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Abstract
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This intertextual study into John Dryden's All for Love and William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is necessary and important for a number of key reasons. First, it allows for the surfacing of important points regarding how dramatic literature has evolved in response to changed cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts. The historical engagings of both Shakespeare and Dryden - that is, the tragic romance of Antony and Cleopatra - are framed through the dominant ideological priorities of their respective eras. A comparison study would thereby afford the scholar an opportunity to show how Dryden's adaptation transposes and reworks Shakespeare's tragedy in greater consistency with the moral and artistic dictates of Restoration England. This contrast marks other cultural changes between the early modern and the Restoration, including the nature of conceptions of love, honour, and politics, and the nature and function of tragedy itself.
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