Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard C. Crowley

Critical Essay by Richard C. Crowley

SOURCE: “Coriolanus and the Epic Genre,” in Shakespeare's Late Plays: In Honor of Charles Crow, edited by Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod, Ohio University Press, 1974, pp. 114-30.

In the essay below, Crowley contends that in Coriolanus Shakespeare was working within the framework of a mixed genre—an amalgamation of tragic and epic form.

Coriolanus has not been the object of a great deal of critical commentary.¹ Furthermore, what little criticism it has elicited in recent years has often been hostile toward the work, denigrating the play on the ground that it is not another Hamlet or Macbeth.² Caius Marcius himself has come in for a great deal of unfavorable appraisal—he is neither imaginative enough, nor sympathetic enough, nor “grand” enough to qualify as tragic hero. Maurice Charney, for example, typifies the tone of many commentaries:

Coriolanus himself is the least inward of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists, he is literally...
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