Coriolanus is one of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great tales in the four most popular books of his time, Holinshed, North's Plutarch, Cinthio, and De Belleforest. Since the newspaper became powerful, topic has supplanted fable, and subject comes to the artist untrimmed and unlit by the vitality of many minds. In reading Coriolanus and the other plays of the great period a man feels that Shakespeare fed his fire with all that was passionate in the thought about him. He appears to be his age focussed. The great man now stands outside his age, like Timon.
Coriolanus is a play of the clash of the aristocratic temper with the world. It contains most of the few speeches in Shakespeare which ring with what seems like a personal bitterness. Hatred of the flunkey mind, and of the servile, insolent mob mind, "false as water," appears in half-a-dozen passages. Some of these passages are ironic inventions, not prompted by Plutarch. The great mind, brooding on the many forms of treachery, found nothing more treacherous than the mob, and nothing more dog-like, for good or evil, than the servant.
Greatness is sometimes shown in very little things. Few things in Shakespeare show better the fulness of his happy power than the following—
(Corioli. Enter certain Romans with spoils.)
1st Roman. This will I carry to Rome.
2nd Roman. And I this.
3rd Roman. A murrain on't. I took this for silver.
Timon of Athens.
Written. 1606-8 (?)
Published. 1623.
Source of the Plot. William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. Plutarch's Life of Antonius. Lucian's Dialogue.
The Fable. Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him. None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens, finding a like ingratitude in the State, openly makes war upon it, reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.
Timon of Athens is a play of mixed authorship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare revised it.