Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  This narcissism that is partly founded in truth became for me a helpful track through the play. From the opening scene she is showing off to the court that she still has it in her. Antony is long expected back in Rome, but she has the power to keep him by her side. Her temperamental storms are done for show, to tantalise Antony and to amuse her court. She even advises one of her women that the best way to keep a man is to be contrary. She gives the order to send a message to Antony and ‘If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick: quick and return.’

  When her woman, Charmian, challenges Cleopatra’s methods and suggests that the better tactic would be to ‘In each thing give him way, cross him in nothing’, Cleopatra retorts: ‘Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him’, giving Charmian the benefit of her years of experience of keeping the balance of power by playing one mighty leader off against another.

  It has to be added here that Shakespeare was certainly describing another narcissistic ruler nearer to home in his own late Queen Elizabeth. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth used her sexual armoury to rule a small nation surrounded by potential enemies. Elizabeth did this by playing a nail-biting game of time-delays and promises of marriage to foreign princes that she never meant to fulfil. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth was a marvellous theatrical self-propagandist, throwing banquets and putting on masques and pageants that would leave Cecil B. DeMille floundering. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth appropriated the imagery of a popular goddess, or the equivalent, by styling herself as the Virgin Queen/the Virgin Mary, thus unifying all the disparate factions in the country and sealing her authority by tying it in to God’s. Also, like Cleopatra, Elizabeth grew up in danger of her life, her very existence being a potential threat to other factions that included close family members. Both had murderous fathers whose memories they worshipped.

  When I played Cleopatra I had only just finished playing Elizabeth in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and I was steeped in her history. Although I recognised the crossovers between the two women, I was determined to emphasise the differences in their personalities, because I always want to play a contrast to whatever I have just played. Schiller’s Elizabeth is buttoned-up and self-controlled, a shrewd politician, almost one of the men. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is outlandish, passionate and impulsive. Shakespeare downplays the intellect and political acumen that the real woman possessed, in favour of perpetuating the myth of the gypsy-whore whose power over men was so irresistible that even the great Mark Antony succumbed.

  Once you start to look, Elizabeth is everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays, albeit judiciously well-disguised. In Macbeth, as Greg Doran pointed out, the Macbeths as a composite are a portrait of the barren Elizabeth whom power corrupts and who successfully gets rid of her closest rival to the throne, Mary Stuart, just as Macbeth gets rid of Banquo. In both cases the bitter irony is that it is the descendants of that rival (the Stuarts/Banquo’s progeny) who next inherit the throne and start a new and lasting dynasty. Similarly, when I played Henry IV (see Chapter Ten) I had a memory of Elizabeth haunted by the guilt of having killed a rival and a fellow royal in order to maintain a grip on the throne, however insecure.

  By the way, I think I can boast that I am one of the few actors, if not the only one, who has played both the King and the Queen of England.

  A Flawed Woman

  Cleopatra’s playfulness in the opening scenes of the play, as well as her stagey tantrums, mask a genuine insecurity. In the first scene between Antony and Cleopatra the audience is immediately introduced to a pattern in their relationship. An outside agent enters: a messenger from Rome with a summons for Antony to come back to Caesar’s side. In front of their audience of attendants, Antony feigns a lack of interest, refuses to hear the news from Caesar and goes back to canoodling with Cleopatra. Their love is boundless and mega-important. Rome can sink into the Tiber for all Antony professes to care. Cleopatra seems to smell a rat. She has sharp instincts, and her mind races to her biggest fear: that the double draw of Caesar and of Antony’s wife Fulvia will outweigh Cleopatra’s own attractions and pull Antony back to Rome; that she will lose him, and thereby her link to power, forever. The best way to get Antony to stay with her is to order him to read the message while at the same time taunting him with his kowtowing, his thraldom to both his wife’s tongue and to the boy Caesar. This in turn makes Antony rebel even more strongly, and he grabs at the idea that he and Cleopatra should disguise themselves and go and people-watch in the streets—an escapist, childish pastime he knows will distract them and bring them close together. They are both grasping at straws, trying to put off the inevitable. They are like middle-aged teenagers.

  When Antony does eventually go back to Rome when his wife Fulvia dies, Cleopatra is left with her smaller audience: her coterie of female servants and eunuchs. With them she can be more candid. Cleopatra’s team buoy her up, keeping the sexual relationship alive and present, fantasising about where Antony is and what he is doing, imagining him riding his horse: ‘Oh happy horse to bear the weight of Antony.’ Hilarity all round. It is like being backstage with the leading actress and her dressers and understudy.

  But in that intimate setting comes a bit of honest truth. In our production I suddenly ripped off the black-haired wig with the emblematic ‘Cleopatra’ cut that I had been wearing from my first appearance and revealed my own hair beneath, which had been treated to look thin and scrappy. Cleopatra looks in the mirror and invites her coterie/audience to imagine this woman they see before them—who is ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black and wrinkled deep in time’—as having once been ‘a morsel for a monarch’, and one who would cause great Pompey to ‘die with looking on his love’. She is like an ageing film star, but without the scrapbook or movie archive to prove she was once something great.

  Although I have never set many of my eggs in the ‘sexual allure’ basket, I can still relate to some of Cleopatra’s fear of getting old. I played Cleopatra in my fifties. Cleopatra died at the age of thirty-nine and to her that was probably the equivalent of fifty to me. Actually, disbelief rather than fear is the predominant sensation when confronting one’s ageing face in the mirror. Can this old woman possibly be me? And I am again reminded of Elizabeth I, who was described by Sir Walter Ralegh as ‘A lady surprised by time’. Elizabeth and Cleopatra may be empresses and queens but they are also mortal women, and I can bring that more mundane aspect on to the stage with me and give them flesh and form.

  Elizabeth is purported to have written the poem, ‘When I was fair and young’, the musings of an old lady looking back and regretting the number of times she rebuffed suitors when she was beautiful and now is left alone. Who knows who might have read that poem? If Shakespeare did, he knew how Cleopatra might look back on her ‘salad days’ when she was ‘green in judgment, cold in blood’. It is the midlife cry of men and women alike. Shakespeare would have understood it in his early forties, and in his portrait of both Antony and Cleopatra he shows his sympathy with their fleeting power.

  Cleopatra keeps a grip on her household through contrariness and unpredictability. It is a petty form of power, but entertaining to play and to watch. Just when Charmian thinks she has permission to chime in with Cleopatra about how wonderful Julius Caesar was, she is slapped down by Cleopatra’s ‘Be choked with such another emphasis! / Say, the brave Antony.’ Charmian is her senior handmaiden and as such occasionally tests the limits of how much truth can be hinted at. She is smartly silenced by Cleopatra, but not before the audience has had a glimpse of her mistress’s weakness.

  Greg Doran is a naturally democratic director who, wherever possible, irons out the hierarchy built in to so many of Shakespeare’s plays. I may have been the alpha lioness on stage, but everywhere else I was equal with the rest of the cast, and our mutual trust and enjoyment of one another helped greatly in creating a believable household. You can play the cruel and despotic diva without having to be one, and you will have a lot more fun on stage.

  I wa
s aware that what I call the ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’ scene, when a hapless servant brings Cleopatra the news that Antony has married Octavia, is written as a comic scene, but at the same time I found it hard to get past the fact that Cleopatra is genuinely shattered by the news. As a politician she would have totally understood the expediency of Antony marrying Octavius’s sister, but as a woman this is a terrible threat. Antony will now have a family thousands of miles away across the sea. Rome has won him back, and her hold over him is weaker than ever. After the comedy of the scene, Shakespeare has Cleopatra genuinely collapse with grief, but he also knows the audience will laugh because he has let them know what Cleopatra doesn’t yet know. The audience has just heard Antony say ‘I will to Egypt: / And though I make this marriage for my peace, / I’ the east my pleasure lies.’ It’s all going to be okay. I had to un-know that and reach for genuine desperation and allow the audience to laugh at my histrionics.

  The next time we see Cleopatra, when the servant comes back for further cross-examination about Octavia, I could have genuine comic fun with Shakespeare’s rhythms and send up Cleopatra’s vanity. Every piece of information Cleopatra learns about Octavia she manages to spin into a negative, so a woman who is not particularly tall and speaks with a low voice (both virtues in Elizabethan eyes) becomes ‘dull of tongue and dwarfish’, and the more Cleopatra crows her delight (relief), the more the terrified messenger warms to his theme now he knows what will please her. He gets his reward and Cleopatra swims onward, secure in the knowledge that she has nothing to fear in her rival.

  In fact Octavia was one of history’s unsung heroines: far from being the cold, passive pawn of Shakespeare’s play, she was a remarkable woman, who bore Antony two children, the ancestors to three famous Roman emperors, Claudius, Caligula and Nero. She was often a political advisor to Antony and was called on to act as diplomatic go-between in the tricky relationship between Antony and her brother Octavius Caesar, and when Antony committed suicide, Octavia became the guardian of his and Cleopatra’s children, taking them into her home and rearing them. But these facts would only muddy Shakespeare’s dramatic purpose, which was to exonerate Antony for leaving his boring stick of a wife for the fascinating Cleopatra.

  Enobarbus, in the most famous speech in the play, further exonerates his great leader by describing Antony’s first sighting of Cleopatra in the famous barge of burnished gold whose sails were fanned by pretty cupids, etc., etc. By recreating the magic of the scene, Enobarbus implies that Rome’s hero general was not weak, because no red-blooded man could have resisted Cleopatra’s sorcery. Shakespeare took Enobarbus’s description almost word for word from Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, the Greek historian who became a Roman citizen. He was writing a hundred years after the events described and probably deliberately took an angle that was favourable to his adoptive country.

  Once you know that Shakespeare is less concerned with historical accuracy or impartiality than he is with telling a very human story about exceptional people, everything falls into place.

  In the play we never see the Cleopatra who is the extraordinary ruler of an Empire, speaker of several languages, expert in the sciences, astronomy and navigation. It is as though Shakespeare is not interested in all that, preferring the rather vain, ageing lover. That is more dramatically rich and ultimately poignant, and possibly far closer to his own heart.

  I found this hard to stomach at times. A couple of scenes that had always stuck in my mind whenever I had seen the play, and which had put me off playing the part, concerned the preparation for the Battle of Actium and its aftermath. Shakespeare couches the whole ill-advised idea of doing battle by sea rather than land, in some petty game Cleopatra is playing in order to prove to Enobarbus that her influence on Antony is greater than his and can overcome all reasoned strategic wisdom. The real Cleopatra would never have sacrificed any possibility of victory for the sake of an increasingly fragile love affair. She would have anticipated the consequences that would not only be disastrous politically, but would also infect and eventually poison her relationship with Antony. The real Cleopatra saw that her ships, and all her wealth contained in them, would be trapped in the bay if she didn’t escape immediately. It was a totally necessary and clever move, but in Shakespeare’s play we have the wimpy, weeping Antony blaming his greatest defeat on his helplessness in face of the whims of his lover, who had just turned tail in mid-battle to test if he would follow or not.

  O whither hast thou led me, Egypt?

  Even her protestations—

  O my lord, my lord,

  Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought

  You would have follow’d

  —are made to sound false by his

  Egypt, thou knew’st too well

  My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,

  And thou shouldst tow me after.

  Here again, Shakespeare was not interested in telling the true story of the Battle of Actium. Instead he was fascinated by the codependency of two ageing, needy lovers.

  Enobarbus

  I am no academic. I don’t create a character from the theories I develop from reading about them. It is the other way around, and that is what I find exciting. I put myself imaginatively and emotionally into a given dramatic scene, speak the words my character is given to speak, and, in the best cases, I learn something I could never have learnt through study. In this exercise of writing about a character long after I played her, I have tried to collect that experience into a coherent theory of the play. I enjoy exchanging these ideas with the learned Shakespearean scholars I have had the privilege to talk to, and it is great when we meet in the middle, both of us reaching some kind of understanding from our opposite starting points. One of the insights I arrived at purely through experiencing the performance was that Enobarbus and Cleopatra are a kind of mirror to one another. As I describe in Chapter Seven (‘Two Loves’), both of them have a deep love for Antony and both can see—and hate to see—his decline. Enobarbus is more honest about what is happening, although he can only bring himself to describe it privately to the audience, while Cleopatra is in denial but behaves in ways that make it clear to Enobarbus that they are on the same page. Cleopatra knows that Enobarbus disapproves of her influence on Antony, but at the same time she is a woman who can make any man fall in love with her, and I think Enobarbus, despite himself, is no exception. Enobarbus understands Cleopatra better than Antony does, and explains her behaviour to the bewildered Antony. When Antony says, ‘She is cunning past man’s thought’, Enobarbus defends her:

  Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love.

  And when Antony says, ‘Would I had never seen her’, Enobarbus replies, ‘O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work.’

  Enobarbus is our most reliable witness to both Antony and Cleopatra. He can see each more dispassionately than the other does, and he observes everything with the closeness of one who is deeply invested in both.

  In Act III, Scene 13, Antony and Cleopatra are at a very low point. The scene begins with Antony offstage and Cleopatra asking, ‘What shall we do, Enobarbus?’ This was a lovely, simple moment: it seems so familiar and right that a woman should ask her husband’s best friend for help in dealing with her husband’s flaws.

  In our production, Antony then entered raging that Caesar has offered a deal with Cleopatra so long as she surrenders Antony to him. Cleopatra hears this for the first time, but in her tiny interjections into his rant we don’t learn much about what she really feels. True love would never do such a deal, we think, but Cleopatra is partly in love with Antony’s status, and to see him slighted this way, and reacting with irrational threats to take Caesar on in single combat, is a total turn-off. Enobarbus comments in the same vein to the audience but does not confide his thoughts to Cleopatra. Cleopatra the hard-headed politician is now calculating her odds for survival, and, when she and Caesar’s ambassador seem to be flirting and
flattering one another, Enobarbus believes the worst and fetches Antony to witness the scene.

  This is one of the most slippery and therefore most interesting scenes to play, because the actress can decide differently from night to night how far Cleopatra has fallen into temptation to buy her freedom by giving up Antony. Through Antony’s jealous fit and his brutal whipping of Thyreus, Cleopatra has time to concoct an excuse, and the actress journeys with Cleopatra through disgust and guilt to some kind of pathos and reconciliation at the other side. This codependent pair feed one another’s egos. Each sees themselves in the mirror of the other. They glory in each other’s victories and hate the defeats. In defeat they start to loathe one another, but really it is their own failure that they are loathing. Cleopatra back-pedals furiously to set Antony back up on his pedestal, protesting far too much when he accuses her of being ‘cold-hearted toward me’. Now she encourages him in all his ridiculous self-deceptive boasts (‘That’s my brave lord’) and in an attempt to restore the enjoyment they used to have she tosses out the skittish line: