Garnier, a magistrate, dramatized his Plutarchan material in order to reflect on the tragedy of civil war in sixteenth-century France. Mary Sidney’s Englished Antonius includes choruses of commoners—first Egyptians, then Roman soldiers—but its primary emphasis was not the many but the few. The play is an exploration of the damage that may be caused to the body politic if the private desires of the great are allowed to override their public duties. To become a lover is to put at risk one’s judgment as a governor.

We should be wary of jumping to the conclusion that Mary Sidney’s intentions in undertaking and publishing her translation were overtly topical rather than broadly exemplary, yet her theme was highly relevant to the concerns of the English court in the early 1590s. This was the period in which the Earl of Essex was beginning to gain considerable influence over the queen. The Sidney circle, with their strong commitment to Protestant virtue, were deeply committed to an image of Elizabeth as noble Roman, not sensuous Cleopatra. Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (published 1594), a sequel to his patroness’s play, is a further exploration of the potential of erotic passion to bring down a royal line. Fulke Greville, also a member of the Sidney circle, destroyed his own Antony and Cleopatra for fear that its representation of a queen and a great soldier “forsaking empire to follow sensuality” might be “construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government.” On “seeing the like instance not poetically, but really, fashioned in the Earl of Essex then falling (and ever till then worthily beloved both of Queen and people),” Greville’s own “second thoughts” were “to be careful.”

This background raises the question of whether Shakespeare needed to be especially careful when writing his version of the story early in the reign of King James. By this time his company were the King’s Men, under direct patronage of the monarchy. And he knew that his tragedy would be played at court. James was beginning to cultivate an image of himself as the modern equivalent of the most admired of all Roman emperors: Augustus. Shakespeare’s play ends at the moment when, the other two members of the triumvirate having been disposed of, Octavius Caesar becomes emperor and takes the name Augustus. When he says “The time of universal peace is near,” Shakespeare’s court audience would have heard an allusion to the “Augustan peace”: the idea that this emperor’s reign was sacred not only because it brought peace after a long period of war (as James had done when he signed the Somerset House treaty with Spain), but also because it was in the time of Augustus that Jesus was born.

If James regarded himself as an Augustus, his detractors saw him as an Antony insofar as his court was characterized by extravagance and profligacy. Whereas proponents of the Augustan ideal busied themselves erecting Roman triumphal arches in the streets of London in honor of the new king, Shakespeare’s Antony says “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall: here is my space.” The space of the play is indeed a space of play, and especially sexual play. Again, this was risky matter, given that James’s court was beginning to gain a reputation as a place of sexual freedom sharply contrasting to the aura of chastity surrounding his predecessor, the Virgin Queen, who in this regard was the very opposite of Cleopatra. “Authority melts from me,” says Antony. He loses his martial identity in a torrent of images of dissolving, discandying, dislimning. To some at court, this might have been perceived as a warning to King James. The king himself, one suspects, would have enjoyed the debate between austere Roman and sensuous Egyptian worlds: he loved nothing more than a good argument.

Plutarch’s greatest importance for Shakespeare was his way of writing history through biography. He taught the playwright that the little human touch often says more than the large impersonal historical force. Plutarch explained his method in the “Life of Alexander”:

My intent is not to write histories, but only lives. For the noblest deeds do not always show men’s virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won wherein are slain ten thousand men, or the great armies, or cities won by siege or assault.

So too in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. It is the particular occasion, the single word, the moment of tenderness or jest, that humanizes the superpower politicians. One thinks of Brutus and Cassius making up after their quarrel in Julius Caesar, of the defeated Cleopatra remembering that it is her birthday, or of Caius Martius exhausted from battle forgetting the name of the man who has helped him in Corioles where he earns the surname Coriolanus.

In Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Antonius,” Antony claims descent from Anton, son of Hercules. To Shakespeare’s Cleopatra he is a “Herculean Roman.” His allegiance to the greatest of the mythical heroes is strengthened by the strange scene in the fourth act, when music of hautboys is heard under the stage and the second soldier offers the interpretation that “the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him.” The memorable image of Antony and Cleopatra wearing each other’s clothes, the “sword Philippan” exchanged for the woman’s “tires and mantles,” thus comes to suggest the cross-dressing not only of Mars and Venus (i.e. war and love), but also of the strong-armed hero Hercules and Omphale, the Lydian queen who subdued his will and set him to work spinning among her maids. The latter tale was often moralized in the Renaissance as a warning against female wiles.

But Shakespeare enjoys the staging of Cleopatra’s allure. Although the “Life of Marcus Antonius” shows more than usual interest in the main female character, the historical structure of Plutarch’s narratives was always premised on the lives of his male heroes. Shakespeare’s play alters this focus to emphasize the death of the woman, not that of the warrior, as the climax of the story. The female perspective stands in opposition to the male voice that orders the march of history.