Coriolanus

Written by William Shakespeare

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic prose and verse read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.

‘Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters.’

Coriolanus is a tragedy based on the life of legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus.

Roman general Coriolanus makes his name defeating an enemy army and defending Rome. The Senate nominates him as consul but he cannot win the people's vote, so he is banished from Rome and allies with his old enemy. He comes to attack Rome, his mother persuades him not to, and his new-found ally kills him for the betrayal.

All of the Shakespeare plays within the ARGO Classics catalogue are performed by the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. The Marlowe was founded in 1907 with a mission to focus on effective delivery of verse, respect the integrity of texts, and rescue neglected plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the less performed plays of Shakespeare himself. The Marlowe has performed annually at Cambridge Arts Theatre since its opening in 1936 and continues to produce some of the finest actors of their generations.

Thurston Dart, Professor of Music at London University and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, directed the music for this production.

The full cast includes: Anthony White; John Arnott; Donald Beves; Tony Church; Anthony Jacobs; John Wilders; John Barton; Peter Woodthorpe; Irene Worth; Dorothy Mulcahy; Christine Baker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Nov 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008442873

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

Reviews for Coriolanus

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a timely play in that it captures something of the American political zeitgeist wherein popularity and playing to the crowd trumps ideals and personal integrity. One can't help hearing the voices of pundits on the left and right in the petty complaints of the tribunes Brutus and Sicinius.

Marcius (Coriolanus):
Thanks. What's the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?

[coach_of_alva · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The citizens of a republic run their greatest soldier out of town because they can't stand him and he can't stand them. As it happens, they can't live without each other - literally. This may be the greatest political drama written. It is also one of the great mother and son stories.

[nycke137 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book on audio in preparation to see the performance. I wanted to familiarize myself with it since I didn't get into Shakespeare much in high school or after. If I had known that his plays were also gruesome and bloody, I would have been enjoying Shakespeare a long time ago.

[phredfrancis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The secondary characters were the best part. I would have preferred spending more time with Menenius and Aufidius and having been spared some of Coriolanus's haughty declarations. I'm no scholar of Shakespeare's works, but it seemed to me that much of his poetry fell short in this play. Rarely did I stop to savor the language or to marvel at an elegant turn of phrase. I did appreciate some of the political themes, but even the best of these pale in comparison with Shakespeare's vast array of more poignant and personal observations.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't have followed this story if my life depended on it. Something about a talented warrior who has mama manipulating him on one side and his cohorts betraying him on the other. Who knows? Who cares? Definitely the weakest of all the Bard's works I've read thus far.

[tzelman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Personal code of honor admits no compromises; Shakespeare's strong argument against republican government

[briony_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have actually seen this as a play as well as read it, and either way, its INSANELY boring.

[thelibrarina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nobody says Coriolanus is their favorite Shakespeare play--not even the kind of people who have favorite Shakespeare plays. But after a second read, it's moving up my list. Martius (aka Coriolanus) is, for the most part, an intensely dislikeable character--but as the play goes on, you begin to see how he came to be the way he is, and while it doesn't excuse his faults, it certainly makes him a complex and intriguing character.There's just so much depth to this play. Martius' relationships with his mother, his wife, and his nemesis are all delightfully screwed up. It's difficult to pick a single "tragic flaw" for Martius because he has so many of them--pride, rigidity, wrath, unhealthy attachment to his mother... It's one of Shakespeare's last tragedies, and thus one of the most mature. Though there's a great deal of blood referenced in the text and the stage directions, there's no on-stage bloodbath as in Titus Andronicus: Martius is the only character to die in the play.It almost needs to be seen, either on stage or on screen, to be really appreciated. Just don't talk to me about the Donmar production unless you want me to spend an hour telling you about how perfect every last detail was.

[jeff5maynes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In most tragedies, and Shakespearan ones in particular, the force of the tragedic ending is based on the reader's (or audience's) sympathy with the principal character. We may not like him or her, but we feel close enough to them to suffer their loss. We've lamented in the storm with Lear, and contemplated with Hamlet. We can never really get to this place with Caius Martius Coriolanus (I'll use Martius to refer to the character, to avoid confusion with the title of the play).Martius is a Roman general of great reknown, whose tragic flaw is his contempt for the people of Rome. Led on by members of the Roman senate, the people turn on Martius, and he is cast from the city. When his mother leads a contingent to him, to ask him to lay down the arms he has raised against Rome, Martius prepares himself for their visit:"My wife comes foremost; then the honored mold Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her handThe grandchild to her blood. But out, affection!All bond and privilege of nature, break!Let it virtuous to be obstinate" (V.3, 22-25).This is a moving passage, and a rich one. Does Martius think that it is obstinate to be virtuous, because the obstinancy protects a virtue (namely his pride)? Or does he recognize that he has long since left virtue behind, and is pleading to retain virtue? Yet even here, where Martius tries to cast aside affection for his family and break the bonds he has with them, it is difficult for the reader to sympathize with Martius in the way we would with characters in other tragedies. He has not given us rich soliloquies, or even reflected on his course of action. What's more, his course of action seems clearly in the wrong. His pride against the people is contemptous, and when he is cast aside, he ends up electing to burn Rome to the ground. The way in which pride drives him to these actions, the way it drives him to atttempt to reject his bonds, is entirely opaque. The play is not weaker for it though. It is different from many of the tragedies, but no less moving and no less thought provoking. While I may not have felt the same sense of desolation that one feels at the end of Lear, this play is rewarding for the complexity of the character interactions, and the depth of the sub-text.Consider, for example, the role of the citizens of Rome. The play opens with their lodging a complaint with Martius, that he has prevented them from receiving available grain. This charge is unrefuted, and Martius instead replies that the people do not deserve it, for they have not served in the wars. They ultimately turn on Martius, and it seems that there is something prescient about this decision. While Martius was not guilty of some of the charges laid against him, his willingness to turn against Rome on the simple matter of his pride suggests a mercenary element of his character that the people have trussed out.At the same time, the people are led by tribunes who goad and manipulate them. Martius' failure is his inability to win the crowd over in this way. This portrayal is much harsher on the citizens. In these passages, they come across as animals waiting to be herded. This is like the image we get of the Roman citizens in Julius Caesar, where the people's emotions are so easily manipulated by Brutus and then Antony. We see elements of that here, but the people are much more complex. After banishing Martius, one citizen recalls "For mine own part, / when I said `Banish him,' I said 'twas pity." One might read this as the citizens simply turning coat again, as Martius' returns with an army. Yet, I suspect there is more to it than that. The citizens may be manipulable, but they recognize this fact. The citizens in Caesar show little indication that they recognize how Antony moves them at his will.This relation between Martius and the people drives the play. As noted above, Martius' downfall is due to his unwillingness and inability to placate the people. In one particularly moving passage, Martius' claims:"...I will not do'tLest I surcrease to honor mine own truthAnd by my body's action teach my mindA most inherent baseness" (III.2, 119-122).Martius, along Aristotelian lines, sees acting viciously as a way of training vicious character, and as he sees placating the people as a vice, he cannot bring himself to do it (or ultimately to do it well). On one hand, if we side with Martius, we see a populace refusing to understand and exalt the triumphs of the soldier. It is Martius who has spilled blood for the city, and the citizens who have benefited from his wounds refuse to honor them. For Martius, the conflict is clear. Yet, it is clear that Shakespeare does not want us to simply settle into Martius' point of view. Indeed, since we understand him so poorly, it is very difficult to do so. What's more, after being thrown from the city, Martius' ultimately elects to burn Rome. Civilian control over the military here seems essential. While they may have been led around by the tribunes, the people have rightly removed a highly dangerous individual, whose loyalty to Rome seems to be rooted more in his own pride at being a soldier than love for the virtues of the city or its society.Shakespeare remains ambiguous between these interpretations, and the opacity of Martius' character lends itself to this ambiguity. Rather than getting sucked into his view of the matter (even if we recognize the other side), here we are unable to really understand anyone. Martius is inscrutable and the people are being led around. I found that this issue truly rewarded reflection, and it is the sort of issue that Coriolanus raises so well.This is not to mention a host of other interesting questions raised in the play, which for the sake of brevity, I will simply mention. The gender politics of Volumnia are fascinating. She has raised Martius by the ideals of honor, even so much as to value his honorable death greater than his living company. Or what is the nature of honor? Is it tied to virtue (or is itself a virtue), or can one have strictly self-interested honor? Should we say that Martius' lacks honor in the end, or that he has a self-interested honor? Woven together, as always, with Shakespeare's unparalled poetry, these rewarding and interesting questions make Coriolanus a truly powerful play.

[aulsmith · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Tragedy usually centers on someone with a tragic flaw, but I'm not sure being an asshole counts as a tragic flaw. There's a reason this one wasn't covered in my Shakespeare courses. Give it a miss unless you insist on reading all of Shakespeare.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

[Coriolanus] by [[William Shakespeare]].While not the best of Shakespeare's tragedies, [Coriolanus] just may be the timeliest. Yes, it's a play about a soldier whose pride and love for his overbearing mother ultimately bring him down. But the driving force behind the plot is a pair of manipulating politicians who know how to spin things to their advantage and lead the fickle multitude by their noses. While the people are more villains that victims, one can't help but notice that some things never change; here's one of them on their current government:Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for usyet: suffer us to famish, and their store-housescrammed with grain; make edicts for usury, tosupport usurers; repeal daily any wholesome actestablished against the rich, and provide morepiercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrainthe poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; andthere's all the love they bear us.All one has to do to see the truth in that is take a look at the PA governor's proposed budget . . . or the federal budget, for that matter. It's Robin Hood in reverse: give to the rich and take from the poor.

[barrettlucero · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In preparation for the movie coming out soon! Best line so far? Menicius (Coriolanus' friend) calling a citizen, who is critical of the arrogant Coriolanus, as the "great toe of the assembly." And not in a good way, either. Coriolanus then calls all mutinous citizens (those that disagree with C?) "scabs." Awesome!
...
Really enjoyed this play, and I believe it's the first Shakespeare I've read since college. Coriolanus has some of the best speeches with which he burns his foes, and these offset some of the longer, duller passages.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Several years ago I read this play as part of a class at the University of Chicago. It was a revelation that entranced me with its drama. Even so, the warrior Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, rarely pausing to soliloquise or reveal the motives behind his prideful isolation from Roman society. Instead, the play demonstrates his character through his actions and his relationships. The relationship with his mother, Volumnia, is the most important of these. The tension of her love for him reaches heights that are only exceeded by those of Coriolanus fame as a warrior for Rome.This is not the Rome of the Caesars but that of the early days when the republic was in its formative stages. It was a city concerned with warring neighbors like the Volscians who are an ever-present enemy. While Caius Martius' success in battles with this enemy lead him to military honors and earn him the name Coriolanus, he does not have the temperamental qualities that would allow him use these accolades for political purposes. He is held back by his own nature and his situation leads to banishment by the crowds who once cheered him. His speech to them as he leaves Rome is memorable:"You common cry of curs! whose breath I hateAs reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prizeAs the dead carcasses of unburied menThat do corrupt my air, I banish you;And here remain with your uncertainty!Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,Fan you into despair! Have the power stillTo banish your defenders; till at length Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,Making not reservation of yourselves,Still your own foes, deliver you as mostAbated captives to some nationThat won you without blows! Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back:There is a world elsewhere."(Act III, Scene iii) It is, for me, the best of the lesser-known of his plays and stands tall by the side of the other two great Roman history plays, Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra. In particular, the psychological depth of the character of Coriolanus, his relationships with his mother and subject Romans, and the dramatic action make this play a delight to read.

[neverstopreading-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 Coriolanus is worth the read, but there's also a reason why you may be unfamiliar with it. Compared to, say, Julius Caesar, it's nothing. But don't let the Bard set the bar too high on himself.