I wrote this chapter recently with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight. It was a welcome opportunity to revisit this extraordinary woman.
The Daunting Task
Cleopatra is the pinnacle of the female actor’s Shakespearean repertoire. We do not have the male actor’s lifespan from Romeo to Hamlet, Macbeth, Timon and King Lear. Cleopatra is the end of our road, and she died aged 39.
I had had a break from the RSC through the 1990s and had been acting in modern plays, on television and in films, but by 1999, with the offer of playing Lady Macbeth, my appetite for Shakespeare had returned. After the intensity of Lady Macbeth I relished the lightness of Beatrice, which I went on to play a few years later, and both these parts expressed some part of myself. But where to go next? There was only Cleopatra left to truly challenge and advance me further, but I didn’t feel drawn to her, and I didn’t feel any connection with her. So I had never put myself forward to try her, and had even turned down the role not long before I finally accepted Greg Doran’s offer to play her at the RSC in 2006.
What changed me? It was mainly the trust I had built up with Greg. He is the most unfussy director, who builds everything from the text and imposes no tricks or conceits that are not supported by the clues and givens in Shakespeare’s language. So I put my first toe in the Nile, so to speak, by saying yes to Greg. But then there was the problem of who would play Antony.
There are some parts that male actors shy away from because they have a reputation for being unrewarding or dull. Given the choice (and male actors do have the choice) they would rather not play what they perceive as a supporting role to a more eye-catching female role. One actor I asked to play Judge Brack to my Hedda Gabler turned it down because ‘It’s her play’. At least he was honest. (If women had that luxury, we might turn down Lady Macbeth, Gertrude or Goneril because ‘It’s his play’.) Luckily some actors have more sense, and I have been blessed with some great acting partners: one of the greatest was Patrick Stewart, who positively wanted to play Antony.
Patrick had played Enobarbus a couple of times, a part that is sometimes thought to be the best male role in the play. By playing the character who best understands Antony, he had gained insights into the part, and now, after years of Hollywood stardom, he saw a chance to get back to Shakespeare and play a role he had developed an ambition to perform. Luckily for me.
How do you approach playing a woman who reputedly stops the heart and eclipses the reason of every man she meets? Who has Julius Caesar eating out of the palm of her hand? To me Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Mata Hari, the erotic, black-eyed woman on Edwardian postcards, impossible for me to get near. However, once I did my research, I found that nowhere in the play or in any historical account is Cleopatra described as beautiful. In fact any existing images of her make her look rather heavy-browed and long-nosed. Hooray! Yes, but on second thoughts not hooray because that meant she managed to pull the men despite not being beautiful. That means she possessed some indefinable sexual ingredient, the X-factor which you either have or have not got and which is something beyond the art of acting.
What I did have were Shakespeare’s words, and they became my largest sexual attribute. They say the brain is the largest sex organ in the body, and her words were of infinite variety. Playful, grandiose, self-dramatising, switchback, heart-breaking, infuriating and unpredictable. I knew that my best chance of convincing an audience that men might fall at my Cleopatra’s feet would be to get behind those words, the switches of mood, the reach of her imagery, the energy and the emotion to be inferred from her rhythms. And if I could bring all that off the page and on to the stage, I wouldn’t need to fulfil every man’s fantasy with my physique or some ‘X’ ingredient. Getting behind those words would be a tough enough task, but at least it was one that could be worked at, whereas one’s physical attributes are more immutable.
What I also had was the real experience of a woman on the cusp of old age, with all the contradictions that presents. On the one hand still in touch with a youthful energy and physicality, and on the other the consciousness that, as I joked at the time, ‘this may be the last time I play the love interest’. Both Patrick and I are fairly fit and athletic—which I am rarely required to demonstrate—so we both used that quality of physical energy and enjoyment wherever we could, and indeed I haven’t had and don’t expect to have another chance to run around the stage barefoot or ever again to leap into a stage lover’s arms.
I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore.
Cleopatra knows that plays will be written about her, and she wants to be in control of the record of her life. It is often the case with Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines that they are self-consciously acting out their own story. Nowhere is this more the case than in Antony and Cleopatra. Both protagonists are in love with their own love story, and they play it out very publicly in front of three layers of audience: the audience of the court and servants on stage with them, the audience who have paid to see the play, and the audience of the gods to whom they feel intimately related and who lend them the importance and consequence that they believe they deserve.
When we did Macbeth, Greg Doran had consulted a psychiatrist about the definition of a psychopath and whether he thought the Macbeths could be described as such. He also helped us identify the folie à deux syndrome that linked the couple in their crime. This same psychiatrist helped Greg with Antony and Cleopatra and corroborated Patrick’s theory that much of Antony’s erratic behaviour and loss of judgment could be explained if he were an alcoholic. Cleopatra also fulfils the pattern of a codependant and enabler, as she encourages his maddest schemes, mainly, one senses, in order to prop up the collapsing hero and their collapsing relationship.
Greg then asked the psychiatrist what psychological profile might fit Cleopatra? The answer came back that she was an almost textbook narcissist.
I leapt to my computer and looked up examples of narcissists and found them to be people who, far from being in love with themselves, feel invalid unless other people praise them. Such people are in need of a perpetual audience—even if that audience is themselves in a mirror—and are given to disproportionate notions of their own importance, swinging from the depths of insecurity to ridiculous self-aggrandisement. It is as though they cannot bear to be alone and face the silence that might echo their own inconsequentiality. I also read that at the more insane end of the spectrum they have delusions of grandeur, imagining themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus, Joan of Arc or Cleopatra. ‘But she is Cleopatra!’ I shriek. Very confusing for her, just as it might be confusing to be a Michael Jackson or a Madonna. What do they think when they are alone and look in a mirror?
I had noted over the years that a large part of the X-factor, star quality, or whatever you want to call it, is the desperate need to be a star. Whatever its psychological source, that need to have power over people can be developed into a self-fulfilling art, the art of playing with people’s desire. This provided a helpful insight into the desperation that lies at the heart of the play. A desperation for both lead characters to hang on to one another, and to the political and sexual power their combined personalities have achieved and which is on the wane from the beginning of the play.
The actual Antony and Cleopatra were undoubtedly important on the world stage, and their love affair did have bearing on the future course of history. At the point where Shakespeare takes up their story, Antony’s reputation as a major player and his stake as co-ruler of the Roman Empire were extremely fragile. He was perceived by Rome as someone who had gone native in Egypt and had surrendered his reason to the exotic and erotic otherness of that country as embodied by Cleopatra. As for Cleopatra, her Empire depended for its very existence on Rome’s need for her abundant harvests and geographical position. If she proved too much trouble in making a ‘strumpet’s fool’ of their great Mark Antony, she could easily be got rid of, the 3,000-year-old Egyptian Empire would wither and be subsumed into the Roman one. Cleopatra personally identifies with her country, naming herself the goddess Isis, and Antony on his deathbed personifies her as the country itself (‘I am dying, Egypt’), and it is as near to the truth as of any character that her fate and the fate of her country are one and the same thing.
This narcissism that is partly founded in truth became for me a helpful track through the play. From the opening scene she is showing off to the court that she still has it in her. Antony is long expected back in Rome, but she has the power to keep him by her side. Her temperamental storms are done for show, to tantalise Antony and to amuse her court. She even advises one of her women that the best way to keep a man is to be contrary. She gives the order to send a message to Antony and ‘If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick: quick and return.’
When her woman, Charmian, challenges Cleopatra’s methods and suggests that the better tactic would be to ‘In each thing give him way, cross him in nothing’, Cleopatra retorts: ‘Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him’, giving Charmian the benefit of her years of experience of keeping the balance of power by playing one mighty leader off against another.
It has to be added here that Shakespeare was certainly describing another narcissistic ruler nearer to home in his own late Queen Elizabeth. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth used her sexual armoury to rule a small nation surrounded by potential enemies. Elizabeth did this by playing a nail-biting game of time-delays and promises of marriage to foreign princes that she never meant to fulfil. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth was a marvellous theatrical self-propagandist, throwing banquets and putting on masques and pageants that would leave Cecil B. DeMille floundering. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth appropriated the imagery of a popular goddess, or the equivalent, by styling herself as the Virgin Queen/the Virgin Mary, thus unifying all the disparate factions in the country and sealing her authority by tying it in to God’s. Also, like Cleopatra, Elizabeth grew up in danger of her life, her very existence being a potential threat to other factions that included close family members. Both had murderous fathers whose memories they worshipped.
When I played Cleopatra I had only just finished playing Elizabeth in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and I was steeped in her history. Although I recognised the crossovers between the two women, I was determined to emphasise the differences in their personalities, because I always want to play a contrast to whatever I have just played. Schiller’s Elizabeth is buttoned-up and self-controlled, a shrewd politician, almost one of the men. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is outlandish, passionate and impulsive. Shakespeare downplays the intellect and political acumen that the real woman possessed, in favour of perpetuating the myth of the gypsy-whore whose power over men was so irresistible that even the great Mark Antony succumbed.
Once you start to look, Elizabeth is everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays, albeit judiciously well-disguised. In Macbeth, as Greg Doran pointed out, the Macbeths as a composite are a portrait of the barren Elizabeth whom power corrupts and who successfully gets rid of her closest rival to the throne, Mary Stuart, just as Macbeth gets rid of Banquo. In both cases the bitter irony is that it is the descendants of that rival (the Stuarts/Banquo’s progeny) who next inherit the throne and start a new and lasting dynasty. Similarly, when I played Henry IV (see Chapter Ten) I had a memory of Elizabeth haunted by the guilt of having killed a rival and a fellow royal in order to maintain a grip on the throne, however insecure.
By the way, I think I can boast that I am one of the few actors, if not the only one, who has played both the King and the Queen of England.
Cleopatra’s playfulness in the opening scenes of the play, as well as her stagey tantrums, mask a genuine insecurity. In the first scene between Antony and Cleopatra the audience is immediately introduced to a pattern in their relationship. An outside agent enters: a messenger from Rome with a summons for Antony to come back to Caesar’s side. In front of their audience of attendants, Antony feigns a lack of interest, refuses to hear the news from Caesar and goes back to canoodling with Cleopatra. Their love is boundless and mega-important. Rome can sink into the Tiber for all Antony professes to care. Cleopatra seems to smell a rat. She has sharp instincts, and her mind races to her biggest fear: that the double draw of Caesar and of Antony’s wife Fulvia will outweigh Cleopatra’s own attractions and pull Antony back to Rome; that she will lose him, and thereby her link to power, forever. The best way to get Antony to stay with her is to order him to read the message while at the same time taunting him with his kowtowing, his thraldom to both his wife’s tongue and to the boy Caesar. This in turn makes Antony rebel even more strongly, and he grabs at the idea that he and Cleopatra should disguise themselves and go and people-watch in the streets—an escapist, childish pastime he knows will distract them and bring them close together. They are both grasping at straws, trying to put off the inevitable. They are like middle-aged teenagers.
When Antony does eventually go back to Rome when his wife Fulvia dies, Cleopatra is left with her smaller audience: her coterie of female servants and eunuchs. With them she can be more candid. Cleopatra’s team buoy her up, keeping the sexual relationship alive and present, fantasising about where Antony is and what he is doing, imagining him riding his horse: ‘Oh happy horse to bear the weight of Antony.’ Hilarity all round. It is like being backstage with the leading actress and her dressers and understudy.
But in that intimate setting comes a bit of honest truth. In our production I suddenly ripped off the black-haired wig with the emblematic ‘Cleopatra’ cut that I had been wearing from my first appearance and revealed my own hair beneath, which had been treated to look thin and scrappy. Cleopatra looks in the mirror and invites her coterie/audience to imagine this woman they see before them—who is ‘with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black and wrinkled deep in time’—as having once been ‘a morsel for a monarch’, and one who would cause great Pompey to ‘die with looking on his love’. She is like an ageing film star, but without the scrapbook or movie archive to prove she was once something great.
Although I have never set many of my eggs in the ‘sexual allure’ basket, I can still relate to some of Cleopatra’s fear of getting old. I played Cleopatra in my fifties. Cleopatra died at the age of thirty-nine and to her that was probably the equivalent of fifty to me. Actually, disbelief rather than fear is the predominant sensation when confronting one’s ageing face in the mirror. Can this old woman possibly be me? And I am again reminded of Elizabeth I, who was described by Sir Walter Ralegh as ‘A lady surprised by time’. Elizabeth and Cleopatra may be empresses and queens but they are also mortal women, and I can bring that more mundane aspect on to the stage with me and give them flesh and form.
Elizabeth is purported to have written the poem, ‘When I was fair and young’, the musings of an old lady looking back and regretting the number of times she rebuffed suitors when she was beautiful and now is left alone. Who knows who might have read that poem? If Shakespeare did, he knew how Cleopatra might look back on her ‘salad days’ when she was ‘green in judgment, cold in blood’. It is the midlife cry of men and women alike. Shakespeare would have understood it in his early forties, and in his portrait of both Antony and Cleopatra he shows his sympathy with their fleeting power.
Cleopatra keeps a grip on her household through contrariness and unpredictability. It is a petty form of power, but entertaining to play and to watch. Just when Charmian thinks she has permission to chime in with Cleopatra about how wonderful Julius Caesar was, she is slapped down by Cleopatra’s ‘Be choked with such another emphasis! / Say, the brave Antony.’ Charmian is her senior handmaiden and as such occasionally tests the limits of how much truth can be hinted at. She is smartly silenced by Cleopatra, but not before the audience has had a glimpse of her mistress’s weakness.
Greg Doran is a naturally democratic director who, wherever possible, irons out the hierarchy built in to so many of Shakespeare’s plays. I may have been the alpha lioness on stage, but everywhere else I was equal with the rest of the cast, and our mutual trust and enjoyment of one another helped greatly in creating a believable household. You can play the cruel and despotic diva without having to be one, and you will have a lot more fun on stage.
I was aware that what I call the ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’ scene, when a hapless servant brings Cleopatra the news that Antony has married Octavia, is written as a comic scene, but at the same time I found it hard to get past the fact that Cleopatra is genuinely shattered by the news. As a politician she would have totally understood the expediency of Antony marrying Octavius’s sister, but as a woman this is a terrible threat. Antony will now have a family thousands of miles away across the sea. Rome has won him back, and her hold over him is weaker than ever. After the comedy of the scene, Shakespeare has Cleopatra genuinely collapse with grief, but he also knows the audience will laugh because he has let them know what Cleopatra doesn’t yet know. The audience has just heard Antony say ‘I will to Egypt: / And though I make this marriage for my peace, / I’ the east my pleasure lies.’ It’s all going to be okay. I had to un-know that and reach for genuine desperation and allow the audience to laugh at my histrionics.
The next time we see Cleopatra, when the servant comes back for further cross-examination about Octavia, I could have genuine comic fun with Shakespeare’s rhythms and send up Cleopatra’s vanity. Every piece of information Cleopatra learns about Octavia she manages to spin into a negative, so a woman who is not particularly tall and speaks with a low voice (both virtues in Elizabethan eyes) becomes ‘dull of tongue and dwarfish’, and the more Cleopatra crows her delight (relief), the more the terrified messenger warms to his theme now he knows what will please her. He gets his reward and Cleopatra swims onward, secure in the knowledge that she has nothing to fear in her rival.
In fact Octavia was one of history’s unsung heroines: far from being the cold, passive pawn of Shakespeare’s play, she was a remarkable woman, who bore Antony two children, the ancestors to three famous Roman emperors, Claudius, Caligula and Nero. She was often a political advisor to Antony and was called on to act as diplomatic go-between in the tricky relationship between Antony and her brother Octavius Caesar, and when Antony committed suicide, Octavia became the guardian of his and Cleopatra’s children, taking them into her home and rearing them. But these facts would only muddy Shakespeare’s dramatic purpose, which was to exonerate Antony for leaving his boring stick of a wife for the fascinating Cleopatra.
Enobarbus, in the most famous speech in the play, further exonerates his great leader by describing Antony’s first sighting of Cleopatra in the famous barge of burnished gold whose sails were fanned by pretty cupids, etc., etc. By recreating the magic of the scene, Enobarbus implies that Rome’s hero general was not weak, because no red-blooded man could have resisted Cleopatra’s sorcery. Shakespeare took Enobarbus’s description almost word for word from Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, the Greek historian who became a Roman citizen. He was writing a hundred years after the events described and probably deliberately took an angle that was favourable to his adoptive country.
Once you know that Shakespeare is less concerned with historical accuracy or impartiality than he is with telling a very human story about exceptional people, everything falls into place.
In the play we never see the Cleopatra who is the extraordinary ruler of an Empire, speaker of several languages, expert in the sciences, astronomy and navigation. It is as though Shakespeare is not interested in all that, preferring the rather vain, ageing lover. That is more dramatically rich and ultimately poignant, and possibly far closer to his own heart.
I found this hard to stomach at times. A couple of scenes that had always stuck in my mind whenever I had seen the play, and which had put me off playing the part, concerned the preparation for the Battle of Actium and its aftermath. Shakespeare couches the whole ill-advised idea of doing battle by sea rather than land, in some petty game Cleopatra is playing in order to prove to Enobarbus that her influence on Antony is greater than his and can overcome all reasoned strategic wisdom. The real Cleopatra would never have sacrificed any possibility of victory for the sake of an increasingly fragile love affair. She would have anticipated the consequences that would not only be disastrous politically, but would also infect and eventually poison her relationship with Antony. The real Cleopatra saw that her ships, and all her wealth contained in them, would be trapped in the bay if she didn’t escape immediately. It was a totally necessary and clever move, but in Shakespeare’s play we have the wimpy, weeping Antony blaming his greatest defeat on his helplessness in face of the whims of his lover, who had just turned tail in mid-battle to test if he would follow or not.
Even her protestations—
O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought
You would have follow’d
—are made to sound false by his
Egypt, thou knew’st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after.
Here again, Shakespeare was not interested in telling the true story of the Battle of Actium. Instead he was fascinated by the codependency of two ageing, needy lovers.
Enobarbus
I am no academic. I don’t create a character from the theories I develop from reading about them. It is the other way around, and that is what I find exciting. I put myself imaginatively and emotionally into a given dramatic scene, speak the words my character is given to speak, and, in the best cases, I learn something I could never have learnt through study. In this exercise of writing about a character long after I played her, I have tried to collect that experience into a coherent theory of the play. I enjoy exchanging these ideas with the learned Shakespearean scholars I have had the privilege to talk to, and it is great when we meet in the middle, both of us reaching some kind of understanding from our opposite starting points. One of the insights I arrived at purely through experiencing the performance was that Enobarbus and Cleopatra are a kind of mirror to one another. As I describe in Chapter Seven (‘Two Loves’), both of them have a deep love for Antony and both can see—and hate to see—his decline. Enobarbus is more honest about what is happening, although he can only bring himself to describe it privately to the audience, while Cleopatra is in denial but behaves in ways that make it clear to Enobarbus that they are on the same page. Cleopatra knows that Enobarbus disapproves of her influence on Antony, but at the same time she is a woman who can make any man fall in love with her, and I think Enobarbus, despite himself, is no exception. Enobarbus understands Cleopatra better than Antony does, and explains her behaviour to the bewildered Antony. When Antony says, ‘She is cunning past man’s thought’, Enobarbus defends her:
Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love.
And when Antony says, ‘Would I had never seen her’, Enobarbus replies, ‘O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work.’
Enobarbus is our most reliable witness to both Antony and Cleopatra. He can see each more dispassionately than the other does, and he observes everything with the closeness of one who is deeply invested in both.
In Act III, Scene 13, Antony and Cleopatra are at a very low point. The scene begins with Antony offstage and Cleopatra asking, ‘What shall we do, Enobarbus?’ This was a lovely, simple moment: it seems so familiar and right that a woman should ask her husband’s best friend for help in dealing with her husband’s flaws.
In our production, Antony then entered raging that Caesar has offered a deal with Cleopatra so long as she surrenders Antony to him. Cleopatra hears this for the first time, but in her tiny interjections into his rant we don’t learn much about what she really feels. True love would never do such a deal, we think, but Cleopatra is partly in love with Antony’s status, and to see him slighted this way, and reacting with irrational threats to take Caesar on in single combat, is a total turn-off. Enobarbus comments in the same vein to the audience but does not confide his thoughts to Cleopatra. Cleopatra the hard-headed politician is now calculating her odds for survival, and, when she and Caesar’s ambassador seem to be flirting and flattering one another, Enobarbus believes the worst and fetches Antony to witness the scene.
This is one of the most slippery and therefore most interesting scenes to play, because the actress can decide differently from night to night how far Cleopatra has fallen into temptation to buy her freedom by giving up Antony. Through Antony’s jealous fit and his brutal whipping of Thyreus, Cleopatra has time to concoct an excuse, and the actress journeys with Cleopatra through disgust and guilt to some kind of pathos and reconciliation at the other side. This codependent pair feed one another’s egos. Each sees themselves in the mirror of the other. They glory in each other’s victories and hate the defeats. In defeat they start to loathe one another, but really it is their own failure that they are loathing. Cleopatra back-pedals furiously to set Antony back up on his pedestal, protesting far too much when he accuses her of being ‘cold-hearted toward me’. Now she encourages him in all his ridiculous self-deceptive boasts (‘That’s my brave lord’) and in an attempt to restore the enjoyment they used to have she tosses out the skittish line:
It is my birthday.
I had thought to have held it poor: but, since my lord
Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.
The couple skip off the stage like teenagers, and the audience is left with very mixed emotions. They have watched the lovers dodge the test of their mutual trust. They had swerved to avoid the truth and patched things up superficially out of fear of losing one another. How totally human. It is left to Enobarbus to look truth in the face. He slopes off alone, and from here on, his path is one of isolation and eventual suicide.
The audience has come to rely on Enobarbus as the one sane voice in the insane story. As an actor waiting in the wings, I used to listen to his final speeches and became increasingly aware that Enobarbus is voicing the thoughts that Cleopatra dares not think.
A Rare Glimpse into Older Love
Of the Shakespeare plays I have been in, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Hamlet seem to show Shakespeare at his most psychologically modern and accurate. (Others will say this of King Lear, but I don’t know that play so intimately.) Shakespeare’s heroines are mostly young, and dominate the comedies, where the plots are all about young love, pursuit, rejection, and finally ending happily in marriage. Shakespeare then leaves us at that ending—which is actually a beginning—with no map as to how to continue.
In a sense I have grown up through Shakespeare. Not only have his demands on me as an actress forced me to mature and deepen, but he has taught me about life itself, offering me insights and providing me with words to describe so much of what I have felt. That is what makes it hard that he abandons women so early in their lives, and that is why I treasure my experience of playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra in particular because, through the actor’s privilege of getting inside these characters rather than reading them on the page or watching them from outside, I can sense a link to the playwright himself perhaps examining his own middle-aged marriage through fully rounded, flawed, mature characters, both male and female. He seems to be speaking to me again. Beneath the exceptional dramatic circumstances of the plots of these two plays, we see the reality of a partnership with all its imperfections, its love/hate contradictions and its shifting power. That leads me to feel that these plays are Shakespeare’s most personal plays and that Antony and Cleopatra is one of his most intimate plays, despite its public historical setting.
Act III, Scene 13 (mentioned above), felt like a major gear change in the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra. They have learnt a lot about one another rather suddenly. Their love has survived, but it has been deeply fractured and they are living on borrowed time. They are sobered in some way, and Cleopatra has more silences, more chances to question and observe this man who now often seems a stranger to her. The scenes themselves come thick and fast, darting between Egypt and Rome and back again. Scenes of extremely contrasting moods are juxtaposed for maximum nail-biting effect: a strange, maudlin Antony bids goodbye to his household on the eve of battle in Act IV, Scene 2, and once again Cleopatra has to ask Enobarbus what it all means. Antony then quickly covers it all up, pretending he didn’t mean any of it and protesting ‘I hope well of tomorrow’. This is followed by a scene in which ordinary soldiers apprehensively wait for the day of battle to dawn. It is full of ominous sentences like ‘Heard you nothing strange about the streets?’ and ‘Have careful watch’. Then one of them notices a strange sound of ‘Music i’ the air’ or was it ‘under the earth’? And all this is interpreted as ‘the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves him’, reminding us of the semi-godlike reputation of the man we have seen up close and personal.
Then there is a playful scene where Cleopatra helps Antony into his armour, but there is a desperate sorrow behind her girlish laughter as she sends him off to war. So the plot races on with short scenes intercutting with a speed more appropriate to cinema than the stage. Shakespeare tosses us around between admiration of Antony (when we and Enobarbus learn of his generosity over Enobarbus’s desertion), to horror at his misogyny (when he accuses Cleopatra of betraying him). Rather than face his own defeat, in soliloquy he blames the ‘foul Egyptian’, the ‘triple-turn’d whore!’ Cleopatra rushes to greet him and he turns his hatred on her:
Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving,
And blemish Caesar’s triumph. Let him take thee,
And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians:
Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot
Of all thy sex; most monster-like, be shown
For poor’st diminutives, for doits; and let
Patient Octavia plough thy visage up
With her prepared nails.
Patrick’s Antony prepared to strike Cleopatra, and when she runs terrified away, Antony says, ‘’Tis well thou art gone.’ I found it so sad that this is actually the only scene where Antony and Cleopatra are alone on stage together and it is so brutal. The next time they speak to one another Antony is dying.
To the Monument
As in life, any ambivalence in a relationship evaporates at the approach of death. When Antony thinks (mistakenly) that Cleopatra is dead, he reaches for the most sublime poetry, putting all petty memories aside and enshrining their partnership back up there with the gods where they have always belonged.
I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra… Stay for me:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.
It got me every time as I listened up in the gods preparing to ‘descend’ into my monument on a narrow platform suspended above the stage that Greg and Stephen Brimson Lewis, the designer, had devised.
In the last rushed scene together, when Antony, who has even botched his suicide, learns that Cleopatra is not dead at all, and Cleopatra sees that her worst fears are being realised, and that their love risks a finale closer to farce than tragedy, the pair have their last gasp of earthly love. In another stroke of genius, Shakespeare offsets the highest-reaching poetry with the day-to-day banter of a marriage that is as familiar as a favourite cardy.
At one moment Cleopatra is commanding the elements to match the enormous scale of her feelings,
O Sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in!
Darkling stand
The varying shore o’ the world!
—and the next moment she and Antony are squabbling childishly over who has the right to speak:
MARK ANTONY:
I am dying, Egypt, dying:
Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.
CLEOPATRA:
No, let me speak; and let me rail so high,
That the false housewife Fortune break her wheel,
Provoked by my offence.
MARK ANTONY:
One word, sweet queen…
(CLEOPATRA:
…Oh, okay…)
and he continues.
When Antony is dead, Cleopatra has some of the most electrifying and emotional lines any character ever spoke. The lines speak to all of us when we are high on grief. We do not have to have been married to an emperor or a hero for these lines to drop to the centre of our hearts:
Noblest of men, woo’t die?
Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty? O, see, my women,
The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My lord!
O, wither’d is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
I played out these scenes eighteen months after my own partner had died, and what a therapeutic gift it was to have such poetry in my head and my heart every night.
In the next passage, Shakespeare contrasts the woman with the gods, encapsulating the interior split in personality which Cleopatra herself experiences:
No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares. It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stol’n our jewel.
Her ferocity and helplessness are regal and human at the same time, and her ‘infinite variety’ is demonstrated in the way in which she switches from the simplest, most beautiful bonding with her women:
Ah, women, women, look,
Our lamp is spent, it’s out!
to a rather hearty practicality:
Good sirs, take heart: We’ll bury him;
to the soldier/priestess inspiring her followers:
and then what’s brave, what’s noble,
Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us.
Then comes an attempt at objectivity:
which is suddenly overtaken by a relapse into grief:
Ah, women, women!
Then a revival and deepened resolve:
come; we have no friend
But resolution, and the briefest end.
Over to You, Cleo
So now it is Act V, and it’s over to you, the actor playing Cleopatra. You walk on to the dimly lit stage, a drab shadow of your former self. Your devoted women wait to hear your bidding. You have already told the audience that there is ‘nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ and that you have no wish to stay in ‘this dull world’. Now you must hold the stage, and shoulder the memory of Antony for the entire final act with no showy sets, costumes or tricks to help you.
Stripped of glory and drained of emotion, a deadly clarity comes to you, and with that clarity a calm and light that we have not seen in Cleopatra and that she has not seen in herself. I found I could say these lines as though each thought were totally new to her/me:
My desolation does begin to make
A better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar;
Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
A minister of her will: and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.
Her own surprising thoughts give her courage. Shakespeare has created a character who is a brilliant actress, always aware of her audience and capable of acting out nobility. Perhaps now these qualities can truly be found deep within her. This is the test for the actor playing her. I am an unremarkable woman playing a very remarkable one. I pretend for a living, but to do real justice to myself, my profession and perhaps to Cleopatra, I must now do more than pretend. This act, which reveals a new self-honesty in Cleopatra, demands the utmost honesty from me. We must go beyond show and tricks into some deeper internal territory, the well-spring for true and less demonstrated emotions.
At the top of the act I know this is where I must aim, but there is still some way to go. Cleopatra will rally all her personae in order to survive the many traps that Caesar has laid for her. Before the act is out we will see the feral fighter with Caesar’s soldiers; the seductress with Dolabella and with Caesar himself; the trickster with Seleucus her treasurer; then, as we get closer to the heart of her, we see the motherly mistress to her handmaidens; the joker with the Clown who brings the asp in a basket of figs; and then she builds back up to the most theatrical moment of her life, her monumental death and ultimate victory against Caesar.
Some years ago I was asked to give a masterclass on Antony and Cleopatra to some American drama students. I don’t know what they learnt from it but I learnt something I didn’t know I knew, or at least had never articulated.
One of the students was asked to deliver Cleopatra’s famous eulogy on Antony:
I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony:
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man! [etc., etc.]
It is one of the greatest speeches I have ever had the luxury of speaking, but there lies the rub. One must not luxuriate in it. The student was delivering the speech so engulfed in her own luxurious misery that the words were indecipherable. All an audience could see was: ‘That woman is very unhappy about something.’ I too had loved the luxury of the speech, but I also knew that more important than my feelings were the words and the images that I/Cleopatra had to sell to the audience and of course, to Dolabella, who will take the message back to Caesar.
Dolabella is the Roman soldier that Caesar sends to seduce Cleopatra into accepting the offer of living captivity rather than glorious death. Cleopatra’s desperation sharpens all her powers, and it is she who ends up seducing Dolabella with the depth of her feeling. I told the drama student that every line of the speech was designed as a weapon or a political tool. The speech was a eulogy, yes, but it was also blatant propaganda, the message being: ‘You think you and your paltry emperor are so great? I will show you what a real emperor is. You little bureaucrats are nothing to me, and what’s more, I may not look much now, but any woman loved by that extraordinary giant is not to be messed with, and will not be impressed by your guy.’
As you speak those lines and reach so far out for those images, Shakespeare’s music does work on you and raw emotions do well up and threaten to choke you, but the words have to cut through all that. It is the words that will affect the audience, and the actor should keep their own feelings in check enough to make the speech active and not a passive rumination or self-indulgence. That is what I told the student, but I was teaching myself as well.
In Act V we see Cleopatra the practised politician: the woman who has been dodging plots against her life since childhood. She knows she has a way out via suicide, and now she can play her last game to the hilt.
She knows that her suicide will damage Caesar’s reputation and add to her own mythology. That is her one weapon. Caesar wants no tragic martyr. He wants Cleopatra alive and conquered and paraded through the streets of Rome. First she tries to bargain with Caesar’s emissary, Proculeius, to secure Egypt for her son. She asks for Caesar himself to meet with her face to face. Maybe she can still muster her old powers to dazzle and distract him. In our production John Hopkins, who played Caesar, entered the monument with his hands shielding his eyes from the sight of Cleopatra. He knew of her reputation and was determined not to fall under her spell.
Cleopatra should be so convincing in her seeming contrition and gratitude to Caesar for his offer of a lifeline that the audience almost believe, with him, that he has won her over. But immediately after he and his entourage have cleared the stage, she blurts out:
He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself,
as if to say, ‘I fooled him, but he can’t fool me.’
Her courage and certitude are building up to her suicide, step by inexorable step. Her more ‘normal’ fearful handmaidens need comforting and inspiring, something she has the insight and tenderness to do. Then, in one of the most extraordinary moments for me, in her only (very short) soliloquy in the play, she privately notices:
My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me: now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.
Shakespeare often puts the word ‘woman’ or ‘womanish tears’ into the mouths of his characters as a taunt or an insult. It was deep within the culture of his time that to give in to feelings was female and weak and that the moon was inconstant and unreliable, like women. Shakespeare seems to subscribe to that theory and to perpetuate it. The fact that he often demonstrates the opposite in action makes me wonder what he really felt.
The ever-confounding Shakespeare introduces a comic clown just when we are preparing for the high-point of tragedy. The Clown presents Cleopatra with the asp that he has managed to smuggle past the guards. The scene is not exactly hilarious, but it is strange and wonderful. Cleopatra and the Clown seem to understand one another, fellow actors in a story. He speaks cryptically of ‘the worm’, but we know that he knows what she is about to do with it, and in his parting shot, ‘I wish you joy of the worm’, we hear Death itself as a friend and co-conspirator.
Now we are truly alone again. Just we three women. Let us get on with it. There is no time to lose. Caesar will be back soon, and we must prepare the final triumphant victory image that will crush him and give me immortality. Come, my stage managers and my dressers. Hurry up: I am longing with all my heart to meet Antony again. He is waiting for me. He will approve of this. I am a true Egyptian, and I know there is an afterlife. I have settled my future and my country’s future.
Give me my robe, put on my crown.
There is an urgency and an excitement to Cleopatra’s last speeches that cuts against any monumental gravitas or sadness, although after her death it is precisely gravitas and sadness that affect the remaining players who wind up the play.
Having wrestled with a snake (sometimes a real one, sometimes a fake: we tried both), I lie there on my throne with my eyes shut, listening to Caesar’s closing speech:
Take up her bed;
And bear her women from the monument:
She shall be buried by her Antony:
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous.
I imagine Cleopatra can hear him too and is smiling at her triumph, and that even though I may not have matched her grandeur, at least I am no squeaking boy.