If Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth conclude with the prescribed pity and terror, Anthony and Cleopatra ends very differently with pity and triumph, as the title lovers, who have lost the world, enact a kind of triumphant marriage in death. Having raised adolescent love to the level of tragic seriousness in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare here dramatizes a love story on a massive, global scale.
Like it, Antony and Cleopatra is a love story that ends in a double suicide however, the lovers here are not teenagers, but the middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra whose battle between private desires and public responsibilities is played out with world domination in the balance. For his last great tragedy, Shakespeare returned to his first, Romeo and Juliet. Written around 1607, following the completion of the sequence of tragedies that began with Hamlet and concluded with Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra stands in marked contrast from them in tone, theme, and structure. Northrup Frye, “The Tailors of the Earth: The Tragedy of Passion,” in Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean TragedyĪmong William Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra is the anomaly. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Antony and CleopatraĪntony and Cleopatra is the definitive tragedy of passion, and in it the ironic and heroic themes, the day world of history and the night world of passion, expand into natural forces of cosmological proportions.
0 kommentar(er)
