Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

they are indicative, nonetheless, of changes in location and of the number of times the stage is cleared. The play as a whole is stretched, elongated, until it approximates in size and grandeur the epic and mythic events it contains—events, as we have seen, that span the globe from Rome to Egypt, and encompass the four elements.

This is a more demonstrably epic structure than we have encountered before in Shakespeare, and the epic scope is matched by an “epic” content, since among the literary and mythic forebears of Antony and Cleopatra themselves we should also count Aeneas and Dido, the key figures in what was, for Shakespeare's England, the most celebrated epic of them all, Virgil's Aeneid.

This is his most epic play

At a key point in Antony and Cleopatra Antony, speaking fondly of a time when he and Cleopatra will wander hand in hand through Elysium, boasts that “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours” (4.15.53-54).

Dido and “her” Aeneas may not be together in Elysium, since Aeneas deserted her, and deserted passionate love, to go on to Rome to marry Lavinia and to take up his responsibilities as the founder of the new city.

the marriage to Octavia is abandoned in favor of Egypt and art, and timelessness, and a legendary love with Cleopatra. So Shakespeare's play presents both epic and anti-epic content, at times deliberately turning away from history and politics toward poetry, romance, fantasy, and desire.

The play moves toward this anticipation of what Christian England would have regarded as universal order in history, in time. But these considerations of order, government, and peace are subjugated in the course of the play to the evolution of the two larger-than-life mythic heroes in its title.

The play's odd and unusual shape, then, is not only effective but also significant. It is a structural counterpart of the issues and figures it presents,

Pragmatically, Rome is better off under Caesar than under Antony.

The taxes will be collected; the chariots will run on time. But at some cost. Efficiency and order—from three parts of the world to two; from two, one—displace passion and generosity.

Octavius Caesar's political ambition is relentless. Octavius gathers, and Antony disperses.

The last half of the play is a continual series of desertions from Antony's camp, as his loyal soldiers reluctantly leave him, one by one, culminating in the agonizing desertion of Enobarbus.

Enobarbus deserts from Antony's camp, and in doing so he breaks his own heart. He cannot live in the cold cynicism of Octavius's world.

incorporates elements of tragedy, comedy, and romance.

Antony is a hero in a world that has grown too efficient to contain and comprehend heroes, a world that has become merely political. Octavius's tone, as he speaks early in the play about Antony's heroic feats

as a soldier, and especially his acts of personal deprivation and endurance, is a tone of wonder and disbelief. It is a tone familiar to modern audiences that look back upon the sacrifices and heroism of earlier eras

Antony is a heroic figure who thus closely parallels, in the Shakespearean pantheon of heroes, old-style champions like Hamlet's father...

Antony and Cleopatra is, along with Coriolanus, the most Oedipal of Shakespeare's plays, full of submerged and smouldering love and resentment,

The triangular relation of these three, Octavius, Antony, and Cleopatra, is as highly charged as the doomed triad of Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona. It is Antony as much as Cleopatra who occupies Caesar's imagination, Antony whom he wishes to marry to his sister, a sister whose name so closely resembles his own.

It is Antony who has his father's mistress, and his father's epic greatness, and it is this same Antony who calls him “boy.”

Octavius's determination is to humiliate a hero, to bring a legend to its end, since he cannot rival it. Again we might be reminded of the complicated web of love and hatred that bound Iago to Othello.

For the death of Antony in the fourth act leaves

the fifth act entirely to Cleopatra, and the fifth act will become the playing space for transformation, metamorphosis, and myth, a space in which the mortal becomes the immortal.

Yet this is a “history” play, as well as a tragedy. The story it tells is true in chronicle as well as mythic terms, and the play

belongs to time as well as to timelessness, to the Plutarchan lesson about rule (and women) as well as to the Shakespearean vision of what fiction can do to mere fact, when deployed with such transgressive mastery.

Although it begins as the tragedy of Antony, the play is transformed, by its close, into the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, giving equal weight to each of its titanic titular heroes, and blending history and tragedy into a sublime transumptive genre. His glory is history. Their story is legend.

Significantly, in the second half of the play, Antony's chief attendant, whom he will ask to assist him in running on his sword, is not Enobarbus but a soldier by the name of Eros.

Pericles

Play 32

HAKESPEARE'S JACOBEAN rival Ben Jonson had scant respect for Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and he resented its enormous popular success. He called it a “mouldy tale,” not worth telling—by which he likely meant that it was both archaic and improbable.

A romance is a story of adventure, often involving a hero who suffers a disaster and then extreme privation, defeating overwhelming odds to emerge triumphant.

While the label “romance” was not applied categorically to Shakespeare's late plays until the nineteenth century, the genre was a familiar and popular one. Some modern audiences—like some early modern ones—have found these plays deficient in realism, but, as we will see, what they actually do is shift the “real” to a different plane, one more aligned to dream, fantasy, and psychology, while retaining, at the same time, a topical relationship to historical events in Shakespeare's day.

If we consider all this, we will realize that dramatic romance, or, as it was then known, tragicomedy, cannot and ought not be judged exclusively by its realism or its social commentary. Romance speaks about society by speaking about poetry, art, dream, and transcendence—and about the quest of the individual, as human being and as art-maker, for identity and for eternity. In fact, Jacobean audiences loved Pericles.

Plays of this kind usually combined, as the name implies, elements of tragedy (serious diction, characters of high birth, and desperate

events like shipwrecks and wars) and of comedy (“low” characters, bawdy jesting, songs, festivals, and love at first sight).

In Shakespeare's time there was some tension between neoclassical taste, which deplored the mixing of genres, and the emergent popularity of no-holds-barred tragicomedy.

Modern readers of Shakespeare, conditioned by their admiration for his tragedies, with their metaphorical and metaphysical language and the psychological suffering of their heroes, will sometimes criticize Pericles

as a startling departure from the master's true métier. There have been readers, like Lytton Strachey, who saw these plays as signs of Shakespearean dotage, a falling-off from greatness.

Theatrical taste, like taste in all the other arts, changes with circumstances, with fashion, and over time, so it should not be surprising to find a preeminent playwright like Shakespeare able to write convincingly in many modes.

The romances enact patterns of desire and loss and fear and passion and hatred and ambition, just like the tragedies, but they do so as if they were happening inside our own imaginations, rather than inside the minds of Shakespeare's introspective and ruminative heroes.

In my reading of the third act of King Lear I suggested that the characters who appear onstage, one by one, are concretizations, or projections, of aspects of Lear's emotional or mental state in the storm.

I love this.

it is possible to see the dramatic action of each of the last plays as taking the form of a dream: in this case Pericles' dream, or Marina's, in which monsters come to life, and impossible reunions, like wishes, come true.

Of equal concern to editors and readers has been the question of authorship. It seems clear from internal evidence that most of the first two acts of Pericles were written by someone else, probably George Wilkins,

plays in this period were often written collaboratively, much as film scripts are

John Gower (1330?–1408) was a poet who told the story of Pericles in his major work, the Confessio Amantis. The prologues spoken by the character of Gower

Yet the figure of Gower is far from being simply a liability, a relic from an outmoded style of drama. For one thing, his presence and his language stress the archaism of the play as a whole, and this is valuable in naturalizing unlikely events and extreme coincidences. Such coincidences, which are part of the world of romance and fairy tale, are easier to accept if the audience is continually reminded that what it is watching is an old story, an ancient song, a deliberate and self-conscious fiction. So Gower functions as a signal to the spectators that they may suspend their disbelief.

the enormous period of fourteen years. Why violate the “unity of time” so overtly? Because the structure of Shakespearean dramatic romance demands it, since that structure depends upon the growth and

maturation of a second generation, one old enough, by play's end, to marry.

Shakespeare in fact almost always mixes his genres, even from his earliest plays.

Romance is the pattern that underlies both psychology and myth: the quest hero, who stands at its center, who undertakes an adventure to prove himself, and to find his own secret

name. This sequence is familiar to us from the story of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, from Parzival, from Hamlet, and from Coriolanus—and it is omnipresent in Pericles.

romance will often cross over into the terrain of comedy (love, sex, and marriage) as well as history (succession, rule, and plenty).