Chapter 4 on Antony and Cleopatra again investigates the dynamics of power, but this time in a dialectic with erotic pleasure as well as with nature. The play’s paradoxically triumphant suicides at the end contain strong utopian resonances affirmative of eros and its links with death and the aesthetic. This play represents the turning point in the development this book is charting, as Shakespeare’s works take on new forms and themes that emphasize the utopian overcoming power in plays that are tragicomic and synthetic of his career. The chapter also analyzes Egypt as containing, along with its political practices, a Shakespearean green world quality, linking the play to earlier green world comedies. Egypt is especially an erotic, feminized, and feminist utopian space housing the play’s counter-political values. Cleopatra emerges as both a political and a utopian character and one who becomes at the very end the play’s dominant figure. Her partner Antony, of course, is essential to the play as well and eventually develops his own utopian qualities after seeming at first a love-sick buffoon, then an instrumental, ruthless politician. The play is formally a tragedy but has a strong tragicomic feeling as well.

In The Winter’s Tale, power, eros, death, the utopian, and the aesthetic are the main themes in play. It begins in a world of amoral and dehumanizing power politics and ends in affirmations of the utopian spirit – while acknowledging the realities of death and suffering. It draws on festival traditions, fairy tales, and ancient issues of resurrection and rebirth in its end and political and psychological issues, as King Leontes becomes a mad tyrant. His madness paradoxically takes an aesthetic form in its (perverse) creativity and reliance on intuitive mental decisions as defined by Kant – thus relating to the aesthetic issues later in the play. The play’s utopian space is a mixed, complicated locus that includes both the utopian and the nonutopian. What makes it a consummate example of Shakespearean metatheater is its investigation of the relations of two concepts of ancient provenance, “art” and “nature,” introduced off-handedly, played with extensively in the second half of the play, and climaxed and thematically resolved in the complex, dissonant unity of the two terms figured when an apparent stone statue of the supposedly dead Queen Hermione is revealed as living flesh.