The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra – from the first folio edition, 1623
This Roman play of Shakespeare has many similarities with Romeo and Juliet, which was also a tragedy about Italian lovers who end up committing suicide. But this play in contrast is about mature love among adults who have already been ‘ploughed’ and ‘cropped,’ had wives and lovers, and seen action at the head of their empires. The military history of the times is combined with the mutual attraction between Antony and Cleopatra which pervades the play.
Cleopatra Sculpture by William Wetmore Story, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
As usual Shakespeare borrows the story from a source, in this case, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch was a Greek biographer and historian who lived from AD 40 to about AD 120. Shakespeare mined the book (in a 1579 English translation by Thomas North) for his Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. How reliable Plutarch was as a historian is a matter of doubt; he was like today’s celebrity journalists, eager to pick up juicy morsels about the great figures of the past who were destined to govern the history of their times.
Nick Walton of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explains in a 12-min video how Shakespeare made Cleopatra the central character in his play. He says that “Shakespeare added significantly to the mythology around Egypt's last queen. He developed his historical sources to create a woman who is at once powerful, jealous, humorous, stern, intelligent, vain, courageous, vulnerable, stubborn, fickle, loyal, down-to-earth, and otherworldly.”
What an unusual collaboration over 1,600 years between Plutarch and Shakespeare! The former merely mentions that Cleopatra came sailing “her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.”
WS turns that account into pure poetry:
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
The word barge is in Plutarch, but see how Shakespeare has added the alliteration of burnish’d, burned, and beaten.
The barge she sat in ... was of beaten gold
No less than other plays A&C is full of phrases you will remember once you read it,
– A lass unparalleled
– A morsel for a monarch
– I have / Imortal longings in me
– Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale /Her infinite variety.
– The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch /Which hurts and is desired.
– My salad days, /When I was green in judgment
– There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
As in all the works of Shakespeare puns abound, some bawdy – meant to entertain the playgoers – some adding depth and a layer of added meaning to the play.
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony
"Horse" refers to Antony’s warhorse (military might) and sexual prowess (horsemanship = riding a lover). The line drips with innuendo—Cleopatra envies the beast that carries him.
‘Die’ was Elizabethan slang for orgasm – Antony’s death throes mirror an erotic climax.
The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.
‘band’ can mean both a unifying bond and a constricting noose.
‘rose’ symbolises both beauty and the fleeting nature of youth (like a flower that withers).
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