A Contextual Guide to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: History, Myth, Gender

(Hardback)

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Description

Employing commentary on the play's main themes, coupled with an editorial apparatus that connects selected primary texts (from Ovid to Montaigne) with Shakespeare's great tragedy, Jyotsna G. Singh and Daniel Vitkus guide the reader through a series of fascinating readings that serve to reconstruct the intellectual and artistic world of Antony and Cleopatra through varied perspectives. This includes chapters on History and Prophecy; Myth; Geography; Gender, Desire, and Eroticism; Theatricality, Festivity, and Spectacle; and Emblematic Perspectives; followed by a Coda describing and analysing some 'Afterlives' of the play on the modern stage. Through their exposure to these thematic frameworks, readers will come to understand more clearly the interpretive possibilities offered by Antony and Cleopatra as a complex and masterful work of art.

Author Bio

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her key publications include The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (co-authored with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms, 1994), Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: 'Discoveries' of India in the Language of Colonialism (1996), Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (2019), Travel Knowledge (co-edited with Ivo Kamps, 2001), and A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500 1700 (2009, 2021).