SOURCE: Baker, J. Robert. “Absence and Subversion: The ‘O'erflow’ of Gender in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 105-15.

In the following essay, Baker examines the gender reversals of Antony and Cleopatra, contending that “Shakespeare figures movement out of one's own gender as a necessary and desirable, if painful, educational process a character must undergo in order to inhabit a world not bound by life or death, tragedy or comedy.”

The complexity of Antony and Cleopatra is daunting. Nothing in the play—genre, character, or gender—continues stable or unchallenged. Even the play's structure remains so multifarious that critics have found it difficult to describe the play as either tragedy or comedy: Carol Thomas Neely aptly suggests that the way in which Antony and Cleopatra inhabit gender roles stretches the play “to include motifs, roles, and themes found in Shakespeare's comedies, histories, problem plays, and romances; and Paula...