Antony and Cleopatra

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares, Jan para

Antony and Cleopatra
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Sophie Holroyd
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Jan Sewell and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Maria Jones (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright): Adrian Noble, Braham Murray, Gregory Doran

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

Antony and Cleopatra
is Shakespeare’s most luxuriant tragedy. The action sprawls around the Mediterranean world as it gives historical form to the mythical encounter between Venus (the goddess of sexual love) and Mars (the god of war). The play is structured upon a series of oppositions: between female and male, desire and duty, the bed and the battlefield, age and youth, the philosophies of Epicureanism and Stoicism. Above all, between Egypt and Rome.

Henry Cockeram’s
English Dictionary
, published in the same year as the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays, has an entry for Cleopatra: “an Egyptian Queen, she was first beloved of Julius Caesar; after, Marcus Anthonius was by her brought into such dotage that he aspired the Empire, which caused his destruction.” The idea that a great lawgiver or warrior could be destroyed by the lure of sexual desire was commonplace in the period. An earlier dictionary reminded the reader of how King Solomon in the Bible “exceeded all men in wisdom and knowledge” but “nevertheless was by dotage on women brought unto idolatry.” The primary definition of the word “dotage” was “to be mad or peevish, to play the fool (as old folks do).” To dote was to go against reason. To fall too far in love was to lose one’s wits. At the same time, the word was used with reference to old age: senility atrophies the powers of reason and makes an old person become a child again.

Antony and Cleopatra
, as its first line informs us, is Shakespeare’s drama of dotage. “Nay, but this dotage of our general’s…”: Mark Antony, Roman general, who bestraddles the world with his military might, is growing old. He is growing foolish and he is crazily in love. Not a good combination for a soldier, but a great subject for a play.

Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, is to Roman eyes a “quean,” which means a whore. She is the embodiment of sexual magnetism. A consummate actress, she is able to change her mood on a whim, to keep
all around her guessing as to whether she is in earnest or at play. Linguistically, she has a marvelous gift of combining a tone of lightness and wonderment with a sexily down-to-earth robustness: “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” She is also the only woman in Shakespeare’s tragedies to have a wit comparable to that of his comic heroines, such as Rosalind in
As You Like It
and Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
. When news comes of the death of Antony’s wife, Cleopatra asks with feigned incredulity “Can Fulvia die?” This arch question plays on the double entendre whereby to die could mean to have an orgasm. Roman wives, she implies, are frigid creatures. Cleopatra is a grown-up Juliet: utterly confident in her body, she relishes her own sexuality and is the dominant partner in the relationship.

There is, however, a darker side to her powers. She uses both her sexual allure and her regal authority not only to seduce and to charm, but also to manipulate and to emasculate. She savages the messenger who brings news she does not want to hear. Her principal courtiers are women, Charmian and Iras. In Shakespeare’s source (of which more in a moment), Plutarch complained that the affairs of Antony’s entire empire were determined by these two women of the bedchamber. While frizzling Cleopatra’s hair and dressing her head, Plutarch implies, Charmian and Iras change the course of world history. There are only two men in the immediate entourage of the Egyptian queen. One is in the strict sense emasculated: Mardian the eunuch. The other is Alexas, whose name would have conjured up in the minds of the more educated members of a Renaissance audience the Alexis of the Roman poet Virgil’s second Eclogue. “Cruel Alexis” is the “lovely boy” (
formose puer
) who refuses to yield to the burning sexual desire of a shepherd called Corydon. To echo his name was automatically to evoke homoerotic desire, which in Shakespeare’s time was also castigated as a form of emasculation.

The name “Alexas” signals the trickier aspect of the Greek influence on Roman culture. Ancient Greece provided classical Rome—and Elizabethan England—with a back-catalogue of military heroes and ideals: Alexander the Great, the generals who fought the Trojan war, the Spartan model of military training. But “Greek love,” as espoused in, say, Plato’s
Symposium
, was hardly calculated to reinforce the Roman code of masculinity. The notion that the good life involved
ascending a ladder of love that proceeded in an unbroken progression from the buggering of boys to contemplation of the divine did not sit well with an ideology of cold baths and route marches.

Historically, Cleopatra’s allegiance was to the Greek as opposed to the Roman world. Her family, the Ptolemies, were Macedonian Greeks. Though some modern productions have played with notions of her blackness, imagining her as a kind of female Othello, Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not regard her as black. George Abbott, who was born within two years of Shakespeare, made the point explicitly in his
Brief Description of the Whole World wherein is particularly described all the Monarchies, Empires, and Kingdoms of the same
:

“Tawny” was an orange-brown color, associated with the sun, but clearly differentiated from the blackness of the Moors of Mauritania. It was the color of “gipsies” (Abbott’s “runagates,” i.e. renegades), who claimed to come from Egypt (the accepted modern term for Gypsies, “Romany,” is irrelevant and confusing in this regard—it has nothing to do with Rome and only dates from the nineteenth century). Whereas Iago insults Othello with racial abuse directed at his black features, the Romans insult Cleopatra by calling her a Gypsy, associating her with a tribe famous for indolence, vagrancy, theft, fortune-telling and verbal wiles, magic, and counterfeiting—exactly the characteristics of Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra’s court. If the play is to be read as a dramatization of the workings of racial prejudice, then it would be historically more truthful to relate it to prejudice against Gypsies than prejudice against black people.

Gypsies were often associated with beggars, and part of the paradox that is Cleopatra comes from the sense in which the opposite
poles of regality and beggary meet in her. Antony begins his journey with the claim that “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,” while Cleopatra ends hers by recognizing that the “dungy earth” is both “The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.” Refusing to demean herself by begging in supplication to Caesar, she welcomes the beggar-like Clown instead and purchases the asp that she will nurse at her breast. It seems that her main reason for refusing to surrender to Caesar is a refusal to undergo the shame of public display:

This is one of Shakespeare’s most daring self-allusions: he is the scald rhymer and his actors are the quick comedians extemporally staging the revels. Antony has been “brought drunken forth” in the person of Richard Burbage, and the “squeaking Cleopatra” who speaks these lines is Burbage’s cross-dressed apprentice, a young man in his late teens or at most his very early twenties. It is sobering, given that in modern times Cleopatra has been considered the supreme Shakespearean role for a mature female actor, to recall that the original Cleopatra would have been a “boy.” When Burbage’s Antony kissed him on stage, there would have been some in the audience—those of a puritan disposition—who would have felt vindicated in their belief that boy actors were nothing more than prostitutes to the perverted players. The phrase “boy my greatness / I’th’posture of a whore” is positively inviting such a reaction.

Where did Shakespeare learn the Roman history that he so memorably dramatized in
Julius Caesar
,
Antony and Cleopatra
, and
Coriolanus
?
Minor variants and improvisations apart, the answer is simple. While most of his plays involved him in the cutting and pasting of a whole range of literary and theatrical sources, in the Roman tragedies he kept his eye squarely on the pages of a single great book.

That book was Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
. Plutarch was a Greek, born in Boeotia in the first century AD. His book included forty-six biographies of the great figures of ancient history, arranged in pairs, Greek and Roman, with a brief “comparison” between each pair. The purpose of the parallel was to ask such questions as “Who was the greater general—the Greek Alexander or the Roman Julius Caesar?” Marcus Antonius was paired with Demetrius Poliorcetes, King of Macedon, who was equally renowned as a general and a philanderer. Plutarch’s reason for pairing them was that they illustrated the precept that from great minds both great virtues and great vices do proceed:

In the “comparison,” they are both praised for their “liberality and bounty,” condemned for their “concupiscence” and “lascivious parts.” On balance, the Roman is preferred to the Greek because “Antonius by his incontinence did no hurt but to himself [whereas] Demetrius did hurt unto all others.” Shakespeare is not in the business of making moral judgments of this kind. He does, however, place a strong emphasis on Antony’s liberality. On the night before the final battle, Octavius Caesar begrudgingly agrees to feed his soldiers: “they have earned the waste.” Antony, by contrast, lavishes wine upon all his captains. There is little doubt as to which is the more likable leader. On the other hand, to “drown consideration” in a late-night drinking binge is probably not the best preparation for an early-morning battle.

For Shakespeare, the historical “parallel” was a device of great power. The censorship of the stage exercised by court officialdom
meant that it was exceedingly risky to dramatize contemporary affairs, so the best way of writing political drama was to take subjects from the past and leave it to the audience to see the parallel in the present. The uncertainty over the succession to the Virgin Queen meant that there were frequent whispers of conspiracy in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. It would hardly have been appropriate to write a play about a group of highly placed courtiers—the Earl of Essex and his circle, say—plotting to overthrow the monarchy. But a play about a group of highly-placed Roman patricians—Brutus, Cassius, and company—plotting to assassinate Julius Caesar had the capacity to raise some awkward questions by means of the implicit parallel.

In 1592 there appeared in print an English version of the
Marc Antoine
of the French neoclassical dramatist Robert Garnier. The translator was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The ultimate source of Garnier’s
Marc Antoine
was Plutarch. The matter was that which Shakespeare brought to the public stage some fifteen years later. Garnier, a magistrate, dramatized his Plutarchan material in order to reflect on the tragedy of civil war in sixteenth-century France. Mary Sidney’s Englished
Antonius
includes choruses of commoners—first Egyptians, then Roman soldiers—but its primary emphasis was not the many but the few. The play is an exploration of the damage that may be caused to the body politic if the private desires of the great are allowed to override their public duties. To become a lover is to put at risk one’s judgment as a governor.

We should be wary of jumping to the conclusion that Mary Sidney’s intentions in undertaking and publishing her translation were overtly topical rather than broadly exemplary, yet her theme was highly relevant to the concerns of the English court in the early 1590s. This was the period in which the Earl of Essex was beginning to gain considerable influence over the queen. The Sidney circle, with their strong commitment to Protestant virtue, were deeply committed to an image of Elizabeth as noble Roman, not sensuous Cleopatra. Samuel Daniel’s
Cleopatra
(published 1594), a sequel to his patroness’s play, is a further exploration of the potential of erotic passion to bring down a royal line. Fulke Greville, also a member of the Sidney circle, destroyed his own
Antony and Cleopatra
for fear that its
representation of a queen and a great soldier “forsaking empire to follow sensuality” might be “construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government.” On “seeing the like instance not poetically, but really, fashioned in the Earl of Essex then falling (and ever till then worthily beloved both of Queen and people),” Greville’s own “second thoughts” were “to be careful.”

This background raises the question of whether Shakespeare needed to be especially careful when writing his version of the story early in the reign of King James. By this time his company were the King’s Men, under direct patronage of the monarchy. And he knew that his tragedy would be played at court. James was beginning to cultivate an image of himself as the modern equivalent of the most admired of all Roman emperors: Augustus. Shakespeare’s play ends at the moment when, the other two members of the triumvirate having been disposed of, Octavius Caesar becomes emperor and takes the name Augustus. When he says “The time of universal peace is near,” Shakespeare’s court audience would have heard an allusion to the “Augustan peace”: the idea that this emperor’s reign was sacred not only because it brought peace after a long period of war (as James had done when he signed the Somerset House treaty with Spain), but also because it was in the time of Augustus that Jesus was born.