Coriolanus (Vol. 30) | A. P. Rossiter (essay date 1952)
A. P. Rossiter (essay date 1952)
SOURCE: "Coriolanus," in Angels with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, edited by Graham Storey, Longmans, 1961, pp. 235-252.
[In the following essay, which was originally delivered as a lecture in 1952, Rossiter praises Coriolanus as the "greatest of the Histories," contending that the play realistically depicts the ironies of politics.]
Shakespeare may have felt some disappointment with Coriolanus. He would not be the last; for I think that few see or read it without feeling that they 'don't get as much out of it as they hoped to' or that it 'somehow doesn't seem to pay' or is 'less profitable than others I could think of; or something like that. But whatever he thought he meant by the play is likely to be very different from what we make of it, unless we keep our attention fixed on what was going on inside Shakespeare's head in 1607—and what was going on in the...
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