William Shakespeare

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Edited with a Commentary by
Emrys Jones
with an Introduction by
René Weis

Contents

General Introduction

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

Introduction

The Play in Performance

Further Reading

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

An Account of the Text

Commentary

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FOUNDING EDITOR: T. J. B. SPENCER
GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY WELLS
SUPERVISORY EDITORS: PAUL EDMONDSON, STANLEY WELLS

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

T. J. B. SPENCER, sometime Director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, was the founding editor of the New Penguin Shakespeare, for which he edited both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

STANLEY WELLS is Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham, and General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare. His many books include Shakespeare: For All Time, Shakespeare & Co., Shakespeare, Sex, and Love and Great Shakespeare Actors.

EMRYS JONES was formerly Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His publications include Scenic Form in Shakespeare, The Origins of Shakespeare and The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse.

RENÉ WEIS is Professor of English at University College London. He has edited King Lear Henry IV, Part II for other publishers, and Romeo and Juliet for the Arden Shakespeare. He is the author of The Yellow Cross and of a biography of Shakespeare. His most recent book is The Real Traviata.

General Introduction

Every play by Shakespeare is unique. This is part of his greatness. A restless and indefatigable experimenter, he moved with a rare amalgamation of artistic integrity and dedicated professionalism from one kind of drama to another. Never shackled by convention, he offered his actors the alternation between serious and comic modes from play to play, and often also within the plays themselves, that the repertory system within which he worked demanded, and which provided an invaluable stimulus to his imagination. Introductions to individual works in this series attempt to define their individuality. But there are common factors that underpin Shakespeare’s career.

Nothing in his heredity offers clues to the origins of his genius. His upbringing in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born in 1564, was unexceptional. His mother, born Mary Arden, came from a prosperous farming family. Her father chose her as his executor over her eight sisters and his four stepchildren when she was only in her late teens, which suggests that she was of more than average practical ability. Her husband John, a glover, apparently unable to write, was nevertheless a capable businessman and loyal townsfellow, who seems to have fallen on relatively hard times in later life. He would have been brought up as a Catholic, and may have retained Catholic sympathies, but his son subscribed publicly to Anglicanism throughout his life.

The most important formative influence on Shakepeare was his school. As the son of an alderman who became bailiff (or mayor) in 1568, he had the right to attend the town’s grammar school. Here he would have received an education grounded in classical rhetoric and oratory, studying authors such as Ovid, Cicero and Quintilian, and would have been required to read, speak, write and even think in Latin from his early years. This classical education permeates Shakespeare’s work from the beginning to the end of his career. It is apparent in the self-conscious classicism of plays of the early 1590s such as the tragedy of Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1592–3) and The Rape of Lucrece (1593–4), and is still evident in his latest plays, informing the dream visions of Pericles and Cymbeline and the masque in The Tempest, written between 1607 and 1611. It inflects his literary style throughout his career. In his earliest writings the verse, based on the ten-syllabled, five-beat iambic pentameter, is highly patterned. Rhetorical devices deriving from classical literature, such as alliteration and antithesis, extended similes and elaborate wordplay, abound. Often, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he uses rhyming patterns associated with lyric poetry, each line self-contained in sense, the prose as well as the verse employing elaborate figures of speech. Writing at a time of linguistic ferment, Shakespeare frequently imports Latinisms into English, coining words such as abstemious, addiction, incarnadine and adjunct. He was also heavily influenced by the eloquent translations of the Bible in both the Bishops’ and the Geneva versions. As his experience grows, his verse and prose become more supple, the patterning less apparent, more ready to accommodate the rhythms of ordinary speech, more colloquial in diction, as in the speeches of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the characterful prose of Falstaff and Hamlet’s soliloquies. The effect is of increasing psychological realism, reaching its greatest heights in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Gradually he discovered ways of adapting the regular beat of the pentameter to make it an infinitely flexible instrument for matching thought with feeling. Towards the end of his career, in plays such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, he adopts a more highly mannered style, in keeping with the more overtly symbolical and emblematical mode in which he is writing.

So far as we know, Shakespeare lived in Stratford till after his marriage to Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, in 1582. They had three children: a daughter, Susanna, born in 1583 within six months of their marriage, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. The next seven years of Shakespeare’s life are virtually a blank. Theories that he may have been, for instance, a schoolmaster, or a lawyer, or a soldier, or a sailor, lack evidence to support them. The first reference to him in print, in Robert Greene’s pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit of 1592, parodies a line from Henry VI, Part III, implying that Shakespeare was already an established playwright. It seems likely that at some unknown point after the birth of his twins he joined a theatre company and gained experience as both actor and writer in the provinces and London. The London theatres closed because of plague in 1593 and 1594; and during these years, perhaps recognizing the need for an alternative career, he wrote and published the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. These are the only works we can be certain that Shakespeare himself was responsible for putting into print. Each bears the author’s dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (1573–1624), the second in warmer terms than the first. Southampton, younger than Shakespeare by ten years, is the only person to whom he personally dedicated works. The Earl may have been a close friend, perhaps even the beautiful and adored young man whom Shakespeare celebrates in his Sonnets.

The resumption of playing after the plague years saw the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company to which Shakespeare was to belong for the rest of his career, as actor, shareholder and playwright. No other dramatist of the period had so stable a relationship with a single company. Shakespeare knew the actors for whom he was writing and the conditions in which they performed. The permanent company was made up of around twelve to fourteen players, but one actor often played more than one role in a play and additional actors were hired as needed. Led by the tragedian Richard Burbage (1568–1619) and, initially, the comic actor Will Kemp (d. 1603), they rapidly achieved a high reputation, and when King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 they were renamed as the King’s Men. All the women’s parts were played by boys; there is no evidence that any female role was ever played by a male actor over the age of about eighteen. Shakespeare had enough confidence in his boys to write for them long and demanding roles such as Rosalind (who, like other heroines of the romantic comedies, is disguised as a boy for much of the action) in As You Like It, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. But there are far more fathers than mothers, sons than daughters, in his plays, few if any of which require more than the company’s normal complement of three or four boys.

The company played primarily in London’s public playhouses – there were almost none that we know of in the rest of the country – initially in the Theatre, built in Shoreditch in 1576, and from 1599 in the Globe, on Bankside. These were wooden, more or less circular structures, open to the air, with a thrust stage surmounted by a canopy and jutting into the area where spectators who paid one penny stood, and surrounded by galleries where it was possible to be seated on payment of an additional penny. Though properties such as cauldrons, stocks, artificial trees or beds could indicate locality, there was no representational scenery. Sound effects such as flourishes of trumpets, music both martial and amorous, and accompaniments to songs were provided by the company’s musicians. Actors entered through doors in the back wall of the stage. Above it was a balconied area that could represent the walls of a town (as in King John), or a castle (as in Richard II), and indeed a balcony (as in Romeo and Juliet). In 1609 the company also acquired the use of the Blackfriars, a smaller, indoor theatre to which admission was more expensive, and which permitted the use of more spectacular stage effects such as the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in Cymbeline and of goddesses in The Tempest. And they would frequently perform before the court in royal residences and, on their regular tours into the provinces, in non-theatrical spaces such as inns, guildhalls and the great halls of country houses.

Early in his career Shakespeare may have worked in collaboration, perhaps with Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1601) in Henry VI, Part I and with George Peele (1556–96) in Titus Andronicus. And towards the end he collaborated with George Wilkins (fl. 1604–8) in Pericles, and with his younger colleagues Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), in Timon of Athens, and John Fletcher (1579–1625), in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio. Shakespeare’s output dwindled in his last years, and he died in 1616 in Stratford, where he owned a fine house, New Place, and much land. His only son had died at the age of eleven, in 1596, and his last descendant died in 1670. New Place was destroyed in the eighteenth century but the other Stratford houses associated with his life are maintained and displayed to the public by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

One of the most remarkable features of Shakespeare’s plays is their intellectual and emotional scope. They span a great range from the lightest of comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors, to the profoundest of tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth. He maintained an output of around two plays a year, ringing the changes between comic and serious. All his comedies have serious elements: Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, almost reaches tragic dimensions, and Measure for Measure is profoundly serious in its examination of moral problems. Equally, none of his tragedies is without humour: Hamlet is as witty as any of his comic heroes, Macbeth has its Porter, and King Lear its Fool. His greatest comic character, Falstaff, inhabits the history plays and Henry V ends with a marriage, while Henry VI, Part III, Richard II and Richard III culminate in the tragic deaths of their protagonists.

Although in performance Shakespeare’s characters can give the impression of a superabundant reality, he is not a naturalistic dramatist. None of his plays is explicitly set in his own time. The action of few of them (except for the English histories) is set even partly in England (exceptions are The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew). Italy is his favoured location. Most of his principal story-lines derive from printed writings; but the structuring and translation of these narratives into dramatic terms is Shakespeare’s own, and he invents much additional material. Most of the plays contain elements of myth and legend, and many derive from ancient or more recent history or from romantic tales of ancient times and faraway places. All reflect his reading, often in close detail. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised 1587), a great compendium of English, Scottish and Irish history, provided material for his English history plays. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by the Greek writer Plutarch, finely translated into English from the French by Sir Thomas North in 1579, provided much of the narrative material, and also a mass of verbal detail, for his plays about Roman history. Some plays are closely based on shorter individual works: As You Like It, for instance, on the novel Rosalynde (1590) by his near-contemporary Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto (1588) by his old rival Robert Greene (1558–92) and Othello on a story by the Italian Giraldi Cinthio (1504–73). And the language of his plays is permeated by the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the proverbial sayings of his day.

Shakespeare was popular with his contemporaries, but his commitment to the theatre and to the plays in performance is demonstrated by the fact that only about half of his plays appeared in print in his lifetime, in slim paperback volumes known as quartos, so called because they were made from printers’ sheets folded twice to form four leaves (eight pages). None of them shows any sign that he was involved in their publication. For him, performance was the primary means of publication. The most frequently reprinted of his works were the non-dramatic poems – the erotic Venus and Adonis and the more moralistic The Rape of Lucrece. The Sonnets, which appeared in 1609, under his name but possibly without his consent, were less successful, perhaps because the vogue for sonnet sequences, which peaked in the 1590s, had passed by then. They were not reprinted until 1640, and then only in garbled form along with poems by other writers. Happily, in 1623, seven years after he died, his colleagues John Heminges (1556–1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627) published his collected plays, including eighteen that had not previously appeared in print, in the first Folio, whose name derives from the fact that the printers’ sheets were folded only once to produce two leaves (four pages). Some of the quarto editions are badly printed, and the fact that some plays exist in two, or even three, early versions creates problems for editors. These are discussed in the Account of the Text in each volume of this series.

Shakespeare’s plays continued in the repertoire until the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642. When performances resumed after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 many of the plays were not to the taste of the times, especially because their mingling of genres and failure to meet the requirements of poetic justice offended against the dictates of neoclassicism. Some, such as The Tempest (changed by John Dryden and William Davenant in 1667 to suit contemporary taste), King Lear (to which Nahum Tate gave a happy ending in 1681) and Richard III (heavily adapted by Colley Cibber in 1700 as a vehicle for his own talents), were extensively rewritten; others fell into neglect. Slowly they regained their place in the repertoire, and they continued to be reprinted, but it was not until the great actor David Garrick (1717–79) organized a spectacular jubilee in Stratford in 1769 that Shakespeare began to be regarded as a transcendental genius. Garrick’s idolatry prefigured the enthusiasm of critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Gradually Shakespeare’s reputation spread abroad, to Germany, America, France and to other European countries.

During the nineteenth century, though the plays were generally still performed in heavily adapted or abbreviated versions, a large body of scholarship and criticism began to amass. Partly as a result of a general swing in education away from the teaching of Greek and Roman texts and towards literature written in English, Shakespeare became the object of intensive study in schools and universities. In the theatre, important turning points were the work in England of two theatre directors, William Poel (1852–1934) and his disciple Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946), who showed that the application of knowledge, some of it newly acquired, of early staging conditions to performance of the plays could render the original texts viable in terms of the modern theatre. During the twentieth century appreciation of Shakespeare’s work, encouraged by the availability of audio, film and video versions of the plays, spread around the world to such an extent that he can now be claimed as a global author.

The influence of Shakespeare’s works permeates the English language. Phrases from his plays and poems – ‘a tower of strength’, ‘green-eyed jealousy’, ‘a foregone conclusion’ – are on the lips of people who may never have read him. They have inspired composers of songs, orchestral music and operas; painters and sculptors; poets, novelists and film-makers. Allusions to him appear in pop songs, in advertisements and in television shows. Some of his characters – Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Shylock and Hamlet – have acquired mythic status. He is valued for his humanity, his psychological insight, his wit and humour, his lyricism, his mastery of language, his ability to excite, surprise, move and, in the widest sense of the word, entertain audiences. He is the greatest of poets, but he is essentially a dramatic poet. Though his plays have much to offer to readers, they exist fully only in performance. In these volumes we offer individual introductions, notes on language and on specific points of the text, suggestions for further reading and information about how each work has been edited. In addition we include accounts of the ways in which successive generations of interpreters and audiences have responded to challenges and rewards offered by the plays. The Penguin Shakespeare series aspires to remove obstacles to understanding and to make pleasurable the reading of the work of the man who has done more than most to make us understand what it is to be human.

Stanley Wells

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

A few of Shakespeare’s writings can be fairly precisely dated. An allusion to the Earl of Essex in the chorus to Act V of Henry V, for instance, could only have been written in 1599. But for many of the plays we have only vague information, such as the date of publication, which may have occurred long after composition, the date of a performance, which may not have been the first, or a list in Francis Meres’s book Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, which tells us only that the plays listed there must have been written by that year. The chronology of the early plays is particularly difficult to establish. Not everyone would agree that the first part of Henry VI was written after the third, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet before A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The following table is based on the ‘Canon and Chronology’ section in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (1987), where more detailed information and discussion may be found.

Introduction

Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare’s supreme imaginative achievements and its dramatic language may be the most highly wrought and daring in the canon. Samuel Taylor Coleridge noticed ‘a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity’ and suggested that the motto for its soaring style should be ‘happy valiancy’ (Shakespearean Criticism). Here, if anywhere, Shakespeare seems to have allowed his imagination and incomparable gift for language to range freely and strain towards poetic sublimity in a historical context and a material world.

The play’s rhetoric generates powerful tensions between objective reality and subjective perceptions of it, as in Cleopatra’s commemorating the dead ‘emperor’ Antony. He was, she claims, the soul of generosity in whose bounty there was ‘no winter’ and who casually dropped from his pocket ‘realms and islands’ as if they were mere silver coins. His very sensuality inspired wonder at the way in which his pleasures transcended the senses. ‘His delights,’ she says, were ‘dolphin-like’ and ‘showed his back above | The element they lived in’. When she inquires of her Roman interlocutor Dolabella whether ‘there was or might be such a man | As this I dreamt of?’ he simply, but not unsympathetically, replies, ‘Gentle madam, no’ (V.2.76, 87–94).

Critical responses to this play largely depend on whether or not we allow ourselves to be swayed by its rhetorical flights, or whether we give priority to its global politics. It is hardly surprising that Antony and Cleopatra has at times been read as a parable about empire and duty conflicting with folly and lust. After all the adulterous love affair of Antony and Cleopatra threatens the commonwealth which, in this play, is nothing less than the empire of the entire world. Nor does Shakespeare mince his words. When Octavius Caesar sneeringly calls Antony an ‘old ruffian’ (IV.1.4) we do not necessarily disagree. In one sense he is indeed just that, a reckless middle-aged reveller who airily brushes aside pressing matters of state when they present themselves at an inopportune moment. Cleopatra, it seems, is not much better. To the Romans these two are well matched in the land of misrule that is Egypt, a place where Roman soldiers become women. As Caesar points out:

EXOTIC GENDER-BENDING

That Antony is unmanned in Egypt is clear not only to Octavius and his intelligencers in Alexandria but is cheerfully acknowledged by Cleopatra herself when she recalls one of their transvestite parties:

The ‘sword Philippan’ here is none other than the one with which Antony overcame Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi (42 BC). It is the ultimate emblem of Roman heroic identity and masculinity. By wearing it Cleopatra, the play’s most prolific image-maker, also becomes its greatest iconoclast.

For Antony to surrender his sword to Cleopatra during a nocturnal sex romp constitutes an insult to Romanitas, that very particular heroic idealism that was commonly thought to have granted Rome absolute sway over the classical world. Cross-dressing might seem appropriate in comedies like Twelfth Night and As You Like It, but there the motif serves a restorative strategy. The temporary disguises help heal wounds left in the natural order and form a part of the plays’ creative anarchy. Not so in Antony and Cleopatra where the lovers’ transvestite playing is interpreted, by the Romans if not the dramatist, as exotic and decadent. They may even appear on the public stage in each other’s attire. Act I, scene 2 suggests as much: we are at a bawdy Alexandrian party and banquet, with Enobarbus requesting wine to toast Cleopatra while her ladies-in-waiting are discussing where they would ideally like their husband’s extra inches to be. ‘Not in my husband’s nose’ (62), Iras replies to Charmian, while the hapless Soothsayer is standing by, knowing that some of his prophecies are as loaded as the weird sisters’ equivocations in Macbeth. But who cares here?

In the thick of this scene of sexual banter and comedy Cleopatra enters. The play’s only source text, the 1623 Folio (which very probably prints Shakespeare’s own manuscript), sets out her entry as:

Modern editions now tend to leave Cleopatra’s entrance where the Folio places it, but it has sometimes been sandwiched between Enobarbus’ and Charmian’s half-lines, or else it was made to follow Charmian’s ‘the Queen’. The reason for this is clear. The arrangement in the Folio means that Cleopatra enters and Enobarbus claims, against the evidence of his eyes and ours, that Antony has just come in.

This pointed one-line Egyptian scene may indicate that in the Orient the heroic Roman, who claims to be descended from Hercules, dresses in the gender-bending robes of a drag queen; or at least that in Egypt male and female attire are indistinguishable. Of course Enobarbus’ admonition to silence is sarcastic, drawing attention to Antony’s loss of selfhood, but Charmian’s guileless setting him right may intimate that not everybody shares the view that this state of affairs is necessarily a bad thing.

Egypt emasculates, and it does so literally in the case of Mardian the eunuch, a castrated attendant of Cleopatra; in antiquity eunuchs were, paradoxically perhaps, closely associated with Eastern fertility cults. When Mardian encounters Antony after the disastrous battle of Actium his sexless presence reminds Antony of his own loss of manhood. ‘O, thy vile lady! | She has robbed me of my sword’, he groans, before being reassured by Mardian that, ‘No, Antony; | My mistress loved thee, and her fortunes mingled | With thine entirely’ (IV.14.22–5). The word ‘mingle’ is one of many merging and transgressive phrases in the play; here it signals the transcending of the single self for the sake of the other. The same Mardian earlier noted that while he ‘can do nothing’ in deed (since he is incapable of having sexual intercourse) he nevertheless has ‘fierce affections’ and thinks of ‘What Venus did with Mars’ (I.5.15–18). And this particular image connects with others which resonate subliminally in the play and generate a richly ambiguous context for its loss of self and adultery; a morally neutral, androgynous space in which the dilution of the single self becomes a prelude, perhaps, to a more creative shared identity.

‘SINGLE NATURE’S DOUBLE NAME’

Before the sea-battle of Actium one of Antony’s loyal soldiers reminds him that the Romans have traditionally won their battles standing on the earth, the most solid of the four elements. ‘Let th’Egyptians | And the Phoenicians go a-ducking’ (III.7.63–4), the unnamed soldier urges his commander-in-chief, pleading with Antony to fight on land rather than follow Cleopatra into a sea-battle. But Antony pays no heed and by going ‘a-ducking’ turns, in Scarus’ words, into a ‘doting mallard’ (III.10.19); the metaphor contrasts Philo’s ‘dotage’ from the first line of the play and the Roman soldier’s ‘a-ducking’.

That martial Romans disintegrate at sea seems to be the implication of this exchange, and the ensuing defeat proves the point. It is also true, however, that water is the most creative and regenerative of all the elements, and the land of Egypt, as the Greek traveller and historian Herodotus famously wrote in his fifth-century BC Histories, was ‘a gift of the Nile’. Shakespeare’s play exhibits a distinct awareness of the exotic and mysterious cults associated with this most ancient of civilizations. Cleopatra’s impassioned desire to be flung stark-naked ‘on Nilus’ mud’ where the waterflies will blow her ‘into abhorring’ or for her ‘country’s high pyramides’ to become her gibbet show her to have been imagined as an integral part of that world (V.2.58–62). It is for good reasons that she is variously addressed and described as ‘Egypt’ (III.11.51, 56), ‘queen of Ptolemy’ (I.4.6) and ‘serpent of old Nile’ (I.5.25), since such figures of speech and titles ground her in this mysterious world where shapes and gender are only ever constant in flux.

Shakespeare’s primary source of information on Egypt was a text by Plutarch, the Moralia, which had been ‘Englished’ in 1603 as the Morals by the Elizabethan translator Philemon Holland. Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. AD 50–c. 120) was a prolific Greek chronicler and biographer whose writings, and particularly his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, were Shakespeare’s favourite source of information on the worlds of Rome and Ancient Greece. Among the most important mythographic essays in the Morals is the ‘Of Isis’, a text which Edmund Spenser had used several years earlier for The Faerie Queene (1590–96). Spenser, like Shakespeare and later John Milton, was intrigued by Egypt and its mystery cults, not least because the writings of Egypt were tantalizingly suggestive and yet indecipherable. The Greeks had called the mysterious script of Egypt ‘hieroglyphics’, that is divine carvings, and the Renaissance followed suit. In late-fifteenth-century Florence there arose an influential Neoplatonic tradition which held that the sacred writings of Egypt constituted a cabalistic tradition, a kind of Apocrypha; since Moses had grown up at the Egyptian court, he must have included bits of it in the revealed knowledge of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The cult of Isis thus inevitably also attracted Judaeo-Christian readings, and this is what Spenser did in his great poem. By aligning the mysteries of the ‘church of Isis’ in Book V with bisexual images such as Venus armata and the figure of Britomart, a disguised young woman bearing male armour in Books III and IV, Spenser set a trend in motion which Shakespeare followed. Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, the Garden of Adonis and the Temple of Venus, from The Faerie Queene (Books II–IV), all provide analogies to Antony’s predicament in Egypt. He is either in the grip of a Circean seductress who turns men into pigs, or he and Cleopatra become ‘mysterious’ through transcendent love, like John Donne’s lovers in his poem ‘The Canonization’ (published 1633) or Shakespeare’s own ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’.

In Plutarch’s essay, as in Spenser’s poem, Isis is associated with fertility myths and eternal re-creations. Plutarch relates how she pieced together her murdered brother–husband’s body from the parts that had been strewn all over the Nile, and how she succeeded in tracing every one of his parts except his penis which she had to remould. For Plutarch this cyclical ritual of dismembering and re-creation symbolizes the periodic floodings of the Nile, a seasonal event during which the excessive swellings of the river water the surrounding banks and deposit on them the fertile mud which provides the seed-beds of Egypt’s crops. Does a sense of this also lie behind Cleopatra’s ‘re-membering’ of Antony in the last act of the play? In the words of one of the most incisive writers on Antony and Cleopatra, ‘Like Isis, Cleopatra finds and restores, memorializes and consecrates Antony’s male identity: in the womblike receptive space of her female memory, suffused with sexual longing, he can live again’ (Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers).

The play’s rhetorical patterning associates Antony with this same watery cycle of flooding and excess through the use of the word ‘o’erflows’, which is applied to his love for Cleopatra in the second line of the play. In a sense of course Antony and Cleopatra is all about a massive swelling of overflowing rhetoric which is answerable only to Shakespeare’s imagination. The choice of ‘o’er’ against ‘over’ and Enobarbus’ similar preference for the elision in ‘o’erpicturing’ when describing Cleopatra (II.2.205) may be significant. If the manuscript behind the Folio is indeed Shakespeare’s, then the elisions are probably authorial. In each case the scansion requires a monosyllable for the line to be perfectly metrical, but the liquid effect resulting from the dropping of the medial ‘v’ in ‘o’er’ may have consolidated Shakespeare’s choice. Strategies at the micro-levels of scansion and phonology seem to chime with the play’s metaphors to render its rhetorical texture ever more fluid. The action moreover flows continuously in such a way that fluidity itself becomes one of its defining features. In the free-wheeling ride that is Antony and Cleopatra the stage empties no fewer than forty-two times, more than in any other Shakespearian play. The complete absence of scenic divisions in the Folio (apart from ‘Actus Primus. Scæna Prima’) brings this home further.

In the deep structure of Shakespeare’s play, as in The Faerie Queene, the story of Isis meshes with two other androgynous stories, both of which carry moral as well as mystical burdens: Hercules and Omphale, and Mars and Venus.

Shakespeare’s Antony appeals to his legendary pedigree when he exclaims:

Alcides is another name for Hercules, and the reference to the poisoned shirt of the centaur Nessus was familiar to Shakespeare from, among others, Metamorphoses IX by Ovid (43 BC–AD 17). Before dying from a wound inflicted by Hercules’ arrow, Nessus tricked Deianira into believing that his blood-soaked shirt would secure her husband Hercules’ undying love. Instead it killed him by burning itself into his flesh. A few scenes earlier Shakespeare had gone out of his way to align Antony with Hercules: when a mysterious music is suddenly heard under the earth one of Antony’s soldiers interprets it as, ‘’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, | Now leaves him’ (IV.3.17–18).

This beautiful cameo originates in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, the main source of the play, but there it was the god Bacchus who abandoned the luckless Antony. Although Antony is the archetypal reveller and a dedicated disciple of Bacchus, Shakespeare changes this to Hercules, because the enslavement of Hercules by the Amazon Omphale was one of the best-known stories in classical mythology. Plutarch uses it in ‘The Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius’, which rounds off The Life of Marcus Antonius: ‘as we see in painted tables, where Omphale secretly stealeth away Hercules’ club, and took his Lion’s skin from him. Even so Cleopatra oftentimes unarmed Antonius …’ (Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare). After subduing Hercules Omphale punished him by setting him to spin with a distaff and wheel. The image of Hercules at the wheel doing a menial woman’s task was emblematic of the unseemly subjugation of masculinity. It also, according to Sir Philip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry (1595), ‘breedeth both delight and laughter’ since ‘the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight and the scornfulness of the action stirreth laughter’. In this unmanned role Antony is indeed the ‘triple pillar of the world transformed | Into a strumpet’s fool’, as the Romans would have it at the very beginning of the play (I.1.12–13).

ROYAL TROLLOPS AND ROMAN COMMANDERS

The analogy of Antony with Hercules underlines Antony’s sexual servitude, and moral opprobrium at first also seems to underpin a complementary story, that of Mars and Venus. Their legendary adultery is related with some gusto by Ovid in Metamorphoses, the gist of it being that Mars and Venus conducted a liaison behind her husband Vulcan’s back. But he found out about them and created an ingenious, invisible net to ensnare them. When he did so he hoisted them up for all the gods to see as they lay naked in each other’s arms. But, instead of joining him in condemning the adulterers, the other gods laughed at Vulcan for thus advertising his own cuckolding; some of them even expressed a desire to be themselves caught with Venus in this fashion. Vulcan’s net may well lie behind Cleopatra’s welcoming Antony back from the skirmish outside Alexandria with: ‘Lord of lords! | O infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from | The world’s great snare uncaught?’ (IV.8.16–18). The divine adultery provides the Romans with the perfect image of their commander’s fall and is recalled in the acclaimed opening of the play. In their rich and complex use of metaphors and myth these lines reach down to its imaginative core. When we join it two Romans, Philo and Demetrius, are deep in conversation, and Philo begins:

Philo’s lampooning of Antony’s affair with Cleopatra cunningly recasts the Ovidian story of Mars and Venus. Its point was after all partly to show up the folly of old men, since the elderly and limping Vulcan (or Hephaistos in Greek) was ill-suited to the beautiful goddess of love. Youth will out in the end, and the dashing god of war provided the perfect match for Venus.

In Philo’s application of the story to Antony and Cleopatra there has been considerable slippage. Antony’s Mars-like eyes have not, it seems, alighted on the glorious face of a great beauty, but upon ‘a tawny front’ (I.1.6), a dark face; and far from reaping the pleasurable rewards of Venus, his brave martial (as it were) heart has instead become the ‘bellows’ fanning the lust of a gypsy. Not even her ‘love’, but the lascivious cravings of a middle-aged Egyptian siren is what Philo sees this Roman Mars servicing in Cleopatra. According to the Romans, by jeopardizing everything for Cleopatra the Mars-like Antony turns into a foolish Vulcan; and instead of a goddess, he is clutching an ageing trollop in his arms.

Her complexion and age are indeed an issue, as she herself acknowledges when she notes that she is ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black | And wrinkled deep in time’ (I.5.28–9). Acres of difference stretch between the perception of Cleopatra as a middle-aged Nubian courtesan and the queen of Egypt, who attributes her darkness to the loving embraces of Phoebus Apollo. She is no longer in those famous ‘salad days’ (73) when she was the youthful, alluring mistress of Julius Caesar. She was twenty-eight when she first met Antony (he was then forty-three), and during the action of the play she is in her mid to late thirties. Her love for Antony, she protests, is that much greater since he adores her in spite of her loss of youth and beauty.

Conventionally darkness in Elizabethan England was a flaw, and the audience could be expected, initially at least, to share the Roman view of Antony, and particularly because it is put with such brio by Philo. The word ‘dotage’ in the opening line is also its first conceptual phrase. In the early seventeenth century it primarily denoted infatuation rather than the foolishness of old age, the lack and loss of sound judgement. Demetrius, Philo’s interlocutor, is, however, not so easily swayed, and Philo therefore offers him visual proof: ‘Behold and see’ (I.1.13). And we join him to witness the world’s triple pillar and greatest soldier trade extravagant compliments with his Egyptian paramour.

The Roman view, not surprisingly, focuses on Antony’s loss ensuing on his relationship with Cleopatra. Although Shakespeare called his play Antony and Cleopatra, it has from time to time been read as if it were instead, as Lord David Cecil suggested, ‘the decline and fall of Antony’ (Poets and Story Tellers (1949)). If this were so, would Shakespeare not have given Antony major soliloquies to consider his predicament? After all, Othello has set pieces which express his anguish at the paralysing effect on the warrior of the collapse of his love for Desdemona. For Othello a mercenary captaincy is at stake, for Antony the dominion of the world. But we rarely see Antony alone, and for him Rome, when compared to his love for Cleopatra, rates as little more than ‘Grates me! The sum’ (I.1.18).

Heroic interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra are the natural corollary of a masculine imperial perspective which allows no scope to the feminine. Educated Elizabethans knew this from reading the most famous imperial poem of them all, the Aeneid by Virgil (70–19 BC