KING
Find him and bring him hither. Exit an attendant.
BERTRAM What of him?
He’s quoted for a most perfidious slave
205
With all the spots a’th’ world tax’d and debosh’d,
Whose nature sickens but to speak a truth.
Am I or that or this for what he’ll utter,
That will speak anything?
KING She hath that ring of yours.
BERTRAM I think she has. Certain it is I lik’d her
210
And boarded her i’th’ wanton way of youth.
She knew her distance and did angle for me,
Madding my eagerness with her restraint,
As all impediments in fancy’s course
Are motives of more fancy; and in fine
215
Her inf ’nite cunning with her modern grace
Subdu’d me to her rate; she got the ring,
And I had that which any inferior might
At market-price have bought.
DIANA I must be patient.
You that have turn’d off a first so noble wife
220
May justly diet me. I pray you yet –
Since you lack virtue I will lose a husband –
Send for your ring, I will return it home,
And give me mine again.
BERTRAM I have it not.
KING What ring was yours, I pray you?
DIANA Sir, much like
225
The same upon your finger.
KING Know you this ring? This ring was his of late.
DIANA And this was it I gave him, being abed.
KING The story then goes false you threw it him
Out of a casement?
DIANA I have spoke the truth.
230
Enter PAROLLES.
BERTRAM My lord, I do confess the ring was hers.
KING You boggle shrewdly; every feather starts you.
Is this the man you speak of?
DIANA Ay, my lord.
KING Tell me, sirrah – but tell me true I charge you,
Not fearing the displeasure of your master,
235
Which on your just proceeding I’ll keep off –
By him and by this woman here what know you?
PAROLLES So please your majesty, my master hath been
an honourable gentleman. Tricks he hath had in him,
which gentlemen have.
240
KING Come, come, to th’ purpose. Did he love this
woman?
PAROLLES Faith, sir, he did love her; but how?
KING How, I pray you?
PAROLLES He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a
245
woman.
KING How is that?
PAROLLES He lov’d her, sir, and lov’d her not.
KING As thou art a knave and no knave. What an
equivocal companion is this!
250
PAROLLES I am a poor man, and at your majesty’s
command.
LAFEW He’s a good drum, my lord, but a naughty
orator.
DIANA Do you know he promis’d me marriage?
255
PAROLLES Faith, I know more than I’ll speak.
KING But wilt thou not speak all thou know’st?
PAROLLES Yes, so please your majesty. I did go between
them as I said; but more than that, he loved her, for
indeed he was mad for her and talk’d of Satan and of
260
Limbo and of furies and I know not what; yet I was in
that credit with them at that time that I knew of their
going to bed and of other motions, as promising her
marriage and things which would derive me ill will to
speak of; therefore I will not speak what I know.
265
KING Thou hast spoken all already, unless thou canst
say they are married; but thou art too fine in thy
evidence; therefore, stand aside.
This ring you say was yours?
DIANA Ay, my good lord.
KING Where did you buy it? Or who gave it you?
270
DIANA It was not given me, nor I did not buy it.
KING Who lent it you?
DIANA It was not lent me neither.
KING Where did you find it then?
DIANA I found it not.
KING If it were yours by none of all these ways
How could you give it him?
DIANA I never gave it him.
275
LAFEW This woman’s an easy glove, my lord; she goes
off and on at pleasure.
KING This ring was mine; I gave it his first wife.
DIANA It might be yours or hers for ought I know.
KING Take her away. I do not like her now.
280
To prison with her. And away with him.
Unless thou tell’st me where thou hadst this ring
Thou diest within this hour.
DIANA I’ll never tell you.
KING Take her away.
DIANA I’ll put in bail, my liege.
KING I think thee now some common customer.
285
DIANA By Jove, if ever I knew man ’twas you.
KING Wherefore hast thou accus’d him all this while?
DIANA Because he’s guilty and he is not guilty.
He knows I am no maid, and he’ll swear to’t;
I’ll swear I am a maid and he knows not.
290
Great king, I am no strumpet; by my life
I am either maid or else this old man’s wife.
KING She does abuse our ears. To prison with her.
DIANA Good mother, fetch my bail. Stay, royal sir;
Exit Widow.
The jeweller that owes the ring is sent for
295
And he shall surety me. But for this lord
Who hath abus’d me as he knows himself –
Though yet he never harm’d me – here I quit him.
He knows himself my bed he hath defil’d;
And at that time he got his wife with child.
300
Dead though she be she feels her young one kick.
So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick,
And now behold the meaning.
Re-enter Widow with HELENA.
KING Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is’t real that I see?
HELENA No, my good lord;
305
’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.
BERTRAM Both, both. O pardon!
HELENA O my good lord, when I was like this maid
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring,
And, look you, here’s your letter. This it says:
310
When from my finger you can get this ring
And is by me with child, etc. This is done;
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?
BERTRAM
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
315
HELENA If it appear not plain and prove untrue
Deadly divorce step between me and you!
O my dear mother, do I see you living?
LAFEW Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon. [to
Parolles] Good Tom Drum, lend me a handkercher.
320
So, I thank thee. Wait on me home, I’ll make sport
with thee. Let thy curtsies alone, they are scurvy ones.
KING Let us from point to point this story know
To make the even truth in pleasure flow.
[to Diana] If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower
325
<
br /> Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower;
For I can guess that by thy honest aid
Thou kept’st a wife herself, thyself a maid.
Of that and all the progress more and less
Resolvedly more leisure shall express.
330
All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.
[Flourish.]
EPILOGUE
The king’s a beggar, now the play is done;
All is well ended if this suit be won,
That you express content; which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then and yours our parts;
5
Your gentle hands lend us and take our hearts.
Exeunt omnes.
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra was first published in the Folio of 1623, as the tenth of the tragedies. Along with ‘The booke of Pericles prynce of Tyre’, it had previously been entered by Edward Blount in the Stationers’ Register on 20 May 1608. Both Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (performed at Court on 2 February 1607) and Samuel Daniel’s ‘newly altered’ fourth edition of his tragedy Cleopatra (published in 1607) show knowledge of Shakespeare’s play. It was therefore probably completed sometime in 1606, roughly contemporaneously with the writing of Macbeth and shortly before Coriolanus.
The story of the tragic love affair was, of course, well known; literary references go back as far as Virgil and Horace, and Chaucer includes Cleopatra in his Legend of Good Women. Shakespeare almost certainly knew several Renaissance versions of the story, most notably the Countess of Pembroke’s tragedy Antonius (1592), adapted from Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, and Daniel’s Cleopatra, first published in 1594 and dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke. However, he depended mainly upon ‘The Life of Marcus Antonius’ in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated from Greek into French by Jacques Amyot, from French into English by Thomas North, and published in London in 1579. Shakespeare often follows North’s Plutarch closely – verbal borrowings are frequent – but he shapes the story to his own purposes, as the action constantly shifts location, ranging quickly back and forth across the Mediterranean.
Rome and Egypt are not merely the geographical poles of the action, but become powerful symbols of competing emotional and ethical values. Rome is a world of measure, Egypt of excess; Rome of pragmatism, Egypt of passion; Rome of political ambition, Egypt of emotional desire. Even stylistically the differences are marked: Roman speech is ‘Attic’, spare and direct; Egyptian speech is ‘Asiatic’, ornate and sensuous. However, the competing values are not wholly consistent, nor do they admit of easy judgements. If Roman values, judged on their own terms, appear disciplined and high-minded, by Egyptian standards they seem cold and inhuman; similarly, Egyptian values, judged on Egyptian terms as generous and life-affirming, by Roman standards appear self-indulgent and irresponsible. The play never allows an audience a secure and stable moral vantage-point from which to judge the action or the characters, giving us instead multiple perspectives and inviting constant reassessment of our responses.
Even death partakes at once of tragic loss and of a paradoxical victory and transcendence. Plutarch’s Antony seeks his own death in despair, ‘sith spiteful fortune hath taken from thee the only joy thou hadst’; Shakespeare’s Antony rather seeks death, to be reunited with his queen: ‘I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon.’ Antony would be ‘A bridegroom in [his] death’, and Cleopatra dies with a final magnificent claim to Antony, ‘Husband, I come!’ For them, at least, love does overcome death. From Cleopatra’s viewpoint indeed ‘’Tis paltry to be Caesar’. But, of course, Caesar survives to become Emperor of the world, and Rome will not ‘in Tiber melt’.
The moral contents of the play are projected in a succession of scenes, many of them brief, which exploit to the full the fluid staging practices of early Jacobean theatres. The proscenium stages and the realistic props and scenery which developed after 1660 ensured that Shakespeare’s play was superseded for a century or more by John Dryden’s neoclassical rewriting of the story as All for Love, or the World Well Lost (1678). When Antony and Cleopatra returned to the theatres of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, productions became ever more opulent and operatic. Spectacle disrupted the play’s own dramatic structure, and critics and reviewers regularly decried its apparent lack of unity. Simply set and played with the staccato rhythms marked by the text, the play has achieved notable, though infrequent, success on the modern stage, its principle of construction clear and effective, its moral design complex and compelling.
The 1995 Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
* * *
triumvirs
CLEOPATRA
Queen of Egypt
Sextus Pompeius or POMPEY
rebel against the triumvirs
followers of Antony
OCTAVIA
sister of Octavius Caesar
followers of Caesar
attendants on Cleopatra
followers of Pompey
MESSENGERS
SOOTHSAYER
SERVANTS
of Pompey
BOY SINGER
CAPTAIN
in Antony»s army
SENTRIES and GUARDS
CLOWN
Eunuchs, Attendants, Captains, Soldiers, Servants
Antony and Cleopatra
1.1 Enter DEMETRIUS and PHILO.
PHILO Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 45
