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?!?!):
(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.
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| 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'.
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