Antony and Cleopatra

by William Shakespeare

Where to find it: Late in the scene, after Antony has agreed to marry Octavia and the leaders have gone out, leaving Enobarbus with Agrippa and Maecenas: from Enobarbus’s “I will tell you.” to “And made a gap in nature.”

ENOBARBUS: I will tell you.¹ The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burned on the water.² The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them³; 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 description⁴: she did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, O’erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature.⁵ 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.⁶ AGRIPPA: O, rare for Antony! ENOBARBUS: 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. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthroned i’ th’ market-place, did sit alone,⁷ Whistling to th’ air, which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature.⁸

1. 1“I will tell you.” Until this line Enobarbus has been swapping gossip with the Romans in prose. With these four words he moves into verse, and the shift tells the audience that what follows is a performance, a set piece he has perhaps told before, and not a plain report.
2. 2“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water.” The simile turns a boat into a seat of royal power, and the near-pun of “burnished” and “Burned” sets fire on water. Two elements that should cancel each other out burn together, which is the paradox the whole speech builds, and it looks forward to Cleopatra’s dying claim, “I am fire and air”.
3. 3“The winds were love-sick with them” Personification makes nature itself fall in love: the winds are love-sick with the perfume, the water follows the oars “As amorous of their strokes”. Enobarbus does not describe Cleopatra at all yet. He describes the world responding to her, so that her power is felt before she is seen.
4. 4“It beggared all description” He claims she is beyond words while spending nearly thirty lines on the scene. The word picks up the language of the opening scene, where Antony says “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned”. The play keeps suggesting that what is truly great cannot be counted or described, and that those who try come away poorer.
5. 5“O’erpicturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature.” A painting of Venus shows imagination outdoing nature, and Cleopatra outdoes even that painting. Keep this in mind for Act 5, Scene 2, where Cleopatra makes the same move about Antony: nature, she says, lacks the material to compete with fancy, yet an Antony would be nature’s masterpiece against it. In both speeches the lover is the real thing that beats imagination.

The question: Explore the ways in which Shakespeare makes Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra so vivid and so persuasive in this passage. For an A-level essay, go on to consider how far the play presents Cleopatra through other people's words rather than letting the audience judge her for itself.

1. 1“Eros, thou yet behold’st me?” The scene opens with a question, and a strange one: Antony asks whether he can still be seen. A man who has lived as a public spectacle now doubts that he exists at all, and the rest of the speech explains the fear.
2. 2“Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,” The list of cloud shapes moves from beasts of strength (dragon, bear, lion) to things of permanence (a citadel, a rock, a mountain). Each can be read as an image of the soldier Antony used to be, and every one is made of vapour. The long, calm catalogue makes the dissolving feel slow and inevitable.
3. 3“And mock our eyes with air.” The clouds deceive the eye, and Antony believes he has been deceived too. The line gathers the play’s worries about seeing and believing: the audience knows, from the scene before, that Cleopatra has only hidden in her monument.
4. 4“They are black vesper’s pageants.” Vesper is evening, and a pageant is a show. The shapes are the night’s theatre, gone as darkness comes, and the image looks ahead to his own ending later in the scene: “The long day’s task is done, / And we must sleep.”
5. 5“The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct / As water is in water.” The rack, the driving clouds, blurs the horse’s outline until it disappears as completely as water poured into water. In Act 1, Scene 1 Antony wished Rome to melt into the Tiber; now it is he who melts. The simile is the play’s image of dissolution at its most exact and most frightening.
6. 6 The name remains but the self has gone. Throughout the play Antony measures himself by his name, “I am / Antony yet” in Act 3, Scene 13, and here the name and the man come apart. Spoken to a servant rather than to the audience, it is one of the most private moments Antony is given.

The question: How does Shakespeare make this such a moving and revealing moment for Antony? For an A-level essay, use the passage as the starting point for a discussion of how the play presents Antony's sense of who he is.

1. 1“You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams;” Cleopatra expects a Roman to sneer and says so first, which disarms the sneer. She is a prisoner, but she still controls how her words will be received. On Shakespeare’s stage Cleopatra was played by a male actor, most likely a boy, so the line can also be heard as a dare to the audience to laugh at the performance in front of it.
2. 2“I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.” The past tense makes Antony a figure of story already. The title is pointed: later in the scene Dolabella announces Caesar with “It is the Emperor, madam.” Cleopatra gives the title to the loser, and the play lets the two claims to it stand side by side.
3. 3“His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck / A sun and moon” The description begins at the face, as a love poem would, and expands at once to the size of the universe. The earth itself shrinks to “The little O”, a speck lit by the sun and moon of his face, so that the whole world Caesar has just won becomes tiny beside him.
4. 4“His legs bestrid the ocean” He becomes a colossus standing astride the sea. The image answers the history the audience has watched: the real Antony lost everything at sea, at Actium and again in Act 4, Scene 12, yet in Cleopatra’s telling the ocean is something he straddles with ease.
5. 5“There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas / That grew the more by reaping.” A harvest that grows as it is gathered is a paradox of endless generosity. It is not only fantasy: in Act 4, Scene 5 Antony sent Enobarbus’s treasure after him when he deserted, and in the next scene Enobarbus called him “Thou mine of bounty”.

The question: Explore the ways in which Shakespeare makes Cleopatra's description of Antony such a powerful moment in the play. For an A-level essay, weigh the view that Antony is great only in Cleopatra's words, using this passage and the play as a whole.