ENOBARBUS Take heed you fall not.
MENAS I’ll not on shore.
No, to my cabin. These drums, these trumpets, flutes, what!
Let Neptune hear we bid a loud farewell
To these great fellows. Sound and be hanged, sound out!
Sound a flourish, with drums [flutes, and trumpets]
ENOBARBUS [throwing his cap in the air] Hoo, says a! There’s my cap.
MENAS Ho, noble captain, come!
Exeunt (2.7.123-128)
Editors mess around a bit with who says what here, because the folio text reads ‘Eno. Take heed you fall not Menas: Ile not on shore, | No to my Cabin…’—so it’s not clear whether Menas is a speech prefix or Enobarbus addressing Menas. It’s not unusual for lines to be squashed together like this; it suggests that the compositors, setting the text, have slightly miscalculated the amount of space needed. Menas has to speak the next line (No, to my cabin) because it’s his ship, or Pompey’s; Enobarbus wouldn’t have a cabin. But some editors (eg Arden 3) do have Enobarbus say ‘Menas, I’ll not on shore’, adding a speech prefix for Menas on the next line—or else, following the folio text strictly, have Enobarbus speak all the lines until Menas’s last line, which doesn’t quite make sense.
So there are Options (of course there are options, not least because this is Enobarbus—and partly this little exchange is here because it’s going to take some time to clear the stage, there’s a lot of people involved in the scene). By saying to the departing Romans (take heed you fall not, getting into the boat that’ll row you to shore from the ship) is Enobarbus perhaps suggesting that he’s staying put, that he doesn’t move? So there’s a kind of logic in making explicit that implication, that he’s saying to Menas, well, I’m not going anywhere (Menas, I’ll not on shore). What this is setting up is a particular dynamic for the end of the scene—which might be explicitly homoerotic—as these two loyal wingmen to Antony and Pompey recognise their kinship, that they will all too often be put aside, left behind by the political calculations and self-interest of their leaders. When Menas replies No, to my cabin it therefore becomes an invitation, although to what doesn’t have to be over-determined. Enobarbus is a pleasure-seeker, certainly; in a modern dress production it might make sense that Menas is offering drugs, especially as he said earlier that he hasn’t been drinking (although he’s had time to catch up). Or it could well be a sexual invitation, or indeed both. But first the scene has to end, with quite literally a final flourish, a distraction from whatever tensions are simmering: these drums, these trumpets, flutes, what! Let Neptune hear we bid a loud farewell to these great fellows. Sound and be hanged, sound out! Great fellows can be bitterly ironic, these drunkards, these calculating politicians, these hypocrites. And so this is very confused as a music cue; drums are military, trumpetsmilitary and courtly, flutes associated with love scenes and pastoral. It’s got to be discordant as well as loud enough to wake Neptune. As loud as you can, boys, sound and be hanged. Enobarbus’s response can be both exuberant—flinging his cap in the air and whooping, as he might at a fanfare (he’s joining in, hoo!) for such great fellows—and ironic. Hoo, says a! There’s my cap! He and Menas are on the same page here, and there’s a sense of release and relief, that this part of the evening’s done, it was always going to be a bit weird, this feasting of enemies, everyone sizing each other up, looking over their shoulders. Now it’s just the two chancers left, vagabonds and loners both, as Menas picks up Enobarbus’s cap in captain and echoes his hoo (and perhaps literally picks up the cap too; it’d be a good speaking gesture, laden with intent) with his final invitation: Ho, noble captain, come.
And that’s the end of this amazing scene, and of the act, at least in modern editions.