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...