Antony And Cleopatra (Vol. 27) | Ernest Schanzer (essay date 1963)
Ernest Schanzer (essay date 1963)
SOURCE: "Antony and Cleopatra," in The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 132-83.
[In the following excerpt, Schanzer responds to critics who have considered Antony and Cleopatra to be "faultily constructed," arguing that the structural pattern of the work consists "(a) of a series of contrasts between Rome and Egypt; and (b) of a series of parallels between Antony and Cleopatra."]
'The events of which the principal are described according to history, are produced without any art of connection or care of disposition', wrote Dr. Johnson of [Antony and Cleopatra, in Johnson on Shakespeare]. Nearly a century and a half later A. C. Bradley expressed a very similar view when he called it 'the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies', and pointed to it as exemplifying Shakespeare's 'defective method' of stringing together a 'number of scenes, some very...
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