PHILO             Look where they come.

Take but good note, and you shall see in him

The triple pillar of the world transformed

Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see.      (1.1.10-13)

Look, note, see, behold: this is spectacle, and of a complex kind, because Philo wants to disparage what’s going on (although actually he’s fascinated, he too is obsessed, can’t stop talking about this); he ostensibly sees this in terms of decline, even pathos. But it’s still spectacular, as the stage fills (or at least gets fuller) with colour, movement, bodies; the women, the eunuchs, the fans. This is theatre. Philo’s concern is with Antony, but all eyes, really, must be on Cleopatra. That’s the point being made here, because despite Philo’s banging on, his lamentation for his fallen general, Cleopatra must be the object of fascination for the audience as much as for Antony (and Philo). That’s her.

Antony has been the triple pillar of the world because he’s one of the Roman triumvirate, the three men tasked with ruling the empire between them—but that image of stability and aspiration, of monumental, sustaining height (and yes, phallic agency and power) will come back again for Antony. This is a play interested in height, in reaching, and in the possibility of fall. (And in hyperbole, but that’s for another day.) Antony may well be a fool, but Cleopatra—a strumpet? The audience might laugh, or gasp, incredulously at the mismatch between that dismissive, diminishing epithet and the can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her sexiness that’s just erupted on to the stage (or not: Cleopatra can be a strumpet, a magnificent strumpet, entirely on her own terms). Behold and see.

(One of the more arcane things that strikes me about this opening is that it’s written by the same playwright who wrote the cynical, finely judged, self-under-cutting bathos of the prologue to Troilus and Cressida. Those notes recur throughout Antony and Cleopatra, but mostly in order to be transcended. Like the Homeric heroes of the (almost certainly) earlier play these heroes have feet of clay; unlike them, that Antony and Cleopatra are fallen, messy humans ultimately doesn’t matter. And it’s also written by a playwright who knew, and had acted in at least one of, Jonson’s Roman tragedies: Jonson exposes the folly and the fallibility, the corruption and the weakness of characters like Tiberius and Sejanus, but he cannot celebrate their magnificent humanity.)