SOURCE: “‘To the Very Heart of Loss’: Renaissance Iconography in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 220-76.

In the following essay, Simonds uses the study of Renaissance iconography as a tool to explore Antony and Cleopatra's characterization. Simonds emphasizes the ambivalence with which Antony and Cleopatra are drawn, in that they are portrayed as both extremely human and semi-divine.

Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes a mortally dangerous “relationship” between two very glamorous international celebrities at a crucial period in the history of western civilization. As personalities, the two lovers both attract and repel not only each other but scholars as well. Thus literary critics have called Antony everything from a romantic “Herculean hero”¹ and a noble lover² to a gluttonous epicurean living only for the pleasures of the flesh.³ In her turn, Cleopatra, admired by most feminist critics,⁴ has been compared by...