Virgilia

"Virgilia bewailing the absence of Coriolanus by Thomas Woolner

Virgilia is the wife of Coriolanus in William Shakespeare's play Coriolanus (1607–1610), in which same play Volumnia is his mother. With respect to the legendary figure Caius Marcius Coriolanus, some accounts (Brewer, 1898) say that his wife's name was actually Volumnia, probably following the Roman historian Livy. However, in the very influential account of his life, and one familiar to Shakespeare, namely, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, the wife's name is Virgilia, or in John Dryden's translation, Vergilia. Virgilia is described by John Ruskin as "perhaps loveliest" of Shakespeare's female characters.

References

• Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham (1898), "Virgilia", in Brewer's Reader's Handbook, Eprint.
• Plutarch, John Dryden (trans.), "Coriolanus", Eprint.
• John Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies: Lecture II