Shakespeare's Treatment of the Source in Coriolanus

Abstract

In the Elizabethan Age, plays, "often put together by writers hired to revise and patch the work of others, were scarcely regarded as literature" ,1l and playwrights had no need to be original in the plots of their plays. Likewise, Shakespeare did not demonstrate his originality in the invention of novel plots. He found the subject-matter of his plays in various sources-familiar stories, historical chronicles, biographies, or plays written by his predecessors. As a matter of fact, each of all his plays can be traced to at least one definite source, with only one exception, Love's Labour's Lost, the plot of which is thought to have been invented by the dramatist himself, though it contains many contemporary topical allusions. A comparison of anyone of Shakespeare's plays with its source is "a sound instinct and a natural and fruitful approach"2J to the study of his dramaturgy. Certainly it may be one of the most effective ways of understanding not only the play itself, but the essentials of his unequalled dramatic art. Coriolanus is a good example of his resourcefulness in transforming the lifeless dull story of the original into a higher artistic form. Shakespeare found the source of Coriolanus chiefly in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, in which the lives and careers of celebrated Greeks and Romans were described in pairs-e. g. Alexander and Caesar, Dion and Brutus, Demetrius and Antony, etc.-and comparisons between them were given.