Ruined Masculinity: Scenes from a Life as Tragedy

1. Antony and Cleopatra Ruined Masculinity - or - Scenes from a life as tragedy? -or - The triumph of the feminine ‘She’s a most triumphant lady if report be square to her’

2. Philo: Nay, but this dotage of our General’s O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, That o’er the files and musters of the war Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front. His captain’s heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gipsy’s lust. [Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her ladies, the train, with eunuchs fanning her] Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transformed Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see (1.1.1-13) Antony: Now, for the love of Love and her soft hours, Let’s not confound the time with conference harsh. There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch Without some pleasure now. What sport tonight? (1.1.45-49) Antony: These strong Egyptian fetters I must break Or lose myself in dotage (1.2.105-06)

3. [M]asculinity is something quite different from biological maleness, and … different cultures define masculinity in markedly different ways …. What remains constant across these differences, however, is the fact that masculinity must be achieved. It is not a natural given, something that comes with possession of male sexual organs, but an achievement, something that must be worked toward and maintained. Masculinity … is not an essence but a construction (Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (CUP, 2000), p. 2). The Farnese Heracles

4. Among most of the peoples that anthropologists are familiar with, true manhood is a precious and elusive status beyond mere maleness, a hortatory image that men and boys aspire to and that their culture demands of them as a measure of belonging …. Its vindication is doubtful, resting in rigid codes of decisive action in many spheres of life: as husband, father, lover, provider, warrior. A restricted status, there are always men who fail the test. (David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Conceptions of Masculinity [1990, p. 17]). ‘[She] married with mine uncle / My father’s brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules’ (Hamlet, 1.2.151-53). The ‘scarce-bearded Caesar’ who ‘at Phillippi kept / His sword e’en like a dancer, while I struck /The lean and winkled Cassius… He alone Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had / in the brave squares of war’; the ‘novice’ The Farnese Heracles (1592) engraved by HendrikGoltzius

5. ‘If masculine identity is something that men give each other, they do so under a complicated system of rules whereby they alternately abet and oppose each other’ (Smith, Masculinity, p. 66). If masculinity is something men ‘give each other’, logically, then, it is something that men can take from each other. It is not just winnable but lose-able, not just achievable but reversible. A man can be emasculated. He can be ‘boyed’ – or worse, ‘girled’. Cleopatra: Why should not we Be there [in these wars] in person? Enobarbus: … Your presence needs must puzzle Antony, Take from his heart, take from his brain, from’s time What should not then be spared. He is already Traduced for levity; and ’tis said in Rome that Photinus, an eunuch, and your maids Manage the war. (3.7.5-15) Canidius: …our leader’s led, And we are women’s men. (3.7.68-69) Omphale with cross-dressed Heracles: ‘the noble ruin of her magic’

6. From North’s Plutarch, 1579 …he had a noble presence, and shewed a countenaunce of one of a noble house: he had a goodly thicke beard, a broad forehead, crooke nosed, and there appeared such a manly looke in his countenaunce, as is commonly seene in Hercules pictures, stamped or graven in mettell. Now it had been a speeche of old time, that the familieof the Antoniiwere discendedfrom one Anton, the sonneof Hercules, whereof the familietooke name. This opinion did Antonius seeke to confirme in all his doings: not onely resembling him in the likenes of his bodye …. But also in the wearing of his garments. For when he would openly shewe him selfe abroad before many people, he would alwayesweare his cassockegyrtdownelowe upon his hippes, with a great sword hanging by his side, and upon that, some ill favored cloke. Furthermore, things that seemeintollerable in other men, as to boast commonly, to jeast with one or other, to drinke like a good fellow with everybody, to sit with the souldiers when they dine, and to eate and drinke with them souldierlike: it is incredible what wonderfull love it wanne him amongest them. And … being given to love: that made him the more desired, and … brought many to love him… Besides … his liberalitie … great credit … his authoritie and power also very great, the which notwithstanding him selfe did overthrowe by a thowsand other faults he had.

7. Thesis: if Shakespeare’s ‘big story’ in history, tragedy, comedy is the making of masculinity, then (I argue) the most challenging agent interrogating masculinity, disrupting its self definition, un-making its self is the woman. (Licit) Parts a woman might play: virgin/wife/mother (Illicit) Parts a woman might play: shrew/witch/whore Question: What part does Cleopatra play in Antony and Cleopatra? What part does she play in the cultural imaginary of the play, as the subject of history, memory, report, gossip, fantasy, and self presentation?

8. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in her time: Now her beauty (as it is reported) was not so passing, as unmatchable of other women, nor yet such as upon present view did enamour men with her: but so sweet was her company and conversation, that a man could not possibly but be taken. And besides her beauty, the good grace she had to talk and discourse, her courteous nature that tempered her words and deeds, was a spur that pricked to the quick. Furthermore, besides all these, her voice and words were marvellous pleasant : for her tongue was an instrument of music to divers sports and pastimes, the which she easily turned to any language that pleased her. She spake unto few barbarous people by interpreter, but made them answer herself, or at least the most part of them : as the Ethiopians, the Arabians, the Troglodytes, the Hebrews, the Syrians, the Medes, and the Parthians, and to many others also, whose languages she had learned.Whereas divers of her progenitors, the kings of Egypt, could scarce learn the Egyptian tongue only, and many of them forgot to speak the Macedonian. Now Antonius was so ravished with the love of Cleopatra … that he yielded himself to go with Cleopatra into Alexandria … where he spent and lost in childish sports … and idle pastimes the most precious thing a man can spend, … and that is time. Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Mark Antony (1579) ‘Her death was sudden.’

9. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in his time: Herodotus on Egypt 5th CBCE in Barnaby Riche’s 1584 translation of his History: a land of Marvels, strange beasts, inverted gender roles (men did the spinning, women worked in commerce in the market), easy living (because the lands brings forth harvest without effort); superstition and the occult; a ‘land continuously void of rain’ which accounts for ‘the blackness and swartness of the people, coloured by the vehement scorching of the sun.’ Andrew Boordeon Egypt: ‘Egypt is a country joined to Jewry … There be many great wildernesses, in which be many great wild beasts …’ The people of the country be swart … they be light fingered and use picking (The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, 1555) George Abbot on Egypt: ‘… the inhabitants there are not black, but rather dun, or tawny, of the which colour Cleopatra was observed to be’ (A Brief Description of the Whole World, 1664). John Cowell: ‘Egyptians are in our statutes and laws of England, a counterfeit kind of rogues, that being English or Welsh people…disguising themselves in strange robes, blacking their faces and bodies, … wander up and down, and under pretence of telling of fortunes … abuse the ignorant’ (The Interpreter, 1607). Samuel Rid: ‘They wander up and down in the name of Egyptians, colouring their faces and fashioning their attire and garment like unto them…’ (The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, 1612).

10. Shakespeare’s Egyptians/gipsies: See Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet; Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Othello, Henry VIII, Twelfth Night, Pericles Cleopatra as Egypt/gipsy: ‘tawny front’; ‘Think on me / That am with Phoebus’s amorous pinches black, And wrinkled deep in time’; Antony’s ‘serpent of old Nile’ (1.5.27-28, 25), the crocodile: Lepidus: What manner o’thing is your crocodile? Antony: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs… Lepidus: What colour is it of? Antony: Of its own colour too. Lepidus: ’Tis a strange serpent’. (2.7.39-46) Ben Jonson: The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) Queen Anna: The Masque of Blackness (Twelfth Night, 1605)

11. Inigo Jones design for Queen Anna of Denmark’s Masque of Blackness at the Court of King James in the Christmas Revels of 1604 ‘a daughter of Niger’ In November of 1603 Shakespeare’s company had staged at Court a play of ‘Othello or the Moor of Venice’ Was Shakespeare at Court to see the Queen’s Masque – to see, that is, a blacked up queen playing ‘a daughter’ of Egypt? Some time in 1605 Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, at its centre, a black queen. Coincidence or influence?

12. For blackness troping sexuality, see: Richard Dyer, White (1997) AniaLoomba, ‘The Imperial Romance of Antony and Cleopatra’ in Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (2002) Carol Rutter, ‘Shadowing Cleopatra: Making Whiteness Strange’ in Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (2001)See William Shakespeare in Othello: ‘an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’ ‘arise, or else the devil will make a grandsire of you’ ‘your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’ ‘your fair daughter [is]… Transported … To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor… Your daughter … hath made a gross revolt, Tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes In an extravagant and wheeling stranger Of here and everywhere. …Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereof we see, in all things, nature tends – Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. Her name, that was as fresh As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face… Was this fair paper, this most goodly book Made to write ‘whore’ upon?

13. ORIENTALISM: • Coined by the postcolonial critic Edward Said, the term “Orientalism” describes “a Western style for dominating, reconstructing and having authority over the Orient” (1979: 3): • Said suggests that the “Orient” features in the Western imagination “as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (1979: 3) – cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, immorality are projected onto it as the anti-qualities of those that Western audiences are encouraged to associate with their own cultures. • “…the Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’. … the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority” (1979: 40, 42). • cf. The battle of Actium: ‘epic showdown’; ‘the battle • that re-drew geo-politics’; ‘that established the • Roman Empire’ and the translatioimperii, 31BCE.

14. See white culture’s habit of ‘whiting out’ Cleopatra in representation, including theatre performance of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, while positioning a black body somewhere in the visual frame to signify those ‘dark’ elements Said locates in Orientalism, elements whiteness needs to distance from itself but also desires. Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Stratford upon Avon directed by Glen Byam Shaw 1953

15. Janet Suzman as Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Trevor Nunn, 1972

16. Helen Mirren as Cleopatra, RSC @ The Other Place, directed by Adrian Noble 1982, with Josette Simon (behind)

17. Claire Higgins as Cleopatra, RSC, directed by John Caird, 1992 (with Clare Benedict as Charmian)

18. RSC @ The Swan, Tarell Alvin McCraney, director, 2013 Joaquina Kalukango as Cleopatra Blackness restored?

19. Josette Simon as Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Theatre 2016 Cleopatra as African Queen

20. ‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s …’ Cleopatra as author of Antony’s tragedy?

21. ‘Roman thought[s]’ on Cleopatra Caesar: You may see, Lepidus, and henceforth know, It is not Caesar’s natural vice to hate Our great competitor. From Alexandria This is the news; he fishes, drinks, and wastes The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy More womanly than he; hardly gave audience …Antony, Leave they lascivious wassails. When thou once Was beaten from Modena … (1.4.1-7, 56-7) * * * * * Pompey: …. But all the charms of love Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip. Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both. Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts. (2.1.20-27) * * * * * Caesar: I’th’marketplace on a tribunal silvered… I’th’common showplace, where they exercise … …He hath given his empire Up to a whore (3.6.3, 12, 66-67). * * * * * Canidius: Our leader’s led. And we are women’s men (3.10.69-70). * * * * * Scarus: The greater cantle of the world is lost With very ignorance; we have kissed away Kingdoms and provinces…Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt… (3.10.6-8, 10)

22. The eye-witness account: [Exit Antony, Octavius Caesar, Lepidus] Maecenas: You stayed well by’t in Egypt… She’s a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her. Enobarbus: When she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus. Agrippa: There she appeared indeed! Or my reporter devised well for her. Enobarbus: I will tell you. 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 turn 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’er picturing 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. Agrippa: I 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’the’market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too And made a gap in nature. Agrippa: Rare Egyptian! Enobarbus: Upon her landing, Antony sent to her, Invited her to supper. She replied It should be better he became her guest, Which she entreated. Our courteous Antony, Whom ne’er the word of ‘No’ woman heard speak, Being barbered ten times o’er, goes to the feast, And for his ordinary, pays his heart For what his eyes eat only. Agrippa: Royal wench! She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed. He ploughed her, and she cropped. Enobarbus: I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street,

23. And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, pour breath forth. Maecenas: Now Antony must leave her utterly. Enobarbus: Never! He will not. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. Maecenas: If beauty, wisdom, modesty can settle The heart of Antony, Octavia is A blessed lottery to him. Agrippa: Let us go. Good Enobarbus, make yourself my guest Whilst you abide here. Enobarbus: Humbly, sir, I thank you. Cleopatra the oxymoron

24. Settle v. infinite variety? Cleopatra as ‘wrangling queen’ See 1.3: ‘Play one scene / Of excellent dissembling and let it look / Like perfect honour … Look prithee Charmian / How this Herculean Roman doth become / The carriage of his chafe .. Courteous lord, one word. / Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it; / Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it; That you know well. Something it is I would – O, my oblivion is a very Antony, /And I am all forgotten…Your honour calls you hence: / Therefore be deaf to my unpitied folly, / And all the gods go with you. Upon your sword / Sit laurel victory, and smooth success / Be strewed before your feet.’ Egyptian stereotype: playing fast and loose; insisting on going to war then fleeing Actium. See 3.13. 45-63, after defeat at Actium Caesar’s ambassador sent to ‘win’ Cleopatra: Thidias: Caesar entreats Not to consider in what case thou stand’stCleopatra as player queen: but what’s Further than he is Caesar. she playing at? ‘You have been a boggler Cleopatra: Go on, right royal. ever!’ ‘Not know me yet?’ Thidias: He knows you embraced not Antony Perfidy? Or politics? As you did love, but as you feared him. Cleopatra: O. Thidias: The scars upon your honour therefore he Does pity, as contrained blemishes, Not as deserved. Cleopatra: He is a god, and knows What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded, But conquered merely.

25. Cleopatra of Act 5. Given the inevitable history of Plutarch, how does Shakespeare, focusing everything on the Egyptian queen, make this a nail-biting conclusion: what is Cleopatra going to do? Why not, after the death of Antony, pack cards with Caesar and live? At the end of 4.15, with the body of Antony dead in her lap, she resolved, Look, Our lamp is spent, it’s out. Good sirs, take heart. We’ll bury him: and then, what’s brave, what’s noble, Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us…Come, we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end. But then… Surprised in the monument; taken prisoner by Proculeius whose guard is relieved by Dolabella, who asks, ‘Most noble Empress, you have heard of me?’ And …

26. Cleopatra: I cannot tell. Dolabella: Assuredly you know me. Cleopatra: No matter, sir, what I have heard or known. You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams; Is’t not your trick? [Dolabella: I understand not, madam] Cleopatra: I dreamt there was an emperor Antony. O, such another sleep, that I might see But such another man! [Dolabella: If it might please ye] His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck A sun and moon which kept their course and lighted The little O, the earth. [Dolabella: Most sovereign creature – ] His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in’t; an autumn it was That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like: they showed his back above The element they lived in. In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. [Dolabella: Cleopatra – ] Think you there was or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? [Dolabella: Gentle madam, no.] You lie, up to the hearing of the gods! But if there be nor ever were one such, It’s past the size of dreaming… Dolabella: Hear me good madam. Your loss is as yourself, great, and you bear it As answering the weight…I do feel, By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites My very heart at root. Cleopatra: I thank you sir. Know you what Caesar means to do with me? Dolabella: I am loath to tell you what I would you knew. Cleopatra: He’ll lead me, then, in triumph. Dolabella: Madam, he will. I know’t. (5.2.75-108) [We know what it looks like for a captive queen to be led in a Roman triumph: viz. Titus Andronicus] Dolabella: ‘Make your best use of this.’ (5.2.197-203) [‘The good grace she had to talk and discourse, … was a spur that pricked to the quick’.]

27. Enter Caesar (now ‘sole sir o’th’world’) – with promises: ‘our intents towards you are most gentle’ and ‘you shall find / A benefit by this change’; and threats: ‘if you [take] Antony’s course, you shall bereave yourself / Of my good purposes, and put your children to that destruction which I’ll guard them from’. Cleopatra responds by calling her treasurer, Seleucus, and instructing him to give to Caesar an inventory of all the ‘money, plate, and jewels / I am possessed of… exactly valued’. Seleucus, commanded by Cleopatra to render the account, declares it’s fraudulent, that Cleopatra ‘kept back’ – that is, failed to disclose – ‘Enough to purchase what you have made known.’ Cleopatra rounds on the ‘Slave, soulless villain, dog!’, ‘wild’ in her rage against his ingratitude. Caesar laughs it off: ‘I approve / Your wisdom in the deed’. And insists, ‘Still be’t yours. / Bestow it at your pleasure…we intend so to dispose you as / Yourself shall give us counsel.’ ‘My master and my lord!’ replies Cleopatra. Then once he exits, ‘He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself…I have spoke already, and it is provided. / Go put it to the haste.’ So what do we make of the Seleucus episode? Enter Dolabella: ‘sworn by your command / Which my love makes religion to obey, / I tell you this: Caesar through Syria / Intends his jouney … You with your children will he send before. / Make your best use of this. I have performed / Your pleasure and my promise.’ ‘Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch my best attires. I am again for Cydnus, To meet Mark Antony…’

28. AND THEN: • Knock, knock. • Who’s there? • It’s the asp man…

29. GUARDSMAN Here is a rural fellowThat will not be denied your Highness’ presence.He brings you figs…This is the man.CLEOPATRA Avoid, and leave him. [Guardsman exits.]Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus thereThat kills and pains not?COUNTRYMAN  Truly I have him, but I would not bethe party that should desire you to touch him, forhis biting is immortal. Those that do die of it doseldom or never recover.CLEOPATRA Remember’st thou any that have died on ’t?COUNTRYMAN  Very many, men and women too. Iheard of one of them no longer than yesterday—avery honest woman, but something given to lie, as awoman should not do but in the way of honesty—how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt.Truly, she makes a very good report o’ th’ worm.But he that will believe all that they say shall neverbe saved by half that they do. But this is mostfalliable, the worm’s an odd worm.CLEOPATRA Get thee hence. Farewell.COUNTRYMAN  I wish you all joy of the worm. [He sets down the basket.]CLEOPATRA Farewell.COUNTRYMAN  You must think this, look you, that theworm will do his kind.CLEOPATRA Ay, ay, farewell.COUNTRYMAN  Look you, the worm is not to be trustedbut in the keeping of wise people, for indeed thereis no goodness in the worm.CLEOPATRA Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.COUNTRYMAN  Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you,for it is not worth the feeding.CLEOPATRA Will it eat me?COUNTRYMAN  You must not think I am so simple butI know the devil himself will not eat a woman. Iknow that a woman is a dish for the gods if the devildress her not. But truly these same whoreson devilsdo the gods great harm in their women, for in everyten that they make, the devils mar five.CLEOPATRA Well, get thee gone. Farewell.COUNTRYMAN  Yes, forsooth. I wish you joy o’ th’worm. [He exits.][Enter Iras bearing Cleopatra’s royal regalia.]

30. Cleopatra: Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have • Immortal longings in me. Now no more • The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip. • Yare, yare, good Iras, quick – methinks I hear • Antony call. I see him rouse himself • To praise my noble act. I hear him mock • The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men • To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come. • Now to that name my courage prove my title. • I am fire and air; my other elements • I give to baser life. So, have you done? • Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. • Farewell, kind Charmian. Iras, long farewell. • [Iras falls and dies] • Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall? • If thou and nature can so gently part, • The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, • Which hurts and is desired. Dost thou lie still? • If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world • It is not worth the leave-taking…This proves me base. • If she first meet the curlèd Antony • He’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss • Which is my heaven to have. Come thou mortal wretch, With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate Of life at once untie. Poor venemous fool, Be angry, and dispatch. O, couldst thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass Unpolicied! …. Peace, peace. Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep? As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle. Antony! Nay, I will take thee too. What should I stay ----- Charmian:In this vile world? So, fare thee well. Now boast thee death, in thy possession lies A lass unparallel’d. Downy windows, close. And golden Phoebus never be beheld Of eyes again so royal. Your crown’s awry. I’ll mend it, and then play… First Guard: Caesar hath sent – Charmian: Too slow a messenger…. First Guard: …. Is this well done? Charmian: It is well done, and fitting for a princess Descended of so many royal kings. Ah! soldier!

31. Generically, what kind of play are we in? History? (‘Go forth, Agrippa, and begin the fight’; ‘the time of universal peace is near’: 31BCE) Cf. Plutarch Tragedy? (‘I’m dying, Egypt, dying’.) Apotheosis? (‘I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony… Think you there was, or might be such a man As this I dreamt of?’ [Dolabella: ‘Gentle madam, no.’] ‘You lie, up to the hearing of the gods. But if there be, or ever were one such, Tis past the size of dreaming.’) Farce? ([He stabs himself] ‘How, not dead? Not dead?’) Slapstick? (‘I wish you joy o’th’worm.’ ‘I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover… I heard of one of them no longer than yesterday, a very honest woman, but something given to lie, as woman should not do but in the way of honesty.’) Comedy? ‘Show me, my women, like a queen’. ‘Why, that’s the way / To fool their preparation and to conquer / Their most absurd intents.’ ‘Poor venomous fool, … couldst thou speak, / That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass / Unpolicied.’ Female triumph? ‘O eastern star! … / Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies / A lass unparallel’d… / Your crown’s awry. / I’ll mend it, and then play.’ Unclassifiable? A play that ‘approves the common liar’, a play that ‘approves’ oxymoron?

32. Cleopatra herself: her hand on an administrative document. ‘make it happen’