[Between 2006 and 2016 I wrote a number of short articles for the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Around the Globe; I’ve been depositing them on this blog under the category ‘Globe Essays’. This is the seventh, from Summer 2014.]
In Antony and Cleopatra Rome is undergoing a crisis of identity. The rapid expansion of the city’s territories has rendered the culture, language and laws of Rome vulnerable to dilution by foreign influences; and in response there has been a rise in xenophobia among the Romans, and a transference of power throughout the republic from the hands of the many to those of the few. The two male rivals in the play, Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony, represent two opposite reactions to the troublingly seductive possibilities offered by the lands that border Rome’s demesnes. Caesar seeks to bring them under control, demonstrating his suitability for the role of dictator-controller with a display of military skill and personal discipline. Antony embraces the culture of the Egyptians with the same easy enthusiasm he shows when crossing class boundaries to drink with his soldiers; and he submits to the charm of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra with the same disdain for rigid gender divisions he showed when he handed over control of his military business to his wife Fulvia, before the play began. Caesar pays lip service to an austere conception of Romanness that associates it with an unwavering commitment to reason and a strict class and gender hierarchy. Antony models himself on his Greek ancestor, the demi-god Hercules: sexually promiscuous, physically powerful, prone to cross-dressing and profoundly unfortunate – in large part because of his tendency to think with his genitals. Caesar ends the play triumphant; but the audience may well feel that the austerely rational version of Rome he stands for has been severely compromised by the nature of his struggle with Antony, and permanently infected by the potent magic of his rival’s Egyptian lover.
The shape of the play mocks Caesar’s version of Rome. Ranging over a vast geographical area from Rome and Greece to Egypt and Syria, the action disperses itself across an astonishing number of short scenes, populated by a host of major and minor characters, and punctuated by excursions into longer set pieces. These long scenes are full of conflict, between Antony and Cleopatra, between Caesar and Antony. The conflicts between the lovers get more volatile as the play goes on, beginning with a mild domestic tiff and culminating in Antony’s violent denunciation of Cleopatra as a traitor. But each squabble ends with a reconciliation, made more moving by the fury that precedes it. Caesar, by contrast, destroys his rivals and antagonists, terminating every contract he draws up in the course of the play. He deposes and imprisons the Roman triumvir Lepidus (who for a while shared power with him and Antony); goes to war with his former ally, Sextus Pompay, who is later assassinated; rewards followers of Antony who desert to his side with a place in the suicidal front rank of his army. At one point Caesar accurately predicts that his reign as the first Roman Emperor will be a ‘time of universal peace’; but Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt as to the ruthless means by which this Golden Age was established.
Nobody in the play has any love for Caesar. Antony, by contrast, is loved by his servants, his soldiers, his lieutenant Enobarbus, his Egyptian lover, even Caesar himself, who weeps for the death of his ‘mate in empire’. But Cleopatra is loved even more than Antony. Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar loved her before Antony did, and the most celebrated speech in the play describes her, on the day she first met Antony, as a version of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, couched in a barge made up of impossibilities. The boat ‘burned on the water’, marrying incompatible elements. Its purple sails did not capture the wind but drew it towards them as if ‘love-sick’. The absurd silver oars did not thrust away the water but made it ‘follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes’. And the boys who fanned Cleopatra’s cheeks succeeded in both heating and cooling them (‘what they undid did’). Inanimate objects were as aroused by this performance as the human onlookers. The boat’s cables swelled in the hands of Cleopatra’s handmaids. Instead of running of their own volition to see the queen, her people found themselves propelled or ejaculated by the city in her direction (‘The city cast / Her people out upon her’). And the whole scene distracted everyone’s attention from the Roman man of power who had come to negotiate with this second Venus: Antony was left alone ‘in the market-place […] Whistling to the air’. The description of this most ‘feminine’ of performances (conceived, performed and staged by women) is given us by the most ‘masculine’ of soldiers, Enobarbus. Contradiction on contradiction composes the verbal picture, from the identity of the speaker, who nowhere else speaks this rhapsodically, to the paradoxes he heaps on one another in an effort to capture the attractions of the queen. The most striking of these paradoxes is that he never does describe her – only her surroundings – so that it is left to the theatre audience to imagine her for themselves. This is a conquest that beggars those of warmongers, bequeathing itself to the imaginations and desires of future city-dwellers as no Emperor ever could.
In the final scene of the play, with Antony dead and Caesar approaching to take control of Egypt, Cleopatra returns imaginatively to the scene of this triumph over Rome. ‘I am again for Cydnus,’ she declares as she prepares for suicide, ‘To meet Mark Antony’. Her death is as sensual as that earlier act of courtship, employing poisonous ‘worms’ to ensure that she dies in a dreamy rapture, undisfigured. Seeing her dead, the usually chilly Caesar is inspired to poetry: ‘she looks like sleep,’ he says, ‘As she would catch a second Antony / In her strong coils of grace’. Like Enobarbus, he has never spoken like this before, and we cannot imagine that he will again. for all his efforts to keep himself ‘pure’, he has been infected by the Egyptian virus; and so too has everyone else who has seen this play.
