SOURCE: “The Stillness and the Dance,” in Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies, University of Nebraska Press, 1993, pp. 197-230.

In the following essay, Mack surveys the many polarities explored in Antony and Cleopatra and suggests that Shakespeare, in order to question logical expectations, deliberately refused to allow ascendancy to any one perspective.

1

The last of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, in my view, is Antony and Cleopatra: the delight of audiences, the despair of critics. Its delight for audiences springs, in part at least, from its being inexhaustible to contemplation, as Coleridge implies when he speaks of its “giant strength,” the “happy valiancy” of its style, and calls it of all Shakespeare's plays “the most wonderful.”¹ No doubt its delight for today's audiences owes something also to its being the most accessible of the major Shakespearean tragedies to twentieth-century sensibilities, especially those not much experienced in drama apart from...