Dialectic and Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to show that Shakespeare shapes Antony and Cleopatra in order to focus on the merits of a dialectical balance between alternate points of view. Though much has been written on the moral ambiguity, dialectical tension, and paradox found in Antony and Cleopatra. most criticism emphasizes the results of such dialectic rather than its purpose. This investigation emphasizes the purpose of Antony and Cleopatra's ambiguity of perspective and unconventional structure. It suggests that Shakespeare consciously avoided conventional fidelity to genre and structure in order to comment on the relativity of assumptions and to suggest that accommodation and balance serve us better to achieve harmony and mutuality. This study shows the episodic structure and combination of tragic, comic, and romantic elements allow Antony and Cleopatra to pay due respect toward reason but celebrate fancy, as Caesar prevails on earth while Antony and Cleopatra triumph in heaven. And in a broader context, it demonstrates that Antony and Cleopatra also stands poised in dialectical opposition to much of Shakespeare's other works in its acceptance of self-deception as an aid to self-fashioning. Furthermore, in view of Renaissance understandings of dialectic, this study proposes that Shakespeare uses this play to dramatize the need to balance the claims of a printed text's avowals to be a container of objective truth with a discursive process which could be a means to subjective mutuality. As a presentation of a struggle of classical modes of discursive reasoning clashing with axiomatic modes of spatial reasoning, Antony and Cleopatra affords Shakespeare a setting from which to examine this process. This study thus attempts to elevate Antony and Cleopatra to a higher rank in the Shakespearean canon. It attempts to enhance Antony and Cleopatra's critical reputation by demonstrating that Shakespeare intentionally disrupts generic focus and conventional structure to simulate a dialectical discourse. As a dramatized argument, Antony and Cleopatra engages the audience in a process that resists absolutist tendencies to superimpose one point of view over another and reflects on the amorphousness of language and its use as a tool to create reality as well as to represent it.