Shakespeare, Steevens, and the Fleeting Moon: Glossing and Reading in Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

The final speech ofAntony and Cleopatra, in which Octavian Caesar notes the “pity” and “glory” (5.2.360) of the titular characters’ “story” (l. 359), is an acknowledgment of the play’s literary bent, its interest in the matter and means of narrative.1 That interest is not the full extent of the play’s literary self-consciousness: it is concerned throughout with reading, particularly if the term is defined to include not only the literal reception or recitation of texts but also the interpretation of personalities, events, and the arc of history.2 Reading’s importance and figurative potential are established early in the first act through the Soothsayer’s introduction to his craft: “In nature’s infinite book of secrecy / A little I can read” (1.2.10–11). Of course, what the Soothsayer is reading in nature’s book—the remaining lives of the play’s central characters—is also the plot of the play. There is thus an inevitable parallel between the Soothsayer’s reading of auguries and two other kinds of reading: Shakespeare’s, necessarily on display in a play about well-documented historical figures, and that of his audience. The latter occurs in many forms: literal reading is never entirely absent even in the theater (the promptbook is always there), playgoers may have read about the characters or the play itself previously, and the play acknowledges, particularly through the panoply of commentary on the meaning of Antony’s life and character, that the audience will be interpreting what they are seeing. In a printed edition of the play, particularly one with a scholarly function, all of these elements of reading, past and future, come together.