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.