CRITICISM

Berek, Peter. “Doing and Undoing: The Value of Action in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 32, no. 3 (autumn 1981): 295-304.

Highlights similarities in the views of Shakespeare's Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavius regarding the limits of worldly action in Antony and Cleopatra.

Charnes, Linda. “What's Love Got to Do with It? Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Textual Practice 6, no. 1 (spring 1992): 1-16.

Holds the near universal acceptance of passionate and real love between Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra up to critical scrutiny.

Curtis, Mary Ann. “The Joining of Male and Female: An Alchemical Theme of Transmutation in Antony and Cleopatra.” Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 116-26.

Probes the imagery of alchemy in Antony and Cleopatra, illuminating the drama's thematic concern with a transcendent union of opposites.

Fitch, Robert E. “No Greater Crack?” Shakespeare Quarterly 19, no. 1 (winter 1968): 3-17.

Critiques the ideal of love usually identified in Antony and Cleopatra, focusing instead on the play's representation of a conflict between pleasure and power.

Hall, Joan Lord. “Themes.” In Antony and Cleopatra: A Guide to the Play, pp. 129-50. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Surveys a selection of dualistic conflicts and themes in Antony and Cleopatra, including the play's representation of love in opposition to military leadership, the antagonism between artistic imagination and nature, the futility of action in the face of capricious fortune, the essential mutability of the sublunar world, and the enormous power of theatricality and role-playing to destabilize perception and reality.

Hamilton, Donna B. “Antony and Cleopatra and the Tradition of Noble Lovers.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 1973): 245-52.

Examines the significance of Shakespeare's allusion to Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women in his Antony and Cleopatra.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. “‘Narcissus in thy Face’: Roman Desire and the Difference It Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 4 (winter 1994): 408-25.

Questions Cleopatra's status as an object of heterosexual desire in Antony and Cleopatra by comparing the drama with Elizabethan versions of the Narcissus myth.

Hiscock, Andrew. “‘Here Is My Space’: The Politics of Appropriation in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” English 47, no. 189 (autumn 1998): 187-212.

Analyzes the interpersonal and intercultural relationships of Antony and Cleopatra in the contexts of early modern English perceptions of time and space.

Morley, Sheridan. Review of Antony and Cleopatra. New Statesman 131, no. 4606 (23 September 2002): 45.

Praises the strong individual performances and the traditional directorial approach to Antony and Cleopatra undertaken by Michael Attenborough and the Royal Shakespeare Company in their 2002 staging of the drama.

Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. “Antony's ‘Secret House of Death’: Suicide and Sovereignty in Antony and Cleopatra.” Philological Quarterly 79, no. 2 (spring 2000): 153-75.

Centers on Antony's motivations for suicide as dramatized in Antony and Cleopatra by contrasting Roman and Elizabethan cultural appraisals of the subject and the thematic significance of Antony's act of “self-murder” in the play.

Weitz, Morris. “Literature without Philosophy: Antony and Cleopatra.” In Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Literature: Essays, edited by Margaret Collins Weitz, pp. 55-67. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Observes that Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra contains numerous philosophical themes—many of them associated with the cyclic process of generation and corruption—but no universal philosophical thesis or claim.

Whitney, Charles. “Charmian's Laughter: Women, Gypsies, and Festive Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra.” Upstart Crow 14 (1994): 67-88.

Discusses Antony and Cleopatra as it displays Shakespeare's tragicomic evocation of “festive ambivalence” in the figure of Cleopatra's faithful attendant Charmian, and in Cleopatra's own gypsy-like qualities.