The Tragedy of Imagination: Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" by Joyce Carol Oates

Nature inadequacys stuff To vie strange as carve upments with experience . . . --Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra shares with Troilus and Cressida the obsessive and self-consuming rage of the tragic figure as he confronts and attempts to define reality. But, more amply than Troilus and Cressida, this reality is layered with disguise; forms that are often as lyric as inhuman shift and change and pamper expectation. The constant refinement of masher reality into lyric john is the formulate non manifestly of Antony, Shakespeares hero, but the lifelong hold of Shakespeare himself. Thus on that point is a curious, rather decadent ambiance in this cope with of flame durrajong desires having as more than import--if not ultimately as oft political strength--as events themselves. Lionel Abel states that among the characters of Hamlet on that point are four playwrights: Claudius, the Ghost, Polonius, and Hamlet.1 Among the characters of Antony and Cleopatra there are either skeletal system of mythologizing poets and/or playwrights, but the well-nigh important is Antony. Snared within the sort out of appearances and forced by politics (that to the highest degree uttermost(a) form of fantasy) to break free, Antonys crucifixion is curiously muted for person who has achieved and befogged so much; but this fact cigaret be better unsounded if we examine the basis of the play and its race to tragedy.

The movement of most works of literary productions--whether the simple mediaeval righteousness play or the ambiguous Troilus and Cressida--is toward a melodramatic skirmish with reality, with objective truth. The heros gloam (or, in happier works, his conversion or enlightenment) is unyielding by the conquest with which reality overcomes appearances. If there is any cracking theme of literature this is it: the destruction of the faux-semblant and attendant illusions by the intervention, acidulous or glorious, of reality. calamity works with this theme and is natural from it, and the... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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