Burton Hatlen, University of Maine at Orono
Tonally, Coriolanus is Shakespeare's coolest tragedy. The protagonist does not invite audience identification—if anything, he spurns our sympathy. But the play treats his antagonists no less coolly. As a consequence, audiences and critics have often seen the play as working not so much upon our passions as upon our analytic faculties.1 But what questions does the play address? In our century, many critics have seen the play as turning on political issues. For some of these critics, the key issue is the struggle, whether in ancient Rome or in Jacobean England, between opposing social classes, noble and plebeian, or the relationship of the "great man" to the people, while other critics have argued that the play problematizes the very concept of the "political." But a second tradition of interpretation has built on psychoanalytic theory to explore Coriolanus' problematic relationship with his mother. And yet a third school of critics has focused on the way the play selfreflexively examines issues of language, especially naming. In this paper, I want to build some bridges among these three schools of interpretation, by focusing on two interrelated issues that seem to me central to Coriolanus: the issues of identity and shame.2
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