SOURCE: Mills, L. J. “Cleopatra's Tragedy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 2 (spring 1960): 147-62.

In the following essay, Mills attributes Cleopatra's personal tragedy to her amoral, equivocal, and egoistic nature.

Interpretations of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra have emphasized, with varying degrees of stress, one or another of the three principal themes in the play, which are, as summarized by John Munro:

… first, the East represented by Egypt and lands beyond versus the West represented by Rome; secondly, the strife in the Triumvirate who divided and governed the world, and the reduction of the three, Octavius, Lepidus and Antony, to one, Octavius; and thirdly, the love and tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Of all these the last is dramatically dominant.¹

But among the commentators who regard the third theme as dominant there is much difference of opinion. Some write as if the play were entitled “The Tragedy of Antony”; for example, J...