My opening paragraph
So here’s the opening paragraph to my essay on Antony and Cleopatra.
Although A.C. Bradley’s article “Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra” from Oxford Lectures on Poetry, and Anna Jameson’s “Cleopatra” from Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, Historical contain enough first person plurals to make any New Critic’s blood boil, both articles touch on something essential to the reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Bradley notes that at the beginning of the play, Philo describes Antony as “a strumpet’s fool” (260). Bradley then contrasts such a negative representation of Antony with what he deems “the tragic greatness, the capacity of finding in something the infinite and of pursuing it into the jaws of death” (261). Thus he recognizes the duality of Antony’s character: he is both a fool and a hero. Likewise, Jameson views Cleopatra as an “antithetical construction” and a “consistent inconsistency” (244). Both Bradley and Jameson briefly touch on the ambivalent representation of Antony and Cleopatra. Bradley concludes that the play is unlike the rest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, while Jameson calls Cleopatra “an astonishing portrait of… originality”(Bradley)(Jameson 248). As a test case, one may look to the death of both Antony and Cleopatra to find such ambivalent representation. Sexual language and images in Antony’s death scene, as well as in Cleopatra’s, lend a comedic variable to the end of the play; while conversely, the hyperbolic idealization Antony and Cleopatra have for one another imbues their deaths with a level of tragedy.
I really hope this doesn’t go over her head/get too muddled.
