SOURCE: “Coriolanus and the Myth of Juno and Mars,” in Mosaic, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 33-50.

In the following essay, Simonds describes the figures of Coriolanus and Volumnia in Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus as personifications of the Roman gods Mars and Juno, respectively.

Shakespeare's Coriolanus has usually been studied as a socio-political statement by the dramatist, as a psychological case history of a hero dominated by his mother, or as evidence of the playwright's attitudes toward Roman history, a subject of great general interest during the Renaissance. Although all these aspects of the tragedy are clearly important, I believe they mainly provide rich surface textures which mask an essential and thus far overlooked mythical substructure of the play. Recently John W. Velz has advanced what seems to be a mythological interpretation in an article attempting to demonstrate similarities between the character of Coriolanus and that of Virgil's warlike Turnus...