Coriolanus (Vol. 86) - Anne Barton (essay date 1985)
Anne Barton (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: Barton, Anne. “Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus.” In Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 123-47. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Barton emphasizes the historical and political themes of Coriolanus and considers the influence of Livy and Machiavelli on Shakespeare's dramatization of republican Rome.]
In book 7 of his great history of Rome, from her foundation to the time of Augustus, Titus Livius recounts, with a certain admixture of scepticism, the story of Marcus Curtius. In the year 362 b.c. a chasm suddenly opened in the middle of the Forum. The soothsayers, when consulted, declared that only a ritual sacrifice of the thing “wherein the most puissance and greatness of the people of Rome consisted” could close the fissure and “make the...
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