...the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne...

I'm still working through the backlog of plays I read in March, so this post is following hard on the heels of the previous one. That seems appropriate, though, as it actually mirrors my initial reaction to Antony & Cleopatra. When I started reading it I was coming down off of Lear and feeling that the latter should have been the last play ever written, that the world should have ended when King Lear's did, that any further work could be but a pale echo, and so on. I resented A&C; it seemed too scattered; all over the map and full of inconsequential people with annoyingly similar-sounding Roman names.

Fortunately, that first impression did not last long. It helped that the professor is really passionate about this play (even in the context of how he feels about the other plays), and went to great lengths to help unpack it for us. He showed us the passage from Plutarch that Shakespeare had virtually lifted for the description of Cleopatra on the river Cydnus, but helped us see how the poet had recrafted it in blank verse and enlivened it by putting the words in the mouth of Enobarbus, the plainspoken, sensible soldier, who sets the with the moral center of the play. He hardly wants to glorify Cleopatra and her influence over Antony, but he cannot help himself, and as he tells the story he is swept up in the memory of the illusion she created and the influence she wielded.

One of the moments of the play that stuck with me the most (perhaps partly because my father quoted it to me before I started reading), was the scene in which Cleopatra recounts her dream of Antony as a colossus, striding the earth. "Think you be there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?" she asks her guard, Caesar's soldier, and on hearing his denial she cries out, "You lie, up to the hearing of the gods." It is an instance of longing for, and belief in a greatness that has gone, that has passed by and will never come again, but whose memory still enlivens the moment with passion. It is that passion for a lost world, for a glory slowly slipping away that gives this story its poignancy, even as it is balanced on a knife-edge between the heroic and the tawdry.