William Shakespeare reinvents the speaker of his Dark Lady sonnets as Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, with the former’s hesitant appreciation of the benefits of a “lying,” lustful relationship reconfigured into the latter’s total embrace of an edifying, creative mutuality. This represents an important philosophical shift in Shakespeare’s view of aesthetics: where in the Dark Lady sonnets, the speaker chastises himself for feeding his desire with lies and self delusions, Antony, his parallel, believes that the love he and his queen have created is somehow noble, even ideal.