'All for Love" as a heroic tragedy.

The Heroic tragedy became very popular in the restoration age. It is about the passion of love between Antony and Cleopatra. The opening scene of 'All for Love' shows Antony's neglect of royal duties. Having suffered a defeat at Actium due to Cleopatra's fleeing from the battlefield, Antony has shut himself in the temple of Isis. He refuses to see anybody. He hates the very sight of Cleopatra. He says that he wants to live like a recluse in a forest.Ventidius tells him that he need not despairs. If he gives up Cleopatra, there are thousands still ready to follow him. Pressed by Ventidius, Antony agrees to withdraw from Cleopatra and launch another war against Octavious. Antony now swings from love to duty, from passion to reason. But this does not last long. He swings once again back to love . When Cleopatra appears before him and convinces him of her steadfast devotion to him. She says that she showered all her love on Antony.

Regarding her fleeting from Actium, she argues that she was affected by womanly fear of violence and bloodshed and not by any desire to please Octavious. Finally, she shows him Octavious letter, offering to make her Queen of Egypt if she betrays Antony. Cleopatra says that she has totally rejected Octavious' offer. Antony once again comes back to her. Love triumphs over duty . At the sight of his children clinging to him, he swings back to Octavia. When he hears that Cleopatra has committed suicide in order to prove her loyalty, Antony regards life without Cleopatra as worthless and stabs himself.

Thus love rises above the demands of duty at the end. Antony dies, kissing Cleopatra. After his death, Cleopatra could have lived with Octavious. But she called herself Antony's wife and dies along her husband. She commits suicide with the help of deadly Asps. Like Shakespeare, Dryden also uses a rhyming couplet to express the superiority and sublimity of the lovers.                      
                            And fame to late posterity shall tell                  
                            No lovers lived so great, or died so well

The machinery of ghost and portents, description of the flooding of the Nile, a whirlwind opening graves and letting out ghosts are the features of the tragedy. Dryden conforms to the pattern of the Heroic tragedy. Passion surmounts reason. Thus ' All for Love ' fulfils the requirements of a Heroic tragedy.