Coriolanus

Topic: Coriolanus

1. Verified Sourced Facts

• The local wiki page covers Coriolanus.
• The same page links the play to the New River Project wiki page.
• The same page preserves a Dell note connecting the play’s opening hunger politics to Chrysostom.
• The direct Folger text witness contains repeated grain, dearth, and garners language in 1.1.
• The same witness contains a direct hunting comparison in 1.1.
• The same witness contains artillery or battery language in 5.4.
• The same witness contains sulfur-and-bolt language in 5.3.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

• No Ken Feinstein Twitter/blog material is isolated in this packet at present.

3. Dating and Historical Context

• The current local wiki page is a stub and does not provide a separate dating section.
• The local page frames the play mainly through its relation to the New River Project page and through Dell’s Chrysostom comparison.

4. Cannon References

• In 5.3, Volumnia says:

“To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' th' air / And yet to charge thy sulfur with a bolt / That should but rive an oak.”

• In 5.4, Menenius says of Martius:

“his hum is a battery.”

5. Hunting and Hawking References

• In 1.1, Menenius says of Caius Martius:

“He is a lion / That I am proud to hunt.”

• In 1.6, Cominius compares Coriolanus to:

“a fawning greyhound in the leash”

6. Metallurgy, Iron, Furnace, or Forge References

• In 1.5, Martius dismisses low-value spoils including:

“Irons of a doit”

• In the direct scene-by-scene reading completed for this packet, no fuller furnace or forge cluster comparable to the Mayfield or Henry V materials was identified.

7. Other Relevant Historical or Local References

• In 1.1, the opening citizen scene includes:

“Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price.”

• The same scene includes:

“For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it”

• The citizens reply:

“Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain”

• Menenius also says:

“Because I am the storehouse and the shop / Of the whole body.”

• Debora K. Shuger writes:

“Like the plebeians in the first scene of Coriolanus, Chrysostom blames the hunger of the poor on hoarding patricians rather than the gods”

• The same passage quotes Chrysostom attacking those who:

“shuttest up corn and raisest the price”

• Source-hardening check of Shuger confirms that this is a contextual analogy between Coriolanus and patristic social criticism, especially hunger, hoarding, and elite responsibility. It is not a direct-source claim that Shakespeare read Chrysostom.
• Shuger explicitly cautions:

“I do not intend to argue that Shakespeare, in fact, studied the writings of the Church Fathers.”

• The same act later includes:

“The Volsces have much corn”

• Dell’s Chrysostom comparison directly connects the opening hunger politics of 1.1 to patrician hoarding.

8. Neville Letter Alignments

• The evidence bank links 1.1 (“Worshipful mutineers”) to Neville’s letter_057 (2 Apr. 1600), which says French forces hoped to “reduce the mutineers.”
• The close-reading compilation links 5.6 (“my pretext”) to Neville’s letter_012 (13 July 1599), where he says royal officers used a “pretext” to extort merchants.
• The same evidence bank also links 4.6 (“temporized”) to letter_057, where Neville writes that “the King temporized.”
• The strict Tier A summary lists repeal as a manual-PASS lemma for Coriolanus, though the fuller close-reading packets used here supplied stronger context for mutineers, pretext, and temporized.

9. Quoted Source Text

Direct play text (Folger)

• 1.1: “Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price.”
• 1.1: “For the dearth, / The gods, not the patricians, make it”
• 1.1: “Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain”
• 1.1: “Because I am the storehouse and the shop / Of the whole body.”
• Shuger: “Like the plebeians in the first scene of Coriolanus”
• Shuger: “I do not intend to argue that Shakespeare, in fact, studied the writings of the Church Fathers.”
• 1.1: “He is a lion / That I am proud to hunt.”
• 1.5: “Irons of a doit”
• 1.6: “a fawning greyhound in the leash”
• 5.3: “charge thy sulfur with a bolt / That should but rive an oak.”
• 5.4: “his hum is a battery.”

10. N-gram Research

• In the codex-neville-ngram-report rare-bigram ranking, Coriolanus ranks 12 with 175 shared rare bigrams.
• In the same folder’s rare-trigram ranking, the play ranks 20 with 254 shared rare trigrams; in the Jaccard-normalized trigram table it ranks 34 with a Jaccard score of 0.006537125209110797.
• No separate exact 4–7 gram phrase dossier for Coriolanus has yet been identified in the current report folders. The current n-gram evidence for this play is ranking-based rather than an extracted exact-phrase packet.

11. Citations

• “Coriolanus.” Henry Neville Research Wiki, 1 Oct. 2020, http://nevilleresearch.com/index.php?title=Coriolanus.
• wiki_coriolanus.md, local preservation of the wiki page.
• Evidence_Bank_AllPlays_PASS.md, Pervez Database manual-PASS evidence compilation.
• Top10_Letter_Affinity_CloseReading_Draft.md, Pervez Database close-reading synthesis.
• CrossPlay_Strict_TierA.md, Pervez Database strict Tier A summary.
• neville_rare_bigrams_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database rare-bigram play ranking.
• neville_rare_trigrams_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database rare-trigram play ranking.
• neville_rare_trigrams_jaccard_vs_plays_1590_1615.csv, Pervez Database Jaccard-normalized trigram ranking.
• Neville_Letters_Corpus_v8.xml, direct local letter corpus witness for letter_012 and letter_057.
• Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Folger Shakespeare Library text witness:
• front_matter.txt
• act-01_scene-01.txt
• act-01_scene-05.txt
• act-01_scene-06.txt
• act-05_scene-03.txt
• act-05_scene-04.txt
• john_chrysostom.md, related packet for Savile’s Chrysostom edition and the Dell/Chrysostom context.
• Dell, Jessica. “Staging Conversion in Shakespeare’s England.” In Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage, edited by Lisa Hopkins and Helen Ostovich, Ashgate, 2011.
• Shuger, Debora K. “Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity.” In Shakespeare and Christianity, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 46-107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518928.004. Local copy: subversive_fathers_and_suffering_subjects_shakespeare_and_christianity.pdf.

12. Notes on Access

• The wiki points back to the local New River Project connection.
• This packet was built from direct scene-by-scene reading of the Folger text witness, not only from keyword searching.
• The Dell chapter is preserved locally through the wiki_coriolanus.md note layer and the related Chrysostom packet.
• The Chrysostom comparison is now also backed by the direct Shuger chapter citation.
• Source-hardening result, 2026-04-27: Shuger strengthens the opening hunger-politics packet because she maps Coriolanus to Chrysostom's attack on hoarding patricians and price manipulation. The limitation should remain explicit: this supports a cultural/patristic analogy, not direct source access.