Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, speaks to Henry Stead about social division in Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The video was filmed in University of Swansea, Wales on Wednesday 7 May 2014.
Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, speaks to Henry Stead about social division in Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The video was filmed in University of Swansea, Wales on Wednesday 7 May 2014.
Dear Professor Pelling
Coriolanus cannot be more topical a Shakespeare than in South Africa at present, which is why I am tackling the Plutarch (and Dionysius and Livy) biography and linking them to the tragedy of 1607. Your talk on You Tube, which was forwarded to me by my own Professor, was a confirmation that I am now on the right track. You might catch a glimpse of our Economic Freedom Fighter Tribunes dressed in their inaugural red boiler-suits/ overalls and red hard hats on their entry to parliament today. Julius and Floyd. The sort of upheavals broached by Shakespeare have a disturbing reality at the Platinum mines, where a strike is in it 17th week, with what social consequences you already know from Coriolanus. This comes in the wake of a senior management person at the mine claiming that his 6 million rand per annum is justifiable. He had to make a humble apology in the press and the media to recover his dignity. We watch the news every day with bated breath, and I’m saying to myself, we’ve had this in 1922, and of course in the Early Roman Republic.