Menenius tries to calm the rioters, while
Marcius is openly contemptuous, and says that the plebeians were not worthy of the grain because of their
lack of military service. Two of the tribunes of Rome, Brutus and Sicinius, privately denounce Marcius. He
leaves Rome after news arrives that a Volscian army is in the field.

The commander of the Volscian army, Tullus Aufidius, has fought Marcius on several occasions and
considers him a blood enemy. The Roman army is commanded by Cominius, with Marcius as his deputy.
While Cominius takes his soldiers to meet Aufidius' army, Marcius leads a rally against the Volscian city of
Corioli. The siege of Corioli is initially unsuccessful, but Marcius is able to force open the gates of the city,
and the Romans conquer it. Even though he is exhausted from the fighting, Marcius marches quickly to
join Cominius and fights the other Volscian force. Marcius and Aufidius meet in single combat, which ends
only when Aufidius' own soldiers drag him away from the battle.
 In recognition of his great courage,
Cominius gives Caius Marcius the
agnomen, or "official nickname",
of Coriolanus. When they return to
Rome, Coriolanus's mother
Volumnia encourages her son to
run for consul. Coriolanus is
hesitant to do this, but he bows to
his mother's wishes. He effortlessly
wins the support of the Roman
Senate, and seems at first to have
won over the plebeians as well.
However, Brutus and Sicinius
scheme to defeat Coriolanus and
instigate another riot in opposition
An 1800 painting by Richard Westall to his becoming consul. Faced with
of Volumnia pleading with Coriolanus this opposition, Coriolanus flies
not to destroy Rome. into a rage and rails against the
concept of popular rule. He "Virgilia bewailing the
compares allowing plebeians to absence of Coriolanus" by
have power over the patricians to allowing "crows to peck the eagles". The Thomas Woolner
two tribunes condemn Coriolanus as a traitor for his words and order him
to be banished. Coriolanus retorts that it is he who banishes Rome from his
presence.

After being exiled from Rome, Coriolanus makes his way to the Volscian capital of Antium, and asks
Aufidius's help to wreak revenge upon Rome for banishing him. Moved by his plight and honoured to fight
alongside the great general, Aufidius and his superiors embrace Coriolanus, and allow him to lead a new
assault on Rome.

Rome, in its panic, tries desperately to persuade Coriolanus to halt his crusade for vengeance, but both
Cominius and Menenius fail. Finally, Volumnia is sent to meet her son, along with Coriolanus's wife
Virgilia and their child, and the chaste gentlewoman Valeria. Volumnia succeeds in dissuading her son from
destroying Rome, urging him instead to clear his name by reconciling the Volscians with the Romans and
creating peace.

Coriolanus concludes a peace treaty between the Volscians and the Romans. When he returns to the
Volscian capital, conspirators, organised by Aufidius, kill him for his betrayal.

Sources
Coriolanus is largely based on the "Life of Coriolanus" in Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's The
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579). The wording of Menenius's speech about the body politic
is derived from William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine (1605),[3][4] where
Pope Adrian IV compares a well-run government to a body in which "all parts performed their functions,
only the stomach lay idle and consumed all"; the fable is also alluded to in John of Salisbury's Policraticus
(Camden's source) and William Averell's A Marvailous Combat of Contrarieties (1588).[5]

Other sources have been suggested, but are less certain. Shakespeare might also have drawn on Livy's Ab
Urbe condita, as translated by Philemon Holland, and possibly a digest of Livy by Lucius Annaeus Florus;
both of these were commonly used texts in Elizabethan schools. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy were
available in manuscript translations, and could also have been used by Shakespeare.[6] He might also have
made use of Plutarch's original source, the Roman Antiquities of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus,[7] as well as on his own knowledge of
Roman custom and law".[5]

Date and text

Most scholars date
Coriolanus to the period
1605–10, with 1608–09
being considered the most
likely, although the
available evidence does not
permit great certainty.

The earliest date for the

play rests on the fact that
Menenius's fable of the
belly is derived from
William Camden's
The first page of The Life of Caius
Remaines, published in
Martius Coriolanus from Thomas
1605. The later date derives
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's
from the fact that several
Lives of the noble Grecians and
other texts from 1610 or
Romanes.
The first page of The Tragedy of thereabouts seem to allude
Coriolanus from the First Folio of to Coriolanus, including
Shakespeare's plays, published in Ben Jonson's Epicoene,
1623 Robert Armin's Phantasma and John Fletcher's The Woman's
Prize, or the Tamer Tamed.[8]

Some scholars note evidence that may narrow down the dating to the period 1607–09. One line may be
inspired by George Chapman's translation of the Iliad (late 1608).[9] References to "the coal of fire upon
the ice" (I.i) and to squabbles over ownership of channels of water (III.i) could be inspired by Thomas
Dekker's description of the freezing of the Thames in 1607–08 and Hugh Myddleton's project to bring
water to London by channels in 1608–09 respectively.[10] Another possible connection with 1608 is that
the surviving text of the play is divided into acts; this suggests that it could have been written for the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre, at which Shakespeare's company began to perform in 1608, although the act-breaks
could instead have been introduced later.[11]

The play's themes of popular discontent with government have been connected by scholars with the
Midland Revolt, a series of peasant riots in 1607 that would have affected Shakespeare as an owner of land
in Stratford-upon-Avon; and the debates over the charter for the City of London, which Shakespeare would
have been aware of, as it affected the legal status of the area surrounding the Blackfriars Theatre.[12] The
riots in the Midlands were caused by hunger because of the enclosure of common land.

For these reasons, R.B. Parker suggests "late 1608 ... to early 1609" as the likeliest date of composition,
while Lee Bliss suggests composition by late 1608, and the first public performances in "late December
1609 or February 1610". Parker acknowledges that the evidence is "scanty ... and mostly inferential".[13]

The play was first published in the First Folio of 1623. Elements of the text, such as the uncommonly
detailed stage directions, lead some Shakespeare scholars to believe the text was prepared from a theatrical
prompt book.
Analysis and criticism
A. C. Bradley described this play as "built on the grand scale,"[14]
like King Lear and Macbeth, but it differs from those two
masterpieces in an important way. The warrior Coriolanus is
perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, rarely
pausing to soliloquise or reveal the motives behind his proud
isolation from Roman society. In this way, he is less like the
effervescent and reflective Shakespearean heroes/heroines such as
Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear and Cleopatra, and more like figures from
ancient classical literature such as Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas Coriolanus at the gates of Rome,
—or, to turn to literary creations from Shakespeare's time, the Franz Anton Maulbertsch (c. 1795)
Marlovian conqueror Tamburlaine, whose militaristic pride finds its
parallel in Coriolanus. Readers and playgoers have often found him
an unsympathetic character, as his caustic pride is strangely, almost delicately balanced at times by a
reluctance to be praised by his compatriots and an unwillingness to exploit and slander for political gain.
His dislike of being praised might be seen as an expression of his pride; all he cares about is his own self-
image, whereas acceptance of praise might imply that his value is affected by others' opinion of him. The
play is less frequently produced than the other tragedies of the later period, and is not so universally
regarded as great. (Bradley, for instance, declined to number it among his famous four in the landmark
critical work Shakespearean Tragedy.) In his book Shakespeare's Language, Frank Kermode described
Coriolanus as "probably the most fiercely and ingeniously planned and expressed of all the tragedies".[15]

T. S. Eliot famously proclaimed Coriolanus superior to Hamlet in The Sacred Wood, in which he calls the
former play, along with Antony and Cleopatra, the Bard's greatest tragic achievement. Eliot wrote a two-
part poem about Coriolanus, "Coriolan" (an alternative spelling of Coriolanus); he also alluded to
Coriolanus in a passage from his own The Waste Land when he wrote, "Revive for a moment a broken
Coriolanus."[16]

Coriolanus has the distinction of being among the few Shakespeare plays banned in a democracy in
modern times.[17] It was briefly suppressed in France in the late 1930s because of its use by the fascist
element, and Slavoj Žižek noted its prohibition in Post-War Germany due to its intense militarism.[18]

Performance history
Like some of Shakespeare's other plays (All's Well That Ends Well; Antony and Cleopatra; Timon of
Athens), there is no recorded performance of Coriolanus prior to the Restoration. After 1660, however, its
themes made it a natural choice for times of political turmoil. The first known performance was Nahum
Tate's bloody 1682 adaptation at Drury Lane. Seemingly undeterred by the earlier suppression of his
Richard II, Tate offered a Coriolanus that was faithful to Shakespeare through four acts before becoming a
Websterian bloodbath in the fifth act. A later adaptation, John Dennis's The Invader of His Country, or The
Fatal Resentment, was booed off the stage after three performances in 1719. The title and date indicate
Dennis's intent, a vitriolic attack on the Jacobite 'Fifteen. (Similar intentions motivated James Thomson's
1745 version, though this bears only a very slight resemblance to Shakespeare's play. Its principal
connection to Shakespeare is indirect; Thomas Sheridan's 1752 production at Smock Alley used some
passages of Thomson's. David Garrick returned to Shakespeare's text in a 1754 Drury Lane production.[19]

Laurence Olivier first played the part at The Old Vic in 1937 and again at the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre in 1959. In that production, he performed Coriolanus's death scene by dropping backwards from a
high platform and being suspended upside-down without the aid of wires.[20]
In 1971, the play returned to the Old Vic in a National Theatre production directed by Manfred Wekwerth
and Joachim Tenschert with stage design by Karl von Appen. Anthony Hopkins played Coriolanus, with
Constance Cummings as Volumnia and Anna Carteret as Virgilia.

Other performances of Coriolanus include Alan Howard, Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen, Ian Richardson,
Toby Stephens, Robert Ryan, Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, Colm Feore, Ralph Fiennes and Tom
Hiddleston.

In 2012, National Theatre Wales produced a composite of Shakespeare's Coriolanus with Bertolt Brecht's
Coriolan, entitled Coriolan/us, in a disused hangar at MOD St Athan.[21] Directed by Mike Brookes and
Mike Pearson, the production used silent disco headsets to permit the text to be heard while the dramatic
action moved throughout the large space. The production was well received by critics.[22][23]

In December 2013, Donmar Warehouse opened their new production. It was directed by Josie Rourke,
starring Tom Hiddleston in the title role, along with Mark Gatiss, Deborah Findlay, Hadley Fraser, and
Birgitte Hjort Sørensen.[24][25] The production received very strong reviews. Michael Billington with The
Guardian wrote "A fast, witty, intelligent production that, in Tom Hiddleston, boasts a fine Coriolanus."[26]
He also credited Mark Gatiss as excellent as Menenius, the "humorous patrician".[26] In Variety, David
Benedict wrote that Deborah Findlay in her commanding maternal pride, held beautifully in opposition by
Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as Coriolanus's wife Virgilia.[27] Helen Lewis, in her review of Coriolanus, along
with two other concurrently running sold-out Shakespeare productions with celebrity leads—David
Tennant's Richard II and Jude Law's Henry V—concludes "if you can beg, borrow or plunder a ticket to
one of these plays, let it be Coriolanus."[28] The play was broadcast in cinemas in the U.K. and
internationally on 30 January 2014 as part of the National Theatre Live programme.[29][30]

Adaptations
Bertolt Brecht adapted Shakespeare's play in 1952–55, as Coriolan for the Berliner Ensemble. He intended
to make it a tragedy of the workers, not the individual, and introduce the alienation effect; his journal notes
showing that he found many of his own effects already in the text, he considered staging the play with only
minimal changes. The adaptation was unfinished at Brecht's death in 1956; it was completed by Manfred
Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert and staged in Frankfurt in 1962.[31]

In 1963 the BBC included Coriolanus in The Spread of the Eagle.

Slovak composer Ján Cikker adapted the play into an opera which premiered in 1974 in Prague.

In 1983, the BBC Television Shakespeare series produced a version of the play. It starred Alan Howard and
was directed by Elijah Moshinsky.

In 2003 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed a new staging of Coriolanus (along with two other
plays) starring Greg Hicks at the University of Michigan. The director, David Farr, saw the play as
depicting the modernization of an ancient ritualized culture, and drew on samurai influences to illustrate that
view. He described it as "in essence, a modern production. The play is basically about the birth of
democracy."[32]

In 2011, Ralph Fiennes directed and starred as Coriolanus with Gerard Butler as Aufidius and Vanessa
Redgrave as Volumnia in a modern-day film adaptation Coriolanus. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray
in May, 2012. It has a 93% rating on the film review site [Link], giving it a Certified Fresh
award.[33] Slavoj Žižek argued that unlike preceding adaptations, Fiennes' film portrayed Coriolanus
without trying to rationalize his behaviour, as a raw figure for the "radical left", a figure who represents
contempt for a decadent liberal democracy and the willingness to use violence to counter its latent
imperialism in alliance with the oppressed, someone he compares to Che Guevara (who justified himself as
a revolutionary killing machine).[34]

Parody

While the title character's name's pronunciation in classical Latin has the a pronounced "[aː]" in the IPA, in
English the a is usually pronounced "[eɪ]." Ken Ludwig's Moon Over Buffalo contains a joke dependent
upon this pronunciation, and the parody The Complete Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) refers to it as "the
anus play". Shakespeare pronunciation guides list both pronunciations as acceptable.[35]

Cole Porter's song "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" from the musical Kiss Me, Kate includes the lines: "If she
says your behavior is heinous,/Kick her right in the Coriolanus."

Based on Coriolanus, and written in blank verse, "Complots of Mischief" is a satirical critique of those
who dismiss conspiracy theories. Written by philosopher Charles Pigden, it was published in Conspiracy
Theories: The Philosophical Debate (Ashgate 2006).[36]

References
1. Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917]. Roach, Peter; Hartmann, James; Setter, Jane (eds.). English
Pronouncing Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 3-12-539683-2.
2. Spelled Martius in the 1623 Folio, otherwise known as Marcius, i.e., a member of the gens
Marcia.
3. R.B. Parker, ed. Coriolanus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17–21.
4. [1] ([Link]
ection%3DDATE+OF+COMPOSITION%3Asubsection%3DMalone) Furness, Horace
Howard, The Tragedie of Coriolanus (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1928), p. 596.
5. University of Michigan, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Michigan Residency, 2003 (http
s://[Link]/web/20130719142930/[Link]
ident/WEBSITE/09142005accession/rsc/plays/coriolanus/[Link]) Retrieved 15
March 2013.
6. Parker, 18–19
7. Parker, 18
8. Lee Bliss, ed. Coriolanus (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–2; R.B. Parker,
Coriolanus (Oxford University Press, 1994), 2–3.
9. Parker, 4–5; Bliss, 6–7.
10. Parker, 5–6; Bliss, 3–4.
11. Bliss, 4–7.
12. Parker, 6–7.
13. Parker, 7, 2; Bliss, 7
14. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy
15. Kermode, Frank (2001). Shakespeare's Language. London: Penguin Books. p. 254. ISBN 0-
14-028592-X.
16. Eliot, T. S. (1963). Collected Poems. Orlando: Harcourt. pp. 69, 125–129.
17. Maurois, Andre (1948). The Miracle of France. Henri Lorin Binsse (trans.). New York:
Harpers. p. 432.
18. Parker 123
19. F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 116.
20. [Link] ([Link]
E_IDENTIFIER,substring,string=C_M982_34) Archived ([Link]
15053707/[Link]
CE_IDENTIFIER%2Csubstring%2Cstring=C_M982_34) 15 February 2009 at the Wayback
Machine Accessed 13 October 2008.
21. Dickson, Andrew (30 July 2012). "National Theatre Wales's Coriolan/us: ready for take-off"
([Link] The
Guardian. UK.
22. Billington, Michael (10 August 2012). "Coriolan/us – review" ([Link]
tage/2012/aug/10/coriolanus-review). The Guardian. UK.
23. Moore, Dylan (10 August 2012). "Coriolan/us, National Theatre Wales, RAF St Athan,
review" ([Link]
[Link]). Daily Telegraph. UK. Archived ([Link]
[Link]/archive/20220112/[Link]
9467499/[Link]) from the original
on 12 January 2022.
24. "Coriolanus 06 December 2013 – 13 February 2014" ([Link]
204547/[Link]
Donmar Warehouse. Archived from the original ([Link]
n/donmar-warehouse/2013/coriolanus) on 12 November 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
25. "Further casting for Donmar Warehouse's Coriolanus" ([Link]
tre-news/news/further-casting-for-donmar-warehouses-coriolanus). London Theatre. 11
October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
26. Billington, Michael (17 December 2013). "Coriolanus – review" ([Link]
m/stage/2013/dec/18/coriolanus-review-donmar-warehouse). The Guardian. Retrieved
27 January 2014.
27. Benedict, David (17 December 2013). "London Theater Review: 'Coriolanus' Starring Tom
Hiddleston" ([Link]
-tom-hiddleston-1200969320/). Variety. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
28. Lewis, Helen. "We three kings: David Tennant, Jude Law and Tom Hiddleston take on
Shakespeare" ([Link]
e). New Statesman. Retrieved 7 February 2014.
29. "Coriolanus – Donmar Warehouse" ([Link]
[Link]/whats-on/donmar-warehouse/2013/coriolanus). Donmar
Warehouse. Archived from the original ([Link]
-warehouse/2013/coriolanus) on 12 November 2014. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
30. "English theatre: Coriolanus" ([Link]
[Link]/klassik-programm/film/[Link]). Savoy Kino
Hamburg. Archived from the original ([Link]
[Link]) on 23 January 2014. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
31. Brown, Langdon, ed. (1986). Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar
Revivals. New York: Greenwood Press. p. 82.
32. Nesbit, Joanne (20 January 2003). "U-M hosts Royal Shakespeare Company's U.S.
premiere of "Midnight's Children" " ([Link]
[Link]/0203/Jan20_03/[Link]). The University Record Online. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan. Archived from the original ([Link]
[Link]) on 26 November 2007. Retrieved 3 August 2017. "Headlined by the U.S. premiere
of the stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's award-winning novel "Midnight's Children," the
16-day residency also offers new stagings of Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor"
and "Coriolanus"."
33. "Coriolanus" ([Link] [Link].
Retrieved 29 July 2017.
34. Wahnich, Sophie (2001). "Foreword". In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French
Revolution. Verso Books. pp. xxiii–xxix. ISBN 978-1844678624.
35. Shakespeare, W. (1968). Coriolanus: Special Illustrated Edition. Starbooks Classics.
Retrieved from [Link] ([Link]
g=PT277&ots=UX_aZ4FUV5&dq=Shakespeare%20pronunciation%20guides%20list%20b
oth%20pronunciations%20as%20acceptable&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Shakespeare%20pr
onunciation%20guides%20list%20both%20pronunciations%20as%20acceptable&f=false).
Accessed 11 April 2014.
36. "Complots of Mischief: Coriolanus and conspiracy" ([Link]
797/complots-mischief-coriolanus-and-conspiracy). [Link]. 21 November 2008.
Retrieved 29 July 2017.

Further reading
Krajewski, Bruce. "Coriolanus: 'Unfit for Anyone's Conversation,'" in Traveling with Hermes:
Hermeneutics and Rhetoric (1992), ISBN 0-87023-815-9.
Lunberry, Clark (2002). "In the Name of Coriolanus: The Prompter (Prompted)" ([Link]
[Link]/uploads/4/2/3/4/42346943/[Link]) (PDF). Comparative Literature. 54
(3): 229–241. doi:10.1215/-54-3-229 ([Link]
JSTOR 4125436 ([Link] Archived ([Link]
eb/20210423120508/[Link]
(PDF) from the original on 23 April 2021.

External links
Text of the play by Shakespeare:
Coriolanus ([Link] at
Standard Ebooks
Full text of Shakespeare's play ([Link]
Old Spelling Transcription ([Link] –
Transcription of First Folio.
Coriolanus ([Link] at Project Gutenberg.
Coriolanus ([Link] at the British Library
Coriolanus ([Link]
=&keywords=&genre_id=0&status=all&project_type=either&recorded_language=&sort_ord
er=catalog_date&search_page=1&search_form=advanced) public domain audiobook at
LibriVox
Coriolanus ([Link] – Scene-
indexed and searchable version of the play.
 Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus :
Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus ([Link] – 17th
century English translation by John Dryden
Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus ([Link]
#LIFE_OF_CAIUS_MARCIUS_CORIOLANUS) – 19th century English translation by
Aubrey Stewart and George Long
Coriolanus ([Link] at IMDb

Retrieved from "[Link]

This page was last edited on 5 September 2022, at 18:59 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0;

additional terms may apply. By
using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.