Choose one of these plays and write an essay discussing how it responds to Shakespeare’s material. As you describe how the play responds to Shakespeare, also consider why it does—what is there about Shakespeare’s play that Dryden or Cary feel they have to fix?

Assignment Question

Antony and Cleopatra

Final Paper. It should be double-spaced, and four to six pages long. Before you begin your final draft, spend some time thinking about evidence for the topic you choose, and how best to organize your paper.

1. Questions about Cleopatra’s race and racial identity occur throughout Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and in the Cleopatra texts following it. Plays like the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius or Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam insistently connect ideas about fairness and its opposite with ideas about feminine beauty and virtue, as do Shakespeare’s so-called “Dark Lady “ sonnets. (You can find these sonnets, number 127-154, at the Folger Shakespeare Library site, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares- sonnets/read/ . There’s a pull-down menu with the numbered sonnets at the upper right.) These questions have to do with skin color as well as with a general sense that Egyptians and Romans are two very different varieties of people. Write an essay about race in a selected Cleopatra text. How does race figure in the ways the characters see themselves, that others see them, or in the final catastrophe that overtake our two protagonists?

2. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a play with extremely powerful and well- developed roles for secondary characters: Enobarbus, Octavius, Iras and Charmian. Write an essay focusing on the contributions of one (or more) of these secondary characters. What do they add to the plot? I’m not asking for a summary of what they do, but rather for a discussion of the texture and particular qualities they bring to their relationships with the main characters. What do they illuminate for us about the play’s central conflicts?

3. Both Cary’s Mariam and John Dryden’s All for Love look back on Antony and Cleopatra. Choose one of these plays and write an essay discussing how it responds to Shakespeare’s material. As you describe how the play responds to Shakespeare, also consider why it does—what is there about Shakespeare’s play that Dryden or Cary feel they have to fix?