If this play [Antony and Cleopatra] is Shakespearean history, then the events of its Rome must
form some precedent and parable of the events of the contemporary world -- Shakespeare's world,
I mean, but I assume it is the beginning of ours.  But this means that our world is perceived
as undergoing, not to say experiencing, catastrophe.  What would this be?  Something about the
succession of the passing of Elizabeth or about her predecessors or successors?  These events
seem, if not the wrong size, a poor shape for the events between Antony and Caesar and
Cleopatra.  But this depends on what we take these events for.  The catastrophe I anticipate,
controversially, is of course the event or advent of skepticism, conceived now as precipitating
not alone a structure each individual is driven by, or resists, but as incorporating a public
history in the modern period, in principle awaiting a historical explanation for its specific
onset in, say, Shakespeare and Descartes.  Such a history will doubtless include the matter of
the rise of the new science ; the consequent and precedent attenuation or displacement of God ;
tne attenuation of the concept of Divine Right ; the preparation for the demand for political
legitimation by individual consent -- call this the extraction of a personal willingness to be
governed in common, as if one is becoming responsible for the political world, unless one
abdicates.  Hegel says that with the birth of Christianity a new subjectivity enters the
world.  I want to say that with the birth of skepticism, hence of modern philosophy, a new
intimacy, or wish for it, enters the world ; call it privacy shared (not shared with the
public, but from it).

I suppose this is registered, among other places, in the history of marriage, in the shift 
from politically arranged to romantically desired marriage.  Here is a reasonable opening way
to consider what is enacted in Antony and Cleopatra in the shift from Rome to Egypt...

Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare p.21