The Tragedy of Imagination: Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" by Joyce Carol Oates

Nature wants stuff To vie strange forms with fancy . . . --Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra shares with Troilus and Cressida the obsessive and self-consuming rage of the tragic figure as he confronts and attempts to define "reality." But, more extravagantly than Troilus and Cressida, this reality is layered with masquerade; forms that are often as lyric as brutal shift and change and baffle expectation. The constant refinement of brute reality into lyric illusion is …

…all corners of their gigantic world. Illusion could not be sustained in Hamlet's gloomy Denmark, or on the wild fields of Scotland; it requires the light-drenched world of old Egypt, a world that exists nowhere except in this play and then only within its words, by the strenuous magic of its language. In Shakespeare's works after Antony and Cleopatra, language will expand its uses to become both "action" and "theme," moving toward the purely lyric.