书名：The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra安东尼与克莉奥佩特拉

作者：William Shakespeare威廉•莎士比亚
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2001
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451527134
商品尺寸：10.6 x 1.9 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：352 （以实物为准）
The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra《安东尼与克莉奥佩特拉》是威廉•莎士比亚于1607年左右编写的罗马悲剧，它是源于古罗马历史学家普鲁塔克的《希腊罗马名人传》。

悲剧意义是深刻的、辩证的、多方面的，莎士比亚既肯定这种生死的爱情，又指出其中不纯的易碎的成分；既肯定他们现实观点的享受人生，又批判了他们爱情至上、放纵感情的生活态度，批判他们为了个人眼前利益而置国家兴亡于不顾，并提出许多有益的教训，如安东尼失败的原因，军人不应贪恋都市生活，人格尊严与道德荣誉比生命重要，强国的专横和弱国的悲哀，对民主自由政治的向往，以及对政治风云和人世沧桑的变化的慨叹等。
本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版修订版，对莎士比亚生平作了介绍，同时提供序言、评论、注释等。内容完整无删减，书本小巧便携。

The Signet Classics edition of the tragedy that features one of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters.

A magnificent drama of passion and war, this riveting play presents the complicated relationship between the seductive, cunning Egyptian queen Cleopatra and the Roman leader Mark Antony, a man torn between an empire and love.

This revised Signet Classics edition includes unique features such as:

• An overview of Shakespeare’s life, world, and theater
• A special introduction to the play by the editor, Sylvan Barnet
• A selection from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, the source from which Shakespeare derived Antony and Cleopatra
• Dramatic criticism from Samuel Johnson, A. C. Bradley, John F. Danby, and others
• A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions
• Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable text
• And more...

Review
“No one is spared Shakespeare’s withering look at the mores of early 17th-century life, not even the pimps and madams who try to get by in the midst of the Duke’s bizarre and coercive disguises and performances. The deeply ambiguous ending of Measure for Measure confirms it as one of Shakespeare’s most ambivalent and arguably despairing plays.” —Jerry Brotton

威廉·莎士比亚（1564-1616）是英国文艺复兴时期伟大的戏剧家和诗人，也是欧洲文艺复兴时期人文主义文学的集大成者，近代欧洲文学的奠基人之一。他共写有37部戏剧，154首14行诗，两首长诗和其他诗歌。代表作有四大悲剧：《哈姆雷特》《奥赛罗》《李尔王》《麦克白》。四大喜剧：《第十二夜》《仲夏夜之梦》《威尼斯商人》《皆大欢喜》。历史剧：《亨利四世》《亨利六世》《理查二世》等。

他是“英国戏剧之父”，本·琼斯称他为“时代的灵魂”，被称为“人类文学奥林匹斯山上的宙斯”。
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a poet, playwright, and actor who is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers in the history of the English language. Often referred to as the Bard of Avon, Shakespeare’s vast body of work includes comedic, tragic, and historical plays; poems; and 154 sonnets. His dramatic works have been translated into every major language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare probably wrote Antony and Cleopatra in 1606 or 1607; it was registered for publication on May 20, 1608, and apparently influenced a revision of Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra that was published “newly altered” in 1607. Antony and Cleopatra was thus roughly contemporary with King Lear and Macbeth. Yet the contrast between those two tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra is immense. Unlike Macbeth, with its taut focus on a murderer and his wife, Antony and Cleopatra moves back and forth across the Mediterranean in its epic survey of characters and events, bringing together the fates of Pompey, Octavius Caesar, Octavia, and Lepidus with those of the protagonists. King Lear gives proper names to fourteen characters, Macbeth to eighteen, Antony and Cleopatra to thirty-four. The Roman play requires no fewer than forty-two separate scenes, of which most occur in what modern editors label Acts 3 and 4, although no play is less suited to the classical rigors of five-act structure, and these divisions are not found in the reliable Folio text of 1623. Indeed, it is as though Shakespeare resolved at the height of his career to show that he could dispense entirely with the classical “rules,” which had never taken serious hold of the English popular stage in any case. The flouting of the unities is so extreme that John Dryden, in his All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1678), undertook not so much to revise Shakespeare as to start afresh on the same subject. Dryden’s play is restricted to the last few hours of the protagonists’ lives, at Cleopatra’s tomb in Alexandria, with a severely limited cast of characters and much of the narrative revealed through recollection. Although a substantial achievement in its own right, All for Love surely demonstrates that Shakespeare knew what he was doing, for Dryden has excised a good deal of the panorama, the excitement, and the “infinite variety” (2.2.246).

Shakespeare departs also from the somber tone of his tragedies of evil. He creates, instead, a world that bears affinities to the ambiguous conflicts of the other Roman plays, to the varying humorous perspectives of the comedies, and to the imaginative reconstructions of the late romances. As protagonists, Antony and Cleopatra lack tragic stature, or so it first appears: she is a tawny gypsy temptress and he a “strumpet’s fool,” a once-great general now bound in “strong Egyptian fetters” and lost in “dotage” (1.1.13; 1.2.122—3). Several scenes, especially those set in Egypt, are comic and delightfully bawdy: Charmian learning her fortune from the soothsayer, Cleopatra practicing her charms in vain to keep Antony from leaving Egypt or raunchily daydreaming of being Antony’s horse “to bear the weight of Antony” (1.5.22), Cleopatra flying into a magnificent rage at the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia and then consoling herself with catty reflections on Octavia’s reported low voice and shortness of stature (“I think so, Charmian. Dull of tongue, and dwarfish,” 3.3.17). In its comic texture, the play somewhat resembles Romeo and Juliet, an earlier play about a younger pair of lovers, although there the bawdry is used chiefly to characterize the lovers’ companions and confidants, whereas in Antony and Cleopatra it is central to our vision of Cleopatra especially. In any case, the later play is a tragedy about lovers who, despite their quarrels and uncertainties and betrayals of self, are reconciled in a vision of the greatness of their love. In its depiction of two contrasting worlds, also, Antony and Cleopatra recalls the movement of several earlier comedies from the realistic world of political conniving to a dream-world of the romantic and the unexpected. We can endorse neither world fully in Antony and Cleopatra, and, accordingly, the vision of life presented is often ambivalent and ironic as much as it is tragic. The contrast of values separating Egypt and Rome underscores the paradox of humanity’s quest for seemingly irreconcilable goals. The ending is neither a triumph nor a defeat for the lovers but something of both. If Antony and Cleopatra seem in one way too small to be tragic protagonists, in another way they seem too large, creating imaginative visions of themselves and their union that escape the realm of tragedy altogether. Our attention is focused less on the way in which the protagonists come to understand some meaningful relationship between their character and the fate required of them by a tragic universe than on the almost comic way in which the absurdities of Roman worldly striving and Egyptian dissipation are transfigured in the world of the imagination.