SOURCE: “Coriolanus—A Tragedy of Love,” in English: The Journal of the English Association, Vol. 40, No. 167, Summer, 1991, pp. 117-34.

In the essay below, Dean examines the play’s politics, dismissing the ‘ideological’ approach and contending that Coriolanus is a “tragedy of thwarted love.”

That the story of Coriolanus was known to Shakespeare at the outset of his career is proved by the allusion to it in Titus Andronicus IV.iv.68, which he probably derived from a reading of the 1579 edition of North's Plutarch.¹ The whole strand of plot in Titus in which Lucius, banished from Rome, returns at the head of a hostile army, adumbrates the essential movement of the later play, though the moral issues at stake are not so complex. It is interesting to notice other incidental similarities, such as Titus's opening with an opposition between autocratic and popular power and its derogatory references to...