ABSTRACT
In Shakespeare's day, the theatres were under frequent attack as sources of distraction from worship and work. Both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra enact a clash of values associated with memory. That model begins to unravel in Julius Caesar, and the process accelerates in Antony and Cleopatra, a play that might be described as a study in distraction. Unlike Julius Caesar, which harbours a residual nostalgia for a moral life based upon memory and continuity with the past, and for public memory as the basis of political action, Antony and Cleopatra advances an implicit argument for the moral claims of a theatre of distraction. Antony and Cleopatra vividly and sometimes gaudily displays the advantages of distracted and therefore more flexible and receptive minds like Antony's and Cleopatra's. Brutus is the character most closely associated with the idea of memory as a foundation of moral virtue, but by the end of Julius Caesar it is no longer a reliable one.
