Coriolanus
Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most uncomfortably modern tragedy, a blistering examination of power, pride, and the toxic bargain between elites and the people they claim to serve. Caius Marcius is a warrior of genuine brilliance, a man who has earned his fame in battle and who despises weakness with every fiber of his being. That contempt proves his undoing. When Rome's citizens hunger and the tribunes smell opportunity, Coriolanus cannot bring himself to perform the simple theatrical gestures that might win their support. He would rather be banished than pretend to care for those he considers worthless. But exile only shifts the stage. The Volscians welcome their enemy turned general, and Coriolanus marches on Rome with the very army he once fought. The question Shakespeare poses is as unsettling now as it was four centuries ago: what happens when a man of genuine excellence decides the rules no longer apply to him? The play offers no easy villains and no comfortable heroes, only the wreckage of a man too proud to bend and a political system too hungry to exploit him.
Editions
X-Ray
“More of your conversation would infect my brain.””
— William Shakespeare
“There is a world elsewhere.””
— William Shakespeare
“They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.””
— William Shakespeare
“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hateAs reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prizeAs the dead carcasses of unburied menThat do corrupt my air, I banish you;And here remain with your uncertainty!””
— William Shakespeare
“I talk of you:Why did you wish me milder? would you have meFalse to my nature? Rather say I playThe man I am.””
— William Shakespeare
“Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.””
— William Shakespeare
“Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.””
— William Shakespeare
“Let me twineMine arms about that body, where againstMy grained ash an hundred times hath broke And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clipThe anvil of my sword, and do contestAs hotly and as nobly with thy loveAs ever in ambitious strength I didContend against thy valour. Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never manSigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heartThan when I first my wedded mistress sawBestride my threshold.””
— William Shakespeare
“Why did you wish me milder? would you have meFalse to my nature? Rather say I playThe man I am.””
— William Shakespeare
