Coriolanus (Vol. 30) - Coriolanus
CORIOLANUS
H. J. Oliver (essay date 1959)
SOURCE: "Coriolanus As Tragic Hero," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 1, Winter, 1959, pp. 53-60.
[In the following essay, Oliver considers Coriolanus a tragic play because Coriolanus' character precludes participation in a democracy.]
Coriolanus has not, on the whole, been a popular play, either on the stage or with the literary critics. Some of the later twentieth-century commentators have been more appreciative (notably D. A. Traversi, Hardin Craig, Peter Alexander, and H. C. Goddard) but nobody has accorded the play the place of honor that one might expect for Shakespeare's last tragedy; and it is hardly too much to say that this reluctance to rate the play highly is the result of a failure to interpret sympathetically the character of the hero.
Sometimes, to be sure, criticism of the play has taken other forms. [In Shakespeare: A Survey, 1925] E. K....
[The entire page is 12646 words long]
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