This books looks at Antony and Cleopatra in performance from 1606 to 2018, examining how actors, directors and designers pick up the play's themes of desire and delinquency, exoticism and erotic politics to locate the most ambituous love story ever told in a new present. Is the play tragedy? Comedy? Farce? Rutter shows it's all three.

Carol Chillington Rutter is Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick

Introduction: A play that 'approves the common liar'
1 'That time? O times!': The Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra
2 'Famous patterns of unlawful love': Antony and Cleopatra, 1677-1931
3 'Wogs exit nearest way': Glen Byam Shaw, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1953
4 'By certain scales i'th' pyramid': Taking the Measure of Antony and Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Company 1972, 1978, 1982
5 Boying Greatness: The Citizens' Theatre (Glasgow), 1972 and Northern Broadsides (Halifax), 1995
6 'Back to Basics': Peter Hall, Olivier Theatre, National Theatre 1987
7 'Some Squeaking Cleopatra': Shakespeare's Globe, 1999
8 Estranging the crocodile: Foreign Antony and Cleopatra in Britain and abroad
9 Restoring blackness: Josette Bushell-Mingo's Cleopatra, Royal Exchange Manchester (2005); Tarell Alvin McCraney's 'Radical Edit', RST, The Public, and GableStage (2013)

Cast lists
Bibliography