It is possible, however, that the audiences of the time remained unmoved by Antony and Cleopatra. With the exception of the allusion by Samuel Daniel, there is no recorded comment on its production. It was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime — and nor indeed was that other Roman drama, Coriolanus. If they had not been included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, there would be no surviving text.
For Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch and from Horace, from Montaigne and from Pliny. It says something about the effect of the theatre and the permanence of theatrical memory that this doomed love between Antony and Cleopatra, together with the assassination of Julius Caesar, have become the two most famous episodes of Roman history. With the magniloquent verse of Antony and Cleopatra, in particular, Shakespeare has reinvented the last years of republican Rome. The language of passion and aspiration dominates this play. It valorises everything, with the billowing rhetoric of the Egyptians contrasted with the high Roman rhetoric of time and duty. It is the oration conceived as poem. By some unerring insight, too, he has divined the essential characteristics of the protagonists. Octavius Caesar here bears all the incipient greatness and ruthlessness of the ruler who would become Augustus, the first emperor in Roman history.
Shakespeare’s imagination seems to have been stirred by the vastness of the enterprise he is enacting; there are images of the world and of immensity, with the main protagonists in the early stage of becoming deities. Antony and Cleopatra could have echoed the emperor Vespasian’s words upon his death-bed, “I am afraid I am turning into a god.” But they embrace that fate; they long for metamorphosis. No play has so wide a stage, with so many scenes and with so many messengers from the boundaries of the known world — except that there are no boundaries and no limits, in this evocation of immensity. It is a pageant, a moving tableau, a procession. That is why Antony and Cleopatra are intensely theatrical creations, admiring their images as if they had been projected by some conjuror upon a linen screen.
CHAPTER 81. That Strain Agen, It Had a Dying fall
On the last day of 1607, Edmund Shakespeare was buried. It was a time of almost unbearable cold. By the middle of December the Thames had frozen solid so that “many persons did walk halfway over the Thames upon the ice, and by the thirtieth of December the multitude … passed over the Thames in divers places.”1 A small tent city sprang up on the ice, with wrestling bouts and football matches, barbers’ shops and eating-houses, trading upon the novelty of the silent and immobile river.
On 31 December Edmund Shakespeare was carried to the church on the southern bank of the Thames. The entry in the burial register of St. Saviour’s reads: “1607 December 31 Edmond Shakespeare, a player, in the Church.” And then a note by the sexton runs: “1607 December 31 Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the church with a forenoon knell of the great bell, 20s.” The money for the bell no doubt came from the purse of his brother, who in the bitter cold accompanied the coffin to the burial place. It is possible, probable even, that Edmund died of the plague. He had followed his infant son within six months.
And then, in the spring of 1608, an entry in the Stationers’ Register records a play that, unlike Antony and Cleopatra, became hugely popular in Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the published version of 1609 Pericles is identified as “diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Globe on the Banck-side.” So it must have been played at that theatre in the spring of the previous year, since the theatres were subsequently closed for eighteen months. The Venetian Ambassador took the French Ambassador to a performance, and a Venetian contemporary noted that “All the ambassadors who have come to England have gone to the play.”2 One versifier compared large London crowds “of gentles mixed with grooms”3 with those who swarmed to see Pericles. Its edition in quarto was reprinted five times. It was quoted incessantly, and had the distinction of being dismissed by Ben Jonson as a “mouldy tale.”4 It was, of course, more successful than anything Jonson himself had ever written.
There is some disagreement over the form and nature of Pericles as well as the other late plays which share an abiding interest in music and spectacle. A convenient term is that of romance, since in this period there was a revival of what might be described as the cult of romance. The king’s oldest son, Henry, was being compared with the legendary Arthur; this in turn inspired a new fashion for chivalry and legendary adventure on the pattern of Malory and Spenser. This was not of course a sufficient condition for the creation of Pericles, but it is a contributing factor. There was also a tradition of stage plays taken from medieval gestes, but the medieval context of Pericles is wider than that of knights and battles.
It is often suggested that Shakespeare had entered an “experimental” phase with Pericles and subsequent plays, but he himself would not have recognised or understood the term. It would also be a mistake to impose upon him principles or standards which a later generation would describe as “aesthetic.” He did not have an aesthetic view of the drama at all, but a practical and empirical one. Pericles is an example. It is a play of extremities, of foul and fair closely joined. The most lubricious and bawdy prose is placed beside some of Shakespeare’s most plangent verse, so that all seems to cohere as if by miracle. The great dirge to the sea deeps gives way to an image of prostitutes that “with continuall action, are euen as good as rotten”(1532-3).
The play attests in particular to Shakespeare’s long affection for the religious plays of his childhood. The last mystery cycle was played in Coventry as late as 1579, well within the purview of the young Shakespeare. It is not necessary that he should have seen the mystery plays — although in the course of a Stratford boyhood it is likely that he did — only that he should have come from a culture in which they played a central role. They were part of the spirit of place.
Such paradigmatic events as “the Agony” and “the Betrayal” are redeployed in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, and Pericles in particular inhabits a world of vision and of supernatural intervention, where the spiritualised hero must endure much suffering before being blessed. The visitation of the goddess Diana here replaces the more usual appearance of the Virgin Mary, but the meaning is the same. Indeed the play of St. Mary Magdalene to be found in the Digby Manuscript bears many parallels with Shakespeare’s drama, including the birth of a child at sea during a storm, and the miraculous restoration of the unhappy mother. It is a matter of record that the Catholic players who had performed in the recusant households of Yorkshire included Pericles in their repertoire, and that the play was also included in a booklist belonging to the English Jesuit College at St. Omer in France.5 It must have been deeply congenial to the adherents of the old religion.