SOURCE: "Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus," in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, edited by Mary Beth Rose, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 89-110.

In the following essay, originally presented in 1982, Sprengnether employs pre-Oedipal psychoanalytic theory in her discussion of Coriolanus, arguing that the drama represents the culmination of the dominant gender-related themes in Shakespeare's tragedies.

Whatever else they are about, Shakespeare's tragedies demonstrate, with a terrible consistency, the ways in which love kills. My argument here concerns the structures of homoerotic and heteroerotic bonding that constitute the primary forms of relationship in the tragedies, the assumptions regarding femininity they entail, and the manner in which they combine, with particular deadliness, in the late tragedy Coriolanus. In this play, which reveals a deep fantasy of maternal destructiveness, one can see elements of a preoedipal plot that underlies the other plays, though less explicitly articulated...