Coriolanus: A Critical Reader

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Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship. The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

Author Bio

Liam E. Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney, Australia, and has been a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Universities of Massachusetts, Nottingham, Warwick and Essex. He leads the Better Strangers project which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. He is author of Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (2013) and The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (1998), and editor of The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 (2019) and Elizas Babes; Or The Virgins Offering (1652): A Critical Edition (2001).