SOURCE: Hallett, Charles A. “Change, Fortune, and Time: Aspects of the Sublunar World in Antony and Cleopatra.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75, nos. 1-2 (January-April 1976): 75-89.

In the following essay, Hallett investigates Shakespeare's combined emphasis on mutability, fortune, and time as defining forces in the pre-Christian world of Antony and Cleopatra.

Antony and Cleopatra is an account of things in terms of the World and the Flesh, Rome and Egypt, the two great contraries that maintain and destroy each other, considered apart from any third sphere which might stand over against them. How is it related to the plays of the ‘great period’, the period which comes to an end with King Lear? The clue is given, I think, in the missing third term. Antony and Cleopatra is the deliberate construction of a world without a Cordelia, Shakespeare's symbol for a reality that transcends the political...