Making sense of a Shakespeare play can be a challenge; it usually takes me a couple of readings to get a handle on it. Antony And Cleopatra is much murkier; I need to peruse the scholarly criticisms before I could decide whether it was terrific or not very good at all.
This is not too embarrassing an admission. The play is famously hard to classify. It has the build-up of a comedy and the ending of a tragedy, so maybe label it a comi-tragedy, but then consider it’s also a history play built around a famous romance. With motivations changing all the time, it’s easy to bounce around on what is supposed to be happening.
It is also a rare Shakespeare sequel, stuffed to the rafters with some of the Bard’s most vibrant and beautiful language outside the sonnets:
ENOBARBUS
The barge she sat in like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them. [Act II, scene ii, lines 196-199]
Enobarbus
is relating the sight of Cleopatra, fabled queen of Egypt and conqueror of
Antony, the very married but always distracted Roman commander. Antony’s
dalliance has enraged his friend-turned-rival Octavian, who summons Antony back
to Rome. Antony agrees to give Cleopatra up and marry Octavian’s sister, if
only to head off civil war. But the pull of the Nile will not be denied for long.
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| Asked if it was true the parties of Cleopatra served eight whole boars to just a dozen guests, Enobarbus scoffs that was one of the poorer affairs. Here, Antony enjoys himself in Charles-Joseph Natoire's 18th-century painting "The Meal Of Cleopatra And Marc Antony." Image from https://pixels.com/featured/the-meal-of-cleopatra-and-marc-antony-charles-joseph-natoire.html |
If this is to be considered a tragedy, there is a question about what classic human flaw it is meant to address, like with Othello and suspicion, or MacBeth and power-lust. Antony is a captive of love, and it leads him to ruin, but the play doesn’t make a persuasive case against his fate, say by suggesting a lost opportunity for a better one.
Early in the play, Antony waves aside official duties with the breezy aside: “Kingdoms are clay. Our dungy earth alike/Feeds beast as man” [I, i, 35-36]. The rest of the play validates the wisdom of this sentiment, as ill fortune and regular betrayals deposit Antony, the greater man, into the ashheap of Octavian’s ambitions. It’s not a world worth ruling.
Of course, to hear Antony’s fellow Romans explain it, everything is Cleopatra’s fault. They do have a point.
In the play’s decisive moment, just before the battle of Actium, a soldier tries to persuade Antony to fight Octavian by land, not by sea. Octavian has the better navy, and Antony’s army is larger and better positioned. Antony tells him to shut up. Cleopatra, it seems, wants a sea battle:
SOLDIER
By Hercules, I think I am i’ th’ right.
CANIDIUS
Soldier, thou art, but his whole action grows
Not in the power on ’t. So our leader’s led,
And we are women’s men.
[III, vii, 67-70]
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| While the fates of Egypt and Rome hung in the balance, Greece was the site of the climactic battle between Octavian (forces in red above) and Antony and Cleopatra (purple). In the play, Antony's defeat seems a matter of fate; history says desertion and malaria were also factors. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Actium |
Cleopatra should be the play’s heavy. There are times in it where she does callous and wantonly destructive things to the man who loves her. But we reject the Roman verdict of her as a dusky beguiler. She cares too much about the people around her, and lives too deeply in the shadows of age and loneliness, for her to be anything but sympathetic.
Her interactions with her servants are deeper and more full-hearted than we are used to seeing in Shakespeare’s rigidly-observed class boundaries. While we are told about her magnificence, we are also reminded of her frailty. When one of her serving women upbraids her for being dismissive of Antony, she responds that being too nice to her lover is the fastest way to lose him.
Later, reminded of her words for another lover, Julius Caesar, she sighs:
CLEOPATRA
My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then.
[I, v, 73-75]
The passage of time is Antony And Cleopatra’s strongest takeaway. I am not sure whether that is to the play’s benefit. As a message it resonates, and Shakespeare finds many ways to bring this tempus fugit theme to the fore. But as a story arc it lacks for incident and dramatic tension.
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| But that your royalty/Holds idleness your subject, I should take you/For idleness itself. [I, iii, 91-92] Antony (Patrick Stewart) finds himself unable to leave Cleopatra (Harriet Walter) even to save his empire, in a scene from a 2006 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Photo by Pascal Molliere from https://www.rsc.org.uk/antony-and-cleopatra/about-the-play/dates-and-sources |
You can say the first three acts of Antony And Cleopatra involve much standing around and talking and very little else. After the play establishes the title pair as a couple, it wastes little time separating them. Antony talks big but seems belittled by everyone around him, especially Octavian, while Cleopatra sits alone in her palace at Alexandria, fretting developments out of her control.
The main incident worth remembering is not dramatic but comic, that being her exchange with a messenger charged to bring the unhappy news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia:
CLEOPATRA
What say you? [Strikes him.]
Hence, horrible villain, or I’ll spurn thine eyes
Like balls before me! I’ll unhair thy head!
[She hales him up and down.]
Thou shalt be whipped with wire and stewed in
brine,
Smarting in ling’ring pickle. [II, v, 62-66]
Brutalizing servants shouldn’t be this funny, but Shakespeare delivers a moment at once both poignant and slapstick. We actually enjoy Cleopatra more while she sends the messenger away in flight; it helps that she is contrite and complimentary when she summons him back shortly after (in a bit that is also quite funny for how it develops.)
In addition to the comedy there, you also have Enobarbus, Antony’s sardonic lieutenant, who has a withering appreciation for the absurdity on display, fearlessly mocking the pretentions of others. Then there’s Lepidus, third member of the Octavian-Antony troika and a withering satire on spineless, clueless political leadership, unfailingly manipulated by Octavian until his usefulness ends.)
Over time, tragedy intrudes, but comedy never entirely goes away. Even Antony’s suicide seems a send-up of elements in other Shakespeare plays. In Julius Caesar everyone seemed capable of dispatching themselves, yet here Antony bungles the job, and later gets ignominiously dumped at his lover’s side, whining to his last.
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| Even Cleopatra's famous death scene makes room for the black comedy of a simple man (dubbed "A Clown" in Shakespeare's text) who brings her a venomous asp for suicidal ends, jokes about its lethal propensities, and wishes her "all joy of the worm." Image from https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/queen-cleopatra-when-die-how-killed-who-was-mark-antony/ |
The play is quite marvelous in its particulars, full of arresting characterizations and brilliant dialogue, but I still find myself with the same question I had when I started. Is it really that good?
The company Antony And Cleopatra keep doesn’t help. Despite being the greatest writer in human history, Shakespeare did produce some duds, but in the period leading up to Antony And Cleopatra, he banged out much of his best work: Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth, King Lear. Any play suffers from comparison with them.
In 1909, scholar A. C. Bradley addressed this head on in a lecture given at Oxford University: “One may notice that, in calling Antony And Cleopatra wonderful and astonishing, we appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the case of the famous four tragedies it is the product of this activity, the thing presented, that engrosses us.”
There is much to this, I think. Certainly the Signet Classic people thought so including it in my old paperback edition. As a play, Antony And Cleopatra is a spectacle with moments of great power and beauty, but the story sputters. It’s more tone poem than drama; working up high emotions at the expense of sequential development. The couple squabble, they separate, they reunite, they face doom together:
ANTONY
Come,
Let’s have one other gaudy night. Call to me
All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more.
Let’s mock the midnight bell. [III, xiii, 182-185]
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| Octavian is presented in the play as a cold schemer, unwilling to unbend even a little at a party celebrating a temporary peace. Above, Jolyon Coy as Octavian endures the spiffed camaraderie of Clive Wood's Antony in a 2014 Shakespeare's Globe (London) production. Photo by Manuel Harlan from https://officiallondontheatre.com/news/antony-and-cleopatra-229224/ |
Reading this play after Julius Caesar, as I did, set me up for disappointment. That play is a masterpiece of structure; this is not. Antony in that other play is dynamic and drives much of the action; here he can only talk about his past greatness and wimpily ask Octavian: “Make me not offended/In your distrust” [III, ii, 32-33] to which Octavian responds by doubling down on his disrespect.
Cleopatra eventually emerges as the more important character; Shakespeare devotes the final act to her. She displays ample narcissism and deceit, but in a way that seems like a personality tic. Her only fatal flaw may be mortality. Age cannot wither her, we are famously told, but she knows her time is running out, and like Antony wants to make the most of it.
The fact they do this may be Antony and Cleopatra’s perverse triumph; perverse of course because they don’t succeed at all in the confines of the play. Theirs is another kind of triumph, ephemeral in our world but more lasting in ways that engage us beyond the sphere of battlefields, of legends who together knew what it was to have lived life to its brim:
CLEOPATRA
Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought
For things that others do; and when we fall,
We answer others’ merits in our name –
Are therefore to be pitied. [V, ii, 176-179]
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