Does
Anybody Like
Antony and Cleopatra?
Is
it blasphemy to say I just can’t like Antony
and Cleopatra? I’m trying to like
it, I really am. I’ve even asked for advice and explanations from people who
like it, but no such person has replied.
I’m sure I’m missing something important, the key, the essence. But until I see whatever it is, I simply
don’t know what to do with this play.
Watching the BBC version
helped a bit; it clarified a few things.
I quite liked Eros, Antony’s valet (or whatever they were called then –
he’s just listed as one of Antony’s followers) and Caesar Octavius was quite
interesting, as well as Pompey. But
Antony was a prat. Of course he was in the play too so I suppose it was well
done. Cleopatra though. She was
awful. I see her in the play as being
quite clever with a wry ironic sense of humour and in the end a kind of noble
intelligence, but in the BBC version she was hysterical, wimpy, weepy and dumb.
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra
and Antony and the play itself have caused critics problems since it was
written. Since I have no idea what to write about it, no brilliant analysis to
offer, this essay will simply be a presentation of what some of our Shakespeare
books have to say about it. It’s a mixed
bag.
Professor Harold Bloom is
absolutely delighted with Cleopatra, calling her “the peer of Falstaff and of
Hamlet” and “the most vital woman in Shakespeare, surpassing even Rosalind”
(page 564). Well, that’s a bit drastic.
Don’t see it myself. At least he recognises her in Shakespeare’s
character as a “politician and as a dynastic ruler” (page 565), which few other
critics seem to notice. Although Bloom seems to think everyone agrees that of “Shakespearean
representation of women, Cleopatra’s is the most subtle and formidable” (page
546) – how does he reckon that? – he does see what I see and just mentioned,
she is “essentially an ironic humorist” (page 551). And Bloom points out that while Antony dies
in humiliation, “Cleopatra transcends any potential for humiliation by her
ritually measured death” (page 559). Antony chose death because he was so
humiliated; Cleopatra to avoid being humiliated. So for once, Professor Bloom and I are partly,
though not completely, in agreement.
It’s harder, on the other
hand, to agree with the notes for Soliloquy
- the Shakespearean Monologues, the Women which, perhaps not surprisingly, emphasize Cleopatra’s theatricality.
There’s nothing wrong with that; she is indeed very theatrical. In her lines after the death of Antony, the
editors suggest that her “speech is not about Antony at all, but about what kind of show to put on...The actor needs to examine and question just how real is
her passion for Antony?” (page 10.) Well, I can go along with that too. But in the next note we are told that her
eulogy of Antony is an example of how she “is so given to highly-strung and
hyperbolic metaphors” and that she tends “to wax lyrical” (page 12). She
“prepares for her suicide the way some people prepare for parties” and that
nowhere else “is the theatrical nature of Cleopatra more lavishly on display”
(page 10). Again, maybe so but why do
the editors make this sound like a shallow, frivolous thing, completely
ignoring any tone of irony or depth?
Another little handbook, For Women: Pocket Monologues, has offered what I see is still more shallow
advice, seeing only a femme fatale figure in the Egyptian head of state. Here
is a list of verbs, nouns and adjectives used to tell us about Cleopatra’s character:
bedazzled, bewitched, bewildered (in describing what she did to Antony),
enchantment, sorceress, caprices, voluptuousness, insecure, passion, pleading,
petulance, childish, conniving (pages 73-74). As if this isn’t bad enough, in
case this list doesn’t convince us that Cleopatra is a bimbo, Antony’s
political responsibilities are emphasized and Cleopatra’s are described as
“nothing.” Even though I don’t love this
play, I find myself indignant at this insulting, and I’m quite convinced
incorrect, interpretation.
It is unfortunately not an
uncommon interpretation. Throughout the
years Cleopatra has presented a problem for audiences and critics alike. “Judgments of Cleopatra’s failings...or a
fascination of her charms, inevitably revealed the critic’s desire for a
natural empathy with a tragic protagonist. And since the universal
audience is implicitly assumed to be male, it is taken for granted that
Cleopatra, like women in general, is impossible for men to understand” (Singh,
page 413, referring to an essay by L.T. Fitz), which is why Antony and Cleopatra, or more specifically Cleopatra probably, hasn’t
been included among “the big four’ - Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth” (page 413). Singh goes on to discuss how feminist critics like Fitz
“have freed the image of Cleopatra from stereotypical clichés, while stressing
her role as a ‘co-protagonist’ with Antony and insisting that in her journey of
self-discovery we can find ‘ the tragic hero’s inner struggle’” (Fitz, via
Singh, page 413). New historicists and
other modern critics have since, according to Singh, “used Cleopatra for the
larger feminist project of unfixing gender identity” and “the complex issues of
politics and desire at stake in her life” are emphasized (Singh, pages
413-414). Well, yes. Since I tend to see
things in a new historicist mode of analysis, this is how I’m trying to see the
play. And I do, sort of. But that
doesn’t make me like it.
Maybe the New Cambridge Companion will help.
Hmmm. Scattered references to the play don’t offer much. Cleopatra is
relegated to a supporting role. “If
Antony recovers his shattered heroic identity, it is because Cleopatra puts the
pieces back together in a loving act of remembrance and imagination” (page 162). She’s called the “queen of rhetoric and
performance” (page 163) and the stereotypical interpretation of a powerful
woman effeminizing a strong man in summed up in a few words: Cleopatra simply
plays “her own entirely conventional role” (page 221). Well, that certainly put
her in her place. No new historicist or
feminist nonsense here, if you please!
OK, no help to be found
from the New Cambridge
Companion. How about
the introduction to the Norton Edition? They can usually be relied upon for
enlightenment. And indeed, Walter
Cohen’s intro is very helpful. It starts
with a background on the history behind the whole thing. These are, after all, historical people. The
Roman Empire and Cleopatra’s Egypt were very real places. In the introduction Antony and Cleopatra are
placed squarely in their political and historical context, which in fact does
clarify the content of the play. And then Cohen helps us see the individuals in
this broad and sweeping historical period: Antony and Cleopatra are and “remain
maddeningly self-absorbed and self-destructive – lying, ignoring urgent business,
acting impulsively, bullying underlings, reveling in vulgarity, apparently
betraying each other” (page 2636). My
goodness, maybe that’s why I don’t like them! But Cohen’s analysis of Cleopatra goes on:
her “teasing frivolity, comic jealousy and cold calculation have rendered her
motives suspect. Yet Shakespeare gives her passages of extraordinary
dignity...when Antony decides to leave her upon hearing of his wife Fulvia’s
death...Cleopatra’s playfulness is the mere surface of her essential depth”
(page 2637). Yes, I did see that, I
think. I wanted to, anyway. I wish the
BBC production, the only one we’ve seen, had brought that out but it didn’t.
Cohen further shows the
depth of her character when he points out that Cleopatra doesn’t decide to kill
herself because Antony dies but because her own freedom and dignity are
threatened by capture by the Romans.
“The concluding triumphant rhetoric thus cleans up earlier dubious
behavior and puts the best face on defeat.
Heroic aristocratic individualism can act in the world only by leaving
it” (page 2640). Food for thought, to be
sure.
One more thin volume on
our shelf sheds a few more rays of light on the Cleopatra. (This essay seems to
have focussed itself on her, hasn’t it?) Eric S. Mallin in his Godless Shakespeare promotes her in fact to the role of a god. Sort
of. With such phrases as “choosing
self-images of her devising” (page 111) Mallin’s Cleopatra is in control. Everything she says is “always undercut by
irony, or context, or her own complex dissembling” (page 111). Mallin claims
boldly that “Shakespeare is playing with God in the canon. What distinguishes Cleopatra from any other
figure...is the potent sense that her miracles of self-preservation and
self-presentation are at once fully functional in history and gratuitously
luminous. Not merely an empress, she is an avatar of divine play” (page 114).
Oh, I quite like that. Now
it’s getting interesting. Maybe there is
something in the play after all.
It’s a play about war. The
fate of great empires and ancient civilizations is in the hands of foolish
quarrelling men. Cleopatra is a part of this. She’s foolish too. But she is so much more. Critics and audiences have had a difficult
time seeing her clearly. It’s probably impossible to do so. Shakespeare tends
to be like that. In this play more than any of his others, it is difficult to
care about, or for, the characters.
Shakespeare’s characters are always ambiguous and often unlikeable, but
they are almost always fascinating. Maybe the characters of Antony and Cleopatra are too, especially Cleopatra. Some of the critics presented in this study
seem to think so.
I’ll keep all of this in
mind next time around.
And especially on June 22
in London, at the Globe, when Hal and I will be seeing it. I am so curious to see how the director Jonathan
Munby and his cast will do it.
I’ll let you know.
Works cited:
- The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
- Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare – the Invention of the Human. 1998.
- Cohen, Walter. “Introduction” in The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition.
- Dotterer, Dick, Editor. For Women: Pocket Monologues from Shakespeare. 1997.
- Earley, Michael and Philippa Keil, Editors.Soliloquy – The Shakespeare Monologues – The Women. 1988.
- James, Heather .“Shakespeare’s Classical Plays” in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. De Grazia, Margreta and Stanley Wells, Editors. 2010.
- Mallin, Erik S. Godless Shakespeare. 2007.
- Singh, Jyotsna S. “The Politics of Empathy in Antony and Cleopatra: A View from Below” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works – the Tragedies. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, Editors. 2006.
Films seen:
- Antony and Cleopatra, BBC, 1980. Director: Jonathan Miller. Cast: Cleopatra – Jane Lapotaire; Antony – Colin Blakely; Caesar – Ian Charleson; Enobarbus – Emrys James; Octavia – Lynn Farleigh. Ian Charleson is good as Caesar and he makes him a character one would like to analyse more. The production does clarify some of the muddle of the play but Blakely as Antony is uninteresting and Lapotaire is very annoying as a silly, weepy and hysterical Cleopatra, so generally the production is very unsatisfying.
Seen on stage:
- Not yet but tickets have been bought for June 22, 2014 at the Globe Theatre in London.
