Coriolanus (Vol. 50) | J. L. Simmons (essay date 1973)
J. L. Simmons (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, Shakespeare's Heroic Tragedies: A Jacobean Adjustment," in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 26, 1973, pp. 95-101.
[In the essay that follows, Simmons compares Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, claiming that the former play glorifies the plebeians as the moral center of the state.]
Shakespeare wrote many plays about heroes, but only Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are distinguished by heroic appeals that are exclusively and definitively aristocratic. Coriolanus and Cleopatra make strange bedfellows; yet despite their different life styles they share an unyielding horror of being scrutinized and judged by a vulgar audience. When the Queen of Egypt contemplates her dishonor at the hands of Octavius, her most terrifying thought is the vulgarization of her nobility in a dramatic representation for a popular Roman...
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