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I. THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY.

Coriolanus was first printed in the folio of 1623, where it occupies pages 1-30 in the division of "Tragedies," though Troilus and Cressida (which was at first intended, as the paging shows, to follow Romeo and Juliet) is placed before it. It is one of sixteen plays in the folio which are recorded

in the Stationers' Registers as not having been previously "entered" to other publishers. For the date of its composition we have only the internal evidence of style and metre, which indicate that it was one of the latest of the plays. It was probably written between 1607 and 1610. Malone and Stokes make the date 1610; Ward, 1610 or "perhaps rather earlier;" Chalmers and Drake, 1609; Fleay (in his Introduction to Shakespearian Study) and Dowden," about 1608;" Delius, "before May, 1608;" and Furnivall, 1607-8. Halliwell sees in v. 3. 97 evidence that Shakespeare used the 1612 edition of North's Plutarch-in which the misprint of “unfortunately" for "unfortunate" is first corrected - while Fleay believes that the correction in North was got from the play. One argument is just as good as the other, both in our opinion (see our note on the passage below) being good for nothing; and the same may be said of any inferences concerning the date based upon the allusion to the "mulberry" in iii. 2. 79.

*

II. THE HISTORICAL SOURCES OF THE PLOT.

The source from which Shakespeare drew his materials was Sir Thomas North's "Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans, compared together by that grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea,” translated from the French version of James Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre, and first published in 1579. As the poet was evidently acquainted with the book when he wrote the Midsummer-Night's Dream (see our ed. p. 15), which was pretty certainly before the appearance of the 2d edition of North in 1595, he probably used the 1st edition in Coriolanus also. The extracts in the Notes will show how freely he drew from North, and how closely in many instances he followed even the phraseology of his authority. Some expressions in the

* See our note below; and for another passage which has been thought to bear on the date, see on ii. 2. 97.

fable told by Menenius in i. 1 may have been suggested by the version in Camden's Remains, published in 1605. Wright thinks it possible that the resemblances to Camden -first pointed out by Malone-may be accidental, but we are inclined, with Ward, Fleay, and others, to believe that Shakespeare was really indebted to that author-though the obligation was at best but a trifling one.

III. CRITICAL COMMENTS ON THE PLAY.

[From Hazlitt's "Characters of Shakespear's Plays."*] Shakespear has in this play shown himself well versed in history and state affairs. Coriolanus is a storehouse of political commonplaces. . . . The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakespear himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of bating the rabble. What he says of them is very true; what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it. The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry: it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation, but it presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind,

"no jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage,"

for poetry "to make its pendent bed and procreant cradle " in. The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another;

*Characters of Shakespear's Plays, by William Hazlitt, edited by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1869), p. 49 fol.

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