Essay On Plutarch's Life Of Antonius

The epic love affair of Antony and Cleopatra is a great and powerful love shared by two people at the height of their fame and glory. Plutarch’s ‘Life of Antonius’ is the principal source, and Shakespeare has blended this factual evidence together with fiction and drama to create a play that is strikingly different from many of his other works, especially in terms of theme, structure and the impressive and most descriptive language used.

Plutarch wrote in the first century AD, probably not more than a hundred years after the death of Antony, but soon enough to hear personal experiences from his great grandfather about the battle of Actium, and from even his grandfather about Antony’s generous entertaining in Alexandria. He was a Greek philosopher, and so his sympathies ran more towards his fellow countrymen than the Roman subjects of his detailed studies. Shakespeare, distilling North’s version at the time when

Philo, the first character to speak, talks of Cleopatra’s power over Antony. He says that she has turned him from a mighty warrior into a ‘strumpet’s fool’. (I, I, 13) Bathetic and epic imagery is used many times during the course of the play, when describing both Antony and Cleopatra. Other examples of bathetic imagery in the play are the image of bellows being curbed by ‘a gypsy’s lust’, the ‘triple pillar of the world’ being reduced to a ‘strumpet’s fool’, and the image of a ‘tawny frost’ diminishing that of Mars. (I, I, 1-13) Bathos is used to reflect the main theme of the play, which is the fall of a great