View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. To whom does Caesar compare Octavia's return to Rome?

2. In what location does Act 3, Scene 4 take place?

3. Who does Canidius say he will follow now that the battle of Actium is over?

4. How does the messenger report the voice of Octavia to Cleopatra?

5. How does Antony have Thyreus's punished?

Short Essay Questions

1. For what reason does Cleopatra fly into a rage in the fifth scene of the second act?

2. For what reason does Antony spurn the news that has come from Rome at the play's beginning?

3. How does Caesar instruct Thyreus to win Cleopatra from Antony?

4. In what way does Antony compose himself in Act 4, Scene 2?

5. What characterizes the reports that the messenger gives to Cleopatra of Octavia?

6. Why does Octavius Caesar lament the absence of Mark Antony?

7. For what reasons are tensions brewing between Antony and Caesar in Act 3, Scene 4?

8. Under what condition would Caesar grant lands in Sicily to Mark Antony?

9. For what reason does Ventidius claim he leaves some soldiering undone?

10. Why does Enobarbus tell Menas that that which has caused amity between Caesar and Antony will likewise "prove the immediate author of their variance"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Of all Cleopatra's many unique character traits, none is perhaps as efficacious on the action and plot of the story as her vanity. In a well-written essay, analyze the cataclysm that is caused by her vain pursuits. In what instances does she show her vanity? How does it affect characters and their actions? What sparks her vain tendencies? What is the evident moral consequence of indulging one's own vanity, as demonstrated by Cleopatra?

Essay Topic 2

In the third act of the play, the fortunes of the two sides of the external conflict are reversed by the machinations of free will. Examine in a thoroughly-developed analytical essay this reversal of fortune. How had the fortunes of Antony and his companions been positively progressing throughout the first few acts of the play? In what way do they regress in the second half? How is this affected in the third act of the play? What particular actions, and of whom, are responsible for the inception of the downfall of the triumvir Antony and in what do they consist?

Essay Topic 3

Keeping in mind that a tragedy is a story of human action which, by the means of free will and fate, results in exceptional calamity and the death or disintegration of the life of an extraordinary man, analyze the relationship between the story of Antony and Cleopatra with the archetypal indications of tragedy in a well-thought-out essay. What indicates the story to be a tragedy? What is the significance of all the central elements of the story insofar as they relate to tragedy? In what does the play's tragedy specifically consist?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 756 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample