how is Mark Antony an important character for the theme of love
Answers
Antony and Cleopatra opens with a scene in which Antony professes his unfathomable love for Cleopatra and, while the play covers much of the political drama surrounding the crumbling of the Roman republic and creation of the Roman Empire under Octavius, it is also centrally about the romantic relationship between Antony and Cleopatra (after all, it’s not entitled Antony and Octavius). Antony tells Cleopatra that his love has no bounds, and often it certainly does seem excessive. It keeps him from important business in Rome, clouds his judgment, and is at the very least a contributing factor to his downfall. This is not to say that Antony’s love is wholly negative or that all love in the play is bad, though. One can view Antony’s love for Cleopatra as (at times) a powerful, genuine devotion to another person. Moreover, the close bond between Octavius and his sister Octavia suggests the positive nature of familial love. Antony’s love is so destructive to himself perhaps because it is mostly a matter of lust and reckless passion.
Enobarbus says that Cleopatra does not satisfy Antony’s appetite for love but rather “makes hungry / Where she most satisfies.” In this, he compares Antony’s desire to other forms of appetite. And indeed it is not merely love that Antony indulges in while in Egypt. He and Cleopatra feast, drink, and carouse decadently. Cleopatra herself seems at times obsessed with beauty and pleasure. All of Egypt becomes associated in the play with a decadent, luxurious lifestyle. This fits with long-standing cultural stereotypes by which western art and literature has often caricatured the east as a place of decadence and leisure, and contributes to a conflict between east and west personified by Antony and Octavius (between whom the world is divided politically). The individual dispute between Antony and Octavius can be seen as a conflict between Rome’s western austerity and Egypt’s eastern luxury. Antony is a Roman, but the play follows his transformation as he moves to Egypt and becomes more and more in thrall to his own desires for various forms of pleasure. At the end of the play, Octavius is victorious, suggesting that his practical austerity conquers Antony’s licentious lifestyle of pleasure. But the play is a tragedy: Shakespeare presents the downfall of Antony and Cleopatra sympathetically, bestowing some honor on them even as they lose themselves among the pleasures of the Egyptian court.
He diverts the issue into eveything that another has provided in his past into positive