Introduction

Abstract

Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s mature epic drama. Written in 1606/7, its immediate forbears were the four great tragedies — Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth — and some of the problem plays, difficult both in structure and in theme: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure. In the tragedies he had presented the fall of great men: complex individuals conceived with the veracity of psychological insight. In the problem plays he had focused on the structure of society itself. He questioned its conduct, its law and order by employing the sexual conduct and amorous desires of individuals as a means to probe institutions and structures beyond the lovers themselves. In reaching both the tragedies and the problem plays he had written his English history plays and his early tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, and had reached the heights of romantic and satiric comedy in plays moving from Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Such, and more — The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, the Sonnets — form the background of a play which has its focus on the experience of love, not merely in terms of its romance or its comedy or its tragic result, but on the interplay of two people alienated by each other, and their political rival, from the world they should control.