`Roman Ruins'

In the April edition of the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple has a superb essay, “Roman Ruins,” on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Here’s a sample:

“Coriolanus has virtues of course - he is extremely brave - but he is mulishly inflexible and his disdain of the common people, merely because they are the common people and not, like him, noble, is not very appealing, or even very intelligent. Moreover, he seems to have no inner life, only an external role to play, that of the hardened warrior, braver, stronger, more unyielding than anyone else; he is, like so many modern politicians, unappealingly one-dimensional. He has, as they say, no hinterland; one cannot imagine him being interested in philosophy or art, or having a strange and passionate hobby, such as collecting things; if there were no wars for him to fight in, he would cease to exist for himself; and one would no more wish to spend an evening in his company than in that of, say, Mrs Clinton.”