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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• Act 1, Scene 5

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Act 4, Scene 9

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

• 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.

• 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.