ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a late and apparently experimental play; Coriolanus may have been Shakespeare's attempt to translate a sense of momentous political change in England into dramatic terms, following the Renaissance habit of using the past both to illuminate the present and to distance it for objective consideration. The chapter reemphasizes the importance of the Jacobean context of Coriolanus and briefly describes certain of its aspects, in order to show how the classical story was molded to the form and pressure of the time. Some critics, attempting to explain the relationship of tragedy and history in Coriolanus, have identified Rome itself as the play's protagonist. Shakespeare's play is perhaps the first great work of imaginative literature to portray the triumph of this new, essentially modern political and historical outlook over the old, essentially medieval one, and to examine the destiny of a noble human being caught in the historical process, the passing of an era.
