SOURCE: "Antony and Cleopatra," in The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 132-83.

In the following excerpt, Schanzer responds to critics who have considered Antony and Cleopatra to be "faultily constructed," arguing that the structural pattern of the work consists "(a) of a series of contrasts between Rome and Egypt; and (b) of a series of parallels between Antony and Cleopatra."

'The events of which the principal are described according to history, are produced without any art of connection or care of disposition', wrote Dr. Johnson of [Antony and Cleopatra, in Johnson on Shakespeare]. Nearly a century and a half later A. C. Bradley expressed a very similar view when he called it 'the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies', and pointed to it as exemplifying Shakespeare's 'defective method' of stringing together a 'number of scenes, some very short, in which the dramatis personae are...