Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mattison, Andrew

Titel

Shakespeare, Steevens, and the Fleeting Moon: Glossing and Reading in Antony and Cleopatra

Ist Teil von

• Shakespeare quarterly, 2023-07, Vol.74 (2), p.90-113

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The final speech of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Octavian Caesar notes the "pity" and "glory" (5.2.360) of the titular characters' "story" (l. 359), is an acknowledgment of the play's literary bent, its interest in the matter and means of narrative.1 That interest is not the full extent of the play's literary self-consciousness: it is concerned throughout with reading, particularly if the term is defined to include not only the literal reception or recitation of texts but also the interpretation of personalities, events, and the arc of history.2 Reading's importance and figurative potential are established early in the first act through the Soothsayer's introduction to his craft: "In nature's infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read" (1.2.10–11). [...]what the Soothsayer is reading in nature's book—the remaining lives of the play's central characters—is also the plot of the play. "5 Antony also reflects Plutarch's interest in both the occasional unreliability and the greater significance of the historical record as the final judgment of great leaders, and it seems to incorporate indirectly something of the comparative nature of Plutarch's biographies, which pair Greeks and Romans. Steevens, who has a particular concern with the editor's role as not just a transmitter but a preserver of texts, also demonstrates in both acknowledged and unanticipated ways that such a role has the potential to be an obstacle to preservation.