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eely225's review
3.0
"A Shakespeare play does not say; it offers a series of juxtapositions and contrasts which illuminate each other." -Bruce King
This text is trying to talk about how people talk about Coriolanus, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. The first half of the book draws mostly on contrasts between different commentators across the years on how the play should be read. The second half of the text is the author's own analysis.
If King offers a conclusion, it's in the quote above: there isn't one. There's no Marxist reading of the play because there's no reading of the play. There's too much contrast and blank space for a proper reading to emerge.
If that's the case, it takes a while to get there. The text can be a bit scattershot, taking stabs at different features of the play without necessarily unifying the picture. The sheer variety of commentators that King references is hard to keep straight and seems not to be terribly important since the second half of the book is his corrections of them.
The text has a very niche audience: people who love this play and want to read about other people who care about it a lot. In that respect, it's successful. You'll get that. But some of the readings are so cursory that it doesn't feel like you're really getting at what these various authors are trying to say. While parts of King's interpretation are compelling, separating them from his commentaries on other commentaries isn't as straightforward as you'd think.
Mostly it made me want to read Coriolanus again, which isn't really a bad thing.
This text is trying to talk about how people talk about Coriolanus, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. The first half of the book draws mostly on contrasts between different commentators across the years on how the play should be read. The second half of the text is the author's own analysis.
If King offers a conclusion, it's in the quote above: there isn't one. There's no Marxist reading of the play because there's no reading of the play. There's too much contrast and blank space for a proper reading to emerge.
If that's the case, it takes a while to get there. The text can be a bit scattershot, taking stabs at different features of the play without necessarily unifying the picture. The sheer variety of commentators that King references is hard to keep straight and seems not to be terribly important since the second half of the book is his corrections of them.
The text has a very niche audience: people who love this play and want to read about other people who care about it a lot. In that respect, it's successful. You'll get that. But some of the readings are so cursory that it doesn't feel like you're really getting at what these various authors are trying to say. While parts of King's interpretation are compelling, separating them from his commentaries on other commentaries isn't as straightforward as you'd think.
Mostly it made me want to read Coriolanus again, which isn't really a bad thing.
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