Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Narremes
- Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis
- A ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’: The Erotics of Narration in Venus and Adonis
- Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth
- Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus
- Shakespeare, Crossing the Rubicon
- Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote
- The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens
- Shakespearian Margins in George Eliot’s ‘working-day world’
- In Her Father’s Library: Margaret Fuller and the Making of the American Miranda
- The Magician in Love
- Narrative Approaches to Shakespeare: Active Storytelling in Schools
- Monsters, Magicians, Movies: The Tempest and the Final Frontier
- Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions and King John
- Inside Othello
- The View of London from the North and the Playhouses in Holywell
- Measured Endings: How Productions from 1720 to 1929 Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure
- Shakespearian Utopias
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 1998
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Narremes
- Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis
- A ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’: The Erotics of Narration in Venus and Adonis
- Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth
- Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus
- Shakespeare, Crossing the Rubicon
- Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote
- The Shadow of Lear’s ‘Houseless’ in Dickens
- Shakespearian Margins in George Eliot’s ‘working-day world’
- In Her Father’s Library: Margaret Fuller and the Making of the American Miranda
- The Magician in Love
- Narrative Approaches to Shakespeare: Active Storytelling in Schools
- Monsters, Magicians, Movies: The Tempest and the Final Frontier
- Shakespeare’s Self-Repetitions and King John
- Inside Othello
- The View of London from the North and the Playhouses in Holywell
- Measured Endings: How Productions from 1720 to 1929 Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure
- Shakespearian Utopias
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1999
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 1998
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
The rising of the peasants has gone on growing from day to day to such an extent that they only required a leader to make it formidable and open rebellion.
(Venetian Ambassador to England, to the Doge and Senate, 26 June 1607)Back in 1876, an anonymous critic in The Cornell Review pronounced Coriolanus 'biography dramatized.' Brander Matthews said much the same thing about the play in 1913: 'Shakespeare rarely contradicts Plutarch whereas he often contradicted Holinshed; he speeds up Plutarch's passage of time, however, and makes no attempt to recreate the ancient world.' For John W. Draper in 1939, Plutarch's story is retold in Coriolanus in contemporary terms. Recently, in 1996, David Farley-Hills has repeated the idea that 'the sources of Coriolanus are . . . followed with considerable fidelity, with only those changes that help convert prose narrative into effective verse drama'.
Certainly Shakespeare followed the main events of Plutarch's 'Life of Caivs Martius Coriolanus': the citizen unrest in Rome, the war with Corioli, Coriolanus' standing for consul, his opposition to the tribunes and free corn, the mob violence, his trial and banishment, his alliance with the Volscians and attack on Rome, the embassy of women, his yielding to Volumnia, and assassination in Antium. Yet in Acts 1 and 3, particularly, Shakespeare added current and exciting material from 1607-8.
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- Information
- Shakespeare SurveyAn Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, pp. 60 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000