The secondary school textbook – this is a useful textbook complete with annotations to explain unfamiliar words (use the ‘look inside’ feature to see an example) but perhaps not really relevant for William as it is designed for school level readers.

The journal article – is in a respected journal but, again, is probably at the wrong level – this time because it is very detailed and specific to a single possible interpretation of the play.

The Wikipedia article – seems to be exactly what William is looking for. It offers information about the play, the historical setting and links to events and people of the period. However, William needs to be careful to check the information he finds there because although it is relevant and seems well presented there is little clue as to the objectivity (see Section 5 Topic 5) or the provenance (Section 5 Topic 7) of the information beyond that it comes from Wikipedia.

The website – also looks very interesting. It has links to other plays by Shakespeare and allows the text of all of his works to be searched. This might be useful if William wants to explore how the same themes occur across plays, for example. However, William also needs to be careful of the links offered on the site which go to other sites containing pre-written essays and projects about Coriolanus. Using any of these works in his own essay could be plagiarism which could also breach copyright and would almost certainly get him dismissed from his class, if not from his whole study programme.