Customer Reviews

Antony and Cleopatra (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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In the history of femme fatales, Cleopatra is still the queen -- she wasn't pretty, but she had charm, wit and power.

And she's the center of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," a play that follows the tragic affair between Cleopatra and her second high-profile Roman lover. The tragedy is undermined by the fact that Cleopatra and Antony aren't very likable people, but the story does have an empire-ending grandeur.

Mark Antony has been neglecting his duties as a Roman soldier ever since he fell in love with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. But eventually Octavian calls him back to Rome, and Antony is even pressured into marrying Octavia's sister -- which unsurprisingly throws a wrench into his relationship with Cleopatra. She's only soothed by the assurances that Octavia is ugly.

In the meantime, tensions between the Romans and the increasingly Egyptophilic Antony are getting worse, until finally they break into full-out war -- despite the prophecy that Antony will lose if he fights Octavian. And the tempestuous love between Cleopatra and Antony takes a terrible turn as Egypt is about to fall...

"Antony and Cleopatra" is sort of a sequel to "Julius Caesar," and it's also half epic romance and half tragedy. On one hand, it's all about the passionate, stormy love affair between Antony and Cleopatra; on the other, it's also about the final crash of an empire that had endured for thousands of years, and its last monarch.

Shakespeare manages to fill the story with a sense of epic grandeur, and his writing really gets across that these conflicts and people are deeply important. Aside from the famous "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/her infinite variety" speech, there's a lot of powerful writing in here, particularly the climactic scene between Cleopatra and her maidservants.

The biggest drawback of the play is... well, Antony and Cleopatra are pretty nasty people. Antony is no longer the heroic Roman soldier of "Julius Caesar," and Cleopatra throws bratty tantrums and spreads false rumors to keep her boyfriend in love with her. They're a little like A-list celebrities -- they're weirdly fascinating, but you wouldn't want them as friends.

"Antony and Cleopatra" is a grand, engaging epic about how a love affair helped bring down the last remnants of an empire, and its nasty characters don't stop it from being fascinating.

Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" leaves the domestic sphere of the earlier tragedies and enters into a world of vast Spenglerian vistas as one culture, weighed down by its decadence, declines and another, elevated by its coldness and amorality, replaces it. A meditation on the tragic nature of history, it is a very political play (written just prior to "Coriolanus," Shakespeare's most political play). It takes into account our nobility but realizes that it is easy prey. The play contains a very large cast of characters, all of them memorable and very well individualized. Psychologically, it is perhaps the work most emblematic of the author's unparalleled genius for creating characters who give the illusion of being full human beings. The star role belongs to Cleopatra, who should be for the actress what Hamlet is for the actor - the most challenging and rewarding of roles. It rightly vies with the other high tragedies as one of Shakespeare's greatest works.

Product arrived to my address quickly and in excellent condition. It's also a very good play.