In the Library
Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare, 1607
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 42
- Length
- Length 26k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Shakespeare took his Antony almost line for line from North's Plutarch, and the Life of Antony gives the barge, the feasts and the fall in the historian's own telling.
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The Aeneid
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The Aeneid does the same thing centuries earlier, a great man choosing empire over a queen who dies for loving him.
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Othello
William Shakespeare
Othello does the same thing, but swaps a foreign queen's spell for a whispered lie, and lets jealousy do what Egypt never could.
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About the book
Two Roman soldiers open the play grumbling that their general, one of the three men who hold the known world between them, has become a strumpet's fool. Then Cleopatra enters, and Rome never quite wins the argument again. Antony shuttles between Alexandria and duty, between a wife taken for the state and a queen who can make his greatness look provincial, and he chooses wrong with his eyes open, again and again, and would choose it again tomorrow. Shakespeare gave this love his widest stage, three continents crossed in short flashing scenes, and his most extravagant verse: Enobarbus on the barge that burned on the water, Cleopatra dreaming an emperor whose legs bestrid the ocean. Nothing else he wrote is this generous about middle-aged desire, or this unblinking about what it costs. The lovers are vain, unreliable, often ridiculous, and by the end the world they threw away looks like the smaller thing.