Antony and Cleopatra (2 page)

If James regarded himself as an Augustus, his detractors saw him as an Antony insofar as his court was characterized by extravagance and profligacy. Whereas proponents of the Augustan ideal busied themselves erecting Roman triumphal arches in the streets of London in honor of the new king, Shakespeare’s Antony says “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall: here is my space.” The space of the play is indeed a space of play, and especially sexual play. Again, this was risky matter, given that James’s court was beginning to gain a reputation as a place of sexual freedom sharply contrasting to the aura of chastity surrounding his predecessor, the Virgin Queen, who in this regard was the very opposite of Cleopatra. “Authority melts from me,” says Antony. He loses his martial identity in a torrent of images of dissolving, discandying, dislimning. To some at court, this might have been perceived as a warning to King James. The king himself, one suspects, would have
enjoyed the debate between austere Roman and sensuous Egyptian worlds: he loved nothing more than a good argument.

Plutarch’s greatest importance for Shakespeare was his way of writing history through biography. He taught the playwright that the little human touch often says more than the large impersonal historical force. Plutarch explained his method in the “Life of Alexander”:

So too in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. It is the particular occasion, the single word, the moment of tenderness or jest, that humanizes the superpower politicians. One thinks of Brutus and Cassius making up after their quarrel in
Julius Caesar
, of the defeated Cleopatra remembering that it is her birthday, or of Caius Martius exhausted from battle forgetting the name of the man who has helped him in Corioles where he earns the surname Coriolanus.

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.

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:

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:

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 perfumèd 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.