439K
(The rebel army id number carved into the bare skin of 8-year-old boy soldier, Citizen’s, back, Moses, Citizen and Me, page 163)
Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her first and, to date only, novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize.
Stats
Moses, Citizen and Me is 226 pages long, with 3 pages of acknowledgements. It is divided into a 2-page prologue then 12 chapters of narrative.
It tells the story of a family coping with the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991 to 2002). The book’s protagonist, London-based academic Julia (Julia/Delia, kind of similar sounding names), receives a disturbing phone call from the neighbour of her Uncle Moses back in Sierra Leone. This neighbour, Anita, tells Julia that Moses’ wife, her Auntie Adele, is dead and begs her to return to her homeland.
When Julia arrives in the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, she discovers that during the civil war, her Aunt Adele was killed by a child soldier who is none other than Adele’s own grandson Citizen. Now the deeply damaged 8-year-old boy is back from the war living with Uncle Moses – the man whose wife he killed – and Julia finds herself joining this troubled household and trying to help all concerned deal with the terrible situation.
There’s no suspense about it: Julia is on the flight by page 5 and confronting Moses on page 7. The interest or motivation is not in finding out whodunnit but, I think, is meant to be in savouring Jarrett-Macauley’s sensitive emotions and the healing bonds of the women and girls (Julia, Anita and the latter’s two young daughters) who help Moses and Citizen.
Style and attitude
I didn’t like Jarrett-Macauley’s attitude or style. It came over, to me, as self important and entitled. Here are the opening sentences.
It was late November, crisp and chilly, but I was dressed lightly and wore no tights, to avoid discomfort on the flight. I had arrived at the airport in good time, no thanks to the minicab driver who sat in the traffic on Lavender Hill, stubbornly refusing to U-turn. (p.3)
1) ‘Crisp and chilly’ struck me as a cliché, the first of many throughout the book (‘Grandma Sara, a slender gracious woman with vivid eyes…’ p.13)
2) Why does she want to tell me that she was wearing no tights? It establishes that she’s the kind of narrator who thinks the reader needs to know absolutely everything about her, down to the state of her undergarments.
3) Why does she think I need to know about her argument with her taxi driver? She’s the kind of privileged, self-absorbed international traveller who finds drivers and hotel staff annoying. ‘Out of my way riff-raff, don’t you know who I am? I am a writer.’
All this clutter about taxis, planes and tights is hurriedly swept out of the way so that she can arrive in Freetown, take a cab to Uncle Moses’ house, and confront the boy monster.
His colouring was mine. But his spirit was so far removed from anything I had ever met that I nearly wept. Suddenly I felt panic, separate and afraid. (p.7)
I realised I was in for a long haul. The first few pages suggested the book is going to be mostly about its narrator’s rare and precious feelings, subtle perceptions, deep emotions, wonderful insights and so on, with very little factual background or useful analysis.
It is written, at least to begin with, in what I’ve previously called the Numb Style. This is very common in modern novels. It’s where the narrative so completely lacks all colour, warmth, subtlety or sophistication, all distance, detachment, analysis, irony or humour that it’s as if the narrator has had a lobotomy. Instead, like someone with severe brain damage, the text just registers one thing. Then another thing. Then another thing. Then another thing.
Small pink apples lay on the plate and I ate one. I asked Citizen whether he would like one too. He did not answer. I didn’t know if he had heard me. Then I realised I had been whispering. (p.8)
E.M. Foster at the start of Passage To India gives us paragraphs of description which vividly bring to life the Indian setting. Closer to the subject matter here, Graham Greene in Heart of the Matter vividly describes the sights and sounds and smells, the people and buildings and noises of Freetown. Those novels’ descriptions invoke a kind of man-of-the-world knowledgableness, the adult ability to sift and judge, to select certain details and descriptions and order them into well-organised paragraphs in order to build up sophisticated word pictures.
Jarrett-Macauley has none of this. What she describes is herself. In the Numb Style.
It is essential to take this slowly. I don’t know whether other people were standing or watching me. I remember only the squawk that came out of my mouth: animal anguish. (p.8)
As you can see, the all-too-frequent corollary of the Numb Style is the narrator’s claim that they have undergone An Enormous Trauma. The style is so brain dead, flat and affectless because it denotes Huge Pain. It shouts at the reader Look at me! See how much I suffer! The Numb Style generally accompanies a sustained outpouring of self-dramatising self-importance which I always find very tiresome.
My feet were cold, so cold they were dying, and speech had deserted me. (p.8)
The midday sun was grilling the earth but my heart was seized with a terrible coldness indistinguishable from doubt. (p.216)
I was bored by page 10, not by the subject matter so much as by narrator’s self importance, self centredness, the relentless emphasis on self self self, by the narrator’s relishing of her own precious feelings and responses, all told with the dead-eyed numbness of a car crash survivor.
He had looked at his watch. It had stopped. He had shaken it. (p.11)
When Jarrett-Macauley is not doing the Numb Style, she switches to bad poetry. Centuries ago critics talked about the poetaster, ‘a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets with implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value.’ Same here. When she’s not saying Look at me how I’ve suffered she’s saying Look in awe at my poetic perceptions.
Anita was coming towards me, gliding, her movements liquid. She poured herself into a shape of love and wrapped it around my tense body. (p.8)
There’s a lot of background about how young Julia lived in Brixton and how Uncle Moses came to stay, there were parties at their house on Sunday afternoons, how one day her mum brought Adele home. Moses was instantly attracted to her and everyone knew they’d get married. And then they did get married.
At that moment Adele did not know and Moses did not know but we all knew that Adele would love Moses and Moses would love Adele. (p.29)
Maybe this is intended to recreate the mental impressions of her 7-year-old self. But a lot of the rest of the text is like this and comes over as the thought processes of a simpleton.
Incidentally, I’ve lived in and around Brixton for 20 years and nothing in Jarrett-Macauley’s numerous descriptions of the narrator’s girlhood upbringing there in any way bring it to mind or capture its swarming, polluted, shambling, vibrant, smelly, noisy, threatening aspects (I’ve been mugged there, twice).
Anyway, Julia and Moses go to visit the camp for ex-child soldiers at Doria outside Freetown, where the main thing that happens is she has a bad attack of the Numb Style.
I looked about to see what was familiar. Nothing was. There were no trees and no flowers. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and the sun was hidden from view. I looked down and the ground was solid yellow dirt with no life. I looked ahead and saw no women. (p.31)
This isn’t a description of an actual place but of a state of mind, the brain-damaged mental state of the Numb Style. And then we have passages of the magical lyrical style, particularly associated with women communing, sharing deep feelings as only women can.
Sally and I sat opposite one another and said nothing but exchanged thoughts. (p.33)
But mostly it’s about Julia and her reactions to hearing the stories of the child soldiers.
Inside I felt a hazy dark cloud and guessed I was about to pass out. I made myself concentrate hard (p.37)
I moved closer to him; I moved closer to myself, into a narrow space where every emotion was restored to its full essence. (p.38)
For three hours I lay in my room, my body moist with the apple’s juices, and for three hours life wandered through my limbs slowly and steadily, like nothing I had felt before. (p.39)
There’s a lot of this self-centred, self-important, self-promoting sensitivity on every page. It’s like taking a wrong turning at the gym and finding yourself in a mindfulness class. Everyone is being very sensitive. Everyone is in touch with their inner self. Everyone is fondling their chakras.
Visions
At the narrative progresses Julia starts having visions which leads us into imaginative recreations of what Citizen the child soldiers must have gone through. She imagines a procession of child soldiers marching up her neck, she imagines her head is a map of Sierra Leone, she talks repeatedly about trying to come down to earth, trying to ‘control her mind’ (p.51), as these visions become more powerful and last longer.
She imagines herself joining the band of child soldiers, being with them when Citizen is abducted, seeing what he sees, watching the stolen children being whipped and crying, hallucinatorily entering ‘another world’ (p.54).
Suddenly the narrator is in the rebel camp, at their base, watching the child soldiers cry and fight and beat each other, being terrorised into undertaking another attack. Citizen is 8 years old. He is a member of the Number-One-Burn-House-Unit led by ‘Lieutenant’ Ibrahim. His friend is Abu, recently abducted from a village the unity burned down. Abu cries for his mummy. Ibrahim whips him with a 6-foot whip. When Abu’s brother gets up to go Ibrahim simply shoots him in the head.
Later she finds herself, in sleep, transplanted to Gola Forest where, apparently, the child soldiers had their bases. In her dream she encounters a mathematician, Bemba G, who entrances the boy killers with the delights of maths. She describes the entire visionary experience as a ‘multidimensional event’.
Among women
These kinds of intense visions alternate with passages from the ‘real world’, where Julia has got involved in helping old Uncle Moses with his collection of rare photographs by native Leonean photographers (because, we learn, Moses was himself at one stage a professional photographer), or spends a lot of time with Anita, a single mum her own age (late 30s) with two daughters, Elizabeth who is just discovering boys, and 9-year-old Sara (p.91).
These scenes are consciously very female, dwelling on the restful healing routines of female chores (cooking and washing and hanging out to dry) and female chat (about men and children and school and clothes). Julia sits on a stool in the yard and lets Anita redo her cornrows.
These quiet feminine times are very obviously designed to be at the opposite pole from the pure destruction of the child soldiers sent to burn down entire villages and murder everyone which Julia increasingly hallucinates.
Thus, in ‘homely world’, Julia cooks chicken groundnut for Moses and Citizen, and for Anita, Elizabeth and Sara. It is a recipe taught her by her mother who in turn had it from her mother, Sally. So it is not just a meal, it is an invocation of the matriarchy or, less grandly, female family traditions.
It is also, like all the dishes cooked in all of these books (by Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) delicious. None of these characters is capable of bad cooking. (Aunt Ida comes to visit and remembers how Auntie Adele’s baking was always ‘perfect’, p.141.; ‘We stopped for lunch. Everyone helped with the preparation, even the children.’ p.221) In much the same way that they are all wonderfully articulate, speak in perfectly rounded sentences, are full of inventive and creative thoughts, are always kind and considerate.
Also, none of them have jobs. Julia the narrator lazes round all day, reading, dozing, day-dreaming, or helping Uncle Moses in his photography studio or chatting to neighbour Anita or cooking up delicious meals.
We sat quietly for most of that afternoon – Moses, Anita, Elizabeth, Olu, Citizen, Sara, and me. Elizabeth began to sing. (p.222)
The book is marketed as a novel about atrocities, but it’s also a depiction of a pretty cushy lifestyle. Made me jealous.
In the perfection of their characters (and their cooking), and the way nobody seems to have a job, the characters are quite unlike most of the people I’ve ever met. There is a novel-ish perfection to every aspect of the book.
Love and peace. The love is in the taste of the food. The peace I took to bed. I undressed and laid my body on the white sheet. Here I am again, black on white, ready to dream tonight. (p.83)
One day Olu came early, before Elizabeth had laid plans for the day. He invited us out to Lumley Beach where we spent several pleasant hours. (p.222)
I appreciate the way Delia Jarrett-Macauley creates this feminist cocoon, this women’s swoon, a calm, undramatic oasis of homeliness, and I know lots of women who live this life and it’s lovely. But it’s not my life or my view of the world. My world is full of hard work and rare breaks and horrifying news. Unlike:
When we had enough prepared vegetables, we put on a pot of rice and retreated into the lounge with our drinks….I leaned my head back on then lounger, balancing my glass on my stomach, and closed my eyes, an interlude before dinner. (p.224)
Aaaah. Sunday supplement perfection. It’s no accident, or it’s entirely apposite, that the novel ends with the narrator imagining herself, Citizen, her friend Chloe and her young daughter going to a burger place in Lavender Hill (not, interestingly, to any of the ethnic restaurants and cafes overflowing Brixton Market) and, after a burger and fries, having rich apple pie, the image of apples one of innocence and wholeness and linking back to the pink Leonean apples she tried to share with the numbstruck boy Citizen right at the start of the story. It’s a happy ending. Citizen has been cured by the love of good women, family and cooking.
The child soldiers’ production of Julius Caesar
Slowly the dream visions take over the text. By three-quarters of the way through Julia is spending nearly all her time in the forest. On page 143 she appears to leave ‘reality’ altogether and magically transport into the bush. Here she rejoins Bemba G and the community of child soldiers at a place called Black Rock, a geographical which changes shape to create various settings (p.169).
Citizen and all the other child soldiers are there and new ones arrive every day. Bemba G organises a daily routine, organises periods for play and sessions of storytelling where they either recount stories of their true experiences or are encouraged to make up stories the others can relate to.
I think this is all in her head. I think these longer and longer ‘visionary’ passages are where the narrator has completely crossed over into an otherworld of fantasy and fulfilment. Here, in this imagined camp, she befriends child victims like Victor with letters carved into his skull or Miriam with her baby, with Hina, KT, Peter, 6-year-old Isata and many others, 35 in all (p.159).
Emerging to dominate this fantasy is Bemba G’s notion of having the children act William Shakespeare’s plan Julius Caesar – which, in some way, overlaps with contemporary African playwright Thomas Dekker’s reworking of it in Krio as Juliohs Siza.
Preparations to perform the play are described at length, as is the way the children feel themselves deep into the roles, practice the assassination and the fighting, meld themselves into this 400-year-old narrative. Whether or not it’s ‘real’ in the same way as Julia’s grumpy taxi driver, flight and hanging out with Moses and Anita are ‘real’ is beside the point. It’s very powerful and develops into the best thing in the book.
In between rehearsals, Julia plays a sometimes central role in organising the children’s playtime, in listening to their individual complaints and nightmares and stories. Her familiarity with the processes involved in addressing, listening to and gently coaching children made me wonder whether Julia/Delia was a social worker. Or a theatre director, maybe. The 60 odd pages from 143 to 200 have more focus and running energy than the previous chapters of the book, which felt more langorous and episodic.
This final third of the text builds up to an actual performance of Julius Caesar for an audience of about 200, including tourists and British peacekeepers. It seems to be staged both out in the depths of the forest beside the shape-shifting Black Rock and in a compound in the capital city, Freetown, at the same time. This doesn’t matter, in fact it’s a positive, lifting the final third of the book into a peculiar dream-fantasy-haze environment which I found more gripping than the first two-thirds.
Did Jarrett-Macauley help produce such a production, of Julius Caesar, in Freetown or here in Brixton? It really feels like it because the text is packed with detail about the Shakespeare play, about particular lines and scenes and moments, and a deep understanding of how the actors approach their parts and different scenes, having sudden insights, matching themselves to their roles, watching the whole thing suddenly crystallise into focus. Right down to the way that, at the end, appreciative journalists throng the ‘green room’ and ask for interviews and photos of the children. Despite being on one level a fantasy, it’s completely gripping.
Futility
When she’s in the ‘real’ world, Julia is helping Uncle Moses sort out his huge collection of photos, many by him, but also snaps by local Leonean photographers, so there are passages about some of these photographers and their work. She’s particularly drawn to (the real life figure of) Alphonso Lisk-Carew who travelled up-country in the 1910s to photograph tribal peoples (pages 105 to 107). At other moments, Moses goes off into long reminiscences about his wooing of wife Adele in the 1960s. In both eras (1910s, 1960s) Julia imagines scenes and conversations, notes records and writings, observes how the people of those times were artlessly optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. How, Julia repeatedly asks herself, did they screw it up so badly? How did they let the country fall into civil war and then collapse into out-and-out barbarism?
In among these reminiscent passages are scenes where, at parties, at dinner, at clubs, Moses and his wife and friends discuss politics and what the country needs. There are extended flashbacks to a period (in the 1960s?) when Moses did some photography work for a politician named Harris (for election brochures and such). At one point this guy tells Moses: ‘We need to make our country a success. You can help.’ (p.115)
Well, here we are in 2024 and Sierra Leone is still one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking 182nd out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (Action Against Hunger). It is on most measures a basket case, the majority of its population living in abject poverty, still suffering the repercussions from its ruinous civil war, with tens of thousands condemned to live out their lives without hands, arms or legs, chopped off by the rebels.
Set beside such barely comprehensible savagery, the trite vapourings of characters from the 60s and 70s about ‘building a better country’ seem mad.
What this book is is an immersion in a particular kind of sensitive female consciousness, with lots of emphasis on the strength of women and the beauty of women, the quiet heroism of women doing the household chores and women cooking and women washing, women caring for their sons and daughters and their ageing parents, women healing the sick and rehabilitating the damaged.
I took her hand as a token of female affection: we are safe. (p.188)
A novel about a woman having dreams and visions which open up into an otherworld of alternative values and perceptions.
An invisible thread runs between the hungry empty ghosts and our earthly selves. As time passes, the veil between our worlds thins. I can feel these souls deeply. They are the same as us but without the blood. (p.185)
That’s what you’re getting into if you read it, and I know this kind of writing about strong sensitive woman and the depth of women’s community and the healing power of women is very popular and very successful. As I mentioned at the start, Moses, Citizen & Me won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to be awarded the prize. But, I’m afraid, although it gains a lot of power in the final quarter, the book was not, in the end, for me.
Recent news from Sierra Leone
Although the civil war ended in 2002 and the era of child soldiers is over, Sierra Leone continues to be one of so many African countries whose people struggle to rule themselves.
Uncle Moses peeked at me to check if I was ready. ‘This is what you people must do, do not be held back by as many rules as we were. Be free!’ I understood what he meant, yet what had we achieved with our freedom? War. (p.97)
Sierra Leone’s most recent (failed) coup took place on 26 November last year.
CLERIMONT: For God’s sake, let’s effect it: it will be an excellent comedy of affliction…
Epicoene is an older archaic spelling, nowadays we spell it ‘epicene’. Epicene means ‘having characteristics of both sexes or no characteristics of either sex; of indeterminate sex’. Intersex is, I think, the modern term.
Cast
Men
Morose: A gentleman that loves silence
Sir Dauphine Eugenie: A knight, Morose’s nephew
Ned Clerimont: A gentleman, Dauphine’s friend
Truewit: Dauphine’s other friend
Epicoene: A young gentlewoman, supposedly the silent woman
Sir John Daw: A knight, Epicoene’s servant
Sir Amorous la Foole: A knight
Thomas Otter: A land and sea captain
Cutbeard: A barber, also aids in tricking Morose
Mute: One of Morose’s servants
Women
Madame Haughty: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Madame Centaure: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Mavis: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Trusty: one of the Ladies Collegiates
Mistress Otter: The captain’s wife
Parson
Plot summary
Act 1
London. Morose is a wealthy old man with an obsessive hatred of noise, going as far as to live on a street too narrow for carts to enter. Morose is morbidly and comically averse to noise of any kind. He lives in a room with double walls and treble ceilings, the windows closed and caulked. It has a voicetube from his room to his servant, aptly named Mute. If they are in his presence, he insists he answers his questions by shaking their left or right legs. He turned away a serving man who came to the house because his new shoes squeaked!
With the miserly ill-will typical of a Jonson character, Morose plans to disinherit his nephew, Sir Dauphine Eugenie, partly because of them mean practical jokes Eugenie has carried out in the past, aided by his two buddies, Ned Clerimont and Truewit.
Dauphine concocts a plan with Cutbeard, Morose’s barber (itself a joke, since barbers were meant to be notoriously gabby), such that Cutbeard presents to Morose a prime candidate for marriage, a young and – here’s the point – very quiet woman to marry.
This main plot continues with Morose being introduced to Epicœne and testing her with questions to see whether she really is a silent woman. He tells her not to succumb to the temptations of the court and tells her about the virtues of silence. Under the assumption that his fiancée, Epicœne, is an exceptionally quiet woman, Morose excitedly plans their marriage. Unbeknownst to him, Dauphine has arranged the whole match for purposes of his own.
But there is a jungle of sub-plots which help to make this play unusually long. First there are two idiots – affected fops, Sir Jack Daw who thinks of himself as a clever intellectual who likes to drop Latin phrases into conversation, and Sir Amorous La Foole, a fop, who fancies himself as a great man-about-town and hosts grand parties. He’s holding a big feast tonight at the house of Captain Otter, a former sea captain and then supervisor of a bear-pit, whose wife is a relative of La Foole’s.
Second, we are told about a ‘college’ of strong-minded women, the so-called ‘Collegiates’ Lady Haughty, Lady Centaure, Mistress Dol Mavis:
an order between courtiers and country-madams, that live from their husbands; and give entertainment to all the wits, and braveries of the time, as they call them: cry down, or up, what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion, with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditical authority; and every day gain to their college some new probationer.
These ladies, too, have been invited to La Foole’s big party.
Act 2
Truewit takes it upon himself to visit Morose a) upsetting him by blowing a horn, such as postmen use but b) with the main purpose of delivering an extended lecture on why women are awful and so Morose should not marry. Almost all of this is copied from Juvenal’s satire against women, and it genuinely terrifies Morose about the prospect of marriage. Truewit warns him he will be made so miserable by a wife that he wants to kill himself, and humorously leaves him a noose behind on his departure.
Jack Daw fancies himself as a poet and so Eugenie and Clerimont egg him on to show his ignorance by a) reciting one of his bad poems and b) giving his ignorant opinions about the famous poets of history, during which it becomes clear that he has a vast library but has never read a book, taking the names on the covers to be famous authors even when, in fact, they are the titles. So, an extended satire on would-be literary pretentiousness.
Truewit returns to his friends and proudly announces that he has put Morose off marrying, for life. Eugenie is devastated and only now reveals to his friend that they have been planning for months to marry him to Epicœne precisely because she will be an agent of Eugenie’s and get Morose to reinstate him as his heir.
Scene 5
Cutbeard presents Epicœne to Morose. Morose has come to suspect that Truewit was sent by Eugenie deliberately to put him off marrying – and that has made him more determined than ever to bed wed! Morose cross-questions Epicœne at length, with Epicœne only rarely answering and then very briefly and softly. Excellent! Just what Morose requires. Morose is so delighted he gives Cutbeard the freehold to the property he was renting.
Scene 6
Cutbeard reports back his success to Eugenie, Truewit and Clerimont, who are delighted. When he’s gone they take the mickey out of the barber’s fondness for Latin tags, they are surrounded by pretentious idiots. Truewit suggests the practical joke of redirecting all the guests heading for La Foole’s feast round to Morose’s to celebrate his wedding. The noise will drive him mad. They all agree it’s an excellent idea.Then they mock Tom Otter, who they rank alongside La Foole and Jack Daw as a fool. Otter has retired from the bear-baiting business to open a pub which he keeps stocked with tankards with animal heads. He is hen-pecked by his powerful wife.
Act 3
Act 3. Scene 1. Tom Otter’s pub
Otter is being nagged and harangued by his wife who ridicules everything about him. The wits – Eugenie, Clerimont and Truewit establish that she is preparing to host La Foole’s party. The wits persuade Jack Daw to divert the party-goers to Morose’s house. La Foole enters and they con him, telling him Daw was trying to spoil his party but La Foole can get his own back be deliberately relocating his party to Morose’s house – which he promptly agrees to do.
Act 3. Scene 4
Cut to Morose who has been married by a feeble Puritan preacher with a heavy cold. And now takes place the Comic Reversal of the play which is that… Epicœne, once wed, turns out to be a chatterbox and a shrew, and immediately falls to nagging her poor husband.
MOROSE: Oh immodesty! A manifest woman!
She immediately starts bossing him around, not just him the servants, too. When Mute comes in and starts making the silent bodily signals Morose has requested, Epicœne scolds him and tell him no longer to use such silly unnatural signing.
MOROSE: She is my regent already! I have married a Penthesilea, a Semiramis, sold my liberty to a distaff.
Truewit arrives and ironically congratulates Morose on sticking to his guns despite his (Truewit’s) advice. Morose curses the barber Cutbeard and he and Truewit engage in several pages of comic abuse and elaborately appropriate curses for a barber.
Act 3. Scene 6
Daw arrives with three of the leading Collegiates to Morose’s horror. The Collegiate ladies are impressed by Epicœne’s self-possession and decide to invite her into the college. They then set about berating Morose for the hole-in-the-wall way he’s got married and criticise him for not having costumes and music and masques and an epithalamium. Morose shrivels with misery.
Act 3. Scene 7
Clerimont arrives with musicians who all start playing at once. La Foole arrives with Mistress Otter and her servants carrying an elaborate wedding dinner. Obviously this is all to the mounting horror and disbelief of Morose, but there is additional comedy when Mistress Otter argues with some of the Collegiates about the order they should enter Morose’s house. Sisters etc. Then arrives Captain Otter, with some trumpeters and drummers. Morose’s misery is complete.
Act 4
Act 4. Scene 1 Morose’s house
Clerimont and Truewit laughingly describing the racket in the house. Dauphine enters and tells Truewit Morose has retired to the tallest attic in the house and wrapped his head in nightcaps. Truewit proceeds to give an extended description of ‘women’ i.e. how they need to be pursued, only pretend to be coy, sometimes must be taken by force. Enough to make a feminist explode. Truewit’s role, after all, is the lecturer, compared to his lighter friends, and he delivers a massive block of prose about how to chat up and insinuate yourself with all types of women. Off the back of this rodomontade we learn that Eugenie is taken with the Collegiates, all of them.
Act 4. Scene 2
Enter Daw, La Foole and Otter who has brought his tankards with the lids shaped into the heads of different animals. They’re already drunk and proceed to have a drinking game and get even drunker. The three wits decide to encourage drunk Otter to express what he really feels about his wife, and get her to come and eavesdrop. He is predictably rude about all wives, in fact gives a very funny description of how Mistress O is assembled from a host of false parts (hair, eyebrows, teeth) manufactured in all parts of London, which have to be laboriously assembled every morning. Overhearing, Mistress O is predictably furious and falls on, starts beating him, while the wits order the trumpets and drums to play and yell, ‘A battle, a battle.’ Presumably all wives and husbands in the audience were laughing with recognition or mock horror.
Morose appears with a huge sword and drives the musicians and Mistress Otter away and runs off shouting, Eugenie follows him, and Truewit and Clerimont are left laughing. But it is very typical of Jonson that their last comments are not charitable, but are spiteful.
TRUEWIT: His humour is as tedious at last, as it was ridiculous at first.
Earlier Truewit had commented on Jack Daw that:
TRUEWIT: A mere talking mole, hang him! no mushroom was ever so fresh.
A fellow so utterly nothing, as he knows not what he would be.
Truewit is excellent at being vicious about people behind their backs. He is the driving force of the play and his motivation is malice and spite.
Act 4. Scene 3
The Collegiate ladies instruct Epicœne. They tell her to exploit her husband mercilessly, to demand a carriage and servants. And then to encourage men to court her, at the theatre, at the Exchange. For taking lovers never hurt anyone. In other words, a stereotyped list of all the behaviours moralists blamed women for.
Act 4. Scene 4
Enter Morose telling Dauphine he would do anything, anything, to be free of all these guests, this racket and his wife. Dauphine positions himself as the One Man Who Can Fix It – with a view to being reinstated as the heir.
Morose is so beside himself that Epicœne then declares he is going insane or having a fit (Truewit lets us know that she is being paid to play a part and is devising inspired means of her own to torment Morose; he is genuinely impressed). This leads into a comic couple of pages where the half-wit men (La Foole, Daw, Otter, ‘a brace of baboons’, Truewit calls them) and the pretentious women outdo each other with absurd remedies for mental illness drawn from a selection of wildly inappropriate contemporary authors.
On and on they pile the agony, Epicœne saying she will read him from each of these authors, at length, every night. We learn that Epicœne talks in her sleep. And snores. Very loudly. Morose storms off followed by Dauphine. The others set about insulting Dauphine behind his back so Truewit instructs Epicœne to go in and praise him to the skies. Dauphine recognises that Truewit is driving the narrative. ‘You have many plots,’ he says.
Act 4. Scene 5
Truewit vows to do down the baboons who were so recently denigrating Dauphine to the ladies. Hide behind the arras he tells Clerimont and Dauphine and watch a master at work. Enter Jack Daw. Truewit persuades Daw that La Foole is after his blood. He hustles Daw into a side room and locks the door, and then loudly pretends as if La Foole had charged up with drawn sword ready to hack Daw to pieces. He begs Dauphine to drag La Foole away, waits a beat then opens the door to Daw who is now petrified and convinced La Foole will murder him. Much ironic humour for the audience as Truewit monstrously exaggerates how many weapons La Foole was carrying and makes Daw admit he’d gladly sacrifice an arm or a leg so long as he lives. Truewit locks him into the room again.
Clerimont asks if he can have a role in part two but Truewit says it requires tact and quick wits. As you might expect, La Foole now appears in the corridor and Truewit similarly persuades him that Daw is out for his blood. Terrified, cowardly La Foole lets himself be pushed into the other room of this corridor and Truewit pretends to be talking to Daw now, who he pretends is outside with a bomb! He shouts through the door to La Foole what terms he will accept. Anything anything, La Foole replies.
Now Clerimont and Dauphine come out of hiding between the arras. Clerimont has the bright idea of going to fetch the ladies, so they can see the climax of the comic drama Truewit has contrived, although Dauphine thinks this is going too far, thinks Truewit is in love with his own contrivances.
Truewit now invites Daw out of the room where he’s been hiding and says La Foole is prepared to let bygones be bygones after payment of a small forfeit. First Truewit teases him by saying La Foole wanted his upper lip and six teeth! Then just two front teeth. Then that he’d be content with five good hard kicks. Daw agrees and Truewit signals to Dauphine, who is heavily disguised, comes out of hiding and delivers five swift kicks. ‘Six’ says Daw, so Dauphine gives him one more then retires. Grateful for his escape, Daw hands over his sword and is locked back in his room.
Now Truewit gives La Foole the same treatment, tells him to come out and, to save his life, must submit to be blindfolded and beaten around the mouth. So once he’s blindfolded Dauphine sneaks in (pretending to be Daw) and beats him round the mouth. Truewit pretends to restrain him and eventually send him away. He unblindfolds La Foole and locks him in his room
Now – all this was because La Foole and Daw joined in a bit of drunken banter about Dauphine and insulted his reputation, saying he was poor and forced to run errands for a living. This extended farce seems both elaborate and cruel. Cruel judgement, disproportionate and harsh punishment, is a characteristic of Jonson’s comedies.
Act 4. Scene 6
The Collegiate ladies arrive onstage having witnessed part of the last scene which has successfully disgraced La Foole and Daw in their opinion, and hugely raised Dauphine. They all fancy him and itemise his attractions.
And now Truewit crowns his farce by calling the two ridiculed knights out of their hidey rooms – first he and Dauphine cautioning the ladies not to titter or give any sign that have seen the ridiculing. And so Daw and La Foole emerge from their rooms and greet each other with excessive politeness and bow and smile and everyone else on stage and in the audience knows what fools they are.
Act 4. Scene 7
Enter Morose, back from the courthouse where he tried to find a lawyer to divorce him but couldn’t they were all so busy shouting at each other. Truewit promises he’ll get him the best lawyer in town, and packs Morose off inside. Then asks Dauphine to run and fetch Otter and the barber Cutbeard from wherever they’ve gone. He will dress them up and transform them into a learned divine and an imposing lawyer. This will be the final humiliation for act 5.
Act 5
Act 5. Scene 1
A scene in which Clerimont eggs Daw and La Foole on to boat about their feats with women, by telling them their reputations go before them as ladykillers, the Collegiate ladies all talk about them… and then lets them both stutter and hand over to the other and try to avoid having to tell any specific anecdote, giving the strong impression they might both be virgins. Clerimont even asks if it’s true they’ve both enjoyed Epicœne’s favours and they mumblingly admit that, yes, it might be true.
Act 5. Scene 2
Dauphine really is a hit with the ladies. Here we see him walking with Lady Haughty who flatters him then tells him to come to her chamber tonight, bouncy bouncy, her maid will let him in, she gives him a jewel to wear for her sake.
She is closely followed by Lady Centaure who tells him not to trust Lady Haughty, that she is over 50 and paints her face, you should see her first thing in the morning! No, he should come and visit her, Lady Centaure, one evening… She is followed by Mavis (another of the Collegiates) who gives him an Italian poem to translate before flitting off. Enter Clerimont who congratulates him on his popularity with the women.
Also to tell him that the rest of the company have carried on getting Daw and La Foole so drunk and egging them on so much that they are both fiercely claiming to have slept with Epicœne, almost vowing to have done so today. Dauphine is delighted, as their comeuppance is inevitable.
Act 5. Scene 3
Enter Truewit, the malicious impresario of the play. As planned he has dressed up Cutbeard and Otter as a canon lawyer and a divine, respectively. Now we realise why it was made a notable feature of both characters that they had a penchant for Latin tags: now they can go made and quote all kinds of dog Latin each other, while Morose stands between them being driven mad by their incomprehensible jargon.
Act 5. Scene 4
The ladies enter and interrupt the lawyerly bickering. Epicœne asks whether anyone ever saw anything so shameful as a bridegroom on his wedding day employing two professionals to help him get divorced. The women suggest they beat or blanket Otter and Cutbeard out of the building. Truewit prompts Morose to come forward and throw himself on the mercy of the women, abjectly apologise and reveal that he is, in fact, impotent!
The ladies all gasp in horror, but then insist he is inspected by a doctor; or why not by them (asks Mistress Otter) and Morose is reeling from this suggestion, when Epicœne caps it by saying she forgives him and will take him anyway.
At this point, there is yet another torment, namely Clerimont bringing forward Daw and La Foole who, if you remember, had been drunkenly banteringly persuaded to confess that they had slept with Epicœne. Reassured that Morose actually wants them to say this, they both agree, that yes, they have had Epicœne as their mistress. This crushes Morose right into the dirt.
MOROSE: O my heart! wilt thou break? wilt thou break? this is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devised! Marry a whore, and so much noise!
Now at his lowest point, his nephew Dauphine steps forward and offers to save him. He tells Morose that he well knows that he, Dauphine, has repeatedly asked to be given £500 a year out of Morose’s annual income of £1,500 and the full amount upon Morose’s death. Now he gives him a document to sign to that effect. Morose signs it, all the company witness it – at which Dauphine steps forward and takes off Epicœne’s wig.
Epicœne is a boy! Dauphine has been planning the con, and paying Epicœne to act a woman, for 6 months. Now he dismisses Morose who shuffles back into his house without a word. He takes off Cutbeard and Otter’s disguises, telling the former he can keep his property and the latter that he will be reconciled with his wife.
A boy! Epicœne is a boy! Truewit congratulates Dauphine who has, for once, outwitted even him (Truewit). Truewit points out that the fact Epicœne is a boy makes a mockery of Daw and La Foole’s claims to have slept with her, but not with gentle ribaldry, with the savage cruelty which is so characteristic of Jonson:
Away, you common moths of these, and all ladies’ honours. Go, travel to make legs and faces, and come home with some new matter to be laugh’d at: you deserve to live in an air as corrupted as that wherewith you feed rumour.
He tells the Collegiate ladies to take care of such wretched braggarts in future, then steps forward and briskly asks the audience to clap if they liked the play, now that Morose has gone into his house he will not be disturbed.
Comedy of affliction
CLERIMONT: For God’s sake, let’s effect it: it will be an excellent comedy of affliction…
It’s hard to think of this as anything other than bullying. In the main plot the entire cast bands together to bully and humiliate and vex Morose. In the big farce sub-plot in act 4, Truewit contrives the extended humiliation and shaming of Jack Daw and La Foole. The plot amounts to as much humiliation, shaming and vexation as can be fitted into three hours.
Morose repeatedly begs for mercy:
MOROSE: Alas, do not rub those wounds, master Truewit, to blood again: ’twas my negligence. Add not affliction to affliction.
Pleas which are completely ignored and, indeed, mocked. When Morose trusts anyone, they deceive him, especially the self-appointed impresario of his torments, Truewit.
MOR: Do your pleasure with me gentlemen; I believe in you: and that deserves no delusion.
TRUEWIT: You shall find none, sir [Morose exits]… but heap’d, heap’d plenty of vexation.
Behind their backs Truewit is scathing. I found his character far more despicable than Morose’s. In fact what is wrong with wanting a quiet life? Whereas reducing a fellow human being to tears of despair doesn’t strike me as being a particularly admirable achievement.
MOROSE: O, my torment, my torment!
Themes
Quite clearly the play’s two main themes are gender and speech. They both seem pretty straightforward. As to gender, the three wits – Truewit, Clerimont and Dauphine – unman and humiliate all the other male characters, most notably Morose (who is forced to admit he is not a ‘real’ man at the play’s climax, then is dismissed) Daw and La Foole (who are subjected to the extended kicking and punching ordeal before being revealed as monstrous liars regarding sleeping the Epicene). Otter and Cutbeard are used to bring out the sham knowledge and empty argot of doctors and lawyers.
And ‘women’ as a gender come in for sustained and vitriolic criticism from Truewit on numerous occasions, besides being portrayed as manipulating exploiters of men who pretend to a noble sisterhood, while in fact secretly scheming and undermining each other (the Collegiate ladies) or straight-out nags and shrews (Mistress Otter).
As to language, clearly the entire play is built on the destruction of Morose’s wish for silence, and celebrates the triumph of cacophony, itself made up of countless different styles and rhetorics, from Mistress Otter’s nagging, to Truewit’s reversioning of Roman satire, to Otter and Cutbeard’s preposterous pretence of Latin learning as the fake doctor and divine. There’s the fake sisterhood of the Collegiate women and the pretended literary knowledge of Jack Daw and La Foole. The closer you look at it, the more you realise the play represents a kind of riot of rhetorics.
The more the play’s charivari of gulls and manipulators babbled on, the more I sympathised for Morose’s forlorn wish for them all just to shut up and go away.
Historic position
Apparently, Epicoene was the first play to be performed when the London theatres re-opened after the restoration of Charles II. He returned to England in May 1660 and as quickly as the next month some of the theatres had re-opened and Epicoene was being staged.
R.V. Holdsworth, in the introduction to the Mermaid edition of the play, speculates that this may have been because the play features many characteristics which appealed to the audience of the time and went on to influence or be reflected in many Restoration comedies, namely: it’s concern with upper-class manners and morals, the centrality of a mock marriage, the cynical libels on both sexes, the fundamental motive of the play – which is a young man extracting money from an old relative – and its colourful parade of wits, fops and middle-aged grotesques.
To my astonishment, John Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) considered the construction of Epicoene ‘the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language.’ Really? Rather than any of Shakespeare’s comedies? This surprising opinion is an indicator of the height and influence of Jonson’s reputation for generations after his death.
Boys
It beggars belief that the play was written to be performed by boys, specifically the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels. It is packed out with bawdy double entendres and sexual references, not least Daw and La Foole’s boasting about their sexual escapades, all the Collegiate women making sexual appointments with Dauphine, Morose shouting that he is impotent – every page is (according to the notes) packed with sexual innuendo. And all performed by children!
The Wikipedia article on boy players says the actors were generally aged 8 to 12, chosen because they hadn’t yet hit puberty or their voices broken! I wonder if anyone in the modern era has tried to restage any of these plays a) entirely played by boys b) with a cast of 8 to 12 year olds? What would be the aesthetic, psychological, comedic impact of watching a lot of 8 to 12 year old boys spending three hours speaking a sustained barrage of sexual innuendo?
What follows are notes on E.F. Watling’s introduction to his translation of Seneca’s plays, published by Penguin Books in 1966, then a summary with comments of the four Seneca plays it contains:
Seneca’s biography
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 4 BC Corduba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had studied rhetoric in Rome and returned to Spain to bring his sons up with respect for the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic, which had ceased to exist a generation earlier, following the victory of Octavian against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC.
As a young man Seneca the Younger studied Stoic philosophy. He lived in Egypt for a while, probably due to ill health (tuberculosis?) and because his aunt was the wife of the prefect there. By 33 AD he was back in Rome, married to his first wife (whose name is unknown) and achieving recognition as a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric.
Seneca had run-ins with several of the early emperors. At one point he was forced to retire into private life due to the suspicions of Caligula. He returned to public life on the accession of the emperor Claudius but in the very same year, 41 AD, was exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with the new emperor’s niece, Julia, probably at the instigation of Claudius’s scheming third wife, Valeria Messalina. Seneca spent eight years on Corsica during which he wrote a number of philosophical works.
In 48 Claudius had Messalina executed for (supposedly) conspiring to overthrow him, and married his fourth wife, the equally scheming Agrippina. But it was Agrippina who asked for the recall of Seneca and made him tutor to her 12-year-old son, Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power 6 years later, in 54 AD, aged just 17, Seneca became his principal civil adviser (Nero had a separate adviser for military affairs, Sextus Afranius Burrus).
Some attribute the fact that the first five years of Nero’s reign were relatively peaceful and moderate to Seneca’s restraining influence. According to Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca taught Nero how to speak effectively, and wrote numerous speeches for him to address the senate with, praising clemency, the rule of law, and so on.
However, palace politics slowly became more poisonous, Nero came to rule more despotically, and Seneca’s position and wealth made him the target of increasing political and personal attacks. In 62 Seneca asked to be allowed to retire from public life, a conversation with Nero vividly described (or invented) in Tacitus’s Annals. Emperor and adviser parted on good terms but, over the next few years, Seneca’s name was cited in various plots and conspiracies.
The largest of these was the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, a plot to assassinate Nero which was discovered at the last moment (the morning of the planned murder), and which, as the suspects were interrogated and tortured by Nero’s Guard, turned into a bloodbath of the conspirators.
Historians think Seneca was not an active conspirator, and debate how much he even knew about the plot, but whatever the precise truth, Nero ordered him put to death. Hearing of this, Seneca, en route back to Rome from Campania, committed suicide with a high-minded detachment that impressed the friends who attended the deed, and made him a poster boy for Stoic dignity. Many classic paintings depict the noble scene. Nero himself was, of course, to commit suicide just three years later, in 68 AD.
The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez (1871)
Seneca’s works
Seneca was a prolific writer. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, an extensive work of natural science, and 124 letters of moral exhortation to his friend Lucilius. The letters are probably his most accessible and popular work.
But Seneca is also credited as the author of ten plays (though scholars bicker: maybe it’s nine; maybe it’s eight). The plays are all tragedies, loosely modeled on Greek tragedy and featuring Greek tragic protagonists. The Romans had a technical term for these, fabula crepidata, meaning a Roman tragedy with a Greek subject.
Seneca’s plays make a striking contrast to his philosophical works not only in tone but also in worldview. The Letters to Lucilius go into great detail about how to banish all attachments, emotions and feelings from your life in order to achieve a calm, rational, Stoic detachment. By contrast, the plays are full of gruesomely bloodthirsty plots and characters wrought to the utmost degree of emotional extremity. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the works seemed so utterly different in worldview that scholars thought Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist were two different people.
Critics have been very harsh indeed about these plays. The editor of the Penguin edition, E.F. Watling, accuses them of ‘bombastic extravagance’, of ‘passionate yet artificial rhetoric’. The German critic Schlegel is quoted accusing them of ‘hollow hyperbole’, ‘forced and stilted’. Watling cites the consensus among scholars who condemn them as:
horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnant of declining Roman taste. (Introduction, p.8)
And yet Seneca’s plays had a very important influence on Renaissance theatre, influencing Shakespeare and other playwrights in England, and Corneille and Racine in France.
Seneca’s tragedies are customarily considered the source and inspiration for what became known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy’ in Elizabethan theatre, starting with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of the 1580s, and continuing on into the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I, 1603 to 1625).
Their importance to Elizabethan drama explains why so fastidious a critic as T.S. Eliot, obsessed as he was with the period, praised Seneca’s plays, singling out Phaedra and Medea – although most critics consider Thyestes to be Seneca’s ‘masterpiece’.
Seneca’s tragedies
Agamemnon
Hercules or Hercules furens (The Madness of Hercules)
Medea
Oedipus
Phaedra
Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women)
Thyestes
Troades (The Trojan Women)
The Penguin paperback edition of the plays, edited and translated by E.F. Watling, contains four of the ‘best’ plays – Thyestes, Phaedra, Oedipus and The Trojan Women. (It also contains an oddity, a play titled Octavia, which resembles Seneca’s tragedies in melodramatic tone but, since it features Seneca as a character, and describes his death, cannot have been by him. Scholars guesstimate that it was probably written soon after Seneca’s death by someone influenced by his style and aware of the events of his lifetime.)
Watling’s critique
Watling’s introduction pulls no punches in detailing Seneca’s shortcomings:
He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of true tragedy: he only recognises the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start and pursued ruthlessly to its end. (p.25)
Seneca routinely stops the action of his ‘plots’ to give characters long, highly-strung, melodramatic speeches, which might not even be particularly relevant to the plot and often take no account of who else is on stage at the time.
His technique of dramatic speech is extremely narrow, having only two modes: either a character is delivering a long monologue, or he deploys stichomythia, where just two characters swap exchanges of dialogue; rarely anything more complicated than that.
Many of the long speeches and even some of the exchanges are so stock and stereotyped that they could easily be swapped from one play to another without anyone noticing. Watling names some of these stock topics – the ‘simple life’ speech, the ‘haunted grove’ speech and ‘the king must be obeyed’ dialogue, which all crop up in several of the plays.
The climax of all the plays is always a gruesome barbarity and Seneca uses the Greek conventions of having it take place offstage and described by a breathless messenger who comes onstage hotfoot from the scene. The messengers’ speeches all follow the exact same formula: the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer.
Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. (p.24)
The Chorus declaims its verse in a different metre from the rest of the play. They are known as Choric odes. The Choric odes’s main purpose is to comment on the main action but they often feature a clotted recital of myths or legends similar or related to the one we are witnessing.
The Chorus also often expresses ideas which contradict the worldview of the play and even of the main action. For example they will powerfully express the idea that death is the end of life and there is nothing after, except that… the plays feature ghosts and numerous descriptions of the classic souls in hell (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion). There is no attempt at consistency – immediate and sensational effect is what is strived for.
The sense of unnecessary repetition is echoed at a verbal level where Seneca creates a drenched and intense effect by repeating synonyms for just one idea – Watling says examples in English would be larding a speech with the synonymous words anger-rage-ire, or fear-terror-dread. No idea is left to float subtly but is bludgeoned into submission by repetition.
Watling sums up Seneca’s plays as 1) sporting a bombastic, over-the-top rhetoric, deriving from 2) gruesomely bloodthirsty plots, which 3) are staged with a remarkable lack of dramatic invention i.e. very clumsily and straightforwardly.
But despite all these shortcomings, the sheer visceral intensity of his plays goes some way to explain why they were useful models for the earliest Elizabethan playwrights writing the first attempts at English tragedy, influencing Kyd, Marlowe and the early Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus (which contains several quotes from Seneca’s Phaedra).
To return to T.S. Eliot who I mentioned above, we can now see why Eliot (in an introduction to a 1927 reprint of Elizabethan translations of Seneca) made the characteristically perceptive remark that, foregrounding vivid rhetoric over more traditional notions of plot or characterisation as the do, might make Seneca’s plays suitable for what was (in 1927) the very new medium of radio – rhetoric i.e. the power of words alone, triumphing over all other factors. A surf of sensationalist sound. The bombastic power of words superseding all considerations of ‘plot’ or ‘characterisation’.
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Plots of the four plays
1. Thyestes
Summary
It’s a tragedy of two brothers who hate each other, Atreus who takes a horrific vengeance on his brother, Thyestes.
Background
Tantalus was a son of Jupiter. He killed, cooked and served up his own son, Pelops, at a banquet of the gods. For this atrocity he was condemned to eternal punishment in hell, fixed in a pool of water, dying of thirst but unable to bend down to scoop up any of the water, and dying of hunger, but unable to touch any of the fruit growing just out of reach above him. Hence the English verb to tantalise. Jupiter restored Pelops to life but he himself went on to win a wife and a kingdom by treachery. Pelops banished his two grown-up sons, Atreus and Thyestes, for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. When Pelops died, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne, but Thyestes claimed it too. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, who helped him steal the gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’s flocks which was said to grant the kingship. But instead of gaining the crown he was banished. Despite sitting pretty, Atreus wants to make his ascendancy over his brother complete, so he is now planning to recall Thyestes from banishment on the pretext of sharing the throne with him, but in fact carrying out an atrocious act of revenge.
Act I
A Fury raises Tantalus’s miserable spirit from the underworld. He moaningly asks if even more pain and suffering await him. The Fury delivers an extraordinary vision of the sins of the house of Peolops, ramifying out to undermine all the order in the world. The Chorus comes onstage. It consists of citizens of Argos. They invoke the presiding gods of the cities of Greece in the hope they can prevent the tragedy.
Act II
Atreus consults with his minister about the best way of carrying out vengeance on his brother. The minister wonders how he can do this, allowing Atreus to explain that he will offer forgiveness and a share in the crown to lure Thyestes back to Argos, where he can carry out his revenge; what it will be, exactly, he is still considering but it will be awful. The Chorus reproves the ambition of rulers, describing the character of a true king, before singing the praises of a retired life.
Act III
Thyestes, having been invited back to his homeland by Atreus, arrives with his three young sons and expresses his distrust and sense of approaching disaster. Atreus applauds himself: his plan is working. The Chorus, apparently oblivious of the preceding act, praises the fraternal affection of Atreus for putting aside the brother’s enmity.
Act IV
With no development of plot or character, with melodramatic abruptness, a messenger appears who describes to the appalled Chorus the grotesque climax of the play which is that Atreus had Thyestes’s three children killed, cooked and served up to Thyestes at the brothers’ reconciliation feast. It takes the form of a question and answer session, the Chorus asking what happened next, the messenger answering. The Chorus, observing the going down of the Sun, hysterically fears that this criminal act might tear apart the whole fabric of the universe.
Act V
Atreus congratulates himself on his cruel revenge. Thyestes trembles with premonition that something terrible has happened. The Atreus reveals to him that he has just eaten his own beloved sons.
(Incidentally, the curse on the house of Pelops was to continue into the next generation in the persons of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who was murdered on his return from the Trojan War, by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes – the subject of one of Seneca’s other plays.)
Thyestes demonstrates the classic characteristics of a Seneca play. It maintains a continuous, shrill, hyperbolic tone. Hyperbolic exaggeration Here’s the Fury seeing the feud escalate into end-of-the-world anarchy:
Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea; and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers’s adultery with brothers’ wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds:
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day.
Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife
And death; let every corner of this place
Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!
(Fury, Act 1)
Here’s Atreus whipping himself up to commit the worst crime in the world:
Sanctity begone!
If thou wast ever known within these walls.
Come all the dread battalions of the Furies!
Come, seed of strife, Erinys! Come, Megaera,
With torches armed! My spirit yet lacks fire;
It would be filled with still more murderous rage!
(Atreus, Act 1)
In the introduction Watling talks up the discrepancy between Seneca the lofty Stoic and Seneca the author of blood-thirsty, amoral plays. But there is some overlap, some places where characters appear to speak the language of Stoic detachment, such as the second Choric ode which describes the true nature of kingship as not being power or riches but resilience and mental strength. The true king
is the man who faces unafraid
The lightning’s glancing stroke; is not dismayed
By storm-tossed seas; whose ship securely braves
The windy rage of Adriatic waves;
Who has escaped alive the soldier’s arm,
The brandished steel; who, far removed from harm,
Looks down upon the world, faces her end
With confidence, and greets death as a friend.
(Chorus, Act 2)
That’s the Chorus, but Thyestes himself also declaims an ‘advantages of the simple life‘ speech to his son as they arrive at Atreus’s palace:
While I stood
Among the great, I stood in daily terror;
The very sword I wore at my own side
I feared. It is the height of happiness
To stand in no man’s way, to eat at ease
Reclining on the ground. At humble tables
Food can be eaten without fear; assassins
Will not be found in poor men’s cottages;
The poisoned cup is served in cups of gold.
(Thyestes, Act 3)
(Words which resonate with Seneca’s experiences in the fraught court of the emperor Nero.) In the final act, just before Atreus reveals to Thyestes what he’s done, Thyestes feels a powerful, world-shaking sense of doom, very reminiscent of the same premonition characters experience in Shakespeare’s tragedies:
The table rocked, the floor is shaking.
The torches’ light sinks low; the sky itself
Hangs dull and heavy, seeming to be lost
Between the daylight and the dark. And why –
The ceiling of the heavens seems to shake
With violent convulsions – more and more!
The murk grows darker than the deepest darkness,
Night is engulfed in night; all stars have fled!
(Thyestes, Act 5)
Once the deed has been revealed, here’s the Chorus reciting a welter of classical precedents in an effort to capture the enormity of the event:
Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?
Has tortured Tityos found strength in his breast again to renew his old aggression?
Or has Typhoeus stretched his muscles to throw off his mountain burden?
Is Ossa to be piled on Pelion again
To build a bridge for the Phlegrean Giants’ assault?
Is all the order of the universe plunged into chaos?
(Chorus, Act 4)
These are all formulae or stock ingredients, which are repeated in all the other plays, and were to be enthusiastically taken up by the Elizabethan playwrights striving for sensational effects in the 1590s and early 1600s.
2. Phaedra
Background
Theseus was a typical Greek ‘hero’ i.e. an appalling human being, guilty of countless crimes, infidelities, murders and rapes. But the play isn’t about him, it’s about his second wife and his son. In his first marriage Theseus married the Amazon warrior Antiope, also known as Hippolyta, who bore him a son, Hippolytus. This Hippolytus grew up despising love, refusing to worship at the temples of Venus. He preferred Diana and the joys of the hunt. During this time, Theseus divorced his first wife and married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, king of Crete (following his adventure on Crete where he slew the Minotaur).
Now, Hyppolitus had grown to be a handsome young man and Phaedra was a mature woman when Theseus left his kingdom for a while to help his friend Peirithous rescue Persephone from the underworld. During his absence, the goddess of love, Venus, determined to take her revenge on Hippolytus for spurning her worship, inflamed his stepmother, Phaedra’s, heart with insatiable desire for the handsome young man.
Prelude (Hippolytus)
Hippolytus soliloquises on the joys of the hunt, delivering a long list of Greek hunting locations to his companions. It not only reveals Hippolytus’s character but impresses the audience with Seneca’s detailed and scholarly knowledge of Greek geography.
Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)
Phaedra soliloquy in which she laments that Theseus has gone off to the underworld, abandoning her in a place she has never liked, exiled from her beloved Crete. She wonders that she has recently become obsessed with the hunt.
(Her mother was Pasiphae, wife of King Minos who notoriously allowed herself to be impregnated by a bull, giving birth to the Minotaur. More relevant, though, is that Pasiphae was a daughter of Phoebus the sun god, and Venus the goddess of love has a long-running feud with him. Which explains why Venus is also against Phaedra.)
It is the nurse who makes explicit the fact that Phaedra has fallen in love with her stepson. Phaedra says her infatuation is driving her so mad she wants to kill herself.
Unreason reigns
Supreme, a potent god commands my heart,
The invincible winged god, who rules all earth,
Who strikes and scorches Jove with his fierce flame…
Interestingly, the nurse insists that all this talk of Venus and Eros is rubbish. There is no little god with a bow and arrow fluttering about in the sky. Instead it is the corruption of the times: ‘Too much contentment and prosperity and self-indulgence’ lead to new desires. In fact she states the Stoic theme that the simple life is best and luxury leads to decadence.
Then the Chorus delivers a long impressive hymn to the power of Eros or Love, as demonstrated by mating behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. As a Darwinian materialist I, of course, agree that the urge to mate and reproduce is the primary function of all life forms, including humans.
Act 2
The nurse describes to the Chorus Phaedra’s ever more miserably lovelorn state, pale face, tearful eyes etc. We are shown Phaedra in her boudoir angrily bossing her attendants about, despising her traditional dresses and jewellery, wanting to wear the outfit of a hunting queen and roam through the woods after her beloved.
Enter Hippolytus. The nurse tells him to stop hunting so hard, relax, find love, enjoy his youth. She counsels him to reproduce; if all young men were like him, humanity would cease to exist. Hippolytus replies not really to her points, instead declaring that he prefers simple rustic rural life in its honest simplicity to the deceit of courts and the city, mob rule, envy etc – turns into an extended description of that old chestnut, the sweet and innocent life of the age of Saturn, before cities or ships or agriculture, before war itself. Illogically this long speech ends with a swerve into his hatred of women, who he blames for all conflict and wars, and explains why he shuns women like the plague.
Enter Phaedra and metaphorically falls at Hippolytus’s feet, swearing she will be his slave and do anything for him. He mistakes, thinking she is upset because of the long absence of her husband, his father, Theseus in the underworld. He tries to reassure her, while Phaedra cannot contain her made infatuation:
Madness is in my heart;
It is consumed by love, a wild fire raging
Secretly in my body in my blood,
Like flames that lick across a roof of timber.
Phaedra describes how beautiful Theseus was as a young man when he came to Crete to kill the Minotaur and sue King Minos for the hand of his daughter, Ariadne. But all this leads up to Phaedra kneeling in front of Hippolytus and declaring her love for him. Hippolytus responds with end-of-the-world bombast:
For what cause shall the sky be rent with thunder
If no cloud dims it now? Let ruin wreck
The firmament, and black night hide the day!
Let stars run back and all their courses turn
Into confusion!..
Ruler of gods in heaven and men on earth,
Why is thy hand not armed, will not thy torch
Of triple fire set all the world ablaze?
Hurl against me thy thunderbolt, thy spear,
And let me be consumed in instant fire.
He rebuffs her. She throws herself into his arms, swearing to follow him everywhere. He draws his sword. Yes! She begs to be killed and put out of her misery. He realises it will defile his sword and all the oceans will not be able to clean it. (A very common trope in tragedy, originating with the Greeks, repeated in, for example, Macbeth, one thousand five hundred and fifty years later.)
Phaedra faints, Hippolytus flees. The nurse steps forward to comment and make the suggestion that, now Phaedra’s criminal love is revealed and Hippolytus has rejected her, to deflect blame she ought to accuse him of propositioning her. She yells ‘Help! Rape!’ as the Chorus enters, representing ‘the people’, showing them the sword Hippolytus dropped in his flight and the Queen, lying distraught on the ground, her hair all dishevelled.
The Chorus apparently ignores the cries of the nurse and instead proceeds with a 3-page hymn to Hippolytus’s matchless male beauty.
Act 3
Weirdly, act 3 opens with the self-same Chorus only now summarising the situation i.e. the queen intends to pursue her utterly false claim of rape against Hippolytus. But the Chorus hasn’t got far before who do we see arriving but Theseus, the mature hero, who describes how he has been in the underworld for four long years, only able to return because Hercules rescued him. But what is all this weeping and lamentation he hears?
The nurse explains her wife is distraught and some kind of curtain is lifted or something removed to reveal an ‘inner scene’ where we see Phaedra holding a sword as if to kill herself. Theseus interrogates Phaedra who refuses to explain. So – in the kind of casual mention of hyper violence to servants and slaves which always disturbs me – Theseus says he’ll have the nurse bound and scourged and chained and whipped till she spills the beans.
But before he can do this, Phaedra says Hippolytus tried to rape her, saying this is his sword which he left in his flight. Theseus now delivers the ‘Great gods, what infamy is this!’ type speech. Interestingly, he accuses Hippolytus not only of the obvious things, but accuses him of hypocrisy in his ‘affectation of old time-honoured ways’ i.e. Seneca has expanded Hippolytus’s traditional character of hunter to include this extra dimension of him being a proponent of the whole back-to-the-ways-of-our-ancestors movement, a view Seneca himself propounds in the Letters to Lucilius.
Theseus accuses Hippolytus of being the worst kind of hypocrite, in language which reminds me of Hamlet berating his uncle Claudius, then vows to track him down wherever he flees. He tells us that the god Neptune granted him three wishes, and now he invokes this promise, demanding that Hippolytus never sees another dawn.
The Chorus steps in to lament why the king of the gods never intervenes to ensure justice, why men’s affairs seem governed by blind fate, why the evil triumph and the good are punished.
Act 4
Enter the messenger with stock tears and reluctance to tell what he has seen. Theseus commands him and so the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus. The youth fled, jumped into his chariot, and whipped the horses off at great speed but that is when a strange enormous storm arose at sea, vast waves attacking the land, and giving birth to a monster, a bull-shaped thing coloured green of the sea with fiery red eyes. This thing proceeds to terrify Hippolytus’s horses which run wild, throwing him from the chariot but tangling his arms and legs in the traces, so that he is dragged at speed over the clifftop’s ragged rocks and flayed alive, his body disintegrating into pieces until he collided with a fallen tree trunk and was transfixed in the groin. Theseus laments that his wish has been so violently fulfilled.
The Chorus repeats the idea which I’m coming to see as central to the play, less about love or lust etc but the safeness of the humble life, not exposed to the decadent living, random lusts and shocking violence associated with the rich.
Peace and obscurity make most content,
In lowly homes old age sleeps easily…
For Jupiter is on his guard
And strikes whatever comes too near the sky.
The thunder rumbles round his throne,
But no great harm can come to common folk
Who dwell in modest homes.
If you think about this for a moment, you’ll realise it’s bullshit. Poor people living in lowly homes often have terrible lives, scarred by poverty, ignorance and, of course, the random violence of their superiors who might, for example, decide to start a civil war and devastate the homes and livelihoods of ‘common folk’ in entire regions. Think of Julius Caesar laying waste entire regions of Gaul, burning cities to the ground and selling their entire populations into slavery. It’s the kind of patronising crap rich people tell themselves to convince themselves that they, the filthy rich, living in the lap of luxury, eating at gluttonous banquets, waited on hand and foot by literally hundreds of slaves, and filling their day with sexual perversions, that they are the ones who have it rough.
Act 5
Barely has Theseus heard all from the messenger than Phaedra enters, wailing and wielding the sword. She begins her lament as the ruined corpse of Hippolytus is brought onstage and continues, lamenting his death, berating her treachery and falsehood, confessing to Theseus that Hippolytus was totally innocent, then stabbing herself to death.
Theseus then laments a) was it for this that he was allowed to escape from hell, into a hell of his own devising? And then lists all the ingenious punishments he saw in hell and says none of them are adequate for him.
The Chorus intervenes to advise that they honour and bury the body first and then, very gruesomely, specifically directs Theseus in placing the left hand here and the right hand over here, and so on, as they assemble his body parts, a ghoulish jigsaw.
In the final lines, Theseus orders his staff to a) go scour the landscape to find the last missing bits of Hippolytus and b) and as for the wicked Phaedra:
let a deep pit of earth conceal
And soil lie heavy on her cursed head.
3. The Trojan Women
Background
The Trojan War has ended. Troy has fallen. Outside the smouldering ruins of the city huddle the surviving royal women, rounded up by the victorious Greeks and awaiting their fate. The leading women are Hecuba, widow of King Priam, and Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior, Hector.
Act 1
Hecuba opens the play with a long lament about the fall of Troy, symbol of the uncertainty on which all pomp and power is based. She interacts with the Chorus of Trojan women. She makes them unbind their hair and loosen their tunics to expose their bare breasts which they then proceed to beat in lament for Hector, wall of Troy, and Priam its murdered king. But at least they are at peace now and will never be led as slaves to foreign lands.
Happy is Priam, happy every man
That has died in battle
And taken with him his life’s fulfilment.
(The literal baring and beating of their own breasts occurs in several of the plays. Was it performed literally in ancient times? Women mourning in ancient times were meant to not only beat their bare breasts but scratch their faces till they bled. If taken literally, surely this would be as difficult to perform persuasively onstage as a sword fight.)
Act 2
The Chorus wonders why the Greeks are delaying. Talthybius describes the momentous appearance of the ghost of Achilles, demanding the sacrifice he was promised before the fleet can sail. A prime slab of Senecan bombast:
A rift appeared,
Caves yawned, hell gaped, earth parted and revealed
A way from worlds below to worlds above.
His tomb was burst asunder and there stood
The living ghost of the Thessalian leader…
Pyrrhus, son of dead Achilles, takes up the case for his father, first listing his great victories before he even came to Troy, then insisting the Greeks fulfil their vow and make a human sacrifice at his tomb. Agamemnon sharply refuses, saying he regrets the blood and cruelty of the night of the sack of Troy but it was sort of justified by bloodlust. But now in the cold light of day, sacrifice a human being? No. This dialogue turns really bitter as the two Greeks insult each other, accusing each other of cowardice and crimes.
Agamemnon calls for Calchas the soothsayer. Enter Calchas who announces that the gods demand two sacrifices: a young woman dressed as a bride must be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb; and Priam’s grandson must be thrown from the battlements of Troy. Then the Greek fleet can sail.
The Chorus delivers quite a profound speech about death: is there anything afterwards, does the spirit live on, or is this all? It concludes:
There is nothing after death; and death is nothing –
Only the finishing post of life’s short race.
Therefore, ambition give up your hopes, anxiety give up your fears. (This is the third play in which, contrary to Watling’s comments in the introduction, we find Seneca’s characters delivering very clearly Stoic beliefs, entirely in line with Seneca the philosopher.)
Act 3
Andromache berates the Trojan women for only just learning grief, whereas for her Troy fell and the world ended when her husband, Hector, was killed. Now she only resists the death she wants to protect their son, Astyanax. An Elder performs the function of the nurse in other plays i.e. asks questions and is a sounding board for Andromache’s thoughts. She tells how the ghost of Hector came to her in a dream warning her to hide their son. Now she has come to the tomb of her husband and pushes the boy to go inside it (through gates) and hide, which he does without a word.
Then the Elder warns that Ulysses approaches. Ulysses announces he has been drawn by lot to ask Andromache for her son. While the son of Hector lives no Greek can rest, knowing he will grow up to restore Troy and relaunch the war. Andromache pretends her son was stolen from her during the sack of the city and laments his whereabouts and fate. Ulysses sees through her lies and threatens her with torture. Andromache welcomes torture and death. Ulysses understands her mother love and says it is love of his son, Telemachus, which motivates him.
At which point Andromache, to the accompaniment of fierce oaths, makes the ironic lie that her son right now is entombed with the dead (he, as we saw, is hiding in the tomb of Hector). Ulysses detects that Andromache is still anxious, pacing, muttering, as one who had lost everything would not. She is lying. He orders his men to tear down Hector’s tomb with the aim of scattering the ashes on the sea.
Andromache agonises over whether to surrender her son to save the ashes of her husband. She places herself before the tomb defying the soldiers to kill her first. Ulysses orders them on. She falls to her knees and clasps Ulysses’ legs and begs him to have mercy. She calls forth the boy, who comes from the tomb, she tells him to kneel before Ulysses.
Andromache ridicules the idea that this poor boy but himself could rebuild the walls of the ruined city. She begs Ulysses to let the boy become his slave. But Ulysses ducks responsibility, saying it is not his decision but Calchas’s.
Andromache despises him, but Ulysses says time is marching on, the ships have weighed anchor. He allows her a moment to lament her son and Andromache gives a page-long speech describing Astyanax growing to manhood and being a wise and noble king, which will not now happen. Andromache bids him go with the Greeks, but the boy clings on to his mother and doesn’t want to leave, but Andromache says there is no choice and bids him take a message from her to his father. Ulysses, bored of all this yap, commands his soldiers to take him away.
The Chorus of Trojan women pulls back, as it were, from this immediate scene, to consider the general problem, what will become of them, where will they be sent, whose slaves will they become?
Act 4
Helen laments that she has been ordered by the victorious Greeks to lie to Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and persuade her she is to be married to Pyrrhus. It is, of course, a lie, she is going to be sacrificed, but Helen dutifully tells her to rejoice and dress as a bride. Andromache, hearing all this, is filled with disgust that anyone can think of rejoicing at this disastrous time, and at the unremitting evil Helen represents, ‘bringer of doom, disaster and destruction’.
Helen replies to this attack, saying she had no say in the matter, was handed over like an object won in a competition, has endured 10 years of exile, and is now hated by all sides. Andromache knows Helen is telling lies and orders her to tell the truth. Herself weeping, Helen comes clean and says Polyxena is to be sacrificed, burned, and her ashes scattered over Achilles’ tomb.
Andromache is shocked that Polyxena takes the news that she is about to die with alacrity and enthusiastically changes clothes, braids her hair etc. It means exit from this misery and avoiding a lifetime of slavery. Not so happy is her mother, Hecuba, who laments.
Now Helen tells the Trojan women have been parcelled out to, Andromache to Pyrrhus, Hecuba to Ulysses, Cassandra to Agamemnon. Hecuba rains down curses on Ulysses, hoping that storm and sea will plague his return to Ithaca. And, as Pyrrhus appears, she extends her curse of storms and shipwreck to the entire Greek fleet.
The Chorus of Trojan women point out there is comfort in numbers, it is easier to mourn or suffer with colleagues, and describes how it will feel to be rounded up into the ships and sail away and slowly lose sight of their homeland, the smoke rising from their ruined city, Mount Ida, all fading over the horizon.
Act 5
The messenger arrives and announces the boy has been flung from the tower, the girl has met her death. The women ask for a detailed account, which he gives them. Both died with tremendous bravery, shaming the Greeks.
The last word goes to Hecuba who laments that death has come to everyone in her family, but will not come to her, to ease her suffering.
Thoughts
The supernatural element of Achilles’ ghost rising up from the underworld is very unlike the chaste, restrained style of Euripides’ tragedy on the same subject. it feels closer in style to the Middle Ages or Gothic horror.
The choral ode in act 2 persuasively argues that there is nothing after death, death is the end, our minds expire with our bodies – which is flatly contradicted by everything else in the play, including Achilles’ miraculous appearance, the ghost of Hector, and so on.
The other plays feature a unified chronological plot. The Trojan Women is interesting because it has what feels like two plots, featuring two women (Hecuba and Andromache) running in parallel, though linking up at places. Its emphasis on the suffering of women reminds me of Ovid’s Heroides. It’s my favourite.
4. Oedipus
Background
The most famous Greek myth. A soothsayer tells Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, the rulers of Thebes, that their unborn son will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, the royal couple deliver the baby, but then expose him in the country. To avoid the prophecy coming true they have the baby’s ankles pierced and joined together with a strap. (This caused the child’s feet to swell up and gave rise to Oedipus’ name, which literally means ‘swollen foot’.)
A peasant finds him and takes him to the king of the neighbouring realm, Polybus of Corinth who, being childless, considers him a providential gift from the gods and adopts him. As Oedipus grows to be strong and virile, his peers taunt him that he can’t be the son of the mild and gentle Polybus. So he travels to Delphi where the oracle tells him he is fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth. On the way back he gets into an argument in a narrow path with an old man driving a chariot and hits him so hard he accidentally kills him. On the same journey he comes across the half-human, half-animal sphinx who won’t let him pass unless he answers the riddle: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon, and 3 legs in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly that it is Man. He travels on to Thebes to discover that the entire city had been terrorised by the Sphinx but he has saved them all. Not only that, but news has come that old King Laius has been killed. As saviour of the city, Oedipus is offered the hand of the widowed queen and marries Jocasta and becomes the new king.
The play opens as a plague is ravaging Thebes. A sequence of events, and messengers bringing news, slowly reveal to Oedipus that he was never the natural son of King Polybus, that he was adopted, that his true parents were Laius and Jocasta and then…that the old man he killed in the fight in the road was Laius and…he has been sleeping with Jocasta, his own mother, for years. At which point a) Jocasta hangs herself and b) Oedipus blinds himself.
Act 1
Oedipus outlines the situation i.e. he is king at Thebes, the city is stricken with plague which is striking down everyone but himself, he has sent to the oracle at Delphi which has sent back the horrifying prediction that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He is pleased he fled his homeland and his father Polybus, but feels a terrible sense of dread.
I see
Disaster everywhere, I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me.
Of course the blight of the plague gives Seneca scope for some typical hyperbole, ‘the murk of hell has swallowed up the heavenly citadels’ and so on. The description of the plague goes on at length, describing people too sick to bury the dead and so on, reminding me of the vivid description of the plague which ends Lucretius’s long poem De Rerum Natura, premonitory of Albert Camus’s great novel about a 20th century plague. Oedipus says maybe he brought the bad luck, maybe must leave the city.
His queen (and unbeknown to him, his mother) tells him a true king grasps misfortune with a steady hand.
Oedipus describes his encounter with the Sphinx who is made to sound a hellish beast surrounded by the bones of those who failed her riddle. Well, he triumphed over her but now seems to have himself brought the plague to Thebes.
The Chorus is made up of Theban elders. It gives a 4-page-long, vivid description of the plague, how it first struck animals then moved to humans. With characteristic bombast it then shrilly describes:
Out of the depths of Erebus their prison
The Furies have rushed upon us with the fire of hell.
Phlegethon, river of fire, has burst its banks,
The River of Hades is mingled with the River of Cadmus.
The act ends as Oedipus sees Creon, Jocasta’s brother, arriving. He has been to the oracle.
Act 2
Creon described to Oedipus the mood of horror at the oracle, till a superhuman voice declared that only when the murderer of Laius is driven out will Thebes know peace. Oedipus then makes one of those ironic vows, vowing to all the gods that the murderer of Laius will never know rest but live in permanent exile, a wandering nomad, and find no pardon – ignorant of the fact he is cursing himself.
On a more mundane note Oedipus now asks Creon how Laius met his death. He was attacked and murdered at a crossroads out in the countryside, says Creon.
Enter the old blind prophet Tiresias, led by his daughter, Manto. He tells Oedipus he can interpret the situation through a sacrifice, so a bull and heifer are brought in and the sacrificial flame rises and parts in two parts which fight each other.
[This is a classic example of the way these plays would be hard to stage but work very well when read, or read aloud, or broadcast. The getting onstage of the animal, its execution and especially the behaviour of the flame would be impossible to create onstage but work pretty well when read out.]
Manto describes the strange behaviour of the flame which Tiresias interprets as the gods themselves being ashamed of the truth. Tiresias asks how the animals behaved when sacrificed and Manto tells him the heifer submitted but the bull shied and defied the blows. The heifer bled freely but the bull’s blood not at all, while dark blood poured from its eyes and mouth. When they examined the entrails, they were in bad shape, the heart was shrunk, the veins were livid, part of the lungs was missing, the liver was putrid. Far, far worse, the virgin heifer turned out to be pregnant and the deformed life in her stirred. The fire on the altar roared, the hearth quaked etc.
Oedipus begs to know what this all means, but Tiresias pushes the play deep into Gothic territory by saying they will have to perform a magic rite to call the soul of the dead king himself up from hell to tell them. Oedipus must not attend, so he nominates Creon to go in his place.
Incongruously, oddly, the Chorus sing a sustained hymn to the Bacchus, god of the vine, listing his adventures and achievements – notably the occasion when he scared pirates who had captured him into jumping overboard and being changed into dolphins, and the time he rescued Ariadne from Naxos and proceeded to marry her.
Act 3
Creon enters. Oedipus asks what he saw at the ceremony. Creon is so terrified he repeatedly refuses to speak until Oedipus forces him. Then Creon gives a terrific description of the dark and ill-fated glade where they took Tiresias and dug a ditch and burned animal sacrifices and chanted evil spells and a great chasm opened up and hordes of the dead appeared before them. Last of all came the reluctant figure of Laius, still dishevelled and bloody, who proceeds to give a long speech saying the plague on Thebes is due to the current king, who killed his father and has slept with his mother and had children by her. Only when he is cast out as an unclean thing will Thebes be cured.
Oedipus is appalled but refuses to believe it: after all, his father Polybus lives on at Corinth and he’s never laid a finger on his mother, Merope. Oedipus refuses to believe it and says Creon is conspiring with Tiresias to seize the crown. Creon, for his part, advises Oedipus to abdicate now, to step down to a humbler position before he is pushed. They proceed to have a page of dialogue which turns into a debate about whether a subject should stand up to the king, Oedipus dismissing these as typical arguments of the revolutionary.
The Chorus gives a potted history of the land of Thebes, and the wider region of Boeotia, populated by Cadmus in search of his abducted sister Europa, of the many monsters which have been spawned in this region, with a final mention of the myth of Actaeon, turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.
Act 4
Oedipus is confused, he asks Jocasta how Laius died and is told he was struck down by a young man when travelling with his entourage at a place where three roads meet. It jogs a faint memory in Oedipus’s mind but then a messenger comes to interrupt his attempts to remember with news that his ‘father’, King Polybus of Corinth, has passed away peacefully in his sleep.
The old man/messenger requests him to come to Corinth to attend the dead king’s funeral, but Oedipus refuses, saying he is afraid of being alone in the company of his mother. The old man reassures him that Meropa was not his real mother and proceeds to tell the full story of how he, the old man, was given Oedipus as a baby, his ankles bound together with a metal pin. ‘Who by?’ Oedipus asks. ‘The keeper of the royal flocks,’ the man replies. ‘Can he remember his name?’ Oedipus asks. No, but he might remember the face. So Oedipus orders his men to assemble all the royal shepherds.
The old man warns Oedipus to stop probing while he still has time, but Oedipus insists he has nothing to fear and the truth will set him free. Poor dupe of fate.
Enter Phorbas, head of Thebes’s royal flocks. He begins to remember the old man. He confirms that he handed the old man a baby but doubts if it can have lived because its ankles were pierced through with an iron bolt and infection had spread.
Who was the baby, Oedipus demands. Phorbas refuses to say so Oedipus says he will order hot coals to torture him with. Phorbas replies with one line: ‘Your wife was that child’s mother.’
With that one line the truth comes flooding in on Oedipus. He is not Polybus and Meropa’s child; they adopted him; he is the child of Laius who he killed at the crossroads and of…Jocasta, the woman he has married and had children with. Oedipus is, understandably, distraught, and expresses it with full Senecan hyperbole:
Earth, be opened!
Ruler of darkness, hide in deepest hell
This monstrous travesty of procreation!
The Chorus continues its very tangential relationship with the story, not commenting on this amazing revelation at all, but instead wishing its ship of life was riding on milder waters to a gentler wind. And then goes off at a real tangent, briefly describing the story of Daedalus and Icarus to show that living in moderation, the golden mean, is best.
Act 5
The Chorus sees a messenger approaching. Never good news these messengers, and this one is no exception. He describes in great detail how distraught Oedipus went into the palace, grabbed a sword and made a great speech about killing himself, but then realised it wasn’t punishment enough, was too quick and easy. Something was demanded to placate the gods and end the curse and the plague, more like a living death, where he would die again and again every day. Then it comes to him to blind himself and the messenger gives a very gory description of Oedipus plucking his own eyes out.
The Chorus gives a brief didactic explanation that Fate is unchangeable, one iron chain of endless causes and consequences. No man can escape it.
Enter Oedipus blinded, freed from the light of the accusing sun.
The Chorus describes Jocasta coming onstage, distraught, uncertain whether to address her son and husband.
Jocasta addresses Oedipus who is horrified and says they must never speak, never be in the same country together. Jocasta seizes his sword and, after some debate exactly where to stab herself, stabs herself in her womb, seat of all her sinfulness, and falls dead.
In his final soliloquy Oedipus says he has expiated his sin and now will set out on his wanderings. He promises the poor suffering people of Thebes that he will take with him the capitalised allegorised figures of infliction and free them at last. What better companions and tormentors could he hope for on his endless wanderings and punishments.
Moral of the story
Even if you’re a childless couple, desperate for a baby, do not accept the gift of a little baby boy whose ankles are pierced together by an iron bar!
*************
Big ideas
When I was a boy reading these Penguin introductions, it was often not specific criticism of specific aspects of the play which stuck with me, but when the scholars and editors made throwaway generalisations which in a flash helped me make sense of an entire genre or period of history.
Thus, in among his detailed critique of specific plays or aspects, Watling offers three big, memorable ideas about Seneca’s influence on English Renaissance literature.
1. One is that Seneca is often blamed for Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights’ addiction to ghosts, ghosts of gruesomely murdered figures who return to the land of the living to trigger the action of the plot (p.28). The ghost of the dead Spanish officer Andrea appears at the start of the archetypal Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and ghosts are important in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar and central to the plot of his greatest play, Hamlet. In fact, Watling refutes this by pointing out there are only two ghosts in Seneca’s oeuvre, Tantalus in Thyestes and Thyestes in Agamemnon.
2. The other is the simple but illuminating comment that:
The language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice – the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. (p.32)
Aha, Ovid and Seneca – so that was their influence and how they fit together to flow through all Elizabethan drama: Ovid for mythological stories, with their bucolic settings, flowers and curlicues; Seneca for accusing ghosts, characters howling for revenge and invoking the shadows of Erebus and darkest night.
3. There’s a third insight, not so striking as the first two, maybe, and this is that, despite the best efforts of scholars and academically-minded authors like Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson to import the so-called Dramatic Unities and impose them on contemporary drama, they failed; they failed to dent the English preference for ‘straggling narrative plays‘ which cheerfully ignore the cardinal unities of time or place or even action (p.35).
In Watling’s words 1) Senecan rhetoric of extreme emotions was grafted onto 2) plots which lacked Senecan focus and concision, to create a ‘fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.’ (p.37).
In the greatest Elizabethan plays, the theme, the form and the language may have crystallised into an impressive whole:
but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death. (p.38)
Messy, mongrel literature has always been our style.
Credit
E.F. Watling’s translation of Four Tragedies and Octavia was published by Penguin Books in 1966.
The following thoughts were prompted by a reading of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The point is that, apart from all other considerations of literature and so on, both plays demonstrate the enduring human tendency to attribute all social change, all meaning in the flow of historical events, to Great and Eminent Personages. To humanise the flow of events and to attribute praise and blame for everything to a handful of Top Dogs.
The confusing world
It’s difficult for any of us to understand what is happening, what is going on in our own lives, let alone in the wider world. There is a natural tendency to humanise everything, to reduce everything to the behaviour of named individuals in order to make our lives manageable, graspable, bearable. If we can attribute everything to individuals then we can relapse into the standard human response of naming and shaming and blaming them. We can blame America’s ills on Donald Trump and Britain’s ills on Boris Johnson.
But on numerous levels, I think this is wrong, not morally wrong, just factually inaccurate. Even in my little family I can see how individuals are swayed by social trends and pressures. I can see how the economic outlook for my children’s generation shapes their attitudes. Multiply this by millions and you, fairly obviously, have a host of broad social, economic, technological and cultural trends which affect everything we hear, and so repeat, discuss, believe, argue about.
At the ‘highest’ level (if you want to visualise it as a hierarchy) are the cultural and ideological trends – the changing things people believe in, think about, argue about.
Beneath them you have economic trends – in our day and age drastic rises in oil and gas prices which affect the cost of fertiliser and transport which threaten severe food shortages this autumn and winter. In my country and time another huge factor is the failure of successive governments to build enough accommodation for the spiralling population, leading to the never-ending rises in house prices, and the dispirited resignation of both my kids that they will never own a home like their parents did.
Economic trends are strongly influenced by technological developments – the most obvious one in my lifetime being the enormous increase in the computerisation of all aspects of life, from high finance to finding a partner, almost everything seems to done via the internet, smart phones and social media, with all kinds of consequences, the most obvious being that people spend a huge amount of time on their phones and are immensely influenced by what they read coming through their social media feeds.
And at a deeper level there are the basic facts of geography and biology – the most important single one being the rapid heating up of the planet which is making severe drought more common, accompanied by the manmade destruction of all manner of ecosystems which we rely on for food and water, which will greatly exacerbate the situation.
At a more individual level we are subject to our genetic inheritances which program whether we are tall or short, fat or thin, male or female, predisposed to heart disease, cancer, dementia and a host of bodily infirmities.
And then, of course, there is the constant threat of infections from outside, something most people are much more aware of since COVID-19 brought the world to a halt.
All this is hard enough to take in, and it’s only a superficial sketch of the multi-layered ‘reality’ we inhabit, or more accurately, the overlapping realities. Our minds inhabit a complex matrix of biochemistry, ever-changing sensory perceptions, the permanent wash of emotions and an endless tide of discourse and words which have no boundaries because all of these issues are, in effect, endless: discourses about the importance of oil prices on civilisation, assessing the impact of global warming, considering the effect of infectious disease on societies, explaining the importance of genetics in human behaviour, these are just a handful out of thousands of serious topics and no-one fully understands them. Vast subjects, impenetrably complex – and, when you start to begin to combine them, impossible for any individual to fully grasp.
The Great Man theory
And so it is much, much easier to think of society and what is happening in terms of a handful of powerful individuals. And this explains why most cultures, for most of human history, have done just that – attributed everything that happens to the eternal gods or, on the human plane, to Eminent Men and Women, to kings and queens and emperors and empresses and the like.
As far back as we have written records, they record the wars and acts of Great Men, emperors of China or India or Assyria or Egypt and the earliest histories which emerge from simple annals or chronologies likewise focused entirely on the doings of great men (and occasional empresses or queens).
The earliest histories had just two explanations for everything: 1. the wise or foolish behaviour of great leaders, and sitting above them, 2. the capricious interventions of the gods. 3. any unexpected turn of events could be attributed to the vague catch-all category, ‘Fortune’.
And 4. hovering behind all accounts was the primitive assumption that the present age is uniquely corrupt and degraded, a sad falling-away from some unspecified previous times when men were all upright, pure and noble.
Boris Johnson and the wheel of fortune
Armed with these four concepts you can, at a pinch, explain everything, right up to the present day. Using this template, Boris Johnson is a Great Man who Got Brexit Done, oversaw the fastest vaccine rollout of any western nation, and was leading this great country of ours onwards to greater things, when his treacherous colleagues, jealous of his achievements, conspired to stab him in the back and bring him down. To quote a Latin tag attributed to Cicero, ‘O tempora, O mores!’ meaning: ‘Oh the times! Oh the customs!’ But then again – a medieval commentator would say – no-one, even of Boris’s majesty and stature, can defy the turn of Fortune’s wheel, which is destined to bring even the highest and mightiest low.
One of the thousands and thousands of medieval depictions of the wheel of fortune bring the mighty low (Illustration by Jean Miélot to Christine de Pizan’s Epitre d’Othéa: Les Sept Sacrements de l’Eglise, about 1455)
See? Anything can be explained using these primitive concepts. Maybe more accurate to say, these concepts can be attributed to almost any events and the impression given that they’ve been explained, a completely spurious impression.
The Great Men theory in ancient authors
So it comes as no surprise when we get to the histories of the ancient (western) world, to discover that Plutarch or Sallust or Suetonius take a moralising approach to history, focusing on the character of the great men of the times they describe, and interpreting their behaviour in terms of the strengths and weaknesses. If this doesn’t completely explain the events they are chronicling, they could always add a knowing reference to Fortune which inscrutably intervenes to wreck the affairs of men.
I sometimes find it odd that the editors and translators of the editions of these ancient authors feel the need to explain the Great Men ideology of their authors, since it has been the default setting of most of mankind for most of history.
As John Wilders writes in his introduction to the Arden edition of Antony and Cleopatra, Plutarch was a very congenial source for Shakespeare’s dramas about the ancient world because, although living 1,500 years apart:
both men wrote on the assumption that the course of history was shaped by the actions of men in power and, for that reason, both were curious to penetrate into the subtleties of human character… (Antony and Cleopatra, Arden edition, 1995, page 57)
QED. It is only very recently that more objective, non-Great Men theories – broadly speaking, concepts to do with economics and sociology – have been developed. We can date this new development in human thought to the period vaguely referred to as the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Maybe we can pick an arbitrary date of 1776, the year Adam Smith published ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, which introduced readers to the notion that we are all members of a globalised system of trade and production, and that our lives – whether we have jobs, what we can afford to buy, eat or wear – subject to events in faraway countries and forces beyond our control. Just as everyone in this country is going to suffer because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A revolutionary new way of thinking about societies and human existence.
This new, economics-based and sociological way of looking at society definitely accompanied the development of the industrial revolution as all manner of authors tried to understand the sweeping changes transforming society without anybody explicitly planning or wanting them.
We find Dickens objecting to the dominance of the new breed of ‘economists’ who want to reduce all human life to economic statistics (Hard Times, 1854), and Karl Marx, obviously, was writing works which engaged with the earlier sociological theories of Hegel, in Germany, and the post-French Revolution school of theorists in France. The revolution crystallised, accelerated and disseminated all manner of new political and social theories, kick-starting the feverish debates of the nineteenth century, Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, Comte and so on.
In the more pragmatic mercantile Anglosphere the industrial revolution prompted an explosion of social and economic theorists following Smith’s lead, Malthus, Bentham, John-Stuart Mill and so on. We still, to a large extent, live in this world, a world awash with ideologies and theories, none of which completely work or explain everything and so are subject to the endless updating, revising, revisiting and rethinking etc which fill so many books and political journals.
I’m not trying to recapitulate the history of modern political and economic theory, I’m interested in the way that, despite the jungle of modern social theorisation, the Great Man / Fortune’s Wheel theory of history persists and flourishes.
Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
And so to what prompted these thoughts, Shakespeare’s plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra which I read after reading about 30 texts from ancient Rome about history (Plutarch, Suetonius, Sallust, Cicero). When characters in these plays describe the lead figures, or the lead figures describe themselves, as world-bestriding colossi, they are doing two things.
First of all, they are reinforcing the Great Man theory of history, stymying any attempt to think beyond it and countenance less simplistic explanations. Again and again, reading ancient literature, you come up across this brick wall, this closed door. Nobody could think beyond it. it makes you realise how immensely intellectually free and liberated we are, in our age. Even if we don’t have all the answers, the answers we do have are infinitely more sophisticated, responsive than anything the ancients had.
But secondly, these old tropes continue to thrill us. The rhetoric surrounding great men in Shakespeare’s plays is wonderfully vivid and exciting:
CASSIUS: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves…
(Julius Caesar, Act 1, scene 2)
This is my final point: that the vicarious thrill to be experienced in the vivid rhetoric of power deployed throughout Shakespeare’s political plays is not necessarily a good thing. Food manufacturers add salt and sugar to processed food because the human palate is designed to respond favourably to their taste. The touch of salt or sugar on the palate fires basic, primitive nerves which release endorphins in the brain. because, during the course of human evolution, edible sources of salt or sugar were so extremely rare that our palates had to be sensitive enough to detect them. In our hyper-industrialised societies, manufacturers now exploit this basic human functionality and stuff so much salt and sugar in their products that the taste pleasure can become addictive. Hence the epidemic of obesity in the western world, due to the addiction of large number of consumers to products packed with unhealthy levels of salt and sugar.
Same with the Great Man Theory. It is the default setting of the human mind, it is the crudest possible way of thinking about politics and history and social change. Listen to vox pops of supporters of either Donald Trump or Boris Johnson and you realise that most people still cleave to a theory of society which predates the ancient Egyptians. “Don-ald! Don-ald! Don-ald!” Chimpanzees picking each others’ fleas are more sophisticated.
I’m exaggerating for effect, but the conclusion I’m leading up to is that a good deal of the pleasure derived from watching plays like Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra is comparable to the guilty pleasure of pigging out on junk food.
The author invites us to thrill to the rhetoric of power embodied in the many descriptions of ‘the triple pillar of the world’ (Philo on Antony 1.1) and ‘the greatest soldier of the world’ (Cleopatra describing Antony 1.3) or great men each owning ‘a third of the world’ (Antony of Caesar 2.2), becoming ‘lord of all the world’ (Menas to Pompey 2.7), to great men playing with half of the world as they pleased (Antony 3.11) or quartering the whole world with his sword (Antony 4.14) or deserving ‘the worship of the whole world’ (Eros of Antony 4.14), being ‘the greatest prince o’ the world’ (Antony on himself 4.15), and ‘his legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm crested the world’ (Cleopatra on Antony 5.2).
My point is that to thrill to this kind of rhetoric, to enjoy it, to be excited by it, is, intellectually speaking, the equivalent of wolfing down a Big Mac with large fries and a king-sized Coke. It is the basic, primitive , lowest-level human response to the society around us and abrogates the difficult but complex knowledge of the world we know we possess and know we ought to be employing if we’re ever to escape the mess we’ve got ourselves into.
‘…we have lov’d each other
Into our mutual ruin.’
(Antony to Cleopatra, All For Love Act 2)
John Dryden (1631 to 1700) was the dominant literary figure of the Restoration period, loosely 1660 to 1700. The period is sometimes called the Age of Dryden by academics who are paid to label such things.
Dryden was extremely prolific. He not only wrote original poems – notably extended satires on the fierce politics and bickering theatre-world of the Restoration era – but produced an awe-inspiring number of translations, notably of Virgil’s Aeneid, of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio and translations from the Middle English of some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Not only this but during the revival of the theatre under the restored King Charles II, Dryden wrote some 30 plays, including texts for some of the earliest English operas.
Dryden’s dominance was in part due to his development of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters) and rhyme royal (rhymed iambic pentameters) into extremely flexible and expressive tools, for writing satirical poems, plays comic or tragic, and narrative verse, whether high toned or entertaining. He added a few variations to add variety, namely alexandrines and triplets. Triplets are when not two but three lines share the same end rhyme, and an alexandrine is a line of six beats or feet rather than the usual five of the pentameter, such as this line from the Faerie Queene:
And to the Dwarfe awhile his needlesse spere he gave.
Setting standards
But there’s a further reason for Dryden’s dominance. No other poet or playwright wrote so extensively about literature. Dryden not only set about establishing orderly blank verse as the standard medium for verse, and set out to revive serious high poetic drama in the theatre; he wrote numerous essays explaining why he wanted to do this and how he was setting about doing it. He was the greatest theorist and justifier of the great change in poetic style and medium which took place during his lifetime.
In Restoration England there was a great hankering for law and order and regularity. Laws were brought in to compel conformity to the state religion, the Royal Society brought together scientists who were seeking the fundamental laws of nature, and writers of the period were motivated to seek out the laws and rules which underpinned the best literature of the ages.
Dryden wrote very appreciatively about both Chaucer and Shakespeare – in fact his translations of Chaucer helped revive interest in him – but at the same time he deprecated them for ignoring what he took to be fundamental rules about correct format and diction and style appropriate to each poetic genre.
Bringing order to the drama
In particular, when it came to plays, Dryden was among many authors of the period in thrall to the so-called Three Unities. Two thousand years earlier the Greek philosopher Aristotle had delivered a series of lectures analysing the tragic plays of his time and noting what the most successful of them had in common. The most successful Greek tragedies tended to focus on just one subject and not waste the audience’s attention on sub-plots and distractions. They tended to happen in one place rather than a confusing variety of locations. And they tended to be very focused in time, often taking place in just one day, sometimes, like Oedipus Rex, taking place in real time, with no jumps, gaps or ellipses.
These were the three unities which later generations converted from being a shrewd analysis of the particular cohort of plays Aristotle chose to analyse into grand universal laws which ought to be applied to all serious dramas.
All this is by way of explaining why Dryden chose to rewrite Shakespeare’s tragic drama Antony and Cleopatra in order as nearly as possible to comply with the three unities.
Unity of Time Shakespeare’s play covers an extravagant ten years of ancient history, from Fulvia’s death in 40 BC to the lover’s suicide after the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. By contrast Dryden’s play covers just the last few days leading up to the main characters’ double suicide.
Unity of Subject Shakespeare’s play is diffuse in the sense that, beside the central story, it also touches on the war against Sextus Pompeius, the character of Lepidus, vivid portraits of Octavius Caesar and his entourage. Antony and Cleopatra covers a larger timeframe and has more named characters than any other Shakespeare play, some 57. By deliberate contrast, Dryden focuses right down on just ten named characters.
Unity of Setting And whereas Shakespeare’s play makes huge leaps in location, from Alexandria to Rome to Greece to Sicily to Athens, Dryden’s sticks to a handful of buildings in the capital of ancient Egypt, Alexandria.
So a concerted focus on setting, subject and time. All depicted in neat, regular and easily understandable verse.
Synopsis
Act One
The Egyptian priest Serapion sets the scene by describing ominous portents and prodigies which are afflicting the country, such as the untimely flooding of the Nile.
Cleopatra’s eunuch and chief minister Alexas dismisses all these omens, tells Serapion to stop broadcasting them, and instead focuses on the army of Caesar which is camped within sight of Alexandria.
Alexas rues the day Cleopatra ever met Antony and so got Egypt dragged into Rome’s civil wars. Alexas gives us the backstory that, since his ignominious defeat at the naval Battle of Actium, Antony has been hiding in the temple of Isis ‘a prey to black despair’, and refusing to see Cleopatra.
Enter Ventidius, a Roman general who is an old friend and colleague of Antony’s (‘A braver Roman never drew a sword’). He is appalled to witness Antony wandering distracted and depressed and insists, over the objections of Antony’s assistants, in seeing the great man.
In their dialogue Antony expresses worldweariness unto death and Ventidius laments that a man who was once ‘the lord of half mankind’ has been reduced to such a pitiable state out of wretched submission to ‘one light, worthless woman’).
After having a good cry together, Ventidius gets to the point of his visit which is that he has brought 12 battle-hardened legions with him from Syria. They will fight for Antony – but only on condition that he abandons Cleopatra. They are not prepared to die for a flighty foreign queen.
Antony is inspired and agrees these terms.
Act Two
The focus switches to Cleopatra who laments the tragic downturn in her fortunes to her maids, Charmion and Iras. Charmian reports back from a visit to Antony where she tried to persuade him to come see Cleopatra but she refused. Cleopatra sends Alexas.
Cut to Antony in company with Ventidius when Alexas enters bearing flattering messages from Cleopatra and gifts of jewellery for his generals and a bracelet of rubies for Antony. Ventidius gives vitriolic comments on this activity, calling Alexas a ‘vile crocodile’.
When Alexas fumbles to fix this bracelet on Antony’s wrist, he slyly asks wouldn’t he prefer the sender to tie it on herself, and introduces Cleopatra who enters, for the lover’s first confrontation in the play. Ventidius is disgusted and warns Antony to keep his resolve and Antony starts well by delivering a long speech outlining how love for Cleopatra has reduced him and his career to ruins. In fact ‘ruin’ is a key word in this act.
But, inevitably, Antony, like an alcoholic offered a bottle of scotch, relapses. The crux comes when Cleopatra presents a letter from Octavius himself in which Caesar has offered her not only continued rule over Egypt but the kingdom of Syria as well, if she would only surrender Antony. Now, by proving that she refused to do so, Cleopatra wins Antony all over again, he falls into her arms and proclaims his undying love.
Ventidius is disgusted:
VENTIDIUS: O Women! Women! Women! all the gods
Have not such pow’r of doing good to Man,
As you of doing harm.
Nonetheless Antony orders Ventidius to unbar the gate facing towards Caesar’s army, as he is keen to lead his (Ventidius’s) legions into battle.
Act Three
Between acts 2 and 3 Antony has led an army out of Alexandria and defeated Caesar’s army, leaving five thousand dead. The act opens with he and Cleopatra celebrating and mutually praising each other. But after a certain amount of hailing each other as Venus and Mars, respectively, Cleopatra and her entourage exit, allowing Antony’s loyal general and conscience, Ventidius to enter.
He pours cold water on Antony’s good mood by pointing out that Caesar has the whole world and any number of allies and their armies to draw on while Antony has only the finite resources and manpower of Alexandria.
Antony laments that he has had only one true real friend and proceeds to describe the kind of friendship which consists of a complete unity of mind and spirit, which makes me wonder whether he had read Cicero’s Essay on Friendship. (Although the idea of super friendship had been recycled countless times during the Renaissance and was probably available to Dryden as a cliché both of humanistic discourse.)
Anyway, this One True Friend he has in mind is the young Dolabella and Ventidius now proceeds, to Antony’s great surprise…to invite this same Dolabella on stage!
Antony recovers from his shock, embraces his young friend, and there is some dialogue where Dolabella upbraids him for falling thrall to Cleopatra, while Antony reminds Dolabella how utterly enthralled the latter was when Cleopatra made her grand entrance at Cydnus, and explains it was jealousy lest his young soul mate fall equally for Cleopatra which led Antony to banish him from his side (!)
[This offers Drydren the opportunity to do a direct rewriting of the most famous speech from Shakespeare’s play, when Enobarbus describes Cleopatra’s magnificent arrival at Antony’s camp by boat. Below I give a detailed comparison of Shakespeare and Dryden’s styles using a much smaller excerpt.]
Dolabella has come from Caesar’s camp to offer terms. Antony asks who was man enough to stand up to mighty Caesar and plea for terms? Was it Dolabella? Was it Ventidius? No, they reply; someone nobler and stronger than either of them. Then pray produce this prodigy, Antony demands.
At which, with a magician’s flourish, and with rather cheesy dramaturgy, Dryden presents Antony’s forsaken wife Octavia and their three small children! All of them then proceed to gang up on Antony:
DOLLABELLA: Friend!
OCTAVIA: Husband!
BOTH CHILDREN: Father!
– his best friend Dolabella, his loyalest general Ventidius, his noble wife and his three children all beg him to abandon the Egyptian queen and treat with Caesar, who has made a surprisingly generous offer:
OCTAVIA: I’ll tell my Brother we are reconcil’d;
He shall draw back his Troops, and you shall march
To rule the East: I may be dropt at Athens;
No matter where, I never will complain,
At which point Antony utterly capitulates, giving in, begging their forgiveness, weeping, saying Octavia can lead him wherever she wills.
It seems that Cleopatra has heard of this reconciliation because her representative, Alexas, hurriedly arrives and…is ironically dismissed as too late by Ventidius, before he too departs. Alexas has a moment alone onstage to lament that a) as a eunuch he has never known love and passion b) he advised Cleopatra to drop Antony, she refused, so now she’s the one being dropped.
Enter Cleopatra and her entourage. Alexas barely has time to tell her that Antony has defected to the enemy when Octavia herself enters and the stage is set for a set-piece dramatic confrontation between wife and mistress, between duty and passion, between married chastity and sexual indulgence. Cleopatra wins on the topic of beauty and ‘charms’ but Octavia triumphs with her virtue, calling her rival, in effect, a whore.
Obviously this is all a man’s creation, written for a highly patriarchal society, in which the male-created characters speak and argue in terms dictated by patriarchy. Yet Shakespeare was writing for an even more hierarchical society and his women soar.
In Octavia’s handful of scenes in Antony and Cleopatra she emerges as a well-defined character and in her brief scene with Antony in Rome there is real affection and gentleness on both sides. Here, in Dryden, this little set-piece feels like a contrived and highly schematic binary opposition of the kind you find in his political poems.
That said, after Octavia sweeps off the stage, Cleopatra staggers with affliction:
CLEOPATRA: My sight grows dim, and every object dances,
And swims before me, in the maze of death.
My spirits, while they were oppos’d, kept up;
They could not sink beneath a Rivals scorn:
But now she’s gone they faint.
Act Four
Act 4 takes an unexpected turn. Antony asks Dolabella to tell Cleopatra he is leaving and the scene is initially mildly comic because Antony makes to leave three times but each time comes back to give Dolabella just a few more points to say to Cleopatra. It’s a portrait of a man struggling to tear himself away.
But this one request turns out to be the focus of the entire act because Ventidius overhears this arrangement and turns, rather suddenly, into a kind of organising spirit. For he realises that Dolabella is himself still in love with Cleopatra. Now Ventidius fantasises about stepping into Antony’s shoes (‘What injury/To him to wear the Robe which he throws by?’)
Ventidius also overhears (suddenly there is lots of overhearing and eavesdropping – all very Restoration comedy and very unlike the plain dealing of the first three acts) Alexas suggesting to Cleopatra that she make Antony jealous by encouraging Dolabella’s love making, the idea being that Antony will hear about this and be prompted to come running back to her.
ALEXAS: Th’ event wil be, your Lover will return
Doubly desirous to possess the good
Which once he fear’d to lose.
To make it even more staged and contrived, Ventidius gets Octavia to accompany him in eavesdropping on this scene, namely Dolabella supposedly passing on Antony’s final farewell to the queen. At first both play up to their roles i.e. Cleopatra feigns upset at Antony leaving but then says she might accede to Dolabella’s passion and Dolabella, thus encouraged, admits that he’s always loved her from afar. Flirtation:
DOLABELLA: Some men are constant.
CLEOPATRA: And constancy deserves reward, that’s certain.
Ventidius and Octavia see and hear all this from the back of the stage (in a very stagey contrived kind of way). They see Dolabella pretend that Antony had been fierce and heartless in casting her off. But they are all surprised at the extent to which Cleopatra is distraught and collapses to the floor in a faint. This prompts Dolabella to regret his scheming and admit he was lying and to stagily beg forgiveness. Cleopatra joins in the mutual confessing, that admitting she was leading him on as a scheme. Now both succumb to guilt at their respective betrayals (of lover and friend).
But this doesn’t stop Ventidius and Octavia then returning to Antony and swearing they’ve seen Cleopatra and Dollabella holding hands and kissing. Ventidius even ropes in Alexas, who backs them up because, although he hadn’t witnessed the scene himself, this is what he recommended Cleopatra to do.
This all backfires for Ventidius. He hoped portraying them as lovers would finally extinguish any love for Cleopatra and set Antony free, but in the event Antony is so full of jealous anger at Cleopatra’s betrayal that it shocks and disgusts Octavia.
OCTAVIA: Tis not well,
Indeed, my Lord, ’tis much unkind to me,
To show this passion, this extreme concernment
For an abandon’d, faithless Prostitute.
Antony repeatedly tries to argue that Ventidius cannot be right, Cleopatra cannot have pledged love to Dolabella, that she still loves him and his obstinate determination to exculpate her infuriate Octavia. She thought they were completely reconciled at the end of Act 3 but now she sees how naive she has been. She realises Antony has but ‘half returned’ to her. And so she storms out for the final time, Ventidius, like any Restoration schemer, lamenting that Heaven has blasted his ‘best designs’.
The last element in the unfolding of this grand misunderstanding comes after Octavia has stormed out and Dolabella and Cleopatra enter only to be surprised at the ferocity of Antony’s accusations against them, calling them ‘false and faithless’ serpents.
They try to explain themselves but Antony refuses to believe them and Cleopatra in particular beats herself up that one minute’s feigning has now wrecked a lifetime of love. Antony orders them out of his sight, forever but even as he does so he weeps bitter tears. In other words, pity, fear and sympathy are wring to the maximum.
Act Five
Obviously the entire audience knows Antony and Cleopatra will die in this act so the only question is how Dryden handles the scenes, what speeches he gives them.
The act opens with Cleopatra grabbing a knife ready to kill herself and her maids Charmian and Iras struggling to stop her. With comic timing Alexas walks in and Cleopatra forgets suicide and turns her entire fury on him, the counsellor who suggested she play act being in love with Dolabella. Wretch! He has killed her!
Alexas reassures her that the plan half worked – Dolabella and Octavia both banished, Antony has returned to being a wounded animal and may, again, be wooed. He is right now up the tower of the Pharos watching the sea battle between the Egyptian and Roman fleets.
Right on cue, the high priest Serapion enters and announces that, far from attacking Caesar’s fleet, Cleopatra’s fleet sailed right up to it and…joined it! Everyone cheered and the Egyptians fell into line behind the Romans. Now they are entering the port and will soon be in the palace. Antony was beside himself with rage and tried to throw himself tom his death, was prevented, and is hurrying back into the city.
Serapion tells her to flee to her Monument and orders Alexas – the author of her recent banishment – to go and confront Antony and admit the pretending-to-be-in-love-with-Dolabella scheme was his idea. Cleo, Serapion and the others leave quivering Alexas to a soliloquy lamenting his fear.
Enter Antony and Ventidius who roundly insult the craven Egyptians then vow to rouse what men they can and launch an attack on the invaders and so meet their death like Romans.
They come across Alexas and Ventidius is prompted to kill him on the spot, but Antony thinks he’s too despicable to kill. He just wants to know where Cleopatra is. At which, Alexas tells them both the whopping lie that she has holed up in her Monument where, overcome with grief, she has stabbed herself to death.
Alexas’s motivation for this appears to be an extreme way of extenuating and justifying Cleopatra, faithful unto death, for he says her last words were of undying love for Antony. Antony is, of course, stricken with grief and guilt. Alexas thinks to himself his plan has worked, it has prompted Antony to realise how much he loves/loved Cleopatra. All he has to do now is say it was a false report and they will leap back into each others’ arms.
Ventidius expresses satisfaction that the bloody woman is dead and reminds Antony they promised to go out, all guns blazing. But Antony doesn’t care any more, is overcome with apathy and indifference: if Cleopatra is dead, then nothing matters any more.
ANTONY: What shou’d I fight for now? My Queen is dead.
I was but great for her; my Pow’r, my Empire,
Were but my Merchandise to buy her love;
And conquer’d Kings, my Factors. Now she’s dead,
Let Cæsar take the World,———
An Empty Circle, since the Jewel’s gone
Which made it worth my strife: my being’s nauseous;
For all the bribes of life are gone away.
There follows quite a long dialogue between Antony, who asks Ventidius to kill him and live to tell his story, and Ventidius who complains what it will look like if he lives on like a coward after his master has nobly quit the stage. But as Antony turns away his face in readiness for the death blow, Ventidius betrays him by stabbing himself.
Antony laments but praises his friend’s amity unto death; then falls on his own sword but messes it up, so he is badly wounded but not dead. He’s trying to kneel up to have another go when Charmian and Iras enter and Cleopatra!
In his agony, for a moment Antony thinks he has died and gone to heaven and his mistress is greeting him, but then realises he is still alive and Alexas lied to him.
Antony, rather trivially, double checks with Cleopatra that she is true and she never felt anything for Dolabella. Of course not! They place Antony, rather incongruously, in a chair and he delivers a stirring requiem:
ANTONY: But grieve not, while thou stay’st
My last disastrous times:
Think we have had a clear and glorious day;
And Heav’n did kindly to delay the storm
Just till our close of ev’ning. Ten years love,
And not a moment lost, but all improv’d
To th’ utmost joys: What Ages have we liv’d?
And now to die each others; and, so dying,
While hand in hand we walk in Groves below,
Whole Troops of Lovers Ghosts shall flock about us,
And all the Train be ours.
He gives Cleopatra a last kiss. [It’s notable how little actual sensual activity there is from this pair of lovers who are supposedly wallowing in the sink of sin. One kiss – that appears to be it, for the entire play!]
Despite the protests of her maids, Cleopatra resolves to die, motivated not least by a refusal to be led in triumph through the streets of Rome to be gawped at by the plebs. She bids the maids go fetch her finest clothes and jewellery and ‘the aspicks’.
They return, dress Cleopatra in her finery, who sits in the chair next to Antony’s, and addresses a speech to the snakes which are going to deliver her from a cruel world. Offstage they hear Serapion declaring Caesar is approaching so she hurries, forcing the snake to bite her on the arm. As Serapion beats on the locked doors the two handmaids apply the snake to themselves, too and slowly drowse down, laying on the body of their queen as Serapion’s men burst open the door and run up to them.
SERAPION: Charmion, is this well done?
CHARMION: Yes, ’tis well done, and like a Queen, the last
Of her great Race.
Serapion delivers a eulogy to the dead lovers and now we realise the point of the business with the chairs, the apparently incongruous notion of propping the dying Antony up on a chair. The intention was that the two dead lovers present a striking tableau, at the play’s very ending, of sitting on royal thrones:
SERAPION: See, see how the Lovers sit in State together,
As they were giving Laws to half Mankind.
Th’ impression of a Smile left in her face,
Shows she dy’d pleas’d with him for whom she liv’d,
And went to charm him in another World.
Cæsar’s just entring; grief has now no leisure.
Secure that Villain, as our pledge of safety
To grace th’ Imperial Triumph. Sleep, blest Pair,
Secure from humane chance, long Ages out,
While all the Storms of Fate fly o’er your Tomb;
And Fame, to late Posterity, shall tell,
No Lovers liv’d so great, or dy’d so well.
Several thoughts:
1. Shakespeare had ended his play with a scene of Cleopatra’s death which is so intense as to be uncanny, spectral, supernaturally intense. Dryden clearly had to end his play with a bang and you can imagine him casting around for a suitable final setup/scene/page and lines. This closing spectacle of the two dead lovers propped up on thrones makes a striking – and strikingly different from Shakespeare – final tableau.
2. But it is also subject to a very negative interpretation. They may be sitting there like emperors giving laws to half mankind, but they are in fact corpses, dead, powerless, defunct. they are a mockery of living power, a travesty of real authority. The real thing – Caesar – is at the door. And although he (tactfully on Dryden’s part) never makes an appearance in the play, his presence – and the awe due to real power – is present throughout and, in a sense, drives the entire plot.
3. Thus Dryden presents actors, directors and audiences with a very ambiguous tableau at the play’s end. It might be possible to take Serapion’s words at face value. But the more I mull it over the more the sight of two dead losers propped up on outsize thrones by their sycophants should probably be made to look macabre, outlandish, like the gruesome finale of a Hammer horror movie.
General thoughts
All For Love is surprisingly enjoyable. It’s an easy read. This is due to its greatest strength which is also its weakness, which is its tremendous clarity. Everything is clearly explained in calm and lucid iambic pentameters. The rhythm of the verse is as regular as the German train network. Everything arrives on time and in correct order. All the characters explain how they feel or what they are going to do with admirable candour and clarity. There is very little metaphor or simile and certainly nothing obscure or difficult, nothing to disturb the flow of high-toned sentiments. Even when the characters claim to be in a transport of passion, they still manage to explain it in clear and lucid language expressed with regular rhythm:
CLEOPATRA: … My Love’s a noble madness,
Which shows the cause deserv’d it. Moderate sorrow
Fits vulgar Love; and for a vulgar Man:
But I have lov’d with such transcendent passion,
I soar’d, at first, quite out of Reasons view,
And now am lost above it…
Even when it sounds poetic, the language, on closer examination, always turns out to be clear and rational:
VENTIDIUS: I tell thee, Eunuch, that she has unmann’d him:
Can any Roman see, and know him now,
Thus alter’d from the Lord of half Mankind,
Unbent, unsinew’d, made a Womans Toy,
Shrunk from the vast extent of all his honours,
And crampt within a corner of the World?
There are lots of places in Shakespeare which are puzzling to scholars and readers alike, lots of places where the thought is compressed into clever wordplay so convoluted or uses words referring to things or practices which are now so lost or obscure to us, that even the experts aren’t clear what he was trying to say. Nothing like that ever happens in Dryden. There is a steady trickle of metaphor and simile but nothing obscure, nothing puzzling, no sudden imaginative leaps to take your breath away. He has followed Cleopatra’s injunction to:
CLEOPATRA: Be more plain.
Mermaid’s inadequate notes
The notes to the 1975 Mermaid paperback edition I read, written by the editor N.J. Andrew, are disappointing. There aren’t many of them and what there are are mostly concerned with pointing out textual variations in the early printed editions, described in the clipped abbreviations of editorial scholasticism i.e. the dullest kind of notes possible for a classic text.
There is, admittedly, a second type of note, which is where he quotes passages from Shakespeare to indicate where Dryden copied or imitated the Bard. This also is pretty boring and he need only have given the reference not take up half the page quoting the entire passage. Editions of Shakespeare are easy to access.
What the reader very much does want is notes explaining the characters’ motivations, any obscurities, explaining some of the incidents referred to in the text which took place before the play started, or other people referred to in the text who don’t appear, and so on.
But there are almost no notes like that. Better than the tedious textual notes might have been references to the lives of Plautus or other ancient sources Dryden used. But again, nada. The Mermaid paperback is clearly printed and nice to hold in the hand but there must be editions with fuller, more useful notes.
A comparison of Dryden and Shakespeare
One of the places where Andrew highlights the comparison with Shakespeare is particularly famous and instructive. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Act 2 scene 2 line 239 onwards, Enobarbus is drunkenly praising Cleopatra’s amazing charisma to a table of Roman diners:
ENOBARBUS: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies
The first line is clear enough but the ‘cloy the appetites they feed’ bit requires a moment to process, as does its repetition in the next phrase. I think the idea is that male sexuality is usually quenched and dowsed after sex with a woman, sometimes leading to boredom or even repulsion. I had to look up the dictionary definition of ‘cloy’ to find that it is: ‘disgust or sicken (someone) with an excess of sweetness, richness, or sentiment.’ So I think the passage is based on the idea that women attract men who, however, often grow sick of them, particularly after their initial sexual appetite is satisfied. BUT that Cleopatra is not only different, but has the opposite effect, that the more men are with her and have sex with her, the more wild they are driven by love and lust.
Now I’m not very interested in this idea, as an idea, just the way it’s so densely expressed. Maybe I’m being dim, but I did have to look up the word and read the passage half a dozen times to be sure I understood it. So that’s what I mean by describing Shakespeare’s later style as dense and compact.
Compare that with a passage which seems pretty obviously derived from it in All For Love. Dryden has Antony tell Cleopatra to her face:
ANTONY: There’s no satiety of Love in thee;
Enjoy’d, thou still art new; perpetual Spring
Is in thy armes; the ripen’d fruit but falls
And blossoms rise to fill its empty place;
And I grow rich by giving.
It’s less impactful in at least three ways:
1. It’s more clearly expressed: ‘Enjoyed [i.e. after sex] thou still art new’ and the even clearer ‘Perpetual spring is in thy arms’.
2. For sure, there’s a metaphor about ripened fruit falling but being continually replaced with new blossoms (which promise evermore fruit), the implication being that her sexual allure is always new, and never falls into that surfeit or male repulsion which Shakespeare refers to. But the thing about both these metaphors (perpetual spring, ripened fruit) is how easy they are to understand. They’re more sensual and easy to process and so, also, more…well, relaxing. Contrast with the Shakespeare phrase that Cleopatra makes hungry where most she satisfies. This feels much more primeval; he is describing basic physical appetites, physical hunger, physical satisfaction after sex. At the same time, though, although these words describe basic physical processes they are, in a sense, also quite abstract, hunger being a very abstract word, like anger or love. So the Shakespeare passage manages to feel both more intellectual and more basic, at the same time! This maybe explains why, as a description, it feels a lot more intense, intensely physical yet intensely psychological, and all these factors help explain why it feels more dramatic.
3. And this brings me to my final point, which is the speech’s dramatic placement or context: by this I simply mean that Shakespeare having Enobarbus give his vivid description gives it all kinds of dramatic and psychological reverberations; because Enobarbus is a chorus to Antony’s actions who both approves and disapproves of his master’s infatuation, and so is ambivalent about the figure of Cleopatra. The opening lines sound like extravagant praise but Enobarbus goes on to be scathing about Cleopatra in the very next phrase, so it is an ambivalent, complex speech.
Moreover, it is a description of her in her absence, given to a dinner party table of Romans who have never seen her so are all agog at Enobarbus’s account, which, of course, allows the old soldier, a bit drunk, to crank up his description, to exaggerate. In doing so he is bigging up himself as the top eye-witness to all Antony and Cleopatra’s affairs. The grandeur of the description reflects well on its teller.
4. And, lastly, and pretty obviously, Cleopatra is not there, so this is a conjuration from empty air, it is a word painting, it is a tone poem, it is Enobarbus showing off his way with words at the same time that Shakespeare is showing off his ability to conjure magnificence on a bare wooden stage. Quite apart from the subject matter, the speech conjures the pure magic of poetry on the stage, like Prospero with his staff.
Returning to the Dryden passage we find it lacks all of these complex multi-layered effects. In Dryden the speech is just part of Antony telling Cleopatra how wonderful she is. Obviously there’s some context in the specific context in the play i.e. it reflects Antony’s over-confidence in the military victory he’s just won, and the fact that he’s been swung round from deep depression into a renewed will to live, conquer and be in love; so, arguably, it reflects his manic mood and this explains why it is hyperbolic overstatement. But still…it almost completely lacks the complex psychological and dramatic multidimensionality of the Shakespeare version.
Hopefully, just this one comparison demonstrates how the Dryden is easier to process and enjoy, has merits of its own, but almost completely lacks the verbal, psychological and dramatic complexity which Shakespeare achieves.
‘Ruin’
Key words and symbols are often buried in Shakespeare and take rereading or rewatching to bring them out. Not least because his language is so packed with metaphors, imagery and word play it can be like spotting a needle in a haystack. By contrast, as in so many other things, keywords in Dryden are much easier to spot and process, because his language is so much plainer and clearer, so repetitions stand out like a church spire in a flat landscape.
Thus it wasn’t difficult to notice the word ‘ruin’ recurring again and again. Not a very subtle choice of word or image or metaphor, on the contrary, a very rational choice for a drama about two people who ruin themselves, each other, their causes and countries. But it is repeated so many times it is clearly an attempt to create the same kind of verbal threading and echo that Shakespeare does so effortlessly.
ALEXAS: And Dolabella, who was once his Friend,
Upon some private grudge, now seeks his ruine…
ALEXAS: She dotes, Serapion, on this vanquish’d Man,
And winds her self about his mighty ruins…
VENTIDIUS: O, she has deck’d his ruin with her love,
Led him in golden bands to gaudy slaughter,
And made perdition pleasing…
VENTIDIUS: So, now the Tempest tears him up by th’ Roots,
And on the ground extends the noble Ruin.
ANTONY: I was so great, so happy, so belov’d,
Fate could not ruine me; till I took pains
And work’d against my Fortune,
ANTONY: That I derive my ruin
From you alone—
CLEOPATRA: O Heav’ns! I ruin you!
ANTONY: All this you caus’d.
And would you multiply more ruins on me?
CLEOPATRA: …’twill please my Lord
To ruine me, and therefore I’ll be guilty.
VENTIDIUS: O Syren! Syren!
Yet grant that all the love she boasts were true,
Has she not ruin’d you?
ANTONY: This, this is she who drags me down to ruin!
VENTIDIUS: Justice and Pity both plead for Octavia;
For Cleopatra, neither.
One would be ruin’d with you; but she first
Had ruin’d you: the other, you have ruin’d,
OCTAVIA [going up to Cleopatra]: I would view nearer
That face, which has so long usurp’d my right,
To find th’ inevitable charms, that catch
Mankind so sure, that ruin’d my dear Lord.
And so on. No great perspicacity required to spot the keyword or to understand how Dryden intends it as the central theme of his play. For though Dryden gives the lovers the best love and passion poetry he can conceive, the long introductory essay to his play makes it crystal clear that he takes a strong moral line and thinks they were wrong and immoral. That their neglect of their duties – to their families, their friends, their armies and their countries – mean that their wretched fate was entirely deserved and fitting.
In Dryden’s view, we are not meant to admire history’s most famous lovers, but to condemn them.
“These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage…”
(Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, scene 2)
Plot summary
Act 1
The assassination of Julius Caesar in March 44 BC led to a period of chaos with warlords commanding legions around the Roman world, until a deal was brokered the three most powerful of them, Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus, who formed what came to be called the Second Triumvirate in November 43.
They divided up the provinces of the empire and Mark Antony was assigned command of the eastern Mediterranean. The play opens three years later, in 40 BC, and finds him living in Egypt where has fallen deeply in love with the queen, Cleopatra, where he has abandoned himself to a life of luxury and debauchery.
Act 1 scene 1 sets the scene quickly: the chorus of Demetrius and Philo lament that Antony, the fearless warrior, is ignoring his responsibilities and wasting his time in thrall to a seductive queen. They have barely finished before Antony and Cleopatra enter and give us a prize example of the foolish flirting of love. But they have barely begun – are in fact only 4 lines in – when a messenger from Rome arrives and prompts Antony to an outburst of vexed frustration. Cleopatra then taunts him, saying he must listen to the messenger in case he brings instructions from his ‘master’ Octavius in Rome, or from his true Roman wife, Fulvia.
CLEOPATRA: Fulvia perchance is angry; or, who knows
If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent
His powerful mandate to you, ‘Do this, or this;
At which Antony eloquently summarises his own devil-may-care, laddish irresponsibility for the benefit of the audience:
MARK ANTONY: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
Is to do thus;
And he embraces his Greco-Egyptian squeeze. The messengers tell Antony that his Roman wife, Fulvia, is dead. (Fulvia was a tough cookie. She had united with Antony’s brother, Lucius, to raise an army in Italy against Octavian which led to the so-called Perusine War, because it boiled down to a siege of Perusia, modern Perugia, and had taken Octavian over a year to quell. Out of respect for Antony, Caesar spared Lucius, who was sent to be governor of a province in Spain, but he exiled Fulvia to Sicyon in Greece where, we now learn, she has died from unspecified causes.)
As if this wasn’t enough another messenger arrives to tell him that the son of the Gnaeus Pompeius who had fought Julius Caesar in the first civil war of 49 BC – Sextus Pompeius – has established a naval base on Sicily from which he is attacking Roman shipping.
The guilt Antony feels at the death of his wife is compounded by news that the state he is charged with defending is in danger, and so he announces that he must return to Rome.
ANTONY: I must from this enchanting queen break off:
Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,
My idleness doth hatch
Cleopatra is angry, mocking, scornful, upset. Antony travels with his friend, the general Enobarbus who has become even more of a wastrel in the fleshpots of Egypt and who acts as a foil to Antony’s drunken antics, a licensed jester who delivers satirical opinions about Antony, Cleopatra and everything else.
Act 2
Meanwhile in Rome Octavius Caesar, adopted heir of the murdered Julius, has been consolidating his power and acting with stern dutifulness. Their first meeting is difficult, with Octavius and his entourage freely criticising Antony’s unpatriotic, unroman behaviour in Alexandria, which he is forced to acknowledge and admit to.
One of Caesar’s closest advisers, Agrippa, then proposes an ingenious solution to their problems: Antony should marry Octavius’s sister, Octavia. Antony ponders this for a moment, then willingly agrees and the two triumvirs shake hands on it.
The red-faced old general, Enobarbus is shown reunited with officer friends who are part of Octavius’s entourage, and he rather too candidly tells them the marriage will never work out. Antony will never be able to kick his addiction to Cleopatra and he paints a glowing portrait of her multi-faceted character:
ENOBARBUS: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies…
(Act 2, scene 2)
The third triumvir, Lepidus, attends these meetings but is depicted as a well-intentioned but weak-minded older man who just wants everyone to be friends.
Antony had been prompted to return to Rome by news of the threat young Sextus Pompeius poses to Rome’s merchant fleet and so the next scene shows Antony, Octavious and their followers having a summit meeting with Sextus aboard the latter’s ship. At one point Sextus’s admiral suggests they cut the cables, put out to sea, and murder all the triumvirs but Sextus refuses. Once agreement is made, Enobarbus and Antony lead all the delegates into a boozy dinner which turns into a drinking session in which Lepidus is humiliated in front of everyone while Octavius coldly refuses to get drunk and holds himself aloof from the partying which degenerates into drunken dancing.
Act 3
Cleopatra is amusing herself with her serving women, Charmian and Iras, when a messenger arrives and tells her her beloved Antony has married someone else. Furious she attacks the messenger before demanding to know everything about her rival. Only slowly does she reassure herself that this prim and proper Roman matron is no real rival for Antony’s affections.
Meanwhile Antony and Octavia arrive at Athens en route for his command in the East only to learn that Octavius has gone back on the deal he made, and attacked Pompey. He has also ended the triumvirate by dismissing Lepidus on a trumped-up charge relating to the campaign against Pompey in Sicily.
Compassionately enough, Antony sends his new wife back to Rome to parlay with her brother – but also because, like an alcoholic hitting the bottle at the first sign of trouble, this rupture of the triumvirate makes him hanker for his real love, Cleopatra. So he heads back to Egypt with a view to raising an army to take on Octavian.
Caesar had handed over his beloved sister to Antony with visible reluctance, and had repeated his injunction that Antony respect and love her, so her unannounced reappearance in Rome makes him furious, part of which he directs at her (the poor woman). Incensed, he declares war on Antony and Cleopatra.
Antony ignores the advice of Enobarbus and his other generals, to fight on land, and decides to tackle Caesar’s fleet at Actium. During the battle, Cleopatra’s ships flee from the Roman fleet and Antony loses his head and sails after her in his admiral’s ship, abandoning his fleet. He effectively loses the battle, his fleet, and the allegiance of the many eastern kings he had cultivated as allies.
Act 4
Initially very downcast, much weeping and wailing between the loves, Antony eventually pulls himself together and vows to rally his land forces and attack Caesar on land.
However, we are shown various soldiers and generals questioning his judgement and then, in the one supernatural scene in the play, a squad of guards at his camp at night think they hear strange music coming from underground; they take this to be Hercules, Antony’s ancestor and protector, abandoning him.
Back in the real world, Antony’s bosom buddy and drinking companion, Enobarbus, disillusioned at Antony’s string of bad decisions, defects to Caesar’s army. He had been very conflicted about doing this and when Antony graciously sends him all his belongings and a kindly message, Enobarbus is so overcome with guilt that he kills himself.
So a second, land, battle takes place between Caesar and Antony’s forces but Antony’s bullish confidence turns to despair when Cleopatra’s forces abandon Antony and, like everyone else, go over to the unstoppable force of destiny which is young Caesar.
Terrified of the Roman army which is now approaching Alexandria, Cleopatra leads her serving women and eunuchs into the stronghold of her ‘monument’. Wrongly thinking Antony will blame her for her army’s defection, she sends a messenger to Antony, wandering forlorn in the city, to say that she is dead.
She had hoped this would soften his heart to her but it is a colossal miscalculation (and eerily reminiscent of the misunderstanding at the end of Romeo and Juliet). For Antony is so distraught at her death that he resolves to die and falls on his own sword. However, like many a Roman before him (e.g. Cato) he makes a bad job of it and is writhing in agony from his injury when messengers arrive to tell him that Cleopatra is alive after all. Oh.
So he asks the messengers to carry his dying body to Cleopatra’s ‘monument’ where she has holed up. Here they have a piteous exchange, before his body is lifted up on a rope and pulley and fetched inside the ‘monument’ where they exchange touching last words, then Antony dies in her arms and Cleopatra is distraught.
Act 5
With Antony defunct, the entire last act is devoted to Cleopatra and builds steadily towards a kind of apotheosis.
The Romans trick their way into the ‘monument’ and there is, at last, the confrontation between the future world emperor Caesar, and the legendary woman who seduced his father (Julius Caesar) and fellow triumvir.
Caesar is, as usual, suave and reasonable and tells her to live, for her children’s sake, and that he will allow her to continue her rule of Egypt – on Roman sufferance, of course. Cleopatra is more resolute and self possessed than, I think, a woman was expected to be in Elizabethan culture i.e. she shows herself to be exceptional and there are hints that, even in her grief and loss, she may very slyly be laying the groundwork to seduce a third great Roman leader in a row.
But as soon as Caesar leaves, she gets her women to send for a countryman who brings a basket of figs which contain the famous asps, small poisonous snakes. Suspecting nothing the Roman guards let him through. He is, in fact, a yokel, a simpleton, on a par with the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the hungover porter who pops up at the most dramatic part of Macbeth.
It’s a prime example of the incongruity and tonal unevenness which the classically minded French reject about Shakespeare and made the classically-minded Restoration playwright John Dryden rewrite the play to make it conform to enlightened standards.
Long story short, Cleopatra takes not one but two asps from the basket, gets them to bite her and dies, along with her two long-serving maids, Charmian and Iras. However, the intensity of her wish to travel quickly to the afterlife to be reunited with her beloved Antony achieves an intensity and luminance absent from most of the rest of the play and really, for me, takes it to a new level.
She dies, Caesar is called back to see the corpse, delivers the standard eulogy over the dead body of his adversary, orders the lovers to be buried together with all due ceremony etc, then tells his people they must head back to Rome where, of course, he will become undisputed ruler of the state and, in effect, the first Roman Emperor.
But still. In this final act Cleopatra rises above the skittish, ironic, mocking, bad tempered, squabbling middle-aged woman she appears in much of the rest of the play to become a force of nature. And it’s the image of this transcendent icon that she leaves blazing in the audience’s memory.
A problem play
In the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Antony and Cleopatra is categorised as a tragedy, but it is far longer, more complex and problematic than the earlier tragedy, Julius Caesar (1599), to which it is a sort of sequel.
Julius Caesar has one obvious central event to which the first half leads and from which everything in the second half follows; I’ve come to realise that although he is physically absent from the second half, it is nevertheless Caesar’s play because his spirit haunts the subsequent actions of all the characters, actually appears as a ghost to Brutus on the eve of the Battle of Philippi, and that both the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, address his spirit just as the commit suicide, and do so using the same swords they murdered him with. So there is one central figure dominating Julius Caesar.
Antony and Cleopatra is more complicated. There is no one central event and no one central figure. Instead acts 1 and 2 contain a confusing mish-mash of scenes, introducing us to different settings, characters and events in swift succession; and 3 and 4 depict a series of battles which are all defeats for Antony and lead to his downfall…but not immediately; the process is dragged out.
I agree with the assessment of Jonathan Miller who directed the BBC Shakespeare production of it, that there is something elegiac about the whole play: both Antony and Cleopatra are past their prime: Cleopatra is touchy about her age, Antony looks back to past military glories, and both, when they talk about happy love, refer to it in the past. Antony refers to the grey hairs appearing among their brown (Act 4, scene 8).
They are both on the way down and for this reason, maybe, deep down, not that sad to be beaten by confident young Octavian. The whole thing has a dying fall right from the opening lines where two Romans lament Antony’s falling-off from a world-bestriding general to the plaything of an Egyptian strumpet.
Time covered
Whereas Julius Caesar packed two years (44 to 42 BC) into its 3-hour span, Antony and Cleopatra tries to cram in ten years of complex history – from the death of Antony’s wife Fulvia, in 40 BC, to Antony and Cleopatra’s double suicides in 30 BC.
Ten years is a long time and these years were packed with events, the most notable being Antony’s vast ill-fated campaign to invade and conquer Parthia in 36 BC a huge 2-year undertaking of which we hear nothing whatsoever in the play (Wilder, p.58).
This drastic cutting and collaging is testament to Shakespeare’s skill at picking out what he needed, at throwing away references to entire wars (such as the Perusine War) in just a few lines in order to stay focused on the central psychological theme of his play, of the bickering, addicted central lovers. But still, despite all his skill, and even stripped of many key events and virtually all details, the sheer logic of the events which the play sets out to depict is still irreducibly complex and, well, big. The result is that the play is very long and feels it. Picking up on all the historical events and references is quite an ask.
Maybe this is why the final act, Cleopatra’s apotheosis, is, from one angle, the most effective thing in the play. It is the only event that is entirely in the present. It is the most mindful of the acts. It fulfils the old (and misunderstood) Aristotelian idea of the unity of time and action. With Antony dead and her cause roundly defeated, Cleopatra is intensely present. Like many suicides, once the decision is made, those last few minutes of life take on a supernatural intensity. Every word, every gesture, is lovingly scrutinised as the last this mind and this body will take. The never-ending web of Roman wars and alliances which Caesar completely mastered, which Antony miserably failed at, disappear.
Instead the audience is privileged to share the last moments of an extraordinary human being about to turn themselves into a legend.
Stats
A quick check with this website which gives basic stats about the plays reveals that, if Julius Caesar was notable for its relative shortness and the brevity of some of its acts, Antony and Cleopatra is the reverse.
At 3,039 total lines Antony and Cleopatra is longer than the average Shakespeare play (average play: 2,768 lines; average tragedy: 2,936). It has more scenes – 43 – than any other Shakespeare play (average play 21; average tragedy: 24). And far more characters – 57 – than any other play (plays: 36; tragedy: 39).
The obvious conclusion is that the excessive length and the unusually large number of scenes and characters, reflect the complexity of the history Shakespeare is trying to pack in (see below).
Knotty verse
And there’s something else. The verse is more sinewy and knotty than before. As Shakespeare’s career developed, the prolific invention of the early plays evolved into a more mature but still gorgeous style around 1600, dense with metaphor and dazzling flights of fancy. But by the time he wrote Antony and Cleopatra in late 1606, Shakespeare had been writing plays for about 17 years (first play 1589). Antony and Cleopatra follows a run of three major thrillingly visceral tragedies but, as this list demonstrates, represents a pivot into a series of later, less famous and less outstanding works:
All’s Well That Ends Well (1602–1603)
Measure for Measure (1604–1605)
Othello (1604–1605)
King Lear (1605–1606)
Macbeth (1605–1606)
Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1607)
Coriolanus (1607–1608)
Timon of Athens (1607–1608)
Pericles (1608–1609)
Cymbeline (1609–1610)
Either Shakespeare was out of juice or he was pivoting towards a late style in the conception, construction and style of the plays. Assessing the structure of the plays would require an examination of their sources and quickly turn into a book, so it’s easiest to focus on the verse style:
To me Antony and Cleopatra feels characterised by less flashily beautiful verse and a kind of sparser, knottier style than previously. Julius Caesar sounds like this:
CASSIUS. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
This is a vivid metaphor and it is developed over four lines which run confidently over the end of each line to create one long, fluent sentence. It is clear, vivid and enjoyable to read or hear spoken. Compare it with a random passage from Antony andCleopatra:
ANTONY: Go, Eros, send his treasure after. Do it.
Detain no jot, I charge thee. Write to him–
I will subscribe–gentle adieus and greetings.
Say that I wish he never find more cause
To change a master.
This is deliberately staccato, broken up into bitty phrases (except the more fluent sentence at the end, which caps the thought). Whereas sentences in the earlier play are long and complete, confidently running over a series of lines with little punctuation to create a fluid, mellifluent effect, in the later play, again and again, the full stop comes in mid-line and phrases are not an easy sentence in length, but are often shorter, sometimes three little phrases wedged into one line.
CLEOPATRA: Nay, pray you, seek no colour for your going,
But bid farewell and go. When you sued staying,
Then was the time for words, No going then.
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’ bent. None our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven. (Act 1, scene 3)
And speeches hand over from one character to another, not at the neat end of a line, but joltingly, in mid-line.
CLEOPATRA: Or thou, the greatest soldier of the world,
Art turn’d the greatest liar…
ANTONY: How now, lady!
CLEOPATRA: I would I had thy inches; thou shouldst know
There were a heart in Egypt.
ANTONY: Hear me, queen.
This creates a clotted, knotty style, a lot less fluid.
POMPEY: I shall do well.
The people love me, and the sea is mine.
My powers are crescent, and my auguring hope
Says it will come to the full. Mark Antony
In Egypt sits at dinner and will make
No wars without doors. Caesar gets money where
He loses hearts. Lepidus flatters both,
Of both is flatter’d.
It also has the related effect of making the poetry less metaphorical. There are a lot more orders and instructions or sudden thoughts, a lot less florid poetry, similes and comparisons. When Cleopatra asks whether she or Antony is at fault, Enobarbus replies:
ENOBARBUS: Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason. What though you fled
From that great face of war, whose several ranges
Frighted each other? Why should he follow?
The itch of his affection should not then
Have nick’d his captainship.
See what I mean about the sentences ending (and the next one beginning) in mid-line and so creating a stuttering, staccato, clipped effect. There’s similes even in this little passage (the face of war, ‘the itch of his affection’ meaning his lust, ‘nicking his captainship’ meaning cut short his command [of the fleet at Actium]). But none of them are developed at relaxed length into a gorgeous conceit expanding over multiple lines as in his earlier style. Instead they are tightly compressed, expressed in as compressed a form as possible before the verse moves onto the next one.
It is a style less appropriate for the flowing love duets of Romeo and Juliet, than for undecorated sarcasm or irony, which doesn’t need elaborate conceits, as when Cleopatra jokes with Antony that she has something important to say to him, but can’t remember what it is:
CLEOPATRA: Courteous lord, one word.
Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it:
Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it;
That you know well: something it is I would,
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.
Here’s another example from Julius, showing what I mean by the fluent flow of long sentences running through a sequence of lines with hardly any punctuation, or coming only at the end of each line, thus allowing the lines to breathe through their full length:
SOOTHSAYER: The throng that follows Caesar at the heels,
Of senators, of praetors, common suitors,
Will crowd a feeble man almost to death.
I’ll get me to a place more void and there
Speak to great Caesar as he comes along.
It flows, each iambic pentameter has the entire line to breathe and display. It’s a pleasure to read or say aloud. By contrast here’s Octavian from the later play giving instructions to his envoy Thyreus:
CAESAR: From Antony win Cleopatra. Promise,
And in our name, what she requires. Add more,
From thine invention, offers. Women are not
In their best fortunes strong, but want will perjure
The ne’er touch’d vestal. Try thy cunning, Thyreus.
Completely different. This must be deliberate, a deliberate creation of a late style. Why? What does it do? Well, I think that instead of the long verse paragraphs, the far fetched metaphors, the open rhythms of the earlier plays, this style creates something closer to the jerkiness of actual thought and real speech. Fragments of phrases, even individual words, several different thoughts expressed in fragments bolted together to make lines. Much more bitty, fragmented, less florid, less gorgeous.
This explains why the one set-piece speech in the entire play stands out so much, namely Enobarbus’s magnificent long speech describing to Octavian’s lieutenants the scene when Antony first met Cleopatra, when she had herself rowed up the Nile in a magnificent galley.
ENOBARBUS: The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their stroke
Even this, when you look closely, is in the same manner, with the first sentence ending half-way through the second line, and sentences stopping mid-line 3 times in these 7 lines, at ‘water’, ‘them’ and ‘stroke’. The effect of ending sentences and starting new ones in mid-line is to break up the untrammelled liquid flow of the earlier style. But in this speech the effect is overruled by the gorgeousness of the metaphors and the magnificence of the vision. Its rich colour highlights how relatively grey, functional and gnarly a lot of the rest of the play is.
And difficult. The thought is often so compressed as to be hard to follow. In the excerpt below, I don’t really understand what the first half means. It is Antony telling Octavian’s sister, the honest but boring Octavia, who he has married in a purely political marriage to try and patch up his alliance with Caesar – telling her that if she’s unhappy, she’s free to go:
ANTONY: When it appears to you where this begins,
Turn your displeasure that way. For our faults
Can never be so equal, that your love
Can equally move with them. Provide your going.
Choose your own company, and command what cost
Your heart has mind to.
It’s not only the verse that is choppy and fragmented. It feels like something clever is going on in the sentence starting “For our faults…” but, to be frank, I don’t follow it.
This kept happening to me while reading Antony and Cleopatra. I enjoyed reading and rereading Julius Caesar because each reading revealed new depths to the characters, made me realise how certain symbols or topics cleverly recur, made me see the subtle linguistic threads which bind the fabric together. Not so Antony and Cleopatra, with its fewer metaphors and similes, and its thought so compressed I often didn’t understand it. I read and reread passages and they remained obstinately gnarly in rhythm and opaque in meaning. They remain what they first appeared.
Here’s Cleopatra lamenting that Antony has married Octavia and regretting her first angry impulse to smack and slap the messenger who brought this news:
These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself; since I myself
Have given myself the cause.
It sounds interwoven and self-entwining as if there ought to be a hidden meaning, but repeated readings leave it what it was.
And this brings me back to my earlier reference to the theme of age and decline. Because maybe this is a style suited to mature characters. It is not the show-off prolixity of the young and flashy. It feels like the poetic style of a man who has ‘done all that’, has written unbeatably show-off verse in Romeo and Juliet and Henry V and Hamlet and knows it, knows he’s written the best pyrotechnic verse in the world and so is now trying something different.
He’s deliberately cutting back on mellifluous flashiness and trying for something more…tough and wizened. As leathery and furrowed as the face of Colin Blakely playing Antony on the BBC Shakespeare production I’ve just watched. The lined and grizzled face of a man who, although the play gives the impression it’s taking place over a few hectic weeks, in fact ages ten years over its duration.
Lack of oomph
Admittedly ‘oomph’ is not a common technical term in literary criticism. What I mean is something like impact and atmosphere. The first three acts of Julius Caesar not only have dramatic unity because they are entirely about the conspiracy to murder him, but are given thrilling dramatic and psychological atmosphere by the use of the wild storm the night before the murder. The night the assassins hold their final meeting is characterised by a wild storm of thunder and lightning which terrifies half the characters, during which people see ghosts and wild animals prowling the streets and fire in the sky.
This is a fairly obvious effect – the same depiction of discord in nature reflecting the overthrow of the social order on earth is used in Macbeth and King Lear – but it is fantastically successful at giving the play a kind of unity of palette and the same feeling is, of course, revived at the end of the play when Brutus sees the ghost of Caesar appear to him in his tent. Once introduced, this supernatural vibe runs throughout the play.
Antony and Cleopatra lacks any of that. There are occasional attempts to give the thing an orientalist exotic Egyptian vibe, but not many, and you don’t really notice them. There is no comparable melodramatic setting / scene / vocabulary / diction which dominates and unifies the scenes. A couple of times characters refer to the stars, but this is bog standard stuff, passing references: all Shakespeare protagonists refer to Fortune or the stars at some point, even in the comedies:
ANTONY: And at this time most easy ’tis to do’t,
When my good stars, that were my former guides,
Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires
Into the abysm of hell…
ANTONY: Alack, our terrene moon
Is now eclipsed; and it portends alone
The fall of Antony!
It isn’t the large scale dramatisation of astrological doom, as in the storms of Lear or Macbeth. The one ‘spooky’ scene is, as so often, on the eve of the last battle, a standard moment for protagonists to soulfully muse about the destinies which have brought them to this point etc, when none of the main characters are about but soldiers on guard at Antony’s camp hear strange music coming from underground and one, as if clairvoyant, says it is the sound of Hercules, Antony’s ancestor, leaving him to his fate (Act 3, scene 3). That, I grant you, is strange and eerie but not, by itself, enough to spook up the overall story.
Far more emblematic is the setpiece scene where the triumvirate meet with Pompey aboard his flagship, make peace then drink till they’re drunk and perform a drunken dance, accompanied by music. Which has no symbolic overtones at all; it’s just another party.
One way to demonstrate the lack of oomph is to compare the soothsayers in the two plays. In Julius Caesar the soothsayer’s warnings about the Ides of March are genuinely spooky and concern the central event of the play. The murder scene itself (Act 3, scene 1) opens with Caesar progressing to the senate building with his entourage and spotting in the cheering crowd the soothsayer who’d warned him about the Ides of March. Caesar shouts mockingly to him:
CAESAR: The ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.
This has real bite. It links up to the strong supernatural theme, it revives the sense of destiny and fate, and purely in dramatic terms, it gives Caesar and his entourage pause for a moment of doubt, before Caesar recovers his composure and blusteringly dismisses him as ‘a dreamer’. In other words, this two-line exchange packs a punch on a number of levels.
There is also a soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra but a) he isn’t integrated into any other supernatural aspect or indicators; he is a rather isolated almost forlorn figure. And b) his scope is limited to reading the fortunes of Cleopatra’s giggling maids, who mock him and each other. From the sublime to the ridiculing.
Schoolgirls
I watched the BBC Shakespeare production, starring Colin Blakely and Jane Lapotaire, and the 1984 TV movie, starring Timothy Dalton and Lynn Redgrave. Neither of them really convince and both of them bring out Shakespeare’s odd decision to make the second scene in the play a comic one featuring Cleopatra’s two serving women (‘My noble girls!’), Charmian (very much the main one) and Iras (who hardly speaks at all).
Alexas, supposedly Cleopatra’s chief minister but who appears to be her chief male servant, introduces the Egyptian soothsayer to the giggly women and, instead of adding to and crystallising the sense of world-encompassing doom, as his avatar in Julius Caesar does, this soothsayer is reduced to answering their gossipy enquiries about their husbands and children.
Now, the canny audience will spot the way the soothsayer accurately predicts the fact that both women will die alongside their mistress, but in the obscure, limited way of the Delphic Oracle, so that neither of them grasps the truth and, in any case, are too busy making jokes about each other’s future husbands to notice.
Maybe the audience will remember his predictions three hours later when Charmian and Iras accompany their mistress to her death; maybe the audience who knows they’re all going to die will enjoy the dramatic irony when they hear it – but either way, it’s indicative of the way that a supernatural element is vestigially present but much tamped down, itself symptomatic of the more muted, adult focus of the play as a whole.
The unattractive protagonists
The puzzling effect of the play is also a function of the lack of a clear protagonist. Cleopatra emerges in the final act as the dominating figure of the play, but before that was often absent for long periods or, when she was present, was a very reactive figure, reacting to Antony’s decisions or apologies or outbursts. Even when she is alone with her handmaids and Alexas, she is constantly thinking about Antony, reacting to him even in his absence.
Brutus is the protagonist of Julius Caesar and his antagonist is the savvy, virile Antony of that play, drolly ironic, cleverer than all the conspirators put together – with the ghost of Caesar lurking under the stage until he emerges in the last few scenes to neatly round everything off by haunting the assassins to their deaths. I liked the clever, ironic Antony of the earlier play, with his devil-may-care confidence.
The Antony of this play and his Cleopatra, by contrast, I found tiresome, as people. Maybe it’s me, but right at the start Shakespeare goes out of his way to show how quickly the famous lovers fall out and bicker like teenagers (‘Fie! wrangling queen!’).
Along with the immediately following scene of the schoolgirl handmaids, this sets a tone of silliness in their relationship, a stroppy teenage quickness to fall into heated arguments over nothing, from which the play, for me, never qute recovers.
I found Antony’s flip-flopping between infatuation with Cleopatra and guilty acknowledgement that he needs to break free and return to his Roman duties and responsibilities, irritating rather than profound. I wanted to tell him to grow up.
Also, by the time we meet him, he is a loser. He has lost the insouciant, devil-may-care brashness of the earlier play. Now Caesar is the winner, and knows he will win, and goes on to win.
Antony, by contrast, is a loser. He fails in his negotiations with Cesar. He fails as a husband to innocent Octavia, setting out to damply please her but all-too-quickly letting himself and her down.
Antony never comes over as the world-bestriding general the other characters describe him as having been, once, in the play’s heretofore. When we meet him he is well on the way to making a series of catastrophic errors, which lead up to his military blunders: first, deciding to fight by sea, and then abandoning his fleet when Cleopatra sails away.
This sequence of bad calls is capped when he believes the messenger who tells him Cleopatra is dead and makes the foolish decision to kill himself; and then makes a botch of it, terribly injuring himself but failing to die. It’s failure all down the line. It’s a fine line between Tragic Fall and pathetic failure.
Similarly, Cleopatra, for me, for the first four acts, never achieves the awe and majesty which the play claims for her. Enobarbus’s description of her is far more impressive than the reality.
In Julius Caesar both Portia (wife of Brutus) and Calpurnia (wife of Caesar) have real presence and depth. Your heart bleeds for poor Portia, tormented by her husband locking her out from his feelings (i.e. not telling her about the conspiracy to murder Caesar).
Jane Lapotaire is a handsome woman but I found her continual arbitrary switching from anger to irony to sarcasm so tiresome that, when she finally got around to something like genuine expressions of love and/or soulful introspection about her feelings, I’d stopped caring. I found her unpredictable mood swings alienating rather than entrancing. Maybe she’s just not my type.
That said, I suppose Cleopatra’s depiction is on a different plane from that of the men, if only for the sheer length of time she is on stage and the phenomenal number of lines she gets to deliver. But for me, only right at the end, locked away in her strongpoint, as she commits herself to ending her life, does she attain a kind of visionary transcendence, which lifts her onto a different plane from all the other characters.
Enobarbus and Caesar
First a word of explanation: after Julius Caesar was assassinated, it turned out that in his will he left the majority of his estate to his great-nephew (his sister’s daughter’s son) Gaius Octavius who he legally adopted as his son. Octavius, only 18 at the time, promptly came to Rome to claim his inheritance, to ratify his adoption by Caesar, and, as was common with Roman adoptees, to take his adoptive father’s name, calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, where Octavianus is the adjectival form of Octavius. Quite quickly he took to referring to himself as ‘Caesar’ since this helped in winning the loyalty of the dead dictator’s legions. And all this explains why he is referred to as ‘Caesar’ throughout this play.
Enobarbus, meanwhile, is based on this historical figure of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Roman general and politician, birth date unknown, who died in 31 BC. A quick scan of his Wikipedia entry indicates how thoroughly Shakespeare has fictionalised the character, and is also a good indicator of how completely Shakespeare ignores the long historical duration covered by the play, and the extremely complex web of shifting alliances which took place during the ten years the action supposedly covers.
Instead of a highly successful general who led forces against Antony at Philippi and persisted in opposing the triumvirate, until he was eventually reconciled with Antony, and went on to play a leading part in the latter’s ill-fated invasion of Parthia (36 BC), Shakespeare’s Enobarbus is depicted as a fellow drunk, a kind of embodiment of Antony’s devil-may-care debauchery. He’s a sort of cut-price Falstaff.
And a chorus to the main action. His main structural function is to be a court jester to Antony, licensed to say anything: to mock him, to mock the queen, to mock their love affair, to mock Rome and responsibility and pour Antony another drink. In the scenes where Antony and Caesar and their entourages meet, parley and party, he is shown getting on well with two of Caesar’s senior advisers, Agrippa and Maecenas, and speaking probably tactlessly about he and Antony’s party ways back in Alexandria. He very tactlessly shares his belief that Antony’s marriage to Octavia won’t last.
So he is not intended to be a pleasant man, and in his asides to the audience he has something of Iago – not in orchestrating and motivating the action, but in his increasing tone of malevolence and misanthropy. He becomes more bitter and cynical as the play progresses, eventually defects from Antony’s service altogether, going over to young Caesar, but finally malevolences his way right out of existence by killing himself (as does, of course, his former master). So he is like a barometer indicating the steady, relentless decline in Antony’s fortunes.
So from out of this pack of squabbling lovers and their cynical hangers-on, I couldn’t help coming to admire Caesar. He is quite obviously depicted as a Spock-like emotionless automaton, a ruthlessly efficient calculating machine. His speeches are very deliberately made as emotional as computer printouts.
But if one person was going to end up ruling the Roman Empire who would you prefer it to be? The childishly irresponsibly, changeable, unreliable, petulant self-pitying drunk, Antony? Or the sober, hard-working, focused and efficient young Octavian? Antony is like Boris Johnson: an impetuous, charismatic, changeable, unreliable, making-it-up-as-you-go-along party animal. A great bloke to stay up all night carousing with but shouldn’t be left in charge of a whelk stall, let alone half the Roman Empire – as his over-ambitious, badly managed, and disastrous foray into Parthia (36 BC) conclusively proved, and then his catastrophic decision to abandon his fleet and his legions at Actium (31 BC) proved all over again.
Just like Boris Johnson, Antony’s supporters keep giving him the benefit of the doubt as he proves himself unfit for high office again and again and again, as one by one his senior allies defect, until he managed to dig his own grave and even his most loyal hanger-on (Enobarbus) abandoned him.
ANTONY: O, my fortunes have corrupted honest men!
No, Octavian for me. If you want someone to manage a country, let alone an empire, you want a managerial type: hard working, sober, efficient, fair, and also – a winner. As he always does, right from the start Shakespeare plants the seed of the character’s eventual fate – in this case Octavian’s complete triumph – by pointing out that he just wins. Whatever enterprise he undertakes, whether it’s playing dice or taking on the senate, he just wins. Enobarbus comes to realise Caesar is ‘twenty times of better fortune’ than Antony. As the soothsayer (they crop up everywhere, these soothsayers, don’t they) tells Antony:
If thou dost play with him at any game,
Thou art sure to lose; and, of that natural luck,
He beats thee ‘gainst the odds: thy lustre thickens,
When he shines by…
And so it ultimately proves here.
Binaries and dichotomies
Antony is a man caught between two contrasting worlds and sets of values:
Egypt versus Italy
Alexandria versus Rome
East versus West
Femininity (all those Egyptian handmaids plus the eunuchs) versus masculinity (all those Roman senators and generals)
Cleopatra versus Caesar
Love versus Reason
Irresponsibility versus duty
Sensual pleasure versus puritan abstention (Caesar’s fastidious dislike of the drunkenness at Pompey’s party)
An empire of the senses versus the real-world empire of war and conquest
Mistress versus wife
The personal versus the public
Colourful exotic costumes versus the plain white Roman toga
Indeed the play overflows with carefully contrasted binaries and contrasts:
(Cleopatra’s) playfulness versus (Caesar’s) earnestness
Humour versus seriousness
Irony versus sincerity
Hyperbole versus statements of fact
Emotional instability versus fixed resolution
Right down to the contrast between the two suicides, one botched and hideously painful (Antony’s) in which he is pitifully abandoned by his servants; the other ceremonious, beautiful and painless (Cleopatra’s) in which she is loyally served to the end by her maids.
Suicide
1. History. The era is packed with famous suicides: Cato, Portia, Brutus, Cassius, Enobarbus, Eros, Antony, Cleopatra, a generation of generals and rulers liquidated itself to make way for Octavius.
2. Shakespeare. Throw in Shakespeare’s most famous depictions of suicide, Romeo and Juliet and you can reasonably ask: Has any other major author so glamorised and romanticised suicide?
CLEOPATRA: The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desired.
The end speech
While Antony was alive, Caesar’s cronies queued up to mimic their master’s mood and mock and insult Antony. When, in Act 5 scene 1, they learn he is dead, they queue up to praise him (‘A rarer spirit never / Did steer humanity’). Octavian joins in and then, a long 20 minutes later, after Cleopatra has also killed herself and Octavian stands over her lifeless body, he delivers the same kind of eulogy.
This naturally reminds me of the same Octavian standing over Brutus’s corpse while Antony delivers a noble eulogy to him (Brutus) at the end of Julius Caesar. All of which prompts a simple thought: it is easy to be noble and generous about your opponent after he is safely dead.
Boys will be girls
Last thought about the characters, and a fact which opens up a Pandora’s box of debates about gender and identity – women characters in the theatre of Shakespeare’s time were played by boys. The numerous scenes between Cleopatra and her maids, the opening scene where the maids discuss marriage, all those furious arguments with Antony, and Cleopatra’s final, transcendent apotheosis – all this was depicted by pubescent boys.
Historical background
The first thing to emphasise is that, like Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra leaps through long, complicated historical events, cutting and paring and cherry picking just what it needs to produce a narrative which focuses on two of western history’s most famous lovers. But even more ambitiously than the 2 years covered by the earlier play, Antony and Cleopatra depicts events spanning no fewer than ten years of Roman history.
After Julius Caesar’s assassination in March 44 a complicated political and military situation emerged. You’d have expected a straight fight between Mark Anthony as Caesar’s loyal lieutenant and the conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. In fact the opposing factions patched together a compromise peace and all sides, including the senate, were struggling to understand what to do next when the situation was further complicated by the arrival of 18-year-old Gaius Octavius, named by Caesar as his main heir, who arrived in Rome within weeks of Caesar’s murder, determined to claim his legacy.
Brutus and Cassius were amnestied by the senate for the assassination but thought it wise to leave Rome and so secured from the senate governorships in faraway Asia (modern-day Turkey), leaving space for a conflict emerged in Italy between Octavian – who quickly raised troops by playing on his adoptive father’s name – and Antony who marched his legions north to besiege the town of Mutina, held by the legions of another of the assassins, Decimus Brutus.
The conflict developed into one between Antony, determined to seize complete control of Italy, and the senate, who supported Decimus and were persuaded to give their backing to Octavius. This was achieved largely through the influence of Cicero who delivered a series of stinging attacks on Antony’s character and aims, so much so that Antony was declared ‘an enemy of the state’. Meanwhile Brutus and Cassius gathered their forces in Asia, anticipating involvement in the war racking Italy.
Then there came an extremely unexpected development which transformed the situation. Despite having just led their legions in bitter fighting against each other, Octavian in particular came to realise he had more to gain by declaring a truce and even allying with Antony. There was always both an emotional and legal logic to the idea that Caesar’s best friend and his adoptive son would eventually unite against the men who murdered him.
And so it turned out. The senate and all the other political actors in the drama, not least Cicero who had heartily supported Octavian against Antony, were flabbergasted when in October 43 BC Octavian convened a meeting in northern Italy with Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had seized the provinces of Hispania and Narbonese Gaul. They called themselves the ‘triumvirate for organizing the republic’ (Latin: tresviri rei publicae constituendae) known to history as the Second Triumvirate, and divided the Roman Empire between them: at least initially Lepidus held Hispania and Narbonese Gaul, Antony retained Cisalpine Gaul and hegemony over Gaul itself, and Octavian was assigned Africa, Sicily Sardinia.
Octavia and Antony’s joined forces then embarked for Greece to confront the armies of the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, who they defeated in two clumsy, unwieldy battles fought with huge forces on both sides near Philippi in northern Greece on 3 and 23 October 42 BC. Both the assassins committed suicide and their cause dissolved. Antony and Octavian took over control of their legions and divided the Mediterranean world between them, Antony taking the East, where he wanted to win glory by taking on the Parthian Empire, and Octavian, shrewdly assuming control of Italy, Gaul and Spain. Lepidus was reassigned north Africa and Sicily.
The thing about the triumvirate is that it lasted for ten years, from 43, when the senate formally recognised it, to 33 when open conflict broke out between Octavian and Antony. Ten years is a long time and a lot happened, including a wide range of reforms back in Rome and in the administration of the empire (notably very contentious policies to seize land to settle veteran soldiers), plus wars in various places (notably against Gaius Pompeius’s son Sextus, in Sicily, in 36 BC, and the ill-fated Perusine War of 40 BC), and major disagreements between the partners, which were raggedly patched up. The triumvirate was ratified by the senate for five years, but the behaviour of the triumvirs increasingly sidelined the senate and all constitutional processes. It signalled the end of the Republic.
In 36 the triumvirate was renewed for another 5 years but Octavian took advantage of Lepidus’s mismanagement of affairs in Sicily to strip him of his powers in September of that year and force him into exile. The situation had thus evolved into just two Great Men dominating the Roman world, Antony based in the East and Octavian in Italy, Gaul and Spain.
Antony had responsibilities all round the Eastern Mediterranean but fell in love with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and chose to spend years based in her capital, Alexandria, eventually fathering twin children by her, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II.
Octavian made use of every rumour of Antony’s partying, drunkenness, neglect of his duties, and his subservience to a foreign (and therefore, ipso facto, immoral) ruler, and a woman to boot, as part of his propaganda campaign against Antony back in Italy.
Cleopatra the movie
John Wilders, editor of the 1995 Arden edition of the play, optimistically claims that Shakespeare’s depiction of the star-crossed lovers defined them for all time:
Shakespeare clearly set a challenge for himself. He rose to it so splendidly that in most of our minds Antony and Cleopatra actually were the people he created. (Antony and Cleopatra, Arden edition, 1995, page 1)
I disagree. There were plenty of other literary depictions of them, both before and after –by Chaucer in his Legend of Good Women (1380s) and by John Dryden, the Restoration playwright (1677), to pick two famous authors. In fact a quick check of the Dryden Wikipedia page tells us that Dryden’s retelling of the story was widely performed in the 18th century: ‘becoming the preferred version of the story; Shakespeare’s play did not reappear on the London stage until 1813.’
And if you had to choose just one depiction of the story, surely it would be Plutarch’s Life of Antony without which none of the other accounts would exist.
But anyway, leaving the leafy groves of academe, I’d have thought a million times more influential than any literary depiction is the fabulous 1963 Hollywood movie, Cleopatra, starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton at the peak of their fame. Quite obviously this provides the epic spectacle, the awe and majesty, which all the stage productions I’ve watched completely lack.
And although it’s easy to dismiss it as American kitsch, I think it very effectively depicts the kind of middle-aged ‘love’ which is closer to cantankerous addiction, to perpetual arguing with someone you can’t leave, of leaving them and then discovering you can’t live without them, which is the central theme of the play.
Mind you, all this is, of course, before we get to what is indisputably THE most important cultural representation of the story in our time:
Asterix and Cleopatra by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (1963)
1974 RSC TV production starring Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson – my favourite production: I like Richard Johnson (47 at the time) with his smoker’s laugh, as Antony, Suzman (35) has genuine sex appeal, manipulation and threat, the direction (by Jon Scoffield) captures the nuances and subtleties in the script far better than the others. And the court and party scenes, like the massage scene in 1.5, convey a genuine sense of party decadence which the other productions refer to but never show. And Corin Redgrave (35), looking younger than his years, is intimidatingly cool and calculating. The use of soft focus or blurring works very well to convey: messengers approaching from a distance; montages of events being reported, such as Antony and Cleopatra’s enthronement; and the swift transition and overlap of the short scenes conveying the Battle of Actium, the appearance of Cleopatra and her entourage to victorious Antony or of Cleopatra appearing to defeated Antony. All appear shimmering out of the sand yellow which very effectively evokes the blistering deserts of Egypt and also gives a successful visual unity to the sequence of very short scenes which critics from the 1700s onwards have criticised as too bitty.
1981 BBC Shakespeare production starring Jane Lapotaire and Colin Blakely – savour Blakely (51)’s fixed rictus grin in the opening scene: he is not at home playing an abandoned sensualist; Jane Lapotaire is good but, ultimately to thin and light to convey earthy majesty as Suzman does; I very much liked Ian Charleston (32)’s cool Caesar, and liked his careful, even enunciation of the verse.
Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, was first produced, in all probability, in 1599. The plot is based entirely on three of Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Romans, which Shakespeare found in Sir Thomas North’s translations into English of The Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, first published in 1579. The three lives he drew from are those of:
As you can see, whereas the assassination only takes up the last tenth of Caesar’s life, and the period from the assassination to the Battle of Philippi only takes up ten of Antony’s 87 chapters, the assassination and aftermath constitute almost all of Plutarch’s life of Brutus which may, at a very basic level, explain why Brutus emerges as the hero’ of Shakespeare’s play.
Brief synopsis
The figure the play is named after, Julius Caesar, actually dies half way through the play. The first half of the play depicts the conspiracy leading up to his assassination, the second half depicts the main consequences.
The play opens with Rome preparing for Caesar’s triumphal entrance accompanied by his best friend and deputy, Mark Antony. Brutus is a noble upstanding ally and friend of Caesar, but he fears that Caesar will become king and so overthrow the republic which he loves. Cassius is depicted as a wily and slippery friend-cum-tempter who convinces Brutus to join a conspiracy to murder Caesar. As Cassius says to himself (and the audience) after Brutus has left him.
CASSIUS: Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is disposed…
The night before the planned assassination is wild and stormy, with various characters observing or hearing of ominous portents and signs. The conspirators turn up at Brutus’s house and they finalise their plans. When they’ve left Brutus’s wife reveals her extreme anxiety that something terrible is about to happen. Brutus hasn’t told her about the planned assassination and does his best to calm her nerves.
On the day of the assassination, Caesar’s wife Calpurnia describes an ominous dream she had of his dead body spurting blood and begs him to stay at home, but one of the conspirators, Decius Brutus, smoothly reinterprets her dream in a positive light and persuades Caesar to go to the senate as planned.
In the Senate building the conspirators crowd round Caesar before stabbing him to death. A very nervous Antony enters and reveals himself as two-faced: to the conspirators he gingerly says he respects their motives though is understandably upset, and they are satisfied with that. But when they’ve left him alone he reveals he is outraged and distraught at the behaviour of these ‘butchers’ and vows revenge.
Cut to the Roman forum where Brutus makes a speech defending the assassins’ actions before handing over, as the assassins had agreed, to Antony, who had promised to make a moderate and sensible eulogy to the dead man and appeal for calm. Instead he uses the opportunity to inflame the mob into hysterical rage and sends them rampaging through the streets to find and kill the assassins.
Act 4 cuts to 18 months later and finds a slightly tipsy Antony at table with a new character, Octavian who, we learn, was named in Caesar’s will as his main heir and has used the time since to amass a private army and become a player in Rome’s power politics. Now Octavian is cutting a deal with Antony and a third character, Lepidus. They treat Lepidus with contempt, dismissing him from the table with the result that the actor playing Lepidus has just 4 lines. With him gone the other two settle down to signing a compact. They seal it by agreeing a list of political opponents who will be ‘proscribed’ or murdered. The first line of the scene indicates the new atmosphere of brutality.
ANTONY: These many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.
I don’t think any character says it explicitly, but one of Caesar’s distinguishing features, politically and strategically, was going out of his way to ‘forgive’ his opponents. Well, look what that led to: the biggest opponent he forgave and took into his entourage, Brutus, murdered him. So, lesson learned, Octavian and Antony will show no mercy or forgiveness. Opponents will be ruthlessly exterminated.
The second part of Act 4 skips nearly a year ahead, to October 43 and finds the two assassins, Brutus and Cassius, camped with their armies near the town of Philippi in Greece, opposed by the armies of Antony and Octavius, on the night before the fateful battle between the two forces.
Brutus and Cassius have a prolonged and acrimonious quarrel before patching things up. Left alone in his tent with only a serving boy who soon nods off, Brutus sees a ghost who warns ominously about the upcoming battle.
Act 5 is entirely devoted to a succession of quickfire scenes depicting the Battle of Philippi. The two key moments are when Cassius, misled by false reports that his army has lost, persuades a slave to kill him. And then, only moments later, after Brutus’s army really is defeated, Brutus, also, begs a comrade to help him commit suicide.
Moments later, Octavian and Antony enter, stand over the dead bodies and Antony praises Brutus as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.
Shaping and forming
As usual Shakespeare takes his source material and a) shapes it into a five-act play with a beginning, middle and end and b) presents all the 15 or so speaking parts in such a way as to give them each character and individuality, no matter how brief their appearance.
This is especially true of the leading four roles, Caesar, Cassius, Antony, and above all Brutus. Though the play bears someone else’s name, Brutus is the lead protagonist. As T.S. Dorsch puts it in his introduction to the 1955 Arden edition of the play, ‘Caesar is the titular hero, Brutus is the dramatic hero’ (Introduction page xxvii). (And yet see below for the way this initial impression – Brutus as the ‘hero’ – must then be tempered and adjusted by recognition of the centrality of Caesar’s spirit.)
Moral dilemmas
Caesar was written a little earlier than Hamlet (composed sometime between 1599 and 1601) and they share something in common: Brutus, a fundamentally decent man, must nerve himself to commit an unprovoked murder in the name of the greater good; Hamlet, a fundamentally good man, must nerve himself to commit the coldblooded murder of his uncle, who he suspects of murdering his (Hamlet’s) father.
They even at one point share the same key word, ‘question’, placed with emphasis at the end of a key sentence; for Hamlet it is the question of whether to soldier on or commit suicide and thus escape a sea of troubles:
HAMLET: To be or not to be, that is the question.
For Brutus it is the more characteristically practical question of whether Caesar, once crowned king, will become a dictator:
BRUTUS: He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
Both, then, must balance two conflicting moral imperatives, in Brutus’s case the ban on killing weighed against the greater good of the state, in Hamlet’s the ban on killing weighed against the call of justified revenge. No surprise, then, that both characters give vent to their dilemma in a series of to-the-audience soliloquies, indicators of psychological depth vouchsafed to none of the other characters. Hamlet and Brutus alone are inside the secret chamber of the drama, confronting this central moral dilemma, while all the other characters are in a sense on the outside of the psychological drama, mere players, contributors.
Speed
Julius Caesar is a play in a hurry – there is a lot to cram in. This sense of haste or the shoehorning of material comes over in numerous places and makes it, for me, an unsatisfactory play.
Acts 1, 2 and 3 hang together well enough, telling a continuous narrative of the growth and development of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, with atmospheric meetings of the conspirators and the midnight fears of Brutus’s wife, Portia, thrown in to jack up the sense of anxiety and danger.
(Though even here there is much compression: the opening scene which depicts Caesar’s triumphing after defeating Pompey’s son conflates it with the feast of the Lupercalia where Antony thrice offered Caesar the crown and he rejected it, in reality two events which were months apart, October 45 and February 44 respectively.)
Shakespeare moves his narrative at high speed up to the assassination itself (on 15 March 44 BC), accurately based on his sources (Caesar falling at the feet of the statue of Pompey), before moving quickly on to the immediate aftermath, namely the big central scene where first Brutus then Mark Antony speak to the rowdy crowd in the Roman Forum (again skipping over the real events which played out over several days of intense confusion in Rome and telescoping them all into the same few hours).
But then there is a huge leap or break in continuity, for Act 4 skips forward 18 months to show Antony meeting with Octavian to form a pact, the so-called Second Triumvirate (along with the non-descript Lepidus who is assigned a mere 4 lines). To be precise, the play goes straight into a scene with the three men seated round a table deciding which of their political enemies they will ‘proscribe’ i.e. mark for elimination, liquidation, murder.
The point being that this meeting took place in northern Italy in October 43, 18 months after Caesar’s assassination and an enormous amount had happened in that time: After negotiating an uneasy peace with Antony, the assassins decided to flee Rome, heading out East where the senate, in the coming months, ratified their control of the provinces of Asia, where they proceeded to raise armies loyal to them.
Meanwhile, Octavius had arrived in Rome: he raised legions on the strength of his name, he encouraged Cicero to denounce Antony in a series of speeches in and outside the senate leading up to Antony being declared an enemy of the state; he led his army into several pitched battles with Antony’s forces; then both men realised they had more in common than divided them, not least opposition to the assassins or ‘liberators’ as they called themselves, led by Brutus and Cassius. All this goes unexplained when the narrative instead leaps to the scene depicted at the start of Act IV, where Octavius and Antony are shown cobbling together an alliance along with the third leader of a significant army in Italy, Lepidus.
And then, in the very next scene, the play makes another great leap, 11 months further down the line, to the immediate build-up to the Battle of Philippi, when the armies of the assassins and the Caesarians finally come face to face, which was fought in October 42 BC.
Now, making great leaps through events was standard procedure for Shakespeare, witness the history plays which play tremendously fast and loose with chronology. The aim was to skip all the boring details and alight on the key psychological moments. His plays are not factual but psychological histories, picking and choosing the moments he needs to create what are, in effect, character studies of people from history in extreme circumstances.
Thus the complex historical realities of Cassius and Brutus are reshaped to provide a series of scenes which dwell mostly on the psychological dynamic between them, turning history into psychodrama and, the slow complex course of events into a tremendously compressed narrative which moves with the speed of a hurtling train.
Brevity
It turns out there’s a website that analyses Shakespeare stats, and this confirms with statistics the impression you get either watching or reading the play that it is compressed and fast: this tells us that, at 2,451 total lines Julius Caesar is shorter than the average Shakespeare play (average play: 2,768, average tragedy: 2,936). That specific acts are the shortest of their kind: Act Four: 409 lines, much shorter than average (average play: 560, average tragedy: 547); Act Five at 353 lines, the shortest of all tragedies; much shorter than average (average play: 484, average tragedy: 478). And it has 17 scenes which is also less than average (average play: 21; average tragedy: 24). So a lot of action is compressed into fewer lines and scenes than his average play. While, by contrast, the sense of hectic activity is also the result of it having an above average number of characters, 49 characters compared to the average play: 36; average tragedy: 39.
More characters depicting more events, including a highly compressed time-scheme, in a much shorter than average space = hence the sense of hurtling pace.
The snapshot battle scenes
The snapshot approach is vividly epitomised in the final scenes of the play. These are all set during the confused battle of Philippi and play very fast and loose with the historical facts, not least the fact that there was not one but two quite distinct battles of Philippi, fought on 3 and 23 October, whereas Shakespeare makes it all happen on one day – in theatrical time, all in about ten hectic minutes.
None of this matters, it gets in the way of what Shakespeare wants to do which is to provide a neatly rounded end to his drama. All tragedies end in death and so does this one – not the death of the eponymous dictator which, as we’ve seen, comes half way through the action, but the deaths of the two leading conspirators and best buddies, Cassius and Brutus, Cassius falsely believing the battle is lost and so honourably killing himself (well, begging his colleagues and servants to hold his sword while he plunges onto it); then, just a few minutes later, Brutus correctly being informed that the battle is lost and doing exactly the same. Both are given pathetic (in the original sense of the word, meaning designed-to-evoke-tears-of-emotion) speeches, and then proceed to their stabby ends.
I can see what Shakespeare’s aiming to do, to shape messy history into another smoothly delivered morality lesson with the same overall shape as all his other historical morality lessons, leading up to the well-known and heart-rending deaths scenes for both the assassins. But, in my opinion, they don’t really come off and this leaves an enduring impression that the play is unsatisfactory, half-cocked or somehow unfinished.
Part of the problem is the bittiness of the battle scenes. Designed to convey the chaos and peril of battle, they consist of a series of very short scenes, sometimes only half a dozen lines, with one set of soldiers running on, shouting a few lines at each other, then running off only to be immediately replaced with a new set of soldiers running on from the other side of the stage and depicting key moments from other locations on the battlefield. Shakespeare does it in Henry IV and Henry V and probably all the other history plays.
On Shakespeare’s static stage, with huge allowance made for the conventions of the time, this works. But it has proved very difficult for directors in more realistic times, in the Victorian era, let along the post-war period of super-realistic drama, to depict what Shakespeare asks the actors to do without it seeming artificial and contrived and, sometimes, a bit absurd.
The double suicide risks absurdity
This sense of absurdity is, unfortunately, reinforced by the doubling up of the suicide scenes. If it had been just Brutus who realised the battle was lost, delivered a stirring speech about the nobility of his aim to rid Rome of tyranny, then fell on his sword with dignity, it would be one thing; but the effect of Brutus’s speech and death are – for me at any rate – seriously undermined by the fact that Cassius has done the exact same thing 3 minutes earlier.
Not only that, but Cassius’s death is not the result of noble resolve and high-mindedness, it is caused by a really stupid mistake. He sends a messenger back to their base to check whether it has been overrun by the enemy (Antony and Octavius’s army) and, if not, to signal back to them that all is fine. He then sends a colleague up a nearby hill to watch the messenger’s progress. The man up the hill proceeds to completely misinterpret events, because he shouts back down to Cassius that their messenger has been captured. They both hear a big roar from soldiers which the lookout interprets as the enemy cheering at having captured Cassius’s spy. And so Cassius concludes that all is lost and begs colleagues to help him commit suicide.
Except that only minutes after he has collapsed to the floor and bled to death, another messenger comes running in to announce that everything is OK, that the messenger got through to the camp, and it has been successfully held against the enemy, and the cheer they heard was not from the victorious enemy but from his own men cheering to hear he is still alive. Except that now he isn’t. He is dead on the ground and the too-late messenger is given a sad and tear-jerking speech over his dead body before himself stabbing himself and falling on Cassius’s body.
At which point another group of Cassius’s soldiers enter, hoping to find their gallant leader and instead discovering two bloody corpses.
This is… this is hard to take seriously. It is what Plutarch reports as actually happening but in historical accounts is given much more context and explanation and so emerges as a noble and tragic act. It is hard to take seriously a man who kills himself out of high-minded motives which are really just all a stupid mistake.
And then more or less the same thing happens to Brutus – although without the stupid mistake. He at least, at a later stage of the day, has drawn the correct conclusion that the battle is lost . But, in my opinion, the power of his suicide is seriously drained of dignity and meaning by the silly suicide of Cassius only moments before. To persuade us of all that happening in just 2 or 3 minutes of stage time is a big ask and, in the BBC production I’ve just watched, fails.
The standard end-speech
Then the play ends with the stock-in-trade, bog standard arrival of the victors who behold the bodies of their noble antagonists and order that their bodies be given full and proper funerals. Compare and contrast Fortinbras arriving at the end of Hamlet to encounter a stage littered with dead bodies.
In Hamlet this has a pathetic effect in the original sense of the word, depicting a man who has no idea of the complex psychodrama which has played out in the court of Denmark, but instinctively recognises nobility. It has a complex flavour because it is, at the same time, a conventional king’s conventional, conservative response to a situation which is wildly unconventional and strange. We have been witnesses of the extremely complicated psychodrama of which the conventional Fortinbras only sees the outward or external results, and responds in a standard, conventional way.
Whereas Antony and Octavius entering at the end of Julius Caesar, expressing a few stock sentiments about what noble men Cassius and Brutus were and ordering they be given proper state funerals…doesn’t have the same effect. It feels thin and inadequate to me. Shakespeare tries. He saves up some of the best poetry in the play for Antony’s brief eulogy:
ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’
Excellent words, an eloquent summary of the life and motives of the Great and Noble Brutus who is the real subject of this play and yet…they don’t quite compensate for the structural weaknesses of much that came before.
It was a popular play in Shakespeare’s time because audiences couldn’t get enough of kings and princes getting their brutal come-uppance, and so they loved the pathetic suicide speeches of Cassius and Brutus. To my modern sensibility these scenes felt rushed and contrived and so ended the play on a false note.
Famous bits
As so often with Shakespeare the most impactful thing is not necessarily the overall narrative, compressed and hurried as it is – it comes in the numerous moments of deep psychological penetration which litter the drama.
Antony’s Forum speech
The most famous of these is the long scene 2 in Act 3, where Brutus (foolishly, fatally) invites Mark Antony to make a funeral oration to the Roman crowd over the body of the assassinated Caesar. It opens with famously quotable phrases:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
It is a highly enjoyable scene because it is a sustained performance of psychological manipulation. Again and again Antony swears to the crowd that he is not there to inflame them with anger against the assassins, who he repeatedly calls ‘honourable men’, at every mention the phrase sounding increasingly ironic and, eventually, contemptuous – while all the time in fact doing his level best to do just that, to inflame them into a wild mob rage against the assassins so that, by the end, the crowd are ready to rush off and burn down the houses of all the assassins. It is a tour de force of sophisticated rhetoric and mob manipulation, all masquerading as modesty and plain speaking:
I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend…
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on…
As T.S. Dorsch rather grandly puts it: ‘If ever Shakespeare wanted to show genius at work, surely it was in Antony’s oration’ (Arden introduction p.lii) and many, many commentators have analysed the speech at length, highlighting its rhetorical techniques. One reason for its effectiveness is its sheer length, it goes on and on, as Antony pauses for breath, retires for emotion, quells the crowd and draws one more rabbit out of his hat (the reading of Caesar’s will).
But another reason, I think, is its sheer exuberance: it is a bravura performance by a man at the top of his game, of a canny chancer and opportunist responding magnificently to the fact that his patron and protector has been cruelly murdered and his entire world turned upside down. The 1970 movie of the play sinks under the weight of an astonishingly bad performance of Brutus by Jason Robards, but is illuminating in lots of other ways, not least in the way it shows Antony, played with a swaggering sneer by Charlton Heston, having whipped the mob into a frenzy and sent them off to burn the conspirators’ houses down, collapsing exhausted against a nearby cart of wine barrels, hacking one open, drinking deep of the booze, and declaring:
ANTONY: Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt!
His invocation of chaos allies him with Iago and other instigators of anarchy. He doesn’t care what happens, because he’s supremely, sublimely confident that come what may, he will ride the storm and easily get the better of poor saps like Brutus and Cassius. As he does…for a while….
Caesar’s dignity
We only get a flavour of Caesar’s character in three scenes: in the opening one where he is processing regally through the crowd, conferring with colleagues; in the long scene where his wife tries to dissuade him from going to the senate that morning, the ides of March, but Caesar allows himself to be persuaded to attend by the flattery and insinuation of one of the conspirators, Decimus Brutus; and then, maybe, in the dignity of his bearing while the assassins close in with their importunate demands for the return from exile of Metellus Cimber’s brother, before they reveal their daggers and their true intentions.
In the complex opening scene, where many themes and characters are first revealed, Caesar utters the famous lines hinting at his suspicions of Cassius and Brutus:
CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
ANTONY: Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
CAESAR: Would he were fatter!
Ominousness
The play overflows with bad omens. It is interesting to consider that Shakespeare and his audience in the 1590s appear to have been every bit as irrationally superstitious as Plutarch and his readers in about 100 AD. In between there had been one and a half millennia of dark and middle ages, and then the Renaissance, all of which continued to take seriously signs and omens and superstitions and auguries and harbingers and portents and premonitions.
CASCA: Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glared upon me, and went surly by,
Without annoying me: and there were drawn
Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fear; who swore they saw
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noon-day upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
‘These are their reasons; they are natural;’
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Hence the extensive scenes set during the dark and stormy night before the assassination in which all the characters describe nature in turmoil and retail rumours of the dead rising from their graves, great fires across the sky, and so on. The play is drenched with these irrational superstitions, with strange sightings on the dark and stormy night before the assassination, so much so that even the man himself has, or so Cassius alleges, caught the infection:
CASSIUS: But it is doubtful yet,
Whether Caesar will come forth to-day, or no;
For he is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams and ceremonies:
It may be, these apparent prodigies,
The unaccustom’d terror of this night,
And the persuasion of his augurers,
May hold him from the Capitol to-day.
On the morning of the fateful day Calpurnia repeats and reinforces the theme, claiming that all manner of strange sights have been seen across Rome:
CALPURNIA: There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn’d, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
But in fact, as the Calpurnia scene shows, this is another of Cassius’s slurs on Caesar, dictated by his own festering resentment, for in that scene Caesar is very deliberately placed in antithesis to Calpurnia’s fears and alarms, instead displaying a rational and fearless contempt for superstition and hearsay.
The night before murder
One of the most beautiful scenes in literature has to be the young king in Henry V on the night before the battle of Agincourt, disguising himself and going among his soldiers to discover their mood. Night time prompts a special sensitivity in Shakespeare. Compare with the beautiful and sensitive dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in Act 5 scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice.
Here, the night before the planned assassination provides the setting for a number of characters to reveal their worries and fears. It is, of course, a violent stormy night, full of thunder and lightning and so part of the atmosphere of portents and premonitions which anticipate the assassination, and then return at the end of the play to anticipate the deaths of the two leading protagonists.
The night before is always a powerful, revealing moment in a Shakespeare tragedy. Think of the night when Macbeth and his wife are terrified to admit even to themselves their feverish plans to murder the lawful king.
Here, after some scenes involving Cicero, Casca and so on, the drama really zeroes in on the troubled minds of Brutus and his wife. The extent to which we are taken into his private life indicates his centrality as a protagonist. As always, Shakespeare reveals a sensitivity to women characters which seems centuries ahead of his time. Both here and in the scene the next morning when Calpurnia begs her husband not to attend the senate, these wives are depicted with great psychological acuity. The audience is entirely persuaded to sympathise with them and see their points of view.
The night before battle
I should have referred to Henry V in this section, because it is more appropriate. The long Act 4 scene 2 set in Brutus’s tent where he and his best buddy Cassius have a prolonged falling out, ends with Cassius leaving Brutus in the company of his young servant, Lucius, who Brutus asks to fetch a lamp and then settles down to read while Lucius gently plays a harp. As so often in Shakespeare there is a sweetness and delicacy to the scene and Brutus’s concern for the tired boy which reaches out beyond the ostensible subject matter, and his own time and place, and seems to kiss something deep and essential in human nature, a depthless kindness and generosity.
It is all the more effective, then, having conjured this gentle atmosphere, when it is broken by the sudden apparition of Caesar’s ghost to Brutus. As I mentioned at the start, this play was written while Shakespeare was working on the much longer, much more complex Hamlet which also, of course, features an ambiguous ghost. Brutus’s ghost never tells his name, all it says, when Brutus asks its identity, is that he is ‘Thy evil spirit, Brutus’. But any uncertainty is cleared up right at the end when Brutus tells his comrade, Volumnius:
The ghost of Caesar hath appear’d to me
Two several times by night; at Sardis once,
And, this last night, here in Philippi fields:
Explaining that this is why he knows his hour has come.
Revenge
Chances are it is because this allows the play to fit neatly into the format of the revenge tragedy. The argument goes that, rather than disappearing at his death, the titular figure goes underground but remains a presence, disturbing the minds of men, and especially the guilty men who murdered him, as all good ghosts in revenge tragedies are supposed to.
The long argument between Brutus and Cassius which makes up Act 4 scene 2 changes from being a rather pointless bicker to showing the subtle, lingering effects of their crime driving two former friends apart – at one point Brutus bitterly reproaches Cassius for what he’s done, what they’ve done, not unlike the mutual reproaches of the guilt-ridden Macbeth and his wife.
And then in the ghost scene the subterranean presence of the dead man becomes explicit – the haunting of their minds goes from metaphorical to literal.
On this reading, the final scenes do not depict an absurdist comedy of misunderstandings but depict the fitting closure of the revenge theme, as both Cassius and Brutus in their different ways can only find peace through terminating their troubled consciousnesses. And as they point out in order to make the theme of revenge and closure totally obvious to even the dimmest theatre-goer, both do so using the same swords they used to murder Caesar.
CASSIUS: Caesar, thou art revenged,
Even with the sword that kill’d thee.
And Brutus, looking down on his friend’s body, makes the revenge theme explicit:
BRUTUS: O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails. (5.3, 94 to 96)
Then, after all is lost, Brutus rams home the thought as with his final words:
BRUTUS: Caesar, now be still:
I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.
(Runs onto sword. Dies)
On this reading Octavius and Antony don’t arrive on the scene to wind up external historical events but to bring to a fitting end the psychodrama of two men undermined and fated by their own guilt.
On this reading Brutus is not the protagonist he appears to be – that figure is the spirit of Caesar who determines everybody else’s actions, and works underground to bring about his just revenge. The play could be called The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus but it is also The Revenge of Julius Caesar.
Antony’s irony
T.S. Dorsch repeats the good point (first made by various scholars before him) that the true turning point comes not with the murder of Caesar as such (although that is, obviously, the main central event) but with the arrival a few minutes later of a servant from Antony. This servant asks their permission for his master to approach them safely, but with the special combination of enduring love for the dead dictator with flattery of the assassins which is to become Antony’s leading tone or strategy. Dorsch compares it to the introduction of a new theme into the final part of a symphony.
The assassins’ naive hope is that by eliminating the dictator they will restore the One Good Thing which was the old Res publica. But all they have done is return Rome to its pre-civil war state of being a snakepit of conflicting ambitions and men who lie and scheme, and Antony’s character as a champion schemer is wonderfully written and reaches its apogee in the complex ironies of his great speech in the forum. And all this is already present in the servant’s message:
SERVANT: Brutus is noble, wise, valiant, and honest;
Caesar was mighty, bold, royal, and loving.
Say, I love Brutus, and I honor him;
Say, I feared Caesar, honored him, and loved him.
If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony
May safely come to him and be resolved
How Caesar hath deserved to lie in death,
Mark Antony shall not love Caesar dead
So well as Brutus living, but will follow
The fortunes and affairs of noble Brutus
Thorough the hazards of this untrod state
With all true faith.
‘With all true faith’ ha ha ha. As in his speech in person to the assassins, and then to the crowd in the forum, Antony means the precise opposite of what he says, and his discourse is therefore the most vigorous and dynamic and enjoyable of all the characters.
Compare and contrast with the straightforward noble honesty of Brutus’s speeches, which are moving in performance and yet, somehow, eminently forgettable. In these instances ‘character’ doesn’t seem a strong enough word for what Shakespeare is doing: he manages to conjure up entirely different psychological worlds through the medium of spoken language.
Seen from this perspective Cassius is a kind of mini-me to Antony’s master. The opening scenes are all about Cassius flattering and bringing out Brutus’s straightforward noble fears about Caesar’s ambition to become king so that, when Brutus leaves, Cassius rejoices in his ability to manipulate the greater but simpler man. But next to Antony he is an amateur. Antony is a master of discursive distortion and deviousness. In the psychodrama of the play he triumphs not because his army has won a battle, out there, in the boring real world. He triumphs because his discursive ability is streets ahead of either the straightforward Brutus or the wily Cassius, wily and tricksy certainly, but not wily enough. Antony outwilies everyone and it is deeply enjoyable to watch him do so, a master at work.
Brutus as Hamlet
Brutus soliloquises like Hamlet and often in language very similar to Hamlet’s:
BRUTUS: It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question…
That is the question. A little later he delivers the beautiful lines:
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
But Dorsch warns against taking Brutus at face value, at his own valuation, as a noble hero. Once Cassius has swayed him to join the conspirator, all the others accept him as their leader and yet…the sober truth is that on every major decision he’s called upon to make, Brutus makes exactly the wrong call:
they conspirators want to bind themselves by an oath but Brutus overrides them and delivers a pompous little speech about Roman Honour
then Cassius suggests they invited Cicero to join them but Brutus decisively rejects that
Cassius worries whether they ought to kill Antony at the same time as Caesar but, again, Brutus overrides this, insisting that Antony is just a ‘limb’ of Caesar’s
In the aftermath of the murder it quickly becomes clear that Brutus has no better idea what to do to restore the republic than to run out into the streets shouting ‘Freedom! Liberty!’ He has no plan to present to the senate, no strategy to establish control of the all-important army.
And within minutes of the assassination he makes the catastrophically bad decision to let Antony speak at Caesar’s funeral. In the history of Bad Decisions, this is in the top ten.
Things get worse during the long argument scene in Act 4. This has several functions: it is here partly to point the time-honoured moral of how conspirators fall out among themselves. But it also shows Brutus to very poor advantage, showing him bullying and imposing on his snivelling partner. There’s a slight comparison to be had, maybe, with Milton’s Satan who starts Paradise Lost as a vast, awesome and terrifying figure and slowly and relentlessly shrinks and shrivels down until, by the end of the poem, he is the size of a misshapen frog. There isn’t a direct comparison, but something broadly similar can be said of Brutus who starts the play with noble soliloquies and high ideals but consistently mismanages every aspect of one of the most cack-handed conspiracies in history.
His final two contributions are to override Cassius’s suggestion that they delay and battle, insisting they fight on the battlefield of Philippi (which turns out to be a disaster). And then to mismanage the battle itself so that his own side is utterly defeated.
Stripped of all the high-sounding rhetoric, it’s not really an impressive record, is it? Shakespeare, as it were, restores the high dignified tone surrounding Brutus in the opening scenes with Antony’s fine words about ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ – but the litany of really fatal errors and mismanagement I’ve just listed tends to outweigh those fine words.
Dorsch sums up by saying Brutus is a man who honestly struggles with a problem which is beyond his abilities to solve. Murdering one man was easy. Resurrecting the Roman Republic which had collapsed for all kinds of reasons turned out to be wildly beyond the ability of a dozen or so men with daggers and not the slightest idea what to do next.
Suicide
Cassius’s eventual suicide is anticipated and prepared many times earlier in the play. Shakespeare makes him a man extremely willing to consider suicide at the slightest contradiction. Already in act one, when he is only just starting to sketch out the reasons to resist Caesar’s tyranny, he gets very vexed describing their subjugated state to Casca and then whips out his dagger and says he’s ready to off himself at any moment, that suicide is the last refuge of the oppressed:
CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius:
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself. (1.3)
At the height of his argument with Brutus he bares his breast and asks Brutus to stab him:
CASSIUS: There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast; within, a heart
Dearer than Plutus’ mine, richer than gold:
If that thou be’st a Roman, take it forth;
I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart:
Strike, as thou didst at Caesar. (4.3)
By contrast, Brutus betrays no such melodramatic thoughts, indeed Shakespeare has him explicitly speak against suicide in the comrades’ dialogue before the start of the fateful battle:
BRUTUS: Even by the rule of that philosophy
By which I did blame Cato for the death
Which he did give himself, I know not how,
But I do find it cowardly and vile, For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life: arming myself with patience
To stay the providence of some high powers
That govern us below.
So there is concealed in the text a debate, of sorts, about suicide (just as suicide is a major theme of Hamlet who considers killing himself in order to escape his unbearable moral dilemma).
Critics have pointed out that this little speech against suicide is contradicted by Brutus’s own behaviour a few minutes later, but, as so often in Shakespeare, the logics of individual positions (along with accurate chronology and a host of other details) are sacrificed to the compelling immediacy of the drama. In this case the Brutus’s philosophical position is overruled by the dynamic of the play, embodied in the power of Caesar’s ghost as an instrument of fate/fortune/destiny:
The ghost of Caesar hath appear’d to me
Two several times by night; at Sardis once,
And, this last night, here in Philippi fields: I know my hour is come.
You can’t fight a messenger from the other side, and so:
It is more worthy to leap in ourselves,
Than tarry till they push us.
Against the wyrd of ghosts, philosophy has no power.
Reading Shakespeare
Reading Shakespeare is like this. You watch a production of the play and take in the gross events of the plot, noticing pretty obvious things like the murder, the ghost and the suicides. And then you read and reread the play and start to notice the way these aren’t just isolated events, but have been carefully prepared for earlier in the text or have lingering consequences afterwards.
And so you begin to realise that the suicides didn’t come out of nowhere but were anticipated, the idea was discussed, at a number of key moments earlier, or that, in the case of revenge, the word and the theme recur steadily, carefully placed in dialogue and speeches after the assassination. And you begin to appreciate the number of themes and verbal echoes which thread throughout the text which, as a result, comes more fully to life, seems deeper and more complex and more full of carefully planted echoes and anticipations than you dreamed when you just watched it on the stage.
And behold! You have walked through the looking glass into a new world made entirely of text, where ‘history’ or the ‘real world’ are no longer the prime concern, are only useful if they can be quarried for material to bolster and elaborate the dream world of the text, and you are just the most recent of the scores of millions of people who have watched this drama, read this text, and entered this dream.
Wisdom sayings
Apart from his skill at shaping stories into compelling narratives, and his supernatural ability at delving deep into the psychology of such a variety of people of all ranks, ages and genders, Shakespeare is famous for his unparalleled ability to expressing things memorably, for taking age-old saws and insights and giving them beautiful and memorable phrasing.
All his plays abound in sudden moments when his language clarifies and expresses a human thought for all time. Here’s Brutus at the end of his fierce meeting with Cassius, concluding the allies’ discussion of where and when to give battle the next day, explaining that opportunities must be seized:
BRUTUS: There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Noble and heroic, isn’t it? In this respect alone, reading Shakespeare and soaking our minds in the wonderfully evocative expression of all kinds of human feelings, emotions, desires and opinions, hugely ennobles his readers. Although, rather spoiling the effect, the whole speech is uttered as part of Brutus’s insistence that they go to meet their opponents at Philippi, despite Cassius’s objections. In other words, it is the very beautiful expression of a disastrous miscalculation.
‘Whatever’s happened here, it wasn’t my fault.’
(The cowardly servant Parmeno to his master Demea, page 212)
In her introduction, the editor and translator of the Penguin edition, Betty Radice, observes that The Eunuch was Terence’s most popular play and is also the most Plautine of his plays, as if these are coincidental facts. When I opened the The Ghost by Plautus I was laughing by the end of the first page. By contrast, wading through Terence’s play, The Self-Tormentor, made me want to stop reading Terence altogether, it was so contrived, impenetrably complex, and without a single laugh in the entire text. Plautus is my man.
Fortunately, The Eunuch is a lot clearer and a lot funnier than The Self-Tormentor. According to Suetonius’s life of Terence, it was performed twice in one day at the Megalensian Games in 161 BC and won its author 8,000 sesterces, ‘the highest fee ever paid for a comedy’. Like all Plautus and Terence’s plays, it is based on a Greek original, in this case by the Greek playwright Menander.
Incidentally, this play is apparently the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word ‘eunuch’, making it an important resource for academic histories of the (very varied roles played by) ‘the eunuch’ in the ancient world.
The plot
As usual, the scene consists of a street and two houses, showing the front doors of Demea, father of two errant sons, and Thais, a courtesan. As usual, the worthy father, Demea, is struggling to cope with two sons who have made inappropriate love matches: Phaedria is in love with a courtesan, Chaerea is in love with a slave girl.
Phaedria and Parmeno
Parmeno is the elderly family servant. When Phaedria tells him he is mad with love for Thais, Parmeno tells him to grow up, pay up and get rid of her.
Enter Thais
Phaedria goes weak at the knees. Thais apologises to him for locking him out of her house the day before but then goes on to give some key exposition. Thais says her mother came from Samos and lived on Rhodes. A merchant made her a present of a little girl stolen from the area where the play is set, Attica. The little girl knew her father and mother’s name but not where she came from or whether she was free or slave. The merchant had bought her off pirates who claimed to have stolen her from Sunium. This kidnapped girl was brought up alongside Thais as her sister. Then Thais found a ‘protector’, a soldier, Thraso, who brought her here to Athens (where the play is set) and set her up as his courtesan. is soldier, Thraso, then went off to Caria and Thais has found a new protector/sponsor/lover in Phaedria. And that brings the backstory up to date.
But there’s more. Recently Thais’s mother died, leaving the house and goods to her brother, including the foster sister. Since the latter was pretty and could play the lyre, Thais’s brother put her up for sale and, in a spectacular coincidence, she was bought by Thais’s very same protector, the soldier Thraso. He has recently returned to Athens, intending to give Thais the girl as a servant but, when he found out that Thais has been seeing another man (i.e. Phaedria) Thraso changed his mind. He won’t come to see her or hand over the slave girl while Phaedria is on the scene.
So now she gets to the point: will Phaedria agree to lie low for several days so that Thraso can resume his position as her lover, and give her the gift of the slave girl – so that Phaedria can then do a good deed and track down the girl’s family and return her to them?
Phaedria is angry. He thinks it’s all a story to cover wanting to go back to the soldier. Hasn’t he bought her everything? Only yesterday he paid 2,000 drachmas for an Ethiopian slave girl and a eunuch Thais said she wanted. Doesn’t he buy her whatever she wants?
Thais begs, pleads and wears him down and eventually Phaedria promises to leave town for a couple of days so the soldier can return and give Thais the slave girl. But he begs her to remain loyal in her heart. Then Phaedria turns and walks back into his father’s house. Nothing especially funny about this, is there?
Thais tells the audience one further fact, which is that she thinks she’s already identified and contacted the slave girl’s brother and he’s coming to meet her (Thais) today to discuss the matter. Then she goes into her house.
Re-enter Phaedria and Parmeno
Phaedria weeps and wails but we aren’t to take his anguish seriously; he is played for a figure of fun. He instructs Parmeno to fetch the eunuch and Ethiopian slave girl and give them to Thais and to keep an eye on his rival. Then he shoulders his bag and walks offstage, planning to stay out of town for the two days he agreed with Thais.
Enter Gnatho
Gnatho is the bumptious servant of the soldier Thraso. He is bringing the slave girl Pamphila to give to Thais. Parmeno is impressed and says the slave girl is even more beautiful than Thais.
Gnatho soliloquises, saying how proud he is of his status and profession of sponger and hanger-on. He gives a little explanation of the key requirements of the trade, namely to agree shamelessly with whatever your patron says.
The old servant Parmeno overhears all this, then cocky Gnatho spots him and likes the way he looks glum, indicating that he and his master (Phaedria) are not doing well with Thais. Good. Gnatho shows off the slave girl to Parmeno and teases him and then goes into Thais’s house. Having delivered the slave girl, he makes a few choice comments to Parmeno then exits.
Enter Chaerea
Chaerea is Demea’s other son, younger brother to Phaedria. He is a very young man in a frenzy about his new love. Parmeno overhears him talking, rolls his eyes, and pities his poor master (Demea) for having two such lovestruck puppies for sons. Chaerea announces he’s in love with a plump and juicy girl. Parmeno asks how old. 16. Parmeno rolls his eyes. As Chaerea goes on to describe falling in love with her in the street, and that she was accompanied by one of those spongers, Parmeno realises he’s talking about Pamphila, the slave girl who Gnatho has just delivered to Thais.
Parmeno explains all this and that she’s been given as a present to Thais by her soldier lover. ‘What, the rival to his brother?’ says Chaerea. ‘Yes,’ replies Parmeno. Parmeno goes on to explain that Phaedria is giving Thais the old eunuch he brought home yesterday. Not that smelly old man, Chaerea says. How unfair it is that he’ll get to be under the same roof with the fair Pamphila etc.
At which Parmeno jokes that maybe he, Chaerea, could pretend to be a eunuch and gain access to Thais’s house. YES, shouts Chaerea, yes, he can wear a eunuch outfit and pretend to be the gift from Phaedria to Thais. That way he can be close to his new beloved all day long, yes, YES! And he bundles Parmeno into Demea’s house to help dress him up as a eunuch, despite all the latter’s protestations that it was only a joke, he didn’t mean it seriously, he’ll be the one to suffer when it’s all found out etc.
Enter Thraso
Thraso is the middle-aged soldier and lover of Thais. He is a version of that well-established type, the miles gloriosus, full of sound and fury about his brave military exploits, while in fact being a pompous coward and bore.
Thraso enters accompanied by his sponger, Gnatho. Parmeno hears them arrive and opens Demea’s front door to spy on them. He watches while Gnatho shamelessly sucks up to Thraso, laughing at all his bad jokes and nodding at his stories about being the favourite of the king of Caria.
GNATHO: Heavens above, what wisdom! Every minute spent with you is something learned. (p.202)
Thraso asks Gnatho whether Thais loves him and the sponger, of course, insists that she is devoted to him i.e. reassuring Thraso’s delicate ego, as spongers are paid to do.
Enter Thais
Thais enters from her house and encounters Thraso and Gnatho. The soldier says he hopes she likes the slave girl Gnatho gave to her a bit earlier on and invites her for dinner. Parmeno takes the opportunity to present Phaedria’s gifts to Thais. He calls for the Ethiopian slave girl to be brought out, and Thraso and Gnatho make comedy insults about how relatively cheap she looks. Then Parmeno has Chaerea dressed as a eunuch brought out and presented to Thais. She is struck by how handsome Chaerea is, as are Thraso and Gnatho. I think Thraso makes a joke to the effect that, given half a chance, he’d have sex with this handsome eunuch (p.186).
Thais takes her new properties into her house while Thraso tries to mock Parmeno for having a poor master, but Parmeno easily gets the better of him, and strolls away. Gnatho quietly laughs at Thraso being mocked but hurriedly adopts a straight face when Thraso turns to him.
Thais re-enters with an elderly woman slave, Pythia. Thais tells Pythia to take good care of the new acquisitions and that, if Chremes turns up, to tell him to wait. Then she goes off to dine with Thraso and Gnatho, leaving the stage empty.
Enter Chremes
Chremes is the young man who Thais thinks is the next of kin of the slave girl she grew up with and who Thraso has just given to her, Pamphila. He enters and delivers a long speech explaining he’s puzzled why Thais contacted him, asked him a load of questions about a long lost sister, and then asked him to come see her today. He wonders whether Thais is going to pretend that she’s the long lost sister, but Chremes knows the sister would only be about 16, and Thais is much older, so it can’t be her.
Chremes knocks on the door, Pythia opens it and asks Chremes to wait for her mistress but he, suspicious and irritated, says no, so Pythia calls for another servant to take Chremes to see Thais at Thraso’s dinner, and they exit.
Enter Antipho
Antipho is a friend of Chaerea’s. A bunch of the lads had decided to club together for dinner and Chaerea’s meant to be organising it but he’s disappeared, so the lads chose Antipho to find him and ask what’s going on. At just this moment Chaerea emerges from Thais’s house but dressed as a eunuch so Antipho is understandably astonished. But Chaerea explains to him the whole scam, how he’s madly in love with the young slave who’s just been given to Thais as a present, how Parmeno suggested he pretend to be the eunuch Phaedria planned to give to Thais, how it’s worked like a dream, how he’s even been tasked with looking after her, how she’s had a bath and emerged fragrant and beautiful.
Chaerea goes on to explain how all the other serving girls left them to go off and bathe so he…locked the door and…apparently had sex with Pamphila!
This is quickly skipped over as Antipho is interested in the dinner. Chaerea says he rearranged it to take place at Discus’s house. Antipho invites Chaerea to come to his place and change out of the eunuch’s clothes first, and off they both go.
Enter Dorias
Dorias is a maid of Thais’s. She’s just come back from the dinner party where things turned sour. When Chremes turned up, Thais insisted he be brought in. But Thraso thought he was a rival for Thais’s affections, got very angry and insisted that Pamphila be brought in, in retaliation. Thais insisted that a slave girl should not be invited to a dinner and so they had a big argument.
Enter Phaedria
Phaedria should, of course, be at the family farm in the country, as he’d promised Thais. But he couldn’t keep away and has come all the way back to town, casual-like, just to catch a glimpse of his beloved.
Enter Pythias
Which is the exact moment when Pythias, Thais’s head slave, comes bursting out of her house, livid with anger. She explains to an astonished Phaedria that the eunuch who he, Phaedria, recently gave to Thais was no eunuch at all but has raped Pamphila, tearing her clothes and messing her hair. She’s inside now, in floods of tears. Pythias blames Phaedria but Phaedria disavows any knowledge that the eunuch was not a eunuch, and says he’ll go look for the eunuch straightaway. Maybe he’s in the family home, so he goes into Demea’s house to see.
Re-enter Phaedria
Phaedria almost immediately re-enters dragging the real eunuch, Dorus, out of his house. Dorus is wearing Chaerea’s clothes (Chaerea having insisted they do a swap) so Phaedria mistakenly accuses him of stealing his brother’s clothes and making ready to flee. But when he presents Dorus to Pythia and Dorias, Thais’s servants, they both claim never to have seen him before. This is not the rapist!
They all cross-question the eunuch who quickly explains that Parmeno and Chaerea came and ordered him to swap clothes with Chaerea, then they both left. Now they all understand. Chaerea impersonated the eunuch in order to be near Pamphila and then raped her.
Phaedria is terribly embarrassed. It looks like he might be in on the scam, and it certainly reflects badly on his family. So in an aside he tells Dorus to reverse his story and deny everything he’s just said. When the bewildered man does so, Phaedria says the man is an obvious liar and he’ll take him into his house to ‘torture’ him to find out the truth
Re-enter Chremes
Pythias and Dorias are just wondering whether to tell Thais about all this when Chremes re-enters. He’d got drunk at Thraso’s dinner party and now he makes a bit of a pass at Pythias (Thais’s female head slave) who primly fends him off. Instead she extracts from Chremes the fact that there was a big argument at Thrasos’s dinner party.
Enter Thais
Thais is still angry from the argument at Thrasos’s dinner party. She warns her servants that Thraso is on his way to reclaim Pamphila but that he’ll do so over her dead body. She’ll have him horsewhipped first.
First of all she briskly tells Chremes that Pamphila is his long lost sister. Not only that, but Thais hereby gives her to him, free, gratis. Chremes is immensely grateful though not quite as surprised or emotional as you might expect.
Then Thais tells Pythias to hurry inside and fetch the box of ‘proofs’ which prove Pamphila’s identity. But just then Thraso approaches.
Thraso is, of course, a seasoned soldier, albeit a bullshitting braggart. Thais instructs Chremes to stand up to him and hands him the proofs of Pamphila’s identity that Pythias has just fetched out of the house. There is comedy in the way Chremes is a complete milksop, refuses to face Thraso and wants to run off to the market to fetch help, but Thais physically restrains him and tells him to be a man.
THAIS: My dear man, you’re not afraid are you?
CHREMES: [visibly alarmed]: Nonsense. Who’s afraid? Not me. (p.200)
Thais and all her people go into her house.
Enter Thraso and followers
Enter Thraso and Gnatho with six followers. There is quite a funny parody of a military campaign, with Thraso bombastically issuing complex orders for storming Thais’s house to his motley crew of incompetent ‘soldiers’. Thais and Chremes appear at a window overlooking the action. Chremes is fearful while Thais gives a fearless and comic commentary on Thraso’s cowardly and ineffectual ‘military’ orders.
Thraso now parleys with Thais at her window. He reminds her that she promised him the next couple of days, no? And has gone back on her word? So that’s why he wants Pamphila back.
Now Chremes steps forward and confronts Thraso with the new facts: Pamphila is a) a free-born citizen b) of this region, Attica and c) Chremes’ sister. Therefore she cannot be anyone’s property. Thraso thinks he’s lying, but Chremes sends for the box of proof documents.
This is sort of funny if we buy into the play’s premises, but it is also a fascinating slice of social history on a huge subject, namely the definition and rights of free citizens and slaves in the ancient world.
Disheartened Thraso hesitates about what to do next. At which point his parasite, Gnatho, suggests they make a tactical withdrawal on the basis that women are well known for being perverse and so, if Thraso stops asking for something (which is making Thais obstinate), if he changes his approach, maybe Thais will change hers and come round. Rather doubtfully, Thraso calls off the ‘assault’ and he and his men all leave.
Enter Thais and Pythias
With Thraso gone, Thais turns her thoughts to Pamphila who she has discovered in her house with torn clothes and inconsolably weeping i.e. having been raped. Thais is furious with Pythias for letting it happen but Pythias explains that they’ve established it wasn’t the eunuch Phaedria gave her who raped Pamphila, it was Phaedria’s younger brother impersonating the eunuch who did it. At which point the culprit, Chaerea himself, strolls onstage, wearing the eunuch’s clothes.
Enter Chaerea
Chaerea had gone along to Antipho’s house to change for the lads’ party, but Antipho’s parents were home so he was scared to go in and has returned to Thais’s house by backstreets in case anyone recognises him. Now he sees Thais standing in her doorway and momentarily hesitates but decides to brazen it out and continue in character as the eunuch Dorus, so he steps forward.
But after a few exchanges of him pretending to be Dorus, Thais drops all pretences and calls him by his real name, Chaerea. About this point it began to dawn on me that Thais is the real ‘hero’ of this play, easily the most manly, resolute, strong and decisive character on the stage – and that, by the same token, all the men (Thraso, Chremes, Chaerea) are weaker and feebler and morally flawed than she is.
Thais and Chaerea come to an arrangement. Chaerea insists he meant no disrespect to Thais and that he genuinely loves Pamphila. Grudgingly, Thais accepts his apology, despite the scorn of her aggrieved servant, Pythias. In fact, Chaerea grovellingly offers to put himself completely under Thais’ guidance. She is a strong woman.
At this point they both see Pamphila’s brother Chremes approaching and Chaerea begs to be let inside so he can change out of his shameful costume. Thais laughingly agrees and they all go into her house.
Enter Chremes and Sophrona
Sophrona was Chremes’ and Pamphila’s nurse when they were small. Chremes has shown her the tokens Pamphila had and the nurse recognised them all. Now he’s brought the nurse along for the final ‘recognition scene’. The servant Pythias welcomes them and tells them to go into Thais’ house.
Enter Parmeno
As mentioned, Thais has emerged as the main driver of the plot. Usually it’s the cunning slave, in this case Parmeno, but in this play he has been totally overshadowed by Thais’ control of the narrative.
There follows a carefully staged and prepared scene in which Parmeno gets his comeuppance. He had swaggered onstage feeling very pleased with himself because his ruse (disguising Chaerea as the eunuch) had secured Chaerea his beloved, and he had also educated the young man in the ways of courtesans and their wicked ways (by which he is casting a slur on the house of Thais who is, we are reminded, a courtesan by trade).
Pythias, the angry housekeeper overhears all this, including the slur on her mistress and household, and decides to take Parmeno down a peg or two. She comes onstage pretending not to see Parmeno and lamenting and bewailing. When Parmeno asks her what the matter is, Pythias tells him that the young man he introduced into Thais’s household, Chaerea, assaulted Pamphila but now it has emerged that the latter is a free citizen, and has a well-born brother, and the brother has found out and had Chaerea tied up and is about to administer the traditional punishment for adultery and rape – castration!!!
Parmeno is devastated and thrown into a complete panic about what to do, specially when Pythias goes on to tell him that everyone blames him for what’s happened, and are looking to punish him, too. At this moment they both see the two errant sons’ father and Parmeno’s master, Demea, coming up the street. Pythias advises Parmeno to tell Demea everything, before disappearing back onto Thais’ house.
Enter Demea
Parmeno greets his old master and tells him everything (one son in love with Thais, the other in love with a slave woman who’s in Thais’s house, impersonated a eunuch to gain admission, was caught in a rape and is tied and bound and about to be punished). Suitably appalled, Demea rushes into Thais’ house to rescue his son.
Enter Pythias
Re-enter Pythias crying with laughter. Oh, she tells the audience, the comedy of misunderstandings she has just seen! And only she understood why Demea was in a panic about his son being castrated (because she’d just invented it). Hardly able to speak for laughing, she tells Parmeno she properly took him in and made him look a right fool. Now both son and master are furious with him, Parmeno, blaming him for everything. She stumbles back into the house, helpless with laughter.
Enter Thraso and Gnathos
The braggart soldier and his parasite. Thraso has decided to throw himself on Thais’ mercy but they haven’t gone far before Chaerea bursts out of Thais’ house, delirious with happiness. He rushes up to a surprised Parmeno and hugs him and calls him the ‘author and instigator and perfecter’ of all his joys. Obviously the ‘recognition scene’ has just taken place and Pamphila has been confirmed as a free citizen of Attica and therefore an entirely eligible woman for Chaerea to marry. Also, Thais has agreed to marry Phaedria, and thus put herself and her household under Demea’s protection and patronage. It is an entirely happy ending for both sons and the father.
Parmeno dashes into Demea’s house and returns with Phaedria who they tell the good news: he is going to be married to his beloved Thais!
Thraso and Gnatho have overheard all this and Thraso drily remarks that it looks like all his hopes of winning Thais have been dashed. For once Gnatho can’t find words of sycophantic support. But Thraso asks him to make one last sally and see if he can remain in Thais’s good books, if only as a friend. Gnatho extracts a promise from Thraso that, if he pulls this off, Thraso’s house and table will be open to him (Gnatho) for evermore, which Thraso agrees to. Then Gnatho goes up to the two happy brothers.
Phaedria’s first response of Thraso’s offer of friendship is to tell Thraso to clear out and if he ever sees him in this street again, he’ll kill him (!).
Gnatho asks him to calm down, ushers Thraso aside, and speaks confidentially to Phaedria. He proposes a very cynical offer. He suggests that Phaedria accepts Thraso as his rival i.e. a sort of official lover for Thais. ‘What? Why?’ Phaedria asks.
Because Thraso is such a dimwit he presents no threat whatsoever to Thais and Phaedria’s love, but he is very prodigal with gifts and money. These he will lavish on Thais and thus keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed and which, let’s face it, Phaedria can’t afford. Hmm. The brothers confer. It is quite a tidy plan and they agree on it.
Lastly, Gnatho asks if he can be accepted into their circle of friends. Again the brothers agree, and with that, Gnatho mockingly presents them with Thraso! ‘For the laughs and everything else you can get out of him’ (p.218).
Gnatho calls Thraso over and announces that the deal has been struck. Thraso recovers his composure and starts to strut and swank, and the two brothers laugh at his pompousness and foresee years of milking him for his money and mocking his pretensions.
And that is the end. Phaedria abruptly turns to the audience, asks for their applause and they all go into Thais’s house.
*******
Dark thoughts
The Eunuch has plenty of genuinely funny moments, the increasingly funny role of the bombastic soldier Thraso, the comedy swapping of the eunuch’s identity, Chremes’ cowardice, Pythias’s humiliation of Parmeno and so on.
But at the same time, I struggled to get past the ‘otherness’ of Roman society. I can’t really get past the way the entire story rest on the buying and selling of slaves and giving and receiving them as gifts.
Then, when Chaerea rapes the sleeping Pamphila, the entire tone changed for me, and I found it difficult to find anything after that very funny.
And the casual way Phaedria remarks that the only thing which will extract the truth from Dorus is ‘torture’, the casual way Pythias declares that Chaerea is about to be castrated, and the casual references to the way slaves are routinely whipped as punishment – once again I found myself being brought up short and the smile being wiped right off my face by the casual references to hyper violence (torture, whipping, chains, even crucifixion) in these Roman plays.
Sunny thoughts
If you can manage to put those dark thoughts aside then, yes, this is a funny play, by far the funniest of the three I’ve read so far. I think this is because, even though the plot is quite convoluted, of two things:
Once the backstory of the abandoned slave girl and the two brothers in love with two girls is established, everything follows reasonably logically from those premises.
Second reason is that the scenes are quite long and leisurely meaning that – crucially, for me at any rate – the characters thoroughly explain what is going on, what is happening and what they intend to do. For example, the idea for Chaerea to dress up as a eunuch develops quite naturally out of Parmeno’s joke suggestion which then, as it were, gets out of hand. This scene has great psychological and/or comic realism, in the sense that all of us know the experience of making a jokey, off-hand remark which our interlocutor picks up and takes far more seriously than we’d intended, and which we then regret ever mentioning. 2,200 years ago the same experience was common enough to be a comic gag in onstage.
Compare and contrast these two attributes with Terence’s play The Self-tormentor where the plot very much does not follow from the basic premise, but is 1. the result of a whole series of ad lib schemes dreamed up by the naughty slave Syrus and 2. which he keeps to himself; which he does not explain; which may well keep the characters comically in the dark about what he’s up to, but also had the result that I couldn’t follow what was happening half the time and so gave up on the play and almost gave up on Terence as a whole.
The Eunuch restored my faith in Terence as a comic playwright and confirmed my determination to continue and read all six of his plays.
Credit
Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.
Editor and translator Betty Radice says there is no other character in surviving Roman plays quite like Phormio, the central protagonist of this play. He is an entrepreneurial trickster supreme. He offers his services to the two young ‘heroes’ for the sheer pleasure of exercising his expertise. Phormio is a comedy of intrigue as light and fast-moving as a French farce.
It is based on The Claimant, a play by the Greek playwright Apollodorus.
Phormio was performed at the Roman Games held in September 161 BC. The play is, as always, set in a street in front of houses but, unusually, three houses instead of two – those of the two mature men, the brothers Demipho and Chremes, with the addition of the house of Dorio, a slave dealer.
The plot
Enter Davos the slave dealer
Davos has come to repay a small debt owed to the slave Geta. He soliloquises on how unfair it is that slaves have to scrimp and save from their meagre rations to buy presents for their owners and their relatives who are completely oblivious of the effort involved.
Enter Geta
Geta is servant to his master Demipho. He appears at Demipho’s door, spots Davos, takes the debt owed, then launches into a lengthy bit of exposition. His master, Demipho, has an older brother, Chremes. Both these mature men went abroad at the same time and left him, Geta, in charge of their sons, Demipho’s son Antipho and Chremes’ son Phaedria.
Both of them promptly gave trouble. Phaedria fell in love with a lute player who works for the pimp Dorio (whose house is onstage) but doesn’t have a penny to ‘pay’ for her. [Does that mean she’s a sex worker? The status of some of the unfree women is often obscure.] Then Antipho falls in love with a beautiful young free citizen, Phanium, whose mother has just died leaving her penniless. But he was in a bind because his absent father (Demipho) would certainly disapprove on his return.
Geta goes on to explain the role of Phormio, the fixer supreme. They appealed to Phormio for help and Phormio said that, since the law requires that female orphans must be married to their next of kin, he, Phormio, will pretend to be a friend of Phanium’s father and take out a summons claiming Antipho is the next of kin. The court will decide Antipho has to marry Phanium, they’ll get married and when Demipho returns it will a) be a fait accompli b) if he’s angry, he can blame Phormio, who won’t care.
And that’s what’s happened and so Antipho and Phanium got married. But now Geta is understandably anxious about what his master will say when he gets back, having put Geta in charge of the boy.
And Phaedria his master? Still pursuing his hopeless suit. Well, a letter’s just arrived from him and Geta is just off to the post office to collect it. He bids Davos farewell, calls for his wife to come and take the money bag Davos gave him, then exits to the post office.
Enter Phaedria and Antipho
The two young men are gloomy. Antipho is very anxious how his father will react to a marriage he didn’t approve. Phaedria isn’t very sympathetic. He points out that Antipho has all that a young man could dream of – marriage to the beautiful, free, wellborn woman he loves. Whereas he, Phaedria, has to hang around the horrible pimp Dorio begging for a rare sighting of his beloved.
Enter Geta
Geta returns in a great state from the harbour and tells the boys that, as you might imagine, Antipho’s father has returned from abroad and will be home any minute. Antipho is thrown into a panic. Phaedria and Geta both try to calm him and tell him to say he was forced to marry Phanium by the court. Nothing he could do. But Antipho panics and runs off.
Geta and Phaedria agree to confront the old man and stick to the story about the law courts forcing Antipho to marry.
Enter Demipho
Demipho is tired after a long journey and has already heard the new about his son so enters ranting about filial disobedience and disrespect. Geta and Phaedria are to one side and overhear Demipho wondering what excuses they’ll dream up, and he anticipates the way they’ll blame it all on some court decision. Oops. Rumbled.
Phaedria steps boldly forward to brave Demipho’s wrath and defend his cousin. Then Geta steps forward and also takes Demipho’s criticism. But he points out that a slave can’t be a defendant in court nor give evidence so he quite literally could do nothing about the court case. Demipho insists on seeing the man who represented the girl in the case i.e. the trickster Phormio. So he sends Phaedria to go and fetch Antipho and Geta to go and fetch Phormio, then goes into his house.
Enter Phormio
Phormio immediately presents himself as a smart and self-confident young man. Geta has briefed him on the problem and Phormio delivers a long speech about his confidence in his own abilities.
Enter Demipho and three legal advisers
Phormio and Geta see Demipho come on but carry on a staged conversation as if he’s not there. Phormio makes a loud pretence of knowing Demipho’s cousin (who he’s just invented) a fine, upstanding, hard working but poor man named ‘Stilpo’. Phormio pretends to be indignant that Demipho has ‘cast him off’. Geta, for his part, pretends to defend his master as an honourable man.
Eventually they pretend to notice that Demipho is there, Geta exaggerates how much he’s been defending his master, and Phormio steps forward to shame Demipho for dropping this (entirely fictional) cousin Stilpo.
Demipho of course denies any knowledge of this Stilpo, but Phormio pushes on, saying he gave full details of his life and lineage to the court.
Demipho points out that the law says the next of kin of a female orphan should either be forced to marry her or to give her a dowry which will allow her to marry. Demipho promptly pulls out 500 drachmas and offers them to Phormio, saying that – assuming he is some kind of kin to this woman – this dowry quits his legal obligations and frees his son.
Phormio rudely points out that the court dealt with his son not him, since Demipho is beyond marrying age. This infuriates Demipho and Phormio enrages him even more by calmly suggesting they make up and be friends. On the contrary, Demipho never wants to see him again in his life.
Phormio then points out that a beautiful daughter-in-law will be a consolation in his old age. But Demipho says he is determined to kick her out of his house. At which point Phormio plays tough and says that, as her guardian, if any wrong is done her, Phormio will taker Demipho to court. And he saunters off, well pleased with himself.
Demipho orders Geta to go into his house and see if Antipho has come home yet. Then he turns to his three advisers.
The three lawyers
Demipho asks his three lawyers what they think and there is a purely comic scene in which they all hesitate to make a judgement, then give bland assurances, but say it is a difficult case and generally leave Demipho more confused than before he asked them. Then they exit. Demipho decides to go down to the docks and wait for his brother, who is also due home soon. He exits.
Enter Antipho
Antipho is anxious by nature. He enters soliloquising about his worries. Geta greets him and explains that his father knows all about it but Phormio put up a staunch defence aided, ahem, by yours truly.
Enter Phaedria and Dorio
They enter from Dorio’s house and are arguing. Phaedria is begging Dorio for the favour of spending some time with his beloved, Pamphila the lute girl. He tries every argument ‘eternal gratitude’, ‘friend of worthy family’ but Dorio sees through it all and says no, reducing Phaedria to tears. Phaedria sees Antipho and once again draws the contrast between them, telling him how very lucky he is. For it turns out that Dario has sold Pamphila. Phaedria is trying to persuade Doria to wait three days till he can raise the money to match the purchase price, 3,000 drachmas.
After Phaedria, Antipho and Geta all pile into him, Doria concedes that, if Phaedria can match the purchase price by tomorrow morning, when ‘the captain’ is turning up to pay and take Pamphila, then he can have her. Tomorrow morning. That’s the deadline. And he bows and goes into his house.
Antipho says they must help him and pressures Geta to talk to his master, Antipho’s father, Demipho. Not likely, not after the trouble he’s already in about Antipho’s marriage.
Phaedria raises the stakes by declaring he will follow his beloved to the ends of the earth or else…die in the attempt! This melodramatic statement causes Antipho to pile more pressure on Geta who thinks hard and then…announces he has a plan! But he will need Phormio’s help.
Geta tells Antipho to go into his house to comfort poor Phanium. He and Phaedria will go to find Phormium, and so they exit.
Enter Demipho and Chremes
We learn from their conversation that Chremes is back from a trip to Lemnos where he went to collect his daughter. This is because he is a bigamist. While he married a wife in Athens and had a son Phaedria, he was also keeping a second wife on Lemnos who bore him a daughter. She had been complaining about being neglected so he went to attend to her but…discovered she had left, with her daughter, to come to Athens to look for him. It puts Chremes in a quandary because if the girl turns up, he will be duty bound to provide a dowry and yet won’t want her to marry far outside the family because then he’ll have to reveal his relation to her, in which case his wife will find out he’s been keeping an alternative family, and will divorce him and take all his belongings.
(Well, you don’t need to be Einstein to work out that the daughter is going to turn out to be the Pamphila who Antipho has already married, which will relieve Chremes of the need to reveal his secret bigamy.)
Enter Geta
Geta is pleased as punch that Phormio, when he heard of Phaedria’s plight, immediately offered to help. But coming onstage, now, he sees that Chremes has arrived home. Uh oh, double trouble.
Geta steps forward and tells the two brothers the following story. He says he met Phormio and said that he knows how to fulfil everyone’s demands. That Demipho will drop any legal actions against Phormio if he agrees to a) accept the girl Phanium as his wife and b) a dowry from Demipho. ‘How much did he want?’ Demipho asks. ‘6,000 drachmas,’ Geta replies. Well, that’s too much. So Geta shrewdly drops ihis price, enumerating all the expense Phormio will have to go to and eventually settling on 3,000 drachmas.
Now this is precisely the sum Phaedria needs to buy Pamphila. Demipho angrily refuses but his brother, Chremes, comes to the rescue saying he’ll pay the dowry to Phormio, he has the cash now in the form of the rent he’s just collected on his wife’s property in Lemnos. Demipho and Chremes go into Demipho’s house to count out the cash.
Enter Antipho
Now early in this dialogue Antipho had opened the door and overheard everything. He is appalled that Geta seems to be bargaining away his beloved bride. Now he steps forward and confronts Geta. But Geta explains the plan. 1. Phormio will take the money from Demipho and promise to marry Phanium. 2. He will immediately give the money to Phaedria who can buy Pamphila off Dorio. 3. Phormio will come up with reasons to delay the wedding, augurs, superstitions etc until Phaderia’s friends have all chipped in to cover the 3,000 drachmas, then 4. Phormio will decide he doesn’t want to marry Phanium after all and give the 3,000 raised by Phaedria’s friends back to Chremes.
In other words, it is an elaborate form of loan, getting hold of 3,000 drachmas right now so Phaedria can buy Pamphila, then waiting for his friends to chip in the same amount, which Phormio will then give back to Demipho. Phaedria will get his girl. Antipho will remain married to his.
Antipho is still sceptical but Geta tells him to run off and tell Phaedria the plan, so he exits.
Re-enter Demipho and Chremes
They have the money. Demipho asks Geta to take him to Phormio. Chremes tells Demipho on his return to come and get his wife, who will go to see the girl Phanium and explain to her that she’s being passed on to Phormio, he’s a better match for her anyway, and this way she gets a dowry. Women are better at explaining that sort of thing. So Geta takes Demipho off to see Phormio.
Enter Sophrona
Enter Sophrona, ‘the old nurse’, from Demipho’s house. She starts lamenting that she’s made a terrible mistake in fixing up her mistress’s marriage. When Chremes sees her he is overcome with fear, and goes up to her. She says hello and refers to him as ‘Stilpo’ the name Phormio used all those scenes ago. Chremes begs her to keep her voice down and never use that name.
Aha. So she’s the nurse of his secret daughter, the result of the bigamous marriage on Lemnos. Clearly Stilpo was the name he used with this second family. But what is she doing here, Chremes asks. And where are ‘the others’ i.e. his second wife and their daughter?
Sophrona replies that the mother is dead, leaving them penniless, so she did the best she could and got the young mistress married to a fine gentleman. Yes but why is she coming out of Demipho’s house? The husband is the son of the owner. Obtusely, Chremes is astonished to learn that Antipho has two wives (takes one to know one). Then she explains, no, just the one. Antipho has married his secret daughter!
Chremes is delighted! This is exactly what he wanted to bring about, marrying his secret daughter to the son of his brother, thus keeping it all in the family with no messy revelations about his secret family. He couldn’t have hoped for better! There is a god (or gods)!
Chremes takes the old woman into Demipho’s house to learn more.
Enter Geta and Demipho
Well they gave Phormio the 3,000 drachma dowry as arranged and he promised to take Phanium off their hands. Geta plants the seed of doubt that he might not stick to his word, being a shifty so-and-so. Demipho tells Geta to go into Demipho’s house and tell Phanium that Demipho’s wife will be along in a minute with something to tell her. He goes into his house to fetch his wife.
Geta worries how it’s all ultimately going to pan out but goes into Demipho’s house to reassure Phanium that she is not going to be packed off to marry Phormio.
Enter Demipho and Nausistrata
Nausistrata is Chremes’ wife. Demipho has fetched her in order to go in and tell Phanium the news that she is being divorced from Antipho and packed off to marry Phormio. Demipho’s explaining what she has to do when Nausistrata lets slip that her husband is useless at managing her estates. Her father used to make 12,000 drachmas a year out of them. Now it’s much less. Demipho is dazzled by this revelation. I think it is the first indication that his brother has been concealing his income or using some of it for another purpose…
Enter Chremes
From Demipho’s house in a state of high excitement. He has, of course, just had an interview with his real daughter, Phanium, who he hasn’t seen for years, and established the wonderful solution to all his problems which is her marriage to his brother’s son, Antipho. Therefore he has to tell Demipho that the whole plan of giving her a dowry in order to marry her to Phormio…has been called off.
Except that he has to announce this news and justify it to Demipho with his wife present, the very wife he wants to conceal his bigamous affair from. Oops. Tricky. So there’s a page of deep anxiety / comedy while Chremes tries to get Demipho to stop asking so many awkward questions while his wife’s there.
Eventually, Demipho stops asking questions and Nausistrata, puzzled but resigned to the imponderable way of men, accepts that the girl is not now being packed off, which is just as well because she always liked her, and goes back into her house.
Chremes checks the door is shut and only now can tell the full truth to an astonished Demipho. But it’s too secret to talk about here in the open, so he hustles his brother indoors.
Enter Antipho
Anxious Antipho is pleased for his cousin, Phaedria, who now has his girl, but more anxious than ever about his own situation.
Enter Phormio
As at his last appearance Phormio is supremely pleased with himself. He lists the successes of his plan: he got the dowry money; paid off Dorio; took possession of the girl; handed her over to Phaedria whose dreams have come true.
Antipho reveals that he’s onstage and goes up to Phormio, and hears the good news confirmed. What is Phaedria going to do next? Take a leaf out of Antipho’s book and go into hiding from his father. And ask Antipho to defend him to his father just as, at the start of the play, Phaedria defended Antipho. Parallelism. Symmetry. Double plot.
Enter Geta
Very excited, proclaiming the blessings which have been showered on his master. The other two are non-plussed then increasingly frustrated at their inability to get Geta to spit it out. Finally, he comes out with it. Antipho’s wife is his father’s brother’s secret daughter and therefore…his step-cousin! And he’s been sent by the father’s to find Antipho and hustle him into their presence. And with that they both go into Demipho’s house.
Leaving Phormio onstage to have a brainwave about how he can permanently diddle the old men out of their money. He exits.
Enter Chremes and Demipho
Demipho and Chremes are agreeing that they need to find Phormio as soon as possible and reclaim their 3,000 drachmas now that there’s no need for him to marry Phanium. Phormio overhears this and anyway knows the truth of the situation from Geta, so he steps forward to confront them with a confident smile.
When they tell him the deal’s off and they want their money back he enjoys play-acting the aggrieved partner. He says he has cancelled all his other engagements to make way for the wedding. And paid for the feast. And invited guests. And turned down the other woman he was attached to, making humiliating apologies to her family. He can’t go back on any of that! It was to help them that he broke with a woman who was bringing him the same sum. So they are grievously wronging him. They fall to haranguing each other:
DEMIPHO: You hand over my money!
PHORMIO: You hand over my wife!
They threaten to take him to court to reclaim their money. It’s at this point that Phormio very suavely plays his trump card. He knows, he sweetly says, of a certain gentleman who kept a second family on the island of Lemnos, kept it completely secret from his loving wife and the wider community. Wouldn’t it be unfortunate if word about this immoral secret were somehow to leak out…
Chremes turns white, panics, and insists Phormio can keep the dowry, Hush money. Blackmail. Phormio’s word is to tell them to stop behaving like a couple of children. He’s about to walk away and that would have been that except that Demipho thinks they’re giving up too easily. He tells Chremes that now the secret is out his wife is bound to hear about it sooner or later, best if he braves it out and tells him herself. Demipho will support him and intervene to see them reconciled and this way they’ll get their money back (it’s clearly the money that’s motivating him).
Phormio overhears all this and comes back and accuses them of being a right pair of monkeys, continuing to cheat him after they’d made yet another deal. And he starts walking towards Chremes’ house and starts yelling out his wife’s name, Nausistrata.
The two fathers grab him, threaten to punch him or knock his teeth out or put an eye out. As they try to restrain him Phormio says he’ll see them in court for assault and continues to shout out Nausistrata’s name at the top of his lungs.
Enter Nausistrata
All this noise fetches Nausistrata out of her house. The fathers release Phormio who smiles broadly. He tells Nausistrata to touch her husband, she’ll find him frozen to stone. Amusingly, Chremes is so scared of her wrath he can only stammer at her to ignore everything he, Phormio, says.
But despite Chremes’s stammering and Demipho’s interventions, Phormio now proceeds to tell Nausistrata that on Lemnos her beloved husband married another woman and had a daughter, another family. Nausistrata is horrified and asks Demipho if it’s true.
Shamefacedly Demipho admits that it is but tries to make excuses: that Chremes was drunk, it only happened once, he never slept with her again etc. Oh, and now the woman’s dead in any case.
Nausistrata asks if she was worth this betrayal. She asks Demipho if she deserved this. She asks Demipho to repeat all she has been for her wretched husband during the decades. And can she ever trust him again. If a man does this once, and his wife isn’t getting any younger, will it happen again? And does this explain all his long ‘business trips’ to Lemnos? And does this explain why the rents from her property have been so low? Half the income was going to support his bigamous family?
Demipho can only mumble assent. Chremes is so petrified he can’t speak. Phormio has a broad smile on his face. Well done, Demipho. Things had all been agreed and signed off but you had to interfere!
Demipho can only say that Chremes has confessed and now begs for mercy.
Phormio realises he needs to step in sharpish to save his money. He now tells Nausistrata that he tricked her husband out of 3,000 drachmas so he could but a lute girl and marry her. Nausistrata doesn’t mind, she is still obsessed with revenge on Chremes and so she icily asks him whether he has the cheek to reprimand his son seeing how he behaved. At least his son only intends to have one wife! Unlike certain lying, cheating, philandering husbands she could mention!!
Nausistrata is now in the driving seat. She announces she will see her son, Phaedria, and abide by his decision. She asks Phormio’s name and he tells her and points out that he is a friend of the family and a very good friend of her son’s, and she thanks him and says that in future she will do what she can to further his interests. So Phormio a) doesn’t have to repay the 3,000 drachmas b) comes out smelling of roses with the real power behind the throne, Nausistrata.
Phormio has one last request: may he come to dinner? ‘Certainly,’ replies Nausistrata. ‘First go and fetch my son,’ so Phormio darts over to where Phaedria has been loitering by the side of the stage and escorts him, along with Nausistrata, into their house. Demipho follows a little behind, with Chremes, utterly ashamed and diminished, slowly following behind last of all.
Thoughts
The play proceeds, very like The Eunuch, like the peeling away of the layers of an onion. There’s the initial concern with the affairs of the two young lovers; interest slowly transfers to the details of the scams and tricks, in this case devised by Phormio; but by the end the focus has shifted to centre on a strong decisive woman who takes charge of everything and puts almost all the menfolk to shame, Thais in The Eunuch, Nausistrata in this play.
Credit
Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies, edited and translated by Betty Radice.
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