Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra is a story of

contrasts: Egypt with Rome, Antony with Octavius, the Roman soldiers with the members of Cleopatras court, and of course the contrast between Antony and Cleopatra themselves. Ultimately the very structure and themes of the play are a study in contradictions. Is it a tragedy, a comedy or a history play? A political thriller or a timeless romance? More than one literary critic has even categorized it as a farce, whatever that may mean. Written in 1606-7, Antony and Cleopatra is roughly contemporary with Shakespeares great final tragedies King Lear and Macbeth, and it shares many of the elements of those powerful works, yet it is nevertheless, in many ways, unique in the Shakespeare canon. From the opening lines of the play, which introduce us to both Antony and Cleopatra from the Roman perspective, to the final lines, in which Octavius neatly wraps up the high events that have constituted the plays action, Antony and Cleopatra remains a work that over time has, rather like Cleopatra herself, beggar*ed+ all description. Shakespeares audience would have been familiar with the backstory of the play from several sources. Many audience members may well have seen a performance of Shakespeares Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, and would thus have understood the context of the later play. More educated audience members may have read Plutarchs The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, either in the original Greek or, more probably, in the popular 1579 translation by Thomas North. In that book, The Life of Marcus Antonius constitutes Shakespeares chief source. Many elements of Shakespeares play rely directly on Plutarch, including the gorgeously poetic (and justly famous) description of Cleopatra on her barge in 2.2. But the poetry is Shakespeares own and as such provides a fine example of his creative and innovative use of his sources. From the opening lines of the play Shakespeare highlights the contrast between Rome and Egypt, and between the Roman Antony of old and the new, decadent (at least in Roman eyes) Antony whose dotageOerflows the measure. Images such as this of excess and abundance characterize Shakespeares descriptions of Egypt, and of Cleopatra herself. Egypt is represented here as an over-the-top kind

of place: fertile in its very geography thanks to the Nile river, dissolute and self-indulgent in its people, it is everything that Rome is not. Egyptian parties are fabulous studies in extravagance: Eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there, according to Enobarbus (from Plutarch). Egypt is also very much a womans world, in contrast to the masculine energy that defines Rome. The only woman we see in Rome is poor, wronged Octavia, whereas the Egyptian court is dominated by women and one of the principal men, aside from Antony, is a eunuch. Cleopatra herself is often described in terms of her fertility (She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; / He plowed her, and she cropped), and excess. She is also a study in contrasts, for she *makes+ defect perfection, as Enobarbus says, adding that vilest things / Become themselves in her, that the holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish *i.e. lustful+. Antony too is a study in contrasts. Says Antonys follower Philo at the beginning of the play, Those his goodly eyes, / That oer the files and musters of the war / Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn / The office and devotion of their view / Upon a tawny front. Indeed, by the end of the play Antony is attended only by the aptly named Eros, and Antony himself, the soldier who in the scuffles of great fights hath burst / the buckles on his breast, actually bungles his own suicide. Passionate in love as in war, the great orator whom we saw in Julius Caesar has here become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsys lust. Moreover, if Antony can be said to stand in opposition to his former self, he also stands in stark contrast to the much younger, much colder, and much less appealing Octavius, who fully embodies all that is Roman in this play. As emblems of their respective nations and cultures, Antony and Cleopatra might be expected to be very different, and indeed, they are often locking horns, quarreling or attempting to gain control over each other. Antony periodically attempts to tear himself away from Cleopatra and the delights of Egypt (These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage), but invariably the attraction proves too great. Perhaps it is precisely because Cleopatra represents a reality so utterly different from that of

Rome that Antony, whose Roman relationships are always strained, finds her and her country irresistible. And for all her manipulativeness, Cleopatra seems genuinely to love Antony and to be inexorably drawn to him as well. These famously older lovers come to separately tragic ends, yet they are ultimately united in their defiance of Rome, their insistence on meeting death on their own terms, and their achieving tragic stature despite their very human frailties. At the plays end Octavius observes that No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous, suggesting that even he acknowledges their greatness and admires them for it. The welter of contradictions that makes up the characters of Antony and Cleopatra and of the play itself ultimately resolves into a paradoxical unity of opposites. Rome and Egypt may never understand each other, but by the plays end it appears that both Romans and Egyptians finally understand and appreciate Antony and Cleopatra.