Antony and Cleopatra

As usual, there are several interpretations of the play; our interest in it is now – at least – twofold: as a late tragedy in Shakespeare’s oeuvre and as a typically “baroque” or Jacobean tragedy, in its diction heavily influenced by the emerging “metaphysical” poetry of especially John Donne. It is also important that this tragedy totally disregards the unity of place, time and action: it is jumping between Alexandria, Rome and even “Parthia” (Syria) (where, in III, 3 we can see Ventidius after his victory over the “Parthians”), it covers the period between 40 and 30 BC (Shakespeare faithfully following Plutarch, one of his favourite sources) and the play has an epic perspective, while being highly episodic: it starts with Antony moved out of Alexandria only by the news of his first wife’s, Fulvia’s death and of Pompeius’s (Pompey’s) mutiny; continues with the (short-lived) reconciliation between Antony and Ceasar (where the

“price” is Octavia, Ceasar’s sister married to Antony clearly for political reasons), the (once again) phoney reconciliation between Pompey, Ceasar and Antony (when Lepidus gets drunk, and which is quickly followed by Ceasar waging war on Pompey, later killing him as well), then we suddenly see Octavia trying to act as a go-between for Antony and Ceasar but Ceasar is already convinced that Antony is a traitor (since he in effect went back to Egypt instead of Athens), while Antony is offended because Ceasar leaves him out of his victories and the loot and, in III,7, they are at war again; Antony is defeated at sea (because Cleopatra’s ships turn around and flee and Antony follows her); this results in Cleopatra’s willingness to yield to Ceasar, prevented only by Antony’s blunt refusal and his sending Ceasar’s messenger, Thidias back to Ceasar cruelly beaten; then there is Antony’s victory “by land”, quickly followed by his defeat at sea once more (IV,13) and his (at first half-finished) suicide, and Act V is practically about Cleopatra’s negotiations with Ceasar and her suicide. So the play is not only special because it is an – unconscious or conscious – mockery of the principles put forward by Sidney but because there is no attempt at a kind of unity in any sense. We learn about the events (which happen behind the scene) from chit-chatting (gossiping) politicians or soldiers and, in general, there are three types of speech-acts: descriptions of events (of battles, turns of

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fortune, characters, etc.), negotiations (as between Ceasar and Antony in Act II) and taking leave (as III;2, Ceasar saying farewell to Octavia, or Antony to Cleopatra when he is dying at the end of Act IV). There are only few monologues (mostly by Antony, I;2 – on Fulvia’s death; or Antony’s “All is lost”-soliloquy in IV;13), and the play is heavily marked by the absence of intimacy (Cleopatra and Antony are practically never alone – in fact nobody is alone in the course of the play for more than a few minutes – cf. Hamlet’s solitude), and by the lack of the mixture of tragic and comic elements (cf. Hamlet or King Lear, in the former, Hamlet takes the role of the dead Yorick as well, and in the latter, there is a professional Fool, joking even in the storm-scene; but even in Macbeth, a very sombre play, there is the famous and hilarious Porter-scene).

Detractors of the play take Antony to be seduced and abandoned by a sorceress, or by an Indian dancer, or a panther, or even by a wicked monkey, full of feline cunning, the representative of Oriental (exotic) luxury and vice – Cleopatra in the critical literature is often identified with the East, which is female, dark, colonised, available, animalistic, and excitingly dangerous. It is, indeed, never settled if Cleopatra’s affairs (not only with Mark Antony, but, earlier, with Julius Ceasar and with Pompeius the Great) are part of a survival-game or if with Antony the tragic turn is that this time she really falls in love and this brings about her downfall, in which Antony is unable to let her hand go. As it is never settled in the play if she commits suicide because she is afraid of public humiliation by (Octavius) Ceasar (to be dragged in the streets of Rome) or because she really wishes to follow her “husband”

(as she calls Antony in the 5th Act). Almost total unpredictability on Cleopatra’s part is counterbalanced by the sober cunning of (Octavius) Ceasar, the future (first) Emperor of the

“universal peace” (pax Romana): Augustus (the “universal landlord”, III, 13, 72, who is most worried about the manner of Cleopatra’s and her ladies’ death, cf. V, 2, 127)). Ceasar is not entirely made of stone (he loves his sister, Octavia very much) but it is gentle and caring love, as opposed to the “dotage” of “the General” (Antony), “o’erfolw[ing] the measure” (I,1;1-2).

One of the central questions, indeed, is, when somebody is really himself (cf. CLEO. “Antony / Will be himself” [I,1,44/45]; ANT. “how every passion fully strives / To make itself, in thee, fair and admired” [I,1;52-54]): in (within) himself or only within “the Other” (the eternal mother-lover), if one has to restrain himself in order to be who he is or, precisely has to overstep his own boundaries (cf. CEASAR, talking to ANT. about OCTAVIA: “You take from me a great part of myself. / Use me well in’t” [III,2; 24/25], CLEO: “but since my lord / Is Antony again / I will be Cleopatra” [III,13, 188-189]). Is what we are in excess or in the (right) measure, the latter dictated by the necessities of the age? There are lots of metaphors in the play which suggest that, whichever road one takes, every passion, be it restrained, or boundless, will defeat itself:

ANT (when Fulvia’s death is reported): “The present pleasure, / By revolution low’ring [growing lower by turning], does become / The opposite of itself. She’s good being gone; / The hand could [would wish to] pluck her back that shoved her on.” (I,2;114-116).

CEASAR: “This common body [the people] / Like to a vagabond flag [drifting reed] upon the stream / Goes to, and back, lackeying [following slavishly] the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion” (I,4; 44-47).

LEPIDUS: “When we debate / Our trivial difference loud [loudly, violently], we do commit / Murder in [in the process of ] healing wounds” (2;2; 20-22).

ENOBARBUS (describing Cleo.): “On each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem / To glow [make glow]

the delicate cheeks which they did cool / And what they undid did” (II,2; 207-211)

ENOBARBUS (on CLEO): “Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies. For vilest things / Become themselves in her, that holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish [acts like a slut]” (II,2;241-244).

ENOBARBUS: “Ceasar will / Unstate [overthrow] his [Antony’s] happiness and be staged to th’ show / Against a sworder! I see men’s judgements are / A parcel of [consistent with]

their fortunes, and things outward / Do draw the inward quality after them / To suffer all alike [to decay together]. That he should dream, / Knowing all measures, the full Ceasar will / Answer his emptiness!” (III,13; 28-35).

ENOBARBUS: “When valour preys on reason / It eats the sword it fights with”

(III,13;201-202)

ANTONY: “Now all labour / Mars what it does; yea, the very force entangles / Itself with strength” [strength defeats itself by its own exertions]” (IV, 15, 47-49)

ANTONY: “I am conqueror of myself” (IV,15; 62)

CLEO: “none but Antony should conquer Antony” (IV,16;18) “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (IV,16, 59-60).

DECRETAS: “that self hand / Which writ his honour in the acts it did / Hath, with the courage which the heart did lend it, / Splitted the heart” (V,1;23-25)

CLEO: “Nature wants stuff / To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine / An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy, Condemning shadows quite” [Nature lacks material to compete with imagination, but this time it is Nature which imagines and creates an Antony and thus Nature outstrips even fancy].

Shall we, then, call Antony and Cleopatra the tragedy of metaphors, i.e. where we may witness to the tragic end of metaphor itself? In the light of other conflicts one may detect in the tragedy, the answer seems to be “yes”. Here is a random list of conflicts which might be responsible for metaphor’s “suicide”: the conflict between the “lack” (the “vacuum”, the

“emptiness”) of Antony, (cf. “Wash the congealment from your wounds, and kiss / The honoured gashed whole” [IV,9; 9-10]) and the “fullness” of Ceasar; the conflict between old age and youth (Antony and Ceasar); the conflict between the Universe (“melt Egypt into the Nile”[II,5; 78]) and the frailty (mortality) of the human being; the conflict between love and death (death as a piquant, never-tasted desire, cf. “Eros, ho!” IV,13, 49; ANT. “I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t / Ads a lover’s bed” IV, 15; 99-101); the conflict between. fancy and ‘reality’ (mimesis within mimesis; cf. ANTONY: “and I fall / Under this plot” (IV,13;49); CLEO: “The quick comedian / Extemporally [in improvised manner] will stage us, and present / Our Alexandrian revels. Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see ? Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore” (V,2;212-217); the conflict between “privatising” the world and the “withdrawal” of the world: the world not returning Antony’s love for it, and Cleopatra creating the theatre (the illusion) which still returns that love. The world can, at best be artificially re-created but reality and illusion not only annihilate each other but they annihilate themselves, too.

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Chapter 9

Jacobean Drama