Shakespeare's Roman plays, wedged between his great tragedies and late Romance plays, put on stage the extreme pursuit, and its tragic effects, of heroism and honour. With the exception of Titus Andronicus, which is an experiment in Senecan blood tragedy of revenge, his Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus--all put in opposition masculine virtues of discipline, manhood, measure, temperance and cold reason against the feminine elements of indulgence, overflowing, idleness, infinite variety of imagination, and emotion. These Roman plays depict the male fear of effeminization and pollution of manhood through contact with the feminine. For example, Coriolanus sucked his courage from the breast of his mother, Volumnia, and achieved his colossal selfhood and pride thereby. However, his final kneeling down before the pleas of his mother on the brink of his triumphal attack on Rome proves himself the boy of his mother. And this means the self-destruction of manhood by the feminine. Antony and Cleopatra, among his Roman plays, seemingly dramatizes the polar conflicts of values between Rome and Egypt with its epic shifts of elusive thirty-six scenes in total. Rome is the world of men in contrast to the Egyptian world of women. This apparent polarity, however, is put into question in this play of paradoxes and ambiguities. The negative values of Egypt are transmuted into positives ones in the later parts of the play, while Roman pursuit of honour and heroic militarism is proven self-deceiving and expedient as is shown by Pompey in his galley. By his dramatic strategy of transvaluation, Shakespeare appears to maintain that every fact and truth are possible dependent on the given situation, and therefore partial at most. Here any perspective is the mutable one of the viewer projecting his own desires into the object of his gaze. The ever-present renewal and undecidability of meanings is one of Shakespeare's strategies to criticize the strongly self-willed virtues of Roman Caesarism and 'civilized' imperialism done through male power and violence at the cost of the feminine elements. Shakespeare reads new and different meaning into his cultural tradition by transforming Aeneas, the hero and builder of Rome and civilization, into the hero of love. Shakespeare performs his "cultural susurrus," or cultural negotiation with his literary heritage of history as a kind of a text. Antony identifies himself with Aeneas, not the stoic hero of Rome, but the idle lover of Dido, the Queen of Carthage. This historical misreading goes against the grain of Virgil and Marlowe. The heroics of love and death of Antony with Cleopatra exalt them above the barren earth of kingdoms and clay. Death is experienced as a consummation and a part of life, which makes the tragic vision of the play somewhat affected and makes it similar to the vision of the tragicomedies of Shakespeare's final phase. The heroics of love and death of the titular hero and heroine, together with their aristocratic virtues of generosity and affection, is suggested as an alternative, if not a substitution for, to the Roman values of colonialism and imperialism. Shakespeare's Roman plays in general, and Antony and Cleopatra in particular, prepare the way to the happily mingled resolution of the masculine and the feminine in his Romance plays.