I’ the East My Pleasure Lies

Abstract

Antony and Cleopatra has a poetic splendour, a grandeur of historical and geographical perspective, and a magnificence in its conception of characters which give it a place apart in the Shakespearean canon. Yet it has been faulted by some of the most influential critics as lacking in dramatic qualities.1 H. A. Mason, for instance, has pointed to the serious and constant discrepancy between what we are told about the two principal characters and what we are shown. In the speeches of Enobarbus, and indeed frequently in their own spoken estimation of themselves and each other, Antony and Cleopatra assume superhuman properties of charm and nobility, whereas in the behaviour that we see they are entirely, and often ignobly human. ‘More is said of and by the two chief characters than is ever performed by them,’ Mason declares. ‘I cannot believe,’ he says, ‘that Shakespeare tried very hard to make us feel, feel intimately, what he so often talks about ... When I call this play a failure, I do not mean that Shakespeare tried for tragedy and failed: it seems to me he just did not try.’2 Mason is not absolutely fair to Shakespeare. There is an attempt towards the end of the play to demonstrate both the magnanimity and the courage of Antony in action, the former by his generosity to the renegade Enobarbus, the latter by his desperate and successful last battle against Caesar by land. And naturally we do not, as we read or watch the play, make a rigid distinction between report and presented behaviour. Much of the telling will colour our impression of the doing.3 But in the main Mason’s judgement is hard to controvert, and since he has undertaken a detailed underpinning of his argument there is no need for me to elaborate on this general unconformity. I will only add that the gap between telling and doing has been seen by at least one critic as deliberate, ‘an ironic deflation of assumed grandeur’,4 this being a view which I do not share.KeywordsGeographical PerspectiveMomentous DecisionWide ArchTrue NobilityRigid DistinctionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.