Commentary

• Coriolanus, A Miscellany

  - A. C. Bradley, Coriolanus, A Miscellany (London: Macmillan, 1929)
  Excerpt: Coriolanus is beyond doubt among the latest of Shakespeare’s tragedies; there is some reason for thinking it the last. Like all those that succeeded Hamlet, it is a tragedy of vehement passion; and in none of them are more striking… More

• The Republican Regime

  - Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 53-124
  Excerpt: “We are introduced to the Republican regime in Coriolanus in a moment of crisis. Faced with open rebellion against their authority, the city’s rulers must give an account of themselves: I tell you, friends, most charitable care Have the… More

• Coriolanus

  - Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare, 52–184
  Excerpt: “Sterne says that, if he were in a desert, he would love some cypress.” Coriolanus is a desert without a cypress. Not even the sentimental Sterne could fine something to love in it. There is so little to love in the play. Its chief… More

• Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

  - Anne Barton, “Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 136–60
  Excerpt: In writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare depended primarily upon Plutarch, as he had for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Once again, North’s translation provided him with the dramatic skeleton, and even some of the actual words, of his… More

• Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

  - Jan H. Blits, Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006)
  Summary from the Publisher: Spirit, Soul, and City offers a new reading of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s most political play and the last of his great tragedies. Portraying the founding of the Roman republic and the life and soul of its legendary warrior,… More

• Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World by Paul Cantor

  - Cantor, Paul A. Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
  From the publisher: Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an… More

• Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man

  - Carson Holloway, “Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man,” Review of Politics 69 (2007): 353-74
  Abstract: This paper seeks to illuminate magnanimity by examining Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in light of Aristotle’s account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. I contend that contemplation of Coriolanus’s similarity to… More