Had Shakespeare lived to see Cleopatra !

He would certainly have fallen in love with her the way Richard Burton did, twice over. She was willful, outrageous, capricious, demanding, passionate, unpredictable and she was Elizabeth Taylor who played the Queen of Egypt. She was the most seductive and fascinating woman in the world.

She was a ‘queen’ in her own right beautiful and captivating, the woman Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra. Taylor would have swept the Bard off his feet; I may quote here what Octavius said when he found her dead, though it was not his language;

‘She looks like sleep
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace’

Seven or eight years after Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, he returned to the story of Rome and some of the characters he left behind and alive in the play. So, Antony and Cleopatra is a sort of sequel resuming the story of the rivalry between Marc Antony and Octavius already known to us as allies against Brutus and Cassius.

Now, they have become competitors for the Roman Empire. Antony was the older and less prudent of the two. Octavius was the more calculating and efficient. But their circumstances along with ambition and lifestyles had changed. So was it with Shakespeare’s language in new plays. The complexity varied and were seen more as formal and focused on Rome and Alexandria.

Shakespeare was faced with the language he used in the play. It had to contain both Roman virtue and Egyptian excesses. The conflict was both ethical and political and reflected in language appropriate to the contrast between the two men and two cultures with Cleopatra caught between.

Here Taylor as the queen who could not resist the luxuries and follies as against Richard Burton’s Antony, the once hardened old campaigner who turned soft and irresponsible, neglecting his Roman duties while being unable to take his marriage to Octavius’s sister, seriously is the perfect foil in the drama conceived by both Taylor and Burton as Shakespeare would have visualized and would have been proud had he lived enough to see the drama enacted.

The audiences and the readers for such writing and enacting needs to be attentive and the opening lines are an instant challenge. The point they make is clear. They complain of Antony’s ‘dotage’, his enslavement to the Egyptian queen. Once a great solider, he is now adopting slave.

This tragedy of Shakespeare livened up with the character portrayals by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Not even by the Thespian Siddon who wallowed in the role of Cleopatra in the last century.

Shakespeare obviously enjoyed Cleopatra and her wicked ways. Antony’s friend. Antony’s friend Enobarbus speaks the famous account of Cleopatra in her barge on Cydnes and Elizabeth Taylor immortalized the scene:

‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne;
Burned on the water, the poops were beaten gold
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke’....

These words did full justice to Taylor in the last Act. And again it does in style in the last act. She is still cunning and still a match to Octavius and wife to the God-like Antony.

‘His legs bestride the ocean, his rear’d arm,
Crested the world, his voice was propertied
As all turned spheres. His delights,
Were dolphine-like, they showed his back above; Elements they liv’d in’..
Taming of the Shrew

No better shrewdness could Shakespeare have found in than the foulmouthed wench like Elizabeth Taylor. She comes off with a fine dialogue-spiced Katerina, shedding her lady-like dazzling demeanour revealing her other side in performance.

So different to the queenly Cleopatra, she once again teamed up with husband, Richard Burton who was Petruchio. Equally difficult role but Taylor rose to the demanding variety of moods, changes in character, defying her husband who was bent in taming her.

Petruchio contrives to keep Katerina hungry. Sleepless and frustrated until she agrees to do whatever he wanted. Though Katerina’s agreement is severely tested on the homeward journey to Padua where her rich father is, the plot is resolved when at the wedding feast of Bianca and Lucentio, who have been married secretly, Katherina lectures Bianca and another new bride on the whole duty of a wife to the amazement of her father and sister Bianca. Finally, Petruchio had tamed the shrew.

Bianca – ‘Fie; what a foolish duty call you this

Lucentio – I would your duty were as foolish too. The wistom of your duty, fair Bianca; Hath cost me a hundred crowns since supper-time.

Bian – The most fool you for laying on my duty.

Petruchio -Katherene, I charge these, tell thee headstrong women what duty they do owe their lords and husbands.

Pet Come on, I say; and first begin with her

Widow – She shall not

Pet – I say she shall and first begin with her’.....

Act. V Scene 11

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