Antony and Cleopatra (3 page)

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.

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 the 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.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as
prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half-line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semi-colons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in
our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

Entrances and Exits
are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[
and Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

Editorial Stage Directions
such as stage business, asides, or indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as
directorial
interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a different typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an
Aside
?. (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a
may exit
or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.

Line Numbers
in the left margin are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.

Explanatory Notes
at the foot of each page explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.

Textual Notes
at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “F2” indicating a reading that derives from the Second Folio of 1632, “F3” one that derives from the Third Folio of 1663–64, “F4” one that derives from the Fourth Folio of 1685, and “Ed” one that derives from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. Thus, for example: “
3.6.14 he there
= Ed. F = hither” means that at Act 3/Scene 6/line 14, the Folio compositor erroneously printed “hither” and we have followed editorial tradition in emending to “he there.”

MAJOR PARTS:
(
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Mark Antony (24%/202/22), Cleopatra (19%/204/16), Octavius Caesar (12%/98/14), Enobarbus (10%/113/12), Pompey (4%/41/3), Charmian (3%/63/10), Lepidus (2%/30/6), Menas (2%/35/3), Agrippa (2%/28/7), Dolabella (1%/23/3), Eros (1%/27/6), Scarrus (1%/12/4).

LINGUISTIC MEDIUM:
95% verse, 5% prose.

DATE:
1606–07. Perhaps performed at court Christmas 1606 or Christmas 1607. Registered for publication in May 1608 (though not actually published prior to the First Folio); it seems to have influenced a play by Barnabe Barnes that was performed and published in 1607.

SOURCES:
Closely based on the “Life of Marcus Antonius” in Plutarch’s
Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romanes
, translated by Thomas North (1579); there are some exceptionally close verbal parallels. The main addition is the character of Enobarbus, who is only mentioned very briefly in Plutarch. Shakespeare also seems to have known Samuel Daniel’s
Cleopatra
(1594, a play written to be read rather than performed); Daniel, in turn, seems to have been influenced by Shakespeare when revising his play in 1607.

TEXT:
The First Folio of 1623 is the only early text. Apparently set from a scribal transcript of Shakespeare’s manuscript, it is notably inconsistent in the spelling of proper names and has a plethora of minor errors but few major ones.