#MyPlayToday ... Antony and Cleopatra

First impressions of the draw: Damn it, I was really hoping for something pre-1599... (these are the ones I'm looking at in my MA in the next few months) 

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? No

So, apparently my Shakespeare lucky-dip has caught wind of the RSC's most recent season announcement and is feeling very Roman. Enter the world's most famous pair (Caesar's words, not mine), Antony and Cleopatra. I decided to take my reading of this play way back to Rome. I didn't quite hop on a flight, but in true middle-class-stereotype style I hit my local National Trust site; the ruins of a Roman bathhouse in Letocetum. Or, we call it Wall nowadays. 

Antony and Cleopatra is a play I read a few years ago for a module during my undergrad. In a group, we presented on the play's contributions to the Cleopatra 'legacy', complete with a life sized cardboard Cleo cutout. Now, that makes it sound as if I'm about to go all Stanley Wells and drop some miles-deep insight on this play. In fact, I actually remember very little about reading or even studying this play the first time round. And I think this has a lot to do with the fact I've never seen A&C on the stage. 

Of all Shakespeare's plays, I'd want to argue for A&C being the one which most furiously begs to be performed. Or, at least of all those I've read, A&C strikes me as the most overtly about performance. To argue this I'm going to kick off with a speech from Enobarbus (and no, it's not the barge one. What?!?!): 

'Under a compelling occasion, let women die: [...] Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of [Antony's leaving Egypt], dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon a far poorer moment: I do think there is such mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, that she hath such a celerity in dying.' 
(A&C, 1.2.)

Enobarbus' speech pokes a great deal of fun at Cleopatra's histrionic performances of death in reaction to any inconvenience. To put this in the context of Shakespeare's theatre, histrionic performances of death were associated with the stage rather than the court, although it is clear theatricality permeated both these very public arenas. This is the stage which gave us dying lines in the First Folio peppered with 'O, o, o,..'; if these were truly memorial reconstructions of particular performances we are to expect an early modern audience picks up exactly what Enobarbus is dropping in this speech. Cleopatra is an actress. Like the boy player behind her role, the character is described as putting on performances of death quite regularly. We also hear the stage management of these performances from Cleopatra's own lips in the comic scene in which she implores her handmaids to improvise: 

'If you find him [Antony] sad / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick'

(A&C, 1.3)

So, Antony and Cleopatra's relationship is consciously theatrical. I'm not exactly breaking new ground here. But what really fascinated me in a second reading is how the theatricality of the pair begins to disintegrate and where this opens up pockets through which the tragedy emerges. It's as if as soon as Antony leaves Egypt, the pair begin to forget their cues. Cleopatra's fleets on the sea literally get stage fright and fail to perform for Antony, Antony botches the stage trick of his own suicide, his body becomes a stage prop which is clumsily manoeuvred (Emma Smith introduces this idea in her fantastic lecture on the play), Cleopatra has her stage-hand maids redress her as a Queen for her final performance of death. The tragedy is brought about because the patches begin to emerge in these performances. Finally, both Antony and Cleopatra refuse to act in a piece of Roman theatre in which they have no control over the direction: 

'Wouldst thou be window'd in great Rome, and see / Thy master thus with pleach'd arms, bending down / His corrigable neck, his face subdued / To penetrative shame'

(Antony, A&C, 4.12)

'the quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us, and present / Our Alexandrian revels: Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.'

(Cleopatra, A&C, 5.2)

The absolute mind blowingly spectacular irony Shakespeare throws in particularly Cleopatra's lines here is one he wrote for his own theatre, rather than ours. A 'squeaking [...] boy' is already playing Cleopatra. In fact, it is of course a boy player and not the Queen herself who speaks those lines. Oh, Will. I really think Shakespeare's fascination with Rome and Roman figures is bedded in the idea that, like the Elizabethan England he grew up in, highly theatrical performance underpinned displays of power. Of course, we still live in that society where 2 billion people tune in to see ritualised performances from powerful and attractive people. But that is why (CLICHE ALARM) Shakespeare still speaks to us, or rather we still find connections in the world of these plays.

Perhaps, too, the dichotomy of 'worlds' that obsesses the characters of the play and critics alike is not so much the opulent Egypt and the regimented Rome, but behind the curtain and in front of it. If Egypt is the free space of the stage, Rome is the shrouded mechanics of backstage. Look at what Cleopatra says about the release of Egypt compared to Roman restraint: 

'[Antony] was disposed to mirth; but on the sudden / A Roman thought hath struck him.'

(A&C, 1.2)

Egypt, then, is the space of liberation, performance and recreation for Antony and Cleopatra. Egypt is the Elizabethan theatre.  The gender anxieties of early modern theatre also work their way into the gendered analogies of geography given by the play through this model. It is perhaps not the luxury of Egypt that feminises Antony, but the dangerous, potential femininity of performance. And that is why if someone could find me a time machine and take me back to Mark Rylance's 1999 performance of Cleopatra at the Globe I would be eternally grateful. 

Mark Rylance, looking hotter than all of us in a dress since 1999. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: You have to write an essay about Antony's Duchess of Malfi moment, 'I am Antony yet'. 

#MyPlayToday ... Richard II

First impressions of the draw: Mental image of David Tennant's incredible portrayal, the lingering question of whether they gave him super-subtle breast implants?  

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? No

Like the erring Bollingbroke, I'm back to the blog after a short, self imposed banishment. Travelling, tutoring, upcoming Masters faff (I've discovered what Shakespeare was up to in all those lost years. He was trying to find student accommodation in Stratford upon Avon) and reading War and Peace have kept me off these keys for now. Particularly the latter; I love the material Tolstoy, but does there have to be so much of it?

Richard II is a play I feel quite familiar with - my DVD of the RSC production is well loved and I had previously read the play in my bid to read them all chronologically (More on why I changed tactics here). It's also an absolute joy for me to read because it appeals to one of my favourite things about Shakespeare; rhythm. The formality of early modern English, the poeticism characteristic of Shakespeare's early works and the sheer volume of plays he produced make Shakespeare a go-to for anyone who, like me, has a bit of a weird thing about rhythm. Lines of speech that dance as you speak them is what unites my love of Shakespeare and rap (was there a whiter sentence ever spoken?). 

Yes, those are dry cornflakes.

The all-verse form of this play means it is full of elaborate, poetic lines that really do dance as you speak them. Even in the opening war of threats between Hereford (later Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. Phew.) and Mowbray, rhyming couplets abound. What a fantastic juxtaposition of form and context; to have a pair of noblemen arguing furiously in a tight, regulated iambic pentameter. Or, when I reconsider poetry slams and rap battles, perhaps not such a juxtaposition. Not only do characters harangue each other with jaunty rhythmic rhymes, they finish each other's rhyming couplets. This is one of my favourite phenomena in  all of Shakespeare's works; the rhyming couplet split over more than one character. 

'Why uncle, thou hast many years to live.'

'But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.'

RII, 1.3.219-220

This kind of form, in my opinion, lives and breathes on stage. It crackles with tension and immediacy and spares no eloquence. That's the good stuff. 

Talking of form that comes alive on stage, we get it in spades in this play. Take the Duchess of Gloucester's fragmented trains of thought, which split and explode with contradiction and the sheer confusion of grief. She is so bereft she can hardly speak, but it's not left for the actor to dictate. Her fractured emotions stain the text itself. On the other hand, take York's persistent and sassy word-play. The old man's weapons are his words and he wields them mercilessly on a stage of flowery diction. For example: 

'My gracious uncle -'

'Tut, tut! Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.
 I am no traitor's uncle: and that word "grace"
In an ungracious mouth is but profane.'

RII, 2.3.85-7

By interrupting Bolingbroke and dismembering his courtesy, York both jumps on the play's bandwagon of finishing another character's rhyming couplet and sticks his middle finger up to the whole process. Not so incidentally, York's give-zero-fucks linguistic style makes him one of my favourite characters. 

For all its imagery of overgrown gardens, pestilence, power and Christ, one of the most powerful meaning systems lying under this play is language itself. As in Love's Labour's Lost, characters are preoccupied with words; their native tongues; the form of flattery; the power of a dying man's diction; the rhythm which holds music and speech in place. Outside of it's merit as a play therefore, Richard II encapsulates an era of Shakespeare's linguistic style but not in the genre we would expect. We read Romeo and Juliet, LLL or A Midsummer Night's Dream and we expect rhyming couplets to effuse from lovers. But from a dusty, dead King? What a cracking curveball. 

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: Note to self - write an essay about Kingship, inheritance, in relation to images of castration and effeminacy. Hell, it's undoubtedly been done already.