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Could you give up everything for love? Ignore your responsibilities, fail to act in your own self-interest? Desert your wife and children? Provoke a civil war involving half the world? When would you decide it wasn't worth it? Dryden's version of the Antony and Cleopatra story has been described as 'the greatest classical tragedy in English'. Written as a deliberate challenge to Shakespeare, using the unities of space, time and action to focus on the intensity of the central relationship, it is a brilliant study of mutual obsession in circumstances where it is disastrous. Set in the exotic East the play explores the clash between Roman and Egyptian, court eunuchs and stoic general and subversively suggests that wife and friends are less important than one great love.

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Author: John Dryden