ACT 4 SCENE 14
Antony tells Eros that he does not know himself now that Cleopatra has betrayed him: he “cannot hold” his “visible shape.” Mardian enters and Antony tells him that his “vile lady” has “robbed” him of his sword, but Mardian argues that Cleopatra loved Antony. Antony declares his intention to kill Cleopatra, but Mardian claims that she is already dead and that her last words were “Most noble Antony!” Antony tells Eros to “unarm” him and leave. Alone and filled with grief, Antony decides to die so that he can be reconciled with Cleopatra “Where souls do couch on flowers.” Calling Eros back, he asks him to kill him, but Eros refuses, killing himself instead so as to “escape the sorrow / Of Antony’s death.” Antony declares that both Cleopatra and “valiant Eros” have shown themselves more noble than he. He stabs himself. Wounded, he is found by Dercetus, who takes his sword to give to Caesar, and then by Diomedes, sent by Cleopatra who has had “a prophesying fear” that Antony would kill himself. Diomedes explains that Cleopatra is in fact still alive. He calls Antony’s guards to carry him to her.
ACT 4 SCENE 15
Cleopatra declares that she will never leave her monument. Diomedes arrives and explains that Antony is dying and is being brought to her. They call to each other and once again an intimate moment is played out in public with the guards and attendants as audience. Antony tells Cleopatra that he is “dying, Egypt, dying,” but that he is waiting until he has kissed her. Cleopatra is too afraid to leave her monument, fearing capture by Caesar, and so they draw him up to her. They kiss, and Antony tells her to trust only Proculeius. He declares that he is “A Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished,” thus restoring himself, at least in his own mind, to his original status. He dies. Cleopatra faints. When she comes around, it becomes clear she does not intend to entrust herself to Caesar as she announces that she will bury Antony and then do “what’s brave, what’s noble” and take her own life.
ACT 5 SCENE 1
Dercetus brings Caesar Antony’s sword and explains that he is dead. Caesar feels that this news “should make / A greater crack”: after all, Antony represented half the world. He declares that he will mourn Antony because, even though their stars were “Unreconciliable,” they were once friends and companions “in the front of war.” An Egyptian arrives from Cleopatra to ask what Caesar intends for her and he sends assurance that he means to be “honourable” and “kindly” toward her. After her messenger has gone, however, he sends Proculeius to prevent Cleopatra committing suicide, as he wants her to be brought to Rome as a symbol of his “triumph.”
ACT 5 SCENE 2
Lines 1–83: Proculeius brings Caesar’s greetings to Cleopatra. Although she remembers that Antony told her to trust Proculeius, Cleopatra is suspicious and tells him that she asks for Egypt for her son. While Proculeius talks of Caesar’s grace and kindness, soldiers arrive and seize Cleopatra. He gives orders that she be guarded until Caesar comes and, when she draws a dagger, disarms her. He tells her to allow the world to see Caesar’s “nobleness well acted,” a metatheatrical reference that emphasizes the false nature of Caesar’s behavior. She declares that she would rather die in “a ditch in Egypt” than be shown to “the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome.”
Lines 84–223: Cleopatra describes her visions of Antony to a sympathetic Dolabella. She convinces him to admit that Caesar will lead her in triumph through Rome. Caesar arrives and Cleopatra gives him a paper that she claims lists all of her wealth, but her treasurer, Seleucus, tells Caesar that she has lied. Cleopatra is furious at this betrayal, but Caesar assures her that he is not interested in her wealth, saying that he is “no merchant” and that he feels “care and pity” for her.
Lines 224–376: Once Caesar has left, Cleopatra sends Charmian to carry out some orders that she has previously given. Dolabella returns briefly and, showing honor and loyalty to Cleopatra, tells her that she and her children are to be sent to Rome. Cleopatra tells Iras what their lives in Rome will be like, as surrounded by “greasy,” “thick,” and “gross” Romans, they will be displayed and mocked. In a moment of metatheater, she imagines how she and Antony will be staged, and how she will be played by a “squeaking Cleopatra,” a “boy” actor “I’th’posture of a whore.” Determined against this, she prepares to die, once more staging herself in her “best attires” and her crown. A Guardsman enters with news that a peasant has brought Cleopatra a basket of figs. Played by the company Clown, he is shown in. The basket contains snakes and, after a deliberately incongruous bantering (and sexually suggestive) conversation with the Clown, Cleopatra prepares to die by their bite. As she kisses Iras and Charmian goodbye, Iras falls and dies, and, paralleling Antony’s reponse to Eros’s death, Cleopatra comments that she has been pre-empted by her follower. She applies an asp to her breast and another to her arm, and with her final thoughts of Antony, dies. The Guards rush in, but only in time to see Charmian die.
Lines 377–428: Caesar follows Dolabella into the monument where they discover the bodies. Caesar gives the orders for Antony and Cleopatra to be buried together.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA: AN OVERVIEW
Although there is no record of any production of Antony and Cleopatra before the Restoration, scholars believe it was written and first performed in 1606. Versions of two earlier plays revised in 1607, Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra and Barnabe Barnes’s Devil’s Charter, both contain probable allusions to Shakespeare’s play. The Lord Chamberlain’s records of 1669 report it was “formerly acted at the Blackfriars,” the indoor venue of Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, from 1609 to the closure of the theaters in 1642. It was most likely staged at the Globe Theatre also, and it is assumed that Richard Burbage, the company’s leading tragedian, would have played Antony. Speculation as to the identity of the talented, charismatic boy player entrusted with the part of Cleopatra has been great, particularly in view of her anxiety expressed at the idea of seeing “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.” It has been suggested that Enobarbus may have originally been played in a red wig (his name means “red-beard”), aligning him emblematically with the character of Judas Iscariot in the medieval morality plays, who was traditionally bewigged in red.1
When the theaters reopened after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Antony and Cleopatra was assigned to Thomas Killigrew’s company, the King’s Servants, but never performed. Restoration audiences preferred John Dryden’s neoclassical adaptation, All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1677), which takes
place in a single day after the Battle of Actium. David Garrick was the first to stage Shakespeare’s play again, in a text prepared with the scholar Edward Capell, but it proved one of his less successful ventures, despite Garrick’s considerable expenditure on scenery and costumes. Thomas Davies, who played Eros, wrote an assessment of the production in which he argued that Garrick’s slight physique was inadequate for Antony:
His person was not sufficiently important and commanding to represent the part. There is more dignity of action than variety of passion in the character, though it is not deficient in the latter. The actor, who is obliged continually to traverse the stage, should from person attract respect, as well as from the power of speech.2
Spectacle dominated nineteenth-century revivals such as John Philip Kemble’s 1808 production at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and William Charles Macready’s at Drury Lane in 1833. The Gentleman’s Magazine complained that Kemble had “merely dovetailed Shakspere [sic] and Dryden; vamped speeches from one with speeches from the other; welted scenes together and in fact ‘cobbled’ the affair…It did not succeed, as Shakspere’s play has since done, when acted with more regard for the author.”3 Shakespeare’s play was still seen as problematic, though, not least for the role of Cleopatra. Kemble is said to have tried to persuade his sister, Sarah Siddons, the greatest actress of the era, to play the part, but she refused on the grounds that “she should hate herself if she were to act Cleopatra as she knew it ought to be acted.”4 The role continued to pose a problem for actresses. Ellen Tree, for example, who played the part in the first American production in New Orleans in 1838, was described as “impeccably pure and decorous in the proper Victorian manner”:5 decorum is hardly the characteristic Shakespeare was looking for in the part. The first New York production at the Park Theater in 1846 “only ran for six performances despite expensive scenery and costumes and competent acting.”6
Samuel Phelps staged the first successful production of Shakespeare’s play at Sadler’s Wells in London in 1849. It was praised for its realistic sets:
To produce a visible picture consistent with the poetical one drawn by the dramatist has been the great object of Mr Phelps. His Egyptian views, decorated with all those formal phantasies with which we have been familiarized through modern research, give a strange reality to the scenes in which Cleopatra exercises her fascinations or endures her woes.7
But it was the performance of Isabella Glyn that made the show:
The very superior acting of Miss Glyn, as Cleopatra, is of itself enough to create an interest for this revival…The wiles and coquetries which the Egyptian Queen employs to hold more firmly the heart of her lover are represented not only with quick intelligence, but with every appearance of spontaneity.8
Phelps’s Antony was “less delicately shaded” and also “less effective” but played with “great spirit, and is most successful in giving the notion of the half-conscious recklessness with which the infatuated man rushes to his destruction.”9
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the play had some international exposure. Edward Eddy’s 1859 production at the Bowery Theater, New York, with himself as Antony and Elizabeth Ponisi as Cleopatra, was an amalgam of Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s texts. The last production at this old theater on Broadway, it ran for three weeks. Charles Calvert’s 1866 production at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, went on tour and took the play to Australia (Theatre Royal, Melbourne) for the first time.
Subsequent productions cut Shakespeare’s text in the interest of decorum and reduced the number of scenes drastically. In productions such as Frederick Chatterton’s in 1873 at Drury Lane, Lewis Wingfield’s at the Princess’s in 1890 with Lily Langtry as Cleopatra, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1906, archaeological spectacle—elaborate scenic reconstruction of Egyptian antiquity—was the keynote and successfully upstaged individual performances. Chatterton reduced the text to twelve scenes and included Cleopatra’s barge and her first meeting with Antony as well as an Egyptian ballet, thirty choirboys, a procession of Amazons, and the Battle of Actium. Critics complained about the mix of Shakespeare and spectacle:
During the first three acts, in which there is “one halfpenny worth” of Shakespearean “bread” to “an intolerable deal of” scenic “sack,” the delight of the audience with everything set before it was unbounded. In the concluding act, which was wholly Shakespearean, there was a gradual cooling, and the verdict at the end, though favourable, was far less enthusiastic than it would have been could the play have ended with the fight at Actium…the most dramatic scenes, and the most sublime poetry that the stage has known, proved not only ineffective but wearisome.10
Beerbohm Tree’s production cut the text by a third and focused on the lovers. Most critics again thought the lavish sets overblown—it opened and closed with a “projected dissolving Sphinx”11—but were impressed by his Cleopatra:
1. Archaeological spectacle: Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production.
Miss Constance Collier, handsome, dark-skinned, barbaric, dominates the scene wherever she appears. Nor has she ever had a better chance, or more fully availed herself of it, than when in the second act she has to prove how close the tiger’s cruelty lies under the sleek skin of the cultivated woman.12
The theater historian Richard Madeleine suggests that the number of productions and interest in all things Egyptian may have been sparked by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Egypt’s subsequent financial and political crisis which resulted in British military intervention and the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885.13 One of the anachronistically named “Cleopatra’s needles” had been erected in London in 1878.
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that simpler productions were staged, influenced by the theories of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, who advocated a return to the continuous staging of the Elizabethan theaters. William Bridges-Adams’s production for the 1921 Stratford Festival was played with few cuts and only one short interval, but it was Robert Atkins’ 1922 “non-stop” production at the Old Vic which decisively affected future staging. The play was popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s, partly thanks to Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 and a continued cultural fascination with Egypt. John Gielgud played a romantic Antony to Dorothy Green’s voluptuous Cleopatra with Ralph Richardson as Enobarbus in Harcourt Williams’s successful 1930 Old Vic production. This featured semipermanent sets and simple designs inspired by the Renaissance painters Veronese and Tiepolo.
The expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky’s 1936 Stratford-upon-Avon production, on the other hand, ran for only four nights, due in part to his own radical cutting and rearranging of the text, but also to his Cleopatra. The Russian Eugenie Leontovich’s pronunciation was mercilessly satirized, although Donald Wolfit’s Antony was admired, as was Margaret Rawling’s Charmian, praised by the renowned theater critic James Agate for the way she “refrained from wiping Cleopatra off the stage till after she was dead.”14
Glen Byam Shaw’s 1946 production at the Piccadilly Theatre used a versatile permanent set consisting of a single solid central “column-tower-monument with a recess beneath reminiscent of ‘an air-raid shelter or an elevator with sliding doors.’” The design has been perceived by theater historians as “post-fascist” in that it seemed “to belong to the ‘architecture of coercion’ that celebrates the centralisation of power and looks back to the monumental forms of the fascist architecture of the thirties.”15 Godfrey Tearle and Edith Evans were both praised for their individual performances. The fifty-eight-year-old Evans, playing the part of Cleopatra in a red wig, was described as “best in the raillery and mischief.” Both leads were judged “at their best when they are apart.”16 Tearle’s “rich, resonant voice and noble presence” convinced the London Times reviewer that “for once we have an Antony who is really an old lion dying.”17 He went on to play the part the following year opposite Katharine Cornell i
n New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in a record-breaking run, directed by her husband Guthrie McClintic. The production controversially updated and politicized the play: “Shakespeare’s soldiers are Nazis, Pompey a Göring, Caesar a Baldur von Schirach, the rank and file a squad of heiling stormtroopers.”18
In 1951 for the Festival of Britain, Michael Benthall alternated Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the St James’s Theatre; the leads in both cases were the glamorous celebrity couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The venture was not without problems, as the Oliviers’ biographer records:
The plays as a pair were tremendously successful throughout the London season, and were to repeat that success in New York, but it was really a marriage of incompatibles. Even Michael Benthall’s production and Roger Furse’s sets, all of which were designed to fuse them into a whole could not disguise the fact that Shaw’s comedy was a weak partner.19
Critics were divided about individual performances. The New York Times was fulsome: “Miss Leigh’s Cleopatra is superb…Mr. Olivier’s Antony is worthy of her mettle.”20 The Commonweal was more cautious:
Olivier’s Antony is not perfect…But it is still a full-scale, clearly defined piece of work, and fascinating to watch. Miss Leigh’s task is of a different order. Instead of shifting her entire style from night to night, she must establish a clean line of connection between the two Cleopatras. Since one of these is an inexperienced child and the other quite a calculating woman…she is faced with a considerable challenge…But she succeeds in creating a single, believable, and commanding person, and it is no small accomplishment.21
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