Page:Coriolanus (1924) Yale.djvu/175



Coriolanus is the latest in date of Shakespeare's tragedies. The evidence of style and several unusually persuasive internal allusions point to its composition in 1608 or 1609, immediately after Antony and Cleopatra. Of the stage history of the play before the Restoration we have no knowledge whatever. Indeed the earliest positive allusion to it is found in the licensing notice of previously uncopyrighted Shakespearean plays, entered on the book of the Stationers' Company by the publishers of the Shakespeare Folio, November 8, 1628. Here Coriolanus is named first among the eight tragedies 'not formerly entred to other men.' In the Folio of 1623, and the three following Folio editions of Shakespeare, Coriolanus is accordingly printed between Troilus and Cressida and Titus Andronicus. These, with the exception of Tate's alteration, are the only texts of the play published during the seventeenth century.

The manuscript upon which the Folio text of Coriolanus was based appears to have been pretty carefully prepared. The play is accurately divided into acts, though not into scenes, and contains rather full and explicit stage directions. The text is certainly faulty in certain places and the lines are frequently misdivided, but the proportion of error will seem small if one considers the alarming syntactic and metrical peculiarities (those of Shakespeare's last period) with which the printer had to deal. No reason has been