Coriolanus (Vol. 30) | Nicholas Grene (essay date 1992)
Nicholas Grene (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Coriolanus," in Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1992, pp. 249-73.
[In the following excerpt, Grene compares familial and political relationships as portrayed in Coriolanus, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.]
With Coriolanus, Shakespeare completed something like a triptych, the other two panels being Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. All three focus on soldier heroes and are studies in the relation of personal power to political authority; in all three masculine heroism is partially defined by a female vision of it. Coriolanus, though, stands in contrast to both its companion tragedies, and is significantly itself in its difference from both. It belongs with Antony and Cleopatra in its lack of the visionary supernatural which so shapes the action of Macbeth. The gods are much invoked in...
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