SOURCE: "Cracking Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in Coriolanus," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 58-69.

In the following essay, Velz argues that Coriolanus does not reflect a Plutarchian perspective, as is traditionally thought; instead, the play draws on Vergil in its depiction of "the cosmic Necessity that destroys a great but flawed man. "

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was realized that Plutarch's lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Brutus, and Caius Martius Coriolanus were Shakespeare's sources for his three great Roman plays, it has been widely assumed that Shakespeare's Rome is an entirely Plutarchian world, and that Shakespeare the Englishman and Plutarch the Greek saw Rome from exactly the same sympathetic outsider's point of view. John Dennis, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (1711), recognized that the primary source for Julius Caesar and...