3. The Roles of Antony and Cleopatra

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the roles of Antony and Cleopatra themselves, looking in particular at the performance history of the play and how different actors have presented the two central characters. In particular, we think two productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company: Peter Brook’s 1978 production starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson and Greg Doran’s 2006 production featuring Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter.

Course

In this course, we explore several aspects of Antony and Cleopatra. We begin by thinking about why Shakespeare was interested in writing plays that were set in Ancient Rome, before looking at a number of aspects of the play and its performance. In particular, we explore the play’s wide scope in both space and time, the roles of Antony and Cleopatra themselves, and the ‘divided catastrophe’ at the end of the play.

Lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.