SOURCE: "Love," in The Wide Arch: Roman Values in Shakespeare, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 150-72.

In the following essay, Wells discusses the austerity that characterizes the Roman view of love and passion in Antony and Cleopatra. He comments: "Shakespeare suggests that the political world is irredeemably flawed and that it must yield before the higher claims of a personal commitment and devotion. "

However widely Shakespeare ranged among his classical source material for Antony and Cleopatra he would have found little if any sympathy shown towards the famous lovers. Plutarch, upon whom he leaned most heavily, regarded them as degenerate in the extreme. North's translation describes Antony as a 'dissolute man' whose 'ill name to intice men's wives' made the nobility 'hate him for his naughty life'. Horace and Virgil endorse this view, regarding it as axiomatic that his love for Cleopatra undermined both his physical and his moral...