Antony and Cleopatra (Vol. 47) | Sidney R. Homan (essay date 1970)
Sidney R. Homan (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: "Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. XLIX, No. 4, October, 1970, pp. 460-8.
[In the following essay, Homan demonstrates the ways in which Antony and Cleopatra both praises and denigrates acting and the theater, and contends that the play's ambivalent aesthetic statement reflects the ambiguous Renaissance attitudes toward art and imagination.]
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra contains both praise and ridicule of acting, the theater, the use of illusions, and, in general, the artist and his profession.1 In considering these aesthetic issues I do not mean to reduce the play to an allegory of art but rather to quality and deepen the simpler dichotomy between Rome and Egypt that emerges from a good many thematic studies. More partisan views tend to take one of two extremes, reading Antony and Cleopatra...
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