In no other play has Shakespeare created two such equally titanic personages as Rome's great soldier and statesman Mark Antony and the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The story of their irresistible attraction, their jealous quarrels and betrayals, and the effects on friends and subjects of their ruinous choices is a tale leading irretrievably to despair and defeat. Their suicides, however, strike us as a kind of triumph. Shakespeare stood at the height of his powers when he penned this great tragedy, one of the last he produced.