A To Z Blogging Challenge 2022: Shakespeare E Is For Enobarbus And Emilia

Emilia and Desdemona. Dante Gabrielle Rossetti. Public Domain

 Today, we are going back to Antony And Cleopatra, the play with which we started this challenge, and continue with Othello. Both are likeable secondary characters who can be funny, and both end up dead. You really have to be careful when you see a Shakespeare play labelled “tragedy.” There has to be someone left alive at the end to carry off the dead hero for a magnificent funeral, but still…way too many bodies on the stage. 

Enobarbus is a secondary character, Antony’s friend, who eventually goes over  to Antony’s enemy, Octavius Caesar - and feels guilty. He is loosely based on a real person.

Enobarbus is best known for his speech which begins “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water”, describing a memory of Cleopatra the first time she met Antony. It’s a stunning description of her, a wonderful speech, but it’s taken almost directly from a passage in Plutarch’s Lives, on which the play is based. 

When Enobarbus leaves Antony, he goes without taking his stuff. Antony, who is generous, sends his possessions after him. 

And Antony is a generous soul. In his very first scene, when Cleopatra demands to know how much he loves her, he protests, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.” You can’t even think of calculating love! 

You’d think Enobarbus would have noticed this, but not enough. When he realises just how generous a friend he has deserted, he makes a speech and drops dead with grief and remorse, crying, “O Antony!” 

And here I have a confession to make. I once went to see a performance of this play by the Bell Shakespeare Company, with a friend I knew through Star Trek fandom. When Enobarbus dropped dead and the other characters in the scene bent down to look at the body, the words “He’s dead, Jim,” unintentionally burst from my lips. Fortunately, I said it quietly, not heard by the actors, but I rather think I spoiled it for my friend, who couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

There are a number of women called Emilia in Shakespeare’s works. They never seem to be the female leads, only lesser characters, some heroine’s gentlewoman.

Emilia from Othello is Desdemona’s gentlewoman, and is the wife of the villain, Iago. Despite that, she is a good friend to poor Desdemona, who is going to die at her husband’s hands after Iago persuades him that Desdmona is unfaithful. She has been described as “that old married bird” who lightens the scene when Desdemona wonders how any woman could be unfaithful for the whole world. Well, Emilia says drily, there are a lot of things she wouldn’t do it for, but the whole world? Who wouldn’t make her husband a cuckold to make him a king? She is a likeable character considering who she is married to. She knows her husband pretty well, but it never occurs to her that he’d instigate a murder. Not until the last scene, when she is shocked, especially when she finds out that the handkerchief he snatched off her was used as evidence against Desdemona. She tells Othello what really happened and is murdered for it by Iago.

I guess he figures that he’s likely to be executed anyway, so what the heck. But it’s a bit sad to see a likeable comic relief character die that way.

Tomorrow’s post will be F for Fiction Based On Shakespeare.