Bloom Harold - Cleopatra: I am fire and air

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ALSO BY HAROLD BLOOM Falstaff: Give Me Life The Daemon Knows The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Fallen Angels American Religious Poems: An Anthology Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost Hamlet: Poem Unlimited Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages How to Read and Why Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human Omens of Millennium The Western Canon The American Religion The Book of J Ruin the Sacred Truths Poetics of Influence The Strong Light of the Canonical Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism The Breaking of the Vessels The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate Figures of Capable Imagination Poetry and Repression A Map of Misreading Kabbalah and Criticism The Anxiety of Influence The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition Yeats Commentary on David V. Erdmans Edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake Blakes Apocalypse The Visionary Company Shelleys Mythmaking

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The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Interior design by Erich Hobbing Jacket series design by Johnathan Bush Jacket photograph of Janet Suzman As Cleopatra by Reg Wilson RSC The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN 978-1-5011-6416-3 ISBN 978-1-5011-6418-7 (ebook) For Emily Bakemeier

I would like to acknowledge my research assistant, Alice Kenney, and my editor, Nan Graham. As always I am indebted to my literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu. I have tended to follow the text edited by David Bevington in the fifth edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (2004). I have tended to follow the text edited by David Bevington in the fifth edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (2004).

Bevington bases his work on the First Folio (1623). I have repunctuated in a few places, in accordance with my understanding of the text. Sometimes I have restored Shakespeares language, where I think traditional emendations are unfortunate.

I fell in love in 1974 with the Cleopatra of Janet Suzman, the South African actress who was then thirty-five. Forty-three years later her image lingers with me whenever I reread Antony and Cleopatra . Lithe, sinuous, agile, and exuberant, Suzmans Cleopatra is unmatched in my long years of attending performances here and in Great Britain.

The ferocity of the most seductive woman in all of Shakespeare was caught in an athletic portrayal whose mood swings reflected the propulsive force of this womans sexuality at its apex. Antony and Cleopatra received its first performance in 1607, a year after the advent of Macbeth . Plutarchs account of Antony came into Shakespeares consciousness as he overheard Macbeths fear of Banquo being analogized to Mark Antonys eclipse by Octavius Caesar: To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus: Our fears in Banquo stick deep, And in his royalty of nature reigns that Which would be feared. Tis much he dares, And to that dauntless temper of his mind, He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour To act in safety. There is none but he, Whose being I do fear; and under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antonys was by Caesar. Macbeth , act 3, scene 1, lines 4756 The vast panoply of Antony and Cleopatra comprehends rather more than wanton dallying.

Yet without the fierce sexuality that Cleopatra both embodies and stimulates in others, there would be no play. After Cleopatra and her ships flee the Battle of Actium, Antony follows her. The consequence is all but total disaster. Antonys fleet is destroyed, and many of his captains desert him for Octavius Caesar. In his shame and fury, Antony chides Cleopatra and overstates her erotic career: I found you as a morsel cold upon Dead Caesars trencher; nay, you were a fragment Of Gnaeus Pompeys, besides what hotter hours, Unregistered in vulgar fame, you have Luxuriously picked out. act 3, scene 13, lines 11824 The nasty vision of Cleopatra as an Egyptian dish is augmented by Shakespeare. act 3, scene 13, lines 11824 The nasty vision of Cleopatra as an Egyptian dish is augmented by Shakespeare.

As he knew, she had never been the lover of Pompey the Great, who had arrived in Egypt only to be assassinated, at the command of Ptolemy XIII, one of Cleopatras brothers. When Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt, Ptolemy XIII presented him with the head of Pompey the Great. Caesar, outraged at the affront to Roman dignity, executed the assassins. Shakespeare, taking a hint from Plutarch, has Antony add Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey the Greats son, who had visited Egypt but did not get to taste Cleopatras electric bed. It is important to note that the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra as its final monarch, was a Macedonian Greek family descended from one of Alexander the Greats generals. Cleopatra was the first and only Ptolemaic ruler who spoke Egyptian as well as Greek.

She saw herself as an incarnation of the goddess Isis. Following her joint rule with her father, Ptolemy XII, and then with her brothers, Ptolemy XIII and XIV, each of whom she married, Cleopatra moved against her brothers and became the sole pharaoh, consolidating her role by an affair with Julius Caesar. Mark Antony was his successor and became the principal passion of her life, a love at once sustaining and mutually self-destructive. These bare facts are surprisingly misleading when we confront two of Shakespeares most exuberant personalities, Cleopatra and her Antony. Always a magpie, Shakespeare employed Plutarch and perhaps Samuel Daniels The Tragedy of Cleopatra for source material. Modern historians suspect that Octavius Caesar may have executed Cleopatra, or at least induced her to suicide, which would mar and even destroy Antony and Cleopatra , since her exalted apotheosis of self-immolation would lose its imaginative force.

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