9. “The depth of love Enobarbus feels for Antony”: Bob Peck as Enobarbus and Michael Gambon as Antony in Adrian Noble’s 1982 production.
Murray: It’s a wonderful part. It’s extraordinary. He is clearly torn between two things. One, he is a soldier and he has been faithful to Antony—and Antony has been a wonderful soldier—and now he has to see his master cracking up. He has to consider whether he can honorably continue to follow this man who is doing the one thing that he, as a Roman soldier, cannot possibly stomach—he is leading to the disintegration of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, he is in love with Antony and he is in love with Cleopatra. There’s no question that he loves Cleopatra. The famous speech, “The barge she sat in. …,” must be one of the greatest love speeches ever delivered. He is besotted with her. So he is torn in two, and he encapsulates the dilemma I spoke of earlier—the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. When he finally goes over to Caesar his heart breaks, because he has betrayed his love. It’s a wonderful part.
Doran: Enobarbus charts Antony’s decline. He, like us, in a way, is tested; he allows us to rejoice at the other Romans’ outrage at Antony’s behavior, but then finds himself tested to his limit. He really stays beyond the time when he is able to sustain his role as the right-hand man to Antony. When he leaves Mark Antony and goes over to Octavius’ side you realize that his love for Antony is so great that he cannot survive without him, without his love. The scale of his love for Antony allows us also to love Antony. In a way his is perhaps greater than Cleopatra’s love for Antony. That is what is so moving about him. Enobarbus dies in a ditch of a broken heart; Cleopatra dies in a politically motivated suicide which is staged in such a way that allows her great myth to continue. He’s a character that Shakespeare invented and he’s a wonderful Chorus in the play who allows us a shift in perspective.
Charmian’s a great part, too, isn’t she?
Noble: Again, she is both the Egyptian confidante and the Chorus. Egyptian confidante in the sense that she allows expression to all of Cleopatra’s many, many colors and tantrums and all of her vivid personality. She’s the camera through which we can see. She’s the person who allows us to see and hear things we otherwise wouldn’t know had happened. But there is a choral quality, which comes in an extraordinary way in the language in the death scene at the end. Just look through that last section at the use of vowels; it’s very, very interesting. Endless, huge, open, liquid vowels, and Charmian’s right in there as part of that great Chorus of pain and loss; that’s part of her function. Like a Greek Chorus she both expresses the grief and is also witness. The eyes of the Greek Chorus are permanently open; they have to see the pain of Oedipus. They are the camera through which we see the tragedy of Oedipus—she is the multifaceted camera through which we see part of the tragedy of Cleopatra. It’s a fascinating part.
Murray: I think they’re both marvelous parts. I had a wonderful actress, Sarah Paul. Like Josette, she is also a black actress, and we did manage to get a very foreign court, very “un-English,” very “un-European,” which was very important. Her sacrifice, the crucial part she plays in the fifth act, when Cleopatra suddenly thinks, “Oh my god, she’s going to get to Antony before me, she’s braver than me, she’s showing me what to do,” is a sublime moment.
Doran: Charmian is very frequently, at least in Stratford, the understudy Cleopatra. Again, she’s a great part because she’s the loyal one. Even Iras isn’t told the full details of what happened in the monument. She’s a fantastic character because she’s so witty, so rude, and so passionate. That’s why we love her. Both Charmian and Enobarbus do more than support the great characters of Antony and Cleopatra; they also enhance those roles because of their passion for their master and mistress.
But on the other hand, a lot of the other Roman soldiers might seem a bit indistinguishable from one another: did you and your cast find ways of individualizing them?
Noble: One tries to. Basically, you have to cast the best actors you possibly can. I had cracking good actors, a marvelous cast, but you just have to get as good a bunch as you possibly can.
Murray: Well, we tried jolly hard! I had a very good cast. We talked about their position and their relationship to what was happening in the action, what their subtext was, so that they weren’t simply standing round the stage like dummies, there was something in them for the audience. Again, this is one of the great things about being in the round: your audience may be checking the content of the scene not from the faces of the protagonists in the scene, but from the characters who are watching and experiencing the story. We worked very hard on that and I like to think that it worked.
Doran: One of the jobs you have to do as a director when you have something like forty-four speaking roles is to work out what the doubling is going to be. I tended to keep Romans as Romans and Egyptians as Egyptians, and then tied it through from their function in the play. You can double in a way that doubles the function of a character, so, for instance, various different characters who are loyal can be played by the same actor, sometimes in the same costume, but with a different name. Or different skeptical characters, like Ventidius and Philo, can be doubled together.
The other thing is good casting; to make sure the actors themselves bring something to those roles. There is always something interesting to find. Dolabella, for example, or Thidias, are fascinating characters. John Barton once said to me that great actors in the great roles will look after themselves to some extent; it is the job of the director to look after the small characters, to define who they are and what their role in the play is. Part of the job of direction is to ensure that the actors playing those smaller, myriad number of parts have a real investment in what the whole play is doing. So even the man playing Pacorus, which is the smallest part in Shakespeare, the dead body of King Orodes’ son, has his role in the scheme of the play.
Real asp or toy?
Doran: We went for real. We auditioned various snakes and decided on a milk snake. This created a lot of issues that we had to work through. We discovered that the actress playing Charmian, although she kept very quiet about it, had a terrible fear of snakes, so we had to tackle that head-on. We then discovered that you have to feed snakes at particular times of the day, so that by the time the snake is onstage at half past ten it has fully digested its meal, otherwise when you pick it up from its basket of asps it can defecate all over Cleopatra! What it did, however, in terms of the performance, was make the actors realize how important it was. When we did Macbeth I rehearsed the dagger scene with real daggers and real blood for one rehearsal. And using the real snake made that scene a great deal more tense, especially in the Swan Theatre where people are very close to the stage. There was a fridge at the stage door where we kept the snake’s food, which was frozen packs of little naked baby mice. The actors also used this fridge for their lunches, so there was a degree of resistance to this snake!
We continued investigating props because of course you have to have an understudy if the snake goes off. We tried all sorts of different kinds of movement and ultimately the props shop came up with an extraordinary snake that was able to move precisely as a snake moves; if you hold a snake and it tries to get away from you it will reach out for something else to rest itself on. They managed to make an absolutely perfect snake out of bicycle chain and rubber, so it had the right weight and movement. Ultimately I have to admit (though I didn’t admit it at the time) that at a point in the previews we replaced the real snake with the prop. I did take the prop snake around backstage and managed to frighten quite a few people, so I was convinced that it did work in close range. Harriet to begin with was very keen to use the real snake because she didn’t want to start having to do puppetry right at the last moment of the play, but she became very adept so finally we switched and used the prop.
And the poetry? It’s easily Shakespeare’s most lyrical tragedy: does that require a distinctive approach in rehearsal?
Noble: Not a particularly distinctive appr
oach but you have to have really classy actors to do it. To go right back, elegantly, to where we started, each scene, each aspect, each corner of the Mediterranean and each corner of their love affair is quite meticulously laid out by Shakespeare. Compare the use of the vowels in the last five or ten minutes of the play to the moment when Antony returns and treads on the land for the first time. He says: “Hark! The land bids me tread no more upon’t: / It is ashamed to bear me.” There’s a monosyllabic line and a second line broken by that word “ashamed.” It’s a fantastic piece of writing. You can’t rush through a monosyllabic line. It’s written in a very particular way. Play through the monosyllabic nature of that first line and the emotion that then comes out when you have the polysyllabic and the vowel opening with “ashamed.” You get the sense of somebody literally treading on land that doesn’t want you. You can feel it in your legs. That’s a prime example, but there are thousands in the play. You need really classy actors and a very observant director to bring all that out. But you can create something extraordinary if you can tease all that out of the text.
Murray: I think it’s the greatest piece of dramatic verse ever written. Every character is individualized, which actually goes back to your last question. They are all different, and that is remarkable. You demand of the actors what you demand always in Shakespeare, which is to be absolutely sensitive to verse; to ground it in a reality and yet let it work as verse. But because it is so individualized, because there is nothing in the play which is there just for the sake of effect, I think in one sense it’s one of the easiest plays in terms of verse speaking.
Doran: As with all Shakespeare, it requires a commitment to that language, and you can’t pull away from it, you can’t undervalue it or underplay it, because that’s who those characters are. Cleopatra at the end of the play reaches for extraordinary poetry because that’s her own PR, that’s how she mythologizes their relationship. Investing the language with the character’s need to speak in that way is a very important part of the process. Actually, a lot of the characters speak in a crude, down-to-earth way for much of the time, but when they reach for poetry they reach for it because of their need to convey their sense of their own belief in their own characters. That’s what gives it that grandiloquence. The imagery is often very surprising and you have to allow for the surprise of the language. The worst thing to do is to sing it; you have to own it and read the size of those images because that’s the size of the character that you have to play.
SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER
IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.
The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.
For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.
PLAYHOUSES
Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-fra
me stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow-spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.
Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.
At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, also in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.
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