Recommendations
Books Like Antony and Cleopatra
Best books to read after Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
Readers who love Antony and Cleopatra are drawn to its combination of Shakespeare's most extravagant tragedy, the clash between Roman duty and Egyptian pleasure, Enobarbus's magnificent description of Cleopatra, and the double suicide that ends the play. They want works that deal with the conflict between love and political obligation, the mythology of Cleopatra, and the tradition of writers who have been drawn to the most cinematic of Shakespeare's tragedies.
- 1Buy
Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare
The predecessor play in which Antony appears — reading Julius Caesar first gives the full arc of Antony's character, from the politically brilliant young man of Julius Caesar to the middle-aged Antony destroyed by love; the two plays together form a single portrait of a man's life.
- 2Buy
All for Love
by John Dryden
Dryden's Restoration rewriting of the same story — where Shakespeare gives the play enormous political scope, Dryden concentrates on a single day and a single choice between love and duty; the most important later literary engagement with the Antony-Cleopatra story.
- 3Buy
Cleopatra: A Life
by Stacy Schiff
The modern biography that gives Cleopatra back her intelligence and political agency — Schiff's account is essential for understanding how much Shakespeare invented and what the historical Cleopatra was actually like; one of the best narrative histories in recent years.
- 4Buy
The Alexandria Quartet
by Lawrence Durrell
The four-novel sequence set in Alexandria that inhabits the same Egypt as Cleopatra — Durrell's multi-perspective account of lovers in 1930s and 40s Alexandria draws on the same vision of Egypt as the place where sexuality and politics are inseparable.
- 5Buy
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
The historical novel narrating the dynasty Octavius Caesar founds after defeating Antony — Graves begins after the end of Antony and Cleopatra with Augustus (Octavius) as emperor; the direct continuation of the historical narrative the play ends.
- 6Buy
The Moors Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
The novel with Cleopatra as an organizing image — Rushdie's Moor figures as a modern Antony figure whose love destroys him; the novel most deliberately in dialogue with the Antony-Cleopatra tradition in contemporary fiction.
- 7Buy
Memoirs of Cleopatra
by Margaret George
The historical novel retelling the Cleopatra story from Cleopatra's perspective — George's massive first-person narrative gives Cleopatra an interiority that Shakespeare's play cannot provide; the complement to Schiff's biography in fiction.
- 8Buy
Eros and Civilization
by Herbert Marcuse
The philosophical work that gives the theoretical framework for Antony and Cleopatra's central opposition — Marcuse's account of the conflict between the pleasure principle (Egypt) and the reality principle (Rome) is the philosophical structure underlying the play's moral geography.
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