“As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—”: on Antony and Cleopatra

1/ Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All (an insight book about all the plays), I realised how much I loved Antony and Cleopatra. It’s such a vast play, full of lyricism and eroticism and exuberance. 

When I first read the play in 2021, I was baffled. Antony and Cleopatra is so unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies: it doesn’t have the angst, the terror, the heartrending quality of King Lear or Othello; the deaths of the protagonists don’t even feel tragic. Even A. C. Bradley found it an unsatisfying play, despite his love for the inexhaustible Cleopatra. But Antony and Cleopatra is a different kind of play: a play in which Shakespeare explores the stuff of myths and legends and transforms two flawed and in many ways ordinary people into quasi-mythological beings in the last two Acts; a play in which he seems reconciled with humanity, and finds the sublime in two deeply flawed human beings. Despite their irresponsibility and selfishness, despite their defeat in battle, one sides with them—with their love and passion and generosity and vitality—rather than the cold and orderly world of Caesar. And when they die, we don’t feel the pain, the sense of loss as from the death of Cordelia or Desdemona, because of their nobility in death, because they have defeated Caesar and will be reunited, because the world doesn’t feel enough for them.   

“CLEOPATRA […] Husband, I come!

Now to that name my courage prove my title.

I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life...” 

(Act 5 scene 2) 

In death, Cleopatra mythologises herself and Antony. 

It is a wondrous play. I don’t know how Shakespeare does it, the same way I don’t know how he creates that sense of wonder in the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale. 

2/ I have now read 5 essays in Shakespeare After All: on Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra. It is a brilliant book: Marjorie Garber analyses all the plays, with lots of quotes; I like that sometimes she also mentions performances, and the reception of the plays or characters over time.  

For anyone who wants a book of literary criticism about all of Shakespeare’s plays, I would recommend Shakespeare After All and Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (instead of a certain grandiloquent critic I’m not gonna name).  

G. Wilson Knight also has a few excellent essays about Antony and Cleopatra in The Imperial Theme. 

3/ I have never seen any production of Antony and Cleopatra. Who can play Cleopatra? Who can make me think “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety”? Who can make me think “The vilest things/ Become themselves in her”? But I have listened to Frances Barber on audio, and she is Cleopatra. She can be fierce, she can sound cruel, she can sound petty, she can be a drama queen, but there’s an allure about Frances Barber’s performance that one thinks, no wonder Antony says “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch/ Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space/ Kingdoms are clay.” 

4/ I wonder what it says about me that my top 5 Shakespeare plays are Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and Antony and Cleopatra. Nothing controversial, I reckon—all were written after 1600—all are Shakespeare at his peak. 

No comedies though; the Shakespeare comedy I love best is Twelfth Night, which is melancholic; unless you follow the categories in the First Folio and count The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure as comedies.