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Bringing to life the historical, social, moral and political background of Shakespeare’s dark Roman love story

How would a Jacobean audience have assessed the story of these two classical celebrities? Are Antony and Cleopatra simply tragic lovers, or is the play a condemnation of poor male government derailed by passion for an unreliable, self-interested woman? This book provides detailed discussion of the various influences that a Jacobean audience would have brought to interpreting the play. How did people think about the world, God, sin, kings, civilized conduct? Historical, literary, political and sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the 1600s to the Roman world on the stage. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, court corruption, class tensions, the literary profile of the time, the concept of tragedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play an unsettling picture of a disintegrating world lost through passion and machination.

Introduction; Prologue; 1. The Historical Context; 2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust; 3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness; 4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues; 5. Kingship; 6. Patriarchy, Family and Gender Relationships; 7. Man in His Place; 8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context ; 9. The Context of Tragedy; 10. ‘O’erflowing the Measure’: Restraint and Excess; 11. Infinite Variety: Isis or Strumpet?; 12. Rome versus Egypt: Gendering the State; 13. Literary Context; 14. Political Context; Notes; Bibliography; Index

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Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	15 février 2015
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781783083787
Langue	English

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ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA IN CONTEXT
ANTHEM PERSPECTIVES IN LITERATURE
Titles in the Anthem Perspectives in Literature series are designed to contextualize classic works of literature for readers today within their original social and cultural environments. The books present historical, biographical, political, artistic, moral, religious and philosophical material from the period that enable readers to understand a text’s meaning as it would have struck the original audience. These approachable but informative books aims to uncover the period and the people for whom texts were written; their values and views, their anxieties and demons, what made them laugh and cry, their loves and hates. The series is targeted at high-achieving A-level, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement pupils, first-year undergraduates and an intellectually curious audience.

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2015 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Keith Linley 2015
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linley, Keith. Antony and Cleopatra in context : the politics of passion / Keith Linley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78308-377-0 (papercover : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Antony and Cleopatra. 2. Literature and society. 3. Social role in literature. 4. Kings and rulers in literature. 5. Man-woman relationships in literature. 6. Love in literature. 7. Politics in literature. I. Title. PR2802.L56 2015 822.3’3–dc23 2014048303
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 377 0 (Pbk) ISBN-10: 1 78308 377 8 (Pbk)
Cover image © Andrew_Howe/iStockphoto.com
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue: The Setting
Part I. The Inherited Past
1. The Historical Context
2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust
3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness
4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues
5. Kingship
6. Patriarchy, Family Authority and Gender Relationships
7. Man in His Place
8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context
Part II. The Jacobean Present
9. The Context of Tragedy
10. ‘O’erflowing the Measure’: Restraint and Excess
11. Infinite Variety: Isis or Strumpet?
12. Rome versus Egypt: Gendering the State
13. Literary Context
14. Political Context
Notes
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
About This Book
This book concentrates on the contexts from which Antony and Cleopatra emerges, those characteristics of life in early Jacobean England which are reflected in the values and views Shakespeare brings to the text and affect how a contemporary might have responded to it. These are the primary, central contexts, comprising the writer, the text, the audience and all the views, values and beliefs held by these three. The actions taken and words spoken by the characters do not all represent Shakespeare’s own views, but they will have evoked ethical judgements from the audience in line with the general religious and political values of the time. There would have been a range of differing responses, though the fundamentals of right and wrong would have been broadly agreed. These primary contexts, this complicity of writer, audience and text and their shared mediation of the play, are the prime concern of this book.
Where relevant, the book also focuses on a range of secondary contexts. A play does not come into being without having a background and does not exist in vacuo . It will have its own unique features, but also characteristics inherited from its author as well as sources derived from and traits resembling the writing of its time. Other secondary contexts – the actors, their companies, the acting space, the social mix of general audiences – do not figure in this study except as occasional incidentals.
There are tertiary contexts too. There is the afterlife of the text (its printed form, how subsequent ages interpreted it on stage and changed it) – what is called its performance history. And there is the critical backstory, showing how critics of subsequent times bring their agendas and the values and prejudices of their period to analysis of the text. These are referenced incidentally where they seem useful and relevant, but are not a major concern. The ‘Further Reading’ list provides broad guidance on the critical and performance history and any scholarly edition of Antony and Cleopatra will cover these areas in greater detail.
This book is for students preparing assignments and exams for Shakespeare modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require students to show a consistently well-developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Shakespeare’s audience would have done. You will not be writing a history essay, but along with considering the play as a literary vehicle communicating in dramatic form, you will need to know something of how Shakespeare’s audience might have reacted. A text is always situated in some way within its historical setting. The correlatives in this case would have been the classics (for the educated), the Bible, Christian ethics and the society of the day, the latter meaning they would view the play in the light of what had happened in recent history and what was currently happening in the court, in the city, in the streets, on the roads and in the villages. No one could watch Antony’s foolishness and not think of King James. The conduct of rulers was of great interest to writers, preachers, politicians and the ordinary man in the tavern. No one could watch the power struggles on stage and not think of the court. Though the story is from ancient times its issues must have created a disturbing sense of recognition of the political concerns of Jacobean England.
The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the social-political conditions from which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written, and its religious-moral dimension. The setting is pagan, but since the play was written in an age of faith, when the Bible’s teachings and sermons heard in church formed part of every man and woman’s mindset, it is vital to recreate those factors, for the actions of the characters would have been assessed by Christian criteria. You may not agree with the values of the time or the views propounded in the play, but you do need to understand how belief mediated the possible responses of the audience that watched the play in 1606. A key concept in this book’s approach is that Antony and Cleopatra is full of sins, transgressions, boundary crossing and rule breaking – in the personal world and in the public and political arenas. Alerted to the transgressive behaviour of Antony in the opening scene, audience members who did not already know the story would expect he be punished. Though biblical values would be applied to the action, there is much more going on scene by scene than a series of echoes of or allusions to what the Bible says about virtue and vice. Interwoven are political concerns about rule (of the self, of a state), public service and the dangers of appetite unrestrained, with Antony caught between reason and appetite and Cleopatra representing appetite out of control.
What Is a Context?
Any document – literary or non-literary – comes from an environment and has that environment embedded in it, overtly and covertly. Its context is the conditions which produced it, the biographical, social, political, historical and cultural circumstances which form it, and the values operating within it and affecting the experience of it, including what the author may have been trying to say and how the audience may have interpreted it. A text in isolation is simply a collection of words carrying growing, developing meanings as the writing/performance progresses. It is two-dimensional – a lexical, grammatical construct and the sum of its literal contents. It has meaning, we can understand what it is about, how the characters interact, but context provides a third dimension, making meaning comprehensible within the cultural values of the time. Primary context is the sum of all the influences the writer brings to the text and all the influences the viewer/reader deploys in experiencing it. Knowing the cultural context enriches that experience. This book concentrates on the archaeology of the play, recovering how it would be understood in 1606, recovering the special flavour and prevailing attitudes of the time, and displaying the factors that shaped its meaning for that time and that audience. ‘ Antony and Cleopatra’ in Context offer the views, prejudices, controversies and basic beliefs buried in the play. These are the significations of society embedded in the text that, added together, make it what Shakespeare intended it to be – or as close as we can be reasonably