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

Nature inadequacys stuff To vie strange assortments with fancy . . . --Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeargons Antony and Cleopatra sh bes with Troilus and Cressida the obsessional and self-consuming rage of the tragical figure as he confronts and attempts to lay ingenuousness. But, more richly than Troilus and Cressida, this public is layered with masquerade; forms that are often as lyric as brutal replacement and change and fumble expectation. The constant refinement of brute reality into lyric legerdemain is the formulate not simply of Antony, Shakespeares hero, barely the lifelong work of Shakespeare himself. Thus there is a curious, kinda decadent ambience in this play of flamboyant desires having as much import--if not ultimately as much governmental strength--as events themselves. Lionel Abel states that among the characters of Hamlet there are four playwrights: Claudius, the Ghost, Polonius, and Hamlet.1 Among the characters of Antony and Cleopatra there are any frame of mythologizing poets and/or playwrights, only if the most crucial is Antony. Snared within the sort out of appearances and forced by government activity (that most extreme form of fantasy) to break free, Antonys agony is inquisitively muted for someone who has achieved and befogged so much; but this fact can be better understood if we find the basis of the play and its race to tragedy.

The movement of most whole kit of literature--whether the simple medieval righteousness play or the ambiguous Troilus and Cressida--is toward a dramatic skirmish with reality, with objective truth. The heros downfa ll (or, in happier kit and boodle, his conv! ersion or enlightenment) is unyielding by the success with which reality overcomes appearances. If there is any cracking theme of literature this is it: the desolation of the faux-semblant and attendant illusions by the intervention, acidulous or glorious, of reality. Tragedy works with this theme and is inseparable from it, and the... If you want to get a good essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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