Antony and Cleopatra: The Queen My Mistress

An Egyptian messenger comes before Caesar after Antony’s death, asking what Caesar 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. North sends Proculeius to Cleopatra; Shakespeare adds the queen’s representative approaching Caesar. North’s Proculeius tells Cleopatra to be “of good cheere”; Shakespeare’s Caesar replies to her envoy, “Bid her have good heart.” The reassurance becomes part of a formal audience.²

“The Queen my mistress” was a recurrent formula in Neville’s embassy correspondence. Reporting his first audience with the French king in May 1599, he 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, and knowing that nothing could be more available thereunto, than a good and real intelligence between them, had sent me to reside about his person as her ordinary ambassador³

Both Shakespeare’s Egyptian envoy and Neville speak to a foreign ruler as the representative of an absent queen. Neville’s “mistress” is Elizabeth, whose instructions he carries and whose interests he must defend. The Egyptian’s is Cleopatra, whose fate turns on Caesar’s answer.

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

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This was habitual language for Neville. The exact sequence occurs twelve times in ten English letters to Cecil between May 1599 and January 1600, as he discusses alliances, debts, war and obligations between rulers. The table adds one possessive form, giving thirteen instances.⁵

In the surveyed drama through 1616, “queen my mistress” occurs in two Shakespeare plays and none of the 254 other dramatic entries. 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 also occurs in other printed prose, including ambassadorial speech in Hakluyt, giving Cleopatra’s embassy the voice of contemporary diplomacy.⁷

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 heereafter my mot shallbe fie vpon honnour that brings no profit.⁸

Pompey turns the same opposition into a declaration of principle in Antony and Cleopatra 2.7. His 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.⁹

The episode is already in North. His Pompey says Menas should have acted without telling him, then declares: “I was neuer taught to breake my faith nor to be counted a traitor.” Shakespeare preserves the compromising admission but gives it a new verbal shape: “profit” must follow “honor.”¹⁰

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.

“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.¹¹

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;¹²

North supplies the marriage and its political purpose. Octavia is to be “a good meane to keepe good loue & amitie betwext her brother and him.” Shakespeare makes that hope “perpetual amity”: the language of a treaty enters a proposal of marriage.¹³

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 two diplomatic expressions belong together. “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.