ABSTRACT
Shakespeare sets out to explore the interrelationship between character and society in a context where the social values are intensely felt and powerfully articulated. Shakespeare ended his exploration of Roman worlds as he began, with a primitive Rome. Caius Martius Coriolanus, like Titus, was born into a Rome where valour was ‘the chiefest virtue’, and thrived accordingly – until the world changed. The people of the Roman plays are denigrated chiefly because they exhibit an intolerable vice: inconstancy. The characters in the Roman plays bring to the world their own traits but they are shaped by the social universe into which they are born, its values and its history: they imbibe ideals and seek to live up to them in order to validate themselves. The magnificence of Cleopatra’s barge inhabits the same world as Pompey’s: a barely believable picture is juxtaposed with the all too believable scene of cut-throats and drunkards.
