Antony and Cleopatra (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) Read online

  The most important resource was, of course, the actors themselves. They needed many skills: in the words of one contemporary commentator, "dancing, activity, music, song, elocution, ability of body, memory, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit." Their bodies were as significant as their voices. Hamlet tells the player to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action": moments of strong emotion, known as "passions," relied on a repertoire of dramatic gestures as well as a modulation of the voice. When Titus Andronicus has had his hand chopped off, he asks "How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?" A pen portrait of "The Character of an Excellent Actor" by the dramatist John Webster is almost certainly based on his impression of Shakespeare's leading man, Richard Burbage: "By a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full theater, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre...."

  Though Burbage was admired above all others, praise was also heaped upon the apprentice players whose alto voices fitted them for the parts of women. A spectator at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience were reduced to tears by the pathos of Desdemona's death. The puritans who fumed about the biblical prohibition upon cross-dressing and the encouragement to sodomy constituted by the sight of an adult male kissing a teenage boy on stage were a small minority. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the leading apprentices in Shakespeare's company. It may perhaps be inferred that one was a lot taller than the other, since Shakespeare often wrote for a pair of female friends, one tall and fair, the other short and dark (Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero).

  We know little about Shakespeare's own acting roles--an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage's lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.

  Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear's Fool, which were written for Armin.

  One thing that is clear from surviving "plots" or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters only appear in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn't Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter's Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.

  THE KING'S MAN

  The new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain's Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King's Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare's career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors--and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria's reign.

  Shakespeare's productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King's Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare's death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well.

  From 1608 onward, when the King's Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King's Men's company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612-14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes' Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title "All Is True"), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." These were written after Shakespeare's two final solo-authored plays, The Winter's Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.

  The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare's career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare's personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company's indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.

  About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large "Folio" format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him "a monument without a tomb":

  And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give... He was
not of an age, but for all time!

  SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS:

  A CHRONOLOGY

  1589-91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)

  1589-92 The Taming of the Shrew

  1589-92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)

  1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible)

  1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable)

  1591-92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  1591-92;

  perhaps

  revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)

  1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others

  1592/94 King Richard the Third

  1593 Venus and Adonis (poem)

  1593-94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem)

  1593-1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover's Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship)

  1592-94/

  1600-03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)

  1594 The Comedy of Errors

  1595 Love's Labour's Lost

  1595-97 Love's Labour's Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)

  1595-96 A Midsummer Night's Dream

  1595-96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

  1595-96 King Richard the Second

  1595-97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)

  1596-97 The Merchant of Venice

  1596-97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth

  1597-98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth

  1598 Much Ado About Nothing

  1598-99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)

  1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth

  1599 "To the Queen" (epilogue for a court performance)

  1599 As You Like It

  1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

  1600-01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)

  1600-01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597-99)

  1601 "Let the Bird of Loudest Lay" (poem, known since 1807 as "The Phoenix and Turtle" [turtle-dove])

  1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will

  1601-02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida

  1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

  1604 Measure for Measure

  1605 All's Well That Ends Well

  1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton

  1605-06 The Tragedy of King Lear

  1605-08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)

  1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)

  1606-07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

  1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus

  1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins

  1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline

  1611 The Winter's Tale

  1611 The Tempest

  1612-13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)

  1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher

  1613-14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher

  THE HISTORY BEHIND THE

  TRAGEDIES: A CHRONOLOGY

  FURTHER READING

  AND VIEWING

  CRITICAL APPROACHES

  Adelman, Janet, The Common Liar: An Essay on "Antony and Cleopatra" (1973). Full-scale study, with much psychological insight.

  Brower, Reuben, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (1971), pp. 317-53. Powerful placing in terms of cultural tradition.

  Brown, John Russell, ed., Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra: A Casebook (1969, rev. ed. 1991). Excellent anthology of older critical essays.

  Charney, Maurice, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (1961), pp. 79-141. Close attention to language.

  Dusinberre, Juliet, "Squeaking Cleopatras: Gender and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra," in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (1996), pp. 46-67. Interesting on boy actors.

  Jones, Emrys, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (1971), pp. 225-65. On dramatic shape.

  Knight, G. Wilson, "The Transcendental Humanism of Antony and Cleopatra," in his The Imperial Theme (1931, rev. ed. 1951), pp. 199-262. Expansive, gloriously hyperbolic reading of the play's imagery.

  Loomba, Ania, "The Colour of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural Difference and Renaissance Drama," in Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, ed. Kate Chedgzoy (2001), pp. 235-55. Reading informed by postcolonial thinking.

  Miles, Geoffrey, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (1996). Excellent account of Shakespeare's critique of "Stoic" values.

  Miola, Robert, Shakespeare's Rome (1983). Lucid survey of the Roman plays.

  THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

  Brooke, Michael, "Antony and Cleopatra on Screen," www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/592136/. Overview of film and television productions.

  Escolme, Bridget, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Antony and Cleopatra (2006). Student guide with particularly good insight into theatrical issues.

  Madeleine, Richard, Shakespeare in Production: Antony and Cleopatra (1998). Excellent stage history.

  Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra (2006). Scene-by-scene survey with reference to performances through the ages.

  RSC, "Exploring Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra," www.rsc.org.uk/explore/plays/antony.htm. Interviews and other Web resources drawing on Gregory Doran's 2006 production.

  Rutter, Carol Chillington, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage (2001). Attentive to text as well as performance.

  Worthen, W. B., "'The Weight of Antony': Staging 'Character' in Antony and Cleopatra," Studies in English Literature 26 (1986), pp. 295-308. Sophisticated consideration of dramaturgical questions.

  AVAILABLE ON DVD

  Antony and Cleopatra, directed for television by Jon Scoffield from Trevor Nunn's 1972 RSC stage production (TV 1974, DVD 2004). With Janet Suzman as Cleopatra and Richard Johnson as Antony. Brilliantly acted, with strong use of close-up.

  Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Jonathan Miller (BBC Television Shakespeare, 1981, DVD 2001). With Jane Lapotaire as Cleopatra and Colin Blakely as Antony. Ponderous, though Ian Charleson is interesting as a sternly moralistic Octavius.

  Cleopatra, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz (1963, DVD 2006). Iconic performance by Elizabeth Taylor in a big screen epic: not Shakespeare's version of the story, but central to the modern perception of it.

  REFERENCES

  1. See Richard Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production: Antony and Cleopatra (1998), p. 22.

  2. Thomas Davies, "Antony and Cleopatra," in his Dramatic Miscellanies (vol. 2, 1783, repr. 1973), pp. 333-70.

  3. J. Doran, "Love for, and the Lovers of, Shakspere [sic]," The Gentleman's Magazine, February 1856, p. 123.

  4. Doran, "Love for, and the Lovers of, Shakspere," p. 123.

  5. Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage (vol. 1, 1976), p. 105.

  6. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 45.

  7. London Times review, 24 October 1849.

  8. London Times review, 24 October 1849.

  9. London Times review, 24 October 1849.

  10. The Athenaeum, 27 September 1873.

  11. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 61.

  12. London Times, 4 January 1970, reprinted in Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra: A Casebook, ed. John Russell Brown (1969, rev. ed. 1991), p. 53.

  13. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 59.

&
nbsp; 14. James Agate, quoted in Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 86.

  15. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 87.

  16. Ivor Brown, Observer, 22 December 1946.

  17. London Times, 21 December 1946.

  18. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (1953), p. 28.

  19. Felix Barker, "Tradition at the St. James's, 1948-1953," in his The Oliviers: A Biography (1953), pp. 334-60.

  20. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 21 December 1951.

  21. Walter Kerr, "Cleopatra and Friends," The Commonweal, 11 January 1952, p. 349.

  22. George Rylands, "Festival Shakespeare in the West End," Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953), pp. 140-46.

  23. Rylands, "Festival Shakespeare in the West End," p. 146.

  24. Birmingham Sunday Mercury, 3 May 1953.

  25. T. C. Worsley, "Love for Love," New Statesman, 9 May 1953.

  26. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 93.

  27. Worsley, "Love for Love."

  28. Kenneth Tynan, Evening Standard, 1 May 1953.

  29. Peter Fleming, The Spectator, 8 May 1953.

  30. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 99.

  31. London Times, 6 March 1957.

  32. London Times, 29 March 1957.

  33. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 100.

  34. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 101.

  35. Dan Sullivan, New York Times, 2 August 1967.

  36. Sullivan, New York Times, 2 August 1967.

  37. Tony Richardson, Time magazine, 20 August 1973.

  38. Madeleine, Shakespeare in Production, p. 110.

  39. John Peter, London Sunday Times, 12 April 1987.

  40. Roger Warren, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), pp. 359-65.

  41. Bridget Escolme, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Antony and Cleopatra (2006), p. 120.

  42. Michael Billington, Guardian, 22 October 1998.

  43. Lois Potter, "Shakespeare Performed: Roman Actors and Egyptian Transvestites," Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999), pp. 508-17.

  44. Kristin E. Gandrow, Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), pp. 123-5.

  45. Gandrow, Theatre Journal, p. 125.

  46. Escolme, Shakespeare Handbooks, p. 148.