If it be love…
Thoughts forthe first rehearsal of Antony and Cleopatra with Atlantic Acting School/NYU Tisch 3rd year actors, September 2021.
“If it be love indeed, tell me how much.”
This is the first thing Cleopatra says to Antony in Shakespeare’s play. I hear it as a challenge, not only from Cleopatra to Antony, but from our poet-playwright to anyone who might encounter this text. Is your love real? And if you think so, I dare you to try to measure it.
Shakespeare is a poet, and poets — like mystics — truck in the unanswerable and unmeasurable. These seeming paradoxes — questions that cannot be answered, at least not in words — are the source of our artistic power and where any meaningful artistic process begins.
In encountering Antony and Cleopatra, the question that captivates me most is: What is love, indeed? How do you experience it? Does it have edges? How is it verified? How is it created, and how is it destroyed?
And most of all, how is it practiced? How does it find form in our relationships, our politics, our actions?
What must we let go of in order to experience love more fully?
Antony and Cleopatra might be the most famous couple in history. Theirs is considered one of the greatest love stories of all time. And yet, in Shakespeare’s play, we see a couple that might have been plucked from the pages of TMZ: they have knock-down-drag-out fights, they are unfaithful, they lie, they manipulate each other. It seems they do not trust each other at all. This makes for great drama — and it’s important to remember that the play is a very juicy drama — but is this love, indeed?
Of course, there’s another part of the equation here. Our title characters are not just anybody, but two of the leaders of their known world. Their relationship is played out before and within a web of politics, domination, and conquest, with literally everything at stake. Here we see the conflict of two of life’s great forces: love and power. This dualism is the dramatic engine of the play.
It is writ large in the setting, which whiplashes with the speed of cinematic cuts between the sophistication and sensuality of Cleopatra’s Alexandria, and the cold and stoic atmosphere of Caesar’s Rome. Bringing these two worlds to life with specificity will help articulate the duality at the heart of the play.
It is a play in which people — even our title couple — are almost never alone. Every character has a heightened awareness of the part they must play in public, their role in the great theater of history. Everyone is concerned with how they will be perceived and remembered. After she is captured by Caesar, Cleopatra addresses this when she tells Iras:
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome, as well as I: the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore.
This is meta-moment as the playwright actually has the actor playing Cleopatra (who would have been male-identified — or at least assigned-male-at-birth — in Shakespeare’s time) remind the audience at one of the most heightened emotional moments in the narrative that what they are watching is all pretend.
This performativity extends to the very identities of the characters. Every character exists in relation to their own myth. You hear this in lines like Enobarbus’:
Sir, sometimes, when he is not Antony,
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.
And Cleopatra’s:
…but, since my lord
Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.
As if the very essence of their identity is a mask that can be removed and put back on. But what does this have to do with love, indeed? James Baldwin wrote:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth…Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is growing up.”
My instinct is that each character in the play is caught between their vulnerable, unmasked self and the part they must play in the world to gain or preserve power.
This is just as present in our lives, today. We see almost everything sacrificed at the altar of Image. We curate and promote false selves through social media in order to gain followers. Our politicians seem more engaged in scoring political points on Twitter than in implementing just and humane policy. Even in the world of art — where you might expect love to lead — we see institutions more concerned with preserving the status quo through performative statements than actually enacting the tough and meaningful change in the realms of anti-racism and labor justice that our field so desperately needs.
I think Baldwin might say that, in all of these cases, no love is present.
We know we cannot live without love; or perhaps we can, but it won’t be a life worth living. But do we dare step forward on that tough and universal quest that Baldwin proposes? Do we dare take off the masks we feel we cannot live without? What do we have to lose? What if, like Antony and Cleopatra, it was the known world?
And that brings me to Shakespeare’s other great theme in this play: Death.
Like love, death is a great mystery. It’s a favorite topic of artists, and you often find love and death appearing together in works of art. In Antony and Cleopatra, the two are never far apart. The play begins with news of the death of Antony’s wife Fulvia, which is the inciting incident of the play. Later, with the messenger Alexas, Cleopatra reveals her terror that Antony might have died while apart from her. And in the course of the play, we witness the deaths of multiple characters, at least one from a broken heart.
I don’t want to underestimate the very real creative, emotional, and physical challenges of representing these physical deaths on the stage. That process will be approached with intentionality, care, and skill in order to create as safe an environment as possible for that challenging work.
But I think there’s also a figurative way of understanding death in Antony and Cleopatra. The Elizabethans, Shakespeare’s people, used “death” as a euphemism for orgasm: a moment of ecstasy where the self — however momentarily — is forgotten. This actually shows up a lot in our text. It’s a smaller expression of the larger metaphorical way I believe death functions in this play: the abandonment of the self one knows on the quest for a fuller, more authentic, more loving self. To use Baldwin’s language, it is taking off the mask we cannot live within. A full abandonment to grace.
At a crucial moment in the play, Antony speaks of not being able to hold his corporeal shape, feeling he has become as insubstantial as a cloud. And shortly before her death, Cleopatra says she has become “fire and air,” leaving her baser elements behind.
What’s on the other side of death is a mystery. This confrontation with the reality of death — which throws into sharp relief what truly matters in our lives — is the mystical core of the play. (Mystical: concerned with the soul or spirit, inspiring a sense of awe and mystery.) Our species has, since ancient times, confronted the mysteries of life and death with ritual. Which is, of course, what the theater is.
I’ll close with a quote from Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Eros, which translates as “desire” in Ancient Greek, was the Greek god of love. It’s also the name of a character in our play, which I don’t think is an accident on the part of our poet. Carson writes:
“Your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life… As you handle it, you come into contact with what is inside you in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be…Eros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it…it is a glimpse of god.”
