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 CaivsMartius Coriolanus’: the citizen unrest in Rome, the war with Corioli, Coriolanus's 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.