Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Antony and Cleopatra is a play in two minds, as no other of the tragedies is, least of all Macbeth, written immediately before it, quite possibly in the same year 1606.¹ ‘In Macbeth we are never in any doubt of our moral bearings. Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, embodies different and apparently irreconcilable evaluations of the central experience.’² It is a striking change from the spiritually polarised world of one play to the problematic moral relativism of the other: ‘as we pass from Macbeth to Antony and Cleopatra we see the problem of evil suddenly lose urgency for Shakespeare’.³ Yet this alteration need not be seen as unique, a single ‘sudden’ loss of urgency of the issue of good and evil, a stage beyond the tragic concerns of Macbeth and King Lear, Othello and Hamlet.