Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dying

This article considers a literary-theoretical problem—how a dramatic work manages the relation between its phenomenal finitude and its artifactual durability—through an analysis of William Shakespeare's efforts in Antony and Cleopatra to recover tragic possibilities from the triumphalist political and religious histories with which the suicides of his protagonists had become entangled. A novel mode of allusion, which serves to explode connections rather than to make them, brings these histories into view as limits beyond which members of the audience cannot see. In this way, the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra are reconstituted beyond the interpretive horizons that had originally denied their force as endings.