Seven Ages

Tragedy · c. 1608

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Shakespeare’s last tragedy and his most political: a supreme Roman soldier who cannot perform humility before the crowd, in a city experimenting with giving the crowd a voice.

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By the Seven Ages editors2 min read

Banished by the people he saved, he does the unthinkable and offers his sword to the enemy.

There is almost no interiority — Coriolanus barely soliloquizes — and the play’s energy is all in public confrontation: politics as combat sport. T. S. Eliot thought it better than Hamlet. He was wrong, but it is the tragedy that reads most like it was written yesterday.

Coriolanus on screen

1Coriolanus (2011)

Film · dir. Ralph Fiennes

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