Thank you to Sean Keilen for returning to introduce Antony and Cleopatra.
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and Director of Shakespeare Workshop at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (Yale 2006) and an editor of The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture(Palgrave 2009), as well as ten volumes of Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare: The Critical Complex (Garland 1999). In 2017, he published The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature with Nick Moschovakis. Professor Keilen’s research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library.
Many thanks to my friend Joey Bianco of Whim Wham for the animated video elements.
This is a fascinating and informative introduction.
What an excellent introduction! I love approaching a play with important questions in mind, and this introduction set the stage perfectly.
What an amazing introduction! I absolutely love the duality you present about the ending of the play-what an exhilarating position to have to decide-tackling the truly difficult questions.
Thank you for this wonderful work you presented for us!
This introduction presented so many new angles on the play, I thought I knew it fairly well, but now I shall enjoy re-reading it to find all those different ways of looking at it. I particularly liked the reference to points of view, that we are being put in the position of looking at the world and events through the eyes of one or other of the characters. And the dilemma of the ending — fascinating!