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Antony and Cleopatra and the Subjective Convention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
A major sortie in what Maxwell Anderson has called Bernard Shaw's “furious critical assault on the romantic theatre” is the section entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. Well-known today, this discussion offers proof of Eric Bentley's assertion that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism should be judged as polemic rather than criticism of a more objective sort. Shaw's attack in that Preface on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has naturally been a principal object of critical attention ever since it was penned, but this fact should not blind us to another, that Shaw was at least as much concerned with Antony and Cleopatra, and that in fact his own comedy, as one scholar pointed out more than a generation ago, was more of a counterblast to Antony than to Caesar. It is easy to forget that Shaw followed the lead of certain of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries in re-introducing Cleopatra into a play about Caesar (whom he called “this greatest of all protagonists”) whereas Shakespeare keeps the two rigorously separate. Shaw's purpose in doing what he did was clear, and this purpose is explicated in detail in his comments on Shakespeare's Antony.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961
References
Note 1 in page 420 Maxwell Anderson, Off Broadway (New York, 1947), p. 49.
Note 2 in page 420 Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York, 1946), pp. 142, 146.
Note 3 in page 420 See Wilhelm Rehbach, “Shaw's ‘Besser als Shakespeare’,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, LII (1916), 117: “Shaw's ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ ist mehr im Gegensatz zu Shakespeares ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ als zu ‘Julius Caesar’ geschrieben.”
Note 4 in page 420 “Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor,” Play Pictorial, x (Oct. 1907), 111; reprinted in Mander and Mitchenson, eds., Theatrical Companion to Shaw (New York, 1955), pp. 63–64.
Note 5 in page 420 Since Shaw cites Plutarch as one of his sources for Caesar and Cleopatra, it is reasonable to assume that he found whatever justification he needed for his portrayal of Cleopatra in Plutarch's Antony: “For Caesar and Pompey knew her when she was but a young thing, and knew not then what the worlde ment : but nowe she went to Antonius at the age when a womans beawtie is at the prime, and she also of best judgement.” “Antonius,” Lives, North transi. (Boston: Shakespeare Head Press, 1928), vi, 326. A richly illuminating study of Antony's relations with Cleopatra is W. W. Tarn's account in the Cambridge Ancient History, x (New York, 1934), 3S-42, 66–83, 90–111. An equally interesting examination of Caesar's affair is Jérôme Carcopino's “César et Cléopâtre,” Annales de l'école des hautes études de Cand, I (Ghent, 1937), 35–77. Ronald Syme's full-dimensional portrait of the historical Octavius in The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939) deserves mention here also.
Note 6 in page 420 “Better than Shakespear?” Preface, Three Plays for Puritans, Standard ed., pp. xxvii-xxviii. References to Shaw's works will hereafter be to this edition.
Note 7 in page 420 London Star, Tuesday, 15 April 1913. Used by permission of the publisher. Photostatic copy, not paged. Mac-Callum, in Shakespeare's Creek and Roman Plays, asserts that “Shakespeare could never have taken Dryden's title for his play” (London, 1910, p. 341).
Note 8 in page 420 The Living Shakespeare, ed. Oscar James Campbell (New York, 1949), Intro, to Antony and Cleopatra, p. 980.
Note 9 in page 420 P. xxix. To John Mason Brown, reviewing the Cornell-Tearle production of Antony, the latter assertion is merely perverse. See “O Eastern Star,” SRL, xxx (20 Dec. 1947), 22. In his own defense Shaw might have cited (at a later date) Bonamy Dobrée, who in his Restoration Tragedy boldly asserts that “it would not be at all incongruous” i, 361. In our own time John Mason Brown appears to be one of the few to have echoed Archer in maintaining that Shaw should have attacked Dryden rather than Shakespeare. (Loc. cit.)
Note 11 in page 421 See the review, dated 2 Jan. 1897, of a dramatization of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Our Theatres in the Nineties, in, 2). The title of this review, which is simply “Better than Shakespear,” lends considerable force to the punctuation of the same title with a question mark in the Preface to Three Plays. Surely much of the ink spilt over this title could have been saved had it been observed that Shaw used the question mark when referring to his own work, but had no hesitation in writing the title affirmatively when discussing Bunyan's.
Note 12 in page 421 See “Shakespear in Manchester,” Our Theatres (20 March 1897), nr, 76–83; also “Mainly about Shakespear,” Our Theatres (29 May 1897), in, 147. In Act I of Heartbreak House and the last part of Back to Methuselah, respectively, Shaw again glances at the problem posed by the “vampire women” or “Semiramis-Cleopatras” of the world.
Note 13 in page 421 “ ‘Caesar and Cleopatra,‘ by the author of the Play.” Signed G.B.S. New Statesman, I (3 May 1913), 112–113. Mommsen and Froude undoubtedly are in the background of Shaw's account, which is not borne out by histories such as CAH. Carcopino in particular seems to suggest that Cleopatra's presence in Rome was a part of Caesar's plans for assuring Roman hegemony in Egypt (Annales, pp. 5153).
Note 14 in page 421 “Mr. Shaw on Heroes,” signed “A.D.,” Liverpool Post, 19 Oct. 1927. I am indebted to the City Librarian of Liverpool for assisting in obtaining a photostatic copy of this interview. The copy is not paged. Although Shaw's practice of faking interviews is well-known, in the absence of evidence to the contrary I assume that this interview is genuine; however, the point is the same regardless.
Note 15 in page 422 Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1922), pp. 119 ff.
Note 16 in page 422 Prefaces to Shakespeare, I (Princeton, 1946), 441.
Note 17 in page 422 Intro., New Arden Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge, 1954), p. lii.
Note 18 in page 422 An Approach to Shakespeare (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), p. 260. Subsequent references will appear in the text.
Note 19 in page 422 Antony and Cleopatra, iii.x.22. Subsequent references to the play will be made in the text.
Note 20 in page 422 Loc. cit. Cf. J. Dover Wilson, Intro., New Cambridge Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge, 1954), p. xix: “In Antony and Cleopatra sensuality is not the main theme at all, but merely the medium through which Shakespeare conveys something different.” The “something different” is “vitality,” or “ ‘the nobleness of life’,” which is the play's “true theme” (p. xxxvi).
Note 21 in page 423 “Mainly about Shakespear,” Our Theatres, iii, 147. This comment on Octavius seems to have escaped general notice, but is quoted by Rehbach in the study cited above (n. 3), p. 120. An interesting discussion of Octavius as a Shavian hero appears on p. 130 of Rehbach's study.
Note 22 in page 423 Shakespeare, of course, though much the greatest, was far from being the only playwright to expose Antony to the reproaches of his fellow-characters. A particularly interesting parallel is to be found in the Tragedy of Caesar's Revenge (1606), in which Antony's Bonus Genius, once we have allowed for the infinite disparity in the verse, talks surprisingly like Shakespeare's Octavius: “Hast thou so soone forgot the discipline/And wilsome taskes thy youth was trayned to,/Thy soft downe Pillow, was a helme ot su.=.u./The could damp earth, a bed to ease thy toyle,/Afrigted slumbers wen. IA.v ffoiden sleepes :/Hunger and thirst thy sweetest delicates/Sterne tgastly woundes, pale greesly death :/Thy winde depressing picas, ures and delights,/And now so soone hath on enchanted face,/These manly labours luld in drowsy sleepe.” Malone Society reprints, ed. F. S. Boas & W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1911), 11. 1312–23. On this play as a Shakespearean source see Ernest Schanzer, “A Neglected Source of ‘Julius Caesar’,” N&Q, cxcix (May 1954), 196–197.
Note 23 in page 423 “A Queen's Story,” review of the production of Antony and Cleopatra with Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, SRL, xxxv (12 Jan. 1952), 25; reprinted in As They Appear (New York, 1952), 89–97.
Note 24 in page 423 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (New York, 1951), p. 1096, note to II. 195–200 of Act iii, Sc. xiii.
Note 25 in page 423 Prefaces to Shakespeare, i, 452. See also MacCallum's discussion of both Enobarbus and Scarus (pp. 349–360), and Dover Wilson's even broader view in Antony, Intro., New Cambridge ed., p. xxiii.
Note 26 in page 424 Margaret Webster, Shakespeare without Tears (New York, 1942), p. 261.
Note 27 in page 424 In A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948), p. 576, Tucker Brooke notes that The False One, by Fletcher and Massinger (1618–19), “handles much the same subject as Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra.” Sceva, Caesar's henchman in The False One, might double for Enobarbus or Shaw's own Rufio. In a scene which ought to have interested Shaw, Sceva exchanges witticisms with Antony and Dolabella about Caesar's infatuation with Cleopatra, much as if Sceva were Philo, and Caesar, Antony (iii. ii. 25–33, in Variorum ed. [London, 1912], Vol. iv). In “Six Cleopatras,” Atlantic Monthly, xcv (Feb. 1905), 252–263, William Everett calls Sceva the prototype of Dryden's Ventidius. For a recent comparative study of The False One, All for Love, and Caesar and Cleopatra, see Oliver Ellis, Cleopatra in the Tide of Time (1947).
Note 28 in page 424 See Dixon Scott's shrewd attempt to turn back on the playwright himself Shaw's attack on the so-called “romantic convention,” in “The Innocence of Bernard Shaw,” George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Survey, ed. Louis Kro-nenbergcr, p. 91, reprinted from Men of Letters (London, 191?), pp. 2S-29. A sensible evaluation of Shaw's Puritanism is Norbert F. O'Donnell's “Shaw, Bunyan, and Puritanism,” PMLA, LXXII (June 1957), 520–533.
Note 29 in page 424 In addition to the relevant portions of the dramatic criticism and the Prefaces, the note “How Frank Ought to Have Done It,” in Sixteen Self-Sketches (New York, 1949), pp. 200–201, provides a summary of Shaw's role in the crusade for Ibsen and the “New Drama.”
Note 30 in page 424 Johnson, Works (Troy, N.Y.: Literary Club ed., 1903), XI, 330–331. Quoted by Josef Caro, “Bernard Shaw und Shakespeare,” Die Neueren Sprachen, xxii (Dec. 1914), 522, n.4. See also F. S. Boas, Shakespere and His Predecessors (New York: Scribner's University Ser., n.d), p. 474: “Thus Shakespeare, even when making an elaborate study of amorous passion, does not isolate it from the wider, more material issues of surrounding civic or national life. He thus avoids the disastrous pitfall of treating love as the exclusive factor in existence… he never cheats himself or others into the belief that sexual relationship is the solitary, imperious concern of all mankind.” Quoted in New Variorum Antony and Cleopatra, ed. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1907), p. 487.
Note 31 in page 425 New York, 1923, pp. 205–206.
Note 33 in page 425 'Bernard Shaw (Norfolk, Conn., 1947), pp. 159–160. To Major Swindon's horrified inquiry upon learning of the miscarriage of plans in The Devil's Disciple (1896–97), Act iii, “What will History say?” Shaw's own General Bur-goyne retorts: “History, sir, will tell lies, as usual” (p. 67). In Geneva (1938) Shaw makes his Judge refer to the “falsehoods called history” (Act m, p. 81). Everybody's Political What's What? (1950) contains the assertion that In Good King Charles's Golden Days will teach the “dynamics of Charles's reign” better than a decade of grubbing in the British Museum could do (p. 181).
Note 33 in page 425 E. G. Sihler, Intro., Cicero of Arpinum, 2d ed. (New York, 1933), p. viii, note. In the Appendix to his Annals of Caesar (New York, 1911), pp. 309–314, Sihler discusses Mommsen's point of view at length, concluding with the sarcastic comment: “It is not wise, if one desires true vision, to approach a figure, no matter how great, on all fours” (p. 314). Sihler also discusses Mommsen briefly in the second part of his attack on Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of Rome, “Caesar, Cicero and Ferrero,” AJP, xxxvi (1915), 20–22. Hans Kohn's recent study, The Mind of Germany (New York, 1960) contains an evaluation of Mommsen that should interest students of Shaw (pp. 183–188).
Note 34 in page 425 Eduard Meyer, Caesars Monarchie und das Principal des Pompeius, 3“ Aufl. (Stuttgart u. Berlin, 1922), p. 327.
Note 35 in page 425 Sir Cedric Hardwicke, “Shavian Version of a Dictator,” New York Times, 18 Dec. 1949, ii, 3.