In 1755 Samuel Johnson published in two stout volumes his Dictionary, one of the first such endeavors for the English language. An erudite curmudgeon, he then turned his attention to the plays of William Shakespeare. By 1765 Johnson had published prefaces and notes to each of the plays appearing in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

In his preface for Shakespeare’s last tragedy, Coriolanus, Johnson wrote that it is “the most amusing of our author’s performances.” Johnson was amused by “the old man’s merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady’s dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunician insolence in Brutus and Sicinius.” For Johnson, all together they “make a very pleasing and interesting variety; and the various revolutions of the hero’s fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity.” All the same, whatever else critics and actors might say about it, they never classify Coriolanus as an amusement.

As Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar wrote in The Folger Guide to Shakespeare (1969), Coriolanus “has been condemned by some as antidemocratic, while others have interpreted it as a revelation of the evils of dictators and fascists.” Either way, they maintained, “the play contains flashes of great poetry and shrewd insights into the nature of man and is peopled with characters of flesh and blood.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, though.

Thirty years earlier, Mark Van Doren, in his Shakespeare, said that if the meaning of this play “has to do with the difference between the many and the one, that difference is viewed from both directions,” so that “the many, Roman mob, are criticized without mercy, but so is Coriolanus as the one.” It can be hard for anyone to warm up to these complexities and ambiguities.

As have literary critics, actors have found the play anything but amusing. In 1992 Judi Dench played Volumnia, Coriolanus’ strong-willed mother, in a production at the Chichester Festival Theatre in England. In Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (2023), she reflected on the play not being popular, and she said, “the characters are perhaps not as sympathetic” as in other Shakespeare plays, and “there are very few soliloquies, which often help you connect with an audience. There’s not much poetry and very little self-reflection. It’s play of action.”

In 1948 Alec Guinness played the wise and wily old Senator, Menenius, in a production of Coriolanus with the Old Vic Company in London. Fifty years later, writing his third and last volume of memoirs, A Positively Final Appearance, he said he was re-reading the play but “to my consternation I find I have no recollection of saying a single line.” For him, the play was not so much about action as about words, and they were words that had somehow failed to stay with him.

As Johnson saw, the key to appreciating this play is following how the various types of characters interact. Here we encounter Shakespeare as a dedicated student of ancient history, with no recourse to ghosts or soothsayers, meditating on people’s virtues and vices and how they complement and collide. Despite Menenius in Act II, Scene 1, asking two tribunes, “Do you two know how you are censured here in the city—I mean of us o’ the right-hand file?,” it is a red herring to see this play as a parable of the political categories of Left and Right as they have developed since the late eighteenth century.

As the saying goes, the clue is in the name, and so Coriolanus himself remains the most interesting character in the play bearing his name. As Shakespeare read Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus, he became intrigued with the dramatic possibilities of what happens when people insist on promoting the wrong man for the job, especially when the man himself knows he is not cut out for it. While historians today debate whether Coriolanus ever lived, Plutarch placed him in what we know as the fifth century before Christ, and even in the Roman Republic, where most able-bodied men served a term in the army, he stood out as a soldier’s soldier.

For him, fighting in battle brings sexual exhilaration. Here he is in Act I, Scene 6, thrilled by victory and saying to a fellow officer, “O! Let me clip [hug] ye/In arms as sound as when I wooed; in heart/As merry as when our nuptial day was done,/And tapers burned to bedward.” Indeed.

After his great victory over the Volscians at their town of Corioli (hence his name), his fellow patricians want to run him for consul, the annually elected chief magistrate of Rome. It is a pattern recurring throughout human history, a war hero being picked by bigwigs for political office. All Coriolanus needs to do is banter about himself for a while with some ordinary voters at a meet and greet event. Even his (pardon the anachronism) Rotarian friend Menenius knows it will be a tough sell, conceding, “His nature is too noble for the world,/He would not flatter Neptune for his trident/Or Jove for ’s power to thunder.”

Without mentioning Johnson, Louis Auchincloss, in Motiveless Malignity (1969), made much the same point about character. “Shakespeare, in his later years,” said Auchincloss, “was increasingly absorbed with the problem of human perversity: men acting suddenly and irrationally against their own happiness and best interests.” Even without looking to the Tudor or Jacobean royal courts or to our current headlines, everyone knows such men, and what is now lost to time is how many of them Shakespeare met among his neighbors back home in Stratford and on his daily rounds in London.

For the sort of person who buys coffee mugs covered with insults written by Shakespeare, Coriolanus delivers some of the Bard’s best put downs. It can take a few re-readings of the play and more than one viewing of it to enjoy it as Samuel Johnson did, as an interesting clash of characters. As a teaser, it could be refreshingly amusing to see a political candidate, who declares, “Let it be virtuous to be obstinate,” reject “pressing the flesh” and let loose with: “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate/As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize/As the dead carcasses of unburied men/That do corrupt my air . . .” If nothing else, it amused a man who compiled a dictionary.