ABSTRACT
Coriolanus intends to humiliate his country by forcing on it disgraceful terms of peace. And this, apart from its moral quality, is a reasonable design. In Shakespeare's greatest tragedies there is a second source in one or two the chief source of supreme imaginative appeal, the exhibition of inward conflict, or of the outburst of one or another passion, terrible, heart-rending, or glorious to witness. Coriolanus's mother and friends urge him to deceive the people with false promises. Dr. Johnson observed that 'the tragedy of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of the author's performances'. Professor Case, in the Introduction to his admirable Arden edition of Coriolanus, while approving the interpretation in this paragraph of the change in the hero's mind, withholds his assent to the stress laid in the paragraph on the particular idea of the burning of Rome.
