Antony and Cleopatra--2

Through Act 3 now. I do feel a little bit closer to the characters now. It's not so much that Antony has opened up: he stays removed. Rather, the underlings have opened not only the world of the play, but also the luminaries who would seem necessarily to be in the forefront of the play. Such isn't always the case. If I were an actor and were in this play, I would want to play Enobarbus, Antony's friend and follower, who has all the life even of Antony and Cleopatra, but with more earthiness.

I think this is something that is going on throughout the play. We get access to the big-shots (Antony, Caesar, Cleopatra, even old Lepidus) and to the world of the play through the followers of the big-shots. Enobarbus delights in his conversations with Octavius' backups and with Antony, but also when he speaks up in front of Octavius. He's the major character who isn't a politician in the play and can speak his, and our, mind.

But Cleopatra also opens up a little bit. She is famous for being a seductress, who conquered the true pillars of this world: Caesar (the dead one), Antony, and Pompey (the dead one). And she seduces us. Even if we don't get close to her, we are fascinated, we are enthralled. It's nice to be captivated like this by a Shakespearean character who isn't a villain. Cleopatra is more interesting than Richard III, though maybe not than Macbeth.

Antony and Cleopatra are very lusty, which leads to one of the more natural links between Shakespeare and life that I've had on this blog. On Friday, an entire high school class came into the bookstore on a field trip. The kids were rambunctious, loud, having fun, causing us all kinds of problems. Our building was built in the 1870's and has been remodeled a lot of times. It's got all kinds of nooks and hidden corners, even hidden rooms. It's a very cool place, built for ghost hunting or a The Third Man final finish to a detective story. Imagine the Viennese sewer system filled with books.

So, it's time for the kids to leave and two of them are missing. One of my coworkers, L the former seminarian who was asked to leave a conservative Lutheran seminary because he kept wearing a cassock to class and genuflecting on the floor during chapel services, volunteered to go look for them. And, he found them--in flagrante in the music room.

L walks into perhaps the grossest room in the store, where the roof leaks have not at all been fixed, and finds two kids having sex in the last aisle. L clears his throat and says "Your class is leaving. So, uh, I guess you're staying for a while then?"

Great story, right? A few minutes after telling it to me, L ruminates, then says "I wonder if he actually inseminated her."