The New Penguin Shakespeare offers a complete edition of the plays and poems. Each volume has been prepared from the original texts and includes an introduction, a list of further reading, a full and helpful commentary, and a short account of the textual problems of the play.

NOTHINO is known of the early performances of Antony and Cleopatra, though there is a strong likelihood that it was duly performed - with a boy as Cleopatra - at the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses. But whatever success it may have had on the stage was probably confined to the Jacobean era. In 1677 Dryden wrote a free adaptation of it,All for Love, which was so much more to the taste of the time - for instance, its female roles were written for actresses- that it ousted Shakespeare's play from the stage for the best part of two hundred years. In the Romantic period the best-known critical tribute paid to the play was Coleridge's praise of its style: 'Feliciter audax...

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

COMMENTARY

AN ACCOUNT OF THE TEXT