Antony and Cleopatra

A terrific “production” by Henry Clay Folger Shakespeare Library

This electronic edition of Antony and Cleopatra is a terrific “production” in and of itself, especially in terms of typeface, spacing, hyperlinking. It’s visually appealing. Folger, from what I’veShakeeienced, seems to do the best electronic editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The Apple Books edition is also still far superior to that of Amazon Kindle, which doesn’t handle the spacing of blank verse so well.

The accompanying essay following the play and many of the studies and essays in referenced in the end are a little on the postmodern side (most published in the 80’s and 90’s) for my taste, and I’m not going to go after them immediately, but the scholars make some novel arguments and interpretations. Apropos to the brash and audacious late-twentieth century nihilism, there is also the hope in the potential of personal computing. This high-quality, experiential, multimedia, and immersive approach by Folger really delivers on a lot of the promises and potentials of electronic hypertext that we were hoping for in the idealistic early days of the internet and personal computing, days contemporary to postmodern theory, before we saw how much personal computing culminated in serving the ends of consumerist “e-commerce,” terrorism, pornography, plagiarism, hacking, and organized crime more than it did in intellectual stimulation, a new library of Alexandria, a cultural Renaissance and humanism comparable to that that unfolded and developed during Shakespeare’s time. To me, there is a resonance between that out-there scholarship and productive use of what I would call appropriate technology. It makes me think of the nineties or turn of the century, maybe as Shakespeare and his contemporaries faced the beginning of an uncertain seventeenth century that would prove catastrophically more difficult for England than the already tumultuous sixteenth century.

The language of the play itself is more challenging than what I consider Shakespeare’s first-tier plays, such as those that are more commonly taught and read in schools. I’ve read Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, and I still found Antony and Cleopatra much more challenging and full of textual knots to untangle the meaning from than those other plays. Nonetheless, it’s story material worth contemplating on and reading again, the interaction of late indigenous Egyptian and Ptolemaic and Latin civilization, a portal into another vast ancient world not often thought about through the vigorous lens of Renaissance England, a civilization itself straddled in between the medieval and modern world. And, all the more reason for using the resources in this edition than trying to go at it with an “urtext” or free edition.

As is the case with their other editions, the engravings and other Renaissance era imagery in Folger’s notes are fascinating.

Cleopatra and Antony are fascinating historical personages who mingle the colossal prestige of antiquity with our modern tabloid fascination with celebrity elopements and liaisons. Shakespeare really nails the part of Octavian and his formal and regal eloquence and political suasion: think silver-tongued slick-Harvard lawyer Obama or some polished governor with perfect haircut and perfect teeth who through his sophistry can make the lamest, falsest, worn-out, and clichéd arguments for supply-side economics still sound good to a voting base. Of course the less politically powerful characters in Antony’s and Cleopatra’s entourage have their own dramatically powerful intercessory and interjectory moments too.