"Antony and Cleopatra": the play’s structure

Antony and Cleopatra: the play’s structure

Emrys Jones discusses the dramatic structure of the play. It boasts more scenes – many of them very short – than any other Shakespeare play. He attributes this to Shakespeare’s desire to deliver a more detached, at times even ironic, perspective on the protagonists and the action. The play’s scenic structure becomes a game of point and counterpoint; we are urged to measure reality against perception by a series of dramatic snapshots.

Antony and Cleopatra heaves ripplingly like the sea in a quiet mood. Most of its scenes are short and circumscribed; they have no room for the grander movements of feeling, such as occur in most of the other great tragedies (like the forum scene in Julius Caesar or the temptation scene in Othello).

With one possible exception, the last scene of all, there is nothing like this in Antony and Cleopatra. It makes its effects in quite a different way.

Shakespeare’s technique of short scenes lends itself to a number of expressive purposes. In the first place, the practice of clearing the stage every hundred lines or so forbids – in the first movement of the play, at least – any very deep emotional engagement on the part of the audience. The constant changes of location (Egypt, Rome, Misenum, Syria, Athens), the contrasting evaluations of Antony’s behaviour, as well as the fluctuating play of mood within the individual personality, all work to encourage an ironical comparative response, not quite detachment (because the play kindles a keen interest), but not a profound attachment of feeling either. The setting of the play is the entire world – the Roman empire and its Levantine neighbours, which is the world as its inhabitants see it. The dramatist may show us, in one scene, what is going on in that part of the world, but we can be sure that elsewhere, in many other places, many other things are also going on. From its opening scene the play establishes the simple fact that there are as many viewpoints as there are human beings. This is one of the points made by the scene, hardly necessary to the plot, in which Antony’s lieutenant Ventidius is shown in Syria (III.I). We have scarcely met him before, and never see him again, but for a few moments we see Antony and Caesar through his eyes – and from this angle they look different. Public actions will always be interpreted in different ways, since every human being brings his own experience to what he sees, and what he sees may not be instantly intelligible to him. Indeed in this world, for all the crystalline clarity of the play’s poetic vision, human beings are intelligible neither to each other nor to themselves. Everyone moves in a mist of passion, driven by obscure pressures which may erupt in action seemingly involuntary. In the first scene Antony rejects the messengers, declaring himself wholly for Cleopatra and love. In the second, his mood has changed: he is all for breaking away and returning to Rome. When he takes leave of Cleopatra in the following scene he protests his fidelity, and in Act I, scene 5, we hear that he is still doing so through messengers. As soon as he arrives in Rome, however, he enters into a new understanding with Caesar and promptly agrees to marry his sister. We next see him assuring Octavia that he is a reformed man: ‘that to come | Shall all be done by th’rule.’ But a few moments later he has accepted his Egyptian destiny: ‘I’th’East my pleasure lies’ (II.3.6–7 and 41). Throughout the first half of the play the technique of short scenes is essential for putting across this view of human activity, with its stress on discontinuity and multiplicity, volatility and impulsiveness.

One effect of this technique, then, is to induce a moderately critical and ironical frame of mind: we keep on making comparisons. But there are other effects too. The short scenes are often atomistically constructed: they are often made up of even shorter discrete parts. In Act IV, scene 4, for example, Antony is shown going out to battle. The scene, though very short (under forty lines), contains several distinct units of action: Antony, in high spirits, is helped into his armour by Cleopatra; he is then greeted, first by a single soldier, and then by a number of ‘Captains and soldiers’; he takes a soldier’s leave of Cleopatra and leads away his men; finally, alone with Charmian, Cleopatra muses on Antony’s chances and shows that her real mood is one of low-spirited, clear-eyed detachment: ‘Then Antony – but now. Well, on.’ Such a technique makes possible a kind of quick close-up view of the speakers like the abruptly discontinuous shots of a news-reel. An illusion of intimacy is created, although we seldom if ever penetrate beneath the surface or overhear a speaker’s unspoken thoughts. At the same time the illusion of life in free spontaneous motion is very powerful: the action becomes a succession of moments with a dreamlike vividness. This is what life seems like, pre served in memory – brilliant snapshots surrounded by darkness.