The Tragedy of Coriolanus

Coriolanus, the last of the so-called political tragedies by William Shakespeare, written about 1608 and published in the First Folio of 1623 seemingly from the playbook, which had preserved some features of the authorial manuscript. The five-act play, based on the life of Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, a legendary Roman hero of the late 6th and early 5th centuries bce, is essentially an expansion of the Plutarchan biography in Parallel Lives. Though it is Elizabethan in structure, it is markedly Classical in tone.