SOURCE: Turner, John. Introduction to The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Turner, pp. 13-29. New York: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995.

[In the following essay, Turner examines Shakespeare's treatment of Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, suggesting that his view of the empire was fueled by an imaginative return to the “honour culture” of late medieval aristocrats. Turner also comments on the major relationships within the play, and on the love poetry of Antony and Cleopatra.]

The stage upon which The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra is enacted is a site upon which competitors meet. …

I am using the word ‘competitor’ in that precise but ambiguous sense which it enjoys throughout the play, and which, according to the OED, it enjoyed for the century between 1579 and 1681: a sense fluctuating between ‘rival’ and ‘associate’, and implying both the competition and collaboration that today—though we still speak of ‘fellow-competitors’ in a race—are usually thought to be mutually incompatible.

It is no accident that the period of the word's ambiguity coincides so closely with the period of the greatest efflorescence of court society in Britain, as succeeding monarchs sought to ‘gentle’ their aristocracy and disarm their code of honour by drawing them to court, where their behaviour might be overseen and their energies directed towards an honours system managed by the crown.¹ Here was a society alive and anxious with ‘the ebb and flow of friendships and rivalries, alliances and ruptures, loyalties and betrayals’ as courtiers vied incessantly for prestige, now competing with and now competing against one another.² The slipperiness of the word, that is, precisely mirrored the slipperiness of court society: what Wyatt at the start of our period called ‘the slipper top / Of court's estate’, and what Marvell at its end called ‘giddy favour's slippery hill’.³

Yet although the structural ambiguity of the term ‘competition’ belongs to the contemporary world of court society, aristocratic life had previously been characterised by an even greater sense of political instability. The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, in its attempt to imagine the Rome of the triumvirate, returns to the honour culture of the late mediaeval aristocracy, before it had yielded to the power and ideology of a centralised monarchy with a providentialist view of history. It returns to an honour culture haunted by the belief ‘that Fate, irrational, incomprehensible and uncontrollable, rules over human history’.⁴ To the man of honour, all the critical moments of his life had seemed ‘hag-ridden by Fate’; and it is no accident that the chief focus of Shakespeare's play, in describing the competitiveness of the life of honour, should fall upon the instability of its alliances, the unpredictability of its military encounters and, more generally, upon the mutability of all earthly fortunes. It is not that Shakespeare ‘was using the Roman Empire as a symbol for the sublunar world’ unsustained by divine order and love.⁵ His point, I think, was political rather than theological: he was depicting the endemic instability of a dying culture and the determined efforts of Caesar to bring about a new order, centralised and stabilised under his own imperial power.

There is something of the play's sense of mutability in North's Plutarch, where we find that Anthony had ‘oftentimes proved both the one and the other fortune’ and that he was ‘throughly acquainted with the divers chaunges and fortunes of battells’.⁶ But as the poems of Wyatt and Marvell intensify Seneca's sense of the slipperiness of court society, so too does Shakespeare's play intensify Plutarch's picture of the fickleness of Fortune. Its swirling sequences of short scenes, with their peripateias, their multiple perspectives, their giddy rangings across the globe and their collapsing of a decade's history into a three-hour entertainment, all enhance this effect—especially in the Folio text before us, where the absence of division into acts and scenes casts us adrift from our familiar bearings.⁷ Throughout the play we witness the human attempts to make meaning, and to win an honourable place in history, under the threat of constant erasure from the fluxes and refluxes of fortune. The power that makes is the power that mars: in Anthony's own words, ‘That which is now a Horse, even with a thoght / the Racke dislimes, and makes it indistinct / As water is in water’. It is this power of fortune that Caesar sets out to master.

When the claims of Rome and Egypt compete for Anthony's attention and loyalty at the start of the play, he replies as follows, in a passage justly famous for its poetic beauty:

Let Rome in Tyber melt, and the wide Arch
Of the raing'd Empire fall: Heere is my space,
Kingdomes are clay:

‘Heere is my space’: it is indeed a question of space. If these words are taken naturalistically, they refer to the space allotted by the drama to Egypt, and in particular to Cleopatra's court; and in their passionate rejection of Rome, they suggest that the most important competition in the play will prove to be that between Anthony and Caesar. If we consider the words metadramatically, however, as Raymond Williams has pointed out,⁸ we shall see that the space towards which Anthony gestures is also the theatrical space around him: the actor, in competition with the rest of the cast, is indicating the arena which he hopes to fill with his own particular speaking voice and, beyond that, the city with whose attractions the play is competing in its search for an audience. I want to explore each of these two points in turn, before returning to my opening claim that the First Folio text too is a space which we must understand as a site of competition. In each case, we shall find that what is at stake is the peculiar nature of the poetry that Shakespeare wrote for this play, and his growing awareness as a dramatist of the equivocal status of human beings as poets, story-tellers, spinners of narrative, in a world where—the conflictual and multivocal nature of the dramatic form itself drives home the point⁹—the competition for power, and thus for hegemonic control over the narratives of others, was felt to alienate and denature the individual self.

Anthony's claim that his space is here—in Egypt, in Cleopatra's court, even perhaps in Cleopatra's arms—is a characteristically indirect admission of his harassed sense of Caesar's inescapable presence, even in his absence. It is not paradoxical, I think, but true to say that the competition between Anthony and Caesar is the most important human relationship in the play; and the evidence of this is to be found in the scene with the Soothsayer.

His Cocks do winne the Battaile, still of mine,
When it is all to naught: and his Quailes ever
Beate mine (inhoopt) at odd's. I will to Egypte:
And though I make this marriage for my peace,
I'th'East my pleasure lies.

It is Caesar's cocks and quails that drive Anthony back to Egypt; his love for Cleopatra, his pleasure in the East, seem here no more than rationalisations of his primary superstitious dread of Caesar. It is a question, it seems, of ‘Naturall lucke’; and however much we seek to translate these words into a discourse more familiar to us today—discussing the sexual competition between the rising young man and the declining man in his mid-life crisis, for example, or contrasting the focused self-possession of the new man with the reckless magnanimity of the old—Anthony himself is bound by the language of the fortune-teller. ‘Whose Fortunes shall rise higher / Cæsars or mine?’: the man of honour, dependent upon his own resolve to win prestige, is haunted by the sense of his own impotence, fearful that the world lies fatefully beyond his control and that his will is doomed to be overthrown by the fellow-contrary power of Fortune.

The centrality of Caesar to the play means that the love between Anthony and Cleopatra—powerful and real though it is—must be understood in relation to the Rome that has produced it. ‘Let Rome in Tyber melt’: their love is a dissolution, a melting, an overflowing of all the measures of time and place upon which Rome depends, and its very existence depends upon having those measures to transgress. There is, in other words, no self-authenticating language of pleasure in the play. From the licentiousness of Charmian's talk at the start to the malapropisms of the Clown at the end, the discourses of pleasure subvert the moral and linguistic grammar whose purpose is to order them; but they cannot create a coherent world of their own. The opening tableau of the play makes the point perfectly for us. With eternity upon their lips but with Roman soldiers and messengers by their sides, the two lovers dream of a ‘new Heaven, new Earth’; and yet these new worlds of which they dream are no more than the resorts of fantasy to dissolve the intolerable tensions of the old. Love can only realise itself in opposition to duty, Egypt in opposition to Rome. But it is not enough to talk of antithesis here: whether we speak of Rome and Egypt, of duty and love, of Caesar and Cleopatra or of Apollo and Dionysus,¹⁰ we must remember Jonathan Dollimore's insistence, quoting Derrida, that ‘binary oppositions are “a violent hierarchy” where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other’.¹¹ The hierarchy here serves Rome and is held in place by a culture of demonisation that sees Cleopatra as a ‘great Faiery’ or a ‘Witch’, dependent upon whether she is in or out of favour with Anthony; it is a world in which love is linguistically structured as a spell, a charm, a magical fascination.

Hence, of course, the danger in describing the play as a ‘love-tragedy’; for the label, through its very familiarity, may blind us to precisely those connections that we are being invited to make—the connections between love and history, both personal and political. Anthony and Cleopatra themselves, at certain moments of their lives—though, importantly, not at others—speak of their love as absolute, magical, transcendental; they identify one another with mythical figures, especially with Venus and Mars; and they strive to make their love the stuff of legend, so that they might become what Caesar finally calls them: ‘a payre so famous’ that no grave can hold their like. Moved we may be; but we should not be taken in. For there is no such thing as love; there are endless varieties of experience that are called love, and we need to understand them in their variety. The interesting questions are always the particular ones: what is understood by ‘love’ in each case? why do people fall in love with certain people and not with others? why, in so doing, do they sometimes speak of Love rather than of love? The purpose of these questions is to return the seemingly overwhelming experience of love back to the totality of its material history in order to understand it fully; and here the play can help us.

For it helps to deconstruct those aristocratic—and, later, bourgeois—reifications which have seen Love as a kind of Fate, a transcendental power which was impossible to resist. The Venus and the Cupid of the aristocratic culture of the late sixteenth century—like the Eros of the bourgeois culture of the late nineteenth century—ensnared their victims in a passionate game whose fascination obscured the political realities of the society in which it was played out. The young aristocrat who went to court to enjoy the pleasures of love unwittingly submitted to the royal power of surveillance as he did so; excelling in the field of love, he lay down his arms in the field of war, and thus confirmed the power of his sovereign. Here in The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, it is this same connection between love and politics that is laid bare. It is the distraction of love that we see, in both senses of the word: a passionate excitement that, in engulfing the reason, seduces the military man from the noble pursuit of honour amongst his fellow-competitors.

It is perhaps a question of punctuation in the narratives we tell, of whether ‘love’ should be the last word in the sentences we spin; and here too the Folio can help us. For how should we punctuate the title of the play? It is an important question, to which the Folio has two answers. In the heading of the play—the version that I have preferred here, for its capacity to surprise—there is a comma after Anthonie; but on the running title at the head of each page, the comma is gone. There is no single answer; the play has two titles, each with different implications—and each might be said to epitomise something really present within the text. If we omit the comma, we are encouraged to think of Anthony and Cleopatra as constituting in some sense a single unit of thought—as though their tragedy is the consequence of their love, enabling the two of them together to constitute a reality greater than they do apart. But if the comma is inserted, it divides their destinies, opens up their different experiences of love for separate scrutiny in their different political contexts, and draws our attention to those distinctions which their poetry labours to dissolve.

For the love-poetry of Anthony and Cleopatra is a poetry of dissolution. There are, of course, many other kinds of poetry in the play; but it is the love-poetry that has attracted most attention—and understandably so, because of its great beauty. Yet beauty, like love, is always of a particular kind, and must be not only admired but characterised. ‘Kingdomes are clay’: the plangency of such verse derives from its curious blend of transgressive defiance and regressive yearning, and exists from the start in a curiously paradoxical relationship with time and place. For its aristocratic recklessness, its fine prodigality of word and emotion, is also a wilful neglect of the real world where aristocratic honour must be won. This is Aristotelian liberality run to excess. Kingdoms are not clay; but the energy of the poetry springs from the insatiable need to say that they are. The lovers are driven to dematerialise the material; to transform the untransformable; to build out of words a home that can never be built out of bricks. The beauty of their verse, in other words, for all its defiant aspiration, is also a function of its commitment to illusion; it is plangent because it overlooks (in both senses of the word) the facts of daily life which usually provide imagination with its materials to work upon. But the imagination here is driven into counter-creation; it must evolve a counter-narrative to efface the history that Caesar is engaged in writing.

The crowning achievement of such counter-narrative, of course, occurs at the end of the play, when Cleopatra in defeat draws herself up in the full pomp of her regalia and rhetoric.

Give me my Robe, put on my Crowne, I have
Immortall longings in me. Now no more
The juyce of Egypts Grape shall moyst this lip.
Yare, yare, good Iras; quicke: Me thinkes I heare
Anthony call: I see him rowse himselfe
To praise my Noble Act. I heare him mock
The lucke of Cæsar, which the Gods give men
To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come …

The verse is beautiful, spell-binding; but its theological beliefs are illusion. Cleopatra's declaration of the supremacy of love in the next life only serves to disclose the supremacy of Caesar's power in this. The queen who will shortly see the asp that is killing her as a baby sucking her to sleep is compelled to transform the world in verse because she has failed to transform it in fact. This dissociation between imagination and reality is Caesar's real victory. Cleopatra dismisses his triumph as ‘lucke’, as she later dismisses Caesar himself as ‘Asse, unpolicied’. But she is wrong; it is not a question of luck but of successful policy. He could not stall with Anthony, he says, in the whole world, and so he prepared himself for the moment when their uneasy collaboration would break down into a deadly rivalry. Here is a man determined to owe nothing to luck and fortune. An old world at the last gives way to a new; and an older kind of competition gives way to a kind that we should recognise today.

‘Heere is my space’: the actor saying these words may also gesture towards the theatrical arena around him, and in so doing spark off a series of reflections about the relationship between theatre and ‘real life’ that might naturally culminate in contemplating the theatricality of Cleopatra's death.

In one sense, of course, in Jacobean London as today, theatre was very much a part of that ‘real life’. It was a flourishing commercial enterprise in competition with other businesses to attract audiences; and the actor who declared the theatre to be his space was also declaring the source of his income, in a world where everyone was busy making a living. But in another sense, theatre was—and still is—a place apart. In Jacobean London, the marginality of the theatre was inscribed in its geographical exclusion outside the city walls. It was a place dangerous to the physical and the moral health of its audience, a place where crowds could gather, where actors could impersonate their betters, and where the pretensions of power and the self-interest of ideology could be exposed simply by the productions and reproductions of the new dramatic form. Right from the start, that is, capitalism generated space for its own critique.

Yet neither money nor satire could wholly satisfy the new dramatists, who also needed to feel the social and political centrality of their own practice; and here, I think, they were often disappointed. There is an excess in their satirical railing that suggests a consciousness of their own marginality; and the sense of theatre as illusion, which is so pervasive in the later works of Shakespeare, suggests a similar awareness. No doubt this sense was also in part a reaction to the conditions of working in the theatre, with its devotion to make-believe and its rapid turnover of material. In the theatre it is art that is short-lived, life that is long; and the form that Sidney thought capable of embodying eternal verities appeared hauntingly ephemeral to Shakespeare. Cleopatra's death, in its theatricality, embodies perfectly his sense of the paradoxical status of dramatic art; for the beauty of her verse, even as she speaks it, discloses its most powerful effects as illusion. Art, it seems, is denatured by the same market-place that prompts it.

Yeats once speculated that ‘there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought’. Shakespeare's myth, he went on, referring to Hamlet and the second tetralogy of History Plays as his examples, ‘describes a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness’.¹² If there is perhaps one single myth informing Shakespeare's work, I should say that it depicts the displacement of the corrupt poetry of a vestigial aristocratic code of honour by the mean-spirited prose of an emergent machiavellianism; and that this myth—which with various modifications informs plays like Hamlet, the second tetralogy, the Tragedies and, of course, the play before us now, The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra—has its roots in Shakespeare's sense of the history of his own lifetime, as the flawed glamour of Essex and his friends, including Shakespeare's own patrons, had been thrust from places of influence at court by the pragmatism of Cecil and his supporters.¹³

The competition between Caesar and Anthony, in other words, is not simply the history of two incompatible personalities; it is also the history of the cultural clash between two incompatible ways of seeing the world, each of which is grounded in a different material reality. It was a history found in Plutarch but shaped in sixteenth-century London, with the events of the two historical periods assimilated into a single myth that offers to interpret them both. Caesar's triumph at the end of the play creates for its audience a picture of the prehistory of its own present; Augustan Rome becomes the cradle of the modern world—a world from which the poetry of honour and love has disappeared, along with their material base in aristocratic power and the early court societies of the Renaissance. All that remains is Caesar, whom Jonathan Dollimore has likened to Machiavelli's Prince: ‘inscrutable and possessed of an identity which becomes less fixed, less identifiable as his power increases’.¹⁴ Ben Jonson had already in The Poetaster (1601) introduced Augustus Caesar to the English stage,¹⁵ portraying him as an idealised ruler whose sense of the importance of moral temperance, social hierarchy and literary patronage was perhaps intended as coercive flattery of Elizabeth herself. But Shakespeare's Octavius—still to proclaim himself the Emperor Augustus—is no such ideal figure; he is a model of prudence and watchfulness, a puritan whose denatured realpolitik seems to epitomise Shakespeare's own sense of the political life that succeeded the disarming of the aristocracy.

What is missing from this picture of Caesar, however, is the poetry that honour, beauty and love evoke from him at two critical moments in the play: on his first appearance he celebrates the heroism of Anthony's soldiership in the Alps, and on his last he celebrates Cleopatra's ‘strong toyle of Grace’ and the fame that she and ‘her Anthony’ will enjoy as lovers. It is true that in each case his tribute is expedient; and yet it also seems true that each is profoundly felt. His poetry is moving. In other words, the dissociation between imagination and realpolitik that Caesar is irresistibly imposing upon the world is replicated within his own subjectivity. He is, of course, too canny to succumb to its tragic potential; it is Enobarbus' role in the play to do this, and the fact that Shakespeare has made the character who played so small a role in Plutarch so central to his own play is proof of his interest in the dissociation that Caesar has brought about.

For the true heir of Caesar is the dramatist himself, together with his play and the playhouse in which it is enacted. Here in the marginal place of the playhouse, in the marginal time of the play, the dramatist too recalls the flawed poetry of honour, beauty and love that have gone from the world. He recalls them critically, without nostalgia, in a critique of the meanness of the world that survives; and yet his play is implicated in that world by its existence as a commodity in the market-place. This paradoxical relationship of conformity and unconformity between the new work of dramatic art and the new world emerging around it constitutes the subtext to the closing words of the play:

                                                                                their Story is
No lesse in pitty, then his Glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our Army shall
In solemne shew, attend this Funerall,
And then to Rome. Come Dolabella, see
High Order, in this great Solemnity.

One story is brought to its ritual conclusion, but another goes on; once Anthony and Cleopatra are buried in Egypt, Caesar will return to Rome. Yet despite Caesar's wish to have the last word, to be master of the narrative he tells and the funeral he stages, the competition between himself and Anthony still continues. It continues, as we have seen, within his individual sensibility; and it continues too within the sensibility of the dramatist and his audience, as the ‘solemne shew’ of his tragedy is produced and reproduced again and again in performance. The competition between Caesar and Anthony is thus constantly regenerated as part of the paradox of an art which both collaborates with the economic activities of its society and criticises them in the name of a greater richness and vitality—a richness and vitality which, though flawed in all their manifestations hitherto, nevertheless persist in making their lack felt through an imaginative hunger which Caesar, for all his wealth, cannot feed.

The text of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra too, as it is produced and reproduced in print and in performance, has become a site of competition, though in a different way, befitting the new ambiguities structured into bourgeois scholarship; it has become a site where generations of editors, from the First Folio on, have collaborated and vied with one another in the attempt to establish and to annotate a text which is both authentic and comprehensible.

What is striking about this long history of editorial work is that, until the last ten years or so, it has tended to produce texts that are more suitable for the armchair than the theatre: texts that have the completeness, self-consistency and grammatical correctness of a novel, together with long and learned notes to satisfy the scholar, the lexicographer and the cultural historian. What is missing—interesting and valuable though such editions are—is twofold: a recognition of the theatrical potential of Shakespeare's texts, and a recognition of their original (and continuing) status as what Jonathan Bate calls ‘vital, mutable theatrical scripts’,¹⁶ to be shaped differently according to the requirements of different theatrical performances. For there is, in other words, no authentic script of any Shakespearean play; nor could the sudden discovery of an original manuscript provide one. It is true that the First Folio texts which we are reproducing in this series have misprints, errors, mispunctuations and enigmas in them, and that it remains the duty of an editor to try to find sense in nonsense. Yet their incompletenesses, inconsistencies and incorrectnesses are useful in reminding us of the status in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre of the playscripts that we are dealing with; and, of course, they also enable us to inspect the processes of emendation that they no doubt began and that have been going on ever since.

It is once again a question of narrative and of how we punctuate that narrative. Each added stage-direction, each emendation and each gloss involves us in the construction of a narrative; and each narrative involves competition with our fellow-editors, as our narrative converges upon—or diverges from—theirs. The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra does not raise the same kind of fundamental editorial problems that bedevil plays like Hamlet and King Lear, where there are different texts in existence with rival claims to be authoritative; the First Folio of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra is the only text that we have. The questions it raises are thus always local and particular; and yet they are interesting, as the following three examples may show.

First, at the end of the play, when Cleopatra has secured herself in her monument and is negotiating with Proculeius, the Folio suddenly assigns him two speeches together, the second one of which begins: ‘You see how easily she may be surpriz'd’. The intended stage-business is clear: troops have been smuggled into the monument, and Cleopatra finds herself under arrest. Precisely how the operation is carried out is not stated in the Folio; but some editions, including the Arden, on the authority of Plutarch, assign the operation—and the second of Proculeius' two speeches—to Gallus, whom Caesar was preparing to use in some unspecified task in the previous scene. The Arden editor, in developing this narrative, is able to praise Proculeius' honesty and corroborate Anthony's dying judgment of him: ‘None about Cæsar trust, but Proculeius’. He is also able to clear Shakespeare from the charge of ‘bad craftsmanship’¹⁷—that is, of introducing an expectation and not fulfilling it—by suggesting a compositorial error that transferred the name of Proculeius from the text to the speech-heading that should have read ‘Gallus’. Charlton Hinman too suspects that compositorial error made it necessary, for reasons of space, to drop material from the original manuscript here.¹⁸ Yet why should we assume that Shakespeare's manuscript was complete in this way? Such an idea of a finished work of Art is not necessarily appropriate to a play-script which, as Hinman himself goes on to say, can be ‘finished only in performance’,¹⁹ when the details of entrances, exits and other stage-business can finally be thrashed out. There is enough in the Folio text from which to fashion a production; and it may be a strength and not a weakness that the whole of this final scene should be so open. It leaves a great deal to the technical and imaginative resources of the playhouse; and in so doing, it underlines the inscrutability of Caesar's character and behaviour, and emphasises finally the disastrous unreliability of Anthony as a judge of character. It all depends what narrative we want to tell; but I can see no good reason to add new stage-directions to the printed text.

Second, a few lines later in the play, there is a famous moment when Cleopatra, in conversation with Dolabella, praises Anthony's unrivalled generosity of spirit:

                                                                                For his bounty,
There was no winter in't: an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping:

Or so she usually says. But in the Folio she says: ‘An Anthony it was, / That grew the more by reaping’. Although acknowledging its orthographical unlikelihood, the Arden editor calls the emendation from ‘autumn’ to ‘Anthony’ brilliant, and adds that it gives ‘admirable sense, and that the turn of imagination is thoroughly Shakespearean, whereas Antony gives no sense at all’.²⁰ What is at issue here is an ideal of poetic decorum quite at odds with the spirit of hyperbole driving Cleopatra. Her metaphor overflows the measure because she can find no words other than the name of the man himself to express the qualities she thinks he had. As once she had said that ‘my Oblivion is a very Anthony’, so now her speechlessness is vindicated in the ineffableness of Anthony's virtue. Words and metaphors are at breaking-point, and to tidy them up is to go against the grain of the whole passage. Once again, of course, it depends upon what narrative we want to tell. But the key test of the lines should surely be whether or not they make sense in the theatre, not whether they reach the standard of some idealised Shakespeare with whose imaginative workings we feel ourselves to be intimate. This example may stand for a number of emendations in modern editions that aim to tidy up the syntax or the imagery of people who are in a state of excitement; and in these cases I think we should be especially reluctant to emend the Folio text.

Third, when Caesar is saying farewell to Octavia before she leaves with Anthony, he urges her:

                                                                                Sister, prove such a wife
As my thoughts make thee, and as my farthest Band
Shall passe on thy approofe:

The last clause here is condensed and its meaning difficult to tease out. The New Cambridge edition quotes approvingly the gloss of Dr Johnson: ‘as I will venture the greatest pledge of security on the trial of thy conduct’.²¹ According to this explanation, Caesar will only let his honour stand surety for his sister's virtue if her conduct merits it; he may refuse if he so pleases, and she of course may misbehave if she so pleases. Now it is true that Octavia may misbehave, and that he may refuse to stand surety for her; but the drive of the honour code is to occlude both the woman's freedom to act as she wishes and the man's freedom to dissociate himself from his family and friends. Caesar feels—or he talks as though he does—that his honour is already, of necessity, pledged on behalf of his sister's conduct, and that he will only be able to circulate freely amongst men of honour as long as his word passes for currency amongst them. ‘What is a man but his promise?’:²² therefore, in the chiastic structuring of his sentence, he works hard to bind Octavia's freedom so that she will prove herself only in such a way as to be approved within the circles of honourable men. Hence my own interpretation of his final clause: ‘so as even my uttermost pledge as to your merits shall be vindicated and found acceptable when other people come to inspect and approve them’. It is this emphasis upon the policing of the honour code that is lacking from Dr Johnson's explanation. Perhaps he thought more naturally in terms of the individual protestant ethic rather than in terms of the essentially social nature of the honour code. But for whatever reason, the difference at issue shows how even the smallest gloss involves editors in the construction of rival narratives in a competition to see which shall command the most assent.

These are indeed only small examples of the processes involved in every emendation and gloss; the endnotes are full of countless others, and every editor of course could tell a similar story. It is perhaps no coincidence, however, that each example discussed here should date back to the eighteenth century—to Theobald twice and once to Dr Johnson—when modern methods of editing Shakespeare were laid dowm, when drama was often excluded from the categories of respectable literature, and when art was something to be consumed in the pleasurable solitude of the drawing-room rather than created in the vulgar public arena of the theatre. It is against that tradition that this edition of the First Folio is launched. ‘Heere is my space’: it is perhaps a new space for most performers and readers alike, and one which may help them to remember the true status of Shakespearean texts as play-scripts; to keep alive a sense of their theatrical openness which is also a kind of danger; and to do so particularly here, in the case of a play written to commemorate the flawed but overflowing vitality of a disorderly world which had all but vanished before the new order of the heirs of Caesar—‘the little o'th'earth’, Cleopatra calls them (though only in the Folio text), whose only glory comes from the light cast by Anthony. For this is the abiding power of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra: that it continues to articulate a dissociation characteristic of our culture. No matter whether we consider it in its history or in our own present, it still reproduces its fundamental antithesis, which still remains a ‘violent hierarchy’ and a potential source of tragedy: the tragedy of the dissociation between romantic images of beauty, vitality and freedom and our disillusioned experiences of competition in the everyday worlds of home, work and political power.

Notes

1. See Rosalie Colie, ‘Reason and Need: King Lear and the “Crisis of the Aristocracy”’, in Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (eds), Some Facets of ‘King Lear’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), for an interesting account of the way that the Tudor state had set out ‘to gentle the armigerous aristocracy’ (p. 186).

2. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner, Shakespeare: Out of Court (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 19. The allusion is to a study of competition in Love's Labour's Lost.

3. Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem ‘Stand, whoso list, upon the slipper top’ is a translation of the same passage from Seneca as Andrew Marvell's ‘The Second Chorus from Seneca's Tragedy “Thyesetes”’.

4. Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485-1642’, Past and Present, Supplement 3 (The Past and Present Society, 1978), p. 7. The whole of this long essay has much to offer to a student of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra.

5. Charles A. Hallett, ‘Change, Fortune, and Time: Aspects of the Sublunar World in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. LXXV (1976) p. 87.

6. Quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare vol. V (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 302.

7. It is worth remembering Charlton Hinman's caution about the conventional act-scene divisions found in editions of Shakespeare: ‘they tend to foster mistaken notions both of the principles by which Shakespeare constructed his plays and of the manner in which they were meant to be staged’; in The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), p. xxiv.

8. Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 69. Chapter 4 of this book is a pioneering analysis of the First Folio as a text for performance.

9. See Raymond Williams, in the Afterword to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 238, for a discussion of the political implications of the ‘multivocal’ and ‘interactive’ form of the new drama.

10. There is a good discussion of the play in Nietzschean terms during the last chapter of Michael Long's The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 220-59.

11. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic’, in Critical Quarterly vol. 28, nos. 1 and 2 (1986), p. 190.

12. W. B. Yeats, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 107.

13. A connection between Essex and Mark Antony had already been drawn by friends of Fulke Greville, urging him to destroy his own tragedy about the story of Antony and Cleopatra. See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, pp. 216-17.

14. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 208.

15. A comparison of Jonson's and Shakespeare's pictures of Augustus Caesar may be found in the last five pages of Howard Erskine-Hill's essay, ‘Antony and Octavius: The Theme of Temperance in Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra”’, in Renaissance and Modern Studies. vol. XIV (1970), pp. 26-47.

16. Jonathan Bate, ‘Shakespeare's Tragedies as Working Scripts’, in Critical Survey, vol. 3, no. ii (1991), p. 126.

17. See the Arden edition of Antony and Cleopatra (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 254.

18. See Hinman, The Norton Facsimile, p. xvii.

19. Ibid., p. xiii.

20. Arden edition, p. 214.

21. New Cambridge edition of Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 155.

22. These words, epitomising the honour code of the aristocracy, were spoken by Lord Darcy in 1536 to justify military confederacy against the crown. They are quoted in Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642’, p. 29.