Knots and Questions: A Response to David Hillman

Anthony and Cleopatra opens with what seems in retrospect, as the drama of the play unfolds, the statement of a theme. It is a play, as David Hillman’s wonderfully illuminating essay makes clear, that has so much to say about the unreliability of description, and the instability of definition; about how people change by remaining the same. The play keeps showing us that we, like the characters in the play, are tempted to jump to conclusions about who people are, and what they want, and how they mean what they say, and that we need to wonder what we are doing when we do this.