Love and Death

• The structure of the play
  • Rome and Egypt: alternating scenes
  • Is there a "turning point" in the tragedy? Antony's return to Egypt? The battle of Actium? Both off-stage.
  • Whose tragedy is it anyway?
• Does Antony really love Cleopatra?
  • His marriage to Octavia
• Does Cleopatra really love Antony?

  •                         If you find him sad,
    Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
    That I am sudden sick.
            (1.3.3-5)

  • The Thyreus/Tidias episode (3.13.46ff)
• Antony's death
  • Cleopatra's feigned message of death (4.13.7)

  •                         I will be
    A bridegroom in my death and run into't
    As to a lover’s bed.
            (4.14.99-101)

  • Generosity in death: "None about Caesar trust but Proculeius" (4.15.46, 48)
  • "a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished (4.15.57-8)
• Cleopatra's death
  • Proculeius betrays her (5.2.32)
  • Her vision of Antony -- and its effect on Dolabella
  • The Seleucus episode (5.2.141ff)
  • She encourages her attendants to follow her example:

                            . . . the quick comedians
    Extemporally will stage us, and present
    Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
    Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
    Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
    I' the posture of a whore.
            (5.2.216-22)
    
    The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
    Which hurts, and is desired.
            (5.2.295-6)

Antony is hauled up to the monument in a very nineteenth-century staging.