With every play, I like to take a look at the authorship question. And no, I don’t mean who was Shakespeare and if “he” really wrote the plays. No, that question really doesn’t float my boat. No, what I mean is, did the “entity” that we call Shakespeare write this play in its entirety or did he have help? And so, as we’re at the beginning of a new play, I gotsta ask: “Who wrote Coriolanus?”
Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in a long time, it looks as if–unlike our last play Pericles, or Timon of Athens, a few plays before that one–we have a play that’s Shakespeare, through and through.
It’s going to make this reading an interesting experience compared to some of the other ones (trying to figure out who wrote what, and was there a discernible shift in quality in those sections…).