Antony and Cleopatra: The Queen My Mistress

An Egyptian messenger comes before Octavius Caesar after Antony’s death, asking what he intends for Cleopatra:

EGYPTIAN
A poor Egyptian yet, the Queen my mistress,
Confined in all she has, her monument,
Of thy intents desires instruction, […]
— Antony and Cleopatra, 5.1¹

Shakespeare’s principal source, North’s translation of Plutarch, has no Egyptian envoy at this point. Instead, North sends Caesar’s representative Proculeius to Cleopatra directly. Shakespeare adds the queen’s representative approaching Caesar, as well as the phrase “the Queen my mistress.” The phrase does not occur in the searchable text of North’s 1579 translation.²

Reporting his first audience with Henri IV in May 1599, Neville described how he had presented Elizabeth’s letters and explained his appointment:

the Queen my mistress being very willing to continue the good amity, that had been so long since begun and entertained between them […] had sent me to reside about his person as her ordinary ambassador.³

Both Shakespeare’s Egyptian envoy and Neville speak to a foreign ruler as the representative of an absent queen.

Writing in French to Villeroy, the secretary of state, on 6 June 1599, Neville uses the same formula, la royne ma maistresse, while pressing for a satisfactory answer to Elizabeth’s demands.⁴

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This was habitual language for Neville: the exact phrase occurs twelve times in ten English letters to Cecil between May 1599 and January 1600, discussing alliances, debts, war and obligations between rulers.⁵

Twelve exact uses and one possessive form.

In the survey of 239 dramatic texts dated 1590–1615, the words “queen my mistress” occur in two Shakespeare plays and none of the 201 other entries. Only Antony and Cleopatra uses the full formula “the Queen my mistress.” The other Shakespeare example is Posthumus’s exclamation to Imogen in Cymbeline 1.1:

POSTHUMUS
My queen, my mistress!⁶

Posthumus addresses his beloved; the Egyptian speaks for his queen. The formula occurs in other printed prose, including accounts of two embassies recorded in Hakluyt. Neville used the language of contemporary diplomacy, and Shakespeare gives that language to Cleopatra’s envoy.⁷

“Perpetual amity”

The same letter reporting Neville’s first audience contains a second expression used in Antony and Cleopatra. Neville had urged the king to maintain free trade between England and France. He argued that friendship would last longer if it rested on the interests of their subjects as well as the dispositions of their rulers. He therefore asked that trade continue:

in such ample sort as it had been in his predecessors’ times, and according to the treaties of perpetual amity passed between the two crowns.⁸

In Antony and Cleopatra 2.2, Agrippa proposes a marriage to secure an alliance between Antony and Caesar. Antony should marry Caesar’s sister Octavia:

AGRIPPA
To hold you in perpetual amity,
To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts
With an unslipping knot, take Antony
Octavia to his wife, whose beauty claims
No worse a husband than the best of men;⁹

North supplies the marriage and its political purpose. Octavia is to be “a good mean to keep good love and amity betwixt her brother and him.” Shakespeare makes that hope “perpetual amity”: the language of a treaty enters a proposal of marriage. No other dramatic text in the 1590–1615 survey uses the phrase.¹⁰

The French equivalent also appears in diplomacy and literature. Francis I’s instructions to his ambassador in England in 1533 speak of perpetuelle amitié (perpetual friendship) with the pope; in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, lovers promise une amitié perpetuelle (a perpetual friendship).¹¹

Neville invokes treaties binding two crowns; Agrippa proposes to bind rival rulers through Octavia. Both speakers seek a lasting settlement by giving political friendship a durable foundation. The play will expose the fragility of Agrippa’s promise.

“The Queen my mistress” identifies the authority for whom Neville speaks; “perpetual amity” names the relationship he is charged with maintaining. Both occur in his account of his first audience with Henri IV, and both enter Antony and Cleopatra where Shakespeare reshapes North’s narrative. The play’s ancient politics are expressed in language Neville used in conducting his own embassy.

Honour and profit

Overwhelmed by the expense of entertaining English visitors in Paris, Neville told Thomas Windebank in January 1600 what his future motto would be:

And ever hereafter my motto shall be fie upon honour that brings no profit.¹²

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Pompey turns the same opposition into a declaration of principle in Antony and Cleopatra 2.7. His new allies and former enemies are drinking aboard his vessel. Menas proposes cutting the cable and killing them, leaving Pompey master of their territories. Pompey says Menas should have acted without consulting him; now that he knows the plan, he must forbid it:

POMPEY
Ah, this thou shouldst have done
And not have spoke on ’t! In me ’tis villainy;
In thee ’t had been good service. Thou must know
’Tis not my profit that does lead mine honor;
Mine honor, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue
Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown,
I should have found it afterwards well done,
But must condemn it now. Desist and drink.¹³

The episode is already in North. His Pompey says Menas should have acted without telling him, then declares: “I was never taught to break my faith nor to be counted a traitor.” Shakespeare preserves the compromising admission but gives it a new verbal shape: “profit” must follow “honor.”¹⁴

Neville curses honour that costs him money; Pompey insists that honour must govern profit, while admitting he would have welcomed the profitable crime had it been committed without his knowledge. Neville makes a bitter joke of the conflict between public standing and personal advantage; Pompey makes a convenient principle of it.