Coriolanus

I don’t think it’s necessary to add who wrote this.

This version was very helpful in that half of the book is the Oxford World’s Classics essay about the play. The play itself only takes up about less than half of the book, and a lot of that is footnotes.

What I was curious about with regard to this play — the last of his tragedies, presumably — is that people have said it is one of the “gayest” characters Shakespeare wrote, yet he is basically nothing but an extremely fierce and brutal warrior. I wanted to see what was so “gay” about him and, of course, there isn’t anything gay about him.

Except for the fact that Shakespeare, throughout, constantly equates battle with sexuality. One character even goes so far as to say that nothing could excite him more than going head to head with Coriolanus, even more than standing on the threshold of his bedroom with his new wife waiting for him. There’s a homoerotic feeling that pervades the entire play, but it is not explicit.

Anyway, I’m not qualified to write about Shakespeare, even though I tried at University.

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