So, today I'm talking about Anthony and Cleopatra, a play written in 1606 to 7, first published in the first folio in 1623.

So if we think about its nearest neighbours chronologically in Shakespeare's writing, we're

thinking about plays like King Leia, Macbeth and Coriolanus. So it's important, I think, and it's

important for what I go on to talk about in the lecture, to think about it as coming towards

the end of Shakespeare's period of writing tragedies in the first decade of the 17th century, just

before he turns to the romances with which he ends his career.

And that sense of generic shift or of genres being in some kind of flux is something I'm

going to really focus on in this lecture.

Anthony and Clairpatchel has got obvious connections with other Roman plays, perhaps most particularly the earliest Roman play Titus Andronicus, but also with Julius Caesar and with Coriolanus.

Those second two, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, share the same source with Anthony Cleopatra, Thomas North's translation of Plutarch.

And because we've got such a single major source here with North's Plutarch,

this is a really good, Anthony Cliopatra is a really interesting case for a kind of source study,

for comparing what Shakespeare has done with that source.

By presenting a middle-aged version of Romeo and Juliet, it links itself to that play,

and with Othello perhaps in seeing sexual love as a motive for tragedy.

I've chosen to focus today's lecture around that question of tragedy, whose tragedy is it?

Whose tragedy is it? But I'm going to start again, as usual, with a sense of the context

and a kind of synopsis for the play. Of course, in particular with this play I found, making

an outline or a synopsis of the play is already

an act of interpretation. It's not really possible to tell what happens in the play without giving

it a spin or without interpreting it. I'm thinking about what E.M. Foster says in aspects of the novel

about the difference between story and plot. So this is Forster on story and plot.

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