Page:Antony and Cleopatra (1921) Yale.djvu/159

Antony and Cleopatra the best judgment of those who saw the performance was that Antony and Cleopatra is not a good acting play. Its fire is too scattering, its plot too broken, and the conflict between the imperial interests of the story and the human interest of the love affair is never entirely resolved. In sum, Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest characterizations, Antony is only less high in the register, certain scenes are among Shakespeare's very best, but the play as a whole lacks that continuity of dramatic interest and unity of situation which are necessary for complete theatrical success.

In all fairness it should be added, however, that Antony and Cleopatra, with its profusion of scenes and rapid shift of place, is particularly injured by the usual conditions of modern stage presentation. And it is further prejudiced by the temptation (apparently irresistible) to overload its more triumphant scenes with stage decoration, by which the action is still more impeded. Apparently the play has never had a truly Shakespearean performance since Jacobean days. Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, in Shakespeare's Theater, pp. 124–125, presents a scheme by which the third and fourth acts could be given panoramic continuity and rapidity without confusion, by the use of the inner stage and its curtains as they were in the theatre of 1608.

Many other writers have taken the story of Cleopatra for dramatic presentation. The theme has been especially popular in France, from the Cléopâtre Captive of Estienne Jodelle in 1552, the first tragedy to appear in the French language, on into the nineteenth century, including the version by Marmontel, where an automatic asp hissed at the breast of Cleopatra in a day when hissing in the theatre was forbidden. 'Je suis de l'avis de l'aspic,' said a man in the audience, and the play failed. In English,