Southern has a flair for this kind of narrative-history-with-argument, but she has already written extensively on both Antony and Cleopatra as well as Caesar, and for those who have read those earlier books there will be little new here.
The play was published in 1606 after the great success of Macbeth. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Cleopatra spent her reign fighting for her right to rule and struggling to maintain Egypt's independence. Love, power, and political advantage became intertwined as Cleopatra aligned herself with the dominant political figures of her time.