Antony and Cleopatra Read Online Free PDF Page A

Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.
    Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, or indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as
directorial
interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a different typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside ?. (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.
    Line Numbers in the left margin are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.
    Explanatory Notes at the foot of each page explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
    Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “F2” indicating a reading that derives from the Second Folio of 1632, “F3” one that derives from the Third Folio of 1663–64, “F4” one that derives from the Fourth Folio of 1685, and “Ed” one that derives from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. Thus, for example: “ 3.6.14 he there = Ed. F = hither” means that at Act 3/Scene 6/line 14, the Folio compositor erroneously printed “hither” and we have followed editorial tradition in emending to “he there.”

KEY FACTS
    MAJOR PARTS: (
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Mark Antony (24%/202/22), Cleopatra (19%/204/16), Octavius Caesar (12%/98/14), Enobarbus (10%/113/12), Pompey (4%/41/3), Charmian (3%/63/10), Lepidus (2%/30/6), Menas (2%/35/3), Agrippa (2%/28/7), Dolabella (1%/23/3), Eros (1%/27/6), Scarrus (1%/12/4).
    LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 95% verse, 5% prose.
    DATE: 1606–07. Perhaps performed at court Christmas 1606 or Christmas 1607. Registered for publication in May 1608 (though not actually published prior to the First Folio); it seems to have influenced a play by Barnabe Barnes that was performed and published in 1607.
    SOURCES: Closely based on the “Life of Marcus Antonius” in Plutarch’s
Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romanes
, translated by Thomas North (1579); there are some exceptionally close verbal parallels. The main addition is the character of Enobarbus, who is only mentioned very briefly in Plutarch. Shakespeare also seems to have known Samuel Daniel’s
Cleopatra
(1594, a play written to be read rather than performed); Daniel, in turn, seems to have been influenced by Shakespeare when revising his play in 1607.
    TEXT: The First Folio of 1623 is the only early text. Apparently set from a scribal transcript of Shakespeare’s manuscript, it is notably inconsistent in the