Menas and the Editors: A Folio Script Unscripted

Abstract

I N THE FOLIO SCRIPT OF ANTHONIE, AND CLEOPATRA, the brief sixth scene (designated Act II, scene i by later editors) begins with this direction: Enter Pompey, Menecrates, and Menas, in warlike manner. Pompey and Menecrates carry on a conversation while Menas remains silent-obstinately and mysteriously silent, for Pompey in three of his seven speeches speaks directly to him by name while never naming Menecrates at all. This is not, however, the script of the play as most of us know it. In the six modern texts most commonly used by students, teachers, scholars, theatre companies, and the general reader a new character appears: he is still called Menas but is now cooperatively sociable, having appropriated most of the speeches that the Folio assigns to Menecrates. Meanwhile, the mysteriously, obstinately, fascinatingly silent man of the Folio has disappeared. So, of course, has the very talkative Menecrates, and the Pompey who in the Folio is caught between them.1 There is no legitimate authority of any kind to support this alteration of the only authoritative script of the play that we possess. That the treatment of the scene in modern editions represents adherence to an editorial tradition going back to the eighteenth century is true, that it is a triumph of common sense is clear (for Menas, more important than Menecrates, who never appears again,