SOURCE: "'High Events as These': The Language of Hyperbole in Antony and Cleopatra, " in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. LXXII, No. 1, Spring, 1965, pp. 26-51.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture at Queen's University in 1964, Doran discusses Shakespeare's use of hyperbolic language to characterize Antony, Cleopatra, and Roman politics in Antony and Cleopatra.

When Shakespeare opens the play of Antony and Cleopatra with an adverse judgment spoken by one of his officers, he sets the former Antony, the famous soldier, beside the present Antony, the lover of Cleopatra; and he puts the infatuation in the most demeaning terms:

Nay, but this dotage of our general's
 O'erflows the measure.…
                                    His captain's heart,
 Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
 The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper
 And is become the bellows and the fan
 To cool a gypsy's lust.

"The triple pillar of the world," he...