Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

It is my birthday.

  I had thought to have held it poor: but, since my lord

  Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.

  The couple skip off the stage like teenagers, and the audience is left with very mixed emotions. They have watched the lovers dodge the test of their mutual trust. They had swerved to avoid the truth and patched things up superficially out of fear of losing one another. How totally human. It is left to Enobarbus to look truth in the face. He slopes off alone, and from here on, his path is one of isolation and eventual suicide.

  The audience has come to rely on Enobarbus as the one sane voice in the insane story. As an actor waiting in the wings, I used to listen to his final speeches and became increasingly aware that Enobarbus is voicing the thoughts that Cleopatra dares not think.

  A Rare Glimpse into Older Love

  Of the Shakespeare plays I have been in, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Hamlet seem to show Shakespeare at his most psychologically modern and accurate. (Others will say this of King Lear, but I don’t know that play so intimately.) Shakespeare’s heroines are mostly young, and dominate the comedies, where the plots are all about young love, pursuit, rejection, and finally ending happily in marriage. Shakespeare then leaves us at that ending—which is actually a beginning—with no map as to how to continue.

  In a sense I have grown up through Shakespeare. Not only have his demands on me as an actress forced me to mature and deepen, but he has taught me about life itself, offering me insights and providing me with words to describe so much of what I have felt. That is what makes it hard that he abandons women so early in their lives, and that is why I treasure my experience of playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra in particular because, through the actor’s privilege of getting inside these characters rather than reading them on the page or watching them from outside, I can sense a link to the playwright himself perhaps examining his own middle-aged marriage through fully rounded, flawed, mature characters, both male and female. He seems to be speaking to me again. Beneath the exceptional dramatic circumstances of the plots of these two plays, we see the reality of a partnership with all its imperfections, its love/hate contradictions and its shifting power. That leads me to feel that these plays are Shakespeare’s most personal plays and that Antony and Cleopatra is one of his most intimate plays, despite its public historical setting.

  Act III, Scene 13 (mentioned above), felt like a major gear change in the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra. They have learnt a lot about one another rather suddenly. Their love has survived, but it has been deeply fractured and they are living on borrowed time. They are sobered in some way, and Cleopatra has more silences, more chances to question and observe this man who now often seems a stranger to her. The scenes themselves come thick and fast, darting between Egypt and Rome and back again. Scenes of extremely contrasting moods are juxtaposed for maximum nail-biting effect: a strange, maudlin Antony bids goodbye to his household on the eve of battle in Act IV, Scene 2, and once again Cleopatra has to ask Enobarbus what it all means. Antony then quickly covers it all up, pretending he didn’t mean any of it and protesting ‘I hope well of tomorrow’. This is followed by a scene in which ordinary soldiers apprehensively wait for the day of battle to dawn. It is full of ominous sentences like ‘Heard you nothing strange about the streets?’ and ‘Have careful watch’. Then one of them notices a strange sound of ‘Music i’ the air’ or was it ‘under the earth’? And all this is interpreted as ‘the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves him’, reminding us of the semi-godlike reputation of the man we have seen up close and personal.

  Then there is a playful scene where Cleopatra helps Antony into his armour, but there is a desperate sorrow behind her girlish laughter as she sends him off to war. So the plot races on with short scenes intercutting with a speed more appropriate to cinema than the stage. Shakespeare tosses us around between admiration of Antony (when we and Enobarbus learn of his generosity over Enobarbus’s desertion), to horror at his misogyny (when he accuses Cleopatra of betraying him). Rather than face his own defeat, in soliloquy he blames the ‘foul Egyptian’, the ‘triple-turn’d whore!’ Cleopatra rushes to greet him and he turns his hatred on her:

  Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving,

  And blemish Caesar’s triumph. Let him take thee,

  And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians:

  Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot

  Of all thy sex; most monster-like, be shown

  For poor’st diminutives, for doits; and let

  Patient Octavia plough thy visage up

  With her prepared nails.

  Patrick’s Antony prepared to strike Cleopatra, and when she runs terrified away, Antony says, ‘’Tis well thou art gone.’ I found it so sad that this is actually the only scene where Antony and Cleopatra are alone on stage together and it is so brutal. The next time they speak to one another Antony is dying.

  To the Monument

  As in life, any ambivalence in a relationship evaporates at the approach of death. When Antony thinks (mistakenly) that Cleopatra is dead, he reaches for the most sublime poetry, putting all petty memories aside and enshrining their partnership back up there with the gods where they have always belonged.

  I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra… Stay for me:

  Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,

  And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:

  Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,

  And all the haunt be ours.

  It got me every time as I listened up in the gods preparing to ‘descend’ into my monument on a narrow platform suspended above the stage that Greg and Stephen Brimson Lewis, the designer, had devised.

  In the last rushed scene together, when Antony, who has even botched his suicide, learns that Cleopatra is not dead at all, and Cleopatra sees that her worst fears are being realised, and that their love risks a finale closer to farce than tragedy, the pair have their last gasp of earthly love. In another stroke of genius, Shakespeare offsets the highest-reaching poetry with the day-to-day banter of a marriage that is as familiar as a favourite cardy.

  At one moment Cleopatra is commanding the elements to match the enormous scale of her feelings,

  O Sun,

  Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in!

  Darkling stand

  The varying shore o’ the world!

  —and the next moment she and Antony are squabbling childishly over who has the right to speak:

  MARK ANTONY:

  I am dying, Egypt, dying:

  Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.

  CLEOPATRA:

  No, let me speak; and let me rail so high,

  That the false housewife Fortune break her wheel,

  Provoked by my offence.

  MARK ANTONY:

  One word, sweet queen…

  (CLEOPATRA:

  …Oh, okay…)

  and he continues.

  When Antony is dead, Cleopatra has some of the most electrifying and emotional lines any character ever spoke. The lines speak to all of us when we are high on grief. We do not have to have been married to an emperor or a hero for these lines to drop to the centre of our hearts:

  Noblest of men, woo’t die?

  Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide

  In this dull world, which in thy absence is

  No better than a sty? O, see, my women,

  (MARK ANTONY dies.)

  The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My lord!

  O, wither’d is the garland of the war,

  The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls

  Are level now with men; the odds is gone,

  And there is nothing left remarkable

  Beneath the visiting moon.

  I played out these scenes eighteen months after my own partner had died, and what a therapeutic gift it was to have such poetry in my head and my heart every night.

  In the next passage, Shakesp
eare contrasts the woman with the gods, encapsulating the interior split in personality which Cleopatra herself experiences:

  No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded

  By such poor passion as the maid that milks

  And does the meanest chares. It were for me

  To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;

  To tell them that this world did equal theirs

  Till they had stol’n our jewel.

  Her ferocity and helplessness are regal and human at the same time, and her ‘infinite variety’ is demonstrated in the way in which she switches from the simplest, most beautiful bonding with her women:

  Ah, women, women, look,

  Our lamp is spent, it’s out!

  to a rather hearty practicality:

  Good sirs, take heart: We’ll bury him;

  to the soldier/priestess inspiring her followers:

  and then what’s brave, what’s noble,

  Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion,

  And make death proud to take us.

  Then comes an attempt at objectivity:

  Come, away:

  This case of that huge spirit now is cold,

  which is suddenly overtaken by a relapse into grief:

  Ah, women, women!

  Then a revival and deepened resolve:

  come; we have no friend

  But resolution, and the briefest end.

  Over to You, Cleo

  So now it is Act V, and it’s over to you, the actor playing Cleopatra. You walk on to the dimly lit stage, a drab shadow of your former self. Your devoted women wait to hear your bidding. You have already told the audience that there is ‘nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ and that you have no wish to stay in ‘this dull world’. Now you must hold the stage, and shoulder the memory of Antony for the entire final act with no showy sets, costumes or tricks to help you.

  Stripped of glory and drained of emotion, a deadly clarity comes to you, and with that clarity a calm and light that we have not seen in Cleopatra and that she has not seen in herself. I found I could say these lines as though each thought were totally new to her/me:

  My desolation does begin to make

  A better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar;

  Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,

  A minister of her will: and it is great

  To do that thing that ends all other deeds;

  Which shackles accidents and bolts up change;

  Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,

  The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.

  Her own surprising thoughts give her courage. Shakespeare has created a character who is a brilliant actress, always aware of her audience and capable of acting out nobility. Perhaps now these qualities can truly be found deep within her. This is the test for the actor playing her. I am an unremarkable woman playing a very remarkable one. I pretend for a living, but to do real justice to myself, my profession and perhaps to Cleopatra, I must now do more than pretend. This act, which reveals a new self-honesty in Cleopatra, demands the utmost honesty from me. We must go beyond show and tricks into some deeper internal territory, the well-spring for true and less demonstrated emotions.

  At the top of the act I know this is where I must aim, but there is still some way to go. Cleopatra will rally all her personae in order to survive the many traps that Caesar has laid for her. Before the act is out we will see the feral fighter with Caesar’s soldiers; the seductress with Dolabella and with Caesar himself; the trickster with Seleucus her treasurer; then, as we get closer to the heart of her, we see the motherly mistress to her handmaidens; the joker with the Clown who brings the asp in a basket of figs; and then she builds back up to the most theatrical moment of her life, her monumental death and ultimate victory against Caesar.

  Some years ago I was asked to give a masterclass on Antony and Cleopatra to some American drama students. I don’t know what they learnt from it but I learnt something I didn’t know I knew, or at least had never articulated.

  One of the students was asked to deliver Cleopatra’s famous eulogy on Antony:

  I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony:

  O, such another sleep, that I might see

  But such another man! [etc., etc.]

  It is one of the greatest speeches I have ever had the luxury of speaking, but there lies the rub. One must not luxuriate in it. The student was delivering the speech so engulfed in her own luxurious misery that the words were indecipherable. All an audience could see was: ‘That woman is very unhappy about something.’ I too had loved the luxury of the speech, but I also knew that more important than my feelings were the words and the images that I/Cleopatra had to sell to the audience and of course, to Dolabella, who will take the message back to Caesar.

  Dolabella is the Roman soldier that Caesar sends to seduce Cleopatra into accepting the offer of living captivity rather than glorious death. Cleopatra’s desperation sharpens all her powers, and it is she who ends up seducing Dolabella with the depth of her feeling. I told the drama student that every line of the speech was designed as a weapon or a political tool. The speech was a eulogy, yes, but it was also blatant propaganda, the message being: ‘You think you and your paltry emperor are so great? I will show you what a real emperor is. You little bureaucrats are nothing to me, and what’s more, I may not look much now, but any woman loved by that extraordinary giant is not to be messed with, and will not be impressed by your guy.’

  As you speak those lines and reach so far out for those images, Shakespeare’s music does work on you and raw emotions do well up and threaten to choke you, but the words have to cut through all that. It is the words that will affect the audience, and the actor should keep their own feelings in check enough to make the speech active and not a passive rumination or self-indulgence. That is what I told the student, but I was teaching myself as well.

  In Act V we see Cleopatra the practised politician: the woman who has been dodging plots against her life since childhood. She knows she has a way out via suicide, and now she can play her last game to the hilt.

  She knows that her suicide will damage Caesar’s reputation and add to her own mythology. That is her one weapon. Caesar wants no tragic martyr. He wants Cleopatra alive and conquered and paraded through the streets of Rome. First she tries to bargain with Caesar’s emissary, Proculeius, to secure Egypt for her son. She asks for Caesar himself to meet with her face to face. Maybe she can still muster her old powers to dazzle and distract him. In our production John Hopkins, who played Caesar, entered the monument with his hands shielding his eyes from the sight of Cleopatra. He knew of her reputation and was determined not to fall under her spell.

  Cleopatra should be so convincing in her seeming contrition and gratitude to Caesar for his offer of a lifeline that the audience almost believe, with him, that he has won her over. But immediately after he and his entourage have cleared the stage, she blurts out:

  He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not

  Be noble to myself,

  as if to say, ‘I fooled him, but he can’t fool me.’

  Her courage and certitude are building up to her suicide, step by inexorable step. Her more ‘normal’ fearful handmaidens need comforting and inspiring, something she has the insight and tenderness to do. Then, in one of the most extraordinary moments for me, in her only (very short) soliloquy in the play, she privately notices:

  My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing

  Of woman in me: now from head to foot

  I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon

  No planet is of mine.

  Shakespeare often puts the word ‘woman’ or ‘womanish tears’ into the mouths of his characters as a taunt or an insult. It was deep within the culture of his time that to give in to feelings was female and weak and that the moon was inconstant and unreliable, like women. Shakespeare seems to subscribe to that theory and to perpetuate it. The fact that he often demonstra
tes the opposite in action makes me wonder what he really felt.

  The ever-confounding Shakespeare introduces a comic clown just when we are preparing for the high-point of tragedy. The Clown presents Cleopatra with the asp that he has managed to smuggle past the guards. The scene is not exactly hilarious, but it is strange and wonderful. Cleopatra and the Clown seem to understand one another, fellow actors in a story. He speaks cryptically of ‘the worm’, but we know that he knows what she is about to do with it, and in his parting shot, ‘I wish you joy of the worm’, we hear Death itself as a friend and co-conspirator.

  Now we are truly alone again. Just we three women. Let us get on with it. There is no time to lose. Caesar will be back soon, and we must prepare the final triumphant victory image that will crush him and give me immortality. Come, my stage managers and my dressers. Hurry up: I am longing with all my heart to meet Antony again. He is waiting for me. He will approve of this. I am a true Egyptian, and I know there is an afterlife. I have settled my future and my country’s future.

  Give me my robe, put on my crown.

  There is an urgency and an excitement to Cleopatra’s last speeches that cuts against any monumental gravitas or sadness, although after her death it is precisely gravitas and sadness that affect the remaining players who wind up the play.

  Having wrestled with a snake (sometimes a real one, sometimes a fake: we tried both), I lie there on my throne with my eyes shut, listening to Caesar’s closing speech:

  Take up her bed;

  And bear her women from the monument:

  She shall be buried by her Antony:

  No grave upon the earth shall clip in it

  A pair so famous.

  I imagine Cleopatra can hear him too and is smiling at her triumph, and that even though I may not have matched her grandeur, at least I am no squeaking boy.

  BRUTUS