ABSTRACT
A philological study of Antony and Cleopatra has to reckon with the formidable chain of storytellers that link William Shakespeare to his characters. In order to properly hear the language of Antony and Cleopatra, it makes sense to treat both Shakespeare’s play and North’s prose as efforts of translation and adaptation, interesting in their fidelities to their respective sources and in their departures from them. In framing the character of Antony, Shakespeare draws from North’s Plutarch the to-and-fro movement between the triumvir’s remarkable endurance of physical hardship and his stubborn preference for leisure. Shakespeare picks up both the generally fraught characterization of leisure and the specific language of recreation found in North’s life of Antony. Antony’s characterization, in the early scenes of the play, depends upon a particular understanding of recreational time that gets its fullest expression in accounts of angling.
