Antony and Cleopatra
Introduction
Shakespeare probably wrote Antony and Cleopatra in 1606 or 1607; it was registered for publication on May 20, 1608, and apparently influenced a revision of Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra that was published “newly altered” in 1607. Antony and Cleopatra was thus roughly contemporary with King Lear and Macbeth. Yet the contrast between those two tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra is immense. Unlike Macbeth, with its taut focus on a murderer and his wife, Antony and Cleopatra moves back and forth across the Mediterranean in its epic survey of characters and events, bringing together the fates of Pompey, Octavius Caesar, Octavia, and Lepidus with those of the protagonists. King Lear gives proper names to fourteen characters, Macbeth to eighteen, Antony and Cleopatra to thirty-four. The Roman play requires no fewer than forty-two separate scenes, of which most occur in what modern editors label Acts 3 and 4, although no play is less suited to the classical rigors of five-act structure, and these divisions are not found in the reliable Folio text of 1623. Indeed ...
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