ABSTRACT
Antony and Cleopatra was presented at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as part of their 1999 season, with Giles Block as director. At Shakespeare’s Globe, the director is referred to as the Master of Play. During that season, Giles Block was also Master of Verse, a more general position designed to improve the verse-speaking in all of that season’s productions. Mark Rylance, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, made the decision to mount an allmale production of Antony and Cleopatra, casting Paul Shelley as Antony, Mark Rylance as Cleopatra, and John McEnery as Enobarbus, before Giles Block was invited to be director. The announcement of the 1999 season was greeted with intense press curiosity, which focused on the proposal for an allmale Antony and Cleopatra. Rylance’s daring decision to give one of the most famous of all female roles to a man fascinated journalists, who responded with enthusiasm to the frisson of men playing women. The reviews kept by the Globe reveal that the decision to stage an all-male Antony and Cleopatra was a great marketing success. Rylance also decided to stage the production in original costume, and a large proportion of the play’s budget was spent on the impressive costumes designed by Jenny Tiramani and made in the Globe workshop (see fig. 16).1 Cleopatra had some extremely arresting costumes based on Inigo Jones’s designs for Jacobean masques, and she changed costume frequently, while Antony did not. In conversation, Jenny Tiramani explained that she hoped that Cleopatra’s costume changes would contribute to the impression of a woman of “infinite variety” (2.2.235), but that, in retrospect, she would have suppressed one of Cleopatra’s costume changes. The authentic costumes were experimental, as the workshop investigated techniques of production and as the actors and dressers explored the ways the costumes would affect the mechanics of staging and movement. Tiramani noted that, as a result of the experiments carried out in this production, she now doubted whether Elizabethan actors, working without the large number
Fig. 16: Mark Rylance as Cleopatra in Giles Block’s 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s Globe. Photo: John Tramper; Courtesy of Shakespeare’s Globe, London.
