Abstract
Heroic tragedy or comical tragedy? Our uneasiness in defining the response to Antony mirrors our difficulty in describing the whole play’s genre and tones. Whether or not we accept either of the views quoted above, we cannot deny that Antony, first served to the audience in a piquant sauce of Cleopatra’s humour, elicits a response that sets him apart from all the other tragic heroes. Smarting in lingering pickle he loses tragic stature, at least in the opening scenes.
Majesty, affability, benevolence, liberality, placability, amity, justice, fortitude, patience in sustaining wrong; all and more are Antony’s... in a word, Antony, not Julius Caesar, as some vainly suppose, is [Shakespeare’s] portrait of true greatness.
(J. Dover Wilson)1
Once we have the idea in our heads that amusement is a permissible (and indeed essential) response to large tracts of this play, Antony’s fury after Actium, his treatment of Thidias [Thyreus], and his row with Cleopatra, come into sharper focus.
(A. L. French)2
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Notes
A. P. Riemer, A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (Sydney, 1968) p. 15, surveying ‘the traditional body of attitudes that had accumulated around the lovers’, declared that Shakespeare’s ‘passages of comedy... find no sanction at all in these traditions.’ Shakespeare’s passages are largely his own, of course, but Plutarch told him that jesting had an important place in Antony’s life.
Compare Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (1962);
Reuben A. Brower, Hero & Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971); Dover Wilson (quoted above, p. 150); and, as an example of a mixed response, Riemer, A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’.
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© 1976 E. A. J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (1976). Antony versus Cleopatra. In: Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02931-0_9
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