Of all his tragic chronicle / biographical plays, is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus the bard’s “farewell” to the tragedy play format?
By: Ringo Bones
Recent studies by scholars have shown that William
Shakespeare’s “ruthlessness” as a businessman who profited from famine and
hardship was largely influenced by his tragic chronicle / biographical play
Coriolanus. After he finished most of his plays, Shakespeare returned to Warwickshire
where he had a lot of land planted with corn and barley crops and hoarded the
season’s harvests where he managed to manipulate and cornered the then existing
grain market during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
The bard’s “complex character” was evident on his action as
an “illegal food hoarder” 400 years ago who sold grain at inflated prices
during famine was recently uncovered by researchers back in 2013. And it seems
that this particular play very much influenced Shakespeare as a “shrewd”
businessman. And sometimes I also wonder if Shakespeare had read Sun Tsu’s The
Art of War.
To most Stratfordian scholars, William Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus are founded on Sir Thomas North’s English translation of Plutarch’s
Lives, a fact of which may indicate that the wearied poet felt the need of a
source he could follow closely without having to rack his brains in invention. Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus – composed between 1608 and 1609 – is a more firmly built play of
the most of his “biographical tragedies”. After the civic riots and pitched
battles of the first act, recalling the technique of the chronicle plays,
Shakespeare concentrates upon the character and fate of the protagonist. And
this fate is, perhaps, more rigidly determined by character than elsewhere in Shakespeare.
Coriolanus might be called Shakespeare’s farewell to tragedy; the tragic
temper, the sympathetic hero and the poetic expression of the tragic theme seem
fainter and less effective here than in the earlier and greater plays.
