Cleopatra, page 14
A later story—perhaps apocryphal—has a Victorian audience member remarking that Queen Victoria’s home life was surely very different from the intense suffering and the raging passion that Sarah Bernhardt portrayed when she played Cleopatra mourning Antony onstage. Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, is troubled by a painting of the “larger than life” Cleopatra lounging on her sofa, dressed in clothes that fail to adequately cover her distressingly voluptuous body. Lucy’s fiancé, Paul Emanuel, scolds her just for looking at the painting.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra
Without additional biographical information, an audience watching Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra might have a hard time understanding what exactly its nominal heroine did before she met Antony. We might well wonder what it would have meant to be queen of Egypt when Cleopatra seems to have no duties or responsibilities beyond her strenuous efforts to make sure that the flame of Antony’s passion for her does not flicker or die out. It is yet another example of the way in which Cleopatra has been defined by her relationship with her lovers rather than by her own record, her own achievements and accomplishments.
Antony and Cleopatra (1607) may be one of Shakespeare’s busiest and most chaotic plays. It has an enormous cast of characters, and for much of the action at least two things are happening in two different places. There is something disorienting about the frequent scene changes and shifts of locale, the reverses in what we feel for the characters and in what they seem to feel about one another. The semi-constant disruptions can make the drama seem oddly modern and experimental, less King Lear than the Wooster Group or Richard Foreman.
In a perceptive essay, “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” Phyllis Rackin argues that the “recklessness” of the play’s structure and its use of language—“a curious mixture of the most elevated Latinisms and the coarsest contemporary slang”—echo the behavior of its heroine.
The episodic structure, with its multiplicity of tiny scenes ranging in setting from one end of the known world to the other, directly opposed the growing neoclassical demand for the Unities. . . . The bewildering parade of tiny, scattered scenes requires explanation, as does the diffusion of the catastrophe through the last two acts. . . . What is perhaps most reckless of all, and most offensive to neoclassical taste, is Shakespeare’s presentation of his heroine, for his Egyptian queen repeatedly violates the rules of decorum. . . . Cleopatra’s incredible parade of shifting moods and stratagems, together with Shakespeare’s notorious reticence about her motives, has led even her admirers to conclude that her one salient quality is, paradoxically, her lack of one—the magnificent inconstancy that Enobarbus calls “infinite variety.”
Those going to Shakespeare for a deeper or more complex understanding of the nature of Cleopatra might be wise to look elsewhere. Cleopatra is at once one of the most vocal, the most self-dramatizing, and ultimately the most opaque of Shakespeare’s heroines.
The play contains astonishing flashes of gorgeous poetry (most of them given to Cleopatra) as well as dramatic moments that require great delicacy to avoid either underplaying or overdoing. Among these passages is the scene in which Cleopatra interrogates a messenger about Octavia. He says, a bit dismissively, that she is thirty, meaning that she is over the hill, and Cleopatra’s reaction—she herself is thirty-nine—has to be precisely right. There is an affecting scene in which Antony complains that Caesar sees him the way he is and not the way he used to be. This passage too requires a pitch-perfect delivery to awaken our deeper sympathies for the beleaguered hero.
The poet John Berryman tactfully called the play a “relaxation” from Macbeth, which Shakespeare wrote the previous year: “a relaxation affecting structure, versification, material and manner. There is no true development either upward or downward in the play. For 1,700 lines, up to the action at Actium, the hero’s fortunes (and the heroine’s) are at their height; then, after an interim of 35 lines wherein the woe is announced by others, for 1,300 lines their fortunes are at the bottom.”
Berryman has done the mathematics for us, but we understand what he means. We do not feel, as we do in Macbeth, the rising tension between the inevitable and the unexpected, an inexorable and unstoppable force propelling the action forward. Here one thing happens, then another. The characters react. A war begins and ends and flares up again. The scene changes from Alexandria to Rome, then we hear the disturbing news about a series of battles. But the lovers never seem to be part of it; the serious drama is transpiring elsewhere, while they exist in a kind of bubble, enacting the theatrics of a dying love affair.
Brilliant direction would be required to work around the fact that, because of the way Shakespeare writes her part, the patient, steady, wronged-against Octavia is far more appealing and sympathetic than her Egyptian rival. Octavia does not ask as much of us, or of Antony, and she never grates on our nerves as Cleopatra more often does. Likewise, inspired stagecraft would be necessary to give the scene of the dying Antony being hoisted up to the tomb the pathos and horror it has in Plutarch. It is hard to envision a version of this turn in the narrative that wouldn’t be more grotesque than tragic as we watch it transpire before us.
Shakespeare, as we know, borrowed his plot and most of the characters from Plutarch; some of his language was taken from Thomas North’s 1579 English translation. Enobarbus’s rhapsodic description of the golden barge in which Cleopatra sailed to meet Antony is essentially paraphrase, and the borrowing grows more direct as the play nears its end. Antony’s last enjoinder to his men, that they eat, drink, and be merry because by tomorrow he may be dead and they will be serving another master, is quoted almost verbatim, though the “withered corpse” he fears becoming is transformed nicely into “a mangled shadow.” Antony’s somewhat sad last words, his valiant boast that he was “a Roman killed by a Roman” are the same in Plutarch and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare also seems to have followed the arc of Plutarch’s gradual, even reluctant, warming toward the character of Cleopatra. In the play, the first words we hear about Cleopatra are gypsy and strumpet and the rest of the drama marks a gradual and uneven progression from these harsh offhand judgments to something closer to admiration for the queen, who only at the edge of death begins to seem, as Charlotte Brontë says in Villette, larger than life. Even then our sympathy for Cleopatra falls far short of the pity we feel for Lear or Juliet. We are never entirely on Cleopatra’s side, and by the end we may find ourselves a little tired of her, exhausted by Antony and by their overheated accusations, complaints, misunderstandings, and reconciliations.
What is striking is what Shakespeare took from Plutarch, and what he chose to leave out: namely, anything that Cleopatra might have done outside the tomb and the bedroom. When in act 5 Cleopatra asks that Octavian give Egypt to her son, we may well wonder, “What son?” Caesarion has been mentioned, in passing, only once before.
Unlike Plutarch, Shakespeare had seen in his own lifetime that a woman was fully capable of running a country; his play was written not long after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. He could, had he chosen to do so, have departed from Plutarch to make the drama more closely resemble Macbeth, his most recent composition. With substantial revisions, it could have echoed Macbeth’s study of how a power-hungry woman urges her mate to get what he wants but cannot convince himself to go after. But Shakespeare’s Cleopatra has none of the flinty tormented complexity of the Scottish chieftain’s homicidal wife.
Shakespeare chose to draw from Plutarch the same conclusions that the classical writer wanted his readers to reach. Cleopatra existed largely to be Antony’s serious mistake, though (at least near the end of her life) her story was as engaging as his. For all Cleopatra’s electric energy and her lyrical speeches, Octavia is Shakespeare’s true heroine-martyr: a decent woman exploited by her brother, her husband, and her husband’s mistress.
Many writers on Shakespeare, Berryman among them, have noted that Antony and Cleopatra is more of a history play than a tragedy in that it follows the succession of “real” events rather than the rise and fall of a singular tragic fate. It dramatizes multiple meetings at which cabals are formed and dissolved, urgent plans and agreements made and broken, alliances arranged and altered. But unlike the great tragedies, it fails to make us feel the grief we experience at the death of Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Macbeth is a murderer, Lear a foolish old man, and Hamlet an indecisive young one, and yet we overlook their flaws and mourn their loss. If we are expecting something similar to happen at the conclusion of Antony and Cleopatra, we may be disappointed; Shakespeare has not managed to overcome his ambivalence toward his hero and heroine, and this makes it harder for us to overcome our own mixed feelings.
If Antony and Cleopatra is indeed a history play, it is an unusual one, in that Cleopatra—one of the two main characters in the chronology it dramatizes—seems to have only a tangential role in its historical events. Though her political and military strategies were deciding factors in the war between Octavian and Antony, Shakespeare never lets us see the queen doing anything but flirting with Antony, suffering agonies of jealousy, flirting more, retreating to the tomb with orders that Antony be told she is dead, receiving Antony’s body, mourning Antony, greeting the peasant with the fig basket, pressing the serpent to her breast, and dying. One cannot imagine this woman governing a kingdom or staving off the incursions of the Roman Empire for twenty years. How would she have found the time and energy for statecraft, administration, and diplomacy when so much of her attention was focused on her romantic rivals?
Before the play begins, Shakespeare’s Antony is already destroyed. He has sacrificed his responsibilities, his notions of duty, and his sense of himself for Cleopatra. He has let himself be dominated by her, and the consequences have been as dire as Plutarch warned us that they would be. Yet we never see Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as dominant so much as willful, lascivious, and seductive. She does not seem capable of (or interested in) steering Antony into a series of fatal errors, and when disaster strikes, and he accuses her of betraying him, we are not entirely sure why he holds her responsible. Something is off in the balance between the lovers and the world around them. We would have had to have read Plutarch to understand that a country and an empire are at stake for both of them. No matter who plays Shakespeare’s Cleopatra—among the best was the brilliant Mark Rylance, who staged the play with an all-male cast, as it would have been staged in Shakespeare’s time—the words drama queen may at some point cross the viewer’s mind.
In her essay “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers,” Linda T. Fitz critiques the way Cleopatra has been deprived of her individuality and turned into “the archetypal woman: practiser of feminine wiles, mysterious childlike, long on passion and short on intelligence—except for a sort of animal cunning.” Fitz quotes a succession of male critics, commenting on Shakespeare’s portrait of the Egyptian queen. Here is Harley Granville-Barker: “The passionate woman has a child’s desires and a child’s fears, an animal’s wary distrust; balance of judgment none, one would say. But often. . . . she shows the shrewd skepticism of a child.” And here is Edward Dowden: “At every moment we are necessarily aware of the gross, the mean, the disorderly womanhood in Cleopatra, no less than of the witchery and wonder which excite, and charm, and subdue” (in Steppat).
Fitz goes on to address the play’s sexism, the double standard with which the behavior of Antony and Cleopatra is judged, the uncritical representation of the female fear of aging, the hatred of the sexuality that Cleopatra is taken to represent. We may feel that the truth is quite a bit more complicated, but we know what the writer means: the hatred for Cleopatra that has persisted through time, fed and mediated by the image of her as the ultimate seducer.
Our response to Cleopatra and her plight can depend on the particular production. In the 2017 BBC version, Antony tries to impale himself by falling with his sword on a bed, an inadvertently comical answer to the question of why the wound does not prove fatal. And in two productions I have seen, overly literal staging turns the scene of Antony’s being hoisted up to his lover’s tomb into something edging on farce.
There is one last beautiful speech that Shakespeare gives to Cleopatra, the passage in which she describes her dream of Antony, restored beyond the wreck he was at the end of his life, changed back to the man she fell in love with, only more divine and heroic in memory even than in life. It is a demanding one for an actress, this wounded cry of transcendent love exalted above the bickering, flirting, and jealous fits of the first four acts. Her passion and heartbreak are somehow intensified by the fact that she is constantly—and maddeningly—being interrupted by Dolabella, one of Octavian’s agents.
Cleopatra: I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man.
Dolabella: If it might please ye—
Cleopatra: His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, th’earth.
Dolabella: Most sovereign creature—
Cleopatra: His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t: an autumn ’twas
That grew more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above
The element they lived in.
That the man she describes bears only a passing resemblance to the one we have watched onstage only adds to the loneliness and the pathos of her loss; she is mourning someone whom she alone seems to have known and to remember.
Written seventy years later, John Dryden’s introduction to his Antony and Cleopatra drama All for Love freely admits using Shakespeare and “the greatest wits of our nation” as a model. Like his predecessors, he was inspired by the “excellency of the moral: For the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love. . . . The crimes of love, which they both committed, were not occasioned by any necessity, or fatal ignorance, but were wholly voluntary; since our passions are, or ought to be, within our power, their end accordingly was unfortunate.”
Understandably he worries that Octavia will draw all our sympathies away from Cleopatra—a flaw that does in fact prove a problem in Shakespeare’s play, and that would remain difficult in later versions of Cleopatra’s story, among them the 1963 film extravaganza: “Though I might use the privilege of a poet, to introduce [Octavia] into Alexandria, yet I had not enough considered, that the compassion she moved to herself and her children was destructive to that which I reserved for Antony and Cleopatra. . . . Though I justified Antony in some measure, by making Octavia’s departure to proceed wholly from herself; yet the force of the first machine, like the cutting of a river into many channels, abated the strength of the natural stream.” Dryden’s solution to the problem does not entirely succeed: a confrontation between the two women that reduces our sympathy for them both.
Though its poetry never soars as high as Shakespeare’s—passages do come close—Dryden’s play is more tightly focused. It begins after Actium, when the couple are already defeated, and follows their downward trajectory. The action takes place over a single day, Antony’s last. It avoids the dizzying shifts from Egypt to Rome and does not attempt to depict a turning point in history but rather focuses on the dramatic end of a catastrophic love affair: the sort of failed romance that levels everyone and everything in its path.
Dryden paid attention to the moments that stay with the reader from Plutarch—Dryden’s own translation of Plutarch’s Lives would appear five years later—and in a series of long scenes charts Antony’s spiral into despair and Cleopatra’s futile efforts to reanimate him with the will to live.
It is a pity that Dryden’s play is not performed more often because it contains memorable moments that make the lovers seem more like human beings than the myths so familiar to us that nothing much can surprise us. There is, for example, a lovely exchange between the two while Antony lies dying:
Antony: But grieve not, while thou stayest,
My last disastrous times:
Think we have had a clear and glorious day,
And Heaven did kindly to delay the storm,
Just till our close of evening. Ten years’ love,
And not a moment lost, but all improved
To the utmost joys—what ages have we lived!
And now to die each other’s; and, so dying,
While hand in hand we walk in groves below,
Whole troops of lovers’ ghosts shall flock about us,
And all the train be ours.
Cleopatra: Your words are like the notes of dying swans,
Too sweet to last. Were there so many hours
For your unkindness, and not one for love?
In the play’s final lines, the priest Serapion delivers their eulogy:
Sleep, blest pair,
Secure from human chance, long ages out,
While all the storms of fate fly oe’r your tomb,
And fame to late posterity shall tell,
No lovers lived so great, or died so well.
CHAPTER NINE
