There’s no way around it: I opened Antony and Cleopatra expecting a worthy sequel to Julius Caesar, but I closed the book with the deflated feeling of a soap opera finale. The story checks all the boxes of melodramatic romance, except that you have to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that these two people are really in love. I was left unconvinced.

There is no shortage of grand declarations of love; they start pouring in from the first few pages. Upon being questioned about his affections for her, Antony asserts:

There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

Then comes a messenger from Rome, to whom Antony makes his loyalties clear:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

Cleopatra too waxes poetic about her love for him:

Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven.

Loyal to the end, she follows him to the grave, comparing the bite of a snake to a “lover’s pinch”. Liebestod indeed, but a question nags: if they loved each other enough to die for each other, how come they couldn’t work together while alive? Cleopatra’s fleet turns around twice at the crucial points of war—no explanation offered to either Mark Antony or the reader. But there are cracks even before Actium. Upon hearing Antony’s plan to return to Rome, she pretends to faint, then throws a tantrum. She questions him:

“Excellent falsehood! / Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her? / I’ll seem the fool I am not.”

When Thidias, messenger from Octavian, comes to persuade her surrender, she lets him kiss her hand. The sight brings so much fury to Antony that he curses his lover thus:

“You were half blasted ere I knew you.”

One could say that Antony and Cleopatra bring their downfall upon themselves. One could even argue that, without Octavian, they would find another way to self-sabotage. Whatever sweet nothings Antony and Cleopatra whisper to each other, the ugly reality of their relationship remains: it is one of constant misjudgment and mistrust. Their tragedy is not the tragedy of circumstances (Romeo and Juliet), but the folly of character; they are two people who love grandly but trust poorly.