Coriolanus - William Shakespeare

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Résumé :
Vengeance and War- Rome is in turmoil, there is rioting in the streets and open warfare between the varying ruling factions. Coriolanus would bring peace and order to Rome, but will Rome let him? You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air- I banish you.

Biographie:
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English playwright, poet, actor, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he became the central dramatist of the English Renaissance stage and remains the most widely read and performed writer in the English language. His plays range across tragedy, comedy, history, romance, and problem drama, combining theatrical intelligence, psychological depth, political awareness, verbal power, and an extraordinary ability to give dramatic form to human conflict.Shakespeare's major works include Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and the English history plays. Coriolanus, one of his Roman tragedies, draws on classical history to examine pride, military virtue, public opinion, political rhetoric, class resentment, and the destructive force of a hero who cannot separate honour from contempt. Its severity and political intelligence have made it one of Shakespeare's most enduring plays for readers and theatres interested in power, populism, war, and civic crisis....

Sommaire:
Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a severe and powerful tragedy of war, pride, political manipulation, and a great soldier's inability to live within the society he has defended. Caius Martius is Rome's fiercest warrior, a man of extraordinary courage and brutal honesty whose victories earn him the name Coriolanus. But battlefield greatness does not make him fit for civic life. Pressed toward political office, he cannot flatter the common people, cannot disguise his contempt, and cannot bend his nature to the machinery of public power. His enemies understand the crowd better than he does, and his pride turns military glory into political ruin. Written late in Shakespeare's career, Coriolanus is one of his most searching political plays. It examines class conflict, republican government, popular resentment, military honour, maternal influence, exile, betrayal, and the dangerous distance between personal virtue and public usefulness. The play offers no easy hero and no simple villain: Coriolanus is courageous, arrogant, principled, cruel, magnificent, and catastrophically unsuited to compromise. This Wilder Publications edition is suited to readers of Shakespeare, classic drama, political tragedy, Roman plays, Renaissance literature, and works concerned with power, citizenship, honour, and the unstable bond between leaders and the people they claim to serve....