Antony and Cleopatra, The Shakespeare Theatre

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

General Thoughts

It is important to be aware that this play is based on actual historical figures and historical events. The play was based on Plutarch’s history of Roman figures.

To me, however, this play is not solely about history; it is about emotional changes that occur in the lives of people, and about how history is shaped and changed by the emotional changes that occur in the lives of historical figures. This play is about Mark Antony’s letting go of his passion to be a great soldier and political figure, and becoming more enmeshed in his feelings, his emotional needs, for hedonism and for love. After Antony became focused on Cleopatra, he made numerous critical military and political errors that led to his downfall. Where he had previously been a great military general, he became ineffectual. And as in all lives, as we let go of our passion for our profession, someone else is there to fill the void. In Antony’s case, Octavius Caesar was there to fill the void left by Antony’s emotional departure.

How many times in life do we see famous and not so famous people reach a point in their lives when their mental focus changes from achievements in their profession to pleasure in one form or another. Sometimes, they become interested in drugs, or sexual pleasures, or perhaps in some other activity. And as their focus changes, their achievements in their profession diminish, often ending their professional careers. In this play and in history, Antony and Cleopatra lost their positions and their lives as their focus changed.

The Play

(This summary is based on background information from The Shakespeare Theatre website and from Isaac Asimov’s Guide To Shakespeare.)

Shakespeare was a showman, a producer of successful plays. For Shakespeare, setting five of his plays in the Roman Empire was good business. English school children read the works of the great Roman writers as the foundation of their classical education. A new translation of the historian Plutarch’s biography of the great Romans sold well, and plays about Rome filled theatres. In fact, the name of Julius Caesar appears in 17 different plays by Shakespeare, including his plays about English history.

Shakespeare’s England (itself a burgeoning empire in the 1590s) saw itself as the intellectual and historical heir to Rome. “To Shakespeare’s original audiences,” writes the scholar Marjorie Garber, “a play about ancient Rome was not an escapist document about a faraway world, but a powerful lesson in ethics and statecraft. The Elizabethan view of history suggested that the Romans provided models of conduct, that history taught, and that its lessons could—and should—be learned.”

After opening the Globe Theatre with his popular Julius Caesar in 1599 (based on Plutarch’s Roman history), William Shakespeare spent the next few years writing his great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. He then returned to Plutarch’s history with Antony and Cleopatra in 1607.

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare portrayed the last days of the Roman Republic. The conspirators assassinated Julius Caesar because they believed he was destroying their way of life and ushering in a new era of one-man rule, which would replace the republican virtues with the decadence of an empire.

After the death of Caesar, Mark Antony, the great war general under Caesar, defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C. Then Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus formed a Triumvirate to rule the Roman Republic. Octavius was Caesar’s teenaged great-nephew; he was given Western Europe for his third of the Republic. Lepidus was awarded Africa; and Antony took the Eastern provinces.

According to Asimov, the East suited Mark Antony well; he was a soldier and a hedonist who had never gotten along well in Rome and preferred the Eastern provinces. Although Antony ruled the Eastern provinces, his passion for war and politics waned, and he became more emotionally drawn to hedonism. He made his headquarters in Tarsus, from which he summoned Cleopatra in 41 B.C. for the purpose of extorting money as a way of her retaining her position of Queen of Egypt. However, when Cleopatra arrived to meet him, Mark Antony’s life changed forever.

Plutarch described the scene of Cleopatra’s arrival in Tarsus, and Shakespeare improved the description with his poetic imagination.

"The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colored fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid, did."

When Cleopatra invited Mark Antony to board her barge, he went in what was almost a hypnotic trance, and was her slave from that moment.

Some scholars might object that there are fundamental inconsistencies between the two plays in the character of Mark Antony. In Julius Caesar, Antony comes across as a master politician, able to manipulate the mob in Rome and defeat Caesar’s assassins in the public forum and on the battlefield. By contrast, in Antony and Cleopatra, he appears to be militarily incompetent and politically ineffective, frittering away his share of imperial command for the sake of his sensual indulgence with Cleopatra. Which is the real Antony—the Master of the West or the Playboy of the Eastern World? He was both.

Already in Julius Caesar, Antony appears as something of a playboy, foreshadowing his role in the later play. Julius Caesar says that he prefers the fun-loving Antony to men obsessed with politics like Cassius:

“He loves no plays, as thou dost, Antony;
He hears no music.”

Indeed, Antony evidently has a reputation as a party animal in Rome. When he shows up to accompany Caesar to the Senate in the morning, Julius is surprised:

“See! Antony, that revels long a-nights,
Is notwithstanding up.”

In Antony’s bitter confrontation with the conspirators before the battle of Philippi, Cassius harks back to his reputation as “a reveller.” In fact, the conspirators fatally underestimate Antony’s political capacity precisely because of his playboy image. In deciding not to kill Antony along with Caesar, Brutus dismisses his political importance:

“He is given to sports, to wildness, and much company.”

He was generally thought of as a political lightweight, more interested in partying than ruling the city. What, then, transforms Antony into the powerful political force we see in Julius Caesar? The answer is the murder of Julius Caesar, to whom Antony felt complete loyalty. In a heroic act of self-mastery, Antony pulls himself together in the political crisis created by the assassination and devotes himself whole-heartedly to avenging his lord’s death and bringing down the conspirators. The memory of Julius Caesar gives Antony a cause worth fighting for, and, if need be, dying for. To Antony, Julius Caesar was:

“The noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times.”

But the fact that it takes Caesar’s death to transform Antony from a playboy to a master politician has ominous implications for his future. It threatens to leave a void in his life once he accomplishes his revenge and no longer has Caesar as a cause to fight for. In Julius Caesar, his master’s death taught Antony a lesson in the vanity of ordinary political achievement:

“O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils
Shrunk to this little measure?”

Given this insight, it is no wonder that Antony does not pursue political power with the single-mindedness of his rival Octavius.

Antony’s meeting of Cleopatra and his disillusionment with the imperial political system reignite the impulses that only his devotion to Julius Caesar held in check. As Cleopatra comes to mean more and more to Antony, Rome comes to mean less and less. Cleopatra becomes the justification of his very existence.

Although he was young, Caesar’s teenaged great-nephew and heir Octavius was one of the master politicians of history. He deftly stepped into the void created by Antony’s change of focus and began his march to take control of all of the Roman Republic. First, he officially changed his name to Julius Caesar, immediately winning the loyalty of both the people and Caesar’s military legions on the historical strength of the name alone. He then embarked on a systematic propaganda campaign to depict Antony as an enemy of Rome. He made sure that all of Rome knew of Antony’s associations with the shameless foreign queen, Cleopatra. “Contemning Rome, he has done all this,” says Shakespeare’s Octavius, erasing Antony’s history as a defender of Rome and of Caesar’s memory. He read Antony’s private will in the Senate, revealing that Antony had made his children with Cleopatra his heirs and had requested to be buried in Egypt.

For his part, Antony critically underestimated Octavius’ skill. Shakespeare’s Antony sees himself as an invincible general and cannot conceive of losing a battle to Octavius, whom he remembers as a boy who “no practice had in the brave squares of war.” When he loses to Octavius’ talented lieutenants, the shame is too great to bear. Octavius portrays Antony as a hopeless case and an enemy of Rome, and Antony’s allies defect to Octavius without resistance. Dogged by his own history, by the memory of the great man he used to be, Antony would prefer death to “the inevitable prosecution of disgrace and horror.” The man who had shaped history so skillfully at Caesar’s funeral now becomes one of its victims.

Cleopatra

By all accounts, Cleopatra was no ordinary woman.

Cleopatra was not “Egyptian”; she was Greek. Egypt had become the kingdom of Cleopatra’s forebears in 323 B.C. when one of the generals of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, seized Egypt. From that time, his descendants, each named Ptolemy, ruled Egypt. All of the Ptolemys married Greeks, and all of the rulers of Egypt were completely Greek. They did not even speak Egyptian; they spoke Greek. A number of the Ptolemaic queens were named Cleopatra, meaning “glory of her father” in Greek. The Cleopatra in this play was Cleopatra VII.

When Cleopatra met Mark Antony, she was 28 years old. She was born in 69 B.C. and succeeded to the throne when she was only 17, on the death of her father. In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar landed in Alexandria in pursuit of Pompey. Cleopatra realized that the real power in the world lay in Rome, and she formed a liaison with Caesar and had a son with him. Seven years later, when she was summoned to Tarsus by Mark Antony, she again took the action that was necessary to retain her kingdom in seducing Antony.

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare gave us the greatest description of complete feminine charm the world of literature has ever offered. He said of the possibility of Antony leaving Cleopatra:

“Never; he will not;
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.”

And by comparison, other women were like Octavia:

“Octavia is of a holy, cold and still conversation.”

Cleopatra was "an infinite variety". When other women left a man satisfied, Cleopatra only made him hungrier for more of her. And when she was wanton, the holy priests themselves blessed her.

Incidentally, I felt that this play was not well cast. Cleopatra was 28 years old when she met Marc Antony, and only 40 when she died. She had three children with him. But the woman who was cast in the role of Cleopatra in this play was Suzanne Bertish, a British actress of 55, who looked every day of her age. I felt that she was FAR too old to play Cleopatra.

Daemons

The Greeks believed that with each individual was associated a divine spirit through which the influence of the gods could make itself felt. It was when this influence was most strongly felt that a man could attain heights otherwise impossible to him. If a spirit was continually felt, a man would be of unusual power and ability. This belief was elaborated that each individual was thought to have two such spirits, one for good and one for evil, the two continually fighting for mastery.

To the Greeks, such a spirit was called a "daimon" -- meaning "divinity" -- or "guardian spirit"; the Latin spelling was "daemon". Later, the Christians cast these daemons, being pagan beliefs, as evil, and therefore we get our present "demon", meaning an evil spirit. However, the Greek idea lives on today; we still speak of "guardian angels" and sometimes we envision an individual as being influenced by his better or worse nature.

The soothsayer in the play tells Antony that Octavius Caesar's daemon is inferior to Antony's, but it can still win, so Antony should avoid Octavius.

"Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side,
Thy daemon, thy spirit which keeps thee, is
Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,
Where Caesar's is not. But near him, thy angel
Becomes afeared, as being o'erpow'red: therefore,
Make space enough between you."

Synopsis of the play

Antony, Octavius and Lepidus rule the Roman Empire, but Antony has fallen in love with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra and disregards all news from Rome. When Antony hears that his wife, Fulvia, has died, however, he returns home.

In order to pacify Octavius, who is under attack from the late Pompey’s son, Antony agrees to marry Octavius’ sister, Octavia. Antony, Octavius and Lepidus meet with Pompey before the battle and instead sign a treaty to stave off war.

As soon as Antony and Octavia depart for Greece, Octavius immediately starts a new war on Pompey in defiance of the treaty with Antony and Lepidus. Octavia goes to Rome to patch up the quarrel, where Octavius informs her that Antony has fled to Cleopatra in Egypt.

Angry at his sister’s humiliation, Octavius sails east to fight Antony at sea. Cleopatra offers her navy to supplement Antony’s, but she retreats in the middle of the battle, and Antony follows her.

Antony returns to battle and defeats Octavius by land. But Octavius wins another sea battle, and Cleopatra’s navy surrenders, enraging Antony. Despondent at his rejection, she goes to her monument and sends word to Antony that she has died. Antony falls on his sword, only to learn too late of her ruse. He asks to be taken to Cleopatra and dies in her arms.

Learning that Octavius intends to bring her to Rome as a prisoner, Cleopatra kills herself with poisonous snakes smuggled into the monument. Finding her dead, Octavius promises to bury her with Antony.

After defeating Antony and Cleopatra in battle, Octavius finished the job his great-uncle Caesar had begun; the Senate granted him dictatorial powers, and the Roman Empire was founded. Caesar’s ghost of history could finally rest, and Octavius received the new name Augustus (“the lofty one”) – the same Augustus Caesar in the Bible.

Washington Post review.