Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Writers, playwrights and philosophers have alike been fascinated by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. The contradictions in her character, said the writer Anna Jameson, fuse “into one brilliant impersonation of classical elegance, Oriental voluptuousness, and gipsy sorcery”. When Henry James sought to suggest the charm cast over an impressionable but repressed American by a glamorous Parisian countess, it was Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” to which he had recourse. There are two obvious reasons, say...