A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  This same tragic reversal, the movement from interiority to exteriority, is what happens throughout Antony and Cleopatra. Whereas in earlier tragedies, Shakespeare develops soliloquy as one important theatrical demonstration of inner thought, in which solitude authenticates the character’s words, here Shakespeare makes almost no space for soliloquy to connect us with the inner conflict of his protagonists. We never actually see the lovers alone together: as in a celebrity photo-shoot, they are always surrounded by a crowd of attendants. The first time we see them, the stage direction gives an indication of the gaggle: ‘Flourish. Enter Anthony, Cleopatra, her ladies, the train, with eunuchs fanning her’ (1.1.10). When Antony and Cleopatra begin to banter about quantifying their love – ‘tell me how much’, ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned’ (1.1.14–15) – they do this in front of, and for the benefit of, a large onstage audience. Their tragedy proceeds not by isolation and interiority but by a pervading lack of privacy and intimacy. This is a tragedy constructed for the cameras, as Caesar fastidiously describes: ‘I’ th’ market place on a tribunal silvered, / Cleopatra and himself in chairs of gold / Were publicly enthroned’ (3.6.3–5). ‘This in the public eye?’ asks Maecenas (11). Caesar’s reply skewers the vulgarity of Alexandrine display: ‘I’ th’ common showplace, where they exercise’ (12).

  When Caesar delivers his epitaph for Antony and Cleopatra at the end of the play, his adjective for them is perhaps surprising. ‘No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous’ (5.2.353–4). Final epitaphs for tragic characters – Hamlet, for example, or Brutus – always tend to the underwhelming, but this one is pure bathos. Their predominant characteristic is not passion, pride, or grandeur – certainly not passionate love – but being famous: Antony and Cleopatra are celebrities and, as with modern celebrities, this is a self-perpetuating category fuelled by carefully curated performances of themselves. Flirtation, tantrum, grandiloquence, quarrel – and perhaps love too – are all knowingly played out for the cameras / audience. The flipside of the shame culture in this context is not its anthropological opposite, guilt, but its exhibitionist best friend, celebrity performance. Celebrity, like shame, is externally oriented and needs, in Benedict’s terms, an audience.

  In such a culture the question of authenticity – does Cleopatra/Antony really love Antony/Cleopatra? – becomes unanswerable: how would, how could we know? Sincerity is irrelevant to celebrity. In part, the play anticipates the difficulties of understanding the motives of public individuals, but it does more than this: it suggests that the private self is inscrutable and perhaps overrated. Previous tragedies offered us the theatrical illusion of access to the inner psyche; here we see humans constructed and displayed through dialogue and performance. Like Caesar, all we really know at the end of the play is that the pair were famous, and that our presence at the play has colluded to reinforce that very celebrity. Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy of the exterior not the interior, a tragedy of shame not guilt, and this framework helps us to see that the play’s apparent cultural opposites, Rome and Egypt, are closer than they first appear.

  It’s customary for criticism to map the play’s central dichotomy, between Rome and Egypt, onto a range of related binaries: masculine and feminine, reason and emotion, head and heart, west and east. To do so is to comply with the play’s own investment in these distinctions. Antony and Cleopatra develops the concern of all of Shakespeare’s Roman plays – which is the nature of Rome itself, a civilization always understood through conflict with something else. In Titus Andronicus this other is racial; in Julius Caesar it is political; and in Coriolanus it is sectarian. Here the distinction is cultural and ethnic: Rome defines itself against and in opposition to Egypt, and vice versa. The scenes alternate between the two locations as the play experiments with a radical new use of place: the successive short scenes in the long central acts of the play yearn for the invention of the cinematic cross-cut. Theatre designers have had a field day with the supposedly intrinsic differences between Rome and Egypt: Rome, all sterile hard edges, fascistic marching and harsh lighting; Egypt, an orientalist fantasia of cushions and music and sex. As often in the binary understanding of the early modern period, difference – any difference – is symbolized in the difference between two women: a version of madonna/whore which places the mercurial Egyptian Cleopatra in contrast with Antony’s chillingly upright Roman wife Octavia.

  Antony, of course, is caught between these two worlds, but so too are the audience. Rather as in 1 Henry IV we experience Prince Hal’s conflict between the world of his father’s court and the world of Falstaff in the taverns of Eastcheap as the theatrical difference between boring scenes and enjoyable ones, so too in Antony and Cleopatra we can see that Rome is less dramatically engaging than Egypt. We would rather be in the scenes with Cleopatra than in those with Caesar. The play enacts this in its opening scene. It begins with a short, disapproving prologue from two Romans talking about how Antony has been ‘transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool’ (1.1.12–13), but they are then marginalized by a long Egyptian sequence in which Cleopatra enacts theatrically the allure she holds over Antony. The audience is also seduced. If Antony and Cleopatra is a Roman play, it’s a Roman play that doesn’t want to be Roman. Unlike those other challenges to Rome in different plays, here Rome is really on the losing side. Bookended by Egyptian scenes, Rome seems an unattractive, anti-theatrical antagonist: there will never be a sequel about the bloodless Octavius Caesar.

  But while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two worlds and so to endorse the racial fatalism of the play, the framework of the shame culture also allows us to see their similarities. To be Roman or to be Egyptian is to be public, not private. Antony is a triumvir of Rome; Cleopatra an Egyptian queen: these are public figures not private lovers. Reports of Antony’s previous heroism, like those of Cleopatra’s charisma aboard her legendary barge, identify display, show and consumption by a watching public, as constitutive of these titanic figures’ greatness. Both are in the public eye – both, in Caesar’s terms, famous.

  So this is a tragedy seen from the outside, and experienced on the outside, and oriented towards the outside. This is challenging to the notion of tragedy itself. A play with a central couple that works through dialogue and display is closer to a comedy than to a tragedy, just as Cleopatra’s final ‘Husband, I come’ (5.2.282) attempts to recast death – the ending of a tragedy – as marriage – the ending of a comedy. A series of actions without interiority is closer to farce than to tragedy. And farce might, finally, be a better framework for understanding Antony and Cleopatra. The male Cleopatra actor, imagining her character played by a boy actor at the end of the play teeters on farcical collapse, but this same ground has been already occupied in the aftermath of Antony’s suicide attempt. Brought to Cleopatra’s monument, probably represented by the gallery above the stage, Antony’s inert, fatally wounded body is raised to die in her arms. But rather than being presented as a moment of exquisite pathos, this action is desperately compromised by its stage awkwardness. Raising a body some fifteen feet above the stage, presumably on a rope, cannot have been easy. The physical difficulties are stressed by Cleopatra’s dialogue: ‘How heavy weighs my lord! / Our strength is all gone into heaviness’ (4.16.33–4), but even more so by the stage direction. ‘They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra’ (38). ‘Heave’, applied to a human, indicates both significant physical effort on the part of the women, and a grotesquely dehumanized heaviness on the part of Antony.

  One review of an all-male production at the Globe theatre in 1999 felt that ‘the lifting of the dying hero up to Cleopatra’s monument is inadvertently hilarious, with the captured queen of the Nile and a big, beefy Charmian hauling at the rope’, and suggested that this ending to Act 4 set the final act of the play in a farcical tone: ‘After that, the opening-night audience clearly found it tough to continue suspending its disbelief in a male heroine.’ Perhaps the suggestion that the hilarity was i
nadvertent underestimates Shakespeare’s satiric power to deflate his own mythos and that of his characters. At this point in his career, Shakespeare’s heroes are washed-up remnants of an etiolated classical civilization. Antony and Cleopatra engages with classical epic in echoing Virgil’s Aeneid and, more particularly, revisiting Virgil’s account of the relation between Rome and femininity. In the Aeneid, Aeneas must leave his lover – another charismatically sexual foreign queen, Dido of Carthage – in order to fulfil his destiny and found Rome: Shakespeare’s Antony replays Aeneas’ conflict between desire and responsibility in a different, post-heroic key – akin, perhaps, to Shakespeare’s sardonic rewriting of myth in Troilus and Cressida or the satiric anti-heroism of Timon of Athens.

  Just as its protagonists imagine themselves pushing at the limits of their world, so too the ambition and scope of these theatrical and performative lovers pushes at tragic conventions. Shakespeare seems to be deliberately experimenting in this long, unwieldy, but grand and aspirant drama. The stage history of the play suggests it was not an entirely successful experiment, but, like the lovers themselves, it has gained the ultimate accolade. It’s certainly famous.

  CHAPTER 18

  Coriolanus

  Often it’s the psychological details about Shakespeare’s characters that stick in the mind. Why are we told that Lady Macbeth recognized her father in the sleeping countenance of King Duncan and so could not murder him herself? Who was it who once adored the milquetoast Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night? One detail niggles me about Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s terrifying depiction of a hero so battle-hardened that he can scarcely operate in civilian society. Here goes. Much of the first act of the play concerns a major Roman battle offensive against the rebel Aufidius’ Volscian troops. As the Roman victory under Coriolanus’ leadership is announced, the consul Cominius tells the young victor that he can have anything he wants as a reward. Coriolanus recalls: ‘I sometime lay here in Corioles, / And at a poor man’s house. He used me kindly. / He cried to me; I saw him prisoner’ (1.10.81–3). ‘I request you’, Coriolanus continues, ‘To give my poor host freedom’ (85–6). Of course, says Cominius, with an inauspicious comparison, ‘Were he the butcher of my son he should / Be free as is the wind’ (87–8). Who is this prisoner of war? What is his name? ‘By Jupiter, forgot!’, says Coriolanus. ‘I am weary, yea, my memory is tired. / Have we no wine here?’ (89–91). The name of the Volscian collaborator who gave his enemy sanctuary is lost. Hope of his pardon dissolves, since he cannot be identified, and nothing more is said about it. What’s the purpose of this little wrinkle in the play? Why does Coriolanus forget the name of his comrade?

  Of course the real agency here is not Coriolanus’, but Shakespeare’s. Authorial intention has been the forbidden fruit of literary criticism for over seventy years, since the American critics W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley’s influential essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946). Wimsatt and Beardsley observe sternly that ‘judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine’: the comparison asserts that what the poet intended is both irrelevant (since what matters is how it tastes or works) and irretrievable (since the result does not obviously include the details of its own genesis). Asking what the author intended has since come to seem one of the more risibly unsophisticated manoeuvres of literary interpretation. But on the other hand, the question of intention won’t go away, not least because we do care about it. As we’ve often seen in this book, one way to gussy up the discredited hermeneutic of intention is to turn to Shakespeare’s sources. There we can glimpse Shakespeare at work as he cuts, pastes, skims and chops into pentameter. And where he adds or changes something particular – that looks like the intentionalist creative equivalent of the so-called ‘God particle’.

  Shakespeare’s source for his Roman plays – for Julius Caesar, for Antony and Cleopatra and for Coriolanus – is the translation by Thomas North of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans published in English in 1579. The publisher of the English edition, Richard Field, was a contemporary and associate of Shakespeare, also from Stratford-upon-Avon: perhaps it was Field who gave Shakespeare access to this important book over a period of years during which he consulted it intensively. In Plutarch, at the equivalent point after the victory at Coriole, Coriolanus also asks for pardon for a man who helped him. No name is given to this ‘old friend and host of mine, an honest wealthy man’, but there is no suggestion that Coriolanus has forgotten it. In Shakespeare, by contrast, the sole purpose of the dialogue about this person is to establish that Coriolanus does not know what he is called. Intentionalist junkies can get their fix: Coriolanus forgetting the name of his aider is a distinctively chosen, Shakespearean element of this play. He must have incorporated it for a reason.

  The comparison with Plutarch reveals another interesting micro-shift Shakespeare has made to the source story. In the play, Coriolanus explicitly states that the man who helped him in Coriole was ‘poor’: ‘I sometime lay here in Corioles,/And at a poor man’s house.’ Plutarch tells us equally explicitly that the man was ‘an honest wealthy man’. In a play that is so deeply implicated in class resentment and the divide between rich and poor, this switch can’t be accidental either.

  Coriolanus begins with the stage direction ‘Enter a company of mutinous Citizens with staves, clubs, and other weapons’ (1.1.1). These armed men have a simple aim: ‘rather to die than to famish’ (4–5). They are hungry and cannot afford food, so they are marching on grain stores maintained, for financial profit, by the patrician ruling class. This has its origins in Plutarch, but a more immediate prompt for Shakespeare must have been the 1607 grain riots which took place in his native Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, and were known collectively as the Midland Revolt. Rural unrest was prompted by a series of poor harvests and rising food prices and shortages, some of it attributable to the spread of the new enclosure movement that was taking up arable land for profitable sheep pasture. Shakespeare may show a direct knowledge of the complaints of the rural poor in his apparent echo of their charged word ‘depopulate’, which is found in the petition of the ‘Diggers of Warwickshire’ and, for the only time in his canon, here in Coriolanus.

  Shakespeare’s own position in, and in relation to, these contemporary events is a tricky one – and here we need to ask how far biography is, or is not, an admissible element of literary criticism. One of the biographical facts we have about Shakespeare is his own speculation on barley prices, hoarding eighty bushels in his barns at New Place in Stratford. Further, we know that late in his life Shakespeare was involved in extensive negotiations around a contentious local plan in Stratford to enclose common land. Shakespeare seems to have been concerned only to protect his own rights and income as a freeholder, not with the more collective concerns about enclosure as the forcible privatization of land previously held in common. As the twentieth-century playwright Edward Bond puts it in Bingo (1973), an unsparing depiction of the gulf between the humanity of Shakespeare’s plays and the greed and self-interest of the businessman: ‘he could side either with the landowners or with the poor who would lose their land and livelihood. He sided with the landowners.’ Bond’s Shakespeare emerges from the archives as a capitalist more likely to be identified with the patrician grain hoarders in Coriolanus than with the hungry citizenry.

  Where this leaves the sympathies of the antagonistic play Coriolanus is really hard to pin down. The history of performances shows how different ages have attempted to stabilize its ambiguous politics. Shakespeare’s own text is either even-handed (if you approve of its ideological balance) or evasive (if you don’t). What is clear is that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus forgets the name of a poor man, within a context in which he is vocally hostile to Rome’s lower classes. His first, uncompromising speech in the play makes that utterly clear:

  What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues,

  That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,

  Make yourselves scabs?
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br />   (1.1.162–4)

  It doesn’t get much better. When Coriolanus, pushed to seek political office on the back of his military glories, is also forced to seek the people’s support, he cannot bring himself to ask for their voices. Accused by one of the citizens, ‘You have not, indeed, loved the common people’ (2.3.92–3), Coriolanus replies confidently and unrepentantly, ‘You should account me the more virtuous that I have not been common in my love’ (94–5). Baited by the tribunes, who have class conflict as their aim, Coriolanus reveals his true disdain for the people’s role in the state:

  I say again,

  In soothing them we nourish ’gainst our Senate

  The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition,

  Which we ourselves have ploughed for, sowed, and scattered

  By mingling them with us, the honoured number

  Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that

  Which they have given to beggars.

  (3.1.72–8)

  It’s a clear distinction between us and them. He himself belongs to the ‘honored number’, the patrician class born to rule Rome; they are the ‘cockle of rebellion’, who fritter away the gains made by the patricians.

  So, given that Coriolanus is explicitly resentful of the idle poor, what should we make of the fact that the Coriole man whose name he forgets has been changed from a wealthy man in the source to a poor man in the play? Is this a further example of his ingrained dislike of the lower orders, a sense that he simply doesn’t care enough to remember? Should we interpret this mini-dialogue simply as a sign of Coriolanus’ status fundamentalism: even if he is an ally, the plebeian is not really a person worthy of recall?