Antony and Cleopatra is a play of travel and of messangers. The messengers are the first and most obvious narrators in my analysis. Although Shakespeare has many more overt narrators, who offer pithy sayings and philosophies of life that are essentially authorial insertions into the text of the play, these are actually poor examples of narration as this project insists that we define it. This is the narrator as the voice of the author; I am seeking the narrator as the author himself.
The messengers in Antonly and Cleopatra overtly create the story. Not only would the love affair grind to a stand still without their relay of information, no story would exist at all. The messangers are creating the plot and providing the substance thereof, without them each character has only life, not interaction and not plot.
This brings up the issue of soothsaying.
