I give up on a pithy title; this is my All For Love followup post.

I know I don’t like All For Love because I’ve been putting off reading the last act for five days. I still haven’t, but it looks like I won’t until the followup-post pressure’s off, so let’s forge on.

Dryden underestimates his audience, I think. In riffing off Antony and Cleopatra, All For Love does the same things Antony and Cleopatra did -realistic characters, character-based comedy, a tragedy of misunderstandings- and presents it as a new take on the story, while in fact, all he’s really done is get rid of Shakespeare’s epic scale. He has made the characters more “realistic” (probably not the word Dryden would use, but I think that was his intent) in that he’s made them vague and easily manipulated, taken away their emotional extremities; he does not seem to believe that there are people in the world who act like Shakespeare’s characters, or alternatively, he doesn’t seem to see artistic potential in slightly overplaying.

However, there’s no real way for me to get into the author’s mind, so why don’t I talk about the book, where I’m on firmer ground? If that’s even a reasonable distinction?

Let’s start by praising Dryden. The incidents in the play are ingenious. They’re like incidents in a great movie; they’re visual, and they’re also heavily symbolic – not in a “daffodil means sadness” way, but in a “this shot compresses a larger conflict” way. This is not my favorite way to tell a story, but there is little doubt that Dryden is brilliant when, for example, he has Octavia come to plead with Antony to return – brings his kids – instructs the kids openly on how to cling to him for maximum bathos – martyrs herself obnoxiously (and is called on it by the helpless Antony) – all played as intentional emotional blackmail. We associate this kind of anti-sentimentalism with the modern world, and the modern world with the best of everything; I freely admit I’m probably tumbling into this fallacy when I call this scene great, but on the other hand, it is great. Maybe if I were living in 1850 I’d have to free myself from my times a little more to think so (actually, this is probably a big part of my resentment of All For Love: it too closely resembles what’s currently fashionable in thought, it doesn’t flatter me by demanding I work for it). But it is an objectively gorgeously-plotted play. I hope.

Dryden also does a fine job of retelling an epic as a drawing-room melo-comedy-something. He is formally brave. He reduces the characters to a few vital and thus more highly concentrated roles, in the process giving us the great characters of Ventidius, Alexas (who become increasingly obvious and annoying characters as the play runs on, but are still interesting and funny) and to a lesser extent Dolabella. Dolabella is a transparent plot device, actually, but Dryden does a nice job of writing him: a well-motivated, diplomatic youth in an awkward position. It doesn’t help, however, that Dryden tells him to be in love with Cleopatra. Dolabella’s passionlessness is so striking that it initially seems that Dryden’s setting it up so that he’s actually interested in Antony, and Antony’s blind to it. This could be interesting, but alas, the more time passes, the more this potential wrinkle smooths.

I was somewhat wrong in my initial assessment that Dryden is trying to be epic and satirical about the failures of royal leadership, and also that it’s not really about the leads (though it would still be better titled Antony and Ventidius or, The Room Mis-Judged). I’m completely convinced now that he’s focused on the formal tricks listed above: epic-into-personal-drama. That Shakespeare’s play already has a perfectly good personal drama is not Dryden’s problem.

I was completely correct in my initial assessment that Dryden really shafts Cleopatra, who has not yet demonstrated even a touch of the strength, wit, failings and personal power of Shakespeare’s, and even states (without irony) at one point that she was born to be an ordinary woman. I respect all that in theory; it’s the same thing Shakespeare does, sort of, giving these royal or martial characters strongly humanizing traits and really bringing home the fact that they can’t live inside their myths – but on the other hand, Shakespeare’s characters certainly live up to them. I don’t understand how Dryden’s Antony and Cleopatra have even held on to their thrones. It is fine to write about ordinary people (though if they lack remarkable gifts, they had better be in very interesting or pathetic situations) if the audience doesn’t know that they have extraordinary life histories, that in the case of these ancient politicians, these are people who’d be dead now if they weren’t extraordinary.

Part of this is the dramatic-unities thing. You can’t give it any real sense of history and these characters -without their history- are much weaker even if you change nothing else. In the end, I think, I continue to respect Dryden’s experiment, but I really can’t like it.

I don’t think I’ll write more about All For Love unless Act V really, really shocks me one way or the other. Like, if one of the leads suddenly says, “I’ve written a play about us, my chuck!” and produces a copy of Antony and Cleopatra, and then they perform that instead.

Dryden’s All For Love, Post 1

Antony and Cleopatra was the first book in a long time to appeal to both the literary and fannish sides of my brain, and as such, it leaves a terrible vacuum, which I have filled in a fannish way.

Specifically, I’m reading John Dryden’s All For Love or, The World Well Lost, written about seventy years later in explicit response to Antony and Cleopatra; a rewrite of the play, but with the additional, incredibly bravely-taken challenge of obeying the Greek tragic unities – distilling the whole sprawling epic (which makes so much of its years-long pauses, and its death scenes in which characters have to wait for hours until they bleed out) into a single day of defeat.

Thus far (middle of Act II) I’m not sure whether he’s going to make it. It doesn’t help that his versions of the characters are not so complex, fascinating and ultimately pitiful as Shakespeare’s; they’re literary-fiction characters, tight and satirical, not the sprawling edifices I’m used to. We are not meant to sit in their brains, but rather to watch them helplessly, aghast at the terrible decisions they’re making, and at the terrible effects their self-absorption will have on their subjects and companions.

Because the other thing about Dryden is that he refuses to participate in Shakespeare’s neutral view of history. His story is not actually about Antony and Cleopatra, but about Egypt and Rome, and he actively condemns the leads for putting their romance above the needs of their station; indeed, he presents them as somewhat clueless royal creatures, relying for motivation upon their retainers, Ventidius the Roman general (a strikingly modern character, a bit of a self-conscious parody of the macho, blinkered action hero, though also a very clever man) and Alexas the Egyptian eunuch (an urbane realist who smilingly accepts Ventidius’ jokes about his missing balls while coldly out-talking and out-maneuvering people of much greater manifest intellectual capability). (Ventidius and Alexas hate each other.)

Comparatively, when we first see Antony, he’s somewhat unsuccessfully (but with a fair degree of pathos and poetry, since the whole point of Antony is that he can pretty much do anything except get younger) Hamleting around an Egyptian stronghold, a man of action clumsily trying to get his fists around the idea of depression. On Dryden’s chosen day, his empire is already lost, and he flings himself down and delivers a long, passionate monologue in which he fantasizes about running off to live in the kind of woodland pastoral only a lifelong urbanite would imagine. When Ventidius, who’s been watching him secretly, finally reveals himself, Antony breaks off his ramble (which, through exhaustive description of the forest scene, is made to seem extraordinarily long and involved although it actually isn’t) and they share a beautiful moment of understatement:

ANTONY

Art thou Ventidius?

VENTIDIUS

Are you Antony? I’m liker what I was, than you to him I left you last.

ANTONY

I’m angry.

VENTIDIUS

So am I.

This is a great exchange, half restrained tragedy and half well-timed wry comedy, but again, Dryden seems removed from his characters, and it shows in the suddenness of the transition from a near-break with reality to a moment of total self-awareness. It’s not an insane thing to imagine, but it’s something Shakespeare finessed better (partly by keeping most of the transitions between scenes, and partly by establishing Antony’s character earlier, so that the different fragments refer to an earlier and more coherent self). Played out so baldly, and without setup, it doesn’t work as well, even though you have to admire Dryden for trying to lay the whole matter before you in such a transparent way.

His Cleopatra is, thus far, a disappointment: manipulative without mastery, melodramatic without strength, lacking any more than a practical Brutus’ wit. It’s difficult to believe that she’s a queen who rules by charisma, and Dryden also makes a couple of absolutely inexplicable decisions in his portrayal of her history. Foremost among these is the idea that Antony has been responsible for much of her rise to power. Apparently, he has admired her chastely from afar almost since childhood, and her earlier relationship with Julius Caesar was horrible rudeness on Caesar’s part (and not much more). This decision takes most of the agency from Cleopatra, which would be a legitimate character decision – except that it means we suddenly know nothing about her. If Antony has always had her life firmly in hand, if she started (indeed) as his de facto ward, then who is she, and what does she want? If you’re going to do it this way, then the whole play is now about Antony, and that’s a sad loss.

Though, again, so far the significant characters are Ventidius and Alexas anyway; even Antony’s level of agency is modest compared to Ventidius’ drive (why has he actually interrupted Antony’s forest reverie? To convince him to come and lead an emergency army he happens to have raised). In its relentless focus on the nominally minor parts, it’s almost a proto-proto-proto Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I suspect Dryden (again, in a very modern way) is simply bored with traditional heroes in a particular way that I think shows limitation rather than imagination.

This is my response merely to the first act and part of the second, of course. I found this kind of early-impression post useful the last time I wrote about a play, so I’m putting it up even though I find it quite likely (since Dryden displays a good deal of intelligence and humor) that there are massively improving reversals and twists to come.

Antony and Cleopatra II

Triangles like Cleopatra/Antony/Octavia’s have been written about since antiquity, and by now, we all know how to recognize the “bad lady” character. She’s had several partners, she’s an ironist, a wit; she has perspective and remove; she lacks a degree of worldly power, and instead must rely upon her charisma and her brain. And she’s bad. What’s bad about her is not made clear, but we all think we know it, simply because she has had this life and exhibits this mix of traits. There must be corruption in her. She is false.

The thing is that I’ve dedicated, like, my entire system of thought to defending “bad ladies,” saying the trope’s disgusting (and it is), that it vilifies traits which are often admirable (it does) in the name of keeping intelligent women in the dirt (where, despite those few successes which educated Americans in particular always seem to think instantly redeem millennia of abuse, they still are). Cleopatra makes mistakes, critical miscalculations, as Antony does, but she’s an enormously impressive person, a hero, brave and clever and self-aware, and that is largely the thrust of the play. But even so, when Cleopatra finally proves that her loyalty to Antony and to her own integrity runs deeper than even her enthusiastic love of life, I found I really needed that proof. It was very satisfying, but also very surprising.

Perhaps this is because I believe in the “bad lady” after all, which would certainly be depressing. Perhaps, slightly more flatteringly to me, I simply expected that Shakespeare would let me down -like most writers do- and have the “bad lady” prove her badness; perhaps I was just bracing for the inevitable token ending, which people like me so often have to ignore with great effort in order to continue to like a piece of fiction, in which she blows it and exposes her essential falsity.

But at any rate she doesn’t, and that makes me like the play, if humanly possible, even more. Yes, Cleopatra is two-faced, but both faces turn toward Antony. She lies continually without lying once to him. His distrust of her is the consistent cause of every bad decision he makes (and he makes almost no good ones), but because the viewer cannot help, out of feminist anxiety and/or hateful hard-wiring, distrusting her until the final scenes, perspective is as hard as it is for the heroes. The force of this hateful hard-wiring is one of the strongest things on earth -this narrative, of a powerful but curiously helpless man caught between a virtuous and a “sinful” woman- and, even though the play eventually rips that narrative up and stomps on it, it does enough damage to the characters.

It takes something like that to even begin to dent Antony and Cleopatra. These people are not tragic heroes. They are winners: mature, experienced, intelligent, glamorous, brave, sexy, sincerely in love. Their faults are modest. Antony feels his age too much, can’t define himself except to opposition; Cleopatra’s panicky and a little too sarcastic. These faults are not tragic flaws in any classic sense; they must be played upon expertly in order to bring them down, and the only way they can really lose is through division.

Maybe one of the tragedies of Caesar’s character is that he doesn’t understand that, though it’s crucial to a victory which he has otherwise orchestrated with a brilliant emotional onslaught on Antony. He never tries to divide the lovers; marrying off Antony to Octavia is meant only to send him the latter back to Egypt and bring things to a head.

I think Octavian (now Augustus?) Caesar is an underrated villain, insofar as any Shakespearean anything is “underrated” (I’m not in touch with the community, but I assume they’ve talked most things over by now.) He’s brilliant but colorless, with displays of emotion alternating (in his moments of greater privacy) with a firm, well-intentioned calculation: he wants, he says, to rule the world merely in the cause of “universal peace.”

There’s nothing to say about Antony’s final days that could possibly improve on the text. His boyish, adrenaline-charged shout after his one small victory (he tells Cleopatra to jump between his ribs, clothes and all, and ride his heart like a horse – a statement which I prefer not to read as a double entendre; it’s more spontaneous and private that way)  is, of course, a lot more depressing than any of the moments of despair and desperate plan-changing that precede and follow. And, Christ, the horrible, undignified things that happen during his botched suicide: the friend who won’t kill him because he cares too much; the friends who won’t finish him off because they never liked him; the necessity by which his incapable body is hauled up into Cleopatra’s pyramid to die, because she’ll be taken hostage if she comes down…it’s a mockery of the stiff, heroic suicides that end Julius Caesar, and thus it’s unbelievably wrenching. You have to cry a little, if only a little.

There are so many brutal putdowns in the play, in general. Mostly toward Antony, it must be said, but elsewhere as well (as when Caesar is making his “we’re more alike than different, you and I” villain-speech, and one of his minions observes that with such a large mirror, of course Caesar sees himself in it – the implication presumably being that Antony’s personality is pretty massive and complex, so of course he invites self-comparisons by people whose dimmer stars have any of his colors).

Btw: yes, I get it, mirrors, facets, all the characters reflect one another, all the characters (not just Cleopatra) have “infinite varieties,” thank God I’m well out of any life circumstance which would require a reading of this play with any sort of eye to structure or allegory.

Also, poor Enobarbus. We saw that coming.

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others: Antony and Cleopatra I

ACT IV

SCENE XV. The same. A monument.

Enter CLEOPATRA and her maids aloft, with CHARMIAN and IRAS
CLEOPATRA
O Charmian, I will never go from hence.

CHARMIAN
Be comforted, dear madam.

CLEOPATRA
No, I will not:
All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise; our size of sorrow,
Proportion’d to our cause, must be as great
As that which makes it.

Enter, below, DIOMEDES

How now! is he dead?

Kristeen Young came onstage quoting from the “comforts” speech in San Francisco a few weeks ago. This was not my first recent cue to reread Antony and Cleopatra, strangely; I had been thinking about it earlier, but after this potent reminder I went straight to it.

I’ve considered Cleopatra my favorite Shakespeare for years, ever since I last read it in 2003. Plowing through it now, my opinion’s unchanged, though my opinion of my younger self is. Half of the play is incomprehensible without heavy consultation of footnotes, which I was too smart to bother with at twenty-one; as a result, I missed most of Antony and Caesar’s relationship, which takes up the middle third of the play and is a cacophony of mysterious Roman politics and punning, high-court, coded language which requires a read aloud, a thorough hack through the footnotes, a crude mental translation and then a final silent read to get through. It’s worth it, but you never entirely finish. The way the two communicate is just too far below the surface; I think you’re never really meant to get it.

But you don’t read Antony and Cleopatra for the Antony and Caesar material, well-done though it undoubtedly is. You read it for the title couple. They are fascinating. Much modern writing disdains the portrayal of famous people, kings and queens; there’s such a sense that to portray royals and celebrities in their pomp is to give in to their desire for attention (if I disagree now, it’s because I had to be actively dissuaded). Antony and Cleopatra expose the fallacy of this rule of writing: they are famous people, shown at the height of their personal glamor, and the ways that their actual lives interact with their fame is where the pulpy, sexy strength of the play lies.

At center, they are a good couple. They like each other. They share certain pleasures (walking around town in disguise, people-watching and chatting) and certain kinks (dressing up in each others’ clothes, though it seems that particular incident was mostly Cleopatra’s doing). When they talk, she tends to dominate the conversation; she likes to head him off and question his good faith, and he tooth-grindingly insists he doesn’t want to argue. To me, this doesn’t read as a particularly volatile exchange. You get the impression that they’ve been through all this.

I’m also fascinated by the way Antony runs his love life. He doesn’t seem so much a serial liar and cheat as merely serially decisive, the kind of person who sees a beautiful and complete future for each decision he makes (and then, at the first sign of failure, abandons the whole idea). Or else (and I like this theory better) he’s just capable of loving more than one person at once, and doesn’t really understand why everyone’s so upset about his being with both Fulvia and Cleopatra, and later both Cleopatra and Octavia. After all, his love for each of these women is different in character, isn’t it?

You could even read Cleopatra -who admonishes him for his failures as a husband, as much as for his failures as an adulterous lover- as sharing this philosophy. Perhaps she’s an uncontrollable natural force who can’t take a side, as she’s often read to be; more likely, I think, she’s a rational being who only wants her partner to lead the noble life she knows he’s capable of leading. She’d prefer, obviously, that he led it with her, but she’s aware enough of the realities of their situation to accept that he has other partners, that they are a part of their political world as well as Antony’s life – and if he’s going to have them, he’s going to damned well live up to himself by treating everyone decently.

I haven’t reached the end of the play yet, and don’t remember it well enough to know whether it kills these theories (the grand, failed gesture I know Cleopatra will make is not as sanguine as I’ve made her sound above, but then she’s also human). I suspect I’ll be borne out, though, because the play thus far is unremittingly tragic mostly because there’s both a basic conflict and an absolute 1:1 connection between Antony and Cleopatra’s personal lives and their professional fame, and all of that crushes their nice relationship like an insect.

The way Shakespeare does the rumors is great. Characters who don’t know the main pair constantly exchange information, of various levels of apparent falsity, but there are also gossips in their own camp. Enobarbus (a great character full stop) is particularly interesting with regard to this. When he gets back to Rome, he confirms everything he’s asked about Cleopatra’s court, no matter how outlandish, and again, you could play this as truth, but I don’t think anyone can really eat that many boars. Enobarbus is just plainly too smart to be serving Antony, and yet not driven enough to get further; he talks back to his commander wisely, is ignored, and then goes off and sulkily spreads rumors about him. Everyone else betrays them, too, but out of sulk, politics or love; very rarely malice. Even so, you can really only trust two characters, and that mostly when they’re speaking to each other.