1 00:00:02,160 --> 00:00:11,160 So today, I'm talking about Antony and Cleopatra. A play written in six, you know, six to seven. 2 00:00:11,160 --> 00:00:17,400 First published in the First Folio in 16 23. 3 00:00:17,400 --> 00:00:21,480 So if you think about its nearest neighbours chronologically in Shakespeare's writing, 4 00:00:21,480 --> 00:00:27,270 we're thinking about plays like King Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus. 5 00:00:27,270 --> 00:00:30,570 So it's important to think it's important for what I go on to talk about in the lecture, 6 00:00:30,570 --> 00:00:38,700 to think about it as coming towards the end of Shakespeare's period of writing tragedies in the first decade of the 17th century, 7 00:00:38,700 --> 00:00:43,380 just before he turns to the romances with which he ends his career. 8 00:00:43,380 --> 00:00:52,280 And that sense of generic shift or of Jonás being in some kind of flux, is something going to really focus on in this lecture, 9 00:00:52,280 --> 00:00:56,130 Antony and Cleopatra has got obvious connexions with other Roman plays, 10 00:00:56,130 --> 00:01:03,900 perhaps most particularly the earliest Roman play, Titus Andronicus, but also with Julius Caesar and with Coriolanus. 11 00:01:03,900 --> 00:01:09,360 Those second to Julius Caesar and Coriolanus share the same source with Antony Cleopatra, 12 00:01:09,360 --> 00:01:18,880 Thomas Norths translation of Plutarch, because we've got such as such a single major source here with Norths Plutarch. 13 00:01:18,880 --> 00:01:25,260 This is a really good unthinkable, just a really interesting case for a kind of soul study for comparing what Shakespeare 14 00:01:25,260 --> 00:01:30,630 has done with that source by presenting a middle aged version of Romeo and Juliet. 15 00:01:30,630 --> 00:01:40,800 It links itself to that play. And with Othello perhaps in seeing sexual love as a motive for tragedy. 16 00:01:40,800 --> 00:01:45,010 I've chosen to focus today's lecture around that question of tragedy. 17 00:01:45,010 --> 00:01:49,170 Whose tragedy is it? Whose tragedy is it? 18 00:01:49,170 --> 00:01:56,280 But I'm going to start again, as usual, with a sense of the context and a kind of synopsis for the play. 19 00:01:56,280 --> 00:02:04,200 Of course, in particularly in particular with this play I found, making an outline or a synopsis of the play is already an act of interpretation. 20 00:02:04,200 --> 00:02:10,110 It's not really possible to tell what happens in the play without giving it a spin or without interpreting it 21 00:02:10,110 --> 00:02:17,040 or thinking about what E.M. Foster says in aspects of the novel about the difference between story and plot. 22 00:02:17,040 --> 00:02:27,630 So this is foresta on story and plot. We have defined the story as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence, a plot. 23 00:02:27,630 --> 00:02:32,850 It's also a narrative of events. The emphasis falling on causality. 24 00:02:32,850 --> 00:02:38,790 Then his famous example, the king died and then the queen died is a story. 25 00:02:38,790 --> 00:02:43,530 The king died, and then the Queen died. Of grief is a plot. 26 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:48,360 So the king died. And then the Queen died as a story. The king died, and then the Queen died. 27 00:02:48,360 --> 00:02:55,500 Of grief is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. 28 00:02:55,500 --> 00:03:00,480 So causality is what makes a story into a plot. Consider the death of the Queen. 29 00:03:00,480 --> 00:03:07,320 If it is in a story we say, and then if it isn't a plot, we ask why. 30 00:03:07,320 --> 00:03:14,070 It's quite a nice distinction. Even though Foster is clearly talking about about novels, turning stories, 31 00:03:14,070 --> 00:03:20,930 Shakespeare stories into plots or turning plots back into stories involves quite, 32 00:03:20,930 --> 00:03:29,010 quite an important level of interpretation and possibly even interpellation putting things in that aren't actually there. 33 00:03:29,010 --> 00:03:32,790 We may be over interpret the why because causality, 34 00:03:32,790 --> 00:03:39,990 why things happen and the relation between one factor or agent and another is such a particularly crucial feature of tragedy. 35 00:03:39,990 --> 00:03:43,830 Why do things happen? In some ways, that's the question. Tragedy asks. 36 00:03:43,830 --> 00:03:52,650 That's what turns tragedy into a plot, not a story. Okay, so let's try and think about what happens in Antony Cleopatra. 37 00:03:52,650 --> 00:03:58,950 The Roman general Antony is in love with the Egyptian Empress Cleopatra. 38 00:03:58,950 --> 00:04:07,140 He prefers her company in Alexandria to his political and domestic responsibilities in Rome. 39 00:04:07,140 --> 00:04:13,710 This is much to the disapproval of the Romans in general, and in particular to Octavius Caesar, 40 00:04:13,710 --> 00:04:23,140 with whom Antony is in a partnership in the three way partnership to rule Rome. 41 00:04:23,140 --> 00:04:27,070 Everybody notices what it is like Cleopatra has on Antony. 42 00:04:27,070 --> 00:04:34,420 And particularly important tonight is the role of Einar Barbours, a blunt and loyal soldier, 43 00:04:34,420 --> 00:04:40,030 until he returns from Egypt to Rome on news of the death of his wife, Fulvia. 44 00:04:40,030 --> 00:04:45,370 And news of trouble from a third political rival, Pompeii. I'm back in Rome. 45 00:04:45,370 --> 00:04:53,020 He agrees to marry Caesar's sister, Octavia, in an attempt to renew their political alliance. 46 00:04:53,020 --> 00:05:01,720 A messenger tells Cleopatra, who is none too pleased. Antony and Caesar agree a peace with Pompei and the three men drink together. 47 00:05:01,720 --> 00:05:11,950 But their amity does not last until he hears that Caesar has attacked Pompeii and deposed the third week are trying their Lepidus. 48 00:05:11,950 --> 00:05:21,490 And so he returns. Antony returns to Egypt, feeling he's been betrayed by Caesar and sends Octavia, his wife, as an envoy to try to patch things up. 49 00:05:21,490 --> 00:05:30,220 Caesar, in fact, declares war on Antony and Cleopatra. And at the sea battle in Actaeon, the Egyptian fleet is defeated. 50 00:05:30,220 --> 00:05:38,980 When Antony leaves the fight to follow Cleopatra ship, he's full of despair at having lost his first battle of Actaeon. 51 00:05:38,980 --> 00:05:43,330 But a second battle comes quickly afterwards where he is successful. 52 00:05:43,330 --> 00:05:52,900 On the eve of a third battle, though the soldiers are all fearful in Ebarb, as the loyal soldier deserts, the Egyptian fleet surrenders to Caesar. 53 00:05:52,900 --> 00:06:02,440 Anthony is furious at Cleopatra's behaviour. Cleopatra retreats to her monument and sends a message to him to tell him she has committed suicide. 54 00:06:02,440 --> 00:06:09,640 Antony asks his servant Eros, to kill him. Eros kills himself, and Antony botches his own suicide. 55 00:06:09,640 --> 00:06:17,530 He's taken to Cleopatra's monument to die in her arms. Cleopatra then prepares for her own death. 56 00:06:17,530 --> 00:06:22,990 A darkly comic clown brings her a basket of basket of figs with hidden snakes. 57 00:06:22,990 --> 00:06:27,250 She dresses in her royal robes, allows a poisonous asp to bite her. 58 00:06:27,250 --> 00:06:31,060 She and her handmaidens, Iris and Charmian, die, too. 59 00:06:31,060 --> 00:06:36,010 And Caesar announces that the lovers shall be buried together. 60 00:06:36,010 --> 00:06:43,300 Now, we can see, I think, from the outline of the story, that there is a gap between the deaths of the two lovers, 61 00:06:43,300 --> 00:06:55,250 Antony's suicide attempt and his arrival mortally wounded to die in Cleopatra's monument, a dramatised at the end of act for. 62 00:06:55,250 --> 00:07:04,400 Act five shows us Cleopatra's preparations for her own death crosscut with Octavia's Caesar's increasing control over the conquered Egypt. 63 00:07:04,400 --> 00:07:11,540 So unlike Romeo and Juliet, where the gap between the deaths of the lovers is so brief as to be almost a mistake, 64 00:07:11,540 --> 00:07:17,060 that old observation that Romeo and Juliet misses being a comedy by a matter of seconds. 65 00:07:17,060 --> 00:07:26,570 Antony and Cleopatra distend the gap between the deaths by a whole act, probably about a seventh of the total length of this long play. 66 00:07:26,570 --> 00:07:32,390 So Antony dies at the end of Act four and Act five, where the tragic hero meets. 67 00:07:32,390 --> 00:07:40,910 Usually his death is given over entirely to Cleopatra. It is her death that ends the play. 68 00:07:40,910 --> 00:07:46,580 In this, she has the structural equivalent of Hamlet or Macbeth or King Lear or Othello, 69 00:07:46,580 --> 00:07:52,280 or as I was talking about last week, Richard, the second she has the key position in the tragedy. 70 00:07:52,280 --> 00:07:57,500 Her life span and the span of the play are equivalents. 71 00:07:57,500 --> 00:08:07,550 One easy answer then to the question of whose tragedy is it can be answered by analogy structurally between this play and other tragedies. 72 00:08:07,550 --> 00:08:13,840 And that analogy, as I've just suggested, would tell us it's Cleopatra as tragedy. 73 00:08:13,840 --> 00:08:24,580 Now, if this is true that the tragic figure in the play is Cleopatra, we might think this marks a distinct change in Shakespeare's work. 74 00:08:24,580 --> 00:08:33,430 Some years ago now, the critic Linda Bamber wrote a book on Shakespeare about which all we really need to know is the title Comic Women, 75 00:08:33,430 --> 00:08:38,440 Tragic Men, Comic Women, Tragic Men. 76 00:08:38,440 --> 00:08:46,090 Bumba develops an analysis of Shakespeare's plays that identifies male dominance as one of the generic traits of tragedy. 77 00:08:46,090 --> 00:08:52,300 And perhaps we need only look at Gertrude or Ophelia or Cordelia as evidence of that. 78 00:08:52,300 --> 00:09:01,210 Women in tragedies in Shakespeare's tragedies tend to be ancillary victims of the male heroes egotistic downfall. 79 00:09:01,210 --> 00:09:08,020 That's often given, say, as the explanation for the death of Cordelia at the end of King Lear. 80 00:09:08,020 --> 00:09:15,610 The psyche that Shakespearean tragedy characteristically dissect is a male one before you call out. 81 00:09:15,610 --> 00:09:19,570 What about Lady Macbeth? Maybe I'll try and pre-empt that. 82 00:09:19,570 --> 00:09:27,040 We could argue that Lady Macbeth exhausts herself trying to get out of that sideline role afforded to women in tragedy. 83 00:09:27,040 --> 00:09:32,500 She's very prominent in the first half. She's winning the battle against the genre, I think, by being so prominent. 84 00:09:32,500 --> 00:09:40,860 But she really disappears in the second half, sacrificed to Macbeth's own increasing tragic isolation. 85 00:09:40,860 --> 00:09:49,560 We could see then the role of women as a kind of generic indicator and also as a sign of structural generic shifts. 86 00:09:49,560 --> 00:09:53,130 My lecture about measure for measure talks about the decline of Izabella, 87 00:09:53,130 --> 00:09:58,800 who begins that play as a comic heroine but as a symbol of and vehicle for the 88 00:09:58,800 --> 00:10:06,000 place turned towards near tragedy declines to almost nothing in the second half. 89 00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:12,020 In this analysis, gender is or at least contributes towards genre. 90 00:10:12,020 --> 00:10:16,200 Now, women's role, as Bamber identifies, is in comedy, 91 00:10:16,200 --> 00:10:25,920 a genre in which women's desires and agency a prominent and women's quests define the shape of the narrative. 92 00:10:25,920 --> 00:10:31,920 If there's a play with a central female character, that's to say in Shakespeare's work, it's almost always a comedy. 93 00:10:31,920 --> 00:10:38,580 That's the genre in which women have agency and have action to have. 94 00:10:38,580 --> 00:10:47,880 Cleopatra, as the play's central character then may affirm her as Shakespeare's first female tragic agent. 95 00:10:47,880 --> 00:10:51,570 You might want to think, though, whether Juliet should have that accolade, 96 00:10:51,570 --> 00:11:03,850 or it might also be one of the ways in which the notion of tragedy is compromised rather than transformed by the play. 97 00:11:03,850 --> 00:11:13,700 Perhaps Cleopatra is the structural, tragic figure in Antony and Cleopatra then since her death on the end of the play, a coterminous. 98 00:11:13,700 --> 00:11:17,450 But two facts about the play seemed to compromise this. 99 00:11:17,450 --> 00:11:22,940 The first is that Anthony is actually dominant in terms of the number of lines. 100 00:11:22,940 --> 00:11:27,800 He has 24 percent of the lines. Cleopatra has only 19. 101 00:11:27,800 --> 00:11:33,380 So 24 to 19 statistics again from the RNC. 102 00:11:33,380 --> 00:11:44,990 Jonathan Bate, addition of the plays that one of its really useful statistical parts of his apparatus. 103 00:11:44,990 --> 00:11:55,510 The second is the unexpected punctuation of the title of the play in the Folio, which gives us the tragedy of Antony comma and Cleopatra. 104 00:11:55,510 --> 00:12:02,520 The comma after Anthony may be entirely accidental or incidental, it may be something into which we shouldn't read too much, 105 00:12:02,520 --> 00:12:10,700 but it may also suggest that his is the tragedy and Cleopatra a kind of afterthought. 106 00:12:10,700 --> 00:12:20,790 But what I want to come to discuss in this lecture is the ways Shakespeare seems to be challenging us to ask about the question of genre in this play. 107 00:12:20,790 --> 00:12:22,590 Just as last week when I was talking about Richard, 108 00:12:22,590 --> 00:12:28,680 the second I suggested the play demands that we ask whether bullying Brook's actions were legitimate, 109 00:12:28,680 --> 00:12:32,340 but actually frustrate any attempt to answer the question. 110 00:12:32,340 --> 00:12:41,190 So to hear in Antony and Cleopatra, I think we're being encouraged to ask questions about who's tragedy or tears and about the play genre. 111 00:12:41,190 --> 00:12:52,520 But in fact, what we get is a depiction of two lovers set against the geopolitics of a world stage which challenges ideas of tragedy. 112 00:12:52,520 --> 00:12:53,120 In some ways, 113 00:12:53,120 --> 00:13:04,520 the death of two lovers gives us a double tragedy in which the second death deepens or amplifies the tragic movement through reiteration. 114 00:13:04,520 --> 00:13:11,630 So a tragedy with two tragic carers, then, is a double tragedy. It happens twice in other ways. 115 00:13:11,630 --> 00:13:18,800 The second death in the play either undermines the first or is rendered pathetic because of it. 116 00:13:18,800 --> 00:13:23,660 That's two tragedies which don't really even add up to one in total. 117 00:13:23,660 --> 00:13:30,830 That's a model where the two deaths actually take away from tragedy rather than adding to it. 118 00:13:30,830 --> 00:13:34,860 And I want to show that this links to the ways in which the plays genre teeters 119 00:13:34,860 --> 00:13:41,970 between high notions of tragedy under kind of threat of satiric collapse. 120 00:13:41,970 --> 00:13:43,530 And that happens as. 121 00:13:43,530 --> 00:13:55,080 And through its challenge to the single teleology we associate with tragedy, replaced here with a repeated structure of doubling and duplication. 122 00:13:55,080 --> 00:14:00,750 Firstly, then, let's think about the deaths of the two lovers. I don't think about Antony first. 123 00:14:00,750 --> 00:14:08,100 This is at the end of Act four after the Egyptian fleet has surrendered to Caesar's forces. 124 00:14:08,100 --> 00:14:13,680 Antony curses Cleopatra. This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me. 125 00:14:13,680 --> 00:14:19,830 This foul Egyptian have betrayed me for a moment, perhaps even for the first moment in the play. 126 00:14:19,830 --> 00:14:25,290 He sounds just like a Roman calling Cleopatra. Right, Gypsy. 127 00:14:25,290 --> 00:14:35,210 Just as the disapproving filer in the play's opening line bemoans the downfall of Antony to be the fan to cool a gypsys lust. 128 00:14:35,210 --> 00:14:40,580 Anthony specific case, though, on Cleopatra is an interesting one. 129 00:14:40,580 --> 00:14:52,250 Let him seise this is let him take the. And hoist the up to the shouting plebeians follow his chariot lie the greatest spot of all thy sex. 130 00:14:52,250 --> 00:14:56,630 Most monsta like be shown for poor. It's diminutives. 131 00:14:56,630 --> 00:15:01,270 Let him take the. And hoist the up to the shouting plebeians. 132 00:15:01,270 --> 00:15:08,960 So Antony's curse to Cleopatra is that she'd be taken prisoner and made a show of in Rome. 133 00:15:08,960 --> 00:15:17,890 The curse that hee hee hee issues to her is that she would be turned into a spectacle of humiliation. 134 00:15:17,890 --> 00:15:24,140 And that's a curse in the play. It works in that, like much of the interaction between these two lovers. 135 00:15:24,140 --> 00:15:29,390 It seems designed to provoke or prompt a response. And it does. 136 00:15:29,390 --> 00:15:35,240 Cleopatra sends Modi'in her eunuch to tell Antony that she's killed herself. 137 00:15:35,240 --> 00:15:41,870 And on hearing the news, Antony calls on Eros, his servant, to kill him. 138 00:15:41,870 --> 00:15:47,780 Eros is, of course, ironically named for the God of love. This is Shakespeare's invention. 139 00:15:47,780 --> 00:15:55,190 Antony Servant in Plutarch is called Eros. But Shakespeare really stresses the name by repetition of it. 140 00:15:55,190 --> 00:16:03,350 In the dialogue of the play almost 20 times we get the name Eros in the dialogue of a couple of scenes and in actual scene 14, 141 00:16:03,350 --> 00:16:08,600 almost every speech by Antony addresses and seven by name at least once. 142 00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:13,910 You might want to just think about something we had in the lecture on Twelfth Night. 143 00:16:13,910 --> 00:16:20,240 Remember that we never hear violence name until the very end of the play. So her name is withheld from us. 144 00:16:20,240 --> 00:16:24,610 But Eros is name quite different technique here is being absolutely rammed home to us. 145 00:16:24,610 --> 00:16:31,700 So we see the irony. Eros, the god of love won't kill Antony. 146 00:16:31,700 --> 00:16:39,290 He would not undertake Antony's command. He says he would rather kill himself to escape the sorrow of Antony's death. 147 00:16:39,290 --> 00:16:45,230 So love does not kill Anthony. Rather, he attempts to kill himself with his own sword. 148 00:16:45,230 --> 00:16:49,580 And it may be intended as a mark of how far he has fallen from the noble Roman remembered 149 00:16:49,580 --> 00:16:56,000 in the opening scenes that he cannot commit the most Roman of acts heroic suicide. 150 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:02,660 But why does Anthony attempt suicide? It is prompted by the news of Cleopatra's apparent death. 151 00:17:02,660 --> 00:17:09,590 But not only by this. Antony's assessment of himself at this point is that he lives in dishonour. 152 00:17:09,590 --> 00:17:18,200 He tells Eros of the fate that awaits him would still be windowed in great Rome and see thy master. 153 00:17:18,200 --> 00:17:26,780 Thus, with pleated arms bending down his courage ible, neck, his face subdue it to penetrated shame. 154 00:17:26,780 --> 00:17:35,660 Whilst the Weald seat of Fortune, it seems, are drawn before him branded, his baseness that ensued would still be windows. 155 00:17:35,660 --> 00:17:40,550 As Antony and great Romans see their master us with preach at arms, bending down his courage ible, 156 00:17:40,550 --> 00:17:49,340 neck his face subdue it to penetrative shame whilst the wheeled seat, a fortunate Caesar drawn before him, branded his baseness that ensued. 157 00:17:49,340 --> 00:17:56,510 This is a really interesting cluster of odd words, Latinate words, unusual words either or concordance, 158 00:17:56,510 --> 00:18:02,670 or the OED or both would show us how rarely they occur in Shakespeare's work at this time. 159 00:18:02,670 --> 00:18:07,880 So how old they would have sounded to audiences. This clustering suggests, I think, 160 00:18:07,880 --> 00:18:12,860 a particular intellectual effort or strain who might compare some similar 161 00:18:12,860 --> 00:18:17,210 speeches of Angello in measure for measure or of loyalties in The Winter's Tale. 162 00:18:17,210 --> 00:18:23,990 And you get this cluster of polysyllabic words, polysyllabic, unusual words, Shakespeare usually doing that. 163 00:18:23,990 --> 00:18:31,370 I think to indicate that the character is not telling us the truth or is is undergoing some kind of mental torment. 164 00:18:31,370 --> 00:18:38,030 But what the speech expresses is the idea, again, of being humiliated in public view in Rome. 165 00:18:38,030 --> 00:18:47,060 Anthony talks about himself in the third person, ThighMaster, his courage ible neck, his face drawn before him, 166 00:18:47,060 --> 00:18:53,860 and that idea of himself in the third person being humiliated is crucial to Antony's despair. 167 00:18:53,860 --> 00:18:54,980 We can see immediately, then, 168 00:18:54,980 --> 00:19:05,830 that this vision of his own fate is closely allied to the curse of public humiliation he placed on Cleopatra that I quoted just a minute ago. 169 00:19:05,830 --> 00:19:13,990 And if we hop forward hoping a word in this play associated with Cleopatra and a kind of informal liveliness, 170 00:19:13,990 --> 00:19:22,010 if we hop forward and act to Cleopatra's own preparations for death, we can see the same sentiment about humiliation again. 171 00:19:22,010 --> 00:19:28,640 There's a famous speech from the end which have collapsed together. 172 00:19:28,640 --> 00:19:34,550 It's actually two speeches, though. An Egyptian puppet shall be shown in Rome as well as I. 173 00:19:34,550 --> 00:19:38,420 This is Cleopatra talking to Eiris and Shaman mechanics. 174 00:19:38,420 --> 00:19:43,770 Slaves with greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall uplift us to the view. 175 00:19:43,770 --> 00:19:50,420 The quick comedian's ex temporarily will stagers and present our Alexandrian Revel's Anthony. 176 00:19:50,420 --> 00:19:56,360 She'll be brought drunk and forth and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra. 177 00:19:56,360 --> 00:20:00,870 Boy, my greatness is the posture of a [INAUDIBLE]. 178 00:20:00,870 --> 00:20:09,320 So thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown in Rome as well as I mechanic slaves with greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall up lift us to the view. 179 00:20:09,320 --> 00:20:19,060 Its kind of image of the theatre comes up and Johnson really a sense that people go to the theatre are deplorably low status people. 180 00:20:19,060 --> 00:20:24,230 So sullying what they what they watch. Greasy aprons. 181 00:20:24,230 --> 00:20:26,390 Interesting idea. 182 00:20:26,390 --> 00:20:36,140 When Cleopatra lifts the poisonous snake, the ASP to her breast, she identifies that her death is designed to cheat Caesar of victory. 183 00:20:36,140 --> 00:20:40,100 She addresses the ASP. Could Star speak that? I might hear the call. 184 00:20:40,100 --> 00:20:47,540 Great Caesar as policy aide. Great Caesar arse on policy. 185 00:20:47,540 --> 00:20:55,250 Now, I've cited these three examples to suggest that what the lovers express is the fear not of parting from each other, 186 00:20:55,250 --> 00:21:05,210 but of being publicly humiliated. Although the play is typically categorised as a tragedy of love. 187 00:21:05,210 --> 00:21:17,150 To accept this at face value may be merely to read the play in the way it would like to be read to accept its own compelling mythos about itself. 188 00:21:17,150 --> 00:21:23,870 What Antony Cleopatra fear is public show a gaping audience witnessing their degradation. 189 00:21:23,870 --> 00:21:28,550 And the irony is, of course, that that is just what they are already suffering. 190 00:21:28,550 --> 00:21:34,310 They're already on the stage. Cleopatra is already played by young male actor buoying her greatness. 191 00:21:34,310 --> 00:21:40,590 What they fear has a kind of inevitability about it because it's already come to pass. 192 00:21:40,590 --> 00:21:48,090 So then while love, jealousy and separation are part of this story, I don't think they're by any means the most pressing motives. 193 00:21:48,090 --> 00:21:56,820 John Dryden's rewriting of Antony and Cleopatra in the late 17th century under the title All for Love or for Love kerbs, 194 00:21:56,820 --> 00:22:01,830 the play's excessive geography and timescale, but it also rewrites its motive. 195 00:22:01,830 --> 00:22:08,360 Perhaps he could he should have called the play all for shame. 196 00:22:08,360 --> 00:22:15,440 Since the Second World War, one of the most dominant paradigms in anthropology has been the distinction between cultures 197 00:22:15,440 --> 00:22:22,910 structured around the principle of guilt and cultures structured around the principle of shame. 198 00:22:22,910 --> 00:22:27,890 The theory was developed by Ruth Benedict at the end of the Second World War to conceptualise a 199 00:22:27,890 --> 00:22:34,010 perceived difference between the way the Japanese and the Americans would process would suffer. 200 00:22:34,010 --> 00:22:37,790 Would think about what had happened in the war. 201 00:22:37,790 --> 00:22:46,010 Put simply, and I'm using Benedict's own definition this is that this has been a very important paradigm, has undergone a lot of shifts since then. 202 00:22:46,010 --> 00:22:54,440 But what Benedict argues is that guilt and shame cultures differ in the ways that individuals experience having done something wrong. 203 00:22:54,440 --> 00:22:57,200 Having done something bad. 204 00:22:57,200 --> 00:23:06,410 Shame tends to imagine this experience, the experience of having done something bad in terms of negative evaluations by other people. 205 00:23:06,410 --> 00:23:10,940 Says shame is something which is related to how other people perceive you. 206 00:23:10,940 --> 00:23:16,820 And therefore, it seemed to be externally orientated. That's where you that's where shame comes from. 207 00:23:16,820 --> 00:23:25,930 It comes from an interaction with people outside of yourself. Guilt, by contrast, is imagined as a negative evaluation by the self. 208 00:23:25,930 --> 00:23:29,330 It's internally oriented. 209 00:23:29,330 --> 00:23:38,510 Shame, then, is a response about failing to meet external or public standards or about exposing one's defects to public gaze. 210 00:23:38,510 --> 00:23:44,600 Guilt is about failing to live up to one's own internal standards. 211 00:23:44,600 --> 00:23:50,510 If I feel bad for having stolen a library book and not being found out because I know it's the wrong thing to do. 212 00:23:50,510 --> 00:23:52,640 I am suffering guilt. 213 00:23:52,640 --> 00:24:01,370 If I feel bad for having stolen the library book because I fear I will be named and shamed and everybody will laugh at me that I am suffering shame. 214 00:24:01,370 --> 00:24:07,400 Work by psychologists has suggested that guilt filled individuals experience empathy for others, 215 00:24:07,400 --> 00:24:14,840 whereas shame prone individuals are more likely to avoid others and withdraw from them. 216 00:24:14,840 --> 00:24:25,490 As the original Japanese American paradigm illustrated, some societies are seen to be more inclined generally to shame or guilt highly individualistic 217 00:24:25,490 --> 00:24:32,480 capitalist countries such as the USA or the UK tend towards an inner orientation of guilt. 218 00:24:32,480 --> 00:24:41,260 Collectivist commie Tarion, communitarian countries like China or the USSR tend towards the external orientation of shame. 219 00:24:41,260 --> 00:24:45,140 I hope that's reasonably clear. Paradigm. 220 00:24:45,140 --> 00:24:51,230 It doesn't. The details of it. We're not trying to be anthropological, but the details of it are not too important to us. 221 00:24:51,230 --> 00:25:00,870 But what I think is important is the externally oriented feeling of shame versus the internally experienced feeling of guilt. 222 00:25:00,870 --> 00:25:12,420 I hope that thumbnail of that paradigm, the shame, guilt paradigm, makes it clear to us that Antony and Cleopatra are both shame oriented individuals. 223 00:25:12,420 --> 00:25:18,090 So those quotations that I read about what they fear is they fear shame. 224 00:25:18,090 --> 00:25:23,610 Neither Anthony or nor Cleopatra, I think, ever suggests that they themselves have done anything wrong. 225 00:25:23,610 --> 00:25:30,300 But what they do fear is the sense that of how other people will judge or look at them. 226 00:25:30,300 --> 00:25:41,130 Each anticipates their ultimate degradation in terms of a public show of being paraded through the streets of Rome in Caesar's triumph. 227 00:25:41,130 --> 00:25:45,870 Cleopatra's fear then of being ridiculed as some squeaking Cleopatra boys. 228 00:25:45,870 --> 00:25:53,760 Her greatness is the inverse or the opposite of all those people who in a his famous speech, 229 00:25:53,760 --> 00:26:04,950 the barge she sat in like a burnished throne or went to gaze on Cleopatra and made a gap in nature to be shamed and to be subject to 230 00:26:04,950 --> 00:26:15,050 scornful public view is what Antony and Cleopatra both fear and what they conceptualise themselves as avoiding in seeking their deaths. 231 00:26:15,050 --> 00:26:23,210 Now, shame seems to me a potentially interesting concept in relation to tragedy and particularly in relation to Shakespeare's tragedies. 232 00:26:23,210 --> 00:26:30,110 Guilt, as I've suggested, has been conceptualised as a more individualistic and interior emotion, 233 00:26:30,110 --> 00:26:33,970 and therefore we might see it as a more appropriately tragic motivation. 234 00:26:33,970 --> 00:26:35,130 People. 235 00:26:35,130 --> 00:26:44,530 But people do what they do in tragedies because of a feeling and interior feeling about how they have behaved according to this view in a barber's. 236 00:26:44,530 --> 00:26:52,310 And today's loyal servant is an alternative tragic centre in the play since he alone acts from guilt. 237 00:26:52,310 --> 00:26:59,510 I have done, IL says in Ababa's, of which I do accuse myself so solely that I will joy no more. 238 00:26:59,510 --> 00:27:06,290 I have done all of which I do accuse myself so sorely that I will join no more. 239 00:27:06,290 --> 00:27:16,100 Accusing myself is a keynote of guilt. Being windowed in Rome looked at from out of a window is a keynote of shame. 240 00:27:16,100 --> 00:27:24,470 Having shame that is a major motivation in a tragedy reorients the locus of judgement from the individual to the community. 241 00:27:24,470 --> 00:27:32,330 Just as Antony and Cleopatra challenges the model of individual tragedy Shakespeare had been previously working on by its double protagonists. 242 00:27:32,330 --> 00:27:38,990 That's to say it also shifts the balance away from interior guilt to exterior shame. 243 00:27:38,990 --> 00:27:49,790 It turns the genre inside out. So I think that shame is part of a movement from interiority to exterior pretty more generally in this play. 244 00:27:49,790 --> 00:27:59,810 What we might look at in previous tragedies is Shakespeare's increasing development of soliloquy as a way to see what's inside the soliloquy. 245 00:27:59,810 --> 00:28:05,630 Of course, has the character alone onstage and solitude serves to authenticate. 246 00:28:05,630 --> 00:28:12,980 What they're saying is because they are alone onstage or so the fiction has it, that what they're saying must be true. 247 00:28:12,980 --> 00:28:21,740 Tragedies like Macbeth and Hamlet make extensive use of soliloquy to connect us with the inner conflict of their protagonists. 248 00:28:21,740 --> 00:28:30,680 Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, makes almost no use of soliloquy, and its main characters are almost no soliloquies in Antony and Cleopatra. 249 00:28:30,680 --> 00:28:38,000 Nor, in fact, does Coriolanus written almost at the same time and again showing a kind of shame oriented tragedy. 250 00:28:38,000 --> 00:28:44,780 So Shakespeare seems to have moved beyond the dramaturge of the previous tragedies in this play. 251 00:28:44,780 --> 00:29:00,980 We never see our lovers alone. Instead, their tragedy precedes via and is maybe a consequence of a complete lack of privacy in the play. 252 00:29:00,980 --> 00:29:07,200 When Caesar delivers his epitaph, Antony and Cleopatra at the end of the play, he's a. 253 00:29:07,200 --> 00:29:12,350 For them, it's perhaps surprising no grave upon the Earth says, 254 00:29:12,350 --> 00:29:21,740 and no grave upon the earth shall clip in it a pass so famous that predominant characteristic is then not passion, 255 00:29:21,740 --> 00:29:30,110 pride, grandeur, not even love, but that of being famous pair so famous. 256 00:29:30,110 --> 00:29:39,290 Antony and Cleopatra are celebrities. And as with modern celebrities, what we see is always a performance of themselves. 257 00:29:39,290 --> 00:29:42,710 In this reading, the play is a kind of hello photo story, 258 00:29:42,710 --> 00:29:49,850 artfully accessorised with Eastern decorative influences in which we never see the lovers alone, but except in some, 259 00:29:49,850 --> 00:29:55,700 but instead in some carefully arranged tableau, flirtation, tantrum, 260 00:29:55,700 --> 00:30:04,280 grandiloquence and perhaps love, too, are all played out for the cameras or for the audience. 261 00:30:04,280 --> 00:30:13,250 We could almost say that these are characters who know we the audience are there because they're doing it all for our benefit. 262 00:30:13,250 --> 00:30:19,650 The flip the flip side of the shame culture in this context is not guilt as it's opposite, but it's preferred version. 263 00:30:19,650 --> 00:30:24,900 Performance or behaviour is externally oriented in this play. 264 00:30:24,900 --> 00:30:31,790 It's about a show. It's about a performance. It's done for the benefit of others. 265 00:30:31,790 --> 00:30:34,020 In that question. 266 00:30:34,020 --> 00:30:42,850 In that culture, the question of authenticity, which many critics have asked, does Cleopatra or Anthony really love Anthony or Cleopatra? 267 00:30:42,850 --> 00:30:47,860 That question about the authenticity of the emotion becomes, of course, completely unanswerable. 268 00:30:47,860 --> 00:30:55,870 How would or could we know? It's it's it's a version of all kinds of questions we might have about celebrity marriages, for instance. 269 00:30:55,870 --> 00:31:01,270 We see a version of them which is generically constructed for our view. 270 00:31:01,270 --> 00:31:08,440 We never get any sense of what it might be really like or whether it really exists in part. 271 00:31:08,440 --> 00:31:13,920 Then Antony and Cleopatra anticipates the difficulties of understanding public individuals. 272 00:31:13,920 --> 00:31:15,790 But I think it does more than this. 273 00:31:15,790 --> 00:31:25,420 It acknowledges after an attempt through those other tragedies to show us what the individual is like to use soliloquy to show us the interior. 274 00:31:25,420 --> 00:31:31,740 At this point, I think Shakespeare actually acknowledges that the interior is utterly inscrutable. 275 00:31:31,740 --> 00:31:35,820 Unlike the heavily soliloquies access then to those other tragic characters, 276 00:31:35,820 --> 00:31:41,880 here, we see humans constructed through dialogue, performance and pretence. 277 00:31:41,880 --> 00:31:53,260 Like Caesar. All we really know at the end of the play is that the pair were famous and that our presence at this play has reinforced their celebrity. 278 00:31:53,260 --> 00:32:00,430 So the answer to the question of whose tragedy as it is, has led us into a suggestion that who's ever tragedy it might be. 279 00:32:00,430 --> 00:32:09,040 It's a tragedy of exterior, Verity, not interiority. A tragedy of public performance rather than private emotion. 280 00:32:09,040 --> 00:32:15,030 A tragedy that we might characterise a tragedy of shame rather than guilt. 281 00:32:15,030 --> 00:32:23,340 And seeing this may help us feel that Rome and Egypt, which are often always in fact characterised as opposites in the play, 282 00:32:23,340 --> 00:32:28,910 are actually rather closer and more similar than they might appear. 283 00:32:28,910 --> 00:32:34,850 It's customary for criticism and particularly for theatrical practise to map the play's 284 00:32:34,850 --> 00:32:42,050 central dichotomy between Rome and Egypt onto a range of related binary oppositions, 285 00:32:42,050 --> 00:32:47,120 masculine and feminine reason and emotion. Head and heart. 286 00:32:47,120 --> 00:32:55,260 West and east. In many ways, Antony and Cleopatra encourages this kind of bifurcation. 287 00:32:55,260 --> 00:33:01,680 This sense that we have opposite places, opposite natures, opposite ways of being. 288 00:33:01,680 --> 00:33:06,540 The play develops the concern, which is central to all of Shakespeare's Roman plays. 289 00:33:06,540 --> 00:33:10,880 The question of Rome itself, the nature of Rome itself. 290 00:33:10,880 --> 00:33:16,290 In Titus Andronicus, that question is an as the conflict between Romans and Goths. 291 00:33:16,290 --> 00:33:27,960 But in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, the question in the debate over the nature of Rome is one conducted within the Roman polity itself. 292 00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:36,000 Here, Rome seems to be constructed in clear opposition to the Egypt of Cleopatra's court. 293 00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:41,130 The scenes alternate between the two locations as this play experiments with 294 00:33:41,130 --> 00:33:46,380 a more radical use of place than we have seen before in Shakespeare's plays, 295 00:33:46,380 --> 00:33:53,400 particularly, I think the Long Act three and four, which are made up of short cinematic scenes. 296 00:33:53,400 --> 00:34:06,370 Crosscutting between the two protagonists. Productions of the play tend towards designs which emphasise intrinsic differences between Rome and Egypt. 297 00:34:06,370 --> 00:34:11,080 Rome is all sterile, hard edges and harsh lighting. 298 00:34:11,080 --> 00:34:21,220 Egypt is an Orientalist Fantasia of cushions and music and sex, as often in the kind of binary understanding of the early modern period. 299 00:34:21,220 --> 00:34:25,980 That difference is vocalised in the difference between two women. 300 00:34:25,980 --> 00:34:29,980 A version of the Virgin [INAUDIBLE] dichotomy, which places Cleopatra, 301 00:34:29,980 --> 00:34:37,900 in contrast with Antony's Roman wife, Octavia Antony, of course, is caught between these two worlds. 302 00:34:37,900 --> 00:34:43,690 But so too are the audience. Rather, as in Henry, the fourth part one, 303 00:34:43,690 --> 00:34:47,770 we experienced Prince Hao's conflict between the world of his father's court and the world 304 00:34:47,770 --> 00:34:53,800 of Falstaff in the taverns as the difference between boring scenes and enjoyable ones. 305 00:34:53,800 --> 00:34:57,160 To talk more about Henry, the fourth part one in a couple of weeks. 306 00:34:57,160 --> 00:35:03,790 So two in Antony and Cleopatra, we can immediately see that Rome is less attractive than Egypt. 307 00:35:03,790 --> 00:35:16,150 In dramatic terms, it's less interesting. We would we, like Anthony, would rather be in the scenes with Cleopatra than the scenes with Caesar. 308 00:35:16,150 --> 00:35:16,750 Interestingly, 309 00:35:16,750 --> 00:35:26,260 the play begins with a short disapproving prologue from two Romans talking about how Anthony has been transformed into a strumpets fool. 310 00:35:26,260 --> 00:35:35,560 But then it immediately cedes the stage to a long Egyptian sequence in which Cleopatra enacts the atomically the earlier she holds over Antony, 311 00:35:35,560 --> 00:35:39,040 the audience to, I think is seduced. 312 00:35:39,040 --> 00:35:45,040 If Antony and Cleopatra is a Roman play in which the Romans ultimately win, it's a play which puts up a good fight. 313 00:35:45,040 --> 00:35:49,930 It doesn't want to be a Roman play bookended by Egyptian scenes. 314 00:35:49,930 --> 00:35:54,220 Rome seems an unattractive umpty theatrical antic antagonist. 315 00:35:54,220 --> 00:36:02,260 There will be no play about Octavius Caesar. So while it's easy to see the differences, though, between the two worlds, 316 00:36:02,260 --> 00:36:12,520 the framework of a shame culture perhaps allows us to see their similarities. To be Roman or to be Egyptian in this play is to be public. 317 00:36:12,520 --> 00:36:17,500 Anthony is a triumph there of Rome. Cleopatra, an Egyptian queen. 318 00:36:17,500 --> 00:36:25,600 These are public figures, not private lovers. Sort of a cliche in Shakespeare criticism to talk about a conflict between public and private. 319 00:36:25,600 --> 00:36:32,680 I don't think we've got a conflict here. I just don't think we get anything private. I don't think the conflict actually truck troubles troubles them. 320 00:36:32,680 --> 00:36:38,110 It's not in a way like a sort of where like the trouble Brutus has in Julius Caesar. 321 00:36:38,110 --> 00:36:45,580 This is a play about public show. It's interesting, I think that all Shakespeare's plays about pairs of lovers. 322 00:36:45,580 --> 00:36:52,030 The early romantic Romeo and Juliet and the satiric Troilus and Cressida, 323 00:36:52,030 --> 00:36:59,770 as well as Antony and Cleopatra stress the extent to which their protagonists cannot be private individuals. 324 00:36:59,770 --> 00:37:06,940 Thus, reports of Antony's previous heroism or of Cleopatra's charisma report about her legendary barge. 325 00:37:06,940 --> 00:37:16,270 Equally identified display show and consumption by watching public as constitutive of these Titanic figures greatness. 326 00:37:16,270 --> 00:37:21,220 They are great because they're famous, not the other way round. Both are in the public eye. 327 00:37:21,220 --> 00:37:28,340 Both in Caesar's terms are famous. So this is a tragedy, I think, seen from the outside. 328 00:37:28,340 --> 00:37:32,380 Experienced on the outside. Oriented towards the outside. 329 00:37:32,380 --> 00:37:38,270 What's missing is interiority, privacy and the secret individual. 330 00:37:38,270 --> 00:37:50,290 And I think that that that absence is something which which has troubled readers and theatregoers for ever since the play was first put on. 331 00:37:50,290 --> 00:37:54,820 So the idea that the tragedy is seen and experienced and oriented towards the outside 332 00:37:54,820 --> 00:37:59,710 may have an impact on how we answer that question about how genre works in it. 333 00:37:59,710 --> 00:38:07,960 A play focussing on a central couple that works through dialogue and display is actually a comedy, not a tragedy. 334 00:38:07,960 --> 00:38:20,710 Just as Cleopatra's final line husband, I come attempt to recast death, the ending of a tragedy as marriage, the ending of the comedy. 335 00:38:20,710 --> 00:38:26,050 So the genre of comedy about this difficult play. 336 00:38:26,050 --> 00:38:34,210 But there are other genres also crowding in. What I want to do in the next short section is to answer the question of who's tragedy. 337 00:38:34,210 --> 00:38:43,170 This play is by suggesting that it's no one's that the play is not really a tragedy at all. 338 00:38:43,170 --> 00:38:50,480 Two genres that might help us displace tragedy as the most prominent generic framework for considering Antony and Cleopatra. 339 00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:58,720 And I want to suggest that they are satire and farce. Let's take Farse first. 340 00:38:58,720 --> 00:39:05,440 Although farse as a form of fast moving physical comedy is not entirely distinct from tragedy. 341 00:39:05,440 --> 00:39:10,740 John Multimode famously described farce as tragedy at a thousand revolutions a minute. 342 00:39:10,740 --> 00:39:14,350 So far, this tragedy speeded up. 343 00:39:14,350 --> 00:39:22,810 The absence of interiority in farce or the absence of time for reflection would seem to place it as an opposite of tragedy, but not necessarily so. 344 00:39:22,810 --> 00:39:29,790 In a play like Antony and Cleopatra, which, as we've already established, is dominated by exteriors and by speed. 345 00:39:29,790 --> 00:39:38,110 The turns of the battle sequences and the interplay between the lovers inact for, for example, have the capacity to be farcical. 346 00:39:38,110 --> 00:39:46,240 The male Cleopatra, imagining herself played by a boy actor at the end of the play, teeters on a kind of farcical collapse. 347 00:39:46,240 --> 00:39:51,280 But we may actually feel that this ground has already been occupied in the aftermath 348 00:39:51,280 --> 00:39:57,370 of Antony's suicide attempt brought at the end of AT4 to Cleopatra's monument, 349 00:39:57,370 --> 00:40:01,440 which was probably represented by the gallery above the stage. 350 00:40:01,440 --> 00:40:12,160 Antony's inert body is raised to die in her arms, but rather than being presented as a moment of exquisite pathos. 351 00:40:12,160 --> 00:40:16,810 This action is fatally compromised by stage awkwardness. 352 00:40:16,810 --> 00:40:23,980 Raising a dead weight some 15 feet above the stage, presumably on a rope, cannot have been easy. 353 00:40:23,980 --> 00:40:28,420 And the physical difficulties of this action are stressed by Cleopatra's dialogue. 354 00:40:28,420 --> 00:40:33,610 How heavy weighs, my Lord. Our strength is all gone into heaviness. 355 00:40:33,610 --> 00:40:37,990 It's even more expressed, though, I think by this wonderful stage direction. 356 00:40:37,990 --> 00:40:44,800 They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra. They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra. 357 00:40:44,800 --> 00:40:50,350 He applied to a human being indicates both significant, 358 00:40:50,350 --> 00:41:02,500 rather graceless or inelegant physical action on the part of the women and a grotesquely dehumanised heaviness on the part of Antony. 359 00:41:02,500 --> 00:41:09,190 One review of an all male production at the rebuilt Globe Theatre in Not Fit In nineteen ninety nine 360 00:41:09,190 --> 00:41:15,190 felt that the lifting of the dying hero up to Cleopatra's monument is inadvertently hilarious, 361 00:41:15,190 --> 00:41:20,080 with the captured Queen of the Nile and a big beefy chami and hauling up the rope 362 00:41:20,080 --> 00:41:25,960 as if they were energetically raising the mainsail on some unwieldy Gallion. 363 00:41:25,960 --> 00:41:32,740 The review, though, suggested that this ending to Act four, said the final act of the play on a farcical tone. 364 00:41:32,740 --> 00:41:38,230 After that, after that, Benedek Magic Girl says that without the opening night, 365 00:41:38,230 --> 00:41:46,240 audience clearly found it tough to continue suspending its disbelief in a male heroine. 366 00:41:46,240 --> 00:41:54,420 The description of the effect of performance is, I think, well made. But perhaps the suggestion that the hilarity was inadvertent underestimates 367 00:41:54,420 --> 00:42:00,530 Shakespeare's satiric power to deflate his own mythos and that of his characters. 368 00:42:00,530 --> 00:42:09,250 But that's to say, as Antony is being raised up into the monument, he's being brought down into a kind of ridiculous figure. 369 00:42:09,250 --> 00:42:15,400 This is a this is a scene of ridicule and humour, farcical humour rather than pathos. 370 00:42:15,400 --> 00:42:29,130 So we've got an aspiration in physical and spiritual or emotional terms, which is brought down by physical and farcical aspects. 371 00:42:29,130 --> 00:42:35,550 That moves us, I think, from farce into satire, a genre critics have associated with this period of Shakespeare's works, 372 00:42:35,550 --> 00:42:42,450 which might include Coriolanus and Timon of Athens in that group of Satie's up this point. 373 00:42:42,450 --> 00:42:51,090 We may feel that the simultaneous, unkind, contradictory presentation of Anthony at once hero and loser creates the kind of 374 00:42:51,090 --> 00:42:57,750 generic instability in the play we associate with satire looked at in this way. 375 00:42:57,750 --> 00:43:06,570 Antony and Cleopatra might be seen as a play of divergent and incompatible sympathies, rather similar to an analysis which has been done on Henry. 376 00:43:06,570 --> 00:43:11,790 The fifth one, which I talk about in my lecture on that play here. 377 00:43:11,790 --> 00:43:22,200 Antony and Cleopatra would be both heroic and pathetic, tragic and satire, noble and farcical, depending which way you look. 378 00:43:22,200 --> 00:43:30,750 Critics have variously described Antony and Cleopatra as a history play, a problem play and a comical tragedy. 379 00:43:30,750 --> 00:43:39,270 But we might also think about its relation to EPIC, in particular its echo of Virgil's inhered. 380 00:43:39,270 --> 00:43:46,440 Antony and Cleopatra revisits Virgil's account of the relation, the foundational relation between Rome and femininity, 381 00:43:46,440 --> 00:43:51,990 because in the end here in the Aeneid in the US must leave his lover, another foreign queen, 382 00:43:51,990 --> 00:43:58,730 Dido, queen of Karthick, in order to fulfil his destiny and found Rome to be Roman. 383 00:43:58,730 --> 00:44:05,100 In the end, it is founded on this the desertion of a foreign female queen. 384 00:44:05,100 --> 00:44:07,510 So we can see how Antony is failing to do that. 385 00:44:07,510 --> 00:44:16,440 Failing to be in is that Shakespeare's Antony replays a near says conflict between desire and responsibility in a different post. 386 00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:28,240 Heroic key. We might think that that's akin maybe to the sardonic rewriting of Homeric myth in Troilus and Cressida. 387 00:44:28,240 --> 00:44:32,200 So my initial question about who's tragedy the play represents was, first, 388 00:44:32,200 --> 00:44:37,660 a formal question or a formalist question about whether we should read Antony and Cleopatra or some 389 00:44:37,660 --> 00:44:43,630 portmanteau identity of them both as tragic protagonist in the second part of the lecture that I've 390 00:44:43,630 --> 00:44:49,600 tried to open up some alternative generic readings for the play or maybe to try and suggest that just 391 00:44:49,600 --> 00:44:55,390 as the protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra imagined themselves pushing at the limits of their world. 392 00:44:55,390 --> 00:45:00,040 So their play pushes in different generic directions. 393 00:45:00,040 --> 00:45:05,470 I think in withdrawing from the technique of soliloquy used so much previously in the tragedy. 394 00:45:05,470 --> 00:45:14,080 Shakespeare seems to be deliberately experimenting with the form of this play is a very long and unwieldy but rather aspirant drama. 395 00:45:14,080 --> 00:45:21,370 I don't think it's an entirely successful experiment. There is not much evidence to suggest it's popular and it's in its own time. 396 00:45:21,370 --> 00:45:27,580 And the play's critical history has always struggled to to define and to come 397 00:45:27,580 --> 00:45:34,120 to terms with its simultaneous self self aggrandisement and self deflation. 398 00:45:34,120 --> 00:45:40,720 You might be interested to look at reviews of recent productions, which always tend to feel disappointed. 399 00:45:40,720 --> 00:45:45,370 They always feel that the central actors are not big enough to fill the roles, 400 00:45:45,370 --> 00:45:51,910 but they always suggest that that's a sort of a kind of failure of this particular production. 401 00:45:51,910 --> 00:45:59,470 I think it may actually be a failure or a mismatch between expectation, between hyperbole and over-the-top rhetoric. 402 00:45:59,470 --> 00:46:06,310 And the more mundane or the more physical or material embodiments of this on the stage, 403 00:46:06,310 --> 00:46:11,320 which is actually intrinsic to the play, is not it's not about Papau Productions or bad casting. 404 00:46:11,320 --> 00:46:17,360 Think it may be intrinsic to the play's own self satirising. 405 00:46:17,360 --> 00:46:21,340 Now, the plane went to talk about next time could not actually be more different from this. 406 00:46:21,340 --> 00:46:25,720 This time, Shakespeare contains his play within the classical unities of time, 407 00:46:25,720 --> 00:46:30,990 place and action, narrowing the scope and focus, just as in Antony and Cleopatra. 408 00:46:30,990 --> 00:46:35,320 He had let them go completely wild. That play is the tempest. 409 00:46:35,320 --> 00:46:50,462 And I think the question I want to ask is, is Prospero. Shakespeare is Prospero.