Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

How hard is Coriolanus to read?

Coriolanus scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100

Shakespeare's Early Modern English saturates the text with archaic and rare words: 'mammocked,' 'bisson multitude,' 'bolted language,' 'tetter,' 'surcease to honour.' Roman political vocabulary — aedile, lictor, consul, tribune — requires contextual reconstruction. The register is elevated throughout, comparable to Moby-Dick in density of unfamiliar diction, though context usually allows meaning to emerge.

Sentence structure: 68 out of 100

Blank verse dominates, with frequent inverted syntax and enjambment that demands the reader hold clause structure in suspension: 'What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent.' Extended rhetorical speeches by Volumnia and Coriolanus stack subordinate clauses four and five deep. Prose passages (tavern scenes, citizen debate) offer relief, but the verse registers are demanding — closer to Faulkner than to contemporary fiction.

Abstraction: 65 out of 100

Political philosophy about the nature of democracy, aristocracy, and honour runs throughout concrete dramatic action. Menenius's belly-and-members fable translates an abstract theory of state into allegory mid-riot. Volumnia's argument that political performance and genuine honour can coexist is philosophical debate dressed as maternal pressure. The play thinks hard about civic obligation without ever leaving the street or the battlefield.

Information density: 70 out of 100

Readers must track Roman constitutional structure — tribunes elected to protect plebeians, consuls commanding armies, the Senate as deliberative body, the Tarpeian Rock as execution site — alongside two warring city-states and shifting factional alliances. Each scene introduces new political maneuvering. Historical background from Plutarch is assumed rather than explained, raising the cognitive load for readers unfamiliar with the Roman Republic.

Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100

The play presents Coriolanus through competing frames simultaneously: the tribunes paint him as a tyrant, Volumnia as a hero she made, Aufidius as a rival he cannot stop admiring. No single perspective is authoritative. His inner life — pride, shame, the desire to be 'author of himself' — must be assembled from what he refuses to say and what others project onto him. The audience must hold multiple unreliable frames at once.

Symbolic density: 72 out of 100

Wounds function as political currency — Coriolanus refuses to display them to the people as if showing them would corrupt the meaning of how they were earned. The 'gown of humility' he must wear to beg votes literalises the degradation he finds unbearable. His name itself is the central symbol: bestowed for the sack of Corioli, stripped by Aufidius at the end ('I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name Coriolanus'), the renaming maps identity onto political allegiance.

Ironic distance: 72 out of 100

The tribunes Sicinius and Brutus are cynical manipulators who pre-plan how to goad Coriolanus into rage ('put him to choler straight'), yet they represent legitimate democratic institutions. Coriolanus is contemptuous of the people but his contempt is frequently accurate — the citizens do reverse their votes within minutes. Shakespeare gives both sides enough rope to hang themselves, refusing to let either aristocratic honour or popular will emerge as simply right.

Resolution withholding: 75 out of 100

The plot closes definitively: Coriolanus is killed by Aufidius's conspirators after being goaded with 'boy of tears.' But the moral meaning remains radically open. Is his capitulation to Volumnia nobility or weakness? Does his death serve Rome or merely Aufidius's ambition? Aufidius's final 'Yet he shall have a noble memory' — spoken over the body of a man he has just murdered — is as ambiguous an ending as Shakespeare wrote outside the tragedies.

Structural complexity: 45 out of 100

Five-act dramatic structure follows classical conventions without formal experiments. There are no timeline jumps, no frame narratives, no unreliable fictional narrators. The relative structural simplicity is offset by the play's perspectival complexity — the audience occupies no stable sympathetic position — but the architecture itself is conventional Shakespearean tragedy. Closer to War and Peace in structural terms than to Pedro Paramo.

How Coriolanus is regarded

Coriolanus holds a literary regard score of 89 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

William Shakespeare