Antony and Cleopatra

• 1. Introduction

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  'Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety': Enobarbus says this about Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Four centuries of argument have proved him right about her complexity. The King's Men first performed the play around 1607, at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe. It did not reach print until the First Folio of 1623.

  Shakespeare gave this play forty separate scenes, more than he used for any other work. The action crosses Alexandria, Rome, Athens, Messina in Sicily, Syria, and other parts of the ancient world without pause. Thirty-four speaking characters move through these scenes, pulled between two empires that share almost nothing in common.

  The plot follows the Roman triumvir Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. It runs from the period of the Sicilian revolt to the War of Actium. Their antagonist is Octavius Caesar, the future first emperor of Rome. A soothsayer warns Antony that he is sure to lose any contest against Octavius. That warning turns out to be correct.

  The question the play refuses to settle is who exactly Cleopatra is. Is she a skilled ruler using every instrument of power available to her? Or is she the seductress who brings down one of the most powerful men in the ancient world? Four hundred years of critical argument have not produced an answer.

• 2. North's Translation

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  Thomas North published his English translation of Plutarch's 'Life of Mark Antony' in 1579, drawing on a French version rather than the original Greek. Shakespeare took the play's most famous speech almost verbatim from North's prose. North described Cleopatra sailing on the river of Cydnus, her barge topped with gold, sails purple and oars silver. Shakespeare gave the same image to Enobarbus: 'The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water.'

  In Plutarch, Enobarbus is a minor figure. Shakespeare expanded his role dramatically, making him the play's clearest moral eye. When Antony's troops desert and Enobarbus himself goes over to Octavius, Antony's response is not rage. He sends after Enobarbus the goods that Enobarbus left behind when he fled. Enobarbus is so overwhelmed by this generosity, and so ashamed of his disloyalty, that he dies of a broken heart.

  Shakespeare also added scenes depicting Cleopatra's domestic life, giving her an inner existence Plutarch never provided. The historical timeline was compressed. In Plutarch, Octavia lived with Antony for several years and bore him two daughters. Antonia Major became the paternal grandmother of the Emperor Nero. Antonia Minor was the mother of the Emperor Claudius and the paternal grandmother of the Emperor Caligula.

  The surviving text contains minor errors in speech labels and stage directions. These suggest the script was set from what scholars call Shakespeare's 'foul papers': his working draft, still in the process of composition. The compressed timeline and expanded Enobarbus give Shakespeare something Plutarch never had: a play where Rome and Egypt carry equal dramatic weight.

• 3. Rome and Egypt

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  Critic James Hirsh has identified four distinct perspectives in the play, not two. There is Rome as Romans see it, Rome as Egyptians see it, Egypt as Egyptians see it, and Egypt as Romans see it. Each version differs sharply from the others.

  From the Roman perspective, Egypt is a place of moral failure. A passage at 1.4.31-33 puts it plainly: the men drawn to Egypt 'pawn their experience to their present pleasure, / And so rebel judgment.' Antony's devotion to Cleopatra is, in Roman terms, irrational and disgraceful.

  Mary Floyd-Wilson has used the term 'geo-humoralism' to describe the Egyptian worldview: a belief that climate and environment shape character. Cleopatra says she has been formed by 'the dung, / The beggar's nurse and Caesar's' (5.2.7-8). Egypt is not a place she rules; it is an extension of herself.

  Critic Donald Freeman has described a 'container' schema running through the play. Rome is a measuring cup: confining and limited. At 1.1.34-36, Antony cries: 'Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space!' For Antony, Egypt is the only domain large enough to contain him. Freeman describes Antony's end as the failure of his Roman 'container.' It 'dislimns,' in Freeman's phrase: it can no longer outline or define Antony, even to himself.

  Cleopatra's line at 5.2.289-290 draws on a different cosmology. She declares: 'I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life.' Critic Mary Thomas Crane has noted that Egyptians throughout the play perceive their world through the Aristotelian framework of earth, wind, fire, and water. Romans, by contrast, imagine themselves above the natural world and able to control it. The Aristotelian system was a waning theory in Shakespeare's time.

  Paul Lawrence Rose has argued that the political attitudes in the play mirror sixteenth-century English debates. Octavius Caesar, cold and effective, represents a Tudor ideal of the king whose genius shows in calculation. Some critics have compared Cleopatra's power, which the play characterises as 'naked, hereditary, and despotic,' to the reign of Mary Tudor. Shakespeare's portrayal of Egypt has been read as nostalgia for a pre-seventeenth-century cosmos. In that vanishing worldview, subject and world were deeply interconnected and saturated with meaning.

• 4. Four Centuries of Argument

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  T.S. Eliot called Cleopatra 'no wielder of power' and argued that her 'devouring sexuality...diminishes her power.' He referred to her repeatedly as 'thing' rather than as a person. This was the dominant critical view through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars of that era saw Cleopatra as an object to be explained and dismissed rather than a ruler to be taken seriously.

  Georg Brandes called her 'the woman of women, quintessentiated Eve.' He and his contemporaries used the serpent imagery in the play to undermine Cleopatra's political authority. In their readings, the serpent represented temptation and feminine weakness. It placed both Cleopatra's body and the kingdom it embodied under Roman imperial power.

  L.T. Fitz identified a problem with this entire critical tradition. She argued that critical approaches to the play are coloured by the sexist assumptions critics bring with them. Fitz pointed to a structural fact: Antony dies in Act IV, but Cleopatra dominates Act V until her suicide. If the protagonist is the character who carries the tragic action through to its conclusion, Cleopatra fulfills that role.

  Scholar Jonathan Gil Harris observed that both Caesar and Antony harbour uncontrollable desires of their own. Caesar's is political; Antony's is personal. The play shows Antony developing desire for his wife Fulvia only after her death, quoting him at 1.2.119-124: 'she's good, being gone.' If Romans cannot govern their own desires, Harris argues, the hierarchy that places rational Rome above emotional Egypt does not hold.

  Estelle Parsons' adaptation at the Interart Theatre in New York City showed how productively modern productions could rethink these questions. Parsons replaced standard costume contrasts with ethnic differences in speech, gesture, and movement. The Romans became upstarts from the West who lacked finesse and polish. Doris Adler has argued that Cleopatra cannot be studied in isolation from the cultural milieu of each production. The character exists, in Adler's view, in performance rather than on the page.

• 5. The Boy on Stage

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  In Act Five, Scene Two, Cleopatra imagines the humiliation of Roman captivity. She pictures watching 'some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I'th' posture of a whore' (V.ii.214-217). As she speaks those lines, a boy actor is doing exactly that to her on Shakespeare's stage.

  Phyllis Rackin has noted that Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra arriving on the Cydnus could never be physically conveyed by a young boy actor. Shakespeare's strategy was to evoke Cleopatra's grandeur through language alone. Before the boy playing Cleopatra could convey her greatness, Rackin writes, he first had to remind the audience he could not truly represent it.

  Cleopatra herself recalls putting her own 'tires and mantles' on Antony 'whilst / I wore his sword Philippan' (II.v.22-23). Gordon P. Jones has argued that the play may have opened with this exchange of clothing still visible on stage. Evidence includes Enobarbus' error near the play's opening, when he announces 'here comes Antony' and Charmian corrects him: 'Not he; the queen.'

  Jones also notes the connection between Antony and Hercules, whom the play identifies as an ancestor of Antony. In Greek myth, Hercules was forced to wear Queen Omphale's clothing while in her service. An Antony who appeared in Cleopatra's garments at the play's opening would have made the Hercules parallel unmistakable to Shakespeare's first audience.

  Charles Forker has argued that women were excluded from the London stage for what he calls their 'own sexual protection.' The patriarchal structure of Elizabethan society made it intolerable, in Forker's view, to see English women in sexually compromising situations on stage. Tracey Sedinger has read the 'squeaking Cleopatra' speech as Shakespeare's critique of that same stage. By placing that line in Cleopatra's mouth, Shakespeare drew his audience's attention to the mechanism that controlled female sexuality in public performance.

• 6. The Aeneid's Echo

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  Janet Adelman has argued that almost all the central elements of the play appear in Virgil's first-century epic, the Aeneid. These elements include Rome's opposition to a foreign passion and the political necessity of a loveless Roman marriage. They also include the concept of an afterlife where the two lovers meet again.

  In the Aeneid, Dido, ruler of the north African city of Carthage, tempts the Trojan hero Aeneas to abandon his destiny. Aeneas is meant to found Rome after the fall of Troy. Dido's love threatens to divert him, and he resists and leaves her. The historical Antony and Cleopatra were understood in Renaissance culture as the real-world prototypes for this fictional story. Aeneas chose political duty over love. Antony did not.

  Heather James has argued that Shakespeare's references to the Aeneid are not tributes but subversions. Cleopatra's dream at 5.2.75, in which she imagines 'an Emperor Antony,' is James's central example. James argues that in the dream, Cleopatra 'reconstructs the heroic masculinity of an Antony whose identity has been fragmented and scattered by Roman opinion.' The dream refuses the Roman verdict on who Antony was.

  Cleopatra kills herself using the bite of an asp, imagining she will meet Antony again in the afterlife. Octavius Caesar orders a public military funeral for both of them. Their deaths leave him free to rule, though he feels some sympathy for them. But the dream Cleopatra narrates in Act Five, Scene Two is still running counter to his account of events. It has been doing so for four centuries.