ABSTRACT

As anyone seriously interested in Shakespeare well knows, the abundance of scholarship and criticism on Antony and Cleopatra has been rich in substance and variety and considerably enlivened by controversy. Increasingly, however, there has been a tendency, not limited to discussions of this play or even to Shakespearean drama, to blur the distinction between human behavior as we know it in life and the behavior of the playwright’s fictionalized characters. In Antony and Cleopatra, the ambivalences and ambiguities evident in the two protagonists’ motives and actions have only heightened our desire to possess a more complete knowledge of their psychologies. To be sure, invoking a psychological explanation of characters and their conduct has been of inestimable value in advancing our understanding of the play. But the practice now “ore-flowes the measure” (1.1.2),1 obscuring the separation between real persons as they fulfill their destinies and Shakespeare’s theatrical figures as they fulfill their artistic functions. In our eagerness to identify characters as actual human beings and to know them with depth and intimacy, we have too often forgotten that they are the controlled products of the playwright’s artistry. The result has been to devalue the playwright’s purely dramaturgical interests and the aesthetic dynamics of the play.