Antony and Cleopatra

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Academic, Feb 26, 2013 - Drama - 128 pages
Desire and duty collide in Shakespeare’s captivating tragedy of politics, passion and power. Two charismatic leaders, Mark Antony of Rome and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, are caught in an all encompassing love that threatens the Empire. Rome will do all it can to pull them apart. Or it will destroy them both. This classic Shakespeare tale is edited by Dame Janet Suzman, making this an authoritative edition. As she says in her new book Not Hamlet: Meditations on the Frail Position of Women in Drama which studies the role of and for women in Shakespeare’s canon, Suzman knows this play better than anyone else in the world, having played Cleopatra twice and having now directed the play twice.

About the author (2013)

Janet Suzman was born in Johannesburg, graduated from the University of Witwatersrand, trained at LAMDA, and was at the RSC for a decade playing many of the heroines and culminating in a memorable Cleopatra. She has since pursued a richly varied career; twice winner of the Evening Standard Best Actress Award, she has also received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, twice won the Liverpool Echo Best Production Award and the TMA Best Production. She has diversified into occasional directing – beginning with her Johannesburg Othello in 1987 – and now teaches, lectures, writes and returns to acting, when the occasion beckons, with relief.

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