Coriolanus: A Tragedy of Rome, War, Pride, and Political Power - Paperback

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a severe and powerful tragedy of war, pride, political manipulation, and a great soldier's inability to live within the society he has defended.

Caius Martius is Rome's fiercest warrior, a man of extraordinary courage and brutal honesty whose victories earn him the name Coriolanus. But battlefield greatness does not make him fit for civic life. Pressed toward political office, he cannot flatter the common people, cannot disguise his contempt, and cannot bend his nature to the machinery of public power. His enemies understand the crowd better than he does, and his pride turns military glory into political ruin.

Written late in Shakespeare's career, Coriolanus is one of his most searching political plays. It examines class conflict, republican government, popular resentment, military honour, maternal influence, exile, betrayal, and the dangerous distance between personal virtue and public usefulness. The play offers no easy hero and no simple villain: Coriolanus is courageous, arrogant, principled, cruel, magnificent, and catastrophically unsuited to compromise.

This Wilder Publications edition is suited to readers of Shakespeare, classic drama, political tragedy, Roman plays, Renaissance literature, and works concerned with power, citizenship, honour, and the unstable bond between leaders and the people they claim to serve.