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T. S. Eliot, in his famous contrarian essay ''Hamlet and His Problems,'' argues that Hamlet is not the splendid artistic achievement it usually is considered to be. Eliot asserts that while ''Coriolanus may be not as 'interesting' as Hamlet but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success.'' It is the kind of praise that more likely keeps readers away from a work than draws them to it. Harold Bloom, taking another tack, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, nevertheless similarly suggests a certain wariness regarding Coriolanus when he describes the character, Coriolanus, as lacking the inwardness with which Shakespeare endowed the heroes of the great tragedies like Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, which immediately preceded it. Derek Traversi's assessment of the play in Shakespeare: The Roman Plays, follows Eliot's essay and precedes Bloom's, but expresses, more expansively, a synthesis of both:

That Coriolanus is conceived with admirable dramatic logic is generally recognized; doubt as to the value of the play by the highest standard only seems to arise when we ask ourselves whether it touches the deeper sources of emotion, whether the hero's disaster, so ironic and detached in its presentation, so clearly the result of inadequacies in his own moral makeup, can effect us as truly and universally tragic in its significance.

A. C. Bradley, in his 1912 lecture on Coriolanus, had already stated similar doubts about the universality of Coriolanus as a tragic figure. ''Coriolanus is angular, granitic, and hence unlovable,'' Eugene M. Waith wrote in The Herculean Hero. Critic after critic, while respecting the craftsmanship Coriolanus obviously reflects, seems to be taken up short by the character of the hero himself, while still intrigued by his problem. Rather like the people of Rome, critics have been put off by the man himself.

Perhaps Frank Kermode provides the simplest reason: ''Coriolanus,'' he writes in Shakespeare's Language, ''is his most political play . . . . It is a study in the relationships between citizens within a body politic; the relationship of crowds to leaders and leaders to led, of rich to poor.'' Its concerns are ''dearth, external enemies, enmity between classes.'' It is, in fact, just the dynamics that Kermode outlines which might tend to be off-putting to most people, who come to Shakespeare's theater for a penetrating, intellectually arousing experience of emotional depth and complexity. Bertolt Brecht, the communist playwright who invented the alienation effect, deliberately constructed his plays to prevent spectators in the theater from identifying with individual characters so that they might consider the politics of the characters' situations. In his ''Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus,'' framed as a multi-person conversation between Brecht and members of his East Berlin theater, The Berliner Ensemble, the focus is precisely on problems of class consciousness, class struggle, and class solidarity. Ann Barton, writing in her essay, ''Livy, Machiavelli, and Coriolanus,'' sees the play's strength as a political meditation on the politics of the conflict between King James I and parliament, and considers the play from the perspective of Machiavelli's analysis of governments and leaders.

One of the most persuasive readings of Coriolanus, however, leaps over the political controversies regarding the play and seems to pierce its ''granitic'' exterior. Janet Adelman begins her penetrating study ''Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Coriolanus'' by saying, ''Coriolanus begins in the landscape of maternal deprivation.'' After summarizing the political situation in Shakespeare's England and ancient Rome, Adelman discusses the role that lack of maternal nurturing played in forming and undermining Coriolanus's character, thus revealing some of the inwardness that can give the character of Coriolanus life without denying the historical, economic, and social contexts in which that life confronted itself.

References:

1) Adelman, Janet, ''Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Coriolanus,'' in New Casebooks: Shakespeare's Tragedies, edited by Susan Zimmerman, St. Martin's Press, 1998, p. 23.

2) Barton, Anne, ''Livy, Machiavelli and Coriolanus,'' in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 152, 159.

3) Bloom, Harold, ''Coriolanus,'' in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998. Bradley

4) Eliot T. S., ''Hamlet and His Problems'' in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1922.

5) Kermode, Frank, ''Coriolanus,'' in Shakespeare's Language, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000, p. 243.

6) Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Coriolanus, edited by Reuben Brower, Signet/New American Library, 1966.

7) Waith, Eugene M., ''Coriolanus,'' in The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden, Columbia University Press, 1962, p. 143.

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