Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: Allegory on the Banks of the Nile and the Thames

By James Norwood

Having performed the role of Cleopatra on numerous occasions, Vanessa Redgrave delivered a lecture at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities in which she raised the following questions: “Why was Antony and Cleopatra not performed in the author’s lifetime?” and “What did Shakespeare have in mind when he was writing it?” This book seeks to respond to these questions through the lens of allegory, which was an all-embracing attitude ingrained in Tudor England. As a literary technique, allegory presents characters abstractly with moral and political significance. A second and related topic is the use of satire, another preferred literary form of Elizabethan writers. An understanding of the conjunction of allegory and satire may shed light on interpreting Antony and Cleopatra in productions. Redgrave also considers how Elizabeth I figures in the complex portrait of Cleopatra. In the matchless pair of Cleopatra and Elizabeth, there is a sense of soul mates across the ages, a tapestry of camaraderie that is woven into the fabric of one of Shakespeare’s most complex plays. James Norwood, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley) taught over 30,000 students in the humanities and the performing arts at the University of Minnesota from 1985-2011. He taught introduction to theater, theater history, a survey course in Shakespeare, text analysis for the actor, and the entire six- course cycle in the Western Humanities. He also offered a seminar on the Shakespeare authorship question. He is the author of A New Way of Looking at Shakespeare’s Stagecraft & Other Essays; Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: All-Inclusive Satire; Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: Based on a True Story; and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: No One is Above the Law … Except for Those in Power.

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