A Contextual Guide to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: History, Myth, Gender

by Jyotsna G. Singh, Daniel Vitkus

Overview

Employing commentary on the play’s main themes, coupled with an editorial apparatus that connects selected primary texts (from Ovid to Montaigne) with Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Jyotsna G. Singh and Daniel Vitkus guide the reader through a series of fascinating readings that serve to reconstruct the intellectual and artistic world of Antony and Cleopatra through varied perspectives. This includes chapters on History and Prophecy; Myth; Geography; Gender, Desire, and Eroticism; Theatricality, Festivity, and Spectacle; and Emblematic Perspectives; followed by a Coda describing and analysing some 'Afterlives' of the play on the modern stage. Through their exposure to these thematic frameworks, readers will come to understand more clearly the interpretive possibilities offered by Antony and Cleopatra as a complex and masterful work of art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474494267
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2026
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her key publications include The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (co-authored with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms, 1994), Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (1996), Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (2019), Travel Knowledge (co-edited with Ivo Kamps, 2001), and A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700 (2009, 2021).

Daniel Vitkus is Professor and Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Elizabethan Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (2003) and of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vitkus is also the editor of Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (2001) and Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (2000).

Table of Contents

About this Volume
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Chronology: Key Historical Events, 82–19 BCE
Family Trees: Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, Pompey

Introduction: Infinite Variety: A Contextual Guide to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
1. Myth
2. Geography
3. Gender, Desire, Eroticism
4. Theatricality, Festivity, Spectacle
5. Emblematic Perspectives
Coda: Antony and Cleopatra's Afterlives

Bibliography
Index