SOURCE: Heffner, Ray L., Jr. “The Messengers in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” ELH 43, no. 2 (summer 1976): 154-62.

In the following essay, Heffner examines Shakespeare's extensive use of messengers in Antony and Cleopatra, contending that “the messenger is a bit of necessary stage machinery which Shakespeare seems almost miraculously to transform…into something rich and strange.”

In electing to present the story of Antony and Cleopatra not, as Dryden did, by compressing the action to a single climactic day in a single place but instead by shifting the scene rapidly over the known world and allowing ample time for almost innumerable turns, counterturns, and apparent vacillations by his protagonists, Shakespeare avoided some problems of dramatic construction and magnified others. In The Tempest, in which the unities are observed, a long and potentially tedious exposition by Prospero must be rather artificially introduced by assuming that, in all their years more or...