Antony : the Shakespearean colossus : part I

Abstract

Shakespeare's personages are always 'Of compelling interest, even within the limitations imposed within 'the three hours' traffic' of a single play. But how much more fascinating it is in those instances where they reappear in a second, sometimes even in a third, play, to follow their fortunes and observe how character broadens under wider vicissitude, where the spectrum of emotion and action may display itself more freely, With this increased range, something of a pattern of development in character is more readily discernible, imposed partly by the exigencies of the playwright, partly shaped by the creative dynamism of the poet, and to some extent determined by known historical truth, to which even so free an adapter as Shakespeare is finally answerable, if in broad outline. For it is in the historical plays that this pattern occurs; and most commonly in the close sequence of the Chronicles, especially those two tetralogies which cover the history of the English crown uninterruptedly from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries, Yet the term 'historical' must be allowed to include the two Roman plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra at the least; their historicity, unlike that of Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus, is at least as valid as that of the English sequence. That they are themselves in close sequence (for all their difference in theme and treatment) is undeniable: the events at the beginning of the second play are felt to derive immediately from those at the close of the first; and both are concerned with (among other issues) the figure of the world dominator, the man who 'doth bestride this petty world/Like a Colossus'.