ABSTRACT
As the context for a discussion of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the citations of the barge for admonitory use—including one by William Shakespeare himself—shape its reception into a meditation on reception per se. One indication of the locational peculiarity of Shakespeare’s version of this scene is Frank’s elision of the space between Antony, enthroned alone in the market-place, and Cleopatra on the river Cydnus, watched by the multitude. Twice in retelling the scene of antony’s enthrallment, Shakespeare closes the gap between antony and Cleopatra by adumbrating the universal connectivity that undergirds the tangible, visible world. The flow of Cleopatra’s performance across its audience is thus a liquidation of established structures of distinction, be they spatial, social, or intellectual. In Antony and Cleopatra, the conditions of theater illuminate the connectedness that underlies and undermines the structures of human separation and solitude.
