ANTONY                                 Come on!

Call forth my household servants. Let’s tonight

Enter three or four Servitors

Be bounteous at our meal. Give me thy hand.

Thou hast been rightly honest; so hast thou,

Thou, and thou, and thou; you have served me well,

And kings have been your fellows.

CLEOPATRA  [to Enobarbus] What means this?

ENOBARBUS  [to Cleopatra] ’Tis one of those odd tricks which sorrow shoots

Out of the mind.

ANTONY                     [to Servitor] And thou art honest too.

I wish I could be made so many men,

And all of you clapped up together in

An Antony, that I might do you service

So good as you have done.

OMNES                                   The gods forbid!        (4.2.8-19)

 

Antony’s in overdrive, and his thoughts turn from the battle to come to the night’s revels: come on! let’s get this party started! (He could walk around, clapping his hands, a very different energy to the others.) Call forth my household servants. Let’s tonight be bounteous at our meal. The servants might creep in, looking disconcerted, distressed, even shifty; it’s a reasonable number to modern eyes, three or four, but an early modern audience might think, is that it? especially if they’re legible as junior, random, the only ones who haven’t fled, the most loyal. It’s going to be a general, generous feast tonight, pull out all the stops (but what kind of supplies do they even have?) and you’re invited! But then Antony starts shaking the servants’ hands, as if in farewell, and the emotional temperature changes; sometimes the servants weep. Give me thy hand. Thou hast been rightly honest; so hast thou, thou, and thou, and thou; you have served me well, and kings have been your fellows. He is commending them for their loyalty and their integrity even more than their service to him: partly this little episode is about Enobarbus, Antony’s closest friend, who is—as the audience knows—trying to find a way to leave Antony, to betray him. Antony values loyalty as he values honour. You’ve been like kings, he says to his servants, in your honour, and it’s as such that I prize you. (The minor kings who flocked to him have fled too.) What means this? Cleopatra asks, taking the focus to her and Enobarbus. What the hell is going on? What’s he up to? ’Tis one of those odd tricks which sorrow shoots out of the mind. He’s lost it a bit, says Enobarbus; he’s gone all sentimental because of the state he’s in, this fancy he’s taken to getting emotional over the servants. Cynical, but true. And thou art honest too! How lucky I am to have such honest, loyal servants! (Again, the proleptic contrast with Enobarbus’s desertion is pointed.) And then Antony gets really whimsical (so Enobarbus is, as ever, right; he’s lost it a bit): I wish I could be made so many men, and all of you clapped up together in an Antony, that I might do you service so good as you have done. I wish that I were divided into as many people as you are here, and at the same time that you were all combined into one as an Antony, like me, so that I could serve you in the same way that you’ve served me. The gods forbid! The servants are, rightly, taken aback at this somewhat alarming prospect (not least because, as good early modern servants, they have a fixed sense of order and hierarchy and what he’s suggesting is carnival at best, anarchy at worst, as well as being so fanciful), but also upset by Antony’s emotional lability, which has such a valedictory tone.