The Antony and Cleopatra Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Antony and Cleopatra Garden.

[Interlocutor]: What plants did you, Will Shakespeare, bring into the play Antony and Cleopatra?

[Shakespeare]: Wheat, onion, grapes and the vine; laurel, rue, and myrtle; flag, rushes, reeds, figs, pine, olive, mandragora, rose, and balm.

[Interlocutor]: Some of those are very familiar – wheat and onion, reeds and rushes – but others, like mandragora and olives and figs, I would think were rare and exotic in your England.

[Shakespeare]: So they are. And so are Antony and Cleopatra both more familiar than wheat and rarer than mandragora. Many people since the world began have made similar choices, triumphed and failed, but their story is writ so large that the fate of the known world is the stakes for which they play and against each other.

[Interlocutor]: At the beginning of the play Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus together rule Rome. But Antony lingers with Cleopatra in Egypt, in love with both her and her life of luxury.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. When word arrives that Antony’s wife has died, one of Antony’s followers suggests this news is nothing to weep over, saying in homely fashion, indeed the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow. Then, as in my time, marriages among the mighty—and often among ordinary folk—were alliances for wealth and power. The alliance of Antony and Cleopatra is one of love, yes, but always also one of power. Antony also hears that Pompey is plotting to seize the rule of Rome by force of arms, and decides that he must return to Rome.

[Interlocutor]: Cleopatra takes more heed of his wife’s death. She protests that Antony will forget her in Rome, which he loudly denies. When he persists in leaving, she prays that he prevail:

upon your sword
Sit laurel victory!

[Shakespeare]: It is a vain prayer. The laurel tree is associated with Apollo, patron of Octavius; it is Octavius who will wear the laurel wreath of victory in the end.

[Interlocutor]: After he has gone, Cleopatra calls for mandragora to help her endure his absence.

Give me to drink mandragora…
That I might sleep out this great gap of time
My Antony is away.

What is mandragora?       

[Shakespeare]: Mandrake. The root of this plant is a powerful drug. It was at times used to treat melancholy, and in surgery it has been used to make the patient sleep. Cleopatra’s women have need to be very careful in decocting it; one sent to sleep with mandragora sometimes never wakes again.

But she does not in truth mean to sleep the time away. She is Antony’s lover, but she is also Egypt; and Egypt must remain awake, knowing and wary of what passes in Rome.

[Interlocutor]: What does pass when Antony returns to Rome?

[Shakespeare]: Antony truly feels the allurement of both Rome and Egypt. Octavius, though, is all Roman ambition. It is power to rule that moves him. He scorns the common people themselves; their love to Pompey means no more to him than the waving of long leaves in the water:

This common body,
Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion.

Octavius has relied on Antony, and loathes the way he has discarded soldierly, politic, Roman virtues to revel idly with Cleopatra.

When Antony arrives in Rome, Octavius at first angers him with accusations, but then chooses to bind him to closer alliance by marriage to his sister Octavia. Antony, now in the grip of Roman ways, consents with alacrity.

He joins Octavius and Lepidus in reaching a truce with Pompey; they all drink together rather than go to war, singing:

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy vats our cares be drowned,
With thy grapes our hairs be crowned.

[Interlocutor]: But that truce doesn’t last.

[Shakespeare]: Antony, with Octavia, goes to Athens, but he soon learns that Octavius has broken the truce with Pompey, removed Lepidus from power, and returned to his dispraising of Antony. So Antony sends Octavia back to Rome, and, returning to Cleopatra, bestows the rule of not only Egypt but also many adjoining lands on her and her children.

[Interlocutor]: So now Octavius and Antony are at war.

[Shakespeare]: They are. Antony’s greatest strength is by land, but Cleopatra joins her own large fleet to Antony’s, and he allows her to sway his martial decisions. In the heat of the sea-battle with Octavius she believes all is lost, and flees with all her ships. Antony follows her, and the day is lost indeed. Cleopatra begs his pardon, and Antony forgives her, but he is also bitterly ashamed of following her. Later, he sees her let Octavius’s messenger kiss her hand. He is enraged, but again he yields to her persuasions of love. Meanwhile Octavius sees his victory approaching. He proclaims:

The time of universal peace is near:
Prove this a prosperous day, the three-nook'd world
Shall bear the olive freely.

The olive is grown throughout the Mediterranean world. The fruit is a common food there. A wreath of olive leaves crowns the victor in the games at Olympia, as an olive branch signifies peace. These lines are a prophecy, for Octavius will become Caesar Augustus and usher in the Pax Romana.

[Interlocutor]: There is another battle, by land this time. In that Cleopatra can play no part, and this time Antony is victorious.

[Shakespeare]: But the next is by sea, and, as before, Cleopatra’s ships abandon the fight, leaving Antony to defeat. He sees himself as a once-mighty tree now doomed by the loss of its bark:

this pine is barked
That overtopped them all. Betrayed I am:
O this false soul of Egypt!

This time he is so bitter against her that she locks herself away and sends him word that she has killed herself. Hearing this, he determines to follow her into death. He stabs himself fatally, but then learns that she still lives. He is carried to her refuge and drawn with ropes to die in her arms.

Octavius takes Cleopatra captive but speaks her fair, aiming to display her in Rome to advance his ambition. Rather than endure such shame, she sends her waiting-gentlewoman Charmian to a rustic fellow who comes to bring her figs.

[Interlocutor]: Figs! There were figs at the very beginning of the play. A soothsayer told that same Charmian that she would outlive Cleopatra, to which she answered:

O excellent! I love long life better than figs.

[Shakespeare]: Figs were a sumptuous fruit to us. But these figs and their leaves serve a different turn: they hide the poisonous snakes whose bite Cleopatra uses to cheat Octavius of his triumph. In her end she is as great as the wide world which she and Antony have ruled, quarreled about, made jest of, and, now, lost. As she dies, she says that the snakes’ bite is “as sweet as balm” – familiar balm, the soothing medicine found in every garden; balm, which is also the sacred oil whereby God himself sets the heads of royalty far above those they rule.