The arguments in Julius Caesar center on questions of political philosophy and civic duty, but in Antony and Cleopatra these issues are complicated by attention to spheres of erotic experience and family life that we now think of as private. While the earlier play focuses on disputes internal to Roman rule, the later one is concerned with the politics of a vast empire spanning the Mediterranean. But if Antony and Cleopatra continues in a chronological sense from where Julius Caesar left off, it exhibits a strikingly different attitude toward its historical material. It dramatizes events from 40 BCE, when Rome was ruled by the uneasy triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus (established after the assassination of Julius Caesar ), to 30 BCE, when the civil war that culminated in Octavius Caesar’s defeat of Mark Antony at Actium destroyed the triumvirate. By repeatedly featuring conflicts between different points of view, Antony and Cleopatra functions not simply as tragedy, history, or Liebestod (a story of a couple dying for love ) but as an inquiry into the historical, political, philosophical, and aesthetic grounds on which any story might be staged in the theater.īecause ancient Rome served as a model for Shakespeare’s English culture, Antony and Cleopatra presumes an audience with some prior knowledge of Roman history. This exchange, testing both the status of heroes and the visionary capacity of lovers, is indicative of the play’s preoccupations as well as its method of considering them. Yet the force of Cleopatra’s imaginative act, the vivid quality of her dream, suggests a limitation in Dolabella’s technical accuracy. In a realistic sense, Dolabella’s answer is correct: Cleopatra has spoken of Antony as a Herculean figure who strides the seas scattering islands like coins, a figure of mythic proportion. Disregarding repeated attempts by Caesar’s follower Dolabella to interrupt her rapturous description, Cleopatra finally asks him, “Think you there was, or might be, such a man / As this I dreamt of?” to which he replies, “Gentle madam, no” ( 5.2.115–17 ). O, such another sleep, that I might see / But such another man” ( 5.2.93–95 ). Near the end of Antony and Cleopatra, the captive Cleopatra muses about her dead lover: “I dreamt there was an emperor Antony.
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