In Plutarch's "Life of Marcus Antonius," Antony claims descent from Anton, son of Hercules. To Shakespeare's Cleopatra he is a "Herculean Roman." His allegiance to the greatest of the mythical heroes is strengthened by the strange scene in the fourth act, when music of hautboys is heard under the stage and the second soldier offers the interpretation that "the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him." The memorable image of Antony and Cleopatra wearing each other's clothes, the "sword Philippan" exchanged for the woman's "tires and mantles," thus comes to suggest the cross-dressing not only of Mars and Venus (i.e. war and love), but also of the strong-armed hero Hercules and Omphale, the Lydian queen who subdued his will and set him to work spinning among her maids. The latter tale was often moralized in the Renaissance as a warning against female wiles.
But Shakespeare enjoys the staging of Cleopatra's allure. Although the "Life of Marcus Antonius" shows more than usual interest in the main female character, the historical structure of Plutarch's narratives was always premised on the lives of his male heroes. Shakespeare's play alters this focus to emphasize the death of the woman, not that of the warrior, as the climax of the story. The female perspective stands in opposition to the male voice that orders the march of history. In tone and language Antony and Cleopatra may be described as a "feminized" classical tragedy: Egyptian cookery, luxuriant daybeds, and a billiard-playing eunuch contrast with the rigors of Roman architecture and senatorial business.
OVERFLOWING THE MEASURE
Though Octavius is political victor, all the poetry of the play has been on the Egyptian side. From the first intimation that "There's not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now" to the final enrobing for the serpent's kiss of death, the language of Cleopatra works its magic upon the listener. Theater's power to create illusion and poetry's power to create beauty are of a piece with her seductive arts.
The first line of the play is only completed in the second: "Nay, but this dotage of our general's O'erflows the measure" says Philo, a Roman soldier whose name evokes the Greek word for "love." From the Roman point of view it is a monstrous embarrassment that one of the three men who rule their great empire should be disporting himself like an infatuated teenager. Perhaps he is indeed entering his dotage, approaching the second childhood of old age. From the Egyptian point of view, the power of desire is on the contrary something that transcends the petty world of tribal politics. Antony is torn between the two worlds: one moment he kisses Cleopatra and says "The nobleness of life Is to do thus," yet the next he says "These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage."
Romanness meant stoically controlling the passions within the restraint of reason. When Roman restraint is abandoned on Pompey's ship, the world is rocked--and politics dissolves into comedy. In Egypt, sensual indulgence is the game. Love is imagined as something that neither can nor should be controlled or measured. Its capacity is infinite. The love of Antony and Cleopatra "find[s] out new earth, new heaven." And love's medium is poetry: in this play Shakespeare gives his lyrical powers freer rein than ever before or after. Though the opening lines are spoken by a Roman, their style is loyal to Cleopatra: the sentence overflows the measure of the pentameter line, preparing the way for the liquid imagery of Egypt--with the fertile River Nile at its heart--that will overcome the measured rigidity of Rome.
Against the grain of the Renaissance idealization of the age of Augustus, Antony and Cleopatra depicts Octavius as a mealy-mouthed pragmatist. The play is concerned less with the seismic shift from republic to empire than with the transformation of Mark Antony from military leader to slave of sexual desire: "Take but good note, and you shall see in him / The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet's fool." To Roman eyes, eros (fittingly, the name of Antony's armorer) renders Antony undignified to the point of risibility. But the sweep of the play's poetic language all the way through to its closing speech--"No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous"--celebrates the glory and magnanimity of the lovers, whose imagined erotic union in death is symbolic of cosmic harmony.
Octavius himself has to admit that the dead Cleopatra looks as if "she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace": "toil" is sweatily sexual, but "grace" suggests that even the most Roman character of them all is now seeing Antony and Cleopatra as something other than self-deluding dotards. The aura of Cleopatra's last speech is still hanging in the air; the power of the poetic language has been such that a sensitive listener will half-believe that Cleopatra has left her baser elements and become all "fire and air." She is, as Charmian so superbly puts it, "A lass unparalleled": just one of the girls, but also the unique queen and serpent, embodiment of the Nile's fertility and the heat of life itself.
The forms of Shakespeare's verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme only features as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but "run on" (a feature known as "enjambment"): instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines, where they are known as the "caesura" and where their placing varies. A single line of verse is shared between two speakers much more frequently than in the early plays. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument: the iambic beat is broken up, and there is often an extra ("redundant") unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (this is known as a "feminine ending"). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended.
Iambic pentameter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple mature Shakespearean "loose pentameter" is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor. Antony and Cleopatra is, simply from the point of view of its sustaining of a lyrical poetic voice, Shakespeare's most beautiful play. Speech after speech soars like music while being grounded in precision of image.
Most famously, there is Enobarbus' description of Antony's first sight of Cleopatra. Plutarch's Lives must have been open on Shakespeare's desk as he composed the scene. The Egyptian queen is at Cydnus, splendidly attired and throned in state upon her barge:
The poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereids (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf's side, pestered with in
numerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all along the river's side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the marketplace, in his imperial seat to give audience.
Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and an appreciative ear. Where the director of a modern musical would tell his designer to build that barge, Shakespeare let his audience fashion the scene in their imagination by turning the prose of Plutarch's English translator, Sir Thomas North, into richly evocative verse:
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: the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
...
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i'th'eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i'th'marketplace, did sit alone,
Whistling to th'air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.
Our modern conception of genius makes creativity synonymous with originality. In matters artistic, there is no more severe accusation than that of plagiarism. A modern student might therefore be surprised to see how closely Shakespeare followed--stole--the shape of his model. The barge and all its accoutrements, the apparel of Cleopatra herself, her gorgeous attendants, the common people running out of the city to gaze upon the exotic queen, imperial Antony left alone on his throne in the marketplace: each successive detail is lifted straight from the source.
But to the Elizabethans, this procedure would have been admirable, not reprehensible. For them, there was no higher mark of artistic excellence than what they called the "lively turning" of familiar material. This was the art of "copiousness" that they were taught in school: take a piece of received wisdom (a proverb, a phrase, a historical incident, a story out of ancient myth), turn it on the anvil of your inventiveness, and you will give it new life. The art is in the embellishment.
The fluidity of the meter plays as big a part in the animation as the enrichment of the language. Line after line is run on, as Enobarbus becomes carried away by the scene that he is conjuring up. Particular energy comes from the placing of verbs at the end of the line: "made," "lie," "see," "seem," "cast." We are carried forward by the desire to discover the object of each verb.
Shakespeare takes the golden poop and the purple sails from North's Plutarch, but adds "and so perfumed that / The winds were lovesick with them." Where the historian has offered mere description, the dramatist adds reaction. He imagines the wind being affected by Cleopatra's aura. Then the water follows suit: the strokes of the oars and their musical accompaniment are in Plutarch, but in Shakespeare the water falls in love even as it is beaten. That pain and love have something to do with each other is a thought he developed later in the play, when Cleopatra compares the stroke of death to a lover's pinch "Which hurts and is desired." In Plutarch, Cleopatra is like a picture of Venus, the goddess of love; in Shakespeare, she out-pictures the best imaginable picture of Venus.
The poet proves his art by transforming the historian's plain simile into an astonishingly complex effect: a work of art usually imitates nature, whereas the very best work of art seems to "out-work" nature, whereas Cleopatra surpasses even that. So does her allure come from nature or from art? Through the poet's imagination, Cleopatra can contrive her goddess-like appearance so that the very elements of nature--first the winds and the waves, then the rope of the tackle, then the stone of the wharf, and finally the air itself--fall in love with her. After this, is it surprising that Antony does so too? Soon he will vacate that throne on which he has been left in the empty marketplace, looking rather ridiculous. The image of vacation becomes symbolic of the whole process of the play, whereby politics and power are left behind, so strong is the allure of Cleopatra's erotic aura. Such is Shakespeare's quickness of mind and fertility of imagination that, Cleopatra-like, he makes effects of art seem like effusions of nature.
Shakespeare certainly acted in his own early plays, but probably not his later ones. He is unlikely to have written a role for himself in Antony and Cleopatra. But the role of Enobarbus, the admiring yet detached witness who speaks these lines, feels as if it corresponds to his own point of view. Shakespeare is a realist as well as a romantic, a skilled politician as well as a supreme poet; he is equally capable of imagining Antony's dramatic trajectory as a rise and as a fall. He is perpetually both inside and outside the action, both an emotionally involved participant in the world he creates and a wry commentator upon it. So he invented a new character, the only major player in the story who is absent from the historical source: Enobarbus. His consciousness is vital to the audience because he seems to offer the perspective of an Egyptian in Rome and a Roman in Egypt. Intelligent, funny, at once companionable and guardedly isolated, full of understanding and admiration for women but most comfortable among men (there is a homoerotic frisson to his bond with Menas and his rivalry with Agrippa), clinically analytical in his assessment of others but full of sorrow and shame when his reason overrides his loyalty and leads him to desert his friend and master, Enobarbus is as rewarding a role as any that Shakespeare wrote. And it might just be the nearest thing anywhere in his complete works to a considered self-portrait.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format "Quartos" published in Shakespeare's lifetime and the elaborately produced "First Folio" text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Antony and Cleopatra, however, exists only in a Folio text. In places it is poorly printed, so editorial emendation is often necessary. It is unfortunate that there is no Quarto text for comparison. The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays: Antony and Cleopatra is not one of them, so t
he list here is editorial. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus "Mark ANTONY").
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Antony and Cleopatra is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations ("another part of the palace"). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Antony and Cleopatra, the key aspect of location is the movement between Egypt and Rome.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King's Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare's fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.