Antony and Cleopatra.

Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. by Richard Madelaine. (Shakespeare in Production) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1998. xvi +358 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]; $59.95 (paperbound 15.95 [pounds sterling]; $22.95).

After a generation of hard work the performance dimension of Shakespeare's plays is now recognized as of equal importance to the more conventional traditions of semantic and literary interpretation, but there is still no consensus about the best way to present such material. One of the most thorough formats devised so far is that of Cambridge's `Shakespeare in Production' series, which combines a long introductory overview with commentary notes focusing on staging possibilities in detail.

The latter is keyed to the New Cambridge editions of the text, but this immediately raises two problems. Since the edition has not been influenced by the theatrical commentary and only a relatively small proportion of it needs annotation, the duplication of text is expensive (the books cost $60.00). Moreover, theatrical analysis is now quite separate from literary interpretation, instead of being complementary, so to study the play properly one needs to use both books. And there is also a problem of overlap between notes and introduction. One of the major tensions in all stage history is between a wish to record the whole sequence of performance as it mirrors the cultural preoccupations of different periods--what we may call an `historical' bias--and the desire to focus particularly on those aspects that feed back directly to Shakespeare's text--what we may call a `literary' (or textual) bias. The Cambridge format could manage both these purposes if the `historical' emphasis were restricted to the introduction, with the commentary limited exclusively to the `literary'; but unfortunately no such clear distinction is maintained, so not only are there many duplications of material but, more seriously, there is a blurring of focus that makes the overwhelming mass of detail difficult to absorb.

Despite these problems, Richard Madelaine's study of Antony and Cleopatra is admirably thorough and informative, covering some seventy-three productions in English from Britain, America, Canada, and Australia, plus key non-English-speaking productions by Simonov (Moscow), Sjoberg (Stockholm), Stein (Salzburg), Senda Koreya (Tokyo), and Zadek (Vienna and Berlin). After discussing the play's Jacobean production (rather too speculatively for my taste), the introduction suggests reasons why Shakespeare's play was supplanted in the Restoration, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Dryden's All For Love, either wholesale or amalgamated with sections of the original in what Byron dismissed wittily as a `salad'. The loose narrative of Shakespeare's play fell short of neoclassical principles of unity and created difficulties for stagings which dropped a curtain between scenes; its exotic locations were costly to present in the elaborately `pictorial' style then favoured; and the protagonists offended current ideals of male heroism and (particularly) female propriety. Mrs Siddons, for example, refused the role of Cleopatra in 1813 on the grounds that she could not have respected herself had she acted the part `as it ought to be played', and Lillie Langtry's depiction of the role in 1890 provoked the famous remark, `How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen', surely the best-known comment in Shakespearean stage history. This prejudice later reversed itself into a claim that English actresses were incapable of the sensuality of the role, expressed most pithily by Kenneth Tynan (about Peggy Ashcroft in 1953): `The great sluts of world drama, from Clytemnestra to Anna Christie, have always puzzled our girls; and an English Cleopatra is a contradiction in terms'. And this, in turn, became involved with arguments about whether Cleopatra should be `tawny' (as in the text) or, as most English actresses have preferred, a fair skinned Greek with flaming red hair and revealingly diaphanous garments. Only with recent emphases on feminism (Janet Suzman 1972, Glenda Jackson 1978, Helen Mirren 1982), recognition of the middle-aged desperation of the lovers' co-dependence (Judi Dench 1987), and experiments with `ethnic' casting has this ghost now been laid.

Madelaine also relates the increasing popularity of Antony and Cleopatra since the mid-nineteenth century to recurrent waves of interest in Egypt itself--Napoleon's campaign there, for example, the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in the 1920s, the Suez war of 1956, the `King Tut' tour of 1972, and the `Egyptomania' exhibition in 1994-95--and like Michael Neill in the Oxford edition of the play, he sees a gradual swing of interpretation from pro-Roman imperialism to an increasingly `postcolonial' sympathy for Egypt. The introduction itself become noticeably more fluent as it reaches the return to Shakespeare's complexities after World War I, and can begin to structure the mass of detail through lines of argument that were not as relevant to productions earlier.

The commentary notes are particularly useful for their extended discussions of such key scenes as the first entrance of the lovers, the feast on Pompey's barge, Cleopatra's beating of the messenger, the god-abandoning-Antony, the hoisting of Antony into the monument, Cleopatra's scene with the clown, and the staging of her death. There is still too much of the fuzziness identified earlier, however: juxtaposition without comment of reviewers contradicting each other, for example, or evaluative quotations that merely praise generally without explaining how such effects were created. All annotation should meet the challenge, `Does this actually clarify the possibilities inherent in Shakespeare's text?'.

Madelaine's book is a considerable work of scholarship, well illustrated and dense in detail, but it is a little hard to grasp coherently because of contradictions of purpose that are as much the format's responsibility as Madelaine's own.

R. B. PARKER
TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO