max theodore’s Reviews > The common liar;: An essay on Antony and Cleopatra > Status Update

"When the time has come for affirmation, we are asked to believe not in the probable but in the palpably impossible: not that the lovers are worthy though misguided, but that they are semidivine creatures whose love has somehow managed to escape the bonds of time and space, and even of death. Whore or goddess, strumpet's fool or colossus: the play allows us no midpoint."

"The dalliance of Venus and Mars serves as an exemplum antithetical to that of Dido and Aeneas: if Aeneas reminds us of the nearly superhuman effort by which love can be subjugated to empire, Mars reminds us that even the god of war is susceptible to the power of love."

“In Julius Caesar and the major tragedies […] mythic personages are infinitely remote. The gods are usually evoked as a distant court of appeal, as participants in another realm, quite separate from that in which the protagonists act […] but in Antony & Cleopatra […] the characters themselves are on the way to becoming larger than life […] they will begin to encroach on the realm of the gods themselves.”

“Instead of Virgil’s splendid and godlike Augustus at Actium, we have Shakespeare’s efficient boy.” the phrasing of this is taking me out

"In most tragedies, the protagonists confide in the audience; we can usually take the tragic hero as seriously as he takes himself. But in Antony and Cleopatra we see through the eyes of the commentators more often than through the eyes of the protagonists; and the commentators seldom take the protagonists as seriously as they might wish."

"We can no longer believe entirely in the existence of the tragic Malvolio." maybe YOU can't

upon reading the table of contents of this, i think maybe everyone has said everything that i wanted to say about shakespeare already and i need either a new career path or to just start designating various shakespearean men lesbians to see what people do