SOURCE: “Erotic Irony and Polarity in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 24, 1973, pp. 265-79.

In the following essay, Payne traces Shakespeare's use of opposition throughout Antony and Cleopatra and demonstrates the way in which these oppositions structure the play. Payne stresses that the play's structure, like its thematic polarities, is both tragic and comic.

One of the most impressive qualities of Shakespeare's art is his facility for creating dramatic situations, characters, and entire plays encompassing ideas, attitudes, and character traits which we ordinarily think of as mutually exclusive or contradictory. In the minds of his characters we discover reason and madness, faith and despair, innocence and experience; the societies he depicts are torn by love and lust, responsibility and irresponsibility, trust and mistrust, honesty and deceit, freedom and bondage. In his depiction of nature, which provides a physical and mythical context for social conflict, we find cyclical...