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

—Act V, scene v, lines 68-72

Plutarch reports that "it was said" that Antony had, on a number of occasions, said something like this. Was it to win over those who had been on Brutus' side for the war that was to follow between himself and Octavius? Was it out of gratitude, since Brutus had refused to allow Antony to be killed on the ides of March? Did Antony really believe what he said?

In terms of Shakespeare's play, this final eulogy is so devastatingly wrong, it can be accepted only as irony. How can we possibly follow Antony in saying that Brutus was the only one who didn't act out of envy, when Shakespeare shows us that he was the only one who surely acted out of envy.

In the great seduction scene in Act I, scene ii, Cassius turns all his arguments against Brutus' weak point, his monstrous vanity. He paints a world in which Caesar is all and Brutus nothing, knowing that Brutus cannot bear such a thought. Finally, he makes the comparison a brutally direct one:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 142-47

It might be argued that Cassius was speaking generally, comparing Caesar to any other Roman citizen, but the fact is that he made the comparison to Brutus specifically, and Brutus listened. Take this together with Brutus' character as painstakingly revealed in every other facet of the play and we can be certain that he was not the only conspirator not driven by envy. On the contrary, he was the one conspirator who was driven only by envy.

I 1607 Shakespeare returned to North's edition of Plutarch, from which eight years before he had taken material for Julius Caesar. Using Plutarch's biography of Mark Antony, Shakespeare wrote what was virtually a continuation of the earlier play, and made it the most Plutarchian of the three plays he derived from that source.

Antony and Cleopatra begins almost at the point where Julius Caesar had left off.

Brutus and Cassius have been defeated at the double battle at Philippi in 42 b.c. by the troops under Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar. These two, together with Lepidus, the third member of the Triumvirate (see page I-301), are now in a position to divide the Roman realm among themselves.

Octavius Caesar took western Europe for his third, with the capital at Rome itself. It was what he could best use, for it left him with the Senate and the political power-center of the realm. Octavius was a politician and the battles he could best fight (and win) were battles of words with the minds of men at stake.

Lepidus was awarded the province of Africa, centering about the city of Carthage. It was an inconsiderable portion for an inconsiderable man, and Lepidus was and remained a mere appendage of Octavius Caesar. Lepidus grew important only when someone was required to act as go-between where the two major partners were concerned.

Mark Antony had the East and this suited him very well. Except for the days immediately following Julius Caesar's assassination, Antony had never gotten along well in Rome. He preferred the Eastern provinces, which were far the richer and more sophisticated portion of the Roman realm. Mark Antony was a hedonist; he knew how to appreciate pleasure, and in the great cities of the East he knew he would find it.

He was also a soldier who welcomed war, and in the East he knew he would find that too. The Parthians were to be found there. Eleven years before they had destroyed a Roman army (see page I-257) and for that they had never been punished. Antony hoped to deliver that punishment.

All Antony's plans went awry, however, when in 41 b.c. he encountered Cleopatra, the fascinating Queen of Egypt. He fell sufficiently in love with her to forget the necessity of beating the Parthians and to neglect the threat of the slow, crafty advance of Octavius Caesar in Rome.

The love story of Antony and Cleopatra has captured the imagination of the world, and has left generations sighing. (And never has it been as ap-pealingly and as majestically described as in this play.) In its own time, however, the affair must have been viewed with impatience by those soldiers who were bound to Antony and who found themselves neglected, their chance for loot and glory vanishing.

The play opens in Cleopatra's palace in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt Two soldiers, Demetrius and Philo, come onstage. Philo, who knows the situation, expresses his soldierly displeasure to Demetrius, who apparently is a newcomer fresh from Rome. Philo says:

—Act I, scene i, lines 1-6

The expression "tawny front" means "dark face" and this represents a misconception concerning Cleopatra that has been common in later times and that can never be corrected, in all likelihood. Because she was the ruler of an African land and because she was an "Egyptian," she has been presumed to be dark, dusky, swarthy, even perhaps part Negress. She may have been dark, to be sure, but she was no darker, necessarily, than any other Greek, for she was not of Egyptian descent.

Egypt had become the kingdom of Cleopatra's forebears back in 323 b.c. when Alexander the Great had died. Alexander had conquered the entire Persian Empire, of which Egypt was part, and after his death one of his generals, Ptolemaios (or Ptolemy, as he is known in English), seized Egypt. In 305 b.c. Ptolemy adopted the title of long and from then on, for two and a half centuries, his descendants, each named Ptolemy, ruled Egypt.

Ptolemy I, the first of the kings of Ptolemaic Egypt, was a Macedonian, a native of the Greek-speaking kingdom of Macedon, lying just north of Greece proper. All the Ptolemies married Greeks and all the rulers of Ptolemaic Egypt, down to and including Cleopatra, were completely Greek. Cleopatra's father had been Ptolemy XI, the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Ptolemy I. There had been a number of Ptolemaic queens, by the way, who bore the name of Cleopatra (a perfectly good Greek name meaning "glory of her father," and not Egyptian at all). The one in Shakespeare's play is actually Cleopatra VII, but she is the only one remembered today and the name without the numeral is enough. There is no danger of confusion with any of the first six.

The notion of Cleopatra as a dark African is carried on further as the speech continues, with Philo saying of Antony:

—Act I, scene i, lines 6-10

The word "gypsy" means simply "Egyptian" here, but although Cleopatra was an Egyptian by nationality, she was not one by descent. Indeed, the true Egyptians were a "lower class" to the ruling Greeks, as the natives of India once were to the ruling British. Cleopatra would undoubtedly have been terribly offended to have been considered an "Egyptian."

Furthermore, the word "gypsy" by Shakespeare's time had come to be applied to a wandering group of men and women of unknown origin. Popular rumor had them coming from Egypt, hence "gypsy," but it is much more likely they came from India (see page I-149). To call Cleopatra a "gypsy," then, is to call up visions of swarthy women in markedly non-Western costume, both to Shakespeare's audience and our own.