An Apology for Antony. Morality and Pathos in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Taking off from a consideration of Antony and Cleopatra’s intermingling of pathetic and moral tragedy, the analysis proposed in the present essay demonstrates how the play’s peculiar combination of morality and pathos results in a dialectical critique of both concepts of the tragic. Shakespeare didn’t write a straight‐forward pathetic tragedy, in fact Antony and Cleopatra questions this very phenomenon from the perspective of the tragicomic Christian theatrum mundi. At the same time, however, the play inverts not only moral tragedy, but also the moral design – the ‘exemplary’ story of the great Mark Antony’s downfall through moral corruption – that Shakespeare inherited from Roman historiography through Plutarch’s Life of Antony, medieval historiography, and Renaissance emblematics.In contrast to the recent critical negligence of the moral aspect of the play, as well as the overemphasis on this aspect in early criticism of the play, the analysis proposed emphazises the dialectic of moralism and pathos in Shakespeare’s play. The fundamental ambiguity permeating Shakespeare’s characterization of Antony as a tragic hero is not only seen to affect the understanding of this particular play, but also, by implication, to question the notion of Shakespeare as a modern dramatist and the view of Renaissance drama as an unequivocal break with the medieval dramatic heritage.