AO2

AO2 – LANGUAGE/IMAGERY/STRUCTURE =

well-developed and consistently detailed discussion of effects (including dramatic effects) of language, form and structure  excellent and consistently effective use of analytical methods  consistently effective use of quotations and references to text, critically addressed, blended into discussion

Remember, Jacobeans would go to ‘hear’ a play (think about the 'audio' in the word 'audience') rather than see it; a huge part of this effect is what one critic has called an “a kind of imagistic unconscious” as if the language and imagery are working on the audience without them even knowing it! When we watch the play, then, images and words flow into our brains, stimulating much more than the bare stage of the Globe could ever achieve. Director Peter Brook puts it this way: “Shakespeare could conjure up images such that, if you could chop open the head of anybody watching his play and pull out the impression from the brain, you’d get something more like a piece of pop art than anything else. Because the effect on the mind is that... every single thing under the sun is possible

LANGUAGE

Hyperbole – This is described as an essential figure of speech in the play “which helps mark the ascent of the lovers from failed protagonists to creators of their own imaginative destiny.”

This includes superlatives (the ‘most’, the ‘best’, the ‘highest’, or conversely the ‘least’ etc).

Antithesis/Oppositions

(Molly Mahood talks of the play’s “blend of the mundane and the cosmic.”) Contrasting images of measure and overflow, heroic past and tarnished present, myth and reality, time and death, mutability and eternal changelessness, seriousness and sport, action versus lack of purpose, creation and decay.

Paradox

Repeated words

IMAGERY

Dissolution (‘a favourite subject of poetic imagination’), but also a reality in the theatre. Also includes ideas of melting and vacillation.

The Elements

Natural symbolism of the elements and the ascent from water and land to air and fire.

Military Imagery of swords and armour

Emasculation

The world (also universal/cosmic imagery)

 – just like medieval drama.

Self-dramatization/metadrama

– “all the world’s a stage”

Religious imagery, often inspired by the Book of Revelation (btw, which is often read as an anti-Roman tract!); or the Gospel; or from Greek/Egyptian mythology.

Roman vs Egyptian language/imagery

Michael Lloyd – “all the Romans speak with a single tongue.”David Bevington: “language distinguishes Rome from Egypt: Rome is a place of words and voices where love and war are talked about, whereas Egypt is a place of actions and the body where love and war are made.”

Caesar’s speech lacks imagination - he is a rhetorician

Egyptian style: sensuous, self-indulgent, ornate, poetic.

Food

Fertility

STRUCTURE

Dramatic Structure: the form of the play is unique amongst Shakespeare’s tragedies – over 40 scenes, marked by ‘flux’ (stage empties, then people come back on), over 220 entrances and exits. As a result some critics argue it is ‘well-nigh unstageable.’ Jumping back and forth from Egypt to Rome, the structure is almost cinematic.

There is also NO documented staging during Shakespeare’s life.

A public play – there are hardly any moments in the play that allow for privacy. A & C are almost never found alone on stage. This intensifies the theme of performance, as there is always an audience for the lead characters.

Act 3? Dizzyingly fast; here we mainly see Roman men engaged in power politics

Act 4 and 5

Although as a tragedy we’d expect to see changes, these two acts are fascinatingly different in tone from the previous three. Is Antony being abandoned by his Gods a possible pivot point?

Juxtaposition

The magic of Shakespeare’s stagecraft is especially evident in his juxtaposition of scenes.

Time

The instability of time – we’re unable to find a fixed locus of commitment in the enduring present and so is forced to vacillate continually between future and past, anticipation and memory… Time is no one’s friend except perhaps Caesar’s, and even he is cheated of what he especially desires.

John Wilders – “when they do express love it is seldom experienced in the present but remembered from the past.” Antony, however, tends to focus on the present, here and now – trying to discover new ideals of selfhood.

Messengers

Use of messengers and the uncertainty of knowing whether messages are true or not, provides a key to the play’s own ambiguity of meaning.

Exits – This includes the structural motif of desertion

Stage-directions

Bathos (comedy) – there is a tendency in the play, which is almost comic, to deflate the heroism/mythology of its legendary characters.

Exteriority vs Interiority