Sources for Antony and Cleopatra

The principal source for Antony and Cleopatra is The Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans by Mestrius Plutarch (c.46-127). Plutarch’s work consisted of biographies of celebrated Greeks and Romans. He was concerned with the ways in which the characters of famous men, their moral virtues and failings, shaped history. This made Plutarch’s work particularly apt for adaptation into more literary forms. Shakespeare used the English translation of Sir Thomas North (1579) as a source for other plays as well, including Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus. [1]

In Plutarch, Antony is ‘valiant and wise’, merciful, with ‘great curtesie’ and a ‘noble presence’, although inclined to a dissolute life, and at the mercy of Cleopatra: ‘if any sparke of goodnesse of hope of rising were left him, Cleopatra quenched it straight’. [2] Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, Philo says that Antony has a ‘captain’s heart’, but also that he is ‘the triple pillar of the world transformed/ Into a strumpet’s fool.’ [3] Particularly famous is the passage in which Plutarch describes Cleopatra:

She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was of gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her selfe: she was layed under a pavillion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus, commonly drawen in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretie faire boyes apparelled as painters doe set forth god Cupide, with litle fannes in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her Ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphes Nereides (which are the mermaides of the waters) and like the Graces, some stearing the helme, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderfull passing sweete savor of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfes side [...]. [4]

Shakespeare clearly found this description to his liking. He retained the essential elements and added his own rich metaphors, transforming the already vivid description into evocative verse:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/ Burned 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 strokes. For her own person,/ It beggared all description: she did lie/ In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,/ O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/ The fancy outwork nature. On each side her/ Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids,/ with divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem/ To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,/ And what they undid did. [...] Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,/ So many mermaids, tended her i’ th’ eyes,/ And made their bends adornings. At the helm/ A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle/ Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands/ That yarely frame the office. From the barge/ A strange invisible perfume hits the sense/ Of the adjacent wharfs. [5]

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is essentially the fascinating woman of Plutarch’s tale, though his Octavia is less prominent. His Enobarbus, based on a minor character in Plutarch, conveys many of Plutarch’s descriptions. Shakespeare omits much of the military detail with which Plutarch begins, and emphasises Cleopatra’s suicide. [6]

Roman writers were hostile to Cleopatra; Horace called her the ‘mad queen’. [7] In the middle ages, Dante placed Cleopatra in the second circle of Hell, where sins of lust were punished; Lydgate chastised the lovers for ‘lustis foul and abhominable’; [8] and Spenser put Cleopatra in Hell with ‘proud wemen, vaine, forgetful of their yoke’. [9]Yet, in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’, she is depicted as a noble martyr to true love. In All For Love (1677), Dryden erred on the side of sympathy, saying, ‘ [I] have drawn the character of Antony as favourably as Plutarch, Appian, and Dion Cassius would give me leave; the like I have observed in Cleopatra’. [10] Shakespeare depicts Antony’s dependence upon Cleopatra as leading to a tragic downfall, yet, like Chaucer before him and Dryden after, offers an insight into the emotional suffering of the characters that makes them, though flawed, still sympathetic. [11]

Karen Kay