Is Coriolanus Shakespeare?s Greatest Tragedy?

To dismiss Hamlet, Eliot must rebut most of the critics who have come before him. But he pays special attention to two fellow poet-critics, Goethe and Coleridge. Those two, he says, used their creative gifts to imagine a Hamlet who doesn?t really exist in the play. Goethe, Eliot says, ?made of Hamlet a Werther,? i.e., a similarly Romantic soul not adequate to his times. And Coleridge ?made of Hamlet a Coleridge,? a man who, in Coleridge?s words, suffers from ?an overbalance in the contemplative faculty,? and thus ?loses his natural power of action.? These attempts to decipher the character founder, according to Eliot, on the play?s fundamental disjointedness: Laying out in detail Shakespeare?s indebtedness to Thomas Kyd?s Spanish Tragedy, he argues that Hamlet is not a coherent work of art by one author, but a never-quite-finished hodge-podge, with a borrowed plot and superimposed set of motivations that don?t quite make sense.

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