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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1. To Cool a Gipsy’s Lust

  2. No Single Thing Abides but All Things Flow

  3. O’erflows the Measure

  4. Oh, My Oblivion Is a Very Antony

  5. Antony and Octavia: A Sacrifice to Roman Power

  6. I That Do Bring the News Made Not the Match

  7. In the East My Pleasure Lies

  8. You Will Be Whipped

  9. The God Hercules Withdraws

  10. This Foul Egyptian Hath Betrayed Me

  11. I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying

  12. The Round World / Should Have Shook Lions into Civil Streets

  13. He Words Me, Girls, He Words Me

  14. Some Squeaking Cleopatra Boy My Greatness

  15. I Wish You All Joy of the Worm

  16. I Am Fire and Air

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Emily Bakemeier

  Author’s Note

  I have tended to follow the text edited by David Bevington in the fifth edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (2004). Bevington bases his work on the First Folio (1623). I have repunctuated in a few places, in accordance with my understanding of the text. Sometimes I have restored Shakespeare’s language, where I think traditional emendations are unfortunate.

  CHAPTER 1

  To Cool a Gipsy’s Lust

  I fell in love in 1974 with the Cleopatra of Janet Suzman, the South African actress who was then thirty-five. Forty-three years later her image lingers with me whenever I reread Antony and Cleopatra. Lithe, sinuous, agile, and exuberant, Suzman’s Cleopatra is unmatched in my long years of attending performances here and in Great Britain. The ferocity of the most seductive woman in all of Shakespeare was caught in an athletic portrayal whose mood swings reflected the propulsive force of this woman’s sexuality at its apex.

  Antony and Cleopatra received its first performance in 1607, a year after the advent of Macbeth. Plutarch’s account of Antony came into Shakespeare’s consciousness as he overheard Macbeth’s fear of Banquo being analogized to Mark Antony’s eclipse by Octavius Caesar:

  To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus:

  Our fears in Banquo stick deep,

  And in his royalty of nature reigns that

  Which would be feared. ’Tis much he dares,

  And to that dauntless temper of his mind,

  He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour

  To act in safety. There is none but he,

  Whose being I do fear; and under him

  My genius is rebuked, as it is said

  Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.

  Macbeth, act 3, scene 1, lines 47–56

  The vast panoply of Antony and Cleopatra comprehends rather more than wanton dallying. Yet without the fierce sexuality that Cleopatra both embodies and stimulates in others, there would be no play.

  After Cleopatra and her ships flee the Battle of Actium, Antony follows her. The consequence is all but total disaster. Antony’s fleet is destroyed, and many of his captains desert him for Octavius Caesar. In his shame and fury, Antony chides Cleopatra and overstates her erotic career:

  I found you as a morsel cold upon

  Dead Caesar’s trencher; nay, you were a fragment

  Of Gnaeus Pompey’s, besides what hotter hours,

  Unregistered in vulgar fame, you have

  Luxuriously picked out. For I am sure,

  Though you can guess what temperance should be,

  You know not what it is.

  act 3, scene 13, lines 118–24

  The nasty vision of Cleopatra as an Egyptian dish is augmented by Shakespeare. As he knew, she had never been the lover of Pompey the Great, who had arrived in Egypt only to be assassinated, at the command of Ptolemy XIII, one of Cleopatra’s brothers. When Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt, Ptolemy XIII presented him with the head of Pompey the Great. Caesar, outraged at the affront to Roman dignity, executed the assassins. Shakespeare, taking a hint from Plutarch, has Antony add Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey the Great’s son, who had visited Egypt but did not get to taste Cleopatra’s electric bed.

  It is important to note that the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra as its final monarch, was a Macedonian Greek family descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Cleopatra was the first and only Ptolemaic ruler who spoke Egyptian as well as Greek. She saw herself as an incarnation of the goddess Isis.

  Following her joint rule with her father, Ptolemy XII, and then with her brothers, Ptolemy XIII and XIV, each of whom she married, Cleopatra moved against her brothers and became the sole pharaoh, consolidating her role by an affair with Julius Caesar. Mark Antony was his successor and became the principal passion of her life, a love at once sustaining and mutually self-destructive.

  These bare facts are surprisingly misleading when we confront two of Shakespeare’s most exuberant personalities, Cleopatra and her Antony. Always a magpie, Shakespeare employed Plutarch and perhaps Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra for source material. Modern historians suspect that Octavius Caesar may have executed Cleopatra, or at least induced her to suicide, which would mar and even destroy Antony and Cleopatra, since her exalted apotheosis of self-immolation would lose its imaginative force. Octavius executed Caesarion, whom Cleopatra bore to Julius Caesar, and Antyllus, the son of Antony by Fulvia. He did, however, spare the other children of Antony and Cleopatra.

  One way to begin apprehending Cleopatra and Antony is to appreciate that they are the first celebrities in our debased sense. Charismatics, the lovers confer shreds of their glory on both their followers and their enemies. Their bounty is boundless. Antony is generous, Cleopatra something else. Hers is a giving that famishes the taker. She beguiles and she devastates.

  Shakespeare follows Plutarch in showing us an Antony who is fifty-four and a Cleopatra who is thirty-nine when they first meet. Antony declines throughout the drama while Cleopatra increases in vividness and at last achieves greatness through her suicide. Poor Antony blunders and bungles. His ultimate travesty comes as he is dying and is hoisted up to the monument where Cleopatra has immured herself lest Octavius take her captive.

  Somewhat departing from Plutarch, Shakespeare made Hercules rather than Bacchus or Dionysus the genius or daemon of Antony. Cleopatra’s identification with the goddess Isis, whose name meant “throne,” is crucial for understanding the mythic aspects of her personality. Isis gathered up the remnants of her brother and husband, Osiris, and thus aided his resurrection. The annual rising of the Nile was attributed to the tears of Isis lamenting Osiris.

  Cleopatra identifies herself with the Nile and with the earth of Egypt. In her dying rapture she proclaims she is air and fire and no longer water or earth. Shakespeare’s capacious imagination implies that Cleopatra as Isis marries Antony as Osiris and sustains him until his suicide. Each time I reread and teach Antony and Cleopatra I find myself murmuring two lines from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Don Juan”:

  It is Isis the mystery

  Must be in love with me.

  Much in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra always will remain a mystery. Like Falstaff, perpetually she acts the part of herself. Theatricality is as acute in Antony and Cleopatra as it is in Henry IV, Part 1 and in Hamlet. Cleopatra will n
ot share the stage with anyone. Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet is her forerunner. Shakespeare has to kill him off before he steals the show. You cannot kill Shakespeare’s Cleopatra or his Falstaff because their plays would die with them.

  However equivocal Shakespeare was in regard to female sexuality, particularly in the Dark Lady Sonnets and elsewhere throughout his plays, his Cleopatra is immortal because she is the endlessly renewing fecundity of a woman’s passion in the act of love. Shakespeare plays upon will as at once his name, sexual desire, and the male and female sexual organs, as he addresses his Cleopatra in the Dark Lady:

  Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

  And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

  More than enough am I, that vex thee still,

  To thy sweet will making addition thus.

  Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

  Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

  Shall will in others seem right gracious,

  And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

  The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

  And in abundance addeth to his store;

  So thou being rich in Will, add to thy Will

  One will of mine, to make thy large Will more:

     Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;

     Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

  Sonnet 135

  If thy soul check thee that I come so near,

  Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,

  And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;

  Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.

  Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,

  Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.

  In things of great receipt with ease we prove

  Among a number one is reckoned none.

  Then in the number let me pass untold,

  Though in thy store’s account I one must be.

  For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold

  That nothing, me, a something sweet to thee.

     Make but my name thy love, and love that still;

     And then thou lov’st me for my name is Will.

  Sonnet 136

  Shakespeare might well be addressing that sexual matrix, his Cleopatra. Though she has wit, canniness, political sagacity, and endless cunning, her prime attribute is astonishing sexual power. Perhaps this Cleopatra was Isis to Shakespeare’s Osiris. Nowhere else, except perhaps in the Sonnets, does he yield so completely to a fascination that nevertheless frightens him. I recall again my reaction to Janet Suzman’s Cleopatra, which vacillated between desire and revulsion.

  Personality in Shakespeare develops rather than unfolds. Cleopatra bewilders us because she is cunning beyond male thought. She can be as witty as Falstaff, has the craftiness of Iago, as well as Hamlet’s implicit ability to suggest transcendent longings. And she is irresistible.

  CHAPTER 2

  No Single Thing Abides but All Things Flow

  Antony and Cleopatra is a tragicomic procession. It moves through the entire Mediterranean world from Rome to Egypt to Parthia and breathtakingly spans a decade. A bewildering profusion of short scenes enhances Shakespeare’s perspectivism, the notion that what we think we see depends upon our own standpoints. Western perspectivism commences with Plato’s Protagoras where Socrates and the Sophist Protagoras argue and each ends up with the position initially taken by the other. Emerson and Nietzsche refine perspectivism but remain inescapably Platonic.

  In Antony and Cleopatra how you see is who you are. If you think Antony a ruffian in decline and Cleopatra an aging whore, then you know better how you feel but the greatness has evaded you. Should you find Antony the Herculean hero, still glorious as he wanes, and Cleopatra the sublime of erotic womanhood, burning to a final kindling, you are far closer to joining in the sad yet wonderfully comic celebration.

  Shakespeare came to the composition of Antony and Cleopatra in the closing phase of an extraordinary fourteen months in which he wrote King Lear, revised it, and then descended into the night world of Macbeth. There is a recoiling from the terrifying inwardness of King Lear and of Macbeth, as though Shakespeare himself needed to emerge from the heart of darkness into a world of light and color. I urge you to reread King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra in sequence, perhaps on three or four consecutive days. It is a journey from the Inferno to the Purgatorio.

  No one else in Shakespeare is so metamorphic as Cleopatra. She overflows as does the Nile. Ebb, flow, return is her cycle of fecundity and renewal. Sustaining all life, Antony in particular, never tires her ebullience. Cleopatra’s ardor, supremely sexual, transfigures her politically acute wisdom. She seduces world conquerors because it is her pleasure, yet also her design to preserve Egypt and her dynasty. An aura surrounds her. Gazing upon her is a transport into a radiance at once earthy and celestial. In Cleopatra Antony finds both sustenance and destruction, as his declining spirit fails to sustain her energizing glory. It is Antony’s sorrow that his larger than life personality has to fade into the light of common day.

  The grand set piece of Antony and Cleopatra is her seductive epiphany as she sails to meet Antony. Following Plutarch, Enobarbus, Antony’s most devoted yet sardonic captain, describes her allure:

  Enobarbus: When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus.

  Agrippa: There she appeared indeed, or my reporter devised well for her.

  Enobarbus: I will tell you.

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

  Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

  Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

  The winds were love-sick 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.

  Agrippa:       Oh, rare for Antony!

  Enobarbus: Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,

  So many mermaids, tended her i’th’eyes

  And made their bends adornings. At the helm

  A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle

  Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,

  That yarely frame the office. From the barge

  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

  Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

  Her people out upon her; and Antony,

  Enthroned i’th’ marketplace, did sit alone,

  Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy,

  Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

  And made a gap in nature.

  act 2, scene 2, lines 195–227

  Patrick Stewart, in the Trevor Nunn production enhanced by Janet Suzman as Cleopatra, was an extraordinary Enobarbus. He caught the contagion of the Egyptian Queen’s genius for spectacle, her guarantee that her glory will be noticed and broadcast.

  Agrippa:       Rare Egyptian!

  Enobarbus: Upon her landing, Antony sent to her,

  Invited her to supper. She replied

  It should be better he became her guest,

  Which she entreated. Our courteous Antony,

  Whom ne’er the word of ‘No’ woman heard speak,

  Being barbered ten times o’er, goes to the feast,

  And for his ordinary pays his heart

  For what his eyes eat only.

  Agrippa:       Royal wench!


  She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed;

  He plowed her, and she cropped.

  Enobarbus:         I saw her once

  Hop forty paces through the public street,

  And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted,

  That she did make defect perfection,

  And, breathless, power breathe forth.

  act 2, scene 2, lines 227–41

  The tribute is superb. Enobarbus shrewdly states Cleopatra’s art that perfects her apparent aging and transmembers her breathlessness into amatory power.

  Maecenas: Now Antony must leave her utterly.

  Enobarbus: 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 the holy priests

  Bless her when she is riggish.

  act 2, scene 2, lines 242–49

  Instantly putting Antony’s heart in her purse, Cleopatra directs and enacts an erotic spectacle in which her barge becomes a lustrous throne burning on the water. Purple and gold and silver shine vividly and the perfumed sails intoxicate winds until they are sick with love. Lascivious melodies from flutes keep amorous strokes and work upon the water as aphrodisiacs. Cleopatra herself reclines invitingly, a silky and golden Venus, surrounded by Cupids with multicolored fans cooling yet rendering incandescent the cheeks of the wanton Queen.

  Mermaidlike and responsive to every glance of their mistress, her women bow to her with voluptuous grace. Overcome with desire, Agrippa, who is Octavius Caesar’s henchman, salutes her as a truly royal wench who bedded Julius Caesar and gave birth to his son Caesarion. Enobarbus is marvelous in his responses. The middle-aged Cleopatra, hopping through the streets of Alexandria, makes of her breathlessness another sign of sexual dynamism.

  The ultimate tribute of Enobarbus is the famous: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” Radiant at thirty-nine, Cleopatra offers a sexual fulfillment that changes with each coupling. Where other women glut their lovers’ appetites, Cleopatra alone overwhelmingly satisfies yet stimulates fresh desire. Most outrageously and joyously, the priests of Isis bless her when she is surpassingly lustful. Even the vilest practices are becoming when they are hers: “for vilest things / Become themselves in her.” “Become” is the refrain heard throughout this great pageant. There are seventeen instances in Antony and Cleopatra of the word “become” and its variations. I recall only one “became” in all of Hamlet, which is a drama of being and unbeing. Cleopatra’s play centers upon becoming.