Antony and Cleopatra—William Shakespeare

I am dying, Egypt, dying

An early depiction of Antony and Cleopatra, models unknown

Written in 1606 by a forty-two-year-old Shakespeare (or possibly by the Earl of Oxford’s ghost), Antony and Cleopatra deals with a crucial moment in Roman history, the collapse of the triumvirate. When the play begins, the three coequal rulers, Octavius Caesar, Marc Antony, and Lepidus, control different regions of the extensive Roman territory. By the end, Octavius rules alone. Thus, while Julius Caesar, which I described last week, takes place at Rome’s moment of transition from a republic to an empire, this play covers the consolidation of all power into a single person.

Of all the Shakespearean plays I’ve read so far, this one gave me the most trouble on even the shallowest level. I blame two things, apart from my own ignorance: First, Shakespeare wrote almost the entire play in verse, replete with metaphors and brilliant or lofty turns of phrases that required twice the effort on my part that “plain” Shakespearean prose would have taken. I felt at times as though the characters, particularly Cleopatra, declaim at one another rather than converse. Secondly, the action bounces from Italy to Sicily to Egypt to Greece to Syria in a dizzying manner. Act Three contains thirteen scenes, and Act Four, fifteen, some of them no longer than four lines. Entire battles take one minute; journeys across the Mediterranean Sea occur between adjacent scenes. This kind of scattershot narrative made it hard for me to get my bearings. I had to wonder how anyone could stage this play in a theater. At least in a movie, a location overlay or two would help. But theatrical scene changes take more than a movie cut.

As the play opens, Marc Antony and Cleopatra romp and play together in Alexandria, while gossip back at Rome runs rampant. But when Antony gets word that his wife, Fulvia, has died and Pompey has attacked Rome, he decides he had better make an appearance back home. Upon his return, it seems that a strategic marriage might smooth things over. So Antony marries Octavius’s sister, Octavia, and when Cleopatra hears about this, she nearly kills the poor messenger. Fortunately, he calms her down by telling her how homely Octavia looks. Antony’s trip to Rome bears other good fruit, too, for the three Roman leaders meet with Pompey and work out a truce: if Pompey stops attacking Roman ships he gets to rule all of Sicily and Sardinia. Everything looks fine, but only for a moment. As soon as Antony slips back to his queenly girlfriend, Octavius decides he doesn’t like sharing with others and all hell breaks loose. He double-crosses everyone and wages war against Antony. During the last half of the play, Antony makes some bad military choices and Octavius presses his advantage. Antony’s love life suffers along with his military campaign. The crisis occurs when, after an argument, Cleopatra has a messenger tell Antony she has killed herself, apparently just to rattle him. Now begins the play’s final phase.

When I started reading the play, I imagined Antony and Cleopatra as a tragedy, despite a growing suspicion that Cleopatra acts like a bratty narcissist and Antony acts like a gawky teenager trying to impress the most popular girl at the prom. But Antony’s death scene strains my credulity past the breaking point. When Antony mistakenly believes the news of Cleopatra’s death, he runs himself through with his sword. Unfortunately, like some character in a Coen brothers film, he doesn’t quite die. So when he gets a “just kidding” message from Cleopatra, he has himself carried to the tower where she’s hiding so he can bid her a fond farewell. Imagine, if you will, the following exchange as if played by Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn.

ANTONY: I am dying, Egypt, dying; only

Here I importune death awhile, until

Of many thousand kisses the poor last

I lay upon thy lips.

CLEOPATRA: I dare not, dear.

Dear my lord, pardon! I dare not …

Here she explains that she really doesn’t want to risk getting captured by Octavius, so she won’t come downstairs to kiss the dying Antony. He has to come up to her. I now picture her and her two female attendants grunting and sweating to hoist Antonio up the side of the tower in a makeshift rope sling. Cleopatra takes charge.

CLEOPATRA: Help me, my women—we must draw thee up;

Assist, good friends.

ANTONY: O, quick, or I am gone.

CLEOPATRA: Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!

Our strength is all gone into heaviness;

That makes the weight. Had I great Juno’s power,

The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up,

And set thee by Jove’s side. Yet come a little.

Wishers were ever fools. O come, come, come,

[They heave ANTONY aloft to CLEOPATRA]

And welcome, welcome! Die where thou hast liv’d.

Quicken with kissing. Had my lips that power,

Thus would I wear them out.

Here, I picture everyone looking at the audience and saying in unison,

ALL: A heavy sight!

Then everyone goes back into character.

ANTONY: I am dying, Egypt, dying.

Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.

CLEOPATRA: No, let me speak; and let me rail so high

That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel,

Provok’d by my offence. …

Finally, the dying Antony gets in a word edgewise, and tells her not to cry, but instead to remember his brave nobility.

ANTONY: The miserable change now at my end

Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thought

In feeding them with those my former fortunes

Wherein I liv’d the greatest prince o’ the’ world,

The noblest; and do now not basely die,

Not cowardly put off my helmet to

My countryman—a Roman by a Roman

Valiantly vanquish’d. Now my spirit is going

I can no more.

Then Cleopatra berates him for his selfishness at dying.

CLEOPATRA: Noblest of men, woo’t die?

Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty? …

Don’t you agree that Madeline Kahn would have delivered those lines perfectly? And much earlier in the play, when waiting for news of Antony, can’t you hear her voice leaving no doubt in our minds that she misses him in the worst way when she says, upon the messenger’s arrival:

CLEOPATRA: O! From Italy?

Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears,

That long time have been barren.

Maybe I see satire when I should see pathos, or maybe it just took me till the final scene to see the two regal lovers as a bungler and a prima donna. I think I kept waiting for soliloquies wherein the lovers would reveal their innermost hopes and desires. The play has none of that, so I had trouble finding the psychological core in either Antony or Cleopatra. The fourth wall never comes down, so our knowledge of anyone’s motives comes from what we can infer from their public actions and from what other characters say about them. We get multiple perspectives on each but no core.

When authors and reliable narrators refuse us entry into the mind of a character, we must attribute motivations and values ourselves. But how do we know for sure that we musn’t rule out irony? So, I like to think I detect a bit of self-mockery in this play. Shakespeare could easily have written that finale as a parody of the garden scene in Romeo and Juliet. Cleopatra has children while Antony has lost one wife and now cheats on his second, but they act like hormone-addled teens. Maybe they can’t go at it like two Veronese virgins, but they sure can do the best with what they’ve got.

Of course everything depends on how the producer interprets the play. As the producer of my own imagination, I tried out more than one approach. For example, in Act Two, Scene Seven, Octavius, Lepidus, Antony, and Pompey all celebrate their truce with a big party. Lepidus gets so drunk he can hardly stand. Should I imagine him as played by the doomed Albert Finney of Under the Volcano, or the ridiculous Jimmy Stewart of The Philadelphia Story? At the same party, an underling takes Pompey aside and tells him of a plot to assassinate the entire triumvirate that very night, thereby conquering Rome in one stroke. But Pompey says, essentially, “Oh, man! Why did you have to tell me?”

POMPEY: Ah, this thou should’st have done,

And not have spoken on’t. In me, ‘tis villainy:

In thee’t had been good service. Thou must know

‘Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour:

Mine honour, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue

Hath so betray’d thine act. Being done unknown,

I should have found it afterwards well done,

But must condemn it now. Desist and drink.

I love that beautiful piece of managerial hypocrisy, but I could imagine it spoken in two very different ways. I could picture Ralph Fiennes saying it, or, just as easily, Harvey Korman. Should we shudder or laugh?

Until corrected, I think I’ll remember Antony and Cleopatra as the mature work of a playwright who, for one reason or another, can’t take himself or this play all that seriously at the moment. So he throws in puns and double entendres and downright absurdities as if to say, “Let’s just have some fun.”

§ § §

I’ve been irregular with these posts, I admit. But I’ll continue with short works, in hopes of playing catch-up. Next, since I’ve treated this play as ambiguous between comic and tragic, I think I should tackle one of the generally acknowledged problem plays, Measure for Measure.

Thank you for reading these reflections on great works of literature. If you haven’t already subscribed, please consider doing so for free and receive each reflection in your in-box as soon as it comes out (I shoot for once a week). If you already have a free subscription and wish to support me further, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I try to buy only hardback copies, and I much prefer used books, so I can promise to put your paid subscriptions to work right away.

Works mentioned in this reflection:

Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

Under the Volcano (1984), directed by John Huston

The Philadelphia Story (1940), directed by George Cukor