SOURCE: “Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring, 1995, p. 1-37.

In the following essay, Wortham investigates the Renaissance emblem tradition that informs Antony and Cleopatra, and attempts to discern how the emblematic imagery operating in the text would have been received by Jacobean audiences.

Antony and Cleopatra both delights and bewilders with its extraordinary diversity. Classical mythology, biblical apocalypse and thematic insistence on the virtue of temperance meet in enlightening combinations and puzzling disjunctions. Critical analysis, precisely because it is analysis, tends to isolate one or two aspects of the play and to discuss them to the exclusion of others. Perhaps it is time to ask whether one should attempt a synthesis that makes some attempt to see the dominant motifs in the play in relation to each other: is there any way that we can begin to see...