So today, I'm talking about Antony and Cleopatra. A play written in six, you know, six to seven.
First published in the First Folio in 16 23.
So if you think about its nearest neighbours chronologically in Shakespeare's writing,
we're thinking about plays like King Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus.
So it's important to think it's important for what I go on to talk about in the lecture,
to think about it as coming towards the end of Shakespeare's period of writing tragedies in the first decade of the 17th century,
just before he turns to the romances with which he ends his career.
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,
Antony and Cleopatra has got obvious connexions with other Roman plays,
perhaps most particularly the earliest Roman play, Titus Andronicus, but also with Julius Caesar and with Coriolanus.
Those second to Julius Caesar and Coriolanus share the same source with Antony Cleopatra,
Thomas Norths translation of Plutarch, because we've got such as such a single major source here with Norths Plutarch.
This is a really good unthinkable, just a really interesting case for a kind of soul study for comparing what Shakespeare
has done with that source by presenting a middle aged version of Romeo and Juliet.
It links itself to that play. And with Othello perhaps in seeing sexual love as a motive for tragedy.
I've chosen to focus today's lecture around that question of tragedy.
Whose tragedy is it? Whose tragedy is it?
But I'm going to start again, as usual, with a sense of the context and a kind of synopsis for the play.
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.
It's not really possible to tell what happens in the play without giving it a spin or without interpreting it
or thinking about what E.M. Foster says in aspects of the novel about the difference between story and plot.
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.
It's also a narrative of events. The emphasis falling on causality.
Then his famous example, the king died and then the queen died is a story.
The king died, and then the Queen died. Of grief is a plot.
So the king died. And then the Queen died as a story. The king died, and then the Queen died.
Of grief is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.
So causality is what makes a story into a plot. Consider the death of the Queen.
If it is in a story we say, and then if it isn't a plot, we ask why.
It's quite a nice distinction. Even though Foster is clearly talking about about novels, turning stories,
Shakespeare stories into plots or turning plots back into stories involves quite,
quite an important level of interpretation and possibly even interpellation putting things in that aren't actually there.
We may be over interpret the why because causality,
why things happen and the relation between one factor or agent and another is such a particularly crucial feature of tragedy.
Why do things happen? In some ways, that's the question. Tragedy asks.
That's what turns tragedy into a plot, not a story. Okay, so let's try and think about what happens in Antony Cleopatra.
The Roman general Antony is in love with the Egyptian Empress Cleopatra.
He prefers her company in Alexandria to his political and domestic responsibilities in Rome.
This is much to the disapproval of the Romans in general, and in particular to Octavius Caesar,
with whom Antony is in a partnership in the three way partnership to rule Rome.
Everybody notices what it is like Cleopatra has on Antony.
And particularly important tonight is the role of Einar Barbours, a blunt and loyal soldier,
until he returns from Egypt to Rome on news of the death of his wife, Fulvia.
And news of trouble from a third political rival, Pompeii. I'm back in Rome.
He agrees to marry Caesar's sister, Octavia, in an attempt to renew their political alliance.
A messenger tells Cleopatra, who is none too pleased. Antony and Caesar agree a peace with Pompei and the three men drink together.
But their amity does not last until he hears that Caesar has attacked Pompeii and deposed the third week are trying their Lepidus.
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.
Caesar, in fact, declares war on Antony and Cleopatra. And at the sea battle in Actaeon, the Egyptian fleet is defeated.
When Antony leaves the fight to follow Cleopatra ship, he's full of despair at having lost his first battle of Actaeon.
But a second battle comes quickly afterwards where he is successful.
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.
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.
Antony asks his servant Eros, to kill him. Eros kills himself, and Antony botches his own suicide.
He's taken to Cleopatra's monument to die in her arms. Cleopatra then prepares for her own death.
A darkly comic clown brings her a basket of basket of figs with hidden snakes.
She dresses in her royal robes, allows a poisonous asp to bite her.
She and her handmaidens, Iris and Charmian, die, too.
And Caesar announces that the lovers shall be buried together.
Now, we can see, I think, from the outline of the story, that there is a gap between the deaths of the two lovers,
Antony's suicide attempt and his arrival mortally wounded to die in Cleopatra's monument, a dramatised at the end of act for.
Act five shows us Cleopatra's preparations for her own death crosscut with Octavia's Caesar's increasing control over the conquered Egypt.
So unlike Romeo and Juliet, where the gap between the deaths of the lovers is so brief as to be almost a mistake,
that old observation that Romeo and Juliet misses being a comedy by a matter of seconds.
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.
So Antony dies at the end of Act four and Act five, where the tragic hero meets.
Usually his death is given over entirely to Cleopatra. It is her death that ends the play.
In this, she has the structural equivalent of Hamlet or Macbeth or King Lear or Othello,
or as I was talking about last week, Richard, the second she has the key position in the tragedy.
Her life span and the span of the play are equivalents.
One easy answer then to the question of whose tragedy is it can be answered by analogy structurally between this play and other tragedies.
And that analogy, as I've just suggested, would tell us it's Cleopatra as tragedy.
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.
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,
Tragic Men, Comic Women, Tragic Men.
Bumba develops an analysis of Shakespeare's plays that identifies male dominance as one of the generic traits of tragedy.
And perhaps we need only look at Gertrude or Ophelia or Cordelia as evidence of that.
Women in tragedies in Shakespeare's tragedies tend to be ancillary victims of the male heroes egotistic downfall.
That's often given, say, as the explanation for the death of Cordelia at the end of King Lear.
The psyche that Shakespearean tragedy characteristically dissect is a male one before you call out.
What about Lady Macbeth? Maybe I'll try and pre-empt that.
We could argue that Lady Macbeth exhausts herself trying to get out of that sideline role afforded to women in tragedy.
She's very prominent in the first half. She's winning the battle against the genre, I think, by being so prominent.
But she really disappears in the second half, sacrificed to Macbeth's own increasing tragic isolation.
We could see then the role of women as a kind of generic indicator and also as a sign of structural generic shifts.
My lecture about measure for measure talks about the decline of Izabella,
who begins that play as a comic heroine but as a symbol of and vehicle for the
place turned towards near tragedy declines to almost nothing in the second half.
In this analysis, gender is or at least contributes towards genre.
Now, women's role, as Bamber identifies, is in comedy,
a genre in which women's desires and agency a prominent and women's quests define the shape of the narrative.
If there's a play with a central female character, that's to say in Shakespeare's work, it's almost always a comedy.
That's the genre in which women have agency and have action to have.
Cleopatra, as the play's central character then may affirm her as Shakespeare's first female tragic agent.
You might want to think, though, whether Juliet should have that accolade,
or it might also be one of the ways in which the notion of tragedy is compromised rather than transformed by the play.
Perhaps Cleopatra is the structural, tragic figure in Antony and Cleopatra then since her death on the end of the play, a coterminous.
But two facts about the play seemed to compromise this.
The first is that Anthony is actually dominant in terms of the number of lines.
He has 24 percent of the lines. Cleopatra has only 19.
So 24 to 19 statistics again from the RNC.
Jonathan Bate, addition of the plays that one of its really useful statistical parts of his apparatus.
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.
The comma after Anthony may be entirely accidental or incidental, it may be something into which we shouldn't read too much,
but it may also suggest that his is the tragedy and Cleopatra a kind of afterthought.
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.
Just as last week when I was talking about Richard,
the second I suggested the play demands that we ask whether bullying Brook's actions were legitimate,
but actually frustrate any attempt to answer the question.
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.
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.
In some ways,
the death of two lovers gives us a double tragedy in which the second death deepens or amplifies the tragic movement through reiteration.
So a tragedy with two tragic carers, then, is a double tragedy. It happens twice in other ways.
The second death in the play either undermines the first or is rendered pathetic because of it.
That's two tragedies which don't really even add up to one in total.
That's a model where the two deaths actually take away from tragedy rather than adding to it.
And I want to show that this links to the ways in which the plays genre teeters
between high notions of tragedy under kind of threat of satiric collapse.
And that happens as.
And through its challenge to the single teleology we associate with tragedy, replaced here with a repeated structure of doubling and duplication.
Firstly, then, let's think about the deaths of the two lovers. I don't think about Antony first.
This is at the end of Act four after the Egyptian fleet has surrendered to Caesar's forces.
Antony curses Cleopatra. This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me.
This foul Egyptian have betrayed me for a moment, perhaps even for the first moment in the play.
He sounds just like a Roman calling Cleopatra. Right, Gypsy.
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.
Anthony specific case, though, on Cleopatra is an interesting one.
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.
Most monsta like be shown for poor. It's diminutives.
Let him take the. And hoist the up to the shouting plebeians.
So Antony's curse to Cleopatra is that she'd be taken prisoner and made a show of in Rome.
The curse that hee hee hee issues to her is that she would be turned into a spectacle of humiliation.
And that's a curse in the play. It works in that, like much of the interaction between these two lovers.
It seems designed to provoke or prompt a response. And it does.
Cleopatra sends Modi'in her eunuch to tell Antony that she's killed herself.
And on hearing the news, Antony calls on Eros, his servant, to kill him.
Eros is, of course, ironically named for the God of love. This is Shakespeare's invention.
Antony Servant in Plutarch is called Eros. But Shakespeare really stresses the name by repetition of it.
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,
almost every speech by Antony addresses and seven by name at least once.
You might want to just think about something we had in the lecture on Twelfth Night.
Remember that we never hear violence name until the very end of the play. So her name is withheld from us.
But Eros is name quite different technique here is being absolutely rammed home to us.
So we see the irony. Eros, the god of love won't kill Antony.
He would not undertake Antony's command. He says he would rather kill himself to escape the sorrow of Antony's death.
So love does not kill Anthony. Rather, he attempts to kill himself with his own sword.
And it may be intended as a mark of how far he has fallen from the noble Roman remembered
in the opening scenes that he cannot commit the most Roman of acts heroic suicide.
But why does Anthony attempt suicide? It is prompted by the news of Cleopatra's apparent death.
But not only by this. Antony's assessment of himself at this point is that he lives in dishonour.
He tells Eros of the fate that awaits him would still be windowed in great Rome and see thy master.
Thus, with pleated arms bending down his courage ible, neck, his face subdue it to penetrated shame.
Whilst the Weald seat of Fortune, it seems, are drawn before him branded, his baseness that ensued would still be windows.
As Antony and great Romans see their master us with preach at arms, bending down his courage ible,
neck his face subdue it to penetrative shame whilst the wheeled seat, a fortunate Caesar drawn before him, branded his baseness that ensued.
This is a really interesting cluster of odd words, Latinate words, unusual words either or concordance,
or the OED or both would show us how rarely they occur in Shakespeare's work at this time.
So how old they would have sounded to audiences. This clustering suggests, I think,
a particular intellectual effort or strain who might compare some similar
speeches of Angello in measure for measure or of loyalties in The Winter's Tale.
And you get this cluster of polysyllabic words, polysyllabic, unusual words, Shakespeare usually doing that.
I think to indicate that the character is not telling us the truth or is is undergoing some kind of mental torment.
But what the speech expresses is the idea, again, of being humiliated in public view in Rome.
Anthony talks about himself in the third person, ThighMaster, his courage ible neck, his face drawn before him,
and that idea of himself in the third person being humiliated is crucial to Antony's despair.
We can see immediately, then,
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.
And if we hop forward hoping a word in this play associated with Cleopatra and a kind of informal liveliness,
if we hop forward and act to Cleopatra's own preparations for death, we can see the same sentiment about humiliation again.
There's a famous speech from the end which have collapsed together.
It's actually two speeches, though. An Egyptian puppet shall be shown in Rome as well as I.
This is Cleopatra talking to Eiris and Shaman mechanics.
Slaves with greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall uplift us to the view.
The quick comedian's ex temporarily will stagers and present our Alexandrian Revel's Anthony.
She'll be brought drunk and forth and I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra.
Boy, my greatness is the posture of a [INAUDIBLE].
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.
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.
So sullying what they what they watch. Greasy aprons.
Interesting idea.
When Cleopatra lifts the poisonous snake, the ASP to her breast, she identifies that her death is designed to cheat Caesar of victory.
She addresses the ASP. Could Star speak that? I might hear the call.
Great Caesar as policy aide. Great Caesar arse on policy.
Now, I've cited these three examples to suggest that what the lovers express is the fear not of parting from each other,
but of being publicly humiliated. Although the play is typically categorised as a tragedy of love.
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.
What Antony Cleopatra fear is public show a gaping audience witnessing their degradation.
And the irony is, of course, that that is just what they are already suffering.
They're already on the stage. Cleopatra is already played by young male actor buoying her greatness.
What they fear has a kind of inevitability about it because it's already come to pass.
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.
John Dryden's rewriting of Antony and Cleopatra in the late 17th century under the title All for Love or for Love kerbs,
the play's excessive geography and timescale, but it also rewrites its motive.
Perhaps he could he should have called the play all for shame.
Since the Second World War, one of the most dominant paradigms in anthropology has been the distinction between cultures
structured around the principle of guilt and cultures structured around the principle of shame.
The theory was developed by Ruth Benedict at the end of the Second World War to conceptualise a
perceived difference between the way the Japanese and the Americans would process would suffer.
Would think about what had happened in the war.
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.
But what Benedict argues is that guilt and shame cultures differ in the ways that individuals experience having done something wrong.
Having done something bad.
Shame tends to imagine this experience, the experience of having done something bad in terms of negative evaluations by other people.
Says shame is something which is related to how other people perceive you.
And therefore, it seemed to be externally orientated. That's where you that's where shame comes from.
It comes from an interaction with people outside of yourself. Guilt, by contrast, is imagined as a negative evaluation by the self.
It's internally oriented.
Shame, then, is a response about failing to meet external or public standards or about exposing one's defects to public gaze.
Guilt is about failing to live up to one's own internal standards.
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.
I am suffering guilt.
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.
Work by psychologists has suggested that guilt filled individuals experience empathy for others,
whereas shame prone individuals are more likely to avoid others and withdraw from them.
As the original Japanese American paradigm illustrated, some societies are seen to be more inclined generally to shame or guilt highly individualistic
capitalist countries such as the USA or the UK tend towards an inner orientation of guilt.
Collectivist commie Tarion, communitarian countries like China or the USSR tend towards the external orientation of shame.
I hope that's reasonably clear. Paradigm.
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.
But what I think is important is the externally oriented feeling of shame versus the internally experienced feeling of guilt.
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.
So those quotations that I read about what they fear is they fear shame.
Neither Anthony or nor Cleopatra, I think, ever suggests that they themselves have done anything wrong.
But what they do fear is the sense that of how other people will judge or look at them.
Each anticipates their ultimate degradation in terms of a public show of being paraded through the streets of Rome in Caesar's triumph.
Cleopatra's fear then of being ridiculed as some squeaking Cleopatra boys.
Her greatness is the inverse or the opposite of all those people who in a his famous speech,
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
scornful public view is what Antony and Cleopatra both fear and what they conceptualise themselves as avoiding in seeking their deaths.
Now, shame seems to me a potentially interesting concept in relation to tragedy and particularly in relation to Shakespeare's tragedies.
Guilt, as I've suggested, has been conceptualised as a more individualistic and interior emotion,
and therefore we might see it as a more appropriately tragic motivation.
People.
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.
And today's loyal servant is an alternative tragic centre in the play since he alone acts from guilt.
I have done, IL says in Ababa's, of which I do accuse myself so solely that I will joy no more.
I have done all of which I do accuse myself so sorely that I will join no more.
Accusing myself is a keynote of guilt. Being windowed in Rome looked at from out of a window is a keynote of shame.
Having shame that is a major motivation in a tragedy reorients the locus of judgement from the individual to the community.
Just as Antony and Cleopatra challenges the model of individual tragedy Shakespeare had been previously working on by its double protagonists.
That's to say it also shifts the balance away from interior guilt to exterior shame.
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.
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.
Of course, has the character alone onstage and solitude serves to authenticate.
What they're saying is because they are alone onstage or so the fiction has it, that what they're saying must be true.
Tragedies like Macbeth and Hamlet make extensive use of soliloquy to connect us with the inner conflict of their protagonists.
Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, makes almost no use of soliloquy, and its main characters are almost no soliloquies in Antony and Cleopatra.
Nor, in fact, does Coriolanus written almost at the same time and again showing a kind of shame oriented tragedy.
So Shakespeare seems to have moved beyond the dramaturge of the previous tragedies in this play.
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.
When Caesar delivers his epitaph, Antony and Cleopatra at the end of the play, he's a.
For them, it's perhaps surprising no grave upon the Earth says,
and no grave upon the earth shall clip in it a pass so famous that predominant characteristic is then not passion,
pride, grandeur, not even love, but that of being famous pair so famous.
Antony and Cleopatra are celebrities. And as with modern celebrities, what we see is always a performance of themselves.
In this reading, the play is a kind of hello photo story,
artfully accessorised with Eastern decorative influences in which we never see the lovers alone, but except in some,
but instead in some carefully arranged tableau, flirtation, tantrum,
grandiloquence and perhaps love, too, are all played out for the cameras or for the audience.
We could almost say that these are characters who know we the audience are there because they're doing it all for our benefit.
The flip the flip side of the shame culture in this context is not guilt as it's opposite, but it's preferred version.
Performance or behaviour is externally oriented in this play.
It's about a show. It's about a performance. It's done for the benefit of others.
In that question.
In that culture, the question of authenticity, which many critics have asked, does Cleopatra or Anthony really love Anthony or Cleopatra?
That question about the authenticity of the emotion becomes, of course, completely unanswerable.
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.
We see a version of them which is generically constructed for our view.
We never get any sense of what it might be really like or whether it really exists in part.
Then Antony and Cleopatra anticipates the difficulties of understanding public individuals.
But I think it does more than this.
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.
At this point, I think Shakespeare actually acknowledges that the interior is utterly inscrutable.
Unlike the heavily soliloquies access then to those other tragic characters,
here, we see humans constructed through dialogue, performance and pretence.
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.
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.
It's a tragedy of exterior, Verity, not interiority. A tragedy of public performance rather than private emotion.
A tragedy that we might characterise a tragedy of shame rather than guilt.
And seeing this may help us feel that Rome and Egypt, which are often always in fact characterised as opposites in the play,
are actually rather closer and more similar than they might appear.
It's customary for criticism and particularly for theatrical practise to map the play's
central dichotomy between Rome and Egypt onto a range of related binary oppositions,
masculine and feminine reason and emotion. Head and heart.
West and east. In many ways, Antony and Cleopatra encourages this kind of bifurcation.
This sense that we have opposite places, opposite natures, opposite ways of being.
The play develops the concern, which is central to all of Shakespeare's Roman plays.
The question of Rome itself, the nature of Rome itself.
In Titus Andronicus, that question is an as the conflict between Romans and Goths.
But in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, the question in the debate over the nature of Rome is one conducted within the Roman polity itself.
Here, Rome seems to be constructed in clear opposition to the Egypt of Cleopatra's court.
The scenes alternate between the two locations as this play experiments with
a more radical use of place than we have seen before in Shakespeare's plays,
particularly, I think the Long Act three and four, which are made up of short cinematic scenes.
Crosscutting between the two protagonists. Productions of the play tend towards designs which emphasise intrinsic differences between Rome and Egypt.
Rome is all sterile, hard edges and harsh lighting.
Egypt is an Orientalist Fantasia of cushions and music and sex, as often in the kind of binary understanding of the early modern period.
That difference is vocalised in the difference between two women.
A version of the Virgin [INAUDIBLE] dichotomy, which places Cleopatra,
in contrast with Antony's Roman wife, Octavia Antony, of course, is caught between these two worlds.
But so too are the audience. Rather, as in Henry, the fourth part one,
we experienced Prince Hao's conflict between the world of his father's court and the world
of Falstaff in the taverns as the difference between boring scenes and enjoyable ones.
To talk more about Henry, the fourth part one in a couple of weeks.
So two in Antony and Cleopatra, we can immediately see that Rome is less attractive than Egypt.
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.
Interestingly,
the play begins with a short disapproving prologue from two Romans talking about how Anthony has been transformed into a strumpets fool.
But then it immediately cedes the stage to a long Egyptian sequence in which Cleopatra enacts the atomically the earlier she holds over Antony,
the audience to, I think is seduced.
If Antony and Cleopatra is a Roman play in which the Romans ultimately win, it's a play which puts up a good fight.
It doesn't want to be a Roman play bookended by Egyptian scenes.
Rome seems an unattractive umpty theatrical antic antagonist.
There will be no play about Octavius Caesar. So while it's easy to see the differences, though, between the two worlds,
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.
Anthony is a triumph there of Rome. Cleopatra, an Egyptian queen.
These are public figures, not private lovers. Sort of a cliche in Shakespeare criticism to talk about a conflict between public and private.
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.
It's not in a way like a sort of where like the trouble Brutus has in Julius Caesar.
This is a play about public show. It's interesting, I think that all Shakespeare's plays about pairs of lovers.
The early romantic Romeo and Juliet and the satiric Troilus and Cressida,
as well as Antony and Cleopatra stress the extent to which their protagonists cannot be private individuals.
Thus, reports of Antony's previous heroism or of Cleopatra's charisma report about her legendary barge.
Equally identified display show and consumption by watching public as constitutive of these Titanic figures greatness.
They are great because they're famous, not the other way round. Both are in the public eye.
Both in Caesar's terms are famous. So this is a tragedy, I think, seen from the outside.
Experienced on the outside. Oriented towards the outside.
What's missing is interiority, privacy and the secret individual.
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.
So the idea that the tragedy is seen and experienced and oriented towards the outside
may have an impact on how we answer that question about how genre works in it.
A play focussing on a central couple that works through dialogue and display is actually a comedy, not a tragedy.
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.
So the genre of comedy about this difficult play.
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.
This play is by suggesting that it's no one's that the play is not really a tragedy at all.
Two genres that might help us displace tragedy as the most prominent generic framework for considering Antony and Cleopatra.
And I want to suggest that they are satire and farce. Let's take Farse first.
Although farse as a form of fast moving physical comedy is not entirely distinct from tragedy.
John Multimode famously described farce as tragedy at a thousand revolutions a minute.
So far, this tragedy speeded up.
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.
In a play like Antony and Cleopatra, which, as we've already established, is dominated by exteriors and by speed.
The turns of the battle sequences and the interplay between the lovers inact for, for example, have the capacity to be farcical.
The male Cleopatra, imagining herself played by a boy actor at the end of the play, teeters on a kind of farcical collapse.
But we may actually feel that this ground has already been occupied in the aftermath
of Antony's suicide attempt brought at the end of AT4 to Cleopatra's monument,
which was probably represented by the gallery above the stage.
Antony's inert body is raised to die in her arms, but rather than being presented as a moment of exquisite pathos.
This action is fatally compromised by stage awkwardness.
Raising a dead weight some 15 feet above the stage, presumably on a rope, cannot have been easy.
And the physical difficulties of this action are stressed by Cleopatra's dialogue.
How heavy weighs, my Lord. Our strength is all gone into heaviness.
It's even more expressed, though, I think by this wonderful stage direction.
They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra. They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra.
He applied to a human being indicates both significant,
rather graceless or inelegant physical action on the part of the women and a grotesquely dehumanised heaviness on the part of Antony.
One review of an all male production at the rebuilt Globe Theatre in Not Fit In nineteen ninety nine
felt that the lifting of the dying hero up to Cleopatra's monument is inadvertently hilarious,
with the captured Queen of the Nile and a big beefy chami and hauling up the rope
as if they were energetically raising the mainsail on some unwieldy Gallion.
The review, though, suggested that this ending to Act four, said the final act of the play on a farcical tone.
After that, after that, Benedek Magic Girl says that without the opening night,
audience clearly found it tough to continue suspending its disbelief in a male heroine.
The description of the effect of performance is, I think, well made. But perhaps the suggestion that the hilarity was inadvertent underestimates
Shakespeare's satiric power to deflate his own mythos and that of his characters.
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.
This is a this is a scene of ridicule and humour, farcical humour rather than pathos.
So we've got an aspiration in physical and spiritual or emotional terms, which is brought down by physical and farcical aspects.
That moves us, I think, from farce into satire, a genre critics have associated with this period of Shakespeare's works,
which might include Coriolanus and Timon of Athens in that group of Satie's up this point.
We may feel that the simultaneous, unkind, contradictory presentation of Anthony at once hero and loser creates the kind of
generic instability in the play we associate with satire looked at in this way.
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.
The fifth one, which I talk about in my lecture on that play here.
Antony and Cleopatra would be both heroic and pathetic, tragic and satire, noble and farcical, depending which way you look.
Critics have variously described Antony and Cleopatra as a history play, a problem play and a comical tragedy.
But we might also think about its relation to EPIC, in particular its echo of Virgil's inhered.
Antony and Cleopatra revisits Virgil's account of the relation, the foundational relation between Rome and femininity,
because in the end here in the Aeneid in the US must leave his lover, another foreign queen,
Dido, queen of Karthick, in order to fulfil his destiny and found Rome to be Roman.
In the end, it is founded on this the desertion of a foreign female queen.
So we can see how Antony is failing to do that.
Failing to be in is that Shakespeare's Antony replays a near says conflict between desire and responsibility in a different post.
Heroic key. We might think that that's akin maybe to the sardonic rewriting of Homeric myth in Troilus and Cressida.
So my initial question about who's tragedy the play represents was, first,
a formal question or a formalist question about whether we should read Antony and Cleopatra or some
portmanteau identity of them both as tragic protagonist in the second part of the lecture that I've
tried to open up some alternative generic readings for the play or maybe to try and suggest that just
as the protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra imagined themselves pushing at the limits of their world.
So their play pushes in different generic directions.
I think in withdrawing from the technique of soliloquy used so much previously in the tragedy.
Shakespeare seems to be deliberately experimenting with the form of this play is a very long and unwieldy but rather aspirant drama.
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.
And the play's critical history has always struggled to to define and to come
to terms with its simultaneous self self aggrandisement and self deflation.
You might be interested to look at reviews of recent productions, which always tend to feel disappointed.
They always feel that the central actors are not big enough to fill the roles,
but they always suggest that that's a sort of a kind of failure of this particular production.
I think it may actually be a failure or a mismatch between expectation, between hyperbole and over-the-top rhetoric.
And the more mundane or the more physical or material embodiments of this on the stage,
which is actually intrinsic to the play, is not it's not about Papau Productions or bad casting.
Think it may be intrinsic to the play's own self satirising.
Now, the plane went to talk about next time could not actually be more different from this.
This time, Shakespeare contains his play within the classical unities of time,
place and action, narrowing the scope and focus, just as in Antony and Cleopatra.
He had let them go completely wild. That play is the tempest.
And I think the question I want to ask is, is Prospero. Shakespeare is Prospero.