‘As if a man were author of himself’: the (Re-)Fashioning of the Oedipal Hero from Plutarch’s Martius to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus Claudia Corti

When Shakespeare began to consider the idea of dramatizing Plutarch’s Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus from the English translation by Thomas North, his priority seems not to have been only that of constructing a political tragedy out of a crucial moment in the early period of the Roman Republic, when aristocratic hegemony begins to be threatened by socially subversive popular forces, in order to highlight a relationship between classical history and the contemporary Jacobean political situation.1 This ideological intention is certainly accurate, and it would by itself invalidate such influential but nevertheless hackneyed statements according to which ‘the first impression produced by a comparison of the biography and the play is that the latter is little more than a scenic replica of the former’.2 Yet, what seems even more relevant, is to realize how Shakespeare, now with mature psychological insight and expert knowledge of source material, responded consciously to latent information and subtle hints offered by the implicitly dramatic structure of Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus. Here, he endeavours to create not simply the simultaneously positive and negative figure of the warrior and political leader, with due observance to the prerequisites of Stuart ideology, but the figure of a modern individual in his existential frailties and psychological ambiguities.