4 - To earn a place in the story: resisting the Aeneid in Antony and Cleopatra

Summary

Eros! – I come, my queen: – Eros! – Stay for me,

Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:

Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops,

And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros!

(4.14.50–4)

Although Antony and Cleopatra manifestly concerns empire, it is not at once clear that this play “translates” empire with either the textual specificity or the eccentricity of Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida. To be distinguished from other Roman plays as a translation of empire, Antony and Cleopatra would have to assume roughly combative relations with its sources, exploiting differences among textual authorities in order to take issue with their formal and evaluative choices. Source studies of the play, however, demonstrate that a far from disputatious Shakespeare plunders Plutarch's history with abandon, scarcely altering such passages as the description of Cleopatra on the barge. Unlike Titus Andronicus or Troilus and Cressida, moreover, the play employs multiple and contrasting images of Antony, Cleopatra, and even Octavius to enrich rather than undermine the characters and the values they espouse. This view seems generally right, and so it comes as a surprise that Antony defends his value of erotic love and protects his heroic exemplarity by directly resisting the Aeneid. Traditional source criticism is at a loss to explain the political dimensions of Antony and Cleopatra's relations to textual authority. As Antony's revision of the Aeneid indicates, the play's principal characters are intensely aware of their duties to promote or disrupt the stories in which their meanings will be recorded.