‘A blameable relish of indecency:’ Antony and Cleopatra in 1776

What were readers of Shakespeare thinking about in 1776 as the United States was forming? Scholar Brandi K. Adams looks at a critical edition of Antony and Cleopatra published in England that year. Its editor didn’t believe that the play had much of a future in performance. Luckily, he was wrong. Adams explores how our understanding of Antony and Cleopatra (and other Shakespeare plays) evolves as we add our own readings to those of the past.

WHEN ASKED TO CONSIDER HOW READERS OF SHAKESPEARE WILL BE ENGAGING WITH HIS PLAYS IN ANOTHER 250 YEARS IN THE UNITED STATES, I thought it only right to think about some of the ways people were reading this material in 1776 as the country was being formed. I wondered, “what might readers have cared about during that time?” Fortunately, the Folger Shakespeare Library holds a copy of a critical edition of one of Shakespeare’s plays published in England that year. Originally printed anonymously for John C. Bell near Exeter-Exchange in the Strand in London and for C. Etherington at York, readers could purchase Antony and Cleopatra, A Tragedy by Shakespeare with “An Introduction and Notes Critical and Illustrative are added, by the authors of the Dramatic Censor.”

This 18^th century edition of the play that we now recognize as the work of Irish actor, playwright, and critic Francis Gentleman is remarkably different from the earlier 16^th and 17^th century versions of the plays. The earliest printed version Antony and Cleopatra, found in Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623)—also called the First Folio—contains no commentary, least of all sustained observations about the various actions of its characters. Instead, this newer, portable copy of Antony and Cleopatra includes the full content of the play along with additional notes to guide readers’ understanding of it.

The “editors,” or rather Mr. Gentleman, set entire sections of the text with quotation marks that readers learn were omitted for performance, due to a combination of “great indecency” and having “little matter relative to the piece.” Gentleman’s extensive “Critical and illustrative,” footnotes to the text provide a kind of rationale for his choices, giving 21^st century readers (and I include myself) an idea of how at least one man in the 18th century approached the play. One of his assumptions especially stands out: he believed that performances of Antony and Cleopatra would not continue into the distant future. In his estimation, the play had far too much objectionable material and was not that remarkable making audiences grow tired of it to the point of obsolescence.

He was categorically wrong on both counts.

Readers continually celebrate the longevity and extensive critical history of the play in terms of its geography, engagement with history, and its relationship to gender, race, and colonialism. Despite Gentleman’s uninterest in the play, Antony and Cleopatra has enjoyed a long history of performance and publication including a riveting 2018 production starring Sophie Okonedo and Ralph Fiennes filmed by the National Theatre to be enjoyed by audiences all over the world.

In the introduction to his edition, Gentleman declares that the last excellent staging of Antony and Cleopatra had been produced 20 years prior in 1756 by “that very able and successful Dramatic Modeller,” actor, playwright and theater manager, David Garrick. He claims that Garrick could “produce it under a state of reformation,” likely by molding the play to 18th-century audience sensibilities. In other words, Gentleman believed that Garrick’s production saved Shakespeare’s play from the time in which it was first performed and printed. In his further reading, Gentleman reduces the character of Anthony to “a slightly infatuated slave to an excess of love and luxury” and Cleopatra to a “tinsel pattern of vanity and female cunning, which work the downfall of both.”  While reductive and disappointing, this kind of reading is nevertheless unsurprising as these statements match a lot of 19^th and early 20^th century criticism about the play.

Before I get to one more of Gentleman’s memorable remarks, I should mention that my hope is that 250 years into the future, scholars, and readers of all types are still interested in how earlier editors, readers, and critics engaged with Shakespeare’s plays, including this copy of Antony and Cleopatra. It is a gift, I think, to be able to learn how other people in various moments in time thought about Shakespeare’s plays and how their early understanding of the material relates to our current readings. How marvelous it is to imagine a reader 250 years from now sitting in the Reading Room at the Folger examining a printed Folger Shakespeare edition of Antony and Cleopatra (preferably with readers’ handwritten marginal comments). As they examine the printed books (without gloves!) they will certainly consider for themselves the ways that early to mid 21^st century readers’ understandings of the plays relate to their own current readings. I imagine that they would be thinking about our readings of the play just as I have examined Francis Gentleman’s responses to this material printed in 1776. I also anticipate that future readers will consider Gentleman’s edition as well.

What I am most thrilled about in terms of encountering Gentleman’s edition of this play and thinking about future readings of Antony and Cleopatra is how much theater practitioners, scholars, and readers have recuperated Cleopatra. Gentleman seems to loathe Cleopatra as demonstrated both in his mission to reduce her lines and overall presence in the play as well as through all his derision of her character and its complexities. Cutting most of the scene where Cleopatra learns that Mark Antony has married Octavia, he writes “[t]he vulgar and virago spirit of Cleopatra, shames every idea or her character; she is in this scene a perfect Covent-Garden amazon, wherefore, to soften her as much as possible, we curtail.” To Gentleman, Cleopatra is an unrepentantly nosy, domineering, and “masculine” woman, unworthy of the play. Somehow, he has also managed to merge Shakespeare’s character with 18^th century women who were in proximity to him and the theaters in Covent Garden in which Antony and Cleopatra was being performed. For Gentleman, neither the women of Covent Garden, nor Cleopatra herself belong to Shakespeare’s Egypt or Rome, even when they did and can contribute to enthralling readings of the play.

Instead of lamenting the disappearance of certain of Shakespeare’s plays as Gentleman has, I instead expect that there will be new exciting editions of Antony and Cleopatra (and all of the Shakespeare’s plays) with brilliant and engaging readings that continually challenge our understanding of queenship, race, and geography as Mira ‘Assaf has done for the Folger’s The Collation blog in “Convivial Cleopatra.” Here, ‘Assaf has magnificently overturned readings like Gentleman’s as she centers Cleopatra as an effective ruler and convener of multiple people from a host of geographies—most of whom were from well beyond Gentleman’s imagination. She writes: “Framed in the holistic terms of improvisational assemblages, indigenous sociality, and queer worldmaking, Antony and Cleopatra, I argue, presents the diverse social constructions and value systems of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian South Mediterranean beyond the edicts of external European forces.”

Unlike Gentleman’s understanding of the play as one that is full of “A blameable relish of indecency,” in 250 years, I anticipate that readers will still be deeply involved with this play and many others by Shakespeare. Perhaps, in the future as they sit in a 344-year-old Folger Shakespeare Library, these new readers will eagerly examine printed texts and other writings about Shakespeare from the past to speculate on the ways that our understandings of these plays have changed over a much longer expanse of time.

Always, without gloves.

>> Explore more of our series in which Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper asks American Shakespeareans what role Shakespeare will play in the next 250 years of the American story

About the author

Brandi K. Adams is an assistant professor at Arizona State University. She is currently writing her first monograph entitled, Extraordinary Readers: A History of Books through Early Modern English Drama.