Not Hamlet

Meditations on the Frail Position of Women in Drama

Janet Suzman

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781849436014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

"A thoughtful and considered kick up the arse to conspiracy theorists and to patriarchy" – Michael Boyd, Artistic Director RSC Cleopatra, La Pucelle, Ophelia, Shaw's St. Joan and Ibsen's Hedda – a handful of seminal roles for women in the classical canon. Janet Suzman has played them all and directed some. Here she examines their complexity and explores why only Cleopatra has an independence that allows her to speak to modern women. None of these, regrettably, matches up to a Hamlet, but as she is grateful for the parts he did write, Suzman feels a lightly-barbed attack on those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship is way overdue. She also takes issue with received ideas on boy-actors playing mature women in Shakespeare's company, and reflects on how female characters in classical drama have not been on a level with their male counterparts. Today, on TV, film and the stage, this remains the case. Not Hamlet but Hamlette, please.

Cleopatra

IT’S THE RICHEST, most varied, most misunderstood part that Shakespeare wrote, and it’s quite impossible to get it all. A woman with imagination and life experience of all kinds has a decent chance of getting most of it. A mature male actor with years behind him of playing female roles? Let’s say a good half of it. A boy actor with none of the above, bar a certain flair, a vague grasp of how the other half thinks, a sharp eye, and who is lucky to have an elder sister or better still a temperamental mother, might have had a fraction of a chance. Else he should just opt for saying the words loud and clear, introduce a pout here, a flounce there, and pray that the audience ekes out the rest of this superhuman human with their imaginations. So one does rather wonder who Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote it?

There’s no record of a performance of this play, but performed somewhere sometime it must have been, most probably road-tested at The Blackfriars. It is rambling and populous, with about thirty-seven speaking parts, more scenes than Hamlet, and sporting the size and glamour, the restless movement of a big, big beautiful movie. And there’s the rub, because a big big beautiful movie was once made of this story, with two big big beautiful stars involved in a real-life love affair, and such is the power of pictures that we still think of this play as a fatal love story, as if a mature and raunchy Romeo and Juliet, but it isn’t that. The film was Cecil B. DeMille’s iconic film called Cleopatra with every frame of it given the full Hollywood treatment, and the two stars were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose beauty and fame were legendary at the time, and still leave a residue of old-fashioned glamour hard to equal. Their real-life love affair got almost more publicity as it unfolded during the shooting of the film than the mighty story of the Queen of Egypt herself.

Physical beauty is so very rare a gift that when people possess it in abundance, as film stars sometimes do, we are bewitched. The gorgeousness of these two actors somehow imbued the historical characters they were portraying with the same attributes, which is a transference not entirely useful to our understanding of Shakespeare’s play; for one, their glamour precludes our ever matching them. But there are other alternatives open to humbler beings, latter-day actors I mean; we can delve more deeply, understand the characters more profoundly, in a word, reveal more of their feelings than their flesh. That is what I prefer to attempt here. For really, Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare is the tragic story of a once mighty hero obsessed by the Queen of Egypt, an obsession so fatal that it drags him to his doom. In that sense, it is, I venture to say, a male version of Phaedra. Phaedra conceived an obsessive passion for her stepson, which she was unable to conquer, and died for it. A woman’s disease, this fatal love thing, you might say, but I am proposing it as a male one. This won’t be well received amongst the scholastic classes but nevertheless, I shall hold to it.

Cleopatra herself is a far more arresting character historically than Elizabeth Taylor’s fatally seductive cleavage allowed us to notice. In actual fact Cleopatra might not even have been beautiful, though blessed with spirit and intelligence in abundance. There’s apparently a marble pillar with a bas-relief reputedly of her, though unverified, stashed away in the basement of The British Museum and a friend of mine, an Egyptologist who has seen it, says she strongly resembles Barbra Streisand. Several coins attest to a Streisand nose. Brainy women are too scary for most men to find sexy, though conversely slews of women just love brainy men. Ergo she must have been une jolie laide – trust the French to find a feminine grace that isn’t vulgar – and thus enraptured both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. It is unlikely and unproven that she had any further affairs. We do know she had an extraordinary voice, reported by Plutarch from many sources contemporary with her. He also attests to her ‘irresistible charm’ and to the ‘persuasion of her discourse’. So there you are; she must have been quite something.

Actresses like to look for substance in the woman we are to play, at least I do, since an inventively flirtatious vocabulary is not fascinating enough an attribute to expend all that time and trouble on. It, the flirty thing, appears however to offer more than sufficient allure to the interested male, as when I have dipped occasionally into critical comment on this play I sigh at the predictably narrow parameters meted out to Cleopatra, reflecting I guess, a general opinion of women viewed from the manly groves of academe. ‘Feminine wiles’, ‘deliberate unpredictability’, ‘conscious manipulation’ are much-used to describe her strategy to keep Antony fascinated. ‘If you find him sad / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick’ (I.iii) is read as proof of her manipulative armoury, when in truth she’s furious, and wants very much to disturb Antony. If I use the word ‘truth’ in relation to this fiction, I am of course referring to dramatic truth, whatever that may be. There is, I believe, a double standard in critical circles about judging the dramatic trajectories of male and of female characters. This is probably not even a particularly male habit, as very often women are harsh judges of women’s behaviour too. All I wish to highlight is that Cleopatra’s life and political judgements on behalf of Egypt are just as fascinating as Antony’s from the Roman side. Being westerners, to this very day still at odds with the east, finding it both as loathsome and attractive as it ever was to the ancient Romans, the play retains a vivid resonance in our world where imperial powers still occupy lands once won and lost by Alexander the Great. It was a general of Alexander’s army, Ptolemaeus from Macedonia, who was given Egypt as a reward, and his offspring is our very own Cleopatra VII of Egypt, who brought her beloved country to its knees in 30 BC. Brought to its knees because her lover, Antony, the Triumvir of the Roman empire, loved her too much, and lost.

I have to assume, or hope, that the reader will have the play by their side if anything I have to say excites an interest. It is, let’s be frank, one of the most wonderful plays ever written. Worth the effort.

At the very start of the play, the moment ‘News, my good lord, from Rome’ is dropped like a time bomb into an indolent Alexandrian court, all hell breaks loose. A story about an angry wife, a battle she initiates, and a whole heap of political tumult starts to unfold, and the mere mistress, queen-goddess of the Nile though she be, feels threatened. The idyll is at an end; that’s how this love story begins. Real politik intrudes from the start.

The chief thing in playing Cleopatra is to know when she is acting up a storm and when she is telling a simple truth, and the rarity of the latter moments makes them even more astonishing, for those who have ears to hear. Act I scene iii is the most difficult scene between the lovers because of the dangerous way she handles the shock of his wife’s death. The dishonesty of their relationship, their ‘mouth-made vows’ unsanctioned by marriage (Shakespeare is the arch-eulogiser of marriage), piques Cleopatra into goading him almost beyond endurance, prodding the open wound of his adultery, mocking his dubious Roman honour, questioning his love and loyalty.

Fulvia, the absent wife, a constant threat to Cleopatra’s safety, is ever-present between them, but hey! – when he displays no sorrow at her sudden death, she leaps, as it were, to the defence of Fulvia, thereby defending all wronged womankind (cf. Emilia’s defense of wives in Othello). What a turn! She derides what Antony, all Romans, hold most dear, honour. That hits home! She affects to be the director of his drama, as if all his feelings are feigned, and rejoices in giving him bad-acting notes. The knife twists on ‘say’, ‘play’, ‘look like’. She revels in his rage because at least it seems real:

Look, prithee Charmian

How this Herculean Roman does become

The carriage of his chafe.

To retain any dignity in this onslaught of mockery, he must leave and with an angry

I’ll leave you, lady

– all politeness dropped – he stalks off. An ironic

Courteous lord, one word

stops him. He must want to be stopped. Everyone knows that walking out in the middle of a row because you just can’t cope, is bad, bad, bad. Yet the faint twang of irony on the word ‘courteous’ covers her panic lest he go before she’s had her say.

I bump up against a difficulty here in mentioning irony, a tone of voice which is impossible to convey on paper. I have to mention it, though, since it’s a way of defusing incendiary behaviour which Cleopatra resorts to, sometimes to lighten the seriousness of a situation, sometimes to be funny. I sympathise with a critic sitting at a desk trying to interpret the dramatic intention of dialogue, but lacking the fine-tuned ear for changes of mood and tone without the presence of actors. (I read with surprise a critical comment assuming that Cleopatra truly means to abase herself to Octavius when she calls him ‘My master and my lord’ in the final act. Well, no, actually, there is an extravagant mockery in the salutation which even my trying to define only succeeds in vulgarising.)

But I return to the longest and most knife-edge of all the scenes between the lovers: Act I scene iii. Having interrupted him repeatedly, made him more and more angry by teasing him unendurably for his dishonesty, her forces are now concentrated for their final onslaught. Her chilling quietness has made him turn, still wary – what now? ‘Their entire story in one word?’, he wonders. She’s got his attention, so she offers two attempts at the simple truth expressed with a Petrarchan formality:

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.

And just as you hope for peace between them, the caesura affords her space for a wicked U-turn:

Something it is I would –

‘Would what?’ – would go on to say her heart is still as it once was, all his? But…but, right at this juncture when his ‘Roman thoughts’ have so expediently kicked aside their world like a squashed beer can, she feels ‘to hell with it, I shall pretend to forget what we once were, just as Antony has already forgotten me’:

O, my oblivion is a very Antony,

And I am all forgotten!

Cleopatra is not about to let sentiment cloud her deepest feelings; she feels sidelined, fragile, she feels her throne rocking, Egypt mocked. She will taunt, tease, mock, challenge, but never plead or kneel. That is the temper of that U-turn.

In case there are doubters about this reading, you have only to look at Antony’s furious reply to her, amounting to this: ‘If fools were not your subjects I would take you for the queen of fools’. It is always useful to look at a character’s riposte to a speech if there’s any doubt about the intention preceding it.

An angry man feeling like a fool himself? But no, she’s not finished yet; you will not find another character in the canon who pushes the envelope so daringly. Once again, she speaks simply and truly, revealing her soul for an enticing four lines:

But sir, forgive me;

Since my becomings kill me when they do not

Eye well to you.

To admit her ‘becomings’ – histrionics – shame her if Antony can’t see through them to her own pain, is to invite Antony’s forgiveness, but that would be too easy. Rome is just asking for more trouble from Egypt – Enobarbus the great observer knows all about that. Another wicked caesura provides the hairpin bend:

Your honour calls you hence;

What subtle tone invests ‘honour’ with a faint tarnish, while sounding in awe of it?

Therefore be deaf to my unpitied folly,

Mocking her silly little self before twisting the knife further with a grand adieu:

And all the gods go with you!

Now another twist disguised as a formalised farewell speech in the Roman manner:

Upon your sword

Sit laurel victory and smooth success

Be strewed before your feet!’

The repeated assonance gives a nice hiss of derision, and a mildly sardonic bow to the laureate will rub salt into the wound nicely.

For a further clue to the teasing tone of her speech, look at Antony’s curt:

Let us go.

No sooner said than regretted: in that instant he can’t bear to leave her so coldly, and his warm heart intervenes as he turns back:

Come.

She, like him, at last lost in feeling, runs into his arms. It’s a hard-earned embrace and puts an audience on its mettle with anxiety; quarrelling shelved under the stark stare of separation. His final speech, three lines of intense intimacy whispered into her ear, makes up for all that has gone before. Knife-edge stuff. And a last view of the lovers together for a very long time.

(This hard-won coming together will be ghosted in the terrible aftermath of the battle of Actium (III.xii) when one tear from her ‘…rates / All that is won and lost.’) If the actress tries to be charming in this parting scene, if she doesn’t play it nudging the very brink of danger in the queen’s emotions, if she doesn’t fulfil to the letter Enobarbus’s sensationally accurate judgement of her temperament, the two of them will miss the extreme sport of the play: the pain of separation.

Lest you think that her reaction to the tumult caused by Fulvia in Parthia, and young Pompey at sea is out of proportion, consider this: an abandoned wife is now dead, and unlamented. Antony’s sworn adoration for his royal mistress might be just as hollow, and as it turns out it is. His marriage to Octavia attests. Meanwhile he has al...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• A Rogue Prologue
• Boy Actors
• Cleopatra
• The Two Joans
• Hedda Gabler
• Gertrude and Ophelia
• Epilogue
• Bibliography and References