Plurk paste

One of the biggest differences between Antony and Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s other tragedies is that we basically never see the titular protagonists alone. You have just observed how tightly a play like Macbeth is focused on the poetic, psychological, and philosophical vision of the title character (in this case alongside his wife). Here, we only see Antony and Cleopatra through the eyes of others, or as they present themselves to others in public.

We might say, that is, that Macbeth is an existentialist kind of play, confronting us with the inevitable future of our own death, while Antony and Cleopatra is a sociological or interpersonal kind of play, confronting us with the problem of how we know other people, and of how other people know us.

This problem of knowing other people is tied up with the problem of knowing history, of trying to understand why historical figures acted in the way that they did.

In part, there is the personal scale of knowing other people, of how we judge someone else’s authenticity. Simply put, do you think that Antony and Cleopatra really love each other, or are they performing this love? At the same time, you should be thinking on the imperial, political, and cultural scale. The play is constantly obsessing over the difference between Egypt and Rome.

You should thus be thinking here about what qualities are given to each place, but you should also be thinking about how people from each place think about the difference between the two places. That is, how do Romans define the difference between Romans and Egyptians, and how do Egyptians define it?