Antony and Cleopatra

Summary

Antony and Cleopatra follows the last ten years of Mark Antony, one of the three men who rule the Roman world after Julius Caesar's murder, and of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, from Antony's dalliance in Alexandria to their deaths after Octavius Caesar's victory. Shakespeare took the story, often almost line by line, from Plutarch's Life of Antony in Thomas North's translation, but he turned Plutarch's moral warning into something far more divided. The play sets two worlds against each other: Rome, with its duty, discipline and calculation, and Egypt, with its pleasure, extravagance and imagination. Antony belongs to both and cannot choose. The play opens with a Roman soldier calling Antony a strumpet's fool, and Antony then declaring that kingdoms are clay beside his love. News of his wife Fulvia's death and of Pompey's rebellion calls him back to Rome. There, to patch up his quarrel with Octavius, he marries Octavius's sister Octavia, while his friend Enobarbus describes Cleopatra on her barge at Cydnus in the most famous speech of the play. A drunken feast on Pompey's galley shows the triumvirs at their ease, and Pompey refusing a chance to have them murdered. Antony soon returns to Egypt. Octavius treats this as an insult, deposes the third triumvir Lepidus, and makes war. Against all advice Antony fights at sea near Actium; in mid-battle Cleopatra's ships flee and Antony follows them, throwing away the day. Shamed, he rages, forgives, and rallies. He wins a skirmish on land, but his soldiers desert to Caesar, among them Enobarbus, who is so overwhelmed when Antony sends his treasure after him that he dies of grief. When the Egyptian fleet yields, Antony accuses Cleopatra of betrayal; she hides in her monument and sends word that she is dead. Antony asks his servant Eros to kill him; Eros kills himself instead, and Antony falls on his sword but fails to die at once. Carried to the monument, he dies in Cleopatra's arms. In the fifth act Cleopatra, captured, learns that Caesar means to lead her in his triumph at Rome. She dresses in her robe and crown, applies the asp brought to her in a basket of figs, and dies with her women Iras and Charmian. Caesar orders that she be buried beside Antony. The play is long, swift and crowded, with some forty short scenes ranging across the Mediterranean. Its poetry is among Shakespeare's richest, and it refuses easy verdicts. Roman voices call Antony's love dotage; Antony and Cleopatra speak of it as greatness. Octavius wins the world and seems small beside the lovers he defeats. Students should weigh what the play admires against what it shows: broken vows to Octavia, a great commander's ruin, suicides presented in a noble Roman style that Christian readers will want to examine rather than imitate. Content guidance: sexual innuendo throughout and several suicides; best suited to mature students in the last years of high school.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: Alexandria and the summons from Rome

  Philo frames Antony as a soldier unmanned by love; Antony waves away messengers from Rome. Learning of Fulvia's death and Pompey's threat, he resolves to leave despite Cleopatra's shifting moods. In Rome Octavius deplores Antony's revels; in Egypt Cleopatra longs for him and sends daily letters.

• Act 2: A marriage of policy and a feast at sea

  Antony and Octavius are reconciled, and Antony marries Octavia. Enobarbus describes Cleopatra's first meeting with Antony on the river Cydnus. A soothsayer warns Antony that Caesar's fortune overshadows his. Cleopatra beats the messenger who brings news of the marriage. The triumvirs make peace with Pompey and feast on his galley, where Pompey rejects Menas's offer to kill them.

• Act 3: The road to Actium

  Ventidius wins a victory in Parthia but holds back lest he outshine his general. Antony and Octavia part with Caesar uneasily, then quarrel. Caesar removes Lepidus and learns that Antony has crowned Cleopatra and her children in Alexandria. Antony chooses to fight at sea; Cleopatra's ships flee and he follows. He sends a challenge to Caesar, has Caesar's envoy Thidias whipped for kissing Cleopatra's hand, and calls for one more night of revelry. Enobarbus decides to leave him.

• Act 4: Desertion, defeat and Antony's death

  Antony bids his servants farewell; soldiers hear music as the god Hercules leaves him. Enobarbus deserts, receives the treasure Antony sends after him, and dies of remorse. Antony wins on land, loses again at sea, and blames Cleopatra, who retreats to her monument and reports herself dead. Eros kills himself rather than kill Antony; Antony's own sword-thrust fails to kill him outright, and he is carried to the monument to die in Cleopatra's arms.

• Act 5: The queen's last performance

  Caesar mourns Antony and sends Proculeius to secure Cleopatra. She is seized, describes to Dolabella her dream of an Emperor Antony, and learns of the planned triumph. Her treasurer Seleucus exposes her hidden wealth. A rustic brings asps in a basket of figs; Cleopatra dons her robe and crown and dies, followed by Iras and Charmian. Caesar orders a solemn joint burial.

Characters

• Mark Antony, triumvir, ruler of Rome's eastern provinces

  A great soldier and generous master, eloquent and magnetic, whose divided loyalties between Rome and Cleopatra destroy his judgment and his power.

• Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

  Witty, theatrical, imperious and changeable; she plays every mood to hold Antony, and in her death scene turns defeat into a self-staged apotheosis.

• Octavius Caesar, triumvir, later Augustus

  Julius Caesar's young heir: disciplined, calculating and successful, cold beside Antony but capable of grief at his rival's death.

• Domitius Enobarbus, Antony's officer and friend

  A blunt, ironic soldier who describes Cleopatra better than anyone, deserts Antony by reason, and dies of shame when Antony repays him with generosity.

• Octavia, Caesar's sister, Antony's second wife

  Gentle and dutiful, married to seal a political bargain; caught between brother and husband.

• Lepidus, the third triumvir

  A weak peacemaker mocked at the galley feast and later deposed by Caesar.

• Sextus Pompeius (Pompey), rebel commander at sea

  Son of Pompey the Great; he declines a sure chance to seize power because his honour will not let him consent to murder beforehand.

• Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra's waiting-women

  Lively companions in the early scenes who die with their queen at the end.

• Eros, Antony's servant

  Asked to kill his master, he kills himself instead.

• Scarus, a soldier loyal to Antony

  Fights on despite heavy wounds and reports bitterly on the flight at Actium.

• Dolabella and Proculeius, Caesar's officers

  Sent to Cleopatra; Dolabella, moved by her, reveals Caesar's plan to lead her in triumph.

• The Soothsayer, an Egyptian prophet

  Foretells the fates of Charmian and Iras and warns Antony that Caesar's fortune will always overpower his own.

• The Clown, a countryman

  Brings the asps in a basket of figs and jokes about the worm with grim innocence.

Lessons

• Rome against Egypt: two ways of measuring a life

  The play's scenes alternate between a Rome of duty, policy and self-command and an Egypt of pleasure, feeling and display. Neither world is simply right. Rome is efficient and often heartless; Egypt is generous and often faithless. Antony's tragedy is that he wants the honours of the first and the delights of the second without paying the price of either.

  • Pick one Roman scene and one Egyptian scene. List the words each uses for what matters most.
  • Philo calls Antony a strumpet's fool; Antony says kingdoms are clay. Which judgment does the rest of Act 1 support?
  • Is Octavius the hero of the play, its villain, or neither?

• Enobarbus and the cost of a reasoned desertion

  Enobarbus leaves Antony because reason says Antony is finished. When Antony sends his treasure after him without reproach, Enobarbus realises that loyalty was owed even when it seemed foolish, and he dies of remorse. His arc lets students examine the difference between prudence and betrayal, and what generosity can do to a guilty conscience.

  • Was Enobarbus wrong to leave? What reasons does he give in 3.13?
  • Why does Antony's gift hurt Enobarbus more than punishment would have?
  • Enobarbus dies calling on Antony to forgive him. What does his death suggest about the power of undeserved kindness?

• Shame at Actium and the failure of command

  At Actium Antony overrules his officers, fights where Caesar wants, and then abandons his fleet to follow Cleopatra. The play does not hide what this costs: soldiers who trusted him, a friend who leaves him, an empire. His shame in 3.11, and his recovery by blaming and then forgiving Cleopatra, show how a leader's private passion becomes public ruin.

  • List the warnings Antony receives before Actium. Why does he ignore them?
  • What does Scarus's report of the battle tell us that Antony's own words do not?
  • Antony tells Cleopatra she knew too well he would follow her. Whom does the play hold responsible for the flight?

• The high Roman fashion: judging the deaths

  Eros, Antony, Cleopatra and her women all choose death, and the play surrounds those deaths with splendid poetry. The Roman ideal of noble suicide, which Shakespeare found in Plutarch, is presented on its own terms; Christian readers in his own day, who held suicide to be a grave sin, would have watched the scenes with divided responses. Students should understand the Roman logic, admire the poetry, and still ask whether the play's beauty settles the moral question.

  • Why does Cleopatra choose to die rather than live as a captive? Which reasons are about Antony and which about herself?
  • Antony's death is clumsy and slow; Cleopatra's is ceremonial. What does the contrast suggest?
  • Can a scene be beautiful and still show a wrong choice? Use 5.2 to answer.

• Cleopatra's infinite variety

  Cleopatra changes mood from line to line: she sulks, mocks, faints on cue, beats a messenger, bargains with Caesar, and dies like a queen. Enobarbus says custom cannot stale her variety. The role was written for a boy actor; students can ask where performance ends and sincerity begins, and whether her final speeches show the same woman or a changed one.

  • In 1.3 Cleopatra tells Charmian to do the opposite of whatever Antony wants. Is this love, strategy, or both?
  • Cleopatra imagines a squeaking boy playing her in Rome. Why would Shakespeare draw attention to his own boy actor at this moment?
  • Is Cleopatra's grief for Antony in 4.15 and 5.2 sincere? What evidence counts?

Context

The action covers roughly 40 to 30 BC: the triumvirate of Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, Antony's alliance with Cleopatra, the battle of Actium (31 BC), and the deaths of the lovers in Alexandria (30 BC), which ended the Ptolemaic dynasty and left Octavius sole master of the Roman world, soon to be Augustus. For Shakespeare's audience Actium also had a providential resonance, since the peace of Augustus was the age into which Christ was born.

Composition

Usually dated 1606 to 1607. Edward Blount entered a book of Antony and Cleopatra in the Stationers' Register in May 1608, but no quarto is known. Shakespeare followed Plutarch's Life of Antony in Thomas North's 1579 English version (made from Amyot's French) very closely; Enobarbus's barge speech versifies North's prose. He may also have known Samuel Daniel's closet drama The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) and the Countess of Pembroke's Antonius (1592).

Reception

First printed in the 1623 First Folio, with almost no act or scene divisions; modern editors divide it into about forty scenes. For much of the Restoration and eighteenth century the stage preferred John Dryden's All for Love (1677), a neoclassical reworking of the same story. Shakespeare's play returned to favour with nineteenth-century and especially twentieth-century productions, and critics have long ranked its verse among his finest.

Comparisons

• Julius Caesar

  Antony and Octavius appear in Julius Caesar as allies avenging Caesar; this sequel shows the same men a decade later, the young Octavius grown into a master politician and Antony's gift for persuasion turned against himself.

• The Aeneid

  Virgil puts Actium on Aeneas's shield as the victory of Rome's gods over the monstrous gods of Egypt, and Aeneas leaves Dido for duty where Antony leaves Rome for love. Shakespeare inverts the Virgilian verdict, even having Antony imagine himself and Cleopatra outshining Dido and Aeneas among the dead.

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

  Read these together: North’s Plutarch is the play’s chief narrative source; compare Actium and the lovers’ end as biography versus tragedy. Genre difference matters more than a plot checklist. Companion essay on the Comparisons hub.

• Romeo and Juliet

  Both plays end with lovers who die by their own hands after a false report of death, but the young lovers of Verona are destroyed by a feud they did not make, whereas Antony and Cleopatra are middle-aged rulers whose choices bring down armies and kingdoms.

• The Twelve Caesars

  Suetonius's Life of Augustus shows the victor's side of the same history and the long reign that followed; set beside the play, it helps students see how little of Augustus's later greatness Shakespeare lets Octavius display.

• Coriolanus

  Written soon after Antony and Cleopatra and also drawn from Plutarch, Coriolanus gives a Roman hero with too little feeling for others instead of too much; the two plays together frame the extremes of Roman virtue and its failures.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Self-chosen death drives the last two acts: Eros, Antony, Cleopatra and her women die by their own hands or by the asp, framed in the Roman ideal of noble death that Shakespeare inherited from Plutarch. Caesar's closing report that Cleopatra's physician had told him of her inquiries into easy ways to die echoes Plutarch's account of her experiments with poisons. Mandragora appears as a sleeping draught, the galley scene treats drunkenness as political comedy, and Scarus's wounds give a glimpse of battlefield injury. Enobarbus's death has no wound or poison: he dies of grief and shame, an instance of the period's belief that strong passion could stop the heart. Retrospective readings of Antony's swings between rage and elation or of Cleopatra's feigned fainting as clinical states are interpretive and not offered by the play itself.

• Act 1, Scene 3

  Cleopatra stages sudden sickness and faintness to keep Antony from leaving, calling for her lace to be cut: illness used as theatre.

  Mind Body
• Act 1, Scene 5

  Cleopatra asks for mandragora so she might sleep away Antony's absence; mandrake was known as a soporific.

  Pharmacology Poisons Sleep Insomnia
• Act 2, Scene 7

  The feast on Pompey's galley: Lepidus is carried off drunk, the leaders dance an Egyptian bacchanal, and Menas's murder plot is refused amid the drinking.

  Alcohol
• Act 4, Scene 7

  Scarus jokes that his T-shaped wound has become an H, and shows more gashes as the battle turns briefly in Antony's favour.

  WAR Wounds
• Act 4, Scene 9

  Enobarbus dies of remorse, praying that his heart, dried with grief, will break; the watch at first think he sleeps.

  Grief Mind Body
• Act 4, Scene 14

  Eros kills himself rather than his master; Antony's sword-thrust fails to kill him and he lies wounded, begging the guards to end his life.

  Suicide WAR Wounds
• Act 5, Scene 2

  The asps in the basket of figs, Cleopatra's death and her women's, and the guards' and Caesar's examination of the bodies, including the trace of the aspic and her physician's report of her inquiries into easy ways to die.

  Suicide Pharmacology Poisons Physicians Doctors Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Retell the flight from Actium from the deck of one of Cleopatra's ships, through the eyes of a sailor who has to decide whether to obey the order to turn away.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Octavia might have had with her brother on the night she learns Antony has returned to Egypt.

• Essay

  Compare Plutarch's verdict on Antony with the play's. Does Shakespeare excuse Antony, or simply make his fall more moving?

• Poetry

  Write a short elegy for Enobarbus in his own blunt, plain voice rather than the lovers' high style.

• Classroom

  Read aloud Enobarbus's barge speech (2.2) beside the corresponding passage of North's Plutarch, and mark every change Shakespeare made; then discuss what the changes accomplish.

Further Reading

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Life of Antony), Plutarch (trans. Thomas North)

  Shakespeare's direct source.

• All for Love, John Dryden

  The 1677 neoclassical rewriting that replaced Shakespeare's play on the stage for a century.

• The Aeneid, Book VIII, Virgil

  Actium depicted on the shield of Aeneas from the Augustan side.

• Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background, M. W. MacCallum

• Oxford Lectures on Poetry, A. C. Bradley

  Includes Bradley's lecture on Antony and Cleopatra.