Overview

"If we had to burn all Shakpeare's plays bar one - luckily we don't - I'd save Antony and Cleopatra." said W.H. Auden. No other play has a heroine like Cleopatra, the legendary Queen of the East who, feared and adored in equal measure, casts a spell over Antony and turns him into her sex-slave. In this new study the eminent Shakespearean scholar Adrian Poole explains why this play is both so special and so different from the four commonly regarded as Shakeseare's greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth. And Poole shows that while Shakespeare is dramatising the most famous love affair in the ancient world, his handling of sex and politics is strikingly modern.