Antony and Cleopatra

Bridget Escolme

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781403942074
• eBook ISBN: 9781350316676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

This handbook offers a way in to reading Anthony and Cleopatra theatrically. Through analyses of key productions, an account of the historical conditions in which the play was first produced, and a scene-by-scene account of how the play might be approached in performance, this book focuses on the challenges of staging the notorious lovers.

1 The Text and Early Performances

Note how simply the producer overcomes the old problem . . . of lifting the body of Antony 10 or 12 feet high into the monument. No struggling with ropes; no scene change here to ruin a good speech or a smooth performance.

(Review of Antony and Cleopatra, Evesham Journal, 5 May 1945)

CLEOPATRA Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!

Our strength is all gone into heaviness,

That makes this weight. Had I great Juno’s power,

The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up

And set thee by Jove’s side. Yet come a little;

Wishers were ever fools. O, come, come, come!

They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra.

(IV.xvi.33–8)

The reviewer above is delighted at the simplicity of Robert Atkins’s 1945 production of Antony and Cleopatra. Here, he is relieved to note, are none of the extravagant scene changes that, during the previous century, had broken the smooth transition from one fictional location to another that the play suggests. But this is not the only thing that pleases. The reviewer is also happy not to be distracted by any ‘struggling with ropes’. A struggle, however, is something that the text itself appears to require. As Cleopatra remarks herself, a smooth transition from ground to monument, one that would permit the smooth delivery of a good speech, would be possible were she a goddess. But the queen and her attendants – and the young men that would have played them in Shakespeare’s theatre – are only foolish, wishing humans; to dispense with the struggle with ropes here would seem to necessitate dispensing with the speech.

If the reviewer expected this scene to offer an emotional throughline, unbroken by any awkward physical struggle, this book is going to argue that he was missing something about this play’s daring shifts from tragedy to comedy, from mythic grandeur to material reality, from fictional to theatrical world. The theatre buildings and the audience for which Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra are partly responsible for the kind of play it is, and the meanings it produces in performance. This does not mean that historical reconstruction is the best way of staging the play. It does mean that it is worth considering the different versions of the play that are produced by the theatrical rules and assumptions of Shakespeare’s time and of later periods. In Atkins’s case they seem to be rules of tragic decorum and assumptions about the ‘smoothness’ provided by Shakespeare’s open stage. In this Shakespeare Handbook, I begin with a discussion of the theatres for which Shakespeare wrote, and in which the play might have been performed. I want to argue that an awareness of the kinds of performances Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres produced will usefully allow Shakespeare to be strange as well as familiar, historically alien as well as recognisable and relevant.

Antony and Cleopatra in the Jacobean theatre

By the end of Shakespeare’s career, the King’s Men – the company for which he wrote his plays and in which he was an actor and shareholder – not only owned the open-air public playhouse the Globe, but had sole use of a private, indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. It is not known in which of these theatres Antony and Cleopatra was first performed, as there is no record of a performance of the play until over a century after Shakespeare’s death. The play has an entry in the Lord Chamberlain’s records of 1669, which states that it was ‘formerly acted at the Blackfriars’. It may well have been, but this does not mean it was first acted there. It was first entered in the Stationer’s Register, the record of publishing rights, in 1608, and plays often had their first performances around the time that they were registered. Though they took a lease at the Blackfriars in 1608, the King’s Men are not likely to have had their first full season there until 1610. A majority of scholars are now convinced that Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra during the second half of 1606 or at the beginning of 1607. If this is so, Shakespeare will have had the Globe in mind when writing the play, even if it was later performed at the Blackfriars. Wherever the first performance took place, however, it is significant that Shakespeare was writing for actors who were used to being surrounded, on almost all sides, by audience members they could see. At the Globe, with its day-lit thrust stage, this is obvious. But even in the Blackfriars, where more in the way of lighting effects could be produced, candles in the auditorium would not have been put out during the performance, and seats were to be had not only in galleries adjacent to the stage, but on the stage itself. In this account of Antony and Cleopatra, then, attention is paid to characters’ relationships with the audience as well as relationships between characters.

The architecture of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres suggests a much more fluid relationship between stage and auditorium than the proscenium arch theatres of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, in which Shakespeare is still sometimes performed today. Indeed, lighting designers and performers still sometimes create a fictional world for the play as if it existed separately from the theatre in which the production takes place, even where modern theatre architecture offers the potential for a more direct relationship between performer and audience. I have argued elsewhere that early modern plays are peopled by figures who have both fictional and theatrical intentions or objectives (see Talking to the Audience, 2005). This is particularly important in a play that is so much concerned with display and reputation. Antony and Cleopatra have a paying as well as a court audience to play to. These characters know they are being watched.

The Globe

The Globe was built near the south bank of the river Thames in 1599, by the theatrical entrepreneur James Burbage, for Shakespeare’s company, then called the Chamberlain’s Men. The theatre was a circular building, with a canopied stage thrusting out into a yard and surrounded by three tiers of seating galleries. The ‘groundlings’ paid a penny to stand in the yard; a seat cost two or three pence. A façade, known as the frons scaenae, was positioned at what we might now think of as the back of the stage. The galleries set into the frons contained not only a balcony in which scenes could take place, but private boxes in which a seat cost a shilling. The position of these expensive Lords’ Rooms suggests that our notions of up and down stage did not pertain to Shakespeare’s theatre – the players must have addressed the Lords’ Rooms as well as lower-paying playgoers – and that being seen as well as seeing was an important motivation for attending the theatre. Below the galleries, the frons had two doors for entrances and exits, either side of a central recess through which larger props – a throne or a bed for Cleopatra’s death, for example – could be brought on stage. Characters could be revealed in this central ‘discovery space’, though it is unlikely that whole scenes would have been played there, as was once thought.

Open and uncluttered with scenery, the Globe provided Shakespeare’s players with an appropriately fluid space for a play like Antony and Cleopatra, with its frequent changes in location. The play repeatedly sets up opposing sides, by having potential rivals enter in conversation from each door, and by marching opposing armies across the stage. The large, open stage space and its entrances facilitate all this. The sense of events happening over huge expanses of the known world, and the expansiveness of some of the language in the play, has been enough to suggest to some scholars that this is a play more suited to the Globe than to the Blackfriars.

The challenge of hauling the dying Antony into Cleopatra’s monument has been met in a variety of ways in modern production, and no final scholarly conclusions have been reached as to how the King’s Men would have managed it. If it is assumed that Antony is hauled aloft to the gallery at the Globe, there is the problem of visibility to be accounted for. The gallery may have been fronted by a balustrade (which would have meant some extra hauling to lift Antony over it), and, even if the smallest of the speculated measurements for the Globe theatre are correct, what happened there would not have dominated the stage space visually, as one might expect the protagonist’s last agonies to do, even in a period when playgoers spoke of going to ‘hear’ rather than ‘see’ a play. If Cleopatra is holding Antony in her arms on the floor of the gallery, he might be hardly seen from behind the balustrade at all. Andrew Gurr solves the problem by arguing that a number of plays prove that ‘there must in fact have been . . . a raised platform, or even a curtained booth set up on stage, of the kind used in the early years by the traveling players as their tiring house’. This could have been used as ‘a “monument” big enough to hold Antony’s body and several women on top, but low enough for the women to lift the body up onto it’ (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 149). Others have argued that the wounded Antony could have been brought on stage in a chair, which was then attached to a pulley and winched to the Gallery by Cleopatra and her attendants. Whatever the solution, Cleopatra’s speech above indicates the effort needed to haul Antony in this scene.

Though the platform stage of both the indoor and the outdoor playhouses offered nothing in the way of extravagant or naturalistic scenic effects, visual spectacle was to be had by way of costumes. Costumes for the leads were often costly, sometimes handed down from the aristocratic patrons of the companies. Evidence from the only surviving artistic representation of a play of the time – Henry Peacham’s drawing of a scene from Titus Andronicus – shows the smaller roles wearing contemporary dress, whilst the leading actors wear approximations of classical dress, including a short toga and a laurel wreath for Titus. Roman costume might, then, have been provided for the triumvirate and their close associates in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s call for Charmian to ‘cut [her] lace’ at I.iii.71 suggests a Jacobean bodice for Cleopatra, though there might have been something more Eastern to enhance it, particularly when she calls for her robes in Act V.

With regard to music, Antony and Cleopatra is a noisy play, with trumpet flourishes to accompany many of the formal entries in the play, and drums and trumpets to open battle scenes. Until the turn of the sixteenth century, it is likely that this music would have come from the tiring house behind the frons, rather than from a specially designated music room above the Globe stage. Gurr suggests that this would have changed around 1607–9, near the time when Antony and Cleopatra was written, and the King’s Men acquired their permanent indoor home, the Blackfriars. At around this time, playwrights producing plays for the outdoor playhouses started dividing their plays into Acts, suggesting more complex inter-Act music played on string and woodwind instruments, like that to be heard at the indoor playhouses. This music would have been better heard from one of the Lords’ Rooms taken over for the purpose. The First Folio (F1) stage direction makes clear that the ‘hautboys’, or oboes, which create the mysterious atmosphere of Act IV, scene iii, are played beneath the stage. This may well have been more resonant and effective at the indoor playhouse.

The Blackfriars

James Burbage bought and converted rooms in the old Blackfriars’ monastery in 1596 for the Chamberlain’s Men, but local residents stopped him from using it for such a purpose by petition to the Privy Council, on the grounds that a theatre in their area would be a noisy and immoral nuisance. After his death in 1597, Burbage’s sons leased the Blackfriars playhouse to a children’s company, the Children of the Chapel, and Keith Sturgess notes that this new occupancy was clearly not considered such a threat to local law and order (Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre, p. 2). In 1603, patronage of Shakespeare’s company was taken over by James I, and they became the King’s Men; there was no repeat banning order when the manager of the Children of the Chapel leased the Blackfriars back to the adult players in 1608. After two years in which a plague epidemic made performances unlikely, the King’s Men had a permanent indoor home, and would spend the winter playing the Blackfriars and the summer at the Globe, until the closing of the theatres in 1643.

The playing space at the Blackfriars probably shared some features of the outdoor playhouse. The very fact that the King’s Men evidently had little trouble performing the same repertory in each space would suggest similarities. Like the Globe, the Blackfriars was likely to have had galleries of seats, a central tiring-house opening with an exit either side, a playing space on an upper level above the opening, and a platform stage, albeit a platform walled in by private boxes rather than thrusting out into a yard. Physically as well as socially, however, playgoing there must have been quite a different experience from that offered by the Globe.

Though Emrys Jones was convinced that Shakespeare might well have at least had the Blackfriars in mind when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra (Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 1971, pp. 23–9), one of the most substantial works on the Jacobean indoor playhouse, Keith Sturgess’s Jacobean Private Theatre does not mention it at all. Sturgess’s account of the Blackfriars emphasises the intimacy of the space. The Blackfriars stage was about half the size of the Globe’s and it held an audience of around one-third the size, some of whom would have paid to enter through the tiring house and sit on the stage itself, cramping the playing space still further. Having imagined Antony and Cleopatra on a large stage, open to the air, it is perhaps difficult to envisage armies marching across a platform half the size, cramped still further by gallants sitting on stools, and watched by an entirely seated audience (the indoor playhouse pits were full of seated playgoers, not standing groundlings).

Sturgess has noted that in plays likely to have been performed primarily or exclusively at indoor playhouses, scenes with large numbers of supernumeraries tend to be structured and ritualistic – dances or masks that involve a careful, controlled use of limited stage space. Martin White’s experiments in a reconstruction of a Jacobean indoor playhouse at the University of Bristol give the impression of an almost voyeuristic relationship between performer and audience, as the latter watch the intimate grotesqueries of mannerist tragicomedies by candlelight. It would be wrong to discount the idea of a performance of Antony and Cleopatra there because of its armies and worldwide settings, or the central characters’ consciousness of themselves as epic figures. Modern studio productions have, after all, successfully conveyed the play’s sense of the fate of the world depending on the fluctuations of a middle-aged love affair, and the candlelit intimacy of the Blackfriars could have produced an almost transgressive sense of being let into the private worlds of mythic figures. It is also worth noting that there are no on-stage battle scenes in Antony and Cleopatra. Action by both sea and land takes place off stage, and if a storm at sea for The Tempest can be produced by ‘squibs from the upper level of the Blackfriars façade’, ‘drums in the tiring house’ and a ‘sea machine (small pebbles revolved in a drum)’ (Sturgess, p. 81), there is no reason why a sea-fight soundscape cannot be created there too, though all these effects would have had to be created more quietly indoors than at the Globe.

More interesting when considering the play’s possible tone and meaning is the combination of the intimacy of the indoor playhouse and the intellectual expectations of its audience. It would be anachronistic to argue that the smaller space produced a ‘naturalistic’ acting style. With audience members seated in boxes close to the stage and on the stage itself, I would argue that the notion of an actor’s circle of attention limited to the world of the fiction is a counter-intuitive one. However, the limited stage space and less challenging acoustic of the indoor playhouse meant that there, actors must have stood at a distance from one another more like that in real social life than when creating imposing stage pictures to fill the Globe; broad, demonstrative gestures would have been both unnecessary and inconvenient.

What is the effect, then, of the expansive language of Antony and Cleopatra, the tendency of the central figures to self-dramatisation and the emphasis of their glorious position on the world st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Text and Early Performances
• 2 Commentary
• 3 The Play’s Sources and Cultural Context
• 4 Key Productions and Performances
• 5 The Play on Screen
• 6 Critical Assessments
• Further Reading
• Index