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.
Which edition?
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. Peter Holland · Bloomsbury
Holland is superb on the politics and refuses to make Coriolanus likeable.
2Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. R. B. Parker · Oxford University Press
Parker writes the best short account of the play’s Rome.
3The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Lee Bliss · Cambridge University Press
Bliss is excellent on the play’s afterlife in other people’s politics.
4Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The late verse is knotty; the glosses untie it without slowing you down.
Coriolanus on stage
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Coriolanus on screen
1Coriolanus (2011)
Film · dir. Ralph Fiennes
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Reading Coriolanus this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.