Coriolanus Part 2 - The Characters

Part 2 begins with a discussion of those political questions – who should have power in a political community? Is power a right or a reward? – and how they are reflected in the play’s imagery. It goes on to explore the paradoxes within the values of Rome and how Coriolanus reveals and struggles with those paradoxes. It concludes by examining the surprising choices that Coriolanus makes at the play’s end to ask whether those choices reflect Coriolanus’s attachment to his inherited Roman values, or an ability to change – to metamorphose.