Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship.
The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

Liam E. Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney, Australia, and has been a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the Universities of Massachusetts, Nottingham, Warwick and Essex. He leads the Better Strangers project which hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website. He is author of Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (2013) and The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (1998), and editor of The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 (2019) and Eliza's Babes; Or The Virgin's Offering (1652): A Critical Edition (2001).

List of Figures and Tables
Series Introduction
Notes on Contributors
Timeline

Introduction
Liam E. Semler (The University of Sydney, Australia)

1. The Critical Backstory
Huw Griffiths (The University of Sydney, Australia)

2. Performance History
Robert Ormsby (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)

3. The State of the Art
Graham Holderness (University of Hertfordshire, UK)

4. New Directions: Putting Tongues in Wounds: The Search for an Honest Body in Coriolanus
Anna Kamaralli (Independent Scholar)

5. New Directions: 'As if a man were author of himself': Fantasies of Omnipotence and Autonomy
Evelyn Gajowski (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA)

6. New Directions: Hegel's Rome and Shakespeare's Coriolanus - Grounds for Tragedy
Jennifer Ann Bates (Duquesne University, USA)

7. New Directions: Coriolanus and the Datasphere
Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle, Australia)

8. 'Teach my mind': Approaches and Resources for the Coriolanus Classroom
Claire Hansen (James Cook University, Townsville, Australia)

Notes
Bibliography
Index