An Elizabethan Eyewitness of Antony and Cleopatra?

Summary

Discussion of the relationship between Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and the 1607 version of Daniel’s Cleopatra has up to the present turned on claims for verbal similarities and an examination of the changes made in the structure of Daniel’s play between 1594 and 1607. There is, however, one curious passage in Daniel’s 1607 play to which attention has not hitherto been drawn and which may possibly provide a more intimate link with Shakespeare’s play than has before been suspected: it may, in fact, be a reminiscence by Daniel of an actual production of Antony and Cleopatra.

The passage in question occurs in Dircetus's account of Antony's last visit to Cleopatra, a part of Plutarch's story which Daniel had not used in the earlier, 1594, version of his play. Dircetus recounts what happens after Antony has given himself the fatal wound:

…Which when his love,

Shee sends with speed his body to remoove,

The body of her love imbru'd with blood.

Which brought unto her tombe, (lest that the prease

Which came with him, might violate her vow)

She drawes him up in rowles of taffaty

T'a window at the top, which did allow

A little light unto her monument.

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