In tone and language Antony and Cleopatra may be described as a “feminized” classical tragedy: Egyptian cookery, luxuriant daybeds, and a billiard-playing eunuch contrast with the rigors of Roman architecture and senatorial business.

OVERFLOWING THE MEASURE

Though Octavius is political victor, all the poetry of the play has been on the Egyptian side. From the first intimation that “There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now” to the final enrobing for the serpent’s kiss of death, the language of Cleopatra works its magic upon the listener. Theater’s power to create illusion and poetry’s power to create beauty are of a piece with her seductive arts.

The first line of the play is only completed in the second: “Nay, but this dotage of our general’s / O’erflows the measure” says Philo, a Roman soldier whose name evokes the Greek word for “love.” From the Roman point of view it is a monstrous embarrassment that one of the three men who rule their great empire should be disporting himself like an infatuated teenager. Perhaps he is indeed entering his dotage, approaching the second childhood of old age. From the Egyptian point of view, the power of desire is on the contrary something that transcends the petty world of tribal politics. Antony is torn between the two worlds: one moment he kisses Cleopatra and says “The nobleness of life / Is to do thus,” yet the next he says “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage.”

Romanness meant stoically controlling the passions within the restraint of reason. When Roman restraint is abandoned on Pompey’s ship, the world is rocked—and politics dissolves into comedy. In Egypt, sensual indulgence is the game. Love is imagined as something that neither can nor should be controlled or measured. Its capacity is infinite. The love of Antony and Cleopatra “find[s] out new earth, new heaven.” And love’s medium is poetry: in this play Shakespeare gives his lyrical powers freer rein than ever before or after. Though the opening lines are spoken by a Roman, their style is loyal to Cleopatra: the sentence overflows the measure of the pentameter line, preparing the way for the liquid imagery of Egypt—with the fertile River Nile at its heart—that will overcome the measured rigidity of Rome.

Against the grain of the Renaissance idealization of the age of Augustus, Antony and Cleopatra depicts Octavius as a mealy-mouthed pragmatist. The play is concerned less with the seismic shift from republic to empire than with the transformation of Mark Antony from military leader to slave of sexual desire: “Take but good note, and you shall see in him / The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool.” To Roman eyes, eros (fittingly, the name of Antony’s armorer) renders Antony undignified to the point of risibility. But the sweep of the play’s poetic language all the way through to its closing speech—“No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous”—celebrates the glory and magnanimity of the lovers, whose imagined erotic union in death is symbolic of cosmic harmony.

Octavius himself has to admit that the dead Cleopatra looks as if “she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace”: “toil” is sweatily sexual, but “grace” suggests that even the most Roman character of them all is now seeing Antony and Cleopatra as something other than self-deluding dotards. The aura of Cleopatra’s last speech is still hanging in the air; the power of the poetic language has been such that a sensitive listener will half-believe that Cleopatra has left her baser elements and become all “fire and air.” She is, as Charmian so superbly puts it, “A lass unparalleled”: just one of the girls, but also the unique queen and serpent, embodiment of the Nile’s fertility and the heat of life itself.

The forms of Shakespeare’s verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme only features as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but “run on” (a feature known as “enjambment”): instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines, where they are known as the “caesura” and where their placing varies. A single line of verse is shared between two speakers much more frequently than in the early plays. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument: the iambic beat is broken up, and there is often an extra (“redundant”) unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (this is known as a “feminine ending”). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended.

Iambic pentameter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple mature Shakespearean “loose pentameter” is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor. Antony and Cleopatra is, simply from the point of view of its sustaining of a lyrical poetic voice, Shakespeare’s most beautiful play. Speech after speech soars like music while being grounded in precision of image.

Most famously, there is Enobarbus’ description of Antony’s first sight of Cleopatra. Plutarch’s Lives must have been open on Shakespeare’s desk as he composed the scene. The Egyptian queen is at Cydnus, splendidly attired and throned in state upon her barge:

The poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her self she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her.