Shakespeare’s recurrent themes and techniques

Abstract

Most authors have their ‘bag’ of themes, scenes, characters, obsessions, mannerisms, ideas, structures, which recur throughout their work and which develop, evolve and change in significant ways. Coriolanus offers a new treatment of a number of Shakespeare’s recurring themes such as the causes of evil, the divorce between language and reality, the destructive manipulation of the naïve by those who can shape social action, the role of hypocrisy in life, the futility yet necessity of political and social action, the dominating role of some women, the alienation of the hero, the self-destructiveness of anger, and so on. The play also is a further development in the ironic distancing inherent to epic theatre, reveals a contrasting development in the use of affective scenes and the linking of domestic and personal with the public. There is a greater individualisation of language and style reflected in new liberties with the iambic pentameter and syntax. There is a further questioning, even a deconstruction of the tragic. Perhaps most significant, acting, directing, writing scripts for others, is treated here as both normal to society and evil. The theatre and language seem to bring destruction.