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Antony and Cleopatra has never been as popular or as frequently performed as the four major tragedies of Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. In the nineteenth century, however, the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also one of the foremost critics of the age, regarded the play as the ''most wonderful'' of the history plays and argued that it might be, in its ''exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigor of maturity, a formidable rival'' of the four great tragedies. Coleridge admired the quality of ''angelic strength'' conveyed in the play.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the most influential of all Shakespearean critics, A. C. Bradley, refuted Coleridge's view. He argued that Antony and Cleopatra was not as dramatic as the other four great tragedies, especially in the first three acts, and claimed that the third and fourth acts were ''very defective in construction.'' He noted the number of scenes in these acts and how difficult they are to present on stage. (There are more scenes in Antony and Cleopatra--forty-two--than in any other Shakespeare play.) Bradley's verdict that Antony and Cleopatra, while a great tragedy, was not the equal of the other four, remained influential throughout the twentieth century. Toward the end of that century, Stanley Wells argued that Antony and Cleopatra may be less universal in its appeal because the ''central characters invite us not so much to identify with them as to wonder at them; . . . they are given virtually no soliloquies in which to reveal themselves to the audience.''

Much of the commentary on Antony and Cleopatra has been devoted to the play's numerous thematic pairings: Antony and Cleopatra; love and war; Antony and Octavius; self-restraint and luxury; reason and emotion. Scholars customarily argue that all, or at least a large portion of, this dualism flows from one essential pairing--Rome (under the guardianship of the strictly disciplined Octavius Caesar) versus Egypt (under the sway of the flamboyantly unpredictable Cleopatra). Antony is traditionally regarded as the go-between or victim of the Rome/Egypt dualism. As such, commentators have remarked, Antony must deal with his own set of internal conflicts: his Roman honor giving way to dishonor in Egypt; his youthful warrior's physique diminishing with age and dissipation; and his love for Cleopatra undermining his loyalty to Rome.

There has also been much critical debate in recent times about the true nature of Shakespeare's Cleopatra. The traditional view was of Cleopatra as a negative force. Richard C. Harrier, for example, argues that Cleopatra's ''selfish and capricious domination of Antony'' ruins him. Writing in the 1950s, Austin Wright reflects a view typical of that period. He criticizes Cleopatra for her failure to be supportive of Antony during his time of trouble; he also condemns her lack of virtue and modesty and calls her opportunistic, lubricious, and common. At the same time, Wright concludes that Cleopatra is irresistible to men.

Later scholars, including L. T. Fitz and Ruth Nevo provide more sympathetic portraits of Cleopatra. After asserting that the Egyptian queen is complex enough to elicit a variety of interpretations, Nevo suggests that Cleopatra behaves unpredictably toward Antony because she is afraid of losing him to Rome, to his first wife, Fulvia, and later to Octavia. Fitz argues that the misogynistic views of critics, and not Shakespeare's characterization, are the source of negative attitudes toward Cleopatra. Fitz asserts that male critics are particularly virulent in their dislike of Cleopatra and that they find her behavior in the play incomprehensible. Fitz contends that Cleopatra's actions are no more confusing than those of an equally complex Shakespearean character such as Hamlet, and that in order to judge her fairly, scholars must dispense with their ''sexist bias.''

Recent scholarship has also discussed the nature of the play's mythological and supernatural elements. Of particular interest to critics today are the patterns of irony and paradox that pervade Antony and Cleopatra and that render much of the play's action and many of its themes problematic. There appears to be a growing consensus that Shakespeare intended that this drama of love, politics, aging, and death be both ambivalent and ambiguous.

References:

1) Bradley, A. C., Oxford Lectures on Poetry, Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1909, p. 283.

2) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ''Antony and Cleopatra,'' in Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection, with an introduction by D. Nichol Smith, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 279-80.

3) Fitz, L. T., ''Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Summer 1977, pp. 297-316.

4) Harrier, Richard C., ''Cleopatra's End,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter 1962, pp. 63-5.

5) MacMullan, Katherine Vance, ''Death Imagery in Antony and Cleopatra,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, Autumn 1963, pp. 399-410.

6) Nevo, Ruth, ''Antony and Cleopatra,'' in Tragic Form in Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 306-55.

7) Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M. R. Ridley, Arden Shakespeare, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1978.

8) Starr, Chester G., A History of the Ancient World, 4th Edition, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 550.

9) Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare: A Life in Drama, W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, p. 300.

10) Wright, Austin, ''Antony and Cleopatra,'' in Shakespeare: Lectures on Five Plays, Carnegie Series in English, Number Four, by A. Fred Sochatoff et al., Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1958, pp. 37-51.

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