Antonius

Mary Sidney’s Antonius is the translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, based on the story of Marc Antony and Cleoparta to be found in Plutarch’s The lives of the nobles Grecians and Romanes (differently from Mary Sidney, Garnier also quotes Dio Cassius as a source), in particular in the Life of Antony.

  Mary Sidney’s play is often labelled as a closet-drama to underline that it was not created for performance but probably to be read or to be recited inside a small circle of people. More recently, Daniel Cadman has introduced the term Neo-Senecan drama in order to define 14 early modern plays sharing formal and content characteristics, among them also Antonius is listed. The new definition goes against “outmoded assumptions about their unperformability and their apparent antagonism towards the commercial theatre” (Cadman 2016, 6). These dramas are characterised by similar political and philosophical concerns, they are all set “during periods of political or constitutional crises and focus upon the plight of politically marginalised individuals who are forced to endure the circumstances of affairs they are powerless to influence” (ibid.). As the other plays, Antonius too deals with the “subject’s relation to a tyrant, [and] the competing demands of domestic and political duties’ (39). In particular, Antonius is seen by Cadman as the first neo-Senecan play in English dealing with republicanism and stoicism.

  Antonius is considered as importing “a French vernacular model for neo-Senecan drama, which at once converged with an emerging native tradition of Roman plays and contributed to renewing it by an unprecedented focus on character development and pathos” (Belle and Cotteignes 2017, 83).

Mary Sidney, the sister of Phylip Sidney, is known to have continued the work of her brother and to have always been circled by intellectuals and to have been the patron to many artists. Among them, also Samuel Daniel who was inspired by Mary Sidney and her Antonius to write his Cleopatra. The influence of Mary Sidney’s tragedy has been asserted also with regards to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Arshad 2019, 35). Among the protégées of Mary Sidney was also the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay, whose Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort Mary Sidney translated (A Discourse of Life and Death) and published along with Antonius in 1592. The tragedy was then published on its own in 1595 with the title The Tragedy of Antony.

  As other plays of the genre, Antonius presents formal characteristics such as the Choruses, the development of action happening mostly offstage and then being reported, the stichomythiae (short and fast dialogues between characters, often consisting of shared lines), the sententiae, and long rhetorical speeches.

Anotonius deals principally with the episodes of the deaths of Antonius and Cleopatra. The two lovers only meet when Antonius has stabbed himself to death, they never exchange lines, but the whole play appears as a long dialogue between the two interspersed with the interventions of the respective friends who try to dissuade them from committing suicide and by the Choruses who relate the situation of the rulers to those of the ruled. Octavius Caesar (called only Caesar in the play) is also present, not only as a character who talks to his friend Agrippa and who learns of Antonius’ death, but also in the speeches of the other characters who portray him as a symbol of tyranny and of the imposition of foreign power.

The main themes are thus those of politics, war, tyranny, and foreign rule, intertwined with the tragic love which brings to the death of the two main characters. Although Antonius appears as the title role of the play equal space is devoted to Cleopatra in this tragedy. The first and third act are devoted to Antonius, while the second act is reserved to the philosophical reflection of Philostratus in the first scene and then to Cleopatra and her women in the second. Antonius’ suicide is described by Dircetus to Caesar in act 4. Act 5 is completely dedicated to Cleopatra – “a structural privilege conventionally granted to the male protagonist” (Neill 1994, 125) – who laments on Anotnius’ now dead body and then kills herself. Cleopatra is always present in Antonius’ discourses as Antonius is present in Cleopatra’s although the two only briefly meet once in the play. The two characters assume thus an equal weight for the tragedy and their speeches often seem complementary.

  Antonius deals with the events which follow the battle of Actium in which Antonius’ fleet was defeated by Octavius Caesar’s one also because Cleopatra had fled from combat. Caesar then followed Antonius till Alexandria and besieged the city.

  The play starts from the lamentation of Antonius who recalls the battle and the way in which Cleopatra abandoned and betrayed him, as well as condemning his own misconduct towards his troops which he deserted in order to follow his lover. The long monologue by Antonius concludes with the affirmation of his willingness to die, and is followed by the Chorus of Egyptians who laments for the destruction brought by the war and the loss of liberty caused by the foreign siege.

In the second act, Philostratus seems to be responding to the Chorus’ lamentation and talks about the situation of Egypt tormented by war and siege: “With soldiers, strangers, horrible in arms/Our land is hid, our people drown’d in tears” (2.1.25-6) claiming that “Love, love (alas, whoever would have thought?) / Hath lost this realm inflamed with his fire. /Love, playing love, which men say kindles not / But in soft hearts, hath ashes made our towns” (2.1.43-6). The Egyptian Chorus responds by invoking mythological characters to cry for their mishaps.

  When Cleopatra appears in 2.2. she seems to be replying to Antonius’ accusations of act 1, and she confirms her love for him and resolves that “the sole comfort of [her] misery” would be “to have one tomb with [Antonius]” (2.2.177-8). She also avows her role in Antonius’ defeat and while her women try to dissuade her from her deadly purpose, but she is fixed in her decision. She also decides to ask a messenger (Diomed) to tell Antonius that she has died for her love of Antony in order to see his reaction, and in order to peacefully die knowing he loves her: “Go then, and if as yet he me bewails,/ If yet for me his heart one sigh fourth breathe/ Blest shall I be: and far with more content / Depart this world, where so I me torment” (2.2.447-50).

  The chorus then speaks of the glorious history of Egypt as opposed to the present devastation under the Roman rule.

  In act 3 Antonius talks with his friend Lucilius of all the things he has renounced for love of Cleopatra, and reiterates his desire to die. His friend vainly tries to dissuade him and to put politics and stately matters above his love for Cleopatra.

  The following Egyptian chorus speaks of death as a relief from pain.

  Act 4 begins with Caesar’s tyrannical speech:

Yet at this day this proud exalted Rome

Despoil’d, captiv’d, at one man’s will doth bend:

Her empire mine, her life is in my hand,

As monarch I both world and Rome command;

Do all, can all; fourth my command’ment cast

Like thundering fire from one to other Pole

Equal to Jove: bestowing by my word

Haps and mishaps, as Fortune’s king and lord

 (4.1.13-20).

Caesar and Agrippa then speak of Antonius’ fall they attribute to his pride and thirst for power, unleashed by his love and vicinity to Cleopatra.

  The two are interrupted in their disquisition on power and rule by the arrival of Dircetus the messenger who tells them that Antonius has died and narrates the circumstances of his death. Dircetus explains how Cleopatra had misled Antonius into believing she had died which had hastened the man’s suicide. The messenger tells how Antonius almost succeeded in killing himself but was still alive when he was told that Cleopatra wanted to meet him in her monument. The almost lifeless body of Antonius was brought to the building and lifted with a cord to the room where Cleopatra awaited and where he died.

  After Dircetus’ story the chorus of Roman soldiers speaks of the war, of the sacrifice of the soldiers, of the losses, deaths, devastation, and hatefulness of the civil war.

The words of Cleopatra in act 5 confirm the death of Antonius and introduce her laments and wish to die. Her women try to dissuade her also reminding her of the presence of her children (one the son of Julius Caesar and the other two the twins she had with Antony) whom she will “of kingdom . . . deprive” (5.28) with her death. The women try to depict the dreadful future of the children under the Roman power if she leaves them but she is resolute in her will to die for her husband, and not to be brought to Rome as a captive. She thus bids farewell to her children and to her women, leaving her last words for Antony, whom she embraces and then dies.

References

Arshad, Yasmin. 2019. Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Belle, Marie-Alice and Line Cottegnies, eds. 2017. Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia. Cambridge: Modern  Humanities Research Association.

Cadman, Daniel. 2016. Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority. Oxon: Routledge.

Garnier, Robert. 1585. Les Tragedies. Paris: Mamert Patisson chez Robert Estienne.

Garnier, Robert. 2010. Théâtre complet. Tome IV. Marc Antoine, edited by Jean-Claude Ternaux. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

Neil, Michael (ed.). 2000. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Oxford: OUP.

Plutarch. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot . . .; and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Vautrouillier and John Wight, 1579.

– Life of Antony, edited by Christopher Pelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Sidney, Mary. 1592. A Discourse of Life and Death Written in French by Ph. Mornay and Antonius a Tragœdie Written also in French by Ro. Garnier Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke. London: William Ponsonby.

Arshad, Yasmin. 2019. Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Belle, Marie-Alice and Line Cottegnies, eds. 2017. Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association.

Braden, Gordon. 1985. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

– 1984. “Senecan Tragedy and the Renaissance”. Illinois Classical Studies 8 (2): 277-92.

Cadman, Daniel. 2016. Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority. Oxon: Routledge.

Charlton, Henry Buckley. 1946. The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cunliffe, John. 1893. The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. London: MacMillan.

Garnier, Robert. 1585. Les Tragedies. Paris: Mamert Patisson chez Robert Estienne.

–   2010. Théâtre complet. Tome IV. Marc Antoine, edited by Jean-Claude Ternaux. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

Hannay, Margaret P. 1990. Philip’s Phoenix. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hannay, Margaret P., Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, eds. 1998. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Neil, Michael (ed.). 2000. William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Oxford: OUP.

Plutarch. The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared together by that graue learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot . . .; and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Vautrouillier and John Wight, 1579.

– Life of Antony, edited by Christopher Pelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Sidney, Mary. 1592. A Discourse of Life and Death Written in French by Ph. Mornay and Antonius a Tragœdie Written also in French by Ro. Garnier Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke. London: William Ponsonby.

Winston, Jessica.  2016. “Early, ‘English Seneca’: From Coterie Translations to the Popular Stage”. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy, edited by Eric Dodson-Robinson, 174-202. Leiden: Brill.  

– 2006. “Seneca in Early Elizabethan England”. Renaissance Quarterly 59: 29-58.

Mary Sidney’s Antonius was first published in 1592 in an edition in which it was preceded by the translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Excellent discours de la vie et de la mort which was published with the title A Discourse of Life and Death; Antonius, the translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine followed. The play was then reprinted in 1595 on its own, with few changes to the title which became The Tragedy of Antony, the pagination and ornaments, and to the typographic rendering of some words, but no substantial variants are present. In the 1595 edition only a correction has been introduced to the name of a character in an exchange between Cleopatra and Charmion, in which in 1592 the shared line 5.1.91 (Cl.Ah,ah. Char.Madame. Cle.Ay me ! Cl.How fainte) seemed to contain two adjacent lines by Cleopatra, the 1595 edition corrects the last character name which becomes Ch. for Charmion.  Both editions end with the inscription “At Ramsbury, 26 of November, 1590”.

According to the USTC, there are six extant witnesses of Mary Sidney’s Antonius (512188), preserved in the UK and the US – one in London at the British Library, one in Oxford at the Bodleian Library, one in Cambridge, and three in the US (at the Huntington Library, at the Beinecke Library, Yale, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library). The witness used for this edition is an octavo of 112 pages. The edition presents, in the first page (<A1>, not numbered), the titles of both A Discourse of Life and Death and Antonius with the indication of the original author, of the translator (Mary Sidney) followed by an illustration, with the inscription “Thou shalt labour for” surrounding the image, and “peace” and “plenty” inside the image. The illustration is followed by the reference to the editor. Signatures in this edition go from A to O, the pages are numbered on the recto page, till the third, then left unnumbered. The first signature is represented only with a letter (A, B, C…O), the second and third with the letter and Arabic number (A2, A3, B2, B3…etc.) the fourth is left unnumbered. The page H3r is erroneously numbered H5r, while L2r is erroneously numbered L3r. The first page of A Discourse of Life and Death the Argument and the first page of the first act of Antonius feature ornaments at the top and at the bottom, and ornate initials.

The text of Antonius is in italics, except for the sententiae, the names of historical or mythological figures, as well as of places which are in Roman type. The 1595 edition is all in Roman type, except for the Argument which is in italics. In the latter edition, italics is used for names of people and places, and for the sententiae.

In the 1592 edition Act 1 is unnumbered; act 2, 4, and 5 are numbered with Arabic numbers. The reference to act 3, present in Garnier, is absent from both 1592 and 1595 editions of the play in English.