50 Fun Facts About Antony and Cleopatra

The asp that kills Cleopatra is smuggled past her Roman guards in a basket of which fruit?

Figs hide the snakes when a rustic clown carries them in, and Cleopatra remarks how poor an instrument may do a noble deed. A guard later spots the slimy trail left on the fig leaves.

In Antony and Cleopatra, age cannot wither the queen, 'nor custom stale her infinite' what?

Variety is the point of the tribute: other women cloy the appetites they feed, the speaker goes on, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.

Which everyday phrase does Cleopatra coin when she brushes off her past love for an earlier Roman?

Salad days were, she says, when she was green in judgment and cold in blood. The phrase only caught on in the 19th century, and Elizabeth II used it in her 1977 Silver Jubilee address.

Which Nile creature does a tipsy Antony describe to a drunken fellow ruler as shaped 'like itself'?

The crocodile, Antony adds with a straight face, is as broad as it has breadth, just as high as it is, and of its own colour too. His befuddled listener calls it a strange serpent.

Which blunt Roman officer gives the famous barge speech about Cleopatra, then later deserts Antony?

Enobarbus has a far bigger role in the play than in Shakespeare's source. His barge speech, though, follows that source almost word for word.

At which sea battle does Cleopatra's fleet turn and flee, with Antony abandoning his men to follow?

Actium costs Antony his honour as much as his fleet: Cleopatra sails away with her sixty ships and he chases after her, then tells her his heart was tied to her rudder by the strings.

The hero of Antony and Cleopatra gives a famous funeral speech in which earlier Shakespeare tragedy?

Julius Caesar, written about seven years earlier, ends with a hint of the friction between Antony and his young ally that drives the later play.

In Antony and Cleopatra, the young rival called simply Caesar later ruled Rome under which name?

Augustus is the title he took after the events of the play, when the deaths of the two lovers left him free to become Rome's first emperor.

Which colour are the sails of Cleopatra's barge, so perfumed that the winds grow love-sick?

Purple sails top a vessel with a stern of beaten gold and silver oars that keep stroke to the tune of flutes, while the water follows faster, as if amorous of their strokes.

Which Hollywood star directed a 1972 film of Antony and Cleopatra and cast himself as Antony?

Charlton Heston wrote the screenplay himself and called the play the most filmable of all Shakespeare's works. He had already played Mark Antony on screen before.

Which sister of his rival Caesar does Antony marry to patch up their quarrel in Shakespeare's play?

Octavia is meant to cement the alliance, but the marriage does the opposite: Antony drifts back east and her brother treats the insult as a cause for war.

In which city, home to Cleopatra's court, does Shakespeare's play both open and end?

Alexandria stands for pleasure and imagination in the play, set against a sterner, more practical Rome, and the action cuts between the two worlds again and again.

In the first scene of Antony and Cleopatra, Antony cries 'Let Rome in' which river 'melt'?

Tiber and empire can both dissolve, Antony declares, because his space is here, with her. It is the first sign of how far the great general has let his duties slip.

Which third triumvir, sharing the Roman world with Antony and Caesar, is carried drunk from a feast?

Lepidus is the makeweight of the three, and an onlooker jokes that the man carrying him out bears a third of the world. Caesar later deposes him, leaving two rivals.

Where does Cleopatra lock herself away after the last defeat, sending Antony word that she is dead?

Her monument is where an attendant tells her to hide from his fury. The lie about her death is meant to win him back, but it destroys him instead.

How do Cleopatra and her women bring the dying Antony into their locked hiding place?

They haul him up by hand, and Cleopatra jokes grimly at how heavy her lord weighs. She will not come down to him for fear of being captured.

Which follower kills himself rather than obey Antony's order to run his master through?

Eros draws his sword, asks Antony to turn his face away, then stabs himself instead. Antony calls him thrice nobler and tries to follow his example, but botches the blow.

What does Cleopatra ask her women to dress her in before she puts the asp to her breast?

Her robe and crown turn the suicide into a royal ceremony: she means to meet Antony looking as she did on the day they first met, and she calls out to him as her husband.

Where does the victorious Caesar order Cleopatra to be buried in the play's closing speech?

Beside Antony is his answer: no grave on earth, he says, will hold a pair so famous. Even the cold winner is moved, and he orders his army to attend the funeral.

Which wife of Antony dies early in the play, after stirring up a war against Caesar in Italy?

Fulvia's death frees Antony to remarry, and he greets the news with guilt rather than relief: there's a great spirit gone, he says, admitting he had wished for it.

In Shakespeare's play, which god is said to abandon Antony as eerie music sounds beneath the ground?

Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves him: so one soldier on night watch decides when oboes play under the stage. The omen comes on the night before the play's last two days of fighting.

Who warns Antony that his guardian spirit turns fearful whenever young Caesar stands near him?

A soothsayer from Egypt tells him to keep space between them: at any game against that rival, he says, Antony is sure to lose, whatever the odds.

Which rebel sea commander hosts Antony and his fellow rulers at a drunken feast aboard his galley?

Sextus Pompey has just made peace with them, keeping Sicily and Sardinia in return for clearing the sea of pirates. Once Antony has left Italy, the others break the truce and attack him.

Which attendant of Cleopatra dies last, telling a Roman guard the deed was fit for a princess?

Charmian straightens the dead queen's headdress, closes her eyes, then takes a snake herself as the guards rush in. Iras has already fallen dead after a farewell kiss.

Which gift does the departed Antony kiss many times before sending it back to Cleopatra?

A pearl is only a petty present, his message says, and he promises to mend it by piecing her throne with kingdoms until all the east calls her mistress.

What does Cleopatra's diver secretly hang on Antony's hook as a prank during an angling wager?

A salt fish, already cured and long dead, is what he eagerly reels in. Cleopatra recalls laughing him out of patience, then next morning drinking him to bed and dressing him in her own clothes.

On which river does Cleopatra first meet Antony, arriving in the barge of the famous speech?

The Cydnus is where she pursed up his heart, the speech says: he sat alone in the marketplace, whistling to the air, while the whole city went to gaze on her.

What does Antony send after the trusted officer who deserts him for Caesar's camp?

His treasure arrives with extra gifts on top, and the kindness breaks the deserter, who calls himself the villain of the earth and dies of shame soon after.

What does the beaten Antony challenge Caesar to, a dare the younger man simply laughs off?

Single combat, sword against sword, is the old soldier's last throw. Caesar replies that he has many other ways to die, and calls him an old ruffian.

What punishment does Antony order for Caesar's envoy after catching him kissing Cleopatra's hand?

A whipping it is, until the man whines aloud for mercy. Antony then sends him back with a taunt: Caesar may flog one of Antony's freed slaves in return to make them quits.

Cleopatra dreads that in Rome her greatness will be mocked on stage by which kind of performer?

A squeaking boy is Shakespeare's in-joke: on his own stage women's parts were played by male youths, so the first Cleopatra spoke the line about himself.

As Cleopatra dresses to die in Shakespeare's play, she says she has 'immortal' what 'in me'?

Longings for the next world replace earthly pleasures: she adds that the juice of Egypt's grape will never wet her lips again, then imagines Antony rousing himself to praise her.

Before she dies, Cleopatra says she is made of which two elements, giving the rest to 'baser life'?

Fire and air are all she keeps: the other elements, earth and water, she gives away with her body. She then kisses her women goodbye and reaches for the first snake.

In the play's first speech, Antony is a 'triple pillar of the world' turned into a strumpet's what?

Fool is the verdict of one of his own disgusted followers, who complains that the general's eyes, which once glowed over armies like plated Mars, now gaze only at her.

Antony calls for 'one other' what kind of 'night', a phrase Dorothy L. Sayers took for a title?

Gaudy night it is: he wants all his sad captains called in to fill the bowls and mock the midnight bell. Sayers gave the name to a 1935 mystery that opens at an Oxford college reunion.

Which game does Cleopatra suggest to pass the time while Antony is away, a famous anachronism?

Billiards did not exist in her world: the earliest recognisable form of the game was played outdoors in the 1340s, more than 1,300 years after she died.

Which sleeping draught does Cleopatra call for so she can sleep through Antony's absence?

Mandragora is mandrake, an ancient narcotic, and she wants it to sleep out the great gap of time her Antony is away. Her maid's cool reply is that she thinks of him too much.

Which pirate offers to cut the cable and murder Antony and his fellow rulers during a feast at sea?

Menas whispers that his master could own the world if the three throats were cut. The host refuses: he would have praised the deed done unasked, but honour forbids him to order it.

Whom does the beaten Antony send as ambassador to Caesar, proof of how few followers remain?

His schoolmaster makes the Romans smirk: a man who lately had kings to spare as messengers, one officer notes, now sends so poor a feather from his wing.

Which Roman officer secretly warns the captive Cleopatra that Caesar means to ship her to Rome?

Dolabella is won over by her grief and tells her she and her children will be sent ahead within three days. The warning settles her mind, and the basket arrives soon after.

Shakespeare took Antony and Cleopatra from Thomas North's translation of which Greek biographer?

Plutarch reached Shakespeare at two removes: North worked from a French version, not the Greek, and whole phrases of his 1579 prose pass straight into the play's verse.

Antony and Cleopatra only reached print in which collection, seven years after Shakespeare's death?

The First Folio is the only authoritative text of the play. It had been registered for publication in 1608, yet no earlier printed copy is known.

Which acting company, Shakespeare's own, first performed Antony and Cleopatra around 1607?

The King's Men took that name in 1603, when James I came to the throne and became their patron. The play was staged at either the Globe or the indoor Blackfriars theatre.

Antony and Cleopatra, darting between Egypt and Rome, holds which record among Shakespeare's plays?

Most scenes by a distance: about forty, because the action keeps cutting between places as far apart as Sicily, Syria and Athens. Shakespeare himself marked no act divisions.

Which tragedy by John Dryden squeezes the story of Antony and Cleopatra into the lovers' last hours?

All for Love, subtitled The World Well Lost, keeps the whole action in one city. Audiences long preferred it: when David Garrick revived Shakespeare's own play in 1759, the run soon closed.

Which American composer's Antony and Cleopatra opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966?

Samuel Barber wrote the opera as a showcase for the soprano Leontyne Price, with a libretto by Franco Zeffirelli. A heavily revised version, reworked with Gian Carlo Menotti, was first staged in 1975.

Which actress played Cleopatra opposite her husband Laurence Olivier on the London stage in 1951?

Vivien Leigh alternated two Cleopatras night by night that season: Shakespeare's queen one evening and George Bernard Shaw's very different one the next.

Which Star Trek captain played Antony for the Royal Shakespeare Company opposite Harriet Walter?

Patrick Stewart had history with the play: in 1979 he won an Olivier Award for a supporting role in an earlier production, years before he boarded the Enterprise.

Which actor played Cleopatra in an all-male production at Shakespeare's Globe in London in 1999?

Mark Rylance was the Globe's first artistic director at the time, and the casting revived the practice of Shakespeare's own theatre, where men took every part.

Caesar recalls Antony once drinking what on a starving retreat, proof of the soldier he used to be?

Horse urine and scummy puddles kept him alive after a defeat at Modena, Caesar says, along with tree bark and flesh that men died to look at. The praise is really a rebuke.