Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire, 125-208

Excerpt:

“In approaching Antony and Cleopatra many critics assume the play deals with the opposition of the public and private life, that it involves a straightforward confrontation between politics in the abstract and love in the abstract. For this view to be valid as it is commonly formulated, Octavius would have to stand for all politicians and Antony and cleopatra for all lovers. But this quasi-allegorization of the story, while perhaps appropriate to a version like Dryden’s All for Love, is not true to the complexity of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Octavius cannot represent politics in general, for he is at most a protoype of the Roman Emperors, and several characters within the play (including Antony) compare him unfavorably with the rulers the Republic produced. A judgment passed on him is by no means a judgement on politics as such, but at most on one Roman Imperial politics. By the same token, Antony and Cleopatra are not typical lovers in general but claim a special status for their passion. In fact their insistence that they “stand up peerless” in the eyes of the whole world suggests they have found an imperial form of love to correspond to the imperial form of politics that prevails in their era.”

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