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Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Phyllis Rackin
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Abstract

The sexual ambiguity of Shakespeare's boy Cleopatra embodies the clash between two poetic theories the theory that poetry imitates Nature and is therefore subject to rules of decorum and verisimilitude and the theory that poetry creates a new, “golden” world to which the truth-criteria for extrapoetic experience do not apply. Both theories were prevalent in Shakespeare's time, as we see in Sidney's Apology for Poetry; and both persist today, as we see in modern controversies about the play. Shakespeare's dramatic strategy in Antony and Cleopatra involves the interplay between these two notions of poetry and poetic truth: the first is associated with the Roman viewpoint and the kinds of dramatic evidence that support it, the second with the Egyptian viewpoint and the kinds of poetic and dramatic evidence that support it. Only by studying the play with both theories in mind can we approach its structural and thematic center and see that its problematic features Cleopatra's enigmatic character and motivation. Antony's ambiguous stature as a tragic hero, and the eccentric structure are – like the boy Cleopatra, necessary components of its dramatic strategy, functional embodiments of its themes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , March 1972 , pp. 201 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 Antony and Cleopatra, v.ii.215–20. All textual references are to the Arden Ed., ed. M. R. Ridley (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1954).

2 Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), p. 121 ; and Robert Speaight, Nature in Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), p. 123.

3 Sr. Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time (New York: Harcourt, 1947), p. 299.

4 “Timber: or Discoveries,” in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, viii (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 620.

5 Anthony Caputi, “Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra: Tragedy without Terror,” SQ, 16 (1965), 188. See also Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 79 ff.

6 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1904), i, 199. For a more extreme statement, see George Whetstone's “Dedication to Promos and Cassandra,” Smith, I, 58–60.

7 “The Roman Plays,” in Shakespeare: The Writer and His Work, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Longmans, 1964), p. 314.

8 From an interview entitled “Mr. Shaw on Heroes,” signed “A. D.,” Liverpool Post, 19 Oct. 1927. quoted by Gordon W. Couchman in “Antony and Cleopatra and the Subjective Convention,” PMLA, 76 (1961). 421.

9 The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random, 1937), i, 860.

10 “Better than Shakespear'.'” Preface to Three Plays for Puritans, in Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable. 1934), p. 716; also quoted by Coucliman. p. 420.

11 Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1946), i, 440.

12 The critics illustrate the ambivalence. Virgil K. Whit-aker argues in The Mirror up to Nature: The Technique of Shakespeare's Tragedies (San Marino. Calif: Huntington Library, 1965), p. 295, that since Cleopatra “has been established as a consummate and habitual actress from the first scene,” the audience remains skeptical “of her heroics” at the end. Like Shaw, Whitaker combines a distaste for Cleopatra with a dislike for the play as a whole. In direct contrast, Robert Ornstein argues in “The Ethic of the Imagination: Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies. No. 8 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 44–45, that “the artist in Cleopatra . . . stirs Shakespeare's deepest imaginative sympathies and . . . receives the immeasurable bounty of his artistic love.”

13 See. e.g., Granville-Barker, i, 435–40 and Guy Boas, “The Influence of the Boy-Actor on Shakespeare's Plays,” Contemporary Review, 152 (1937), 74–77.

14 Apologie, pp. 155–56.

15 Apologie, pp. 184–85.

16 Apologie, p. 197.

17 Apologie, pp. 160, 161, 157.

18 Cf. the similar relationship in MV between Portia's Venetian “disguise” as a boy and her Belmont “reality” as a girl. Here, too, the rationalistic brazen world within the play demands a disguise which conforms to the reality of Shakespeare's London, while the imaginative golden world in the play presents an actuality which is identical with the illusion presented on Shakespeare's stage.

19 Arden Ed., p. 281.

20 Charney, p. 135.

21 Charney, p. 135.

22 If we follow Schmidt in preferring the Folio punctuation of the first line (“yet, the”), the message is positively obsequious.

23 See Arden Ed., pp. xlv-xlvii; Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 143; and Brents Stirling, “Cleopatra's Scene with Seleucus: Plutarch, Daniel, and Shakespeare,” SQ, 15 (1964), 299–311.

24 See Arden Ed., pp. 283–84: “There was a young gentleman Cornelius Dolabella, that was one of Caesars very great familiars, and besides did beare no evil will unto Cleopatra. He sent her word secretly as she had requested him. that Caesar determined to take his jorney through Suria, and that within three dayes he would sende her away before with her children.”

25 Matthew N. Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 181–82, argues that Cleopatra's language here “dislodges Antony from the world of mundane forms and raises him to ‘Platonic’ proportions: ‘Platonic’ in the sense of the Symposium, where art brings to birth new forms which mirror and immortalize the artist-lover and the beloved.” J. A. Bryant, Jr., Hippolyta's View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare's Plays (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1961), p. 183, sees the process as a miraculous redemption “such as only a Christian poet can understand.” Other critics, like John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 352, 361, emphasize the imaginative and dreamlike qualities of the speech.

26 “The Purging of Cleopatra,” ShN, 9–10 (Dec. 1959-Feb. 1960), 9.

27 On the significance of the basket, cf. Charney, pp. 99–100.

28 Cf. Caesar's description of a noble Roman diet (i.iv.55–71).

29 Noted by R. H. Case, Arden Ed., p. 230, n.