SOURCE: “Antony and Cleopatra: The Narrative Construction of the Other,” in ‘Th' Interpretation of the Time’: The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Roman Plays, University of Victoria, 1993, pp. 59-90.

In the following essay, Kujawinska-Courtney analyzes the play's use of diegesis and mimesis and argues that the opposition between the two may be viewed as analogous to the play's theme of polarity. The critic concludes that by the end of Antony and Cleopatra, Egyptian mimesis wins out over Roman diegesis.

In Julius Caesar the theatre audience tries to make sense of two equally powerful narrative evaluations of the past: one Caesarian, the other Republican; in Antony and Cleopatra the spectators are subjected to a single dominant narrative mode, the Roman imperial ideology. Soldiers and politicians are spokesmen for the Roman world, and they galvanize at least temporarily the offstage and onstage audiences' perceptions of the enacted present. The diegetic mode of...