Coriolanus is not a popular play. It is, as Middleton Murry pointed out, unpalatable to the modern taste. Its hero is “unsympathetic”, even “alien”, being a martyr not to the cause of liberty but to the aristocratic idea. Those who sympathize with the play may accordingly render themselves a little suspect as to their basic predilections. But even apart from the political implications of a certain antipathy against the play, it has sometimes, because of its alleged comparative poverty in poetic appeal, rather superciliously been deemed appropriate intellectual food for dry-as-dust schoolmasters or antiquarian philologists. It has been regarded as the privilege of pedants to admire Coriolanus. Thus the lover of the play finds himself between Scylla and Charybdis.

I myself own to a certain admiration for Coriolanus, and there is consolation in the thought that, despite the general unpopularity of the play, it has had at least some illustrious defenders: Coleridge and Swinburne, Granville-Barker, Middleton Murry, and AndréGide. Thus I hope that I may steer a safe course under the protection of such a remarkable convoy.