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II

That Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most political play—perhaps his "only great political play"⁵—has become a commonplace of Shakespeare studies. For many commentators, a political play must necessarily be partisan. Thus our century has seen an extended critical debate over whether the patricians (and thus Coriolanus) are "right" and the plebeians "wrong," or vice versa. Eugene Waith, for example, sees Coriolanus and the class he represents as the embodiment of everything truly noble, and he argues that Shakespeare "makes it impossible to respect" the "many-voiced, ceaselessly shifting people."⁶ And C. C. Huffman argues that "of all the available possibilities of presenting [the] political situation [dramatized in Coriolanus], Shakespeare chooses one consonant with King James's royalist view of it as a rivalry between absolute monarchy and democracy, between rule and misrule, between order and chaos."⁷ In contrast,...

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1. Introduction
2. Ii
3. Iii
4. Iv
5. V
6. Copyright