SOURCE: Hume, Robert D. “Individuation and Development of Character through Language in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 1973): 280-300.

In the following essay, Hume analyzes the way in which language functions in the play and demonstrates how Shakespeare used language in order to distinguish and develop the characters in Antony and Cleopatra.

In some of Shakespeare's plays—Love's Labour's Lost, for example—a linguistic character-typology is quite plain. In others it is less evident. Few of us would say with Tolstoy that all of Shakespeare's characters sound alike, but neither would many say with Pope that we could properly assign all the speeches if the speakers were unidentified. Studies of Shakespeare's language have tended to be either technical and descriptive or devoted to the general poetic effect of the language, particularly the imagery.¹ Here I wish to study not the general effect but the specific function of...