is story, the bare plot, being made into a pretty unpleasant story (Brown, et al., 211-12).
Taken out of context, the conflict between Hermia and Egeus is irretrievably serious. Hermia pleads, "I would my father look'd but with my eyes, but the king, Theseus, confirms parental rights: "Rather your eyes must with his judgement look" (I.i.56-57). On its face, this exchange contains nothing remotely comic. The mood of the piece derives broad comedy from an essentially tragic choice for a young girl: obey or die. There seems nothing realistic in the character of a father who would insist on such a choice for his daughter, still less of a king who would so readily confirm the right of insistence. And if there is psychological reality to such parental tyranny, how can one credibly explain Shakespeare's response: to send everybody into the enchanted forest of Athens, ruled by the fairies Titania and Oberon, who are having marital problems. One plot complication is sillier than the last, no doubt about it.
One could undoubtedly be forgiven for considering a stage production of Antony and Cleopatra unrealistic. The action unfolds more or less everywhere in the Roman universe, shifting from the battlefield to Egypt to private tent or palace quarters and back again. As Granville-Barker puts it, "Here is the most spacious of the plays" (Granville-Barker 1), by which he appears to confirm to the difficulty of creating an intimate connection between onstage performers and audience. It seems legitimate to ask, for example, how a typical audience member should be expected to respond continual and dramatic shifts of scene--together with extremities of emotion from scene to scene. Then there is the fact that the Antony-Cleopatra story is historically remote and little understood, and the unreality of both setting and plot seems confirmed.
The action of Antony and Cleopatra, amplified by the grandly resonant poetry and the heights emotion portray...