Sexual Geography of the Renaissance: On the Imagery of Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Antony and Cleopatra enjoys the dubious reputation of being Shakespeare’s most ambiguous drama. A sample of critical explorations yields the following remarks:

The safest statement we can make about this play is that Shakespeare’s ambivalence toward the characters, and toward their points of view, values, and modes of action, is extreme. … [There is a] marked and pervasive ambivalence which infuses the entire work. … [I]n essence Antony and Cleopatra, at its greatest moments, is gloriously senseless.¹

[A] painful ambivalence … characterises our response to the play.… [It moves] in a dialectical process that begins with experiment and ends in failure This hurts.²

The play seems perfectly calculated to offend the rising tide of neoclassical taste and to disappoint rational expectation. … Shakespeare insists upon … ambivalence, for it is not simply the characteristic of his heroine but also the informing principle of the entire dramatic structure.³

Though he [Antony] be painted one way like a Gorgon, The other way’s a Mars. (II. v. 116–17)