William Shakespeare, Critical Commentary of The Tragedie of Coriolanus
Horace Howard Furness, Jr., A. B.; Litt. D., Ed.

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if you faile in our request Malone: That is, if you fail to grant us our request; if you are found failing or deficient in love to your country, and affection to your friends, when our request shall have been made to you, the blame, &c. [Malone assigns the change ‘we fail’ to Pope; see Text. Notes. Hudson in his ed. ii. is strangely confused; he tells us that the original reads, ‘we fail in your request,’ even accounting for this new reading by the presence of ‘your’ in the line below, and credits Rowe with the reading ‘our request.’—Ed.]—Schmidt (Coriolanus): In modern usage ‘fail’ is the opposite of succeed, but here it is used in a wider sense: not to come up to expectation, not to do the correct thing.—Deighton (reading with Rowe): Yet we will continue to make supplication, so that if we fail to obtain what we ask, the blame may rest upon you for your stubbornness, not on us for our want of persistency. The reading of the Folio may perhaps be explained, ‘fail in the matter of our request.’

104-135. Should we be silent, etc.] Farmer, in his second edition of his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, p. 13, transcribes these thirty-two lines, together with the corresponding passage from North's Plutarch, in order to confute a remark made by Pope in his Preface: ‘The speeches copied from Plutarch in Coriolanus may be as well made an instance of the learning of Shakespeare as those copied from Cicero, in Catiline, of Ben Jonson's.’ Farmer's intent is to demonstrate that Shakespeare's knowledge was gained solely by the translation and not by recourse to the original. Pope has, however, not made any such claim; he clearly says, preceding the above-quoted sentence, ‘There is certainly a vast difference between Learning and Languages. How far he was ignorant of the latter I cannot determine; but 'tis plain he had much reading at least, if they will not call it Learning. Nor is it any great matter, if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another.’ Farmer, in thus quoting but the concluding part of Pope's remark, gives to the reader a quite erroneous impression of Pope's contention. He certainly did not mean that these parallel passages proved that Shakespeare read them in the original Greek. The passage in North's Plutarch, which Shakespeare here follows with but a few verbal changes, in order to make it into verse, will be found in the Appendix: Source of the Plot, ad loc.—Ed.