Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

It is almost as though Shakespeare is preening himself here. After all, he has written the play and in it, Antony is far more than a mere drunkard and Cleopatra far more than a mere whore. The magic of Shakespeare converts them at last to ideal lovers and it is as such, thanks to him, that they will live forever.

Now must come the suicide.

Actually, the method used is a mystery. The Roman guards left behind by Octavius Caesar were surely impressed with the fact that Cleopatra must be kept alive. Cleopatra must therefore have succeeded in hiding something small and unnoticeable, prepared for such a contingency.

Her body was found virtually unmarked except for what seemed to be a puncture or two on her arm. It had to be poison then, but administered how? Was it the puncture of a poisoned needle which she had kept hidden in her hair? Or was it a poison snake?

The poison snake is much more unlikely and is, indeed, rather implausible, but it is exceedingly dramatic and, whether true or not, is accepted by all who have ever heard of Cleopatra. If they have heard only one thing of her, it is her method of suicide by snake.

She prepares for that suicide as though she were meeting her lover once again, and indeed, she expects to, in Elysium. She demands that she be dressed in her most splendid gowns as on that occasion when she met Antony for the first time:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 227-29

A peasant is brought in now with the gift of a basket of figs for her. It is this, partly, which makes the tale of the poison snake implausible. Would anyone have been allowed in to see her under the circumstances? Would he have failed to undergo a search if he were passed through? Is it conceivable that the basket of figs would have been unexamined?

Yet that is the tale that Plutarch reports as one possibility. He also talks of poisoned needles and poisoned razors.

Cleopatra asks the peasant:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 243-44

He does! The "pretty worm" is the asp, or Egyptian cobra, whose venom works quickly and painlessly. What's more, the creature was worshiped, as so many dangerous animals were in Egypt, and the coiled head of the cobra was worn on the headdress of the Pharaohs. A death by cobra bite was a royal death; it was rather like being bitten by a god.

Cleopatra is now ready. She says to her ladies in waiting:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 280-87

And yet not all is pure love of Antony. There is some relish in feeling that she is depriving Octavius of his final victory. For as the asp is biting her, she says to it:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 306-8

Cleopatra dies. Her lady in waiting Iras is already dead of heartbreak, and Charmian (whom early in the play the soothsayer had predicted would outlive her mistress) is applying the asp to her own arm. In come the Roman soldiers, but too late.

Gaping at the dead Cleopatra, they get the significance of it at once. One of the soldiers cries:

—Act V, scene ii, line 323

Then, when the same soldier angrily asks Charmian whether this sort of thing was well done, she answers proudly, just before dying:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 326-27

Octavius arrives to witness the defeat of what he planned as his crowning victory. They puzzle out the manner of her suicide. There is a swelling and a spot of blood on Cleopatra's breast and the soldier who had questioned Charmian now says:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 350-51

It is an old superstition that snakes are slimy. They are not. Some snake-like sea creatures are slimy-lampreys, eels, salamanders. Snakes, however, are perfectly dry to the touch.

It falls to the cold Octavius to give Cleopatra her final epitaph. Even he is moved as he gazes at her dead body as she lies there-Cleopatra still. He says:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 345-47

Nor is he vindictive. He says:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 355-57

And now the world calls the one survivor and victor of all the turbulent events of the play. He says:

—Act V, scene ii, lines 362-64

The civil wars that have lasted fifty years are over. The next year, 29 b.c., Octavius Caesar ordered the closing of the temple of Janus, indicating that Rome was at peace, the first time that had happened in over two hundred years. Then, in 27 b.c., he accepted the title of Augustus, by which he is best known to history.

From 27 b.c. Augustus reigned for forty-one years, establishing a new kind of government, the Roman Empire, and serving as its first and by all odds the greatest of its emperors. So firm was the government he established and so honored was it in the memory of man that though the last Roman Emperor in Italy abdicated in a.d 476, another ruler calling himself Roman Emperor continued to reign in Constantinople. The Constantinopolitan line, which used the title of Roman Emperor to the end, endured till 1453, and even after it was gone there was still a Roman Emperor in Vienna-a line that continued till 1806.

And even after that was gone there were emperors. In the German language, these were called Kaisers and in the Slavic languages tsars- both distortions of Caesar, the family name of Julius and Octavius. The last Russian tsar resigned his throne in 1917, the last German Kaiser in 1918, the last Bulgarian tsar in 1946.

It is interesting that 1946 is exactly two thousand years after 44 b.c., the year in which Julius Caesar was assassinated. For that length of time not one year passed in which somewhere in the world there wasn't someone calling himself by a form of "Caesar" as title (as all the Roman emperors did).

Of the four plays and one narrative history which are set in Rome, Titus Andronicus is the only one that does not deal with accepted Roman history or legend. It is utter fiction. Not one character in it, not one event, is to be found in history.

What's more, Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest and most gruesome of Shakespeare's plays, and the one in which the horror seems present entirely for the sake of horror.

Indeed, Titus Andronicus is so unpleasant a play that most critics would be delighted to be able to believe it was not written by Shakespeare. They cannot do so, however. There are contemporary references to Titus Andronicus as a Shakespearean tragedy, which also place the time of its writing at about 1593. It is an early play but by no means the earliest, and Shakespeare could surely have done better than Titus Andronicus by this time.