Coriolanus (Vol. 30) | Kenneth Burke (essay date 1966)
Kenneth Burke (essay date 1966)
SOURCE: "Coriolanus— and the Delights of Faction," in Language as Symbolic Action, University of California Press, 1966, pp. 81-97.
[In the following excerpt, Burke explores Coriolanus in terms of the aesthetic and ethical assumptions audiences bring to tragedy, concluding that Shakespeare's portrayal of strained class relations serves as a cathartic "invective" against the state.]
This [essay] is to involve one of my experiments with the safest and surest kind of prophecy; namely: prophecy after the event. Our job will be to ask how Shakespeare's grotesque tragedy, Coriolanus, "ought to be." And we can check on the correctness of our prophecies by consulting the text.
We begin with these assumptions: Since the work is a tragedy, it will require some kind of symbolic action in which some notable form of victimage is imitated, for the purgation, or edification of an audience....
[The entire page is 7023 words long]
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