AO4 =
England
This time of political turbulence – the Catholic terrorist attacks on James 1 led by Guy Fawkes in 1605. Previously, issues of uncertainty over who would succeed Elizabeth I was a cause of national anxiety!
Religion was hugely important in Jacobean society. The audience might have picked up on Biblical allusions more than modern viewers. A number of critics have claimed that Jacobeans would recall Christ's last supper in Antony's farewell to his servants (Act 4, scene 2) and would hear in Antony's death scene echoes of the Bible's vision of the end of the world: for example, when Cleopatra says 'O sun / Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in' and 'The crown of the earth doth melt' - both recalling the Book of Revelation's image of the world shaking and cracking
Enormous poverty
in England: ‘The Poor Law Act’ made it a felony to oppose landowners’ new
enclosures – perhaps the depiction of the decadent Egyptian court would have made English more on the side of the Romans?
James I emphasized
nationhood in his reign and saw Britain as the 3rd great Western
civilization after Greece and Rome; he saw London as a new Rome and himself
as Caesar Augustus of
Britain bringing stable rule to the country when he was crowned king (see his coronation coin above from 1603). At his
coronation, writer Ben Johnson praised James in a poem which read ‘lasting
glory to AUGUSTUS state.’
Shakespeare would have known all this and is aware also of Rome and
depicts it both as epitomizing stoicism and cold political maneuvering – as he
writes in Coriolanus: “The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle.” Ironically, chastity was more associated with
Elizabeth 1, the Virgin Queen, rather than the sexual freedom of James’ court.
The triumphal sensuality, poetic imagination and overt sexuality of
the Egyptians might also be an attack on the anti-theatrical puritans.
Cleopatra is not unlike Queen Elizabeth in her magnificence, her penchant for
public display, he volatility and ability to talk to her people in terms they
understand.Either way, the play seems to dramatise the loss of an old-world,
heroic, bound by honour and glory towards a mentality that is ruthless and
cold.
Women: one the one hand, Jacobean
England was unashamedly misogynistic, with women who took control over their
sexuality particularly badly treated in Early Modern drama: as Stevie Simkin points out that “women's sexuality, once
let off the leash, [was] seen as potentially catastrophic for the social
infrastructure.”
Apotheosis = the glorification of a
subject to divine level. This is dramatized in A&C in Cleopatra’s final
scene, but the nostalgia for Elizabeth I had also reached dizzying heights by
the early 1600s. Playgoers might have been reminded on hearing Cleopatra's boast that she will 'Appear there for a man' at the battle of Actium, of Elizabeth's masculine language when she faced the Spanish Armada. Some critics, therefore, argue that with her flair for
stagecraft, her extraordinary power over men and political use of her
sexuality, Cleopatra owes some of her characterization to the English queen.
Just to confuse you even more, Victoria Kiernan has argued that 'Cleopatra must have reminded many of Mary Queen of Scots, a more than half-foreign woman, fond of billiards and of wandering the streets, and England's enemy as Cleopatra was Rome's.'
Plutarch
Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch is the narrative basis for the
play. Plutarch saw himself as a moralist, instructing readers on how to
live: thus he condemns Antony for his ‘lewdness’, highlighting his cruelty,
penchants for bribery and extortion and firmly blaming Cleopatra for his
downfall, writing that her main effect was to ‘stir up many vices.’ Shakespeare’s Antony is treated much more generously than
Plutarch, who called him ‘childish’ (Shakespeare, in particular, seems to
recognize Antony’s generosity). Shakespeare is also aware of Roman codes of
‘virtus’: where a person’s actions should be governed by the public estimation
of others (‘virtue’ closely aligned to ‘virility’: what it means to be a male).Like Shakespeare, Plutarch portrays Octavius as being guided by Fate;
predestined to govern the world. Shakespeare, however, offers a darker side to
Caesear’s Machiavellian tendencies, ignoring playful aspects of his character
observed by Plutarch (that he enjoyed sports and fishing!). Before Shakespeare,
the tradition had been to praise Augustus and blame Antony. Otherwise, there
are two big distinctions:1.
Shakespeare dedicates his final act to the
exploration of Cleopatra’s death, whereas Plutarch’s history focuses much more
on Antony. He emphasizes the lovers’ transcendence into myth.
Genre
Is it really a tragedy at all? An experimental play, a problem play, a tragi-comedy, a romance? Bradley’s perception that the play “is not painful” denies it a status, perhaps, as a true tragedy. Also the difficulty of charting a ‘tragic fall’, since the ending “raises them up” according to Bevington. But Bevington also admits “Antony and Cleopatra are tragic in that they suffer (though in different ways) and acquire knowledge born of suffering.
Tragedy = according to Aristotle a play which
evokes pity and fear; the characters should be consistent – they should be true
to themselves; it should dramatise a fall of some sort http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/aristotletragedy.html
Comedy (“here’s sport indeed) – usually ends in
a marriage. Movement from disharmony to harmony.
Jacobeans would have been very familiar with Classical mythology: they would have known the story of Hercules, who was subjugated by Omphale the Amazon queen - switching clothes with the hero and setting him to the female task of spinning whilst she posed with his club. Equally Mars, whose warrior's strength was defeated by Venus.
Shakespeare draws
on Greek and Roman mythology heavily. Renaissance art is particularly
instructive in showing contemporary aesthetic representations of the mythology
on which the play draws. Typically, he portrays Gods/heroes with all their
contradictions (e.g Hercules
as both a warrior and effeminate slave).
The philosophy
of instability
Montaigne: ‘There is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects.”
Prospero: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
Transformation was also the central theme of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – the ceaseless flux of creation.
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