Coriolanus (Vol. 64) - Richard C. Crowley (essay date 1974)
Richard C. Crowley (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: “Coriolanus and the Epic Genre,” in Shakespeare's Late Plays: In Honor of Charles Crow, edited by Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod, Ohio University Press, 1974, pp. 114-30.
[In the essay below, Crowley contends that in Coriolanus Shakespeare was working within the framework of a mixed genre—an amalgamation of tragic and epic form.]
Coriolanus has not been the object of a great deal of critical commentary.1 Furthermore, what little criticism it has elicited in recent years has often been hostile toward the work, denigrating the play on the ground that it is not another Hamlet or Macbeth.2 Caius Marcius himself has come in for a great deal of unfavorable appraisal—he is neither imaginative enough, nor sympathetic enough, nor “grand” enough to qualify as tragic hero. Maurice Charney, for example, typifies the tone of many...
[The entire page is 5510 words long]
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