Antony and Cleopatra (Vol. 47) | Janet Adelman (essay date 1973)
Janet Adelman (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Infinite Variety: Uncertainty and Judgment in Antony and Cleopatra," in The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra, Yale University Press, 1973, pp. 14-52.
[In the essay below, Adelman maintains that the action of Antony and Cleopatra centers around the characters' attempts to understand themselves and each other, and that the basis for the play's dramatic structure rests more upon the characters' interpretations of actions and events than it does on the actions and events themselves.]
The critical history of Antony and Cleopatra can be seen largely as a series of attempts to assess the motives of the protagonists and to arbitrate between the claims of Egypt and Rome.1 But this search for certainty often encounters the stumbling block of the play itself: at almost every turn, there are significant lapses in our knowledge of the inner state of the principal...
[The entire page is 18168 words long]
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