AO3 i

AO3  (i) well informed and effectively detailed exploration of different readings of text 

There are many ways in which the play can be read, Shakespeare achieves a Keatsian ‘negative capability’ by inviting us to both condemn and admire his characters. As Sir Philip Sidney put it: "Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth."

For the sake of the exam, I want to focus on the two critics I find most interesting: Emma Smith and Ralph Alan Cohen – more on them later. In the meantime, you need to familiarize yourself with these readings and learn some quotes!

Firstly, here are some sound-bites: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1819): regards it as “the most wonderful” play of  Shakespeare because of its insight into the “depth and energy” of the lover’s passion. He encourages us to put it “in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet.” George Bernard Shaw (1898): “You can’t feel any sympathy with Antony after he runs away disgracefully from the battle of Actium because Cleopatra did…If you knew anyone who did that you’d spit in his face.” You can find modern equivalents for these immoral characters “in every public house.” “The play has no moral value whatever.” R.H. Case (1906): on the play’s structure, argues that there is “a sense of clutter” and believes that “Antony and Cleopatra was rather hastily written.” Dolores Burton: ‘Antony and Cleopatra is at last not about tawdry middle-aged lovers but about the power of imagination to place an Egyptian puppet and a drunken Antony on stage and, by poetry, to make the audience forget their smaller-than-life reality.’ Claire Kiney: “In Antony and Cleopatra, speech is as important as action—it is, indeed, a kind of action.” “Antony and Cleopatra speak themselves into legend.” Michael Goldman on Antony: “his greatness is primarily a command over other people’s imaginations.” Duncan Harris: “in Cleopatra’s death we are privileged to see at last what the poetry has made us desire for so long to believe.” Robert Ornstein: Her death “turns life into art… [it is] a death that lives in the artistic imagination.” She stages her final death scene because she knows “her destiny is art.” Maynard Mack (1960): “Antony and Cleopatra, like life itself, gives no clear-cut answers. Shakespeare holds the balance even, and does not decide for us who finally is the strumpet of the play, Antony's Cleopatra, or Caesar's Fortune…” John Wilders: “The end of Antony and Cleopatra seems also like a beginning.”

Some more extended critical extracts:

1. David Bevington: argues that the divergence between how the characters think of themselves and how they behave make this “one of the most ironic of the major tragedies.” It’s an irony particularly associated with Antony: “Shakespeare repeatedly allows Antony to be deflated by a humorous or ironic touch.”

As for Cleopatra, she is “intensely conscious of and preoccupied with her reputation as she goes about making a religion of erotic passion… If Cleopatra will not take herself seriously, how can we?”

“The ending of Antony and Cleopatra compensates extraordinarily for all the failures of human action that have preceded it.”

“The lovers are remarkably alike: they echo one another’s sentiments and words (‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’, ‘Melt Egypt into Nile’), behave in similar ways towards the messengers and describe each other in terms of paradox.”

“Better to be Antony and lose than to be Caesar and win.”

Cleopatra is “the spokesperson for the artist’s imagination.”

2. Jonathan Bate: Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Epicurean tragedy, takes the idea of the shifting self to an extreme of dissolution. Its action sprawls around the Mediterranean world as it gives historical form to the mythical encounter between Venus (the principle of love) and Mars (the god of war).  The play is structured upon a series of oppositions: between female and male, desire and duty, the bed and the battlefield, age and youth, Stoicism and Epicureanism, and above all Egypt and Rome.....

Against the grain of the Renaissance idealization of the age of Augustus, Antony and Cleopatra depicts Octavius as a mealy-mouthed pragmatist. The play is concerned less with the seismic shift from republic to empire than with the transformation of Mark Antony from military leader to slave of sexual desire.... To Roman eyes, eros renders Antony undignified to the point of risibility, but the sweep of the play's poetic language, down to its closing speech ("No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous"), celebrates the fame of the lovers, whose imagined erotic union in death is symbolic of cosmic harmony. Octavius himself has to admit that the dead Cleopatra looks as if "she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace": "toil" is sweatily sexual, but "grace" suggests that even the most Roman character of them all is now seeing Antony and Cleopatra as something other than self-deluding dotards. The aura of Cleopatra's last speech is still hanging in the air; the power of the poetic language has been such that a sensitive listener will half-believe that Cleopatra has left her baser elements and become all "fire and air." She is, as Charmian so superbly puts it, "A lass unparalleled":  just one of the girls, but also the unique queen and serpent, embodiment of the Nile's fertility and the heat of life itself....

[T]he historical structure of Plutarch's narratives is always premised on the lives of his male heroes. Shakespeare's play alters this focus to emphasize the death of the woman, not that of the warrior, as the climax of the story.... In tone and language Antony and Cleopatra may be described as a "feminized" classical tragedy: Egyptian cookery, luxurious daybeds, and a billiard-playing eunuch contrast with the rigors of Roman architecture and senatorial business.

At the end of the drama, young Octavius Caesar is left in sole charge of the empire. He will become Augustus, who was regarded as the embodiment of enlightened imperialism -- a model for the ambitions of Shakespeare's patron, King James. But all the poetry of the play has been on the Egyptian, the Epicurean side....

Shakespeare ... was perpetually both inside and outside the action, both an emotionally involved participant in the world he created and a wryly detached commentator upon it. So he invented a new character, Enobarbus,  the only major player in the story who is absent from the historical source. Enobarbus embodies the pliable self recommended by Epicurus and Montaigne, only to recognize, tragically, that pliability eventually leaves him with nothing but death. He berates himself for his abnegation of that cardinal Epicurean virtue, friendship. Intelligent, funny, at once companionable and guardedly isolated, full of understanding for women but most comfortable among men (there is a homoerotic frisson to his bond with Menas and his rivalry with Agrippa), clinically analytical in his assessment of others but full of sorrow and shame when his reason overrides his loyalty and leads him to desert his friend and master, Enobarbus might just be the closest Shakespeare came to a portrait of his own mind. 

3. A.C. Bradley (1909): He greatly admires the play but feels it is less significant than the other tragedies. He is particularly bemused by the structure and the ending:

“Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? In Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, though in a sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow.... Here we can hardly do that.... It is better for the world's sake, and not less for their own, that they should fail and die.... [W]e do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact that we mourn so little saddens us.   

4. Harold Bloom: “we never see Antony and Cleopatra alone together. Actually, we do, just once, but only for a moment, and when he is dangerously enraged against her. What were they like when they were, more or less, in some harmony? Did they go on acting, each taking the other as audience?

Cleopatra never ceases to play Cleopatra, and her perception of her role necessarily demotes Antony to the equivocal status of her leading man. It is her play, and never quite his, since he is waning well before the curtain goes up, and she cannot allow herself to wane. The archetype of the star, the world’s first celebrity, she is beyond her lovers—Pompey, Caesar, Antony—because they are known only for their achievements and their final tragedies. She has and needs no achievements, her death is triumphant rather than tragic, and she forever is known best for being well known…

All for Love, Dryden’s exuberant title, would not have done for Shakespeare’s play even All for Lust misses the mark. Antony and Cleopatra are, both of them, charismatic politicians1 each of them has so great a passion for himself and herself that it becomes marvelous for them actually to apprehend each other’s reality, in even the smallest degree. Both of them take up all the space1 everyone else, even Octavius, is reduced to part of their audience.

Antony, just this once, almost stops acting the part of Antony, Herculean hero, whereas Shakespeare wishes us to see that Cleopatra never stops acting the part of Cleopatra.

.Are Antony and Cleopatra in love with each other?... We certainly can say that Cleopatra and Antony do not bore each other, and clearly they are bored, erotically and otherwise, by everyone else in their world. Mutual fascination may not be love, but it certainly is romance in the defining sense of imperfect, or at least deferred, knowledge. Cleopatra in particular always has her celebrated remedies for staleness, famously extolled by Enobarbus. Antony, also a mortal god, has his aura, really a kind of astral body, that departs with the music of Hercules, the oboes under the stage. There is no replacement for him, as Cleopatra realizes, since with his death the age of Julius Caesar and Pompey is over, and even Cleopatra is very unlikely to seduce the first great Chief Executive Officer, the Emperor Augustus.

Whore and her aging gull is a possible perspective upon [Cleopatra and Antony], if you are yourself a savage reductionist, but then why would you want to attend or read this play?

You could argue that the Cleopatra of Act V is not only a greater actress than she was before, but also that she becomes a playwright, exercising a talent released in her by Antony's death. The part that she composes for herself is very complex, and one strand in it is that she was and still is in love with Antony, and so is more than bereft. Indeed, she marries him as she dies, which is sublimely poignant.... She is surely the most theatrical character in stage history. We need not ask if her love for Antony ever is love indeed, even as she dies, because the lack of distinctiveness in the play is between the histrionic and the passionate.

Though the play's Antony necessarily cannot match its Cleopatra, Shakespeare creates a magnificent ruin, who becomes only more sublime as he falls. Doubtless, this Mark Antony is too multiform to be a strictly tragic figure, just as Cleopatra is too varied and too close to quasi-divinity for us to find in her a tragic heroine, a Cordelia or a Lady Macbeth.

....

Antony is the grandest of Shakespeare's captains because his personality dominates every aspect of his world, even the consciousness of his enemy Octavius. And that personality, like Cleopatra's, is exuberantly comic: extraordinarily, this tragedy is funnier than any of the great Shakespearean comedies. Shakespeare's genius, remorseless in Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, totally and wonderfully indulges itself in Antony and Cleopatra, which is certainly the richest of all the thirty-nine plays. Poetry itself constitutes much of that wealth, and the personalities of Antony and of Cleopatra constitute a great poem, Herculean and erotic, each an idea of order in that a violent disorder is also an order. Cleopatra, having more mind, wit, and guile, is closer, as I've remarked, to Falstaff, but Antony surpasses everyone in the essential gaudiness of his poetry. I cannot believe that any other male character in Shakespeare so fascinated his playwright, not even Hamlet and Falstaff.

5. Gender:

James Shapiro: “Shakespeare was the noblest feminist of them all.”

Kate McCluskie: Shakespeare “wrote for a male entertainment.”

Liz Lewis: “In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare again explores the idea of the victim within a patriarchal society. However, in this play the gender roles are inverted and it is Antony who is the true victim.” Go to this site for her excellent essay - http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/shakespeare_women.html

Feminist critcs see Cleopatra’s triumph over Caesar as evidence of Shakespeare’s proto-feminist stance. Roman views of the queen are misogynist, yet Shakespeare depicts her as a far more powerful, intelligent character. Feminist critics see Cleopatra as “a positive representation of female power who can create fictions and then act them out.

L.T Fitz points out that Antony dies in Act IV while Cleopatra (and therefore Egypt) is present throughout Act V until she commits suicide at the end and “would seem to fulfill at least the formal requirements of the tragic hero.”

David Quint contends that "with Cleopatra the opposition between East and West is characterized in terms of gender.”

NOTE: Crossdressing within the Play

Some critics believe that the famous barge speech is needed because as Phyllis Rackin points out that "Shakespeare had to rely upon his poetry and his audience's imagination to evoke Cleopatra's greatness because he knew the boy actor could not depict it convincingly."

For more information about ‘crossdressing’ in the play go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra - Performing_Gender_and_Crossdressing