Antony and Cleopatra

"Antony and Cleopatra is, in some ways, the most romantic of Shakespeare’s plays. It takes over, in a way, from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet gives a wonderful exploration of young love, of first love, of romantic attitudes to love. Antony and Cleopatra are mature lovers. They are seasoned. They are disillusioned. It’s an extraordinarily rich play, poetically—as Romeo and Juliet is—but the poetry of Antony and Cleopatra is that of a mature person who has gone through a lot of experiences himself and is capable of expressing the disillusionment of middle-aged love as well as the raptures of it. And, also, the sadness lying behind people who know their lives are coming to an end. “Antony and Cleopatra are mature lovers. They are seasoned. They are disillusioned” It’s a vast play, imaginatively and geographically—it takes place over a couple of continents between Rome and Egypt. It portrays different attitudes relating to those places. It’s also, again, a wonderfully comic play. When Judi Dench played Cleopatra, she brought out a lot of comedy in the role: a sort of self-knowing ironical comedy of Cleopatra who knows that she’s funny, in some ways, but then, of course, becomes transcendent in her acceptance of the need to die at Antony’s side. There’s wonderful poetry infused with comedy because Shakespeare brings on the clown to bring Cleopatra the means of death: the asp with which she is poisoned. Cleopatra is transcendent in her reaction to that and her acceptance of the fact that she’s about to die. It’s a wonderful poetic scene and a wonderful acting scene too. He’s not a scholar. He’s not trying to probe into the truth about the past. He’s not particularly interested in historical truth or accuracy. He’s using the past for his own dramatic means and he’s quite happy about altering historical fact in order to achieve dramatic effects. He’s someone who makes use of the classics imaginatively. He was a great reader throughout his life, and most of the plays are based on other books. For the classics, his main source is Plutarch’s Lives of the Roman Emperors, which he used extensively for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra and indeed for Coriolanus too. Sometimes he even takes over its wording. I think he does have insights into the classical world but that was derived from the writings that he used. Plutarch was a great user of anecdote and that, I think, was one of the things that appealed to Shakespeare. I don’t think Shakespeare was a classical scholar at all but he’s a wonderful user of the stories that classical literature tells for dramatic ends. The play is the thing for him."

"I did a preface for the new Penguin edition of it, but in fact it was my PhD play and I’ve loved it ever since. It’s a play where, as a good friend of mine once put it, Shakespeare felt he could do whatever he wanted to do in language. It’s linguistically and rhetorically the most brilliantly inventive of all of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s full of the most crazy rhetoric. Lines like ‘The crown o’ the earth doth melt’; ‘Eternity was in our lips and eyes, | Bliss in our brows’ bent’. It’s a riotous play, a carnivalesque play, a play about middle-aged adultery. It’s not really a tragedy. Many years ago A. C. Bradley, a distinguished critic of Shakespeare, said for tragedy this play is not painful. Coleridge, another wonderful critic of Shakespeare, said this is perhaps the play in which Shakespeare shows his genius at its fullest because he just lets fly, he lets rip. Cleopatra is very much a creature of language, and her language is unbelievably inventive, as indeed is Antony’s. As a female character, Cleopatra is emancipated, but at the end of the play, she says ‘Husband, I come: | Now to that name my courage prove my title!’ Here is the world’s greatest courtesan, the lover of Julius Caesar, and of Antony and of countless others, with a loud moment of auto-idealisation at the end of the play. People used to think that this is on some level a morality play in that it ends with a defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the hands of Octavius Caesar, who’s a kind of moral, puritanical character. I think nothing could be further from the truth, I think Shakespeare just runs with them. “Cleopatra, in my book, is ultimately a brilliant Falstaffian comedy figure ” In terms of gender Cleopatra is not a tragic figure. She’s an adult so there is no sense of unimaginable waste as there is at the end of Romeo and Juliet . There’s a kind of celebration. Dying in Romeo and Juliet is very real while in Antony and Cleopatra almost every time the word ‘dying’ occurs it’s Shakespeare playing on this idea of dying and human sexuality, which is a pun in the period. ‘Peace, peace! | Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, | That sucks the nurse asleep’, she says at the end of the play, as if this was some kind of Madonna image, or Christ-like image, and Antony compares himself to Christ. These images, these Christian images that invade Antony and Cleopatra , the ultimate pagan story, help to wrench it away from this finality of death. ‘Unarm, Eros; the long day’s task is done, | And we must sleep,’ Antony says, and this aligning of sleep and death in Antony and Cleopatra tends to mitigate and work against the play’s tragic momentum, so it’s not particularly painful, it’s not particularly tragic. Cleopatra, in my book, is ultimately a brilliant Falstaffian comedy figure. It’s quite different really. The classical plays are Julius Caesar of course, Coriolanus , Antony and Cleopatra . In Julius Caesar , the characters have changed completely. Antony is a Machiavellian strategic thinker in Julius Caesar , but the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra is a grizzled lover who, in some ways, has lost all sense of proportion: ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch | Of the rang’d empire fall … Kingdoms are clay’. All that stuff couldn’t be further from the relative austerity of Julius Caesar. “It’s Shakespeare’s most opaque play; brilliant but austere, but hard to love” Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s most opaque play; a brilliant but austere and, it seems to me, hard to love play, whereas Antony and Cleopatra is a riot. There have been very many famous Coriolanus’s: Alan Howard was a legendary Coriolanus in the 1970s; Charles Dance played a wonderful Coriolanus. Funnily enough, there has never been a great production of Antony and Cleopatra . You wonder why—perhaps because the language of that play pulls, as it were, towards poetic inventiveness at the expense of the drama? Impossible to say."