The Clarity of Coriolanus

Abstract

What could have moved Shakespeare to write as strange a play as Coriolanus? A play where he made no attempt to engage the audience as in his earlier tragedies, where he dispensed with many of the essentials of tragedy as he himself had come to see it, the inward-looking hero, the metaphysical interest, the supernatural, the spiritualised emotions. Instead of continuing to work in this successful framework he tried out a different kind of tragedy, one that includes the most difficult crowd-scenes in the canon (plebeians, soldiers, citizens, senators, Volscians, all ‘crowds’ with their own identities), more tumult and sheer brute-human noise than perhaps accords with tragic thoughtfulness, and, strangest of all, an entirely new tragic tone.