Reading Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra

Continuing in my “Reading Shakespeare” series, where I endeavor to read through any Shakespeare work I’m not familiar with, I spent the last few days digesting “Antony and Cleopatra.” Let’s do it to it.

Antony and Cleopatra

Summary: A sequel of sorts to “Julius Caesar”—except not really—”Antony and Cleopatra” is the tragic tale of the power struggles that led to the historic Battle of Actium, where Octavian, later known as Augustus, famously squared off against our titular protagonists.

-Another winner for Shakespeare. “Antony and Cleopatra” is a page-turner full of intrigue, heartbreak, comedy, and rich characters. This is a massive, sprawling epic that captures the same sense of intrigue that “Caesar” pulled off, and then adds a malevolent, soap opera grandiosity.

It’s the best kind of tragedy: a gigantic one. Nothing is held back, the Bard swings for the fences here. “Julius Caesar” had a murder here and there, a couple land battles, and a couple of suicides at the end. AC (my shorthand for the play) almost doubles the number of murders and suicides, and ups the ante to sea battles instead of land. I don’t know if it’s “better” than “Caesar,” but it is more fun.

-My favorite scene transpires in Act II, Scene IV. An unfortunate messenger is tasked with telling Cleopatra that Antony has married Octavian’s sister while away in Rome, and so begins one of the purported origins of the expression “don’t kill/shoot the messenger.”

Now yes, I am updating this dialog. But the crazy thing is, not that much. The rhythm of the scene is incredibly modern, and while I’m going to change around the words, I’m not even touching the basic intent of each line. Get ready for this: (M is the Messenger, C is…well come on, you can figure it out)

So in walks the Messenger, and he knows he’s got to tell Cleo what happened, but he isn’t sure how. Cleo, meanwhile, has no idea this is coming, and is worried primarily about how things went in the negotiations between Octavian and her man:

M: Uh…hey.

C: Hey! You! What’s the word about Mark Antony? You look like a nice dude. Tell me everything is okay. I’ll seriously give you ten dollars if you say Antony’s okay.

M: Uh, he’s fine.

C: Yes! Yes! He’s fine! You are the MAN! I love you! You better not be lying, though. You better not be jerking me around. Are you jerking me around? Cause I’ll pour boiling metal down your throat in, like, two seconds if I find out you’re full of crap. We have a guy for that. That’s all he does.

M: Just hang on, I need to say something here.

C: I’m gonna murder you. I’m gonna seriously have you executed if you don’t shut up. You look like a mean person. You look like a person who says mean things.

M: Can I just say something here?

C: “Can I just say something here?” That’s what you sound like. Fine, whatever, say something. I hate you. I wish your mother was dead. Is Antony okay, though? Are things cool with Caesar? Look, I’m sorry about that thing about your mother, she sounds like a lovely person. Just say things are cool with Caesar…Say it! I’m gonna eat your soul for breakfast, I swear to the gods.

M: He’s totally fine, and things are cool with Caesar.

C: You and I are best friends. Let’s hang out later. You’re awesome. So everything went okay?

M: Well yeah, but…

C: “But?” Yeah I don’t like that even a little bit. Maybe you should just quit while you’re ahead. Can someone get the boiling metal guy on standby?

M: Look, he’s married, okay? He’s married to Octavia.

I imagine there’s a pause here.

C: (clears throat) Married, like, how?

M: Like…uh…they sleep in the same bed.

C: I don’t understand.

M: Um…they’ve had sex?

C: …I can’t breathe. I’m turning pale.

M: So anyway, yeah, Antony is married. I’ll just show myself out–

C: –I WANT YOU TO DIE!

Cleopatra then starts pistol-whipping this guy. I mean, she doesn’t have a gun obviously, but you know what I mean. She goes nuts on him.

C: TAKE IT BACK!

M: Ow! Ow!

C: TAKE IT BACK!

M: I can’t take it back, it happened!

C: Okay I’m not going to hit you again. But seriously, you should stop lying right now.

M: I’m not lyi–

She hits him.

M: Ow!

C: –Say that isn’t true and I’ll give you a really big house with a ton of slaves and I’m not kidding. Here’s the deed, I’m ready to sign it. Just tell me you were joshing me. Pullin’ one over on ol’ Queen of the Nile. Ha ha, very funny. Ya got me! Whew! Good one.

M: Uh…Antony is married to Octavia.

C: No he isn’t.

M: Yes he is.

C: Nope.

M: Uh…yes?

C: I was kidding before. I really am going to kill you now.

At this point, she pulls out a knife, and makes with the stabbing. The messenger survives by blind luck and runs for his freaking life. Cleopatra then claims she is all chilled out (“I’m cool, I’m cool!”), and invites him back. He returns, only to irk her ire again, so he runs away again. When he is finally brought back for a third time, it’s a later scene in Act III:

M: …Hello.

C: Yeah hi, listen, about last time…I mean, what can I say? I was out of line.

M:…It’s cool…

C: Anyway. I’m glad we’re past that. Now about this Octavia slut.

M: …Yes…?

And then, I kid you not, this is how great Shakespeare is, Cleopatra asks the following question (in slightly different words…but not as different as you’d think):

C: Is she hotter than me?

M: No.

C: Really?

M: Really. You’re way hotter.

C: Is she tall?

M: She’s totally short.

C: Yes! Yes! I knew it. What color hair does she have?

M: It’s like, brown.

C: Is it a pretty brown?

M: What? Noooo, of course not. It’s all…stringy.

C: He hates brunettes. He told me once. He’ll get sick of her, I know he will. Thin face or round?

M: Oh, round. Round as hell. She’s a fatty.

C: Ha! I’ll bet she is. She sounds fat. Octavia. What is she, an octagon? Hahahahaha!

Picture, like, the craziest laugh you can imagine right there.

M: …Ha…Ha Ha…Well, it’s  late…

C: Yeah sure, get out of here.

The messenger leaves, and permanently deletes “Egypt” from his GPS.

C: (to her handmaidens) Nice guy, I like that guy.

Like I said: I altered that, but not as much as you might assume. The basic rhythm and tone of the scene is completely intact. I think it’s one of the best, funniest, and most vibrant pieces of tragicomedy I’ve ever read.

-Our good friend Antony is back, and ever remains the perennial douche bag. Billy made a good point to me the other day: he’s not really a politician, he’s a rock star. His indulgent, neglectful, downward spiral behavior is not only compelling drama, it’s modern. By the play’s end, his behavior has gone from De Galle with a hangover to full-on Lindsay Lohan. He writes his own doom, and could have easily avoided it.

As the play opens, he is departing for Rome to deal with Sextus Pompey, a dangerous pirate whose attacks on the empire require the attention of all three members of the Triumvirate. Playing into the classic form of “hos in different area codes,” Antony tells Cleo to chill, girl, you know you is the only woman for me, then promptly marries Octavian’s sister.

I mean in fairness to him, wedding Octavia is the smartest thing he does in this play, and it’s all downhill from there. His mistake is going back to Egypt at all, and leaving a scheming, manipulative mini-Caesar was a massive inferiority complex tottering around the capital city by himself. He’s like, “Wow, my political rival is seriously cunning, I’d better keep an eye on him. On the other hand, these far-East desert hussies aren’t gonna bang themselves, so I’m out of here.”

From there, the mistakes roll in with the tide: everyone tells him to fight Octavian on land, but Antony refuses and makes it a sea battle, because—and I’m not kidding here—Octavian triple-dog-dared him. After their inevitable double-whammy defeat, which every human being within a hundred miles told him would happen, Antony gets word that Cleopatra has killed herself. Now rather than go see with his own eyes like a person with a brain, Antony decides to kill himself as well. And why? Because he can’t go on without her? No. Out of sheer competitiveness. She killed herself, and now he looks like a punk, so he’s got to kill himself.

So, he hands his sword to his buddy Eros and says, “Make it happen!” And then Shakespeare performs one of the most delicious turns of events I’ve yet encountered. Eros winds up for the kill, but can’t bring himself to do it, so he kills himself instead. And now, in another genius burst of tragicomedy, Antony turns around, sees Eros lying dead, and says, “Damn it! Now they’ve both outdone me!” So he jumps on his own sword, but by now we’ve established that Antony fails at everything, and his wound leaves him alive and miserable.

But it just keeps getting better. Cleopatra sends word that she isn’t dead, but had sent word that she was to make Antony stop blaming her for their losses. Now that’s a psychotic thing to do by any measure, and by doing it Cleo single-handedly enters the pantheon of all-time nutcase girlfriends, but that’s not the point. The point is, now we discover the reason that most people verify things with their eyes before making life-or-death decisions based on second-hand information. Antony, on the verge of death, is brought to see Cleopatra, who somehow resists punching him in his stupid moron face. He dies, and ends a long stream of cowardice and idiocy that it took Shakespeare two whole plays to fully describe. Goodnight, sweet prince. Sniffle. He’s up there blaming angels for his incompetence now.

-Cleopatra, despite my evisceration of her sanity in the dialog above, is the most interesting character here. Critics have long debated, for lack of a better way to put it, “her angle” in all of this. Does she really love Antony as madly as she claims? There are several instances in the play where Antony’s moronic escapades drive her to feel out other political options; she’s even receptive to Octavian after Antony’s death, until she gets wind that he plans to parade her around Rome as a trophy of war. And Shakespeare doesn’t let us forget that she pulled this same song and dance on Caesar, and a few characters ponder aloud how sincere she is. She reacts viciously against this, in much the same way Mark Wahlberg reacts when you call him “Marky Mark.”

Others could argue that her undying, unyielding love is totally genuine, and certainly there are ample tirades and lovesick monologues to back that assertion. She’s insane with jealousy all the time, takes his reproaches way too personally, and seems helpless to contain his bull-headed will. The question, therefore, is “Which is it?” Is she a lovesick queen who seals her doom with her heart, or a savvy political manipulator who loses a hard-fought game of diplomatic chess?

Both, I think.

I don’t think it’s possible to deny she is enchanted by Antony: he’s a handsome soldier with brutish strength, and a hot-headed jerk who needs “fixing.” He plays to her maternal instincts and her basic lust. So yeah, she loved the guy, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t also working him over. Her temper tantrums, of which there are many, were all calculated to achieve control of his behavior, a fact she freely admits in the beginning of the play. And she’s constantly on him to play smarter against Octavian, keep up better appearances with the men, etc. She’s trying to make this guy a winner by any and all means necessary, because he is her only meal ticket into Rome.

Although Cleo is soundly beaten, I’m not sure how much I can fairly chastise her. She lost, no doubt, but she played the game about as well as her situation would allow. It’s just bad luck that her only in-road to the Empire was a drunken idiot. Of course, the prudent thing to do would have been to desert Antony, but A) I can understand why she’d never do that, and B) there’s no way she could have truly known it was a good idea.

-So anyway, there’s lots of great stuff here. My criticisms of Antony’s behavior should not come off as marks against Shakespeare: I love how boneheaded the character is, it makes for awesome, page-turning tragicomedy. And Cleopatra is a fascinating black box of a character. She’s an intelligent woman who is stupidly in love, and the reader must puzzle out where one ends and the other begins. Which of her actions were for desire, and which were political? You can never know for certain. Such complexity and depth is what makes Shakespeare last as long as he has.

-Quick side note: Sextus Pompey, the dread pirate out to get Rome for killing his father, is an awesome character. Although only a minor role, he has a shining dramatic moment during a scene where he invites Antony, Lepidus (the other member of the Triumvirate) and Octavian onto his barge for peace talks. While at sea, one of Pompey’s men pulls him aside and says, “Dude, we’ve got them. All three rulers of the known world. Let’s kill them!”

Pompey’s response is amazing: he seems to smile sadly, and with a sigh tells his comrade, “Why the hell didn’t you just do it without my permission? Now I have to forbid you, for the sake of my honor. Damn it, dude.” The portrait of a man cunning enough to wish for an unscrupulous rise to power, but too decent to actually enact it, is brilliant. That right there is why Shakespeare lives forever.

RATING: 10 out of 10