Shakespeare's notion of morality in Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

I feel I ought to preface my lecture by stating that I shall focus in the main on Antony and Cleopatra as a specifically Roman play and that certain assumptions I shall make are implicit in the Roman plays as a whole and, to a certain extent, in Shakespeare's History plays. It is, indeed, in these plays that moral and political assumptions impinge on each other so that it sometimes happens that we gradually become aware that a political decision may be fraught with moral considerations and, vice-versa, a moral attitude, as I hope to demonstrate, may be harnessed to a political cause.