Antony and Cleopatra

Introduction Shakespeare probably wroteAntony and Cleopatrain 1606 or 1607; it was registered for publication on May 20, 1608, and apparently influenced a revision of Samuel Daniel'sCleopatrathat was published "newly altered" in 1607. Antony and Cleopatra was thus roughly contemporary withKing LearandMacbeth. Yet the contrast between those two tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra is immense. UnlikeMacbeth, with its taut focus on a murderer and his wife,Antony and Cleopatramoves back and forth across the Mediterranean in its epic survey of characters and events, bringing together the fates of Pompey, Octavius Caesar, Octavia, and Lepidus with those of the protagonists.King Leargives proper names to fourteen characters, Macbeth to eighteen,Antony and Cleopatrato thirty-four. The Roman play requires no fewer than forty-two separate scenes, of which most occur in what modern editors label Acts 3 and 4, although no play is less suited to the classical rigors of five-act structure, and these divisions are not found in the reliable Folio text of 1623. Indeed, it is as though Shakespeare resolved at the height of his career to show that he could dispense entirely with the classical "rules," which had never taken serious hold of the English popular stage in any case. The flouting of the unities is so extreme that John Dryden, in hisAll for Love, or The World Well Lost(1678), undertook not so much to revise Shakespeare as to start afresh on the same subject. Dryden's play is restricted to the last few hours of the protagonists' lives, at Cleopatra's tomb in Alexandria, with a severely limited cast of characters and much of the narrative revealed through recollection. Although a substantial achievement in its own right,All for Lovesurely demonstrates that Shakespeare knew what he was doing, for Dryden has excised a good deal of the panorama, the excitement, and the "infinite variety" (2.2.246). Shakespeare departs also from the somber tone of his tragedies of evil. He creates, instead, a world that bears affinities to the ambiguous conflicts of the other Roman plays, to the varying humorous perspectives of the comedies, and to the imaginative reconstructions of the late romances. As protagonists,Antony and Cleopatralack tragic stature, or so it first appears: she is a tawny gypsy temptress and he a "strumpet's fool," a once-great general now bound in "strong Egyptian fetters" and lost in "dotage" (1.1.13; 1.2.1223). Several scenes, especially those set in Egypt, are comic and delightfully bawdy: Charmian learning her fortune from the soothsayer, Cleopatra practicing her charms in vain to keep Antony from leaving Egypt or raunchily daydreaming of being Antony's horse "to bear the weight of Antony" (1.5.22), Cleopatra flying into a magnificent rage at the news of Antony's marriage to Octavia and then consoling herself with catty reflections on Octavia's reported low voice and shortness of stature ("I think so, Charmian. Dull of tongue, and dwarfish," 3.3.17). In its comic texture, the play somewhat resemblesRomeo and Juliet, an earlier play about a younger pair of lovers, although there the bawdry is used chiefly to characterize the lovers' companions and confidants, whereas inAntony and Cleopatrait is central to our vision of Cleopatra especially. In any case, the later play is a tragedy about lovers who, despite their quarrels and uncertainties and betrayals of self, are reconciled in a vision of the greatness of their love. In its depiction of two contrasting worlds, also,Antony and Cleopatrarecalls the movement of several earlier comedies from the realistic worShakespeare, William is the author of 'Antony and Cleopatra', published 1988 under ISBN 9780553212891 and ISBN 0553212893.