Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the

reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Hello and welcome back. Today we are

spending some time in Alexandria, and we are talking about Anthony and Cleopatra.

Where does one begin with this endless play?

This work completes the tetrad of plays that I call Shakespeare's tragic procession.

In a period of dark, compulsive creativity, the bard gifted the world Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and then this work.

Which is absolutely of the sublimity and eminence of his prior tragedies.

It's a crowning duel in the

playwright's canon and Cleopatra joins the company of characters who A.C. Bradley rightly

called inexhaustible. The Queen of the Nile sits alongside Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark,

full staff, the wit of East Cheap and Diago, the Machiavellian

web spinner. When it comes to astonishing cognitive power and a sense of reality, of real existence,

these characters feel more real than almost anyone we will actually encounter in our lives

outside of the theatre. And it's all the more startling to contemplate Cleopatra's existence

as a vivid character when we know her, of course, to have been a very real historical personage,

just like Mark Anthony, the other half of this

...