SOURCE: Carducci, Jane. “Shakespeare's Coriolanus: ‘Could I Find Out / The Woman's Part in Me.’” Literature and Psychology 33, no. 2 (1987): 11-20.

In the following essay, Carducci asserts that Coriolanus is a psychologically unbalanced character, and that Shakespeare used various conventions, rhetoric, and staging devices to underscore Coriolanus's isolation from society.

Shakespeare, coming of age during the Renaissance, would have studied the authors of antiquity in school and would have understood the Roman hero as first and finally a soldier. Because the ideal Renaissance gentleman was a courtier, scholar, and soldier, it is likely that Shakespeare saw the Roman living in an unbalanced state, unable to fully experience and express his feelings.

It is in his Roman plays—Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), Julius Caesar (1599), Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), and Coriolanus (1608)—that Shakespeare interrogates his culture's received definitions of manhood and manliness, traditionally defined as independent, brave, stoic, aggressive, proud, and competitive. Coriolanus...