Antony and Cleopatra

Overview

Written around 1606 and 1607, immediately after King Lear and Macbeth, and printed for the first time in the Folio of 1623. It is a sequel: Julius Caesar ends at Philippi with Antony and Octavius victorious, and this play picks them up a decade later.

The source is Plutarch’s Life of Antony, in Sir Thomas North’s translation of 1579, and Shakespeare follows it closely, sometimes lifting whole passages and setting them in verse. Enobarbus’ description of the barge is North’s prose with the lines broken and a few words changed, which is one of the best demonstrations available of what turning prose into poetry involves.

The structure is deliberately un-classical. Forty-odd scenes, some only a few lines long, jumping between Alexandria, Rome, Misenum, Athens, Actium, and a battlefield, with the action covering ten years. Neoclassical critics found this a scandal, and the play was rarely performed intact until the twentieth century. On a bare Elizabethan stage the speed is the effect: the world keeps switching under the characters’ feet.

The language is the last thing to say about it. Shakespeare’s late verse is loose, run-on, syntactically complicated, and here it is also more lavish than anywhere else in the canon. Whole speeches move by hyperbole, and the hyperbole is the argument.

What happens

Act 1. Alexandria. Two Roman soldiers open the play by telling the audience what to think: their general’s dotage overflows the measure, and he has become a strumpet’s fool. Then Antony and Cleopatra enter and are immediately more interesting than the judgement.

News arrives from Rome. Antony’s wife Fulvia has raised a rebellion against Octavius and then died; Pompey threatens by sea. Antony resolves to leave, and Cleopatra plays every register available, mockery, illness, grief, accusation, to prevent it. He goes.

Act 2. Rome. Antony and Octavius patch up their quarrel, and Agrippa proposes that Antony marry Octavius’ sister Octavia to seal it. He agrees, in the same scene where the audience has watched him promise Cleopatra everything.

Then Enobarbus, left behind with the Romans, is asked about Egypt and delivers the barge speech, which has the odd effect of making the case for Cleopatra more powerfully than she can make it herself. He ends by predicting flatly that Antony will never leave her.

Cleopatra receives the news of the marriage, beats the messenger, drags him about by the hair, and then calls him back to interrogate him about Octavia’s height, voice, hair colour and age.

The act ends with the triumvirs drunk on Pompey’s galley, dancing, while one of Pompey’s officers quietly offers to cut the cable and make him master of the world, and Pompey refuses because it would be dishonourable to be told about it first.

Act 3. The alliance dissolves. Antony returns to Egypt and distributes eastern kingdoms to Cleopatra and their children. Octavius, provided with a grievance, declares war.

At Actium, Antony insists on fighting at sea against all advice, because he has been challenged to. Cleopatra’s sixty ships turn and flee in the middle of the battle, and Antony follows her, abandoning his fleet. It is the central event of the play and it happens offstage, reported by a soldier who cannot understand it.

Antony’s shame afterwards is the beginning of his collapse. He offers Octavius his own life in exchange for terms, is ignored, and then has Octavius’ messenger whipped for kissing Cleopatra’s hand.

Act 4. The last day. Antony, briefly, wins a land skirmish and comes home exultant. In the night his soldiers hear strange music under the ground, and one says it is the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaving him.

Enobarbus, who has watched his general fight a sea battle for no reason and challenge a younger man to single combat, deserts to Octavius. Antony sends his treasure after him with a message of kindness, and Enobarbus, unable to bear it, dies of grief.

The second sea battle is lost when the Egyptian fleet surrenders without fighting. Antony believes Cleopatra has betrayed him and threatens her. She locks herself in her monument and sends word that she is dead, hoping to soften him.

He asks his servant Eros to kill him; Eros kills himself instead. Antony falls on his own sword, and does not die. He is hauled up to the monument, and dies in her arms.

Act 5. Cleopatra alone, and Shakespeare gives her a whole act to do what she does.

Octavius sends smooth assurances and means to display her in his triumph in Rome. She learns this from one of his own officers. She has already decided.

She imagines the alternative exactly: the shouting crowds, the officers with greasy aprons, and some squeaking boy actor playing Cleopatra in the posture of a whore, a line delivered in an Elizabethan theatre by a boy playing Cleopatra.

Then the countryman arrives with a basket of figs and the asps in it, making rustic jokes about the worm and about women. She puts on her robe and crown, calls Antony husband, applies the asp to her breast and then her arm, and dies standing. Charmian straightens her crown and follows her.

Octavius arrives and gives the order for their burial together. His last word on her is that she looks as if she would catch another Antony in her strong toil of grace.

How to read it

Accept the double vision and stop trying to resolve it. The play is built so that every Roman judgement about Egypt is accurate and every Egyptian dismissal of Rome is also accurate, and Shakespeare never supplies a position above the two.

Watch Enobarbus. He is the nearest thing to a reliable witness, he says the most beautiful things about Cleopatra and the most damning things about Antony, and his desertion and death are the play’s verdict on pure clear-sightedness.

Read Plutarch’s Life of Antony alongside, at least the sections on Cydnus and on the death. Seeing what Shakespeare took and what he changed, above all the addition of Cleopatra’s last act, is worth more than most criticism.

Note how much happens offstage or in report. Actium, the desertions, Fulvia’s death, Octavia’s humiliation: Shakespeare keeps choosing to have things described rather than shown, and the play’s world is largely made of what people say about it.

Count Cleopatra’s moods in her first scene and her last. In Act 1 she changes three times in fifty lines; in Act 5 she holds one note for four hundred. That change is the play’s whole trajectory.

And take the final act seriously as a transformation rather than a defeat. She loses the war and then takes the ending away from the winner. Whether that is triumph or self-dramatisation is the question, and the play’s answer is probably that the distinction does not hold for her.

Questions it raises

• Is Antony’s choice of Egypt over Rome a fall, or a preference the play endorses?
• Cleopatra flees at Actium and lies about her death. Does the play ever tell us whether she loves him?
• Octavius is competent, temperate and dull. Is Shakespeare saying that is what winning requires?
• Enobarbus does the rational thing and dies of it. What is the play’s view of judgement?
• Why give the defeated queen the entire last act, with the conqueror reduced to a visitor?
• The play calls their love infinite and shows it as ruinous. Are those in tension, or is that the claim?