In Antony and Cleopatra we are never in any doubt of our moral bearings. And it embodies different and apparently irreconcilable judgements between desire and morality of our practical experience. There is the view, with which the play opens, of those who speak badly of Antony's stay with Cleopatra in Egypt. But the lustful attitude, Antony is attached to, is strongly represented in the play, and there are repeated references to 'lascivious wassails', 'the amorous surfeiter', 'salt Cleopatra', 'the adulterous Antony' who shows his potential attitude toward his private life. Antony and Cleopatra is an account of conflicting story in terms of the Desire and the Morality, Rome and Egypt, the two great contraries that maintain and destroy each other, considered apart from any other people that might stand over against them. If readers find, rightly, that there is something both vague and strained about all these accounts, perhaps that is because a remarkable fact about the bond between Antony and Cleopatera has been consistently overlooked. Whether the bond in question is love, or passion, or both, it is neither of these which the lovers themselves mainly bring to light when they speak of each other or of what is between them. Most critics have tried to express how the relation between Antony and Cleopatra can be variously seen from many different viewpoints. Mr. Bradley, who said that from one point of view the play was Shakespeare's supreme expression of love as value, also said that to see it as depicting a senseless surrender to passion was defensible. Whether Antony and Cleopatra's lust, or love, or something of both, is probably a matter on which complete agreement cannot be expected. Men use these words as they are guided not only by their sense of value, but also by their experience of life; both of these are liable to much variation, and the critic may find that opportunities for augmenting the second are, in his case, slight, past or unwelcome. Cleopatra's lament over te dying Antony, her statement of his greatness and bounty, have perhaps considered too heavily in the thoughts that many people have taken from the play as a whole. But the almost unbearable sadness of the last scenes is for what has not in fact been overlooked. It is, of course, one of the signs of a great writer that he can afford to evoke sympathy or even admiration for what, in his final judgement, is discarded or condemned. In Antony and Cleopatra the sense of potential passion between a man and a woman is radically expressed to its climax, and Shakespeare gives the maximum weight to an actual experience that is finally revealed with the death of both. For Shakespeare has chosen as his tragic theme the impulse that man perhaps most readily associates with a heightened sense of adult life with true marriage. It has not seemed necessary here to explore the range and depth of the passion in which the theme of vital activities resulting with frustration, or entangling itself with social life; but it is, of course, the range and depth of the passion that makes Antony and Cleopatra into universal figures.