ABSTRACT
In Antony and Cleopatra reality is 'a strange serpent' indeed. While Roman reality is usually marshalled to the camp of the austere and civil, the constant, the reasonable, the hierarchical, and the temporal, Egyptian reality meanwhile sides with the playful, the over-abundant, the fluctuating, the passionate, the disorderly, and the eternal. In Antony and Cleopatra the mirror imagery returns with strong existentialist preechoes. By examining Shakespeare's depiction of Antony through the language of existentialism, the authors discover that Shakespeare's play discloses vast inadequacies in Stoicism while, simultaneously, revealing problems latent in existentialism as well. Antony and Cleopatra gain a 'sprightly port'; the lifelike, high-spirited bearing they are given in the Underworld, which mimics their strutting magnificence in the world of the play, fleshes out their ghostly aspect. In passing from our world and into the next, Cleopatra departs with the same imaginative force that brings her dream-Antony into reality.
