The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’ posture of a whore. (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.212-217)1
Shakespearean scholars love to talk about the above lines as a great metatheatrical moment, aware as the play makes its audience of the boy who (at the time) would be playing Cleopatra. However, in their, and our, delight at metatheatricality, the moment presents more problems than delights. In this play, Antony is not “brought drunken forth,” nor is Cleopatra presented “I’th’ posture of a whore.” The one scene in which we see Antony drink, reveling with Pompey and the Triumvirate, Lepidus is the one who can’t hold his liquor. Antony operates in a middle ground between Lepidus’ over-indulgence and Octavius’ teetotaling. Cleopatra is a sexual character, but only with Antony. She otherwise surrounds herself only with women and eunuchs. So where did audiences see the “drunken” Antony and the “whorish” Cleopatra?
We know that Shakespeare, for all his brilliance, rarely wrote unique stories for his plays. The story of Antony and Cleopatra comes from Plutarch’s Life of Antony, and it, along with other sources of Roman rulers, inspired a number of plays featuring Mark Antony. Unfortunately, we have very few surviving depictions of Cleopatra from early modern works, and Antony and Cleopatra is the earliest surviving play in which she is a major character. She has a minor role in George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey though we have no direct evidence of the play’s performance before 1653′? (cf. Wiggins No. 1499). Mark Antony plays a larger role in Caesar and Pompey than Cleopatra. Early in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony enters, possibly hung over, just as the conspirators arrive to take Caesar to the forum for his execution (2.2.116-117), but all we know is that he has been reveling late, and nothing in his or any others’ language indicates that he is coming “drunken forth.”
Closet drama is another matter. In 1590, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, translated the French drama Antonius into English. While Pembroke’s Men may have been an established company by this time, there is no evidence this play was performed (Prescott 216)2. Roslyn Knutson, in the Lost Plays Database, suggests that around 1600, the poet Fulke Greville wrote a closet drama concerning the famous pair “according to their irregular passions” but the only evidence we have that the play ever existed is a testimony that he destroyed it for “having some childish wantonness.”3 This play may have exhibited drunkenness and/or sexuality, but Knutson’s evidence indicates that no one but the author even read it. Martin Wiggins dates the anonymous university play Caesar and Pompey to 1605 (No. 1957) and Chapman’s play of the same title, to 1606 (No. 1999), while Norton dates our Antony and Cleopatra to 1606-7 (2633). Logan and Smith suggest that scholars, when they take the time to discuss Chapman’s most obscure play, still debate whether it was ever performed.
The closest evidence we have, beyond the verses that begin this post, that Antony and Cleopatra were commonly performed as drunken and whorish, is a later play: Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One, which deals with Julius Caesar’s time in Egypt. That play makes explicit what Shakespeare’s play merely suggests, showing the moment that Cleopatra seduces Caesar, and the moment Antony meets Cleopatra. Cleopatra trades her virginity to Caesar in exchange for his support against her brother and his advisors. Antony (a minor character in this work) revels, though again, is never unambiguously drunk.
Far fewer plays still exist than were performed, and just because we have no specific evidence that a play did exist doesn’t mean that it didn’t. This line, therefore, presents us with a choice: do we allow the “drunken” Antony and the “boy” Cleopatra “in the posture of a whore” to stand as historical relics of performance, or do we allow them to inform our production decisions, looking for opportunities to sexualize or emphasize drunkenness? Or is there a third way?
— Marshall B Garrett, Antony and Cleopatra Dramaturg
1 Citations are from The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed., Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisman Maus, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
2 Prescott, Anne Lake. “Mary Sidny’s ‘Antonius’ and the Ambiguities of French History. The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1/2. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008. JSTOR
3 Knutson, Roslyn. “Antony and Cleopatra.” The Lost Plays Database, www.lostplays.org, 2010.