The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra: Asps amidst the Figs

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This revaluation of Shakespeares most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philos Roman judgment of the lovers as strumpet and foolpremised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pairnor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the grand illusion of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesars heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poets view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedys subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeares assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the plays eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their intercourse with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for easy ways to die rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.

Reviews

William Zaks new book on Antony and Cleopatra begins where his most recent study, A Mirror for Lovers, left off: with a discussion of the sonnets. This is a natural move since he regards these two texts as the second and third installments in a Shakespearean sequence on love, lust, and narcissism that began with Venus and Adonis. Love is not love if it constitutes a cunningly hidden self-absorption or an imperious desire for possession, but can we always trust ourselves to tell the difference between them Toward the end of his book, Zak formulates the normative framework of temperate love that seems to form the backbone of his argument (and against which the shortcomings of the protagonists have been measured). True lovers, he argues, are capable of commingling love and strife.... There is something to be said for this piece of practical wisdom, as for many other arguments in this interesting and illuminating book. * Renaissance Quarterly *

Author Bio

William F. Zak is emeritus professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland and author of A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speares Sonnets as Curious Perspective.