Critical Essay | Critical Essay by R. B. Parker

Critical Essay by R. B. Parker

SOURCE: "Coriolanus and 'th'interpretation of the time'," in Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, edited by J. C. Gray, University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 261-76.

In the following essay, Parker contends that, in Coriolanus, Shakespeare puts forward "'the familial link" as the core of political life that resists the flux of historical upheaval

I

At the end of act IV in Shakespeare's play, Coriolanus's great enemy, the Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius, comments on the self-defeating nature of Coriolanus's character and the slippery impermanence of political judgments and of human values in general:

So our virtues
Lie in th'interpretati on of the time;
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
T'extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail one nail;
Rights by rights fuller, strengths by strengths do fail.

(IV.vii.49-55)¹

The precise meaning...
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