The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra : Asps amidst the Figs 9781498510370, 9781498510363

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The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

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The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra Asps amidst the Figs

William F. Zak

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zak, William F., 1945– The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra : asps amidst the figs / William F. Zak. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-1036-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4985-1037-0 (electronic) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Antony and Cleopatra—Criticism, Textual. 2. Antonius, Marcus, 83 B.C.?–30 B.C.—In literature. 3. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, –30 B.C.—In literature. 4. Egypt—In literature. 5. Rome—In literature. I. Title. PR2802.Z35 2015 822.3'3—dc23 2014047129

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter 1

Introduction

1

Chapter 2

The Immortal Worm: Caesar Augustus

19

Chapter 3

A Wounded Chance: Marc Antony

59

Chapter 4

An Honoured Gash: Cleopatra

113

Works Cited

155

Index

159

About the Author

163

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Acknowledgments

I am incalculably indebted to the many scholars and critics who have awakened me to the complexities of this marvelous play, most notably J. Leeds Barroll whose work on it has been foundational for those of us hoping to build on his careful excavations. Likewise especially influential in clarifying for me the play’s inner dynamics have been the rich commentaries fashioned by Paul Cantor and John Alvis. Ewan Fernie, another distinguished critic of Antony and Cleopatra, has offered me counsel and encouragement on this project as generously as he did on my recent book about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Christine Smith and Susan Hill, both excellent former students, saw to the manuscript’s preparation with unfailing good humor and consummate skill. Most of all I wish to thank my dear friend and colleague of more than forty years now, Tony Whall, who reviewed with a conscientious editorial eye every paragraph I’ve written in this study. Even more importantly he has unfailingly graced our friendship’s countless moments of majestic instancy with “sheer morning gladness at the brim.” One could not ask for a more welcome companion in life’s journeying.

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Flattery, Contempt, and True Good Will In the protean discourse that the sonnets of Shakespeare variously voice, Sonnet 103 may initially appear to be a welcome oasis of simplicity. ALack what poverty my Muse brings forth, That having such a skope to show her pride, The argument all bare is of more worth Then when it hath my added praise beside. Oh blame me not if I no more can write! Looke in your glasse and there appeares a face, That over-goes my blunt invention quite, Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace. Were it not sinfull then striving to mend, To marre the subject that before was well, For to no other passe my verses tend, Then of your graces and your gifts to tell. And more, much more then in my verse can sit, Your owne glasse showes you, when you looke in it.1

As in most of the sonnets collectively assumed to have been written to a fair young man, this poem’s addressee is but vaguely and mysteriously identified as a figure of surpassing beauty. Equally familiar to readers of any representative grouping of the sonnets is the appearance in this poem of a curious speaking voice so preoccupied with self-deprecation before the beloved that 1

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it may appear to border on the pathological. Here, specifically, in a gambit common to the traditional epideictic repertoire of praise, the poet confesses that his language is in no way adequate to his desire to praise; his art—however notable its merits otherwise—can prove nothing but a dismal failure in its effort to do justice to the extent of the beloved’s beatific “graces and . . . gifts.” The arts of poetic embellishment and ornament can only gild the lily of the beloved’s natural beauty—the “argument all bare” with which the poet had begun as his raw material; indeed, he seems to have concluded that his efforts at enhancement of the beloved’s image may actually have done more harm than the good he intended (“marr[ing] the subject that before was well”). Consequently, the dispirited speaker is ready to concede, though not without suspiciously outlandish flattery, that his art is a dimmer reflection of the beloved’s radiance than any mirror that limns its shadow. Were it not for several false notes in the glib and easy melancholy of this song of praise, jarring notes that insinuate a wholly different and more intriguing story, that would be all there is to tell here. The tale seems little else but a tired iteration of traditional sonnet billet-doux, in which private expressions of feeling are proudly paraded before the cornered reading public by a breast-beating versifier enshrining himself and his peerless beloved in a rhetoric safely sealed off from risk of cavil or obligation to verify the truth value of its grandiose claims. The import of the sonnet would appear to be no more substantive than this vaguely gratifying reflection of the speaker’s “love”—both the indistinct addressee he lauds and his own feeling for that beloved—luminously, if insubstantially mirrored in his art’s glossy surface. The tell-tale cracks in this “glasse,” however, hint of sub-surface pressures threatening to shatter completely the flattering image of perfection such a text would appear to present to the world. Perhaps the most obvious flaw in this mirror is the simple fact that the very inadequacy of language and art to which the speaker confesses in his attempt to record the beloved’s graces and gifts is, paradoxically, only communicated in the poem by that very language and art. Moreover, the poem would suddenly embody a wryly comical narcissism if the speaker’s auditor were actually to take the speaker’s advice, shelve his poetry and smugly gaze instead into his own mirror whenever he seeks sufficiently ample confirmation of his (or her) peerless beauty. This addressee’s narcissistic comic persona breaks the surface of the reflecting pool once again if we should chance to hear in the words “blame me not if I no more can write” a possible hint that the beloved may well be the demanding source of the obligatory praise imposed on the poet, an imposition that has finally driven the writer to humiliating confessions of his own inadequacies and exhaustion under the beloved’s whip. No matter how incomparable the

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beloved’s physical beauty may be, could he or she deserve the kind of praise lavished here if the earnest provider of it needs to endure the danger of losing favor should those praises not pass muster for the skill or regularity of their presentation? One would think that especially in matters of the heart, it is the thought that counts—at least to those who love in return. Were the beloved who is addressed in this poem able to turn away from the frustration and sadness of the speaker in his efforts to sing the beloved’s praises, only to contemplate his or her mirror image in self-satisfaction, that beloved would appear to be as unthinkably egoistic and hard-hearted as a mother turning away from her child’s gift of a portrait of her because it did not do her justice. One might justifiably object, of course, that this may press the case against the addressee far harder than the evidence conclusively warrants. But even if we were to concentrate our attentions exclusively on the frustration evident in the poem’s speaker, the piece complicates itself intriguingly. If one does not needlessly undermine the sole and exclusive authority of the Q manuscript by modernizing the poem’s punctuation and the spelling of “then” in lines 4, 12, and 13, the sonnet can readily be seen to redouble its meaning in the magical manner of a disconcerting figureground painting.2 In such a reading the speaker’s frustration proves to be not with himself or his art, but with the addressee’s inadequate response to that art’s substantial merits. In the interest of concision, we might summarize this alternative reading in the following paraphrase: How unfortunate (“ALack”) that my art evokes such an impoverished response (“A Lack”), an art that possesses such potentiality for distinction and value when properly appreciated and celebrated. A summary of the thematic framework of the poem (its “argument”) is significantly enhanced when a reader realizes the subtler dimensions of the rhetorical ornament I offer to deepen and enrich its praises. Don’t blame me if the essence and depths of my work are not clearer. Look in your own mirror if you really want to determine the source of that problem; for if you do not appreciate the full artistry of my work you must be one of those readers who inattentively skim over (“overgoes”) my poetic “inventions,” depriving my lines of their richer import and making my work seem but shamefully simplistic, even banal. Isn’t it arbitrary and shameful on your part to construe my wit in your simple-minded way when my meaning was clear enough before you started trifling with it? In your boundless self-conceit you imagine that my sole purpose in writing, I suppose, could only be to glorify your talents, most notably those being practiced in your self-congratulatory simplification of this very poem. From your smug point of view, whatever subtler meaning may reside in my verse can remain buried there, uncomprehended by you, because whatever you look upon—

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whether it be books or mirrors—merely provides you with a self-gratifying reflection of yourself that you never tire of fatuously contemplating.

This or some variation on the same embittered and ironic theme (in effect, a mocking put-down of the kind of reader who could construe the poem in its ‘obvious’ former sense) forms the negative pole of what we can now see is a binary opposition in the way the poem could be construed, seemingly rendering the sonnet a contradiction in terms. In one light, the poem is a confession of the speaker’s inadequacies as a poet before the exalted object of his devotion; in another, it is a mocking critique by a most self-confident poet-speaker dressing down his auditor for the inadequacy, not of the poet’s art, but of the addressee’s response to that art. Depending upon the perspective from which we choose to view it, the poem represents an epideictic rhetoric of hyperbolic praise or one of scathing blame, an exercise in flattery or contempt, mel or sal, dulce or aspro. The diametrically opposed voices the poem invites us to hear would seem to violate the very law of contradiction were it not for a subtle identity in the speaker’s stance toward his unspecified and conveniently silenced interlocutor in both cases. In each of these readings of the sonnet, the speaker legitimates and espouses narcissism as an ideal and beneficial attitude to take toward the world, not the wasteful delusion that it truly is. In the first reading, the narcissism is explicitly urged upon the auditor; in the second, it silently emanates from the speaker. In the bitterness of his contempt, the poet-speaker of the latter reading proves, in the final analysis, as much of a narcissist as the addressee he berates for self-absorption and smug interpretive self-satisfaction. For the idle amusement of those as contemptuous of his fellows as he is, his poem merely tells a mean-spirited in-joke on narcissistic readers too dim-witted to recognize that the jest is on them. Neither the first reading’s obsequious flattery of the addressee nor the incivility of the second’s mocking contempt speak with a wisdom that is likely to command an attentive reader’s judicious respect. If we allow them to trouble us sufficiently, these ambiguities in the ethos of the speaker urge us to return to the poem to learn whether we can discover there some way to resolve the interpretive impasse the poem dramatizes. It would be heartening to hear a voice that could wisely mediate between the extremes of flattery and contempt. Figuratively speaking, we would—if we could—make out the voice of true good Will, a generous and kindly voice coterminous with true good will itself. And surprisingly, the voice of true good Will/will is indeed to be found just where we left it, there where it has been waiting patiently for our loving return to the greater favor it can show

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us. The true Shakespearean voice of good will/Will, it turns out, does not care to dally with the shallow and subtly self-seeking art of empty flattery of others nor does it delight in self-satisfied expressions of contempt for them. It breathes and speaks contentedly in the pure atmosphere of its own and our graciousness and gifts exchanged, in what the poem calls, emphasizing good will’s supererogatory essence, “my added praise beside.” Such “added praise” can refer to the grateful praise as readers we offer in solidarity with good Will for the witty benefices his genius continues to multiply in us. But it could just as readily refer to true good Will’s grateful and lavish praise of readers’ latent and as yet unspecified “graces and . . . gifts” as well. The poet fully appreciates that it is alone readers who can re-cognize, re-vivify and, indeed, literally resurrect the spirit of good will/Will he has shared with us through verse. As Sonnets 71 and 74 affirm, Death can have no dominion over sweet good Will/will, even though the poet’s person must ever remain but an inert being “compounded . . . with clay” (71: 10), so long as “my spirit is thine the better part of me” (74: 8), so long as the poet desires that his own egoistic “I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot.” (71: 7) When sweet good Will speaks to us of flattery in Sonnet 103, it is not to flatter us; it is, instead, a well-intentioned effort to help us realize anew that praise is hollow unless it is “praise deserv’d.” (2: 9) When the Bard seemingly makes fun of us for our inadequate attention to his work, it need not be from arrogant pique; it could be from a desire to convey yet more of his true good will hidden there awaiting our delighted discovery. If the speaker in 103 hopes to “bring forth” through his intercourse with his readers more than the “poverty” (103: 1) he deplores or else merely some sadly misshapen thing, he must gently lead his readers on through a series of ravishing poetical delights until, with a gasp of satisfaction and recognition, we get some inkling of his true likeness and living progeny within ourselves. Such intercourse with him does not merely produce some vain ‘spitting image’ of himself spawned from the Bard’s egoistic self-regard nor even some exact but lifeless replication of his own thoughts in us, however insightful. It means to give birth to a far more loving and animated thing than that, a more lively and revivifying ‘likeness’ gestating within us until it is ready to be delivered into the world to take on a life of its own. (As Sonnet 115 reminds us, “love”—or, in other words, true good will/Will—“is a babe.” [13]) Lines 11 and 12, for example—“For to no other passe my verses tend, / Then of your graces and your gifts to tell”—need not be construed as shameless flattery or withering sarcasm; the lines might well be an earnest and heart-felt expression of the poet’s best intentions toward us, though in such a reading the “graces and . . . gifts” he desires to laud almost certainly have

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nothing to do with a natural inheritance we have neither earned or cultivated, but have everything to do with those graces and gifts we can develop, multiply, and share from within ourselves to our greater benefit. If we can imagine that 103’ s speaker may not be making fun of our inadequate attention to his verse to mock us, but for our own good so that further excavation might yet unearth richer treasures still buried there, then the couplet, too, begins to sing a more expansive and sweeter song. No longer a diminishment and deprecation of the speaker’s art and himself nor a belittlement and deprecation of the poet’s readers, the couplet now amply shares and celebrates a common wealth. The last line’s “glasse” need not represent a narcissist’s mirror but, rather, good Will’s poetry itself—on the analogy of The Mirror for Magistrates a kind and deeply reflective Mirror for Lovers and Readers.3 What and how that poetic mirror “showes you when you look in it” (103: 14) is what “more, much more” (13) lies awaiting our generous engagement in our selves’ discoveries about ourselves there, awakenings that again and again bring us, not to self-satisfied, narcissistic reflections on ourselves but to awakenings that perpetually bring us ‘back to life’ and to what life may yet mean for us, even as, in doing so, they also miraculously bring the dead poet back to life as well. That may well be the only resurrection he truly yearns for, one lost in your sweet thoughts, one doubly lost in the sweet thought of you. The true likeness of the poet generated in this congress with his readers is, then, a deeply internalized realization about where genuine good Will/will can only flourish now, in his true spirit renewing itself within us, viva voce, and what that living voice’s proper praise of human graces and gifts, in turn, commits us to. It is not enough for Shakespeare that the poet’s true likeness simply communicate a lifelessly inert mental ‘conception’; it must deliver into the world a new birth of good Will/will in our very persons.  By means of this intercourse  the Bard  means to re-incarnate in his readers’ lives his loving disposition to the world, his fellows, and the time being he still shares with us, his death and bodily decay having failed to silence these poems’ endlessly circulating celebration and appreciation of life. Such is THAT. ETERNITY. PROMISED. BY.  OUR [and (H)OUR] EVER-LIVING. POET. in the epigraph to the entire sequence.

II The Matrix of Tropes I have prefaced this examination of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, one of Shakespeare’s most powerful meditations on love and its betrayal,

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with a discussion of Sonnet 103 because in that sonnet’s brief compass a configuration of metaphors central to our impending discussion neatly articulates itself, the tropes conveniently assembled there for our ready comprehension and recall. Shakespeare repeatedly utilizes this same body of tropes to elaborate his anatomy of desire (or ‘will’), writing, as we have just seen in Sonnet 103, his own personal signature almost literally upon a series of related works.4 Beginning with Venus and Adonis, continuing throughout the sonnet collection, and culminating in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare situates the problematics of eros (the problematics of desire and Will/will) in the context of a persistent tension between the cold standoffishness of a most eligible, if fastidious, young man (Adonis, the Fair Young Man, and Octavius Caesar), emblems one and all of Narcissism, and a hot-blooded, darkly colored female figure associated, by stark contrast, with a wholly enthusiastic, perhaps even indiscriminate pursuit of sexual gratification (Venus, the Dark Lady, and Cleopatra), emblems all, loosely speaking, of Lust. (Though each of these figures individually represents a most difficult challenge to the moral imagination’s powers of identification and comprehension, that challenge compounds itself even further when Shakespeare forces us to contemplate the symbolic fact that each of these ‘Vice’ figures ever threatens to enter into perverse collusion with the other. The befuddled Will/will must not only determine its relationship to Narcissism and Lust, respectively, it must also mull the fact that Narcissism, despite its squeamishness, secretly enjoys its own form of Lust and that Lust regularly mingles licentiously with Narcissism.) It is the poet’s desire in these three studies of love to present these two equally self-defeating attitudes toward life in the flesh as a binary opposition, a persistently moot dramatic tension unsuccessfully mediated, when it is mediated at all. In Venus and Adonis no third party appears to broker the lovers’ clash of wills; only the deadly (emblematically libidinal) boar’s tusk sunders the dramatic stalemate between them, mortally wounding Adonis and leaving Venus woefully embittered. The ever struggling and changeably constant Will, Shakespeare’s persona in the sequence (identified by name in Sonnet 135, 136 and 143 and, by means of a quibble on that name which Booth notes [Shakespeare’s Sonnets 466], likewise identified as the erotic drive itself) makes over 150 attempts to negotiate beneficial relationships to the dark lady, the fair young man, and even to the pair of them when he suspects they have together betrayed him in each other’s arms. Though he may have his moments of seeming happiness and contentment with them, by and large, however, his place and stance between them as well as before them individually and in traitorous tandem remains deeply conflicted, indeed, more

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often than not, torturing—and what’s worse, torturing in inconclusive ways. Any narrative of the relationships involved in the sequence that we might patch together has a most curious inertness of movement and a pitiful lack of closure. We have, for example, no idea whether the sonnet speaker was finally successful in his efforts to mediate between the fair young man and the world’s yearning and need for his marital involvement in it. We are likewise never certain whether the speaker ever successfully mediated between the simultaneous attraction and repulsion he feels whenever he considers his relationship to the dark lady. Nor are we privy to whether his poetic efforts to console himself for his experiences of betrayal and woundedness in his relationship to these shadowy figures gave him any genuine peace even for the moment during which he formulated his rationalizations and conciliations, let alone thereafter when such verbal placebos had to weather the test of challenging further experiences. In Antony and Cleopatra we are left with comparable uncertainty about the mingled authenticity and inauthenticity of Antony’s commitments in his continuing struggle to determine where his allegiance of will should lie. Forced to mediate between his fair young man and dark lady, just as, from time to time, he, too, must contemplate the torturing possibility that together they might betray him, Antony cannot seem to find sure footing in his place between the things he desires, at once attracted and repulsed, on one side, by his Roman affiliations and the imperial spirit embodied in the “fair young” Caesar and, on the other, alternately attracted and repulsed by his hot-blooded dark lady tempting him to sensual oblivion. As we shall see, he goes to his death struggling inconclusively with these wavering allegiances: not mediating successfully between them, but tragically victimized by his divided and half-hearted commitments to each of these corrupting lures to his feckless spirit. Whatever satisfying sense any of these works may make depends completely on the extent to which we as readers can manage, as we do in Sonnet 103, to discern some fruitful mediation between the mutually competing polarities these works seemingly leave suspended in tension. For the speaker in the sonnets, for Antony and Cleopatra in the drama of their lives, and for all readers of these mirroring fictions, the mediational challenge is to determine where true good will/Will lies—where, in short, love lies—and once we determine where that might be, how to keep loving desire from being wholly compromised by or mistaken for its corrupted facsimiles, Narcissism and Lust. Narcissism, the cunningly hidden self-absorption so readily apparent in Vanity, and Lust, the imperious desire for possession of another that cunningly masquerades as the daimon, Eros, itself, are both corrupt mimics of Love hoping to avoid detection by taking full advantage of protective coloration.

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True good will must somehow manage to steer safely between the false good will involved in empty flattery of ourselves and others, on one side, and the true ill will of silent contempt for ourselves and our fellows on the other. The endlessly difficult mediational challenge is, in other words, to find some way—a spiritual quest Antony and Cleopatra never embark upon—to redeem the subtle concupiscence of the human spirit, to vanquish “the breath of the venomous cockatrice which hath infected the whole off-spring of Adam . . ., the sting of that old Serpent”: the self-regarding will itself.5 As we are about to see, in the sterile and needlessly self-restraining relationship between Antony and Cleopatra the sting of this old Serpent ever continues to masquerade as a “lover’s pinch, / Which hurts , and is desir’d” (5. 2. 294–95), a most alluring pinch and subtle sting that “kills and pains not” (5. 2. 244) as it injects its deadly poison. The “glasse” in which we view the experience of these celebrated lovers ought not finally be a vanity mirror before which we simply fool ourselves—cosmetically—in a wish-fulfilling fantasy identification with them; it should instead be Shakespeare’s more deeply reflective book, that Mirror for Lovers in which we avail ourselves of the opportunity to take a long hard look at ourselves and our tendency to generate self-flattering expectations of love aping the lovers’ grand illusions about themselves.6

III The Shakespearean Stance Just as in the case of Venus and Adonis or the dark lady and the fair young man of the sonnet sequence, the seemingly extreme nature of the opposition between the values of Egypt and Rome in Antony and Cleopatra has a curious and bedeviling effect. It does not clarify the nature of the values under dispute so much as it undermines, by turns, an audience’s sympathy for each party to the conflict Shakespeare depicts in dramatic tension.7 It is little wonder that critics who have identified themselves in too unqualified a way with either the Roman or the Egyptian perspective in the play have not been able to win a substantial number of satisfied converts to either partisanship. For the characters in this play and its audience, events never seem to live up to the rhetoric of their advanced billing. All praise—and there is so much of it here—rings hollow when it is never free of questions of self-flattery or ulterior motive; and no blame, however venomous, can be taken with complete seriousness when it is consistently compromised by blind prejudice, panic rage, or attitudinizing and is therefore never honestly offered in response to principle.

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The dramatic experience of the play’s action consistently undermines and even mocks any high-sounding formulation of the opposition between Egypt and Rome as a pitched battle between love and honor, the loving couple’s commanding passions and Caesar’s temperate restraint, or the individual’s yearning for personal satisfactions set against the social demand for a disciplined life of public responsibility. Readers, even those by and large sympathetic to their side in the dispute with Rome, have repeatedly been forced to concede that the lovers’ passion for one another, if thoroughly intense, is far from unqualified and rarely if ever unambiguously admirable, doggedly shadowed as it is by calculation, worldliness, and dissipation: by Cleopatra’s relentlessly manipulative manner and Antony’s irresolute oscillation between his attraction to and repulsion from his mistress.8 For his part, Caesar’s temperance, if habitual, is anything but a restraint on his own brand of perverse excesses. Indeed, Antony and Cleopatra’s loving passion has no temperance; and Caesar and Rome’s temperance, no love.9 The couple’s conception of love, what Cleopatra identifies as “mirth” (1. 3. 4) to distinguish it from the call to duty of “a Roman thought” (1. 2. 75–76; 1. 3. 4), more often than not turns out to be nothing more than a round of trifling extravagances, coy manipulation, and self-flattering rhetorical overcompensation sung to her public in the face of her lover’s all too common absence from her physical embrace. As for the legendary Roman sense of duty (in this twilight of the republic’s abrupt decline into crass imperialism), it seems little more than a self-justifying pretext for willful imperiousness. A life of “honor” in this play imposes no commitment to a principled cultural ideal of any kind whatsoever but only to “power dignified by high self-respect.” (Brower 330)10 So self-important are these Roman generals dueling among themselves for preeminence and world dominion, so completely unconcerned are they with law and custom (Cantor 201) or the social repercussions of their mutual aggressions that piracy seems a much more accurate term than statesmanship to describe their activities.11 So decadently concentrated is political power here that Menas does not in any way overstate the case when he informs Pompey that he can become the ruler of all the known world if, having ‘slipped its moorings,’ he simply sinks the barge on which his self-intoxicated partners in excess carouse. Both at Rome and in Egypt, among warriors and lovers alike, the play’s action reveals little more than an ongoing siege of trumped up conflicts and diseased truces among its principal antagonists (Danby 141); the “wars” seem less an honorable contest between love and duty than they do a pervasively corrupted free-for-all between vices: between self-regarding personal passion

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and the ambition to political preeminence at whatever cost in human life; between willful self-assertion and celebrity, however hollow; between erotic indulgence and lawless geopolitical imperium; between flattery and disgust; between those who trade in love and those who trade in war—in a word, between flesh and the world (Danby 140), with devilishness in different costumes secretly taking every part in the gaudy theatrical pageantry. We can no more get completely comfortable with viewing the lovers as sublime heroes than we can with ridiculing them as besotted fools. We cannot trust the shabby rhetorical deification of the lovers voiced in the questionable sincerity of the praise Octavius offers in his brief eulogy for them at the play’s close any more than we can trust the condemnation Philo directs at them as “strumpet” and “fool” at the play’s inception. Octavius and Philo, both exclusively and provincially Roman in their perspective, are not intimate enough with the broader world of the lovers’ experience to comment with trustworthy comprehension upon it. Our wider familiarity with their lives and love insures, however, that we will not wholly credit Octavius’s self-serving description of them as martyrs for love either, if only because we realize he is perpetuating the lovers’ grand illusion about themselves as a convenient fabrication by which he can manipulate Roman public opinion in his favor. If it works, he can deflect any possible blame for his vicious part in hunting down his newly enshrined divinities of love like beasts. On the other hand, their interactions and mutual yearning to live (or at least die) nobly likewise assures that we do not simply settle into an unsympathetically censorious view of the lovers as whore and her dupe either, though. It should be conceded, then, that each alternative point of view makes it impossible to view the lovers either as they view themselves or as the Romans do with settled conviction. Yet the alternative that would appear to be the only other conceivable response to them, a deftly balanced, fencestraddling ambivalence—doubting the value of their love as profoundly as we believe in it, praising them as much as we blame them—proves just as untenable as simple praise or blame, despite its current critical vogue.12 It has not to my knowledge been sufficiently acknowledged in the criticism of the play that Shakespeare has so arranged matters that should we not feel any compelling need to decide whether theirs is (sooner or later) a world well lost for love or else a disastrous moral degeneration in which personal responsibility yields completely to ruinous self-indulgence, then by default we will have entered the same ominous quandary and self-division destroying Antony. In our assessment of Antony and Cleopatra, are we at liberty to waver and drift, like the aging hero, in self-division and shifting allegiances until, like him, a

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“vagabond flag” upon the “varying tide” of his fortunes and fickle affiliations, washing from Rome to Egypt and then from Egypt to Rome and back again, we, too, simply “rot [ourselves] with motion”? (1. 4. 45–47) Though siding neither with their own view of themselves nor with the mean-spirited and narrowly moralistic ‘Roman’ condemnation of them, this book makes a case for the claim that Shakespeare’s attitude toward the lovers is unambiguous. If the most subtle and helpful readings of the play tend to become irresolutely divided in their view of the metaphysical value of the lovers’ relationship to one another, the poet himself is not so. For him the play, like the sonnet sequence, is a study in the difference between Love and its shabby, acquisitive relations, Narcissism and Lust, colluding with one another to rob Love of the wealth it has to share.13 It is a study in the difference between true good will’s high and steadfast faith and the corrupting and corruptible union in both Antony and his queen between mutual flattery (false good will) and hidden contempt for one another (true ill will). This exchange of flatteries and unknowing contempt constitutes an insidious coupling by which they betray one another and themselves from start to finish until in death they can go on no more. In Sonnet 1’s warning against the dangers of narcissism and lust, the two disastrously related ways by which beauty’s “Rose” (2) may be possessively hoarded and destroyed, the poet identifies the difference between love and these two corrupted facsimiles of love as the difference between “increase” (1), on the one hand, and “making a famine where aboundance lies” (7), on the other. In the former case, the symbolic Rose’s lovely hybrid progeny, lineal descendant of Dante’s multifoliate rose, is generously cultivated so that it may bloom indefinitely (“never die” [2]) and, by means of the gardener’s grafts, in infinite variations. In the latter case, the possessive spirit, Self-will, lacking the gardener’s love for cultivation and turned inward on itself in misguided desire and/or fear, succeeds only in taking the bloom (“thine owne bud” [11]) off the rose. (The words “buriest thy content” [11] magically convey both the possessive hoarding in such acts against one’s own greater potential value and the nagging discontent awakened idiomatically once the ‘bloom is off the rose’). When its own blooming has thus been deprived of its sole source of continuing nurture, the miserly soul’s only recourse in its self-imposed isolation is to watch helplessly as its own glorious “bud,” ever closed in upon itself, wastes away to lifelessness, having made a famine where abundance lies. In Shakespeare’s wondrous adaptation of the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30), lovers either happily multiply the goods they are given or in possessive desire/fear, suspecting one another and the genuineness of their

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own blessed opportunities, they hoard the little they begin with in vainly self-protecting and self-satisfied hope, only to behold even that taken away from them in the end. For all their sensitivity to fear, they simply suffer diminishment, themselves cast out from their inner darkness to an “outer darkness” where there is now but open “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (25:30) Their weeping and gnashing of teeth is not solely a reflection of the fear they endured in the past regarding what they might lose, nor even for what in the present they have now in fact lost; it is likewise a sign of their bitter regret for the wasted time and energy expended in the vain effort to prevent that loss. Were it not that we so haplessly forget or ignore the profundity of this wisdom, its lesson would seem to be unmistakably obvious. Whether from vain, self-protective fear of loss, or vain narcissistic self-absorption, or the vanity of lust’s jealous possessiveness, “Beauty within itself should not be wasted.” (Venus & Adonis 130) Figuratively speaking, its doing so is the most insidious and deeply seated canker in the symbolic Rose. It is the unseen disease limiting and even maiming the fullness of the rose’s blossoming. Love’s beautiful bounty blossoms infinitely; the impoverishment of Lust eats away at it. As Shakespeare delineates the matter in Venus and Adonis: Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun; Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done. (799–802)

As we are about to see in Antony and Cleopatra, Lust’s selfish passion for possession of the other, and Narcissism, masquerading as good will and genuine feeling for one another, aridly couple with the self-protective fear of loss to urge the lovers to hold on for dear life to the stunted and diminished portion of each ‘other’ they mistakenly think they can secure when they might more profitably have reached out together in search of the fullness of love’s blossoming. Their vanities (all some occluded form of concupiscence, the sting of the old Serpent) feed the unseen canker in the Rose, disfiguring the love they could have enjoyed and multiplied in concert. Were we to view their drama for the moment with an inhumanly clinical eye, it would tell a withering tale of aging lovers dissipating themselves, living in ever more pinched and reduced circumstances until, gravely spent, they merely die off inconsequentially. Love does not multiply through them; it only diminishes itself. Both knowingly and unknowingly, the lovers diminish one another; and even their genuine passion for each other only serves to diminish their union, not because that passion is unreal or insincere, but

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because it does not even begin to plumb what they might have meant to each other. Instead of showing love’s true good will toward one another, they knowingly and unknowingly treat one another with a poisonous mixture of flattery and contempt. Though surrounded and indeed even rooted in the bounteous fertility of the Nile delta, Antony and his queen can only manage together to generate “famine where aboundance lies.” In the words of Ovid’s Narcissus, the father of their line, the rich desire for one another they enjoy is but a plenty that makes them poor (inopem me copia faecit). Not Cleopatra alone, but she and her lover together make themselves (and their audiences) hungry where most they satisfy. Lest the narrowly moralistic find too much encouragement in this, one should hasten to add that the problem lies not with their sensuality and passion, nor even with eros itself.14 It is not desire which destroys them but a eunuch-like incompleteness of their intercourse in it. The sting of the old Serpent is not a problem because it is desire, but because the object of that desire is not a personal good but possession of it, an imperialistic and acquisitive power over it: a self-regard, at once narcissistic and lustful, that has insufficient regard for persons—not only the person of the ‘other’ but, even more ironically, insufficient regard for its own person in the grotesquely prodigious self-regard that alone they entertain. For each of the play’s lovers, “th[e] selfe” becomes “th[e] foe to thy sweet selfe, too, cruel.” (1: 8)15 For Antony and Cleopatra, sadly, an abundantly fruitful congress lies tantalizingly close to hand, yet they know not to reach for it. The universe of the male and that of the female, priapic ‘Roman’ monumentality and the gynarchic power of Egypt’s regular cyclic floods passing through the Nile’s alluvial delta do touch one another, literally and figuratively, and even at times mingle intimately; but they never form a more perfect union, instead making defect seem like perfection itself.16 Passion exerts her charm, but the seeming honor, valor, and restraint of the Roman male, though responsive to her allure, also continue to abuse her in contempt. But had the symbolic marriage and interanimating congress of these mighty opposites ever transpired, the miraculous birth of a new heaven and earth would indeed have come to pass in reality, not merely remained Antony’s rhetorical demand for a new venue for their theater of passion and celebrity.17 If passion had genuinely married honor, Antony and Cleopatra’s sizzling liaison would have yielded a dignity it never comes to sustain; and, conversely, the empty Roman sense of honor, most notable in Antony, would have discovered a badly needed devotion to a worthy purpose. If love had truly wed valor, then war could never have been waged in the play in the

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unfeeling, merely self-aggrandizing way we see it waged but always instead with human benefits and its human cost in the forefront of the participants’ minds. Likewise, if valor had married love, then in the crises occurring in the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra, the lovers would have found ways to persist in fighting their way through them until some richer understanding of one another had been born. They would not, in mere mutual flattery, have pulled their punches with one another. In the tepid and overly cautious involvement with one another they live out, they would not so often and so profoundly have lost heart, subtly contemning each other and themselves. If the “mirror” were properly to be held “up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image,” then “passion,” as Hamlet rightly insisted, would be wed to “temperance.” (3. 2. 22–23, 7) Had that fruitful marriage occurred in Antony and Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar could not have been the triumphantly cold-blooded serpent the play relentlessly shows him to be; had temperance been united with their passion, Antony and his queen would not habitually have become that serpent’s ever weakening victims. Had their genuine passion matured into temperate love, it would not have witnessed the kind of reckless, self-destructive behaviors each exhibited to the other and not have made every effort to correct them. Monuments erected without the slightest regard for the anonymous but living flow of the countless generations who might live and shelter within them are empty tombs, a deserted Chapel Perilous forbidding the redemptive and healing discovery of the grail. Empty monuments are vacant shuttles that weave the wind. On the other hand, oblivious commitment to the sensuous flow of life, no matter how passionate its heat, leaves human beings in a comparable waste land unless it can be wed in its turn to the ‘male’ desire to build on it, harvest it in some way, and pass it on to loved ones as a living legacy. Unreflective commitments to the sheer flow of life merely yield what Frost described as the “stream of everything that runs away . . . To fill the abyss’s void with emptiness,” a “universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness.” (“West-Running Brook” 44; 49; 56)  So long as they are not fully engaged to each other, Antony and his Egyptian paramour are merely committed to a life of dissipation of their best energies, the promising seed they spread so lavishly doomed because they fail to cultivate it. Indeed, on the Nile delta, the very emblem of natural fertility, they merely generate a desert place. As we shall see in the following three chapters dedicated to detailed analysis of each of the play’s principal leads, the most salient feature of each of their characters is nothing at all constructive but rather a narcissistic hunger that feeds on itself.18

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Notes 1. Here and throughout, for reasons that will soon be explained, quotations from the sonnets will reference the unedited Q manuscript. Citations from Antony and Cleopatra are to Ribner’s revision of Kittredge’s 1936 edition of the play. 2. As Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 159 notes, “in Renaissance spellings ‘then’ and ‘than’ are interchangeable and both spellings are used to indicate both words.” 3. Or, alternatively, it may well allude to the “glass” or lens through which alone certain anamorphic paintings in the curious perspective tradition, paintings otherwise visually incomprehensible, can alone form a coherent image and sense. Cf. Gilman 39–40; 44. 4. In Sonnet 76, the poet-speaker muses rhetorically: Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keepe invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost sel [spell (?), tell (?), sell (?)] my name, Shewing their birth, and where they did proceed? (5–8)

The wit of line 7 extends further than its vaguely idiomatic sense that the poet’s style is recognizably his own. Not this sonnet alone, but the entire sequence, one and all, more figuratively still, spells out or tells of a single “name” as its recurrent theme: their speaker, in all he does and in all he desires or wishes, is none other than WillI-Am Shake-speare, ever and all the same no matter what variousness his feelings may manifest. Whether understood as flattery’s false good will or contempt’s true ill will or sweet love’s true good will, it is ever ‘Will/will,’ the nature and complexity of the speaker’s yearnings, that displays itself in poem after poem, both in the fair young man and in the dark lady sequences. Whether seemingly urging marriage and procreation to a friend or himself attempting to immortalize his beloved through poetry, it is ever the poetic Will/will, figuratively speaking, shaking or brandishing a spear— phallus or pen—in a quixotic crusade to “make war upon this bloody tyrant time.” (Sonnet 16: 2) (Evidence that a distinction is to be made between the poet’s wisdom and his poetic persona’s intentions in the sequence comes into focus if we observe that the Bard’s witty use of his patronymic may ironically imply a further reflection as well: there is a sizable chasm between the vain bravado of brandished weapons— rattling sabers, so to speak—and actually winning the war such gestures declare.) Cf. Roche 386–87, who also reads the identity of the speaker of the sonnets in figurative terms, though his interpretation of the figure differs profoundly from my own. 5. In Shakespearean Tragedy 246, Barroll cites this quotation from Arthur Golding as an illustration of the claim that the “devil was, by hoary tradition, a serpent” associated with “lust.” 6. When evaluating Cleopatra’s Act 5 idealization of Antony, Stephen Shapiro remarks that Cleopatra is, nevertheless, finally Cleopatra’s main concern. He sees her idealization as a form of “narcissistic self-inflation.” (25) Metadramatically, Shapiro’s comments would apply just as incisively to audiences as viewers of the lovers were we

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to identify with their glory subliminally in the same unreflectively self-consoling way Cleopatra does the dead Antony. 7. Nevo 310, for example, states a common perception about this matter uncommonly well. “This perpetual oscillation of the play between its two milieus provides for continual shifts in point of view and gives rise to the ‘differing and apparently irreconcilable evaluations of the central experience’ which the play embodies.” For Felperin “there is considerable interpenetration between its two rival constructs as they engage each other in a dialectic of mutual demystification. For each enables us to see the weakness or inadequacy of the other as a model of conduct. It is the Roman vision of the lovers as a pair of degenerate hedonists that reveals, against their own vision of themselves, how lacking in anything like a social morality is the neo-morality they stage. . . . Conversely, it is the lovers’ vision of the Romans [especially Octavius] as a gang of petty worldlings that reveals, against their own selfmythologization, how far short of their epic forbears these squabbling and treacherous Romans fall.” (109) 8. Alvis makes a point seldom emphasized: “the pattern of the love through the second half of the play bespeaks a series of abrupt heights and equally sudden depressions suggesting no development but only, on the part of Antony at least, a queasy waffling between perfervid devotion and absolute rejection.” (191) In “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” 271, Charnes notes in passing the common complaint among those who judge the lovers severely that their relationship is seriously undermined by misogyny on Antony’s part and manipulation on hers. 9. In The Common Liar 130, Adelman declares that love and temperance are “mighty opposites unmingled” in Caesar and Cleopatra, the equally self-confident adversaries battling for Antony’s ever divided soul. Cf. Bayley 98. 10. Dollimore 252 quotes Sejanus, “A prince’s power makes all his actions virtue” (III. 717), to suggest that in the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus virtue is not “the source and ethical legitimation of power,” rather “the reverse is true.” For Ornstein, in the Rome of the play, “it is difficult to say whether a Roman thought is of duty or disloyalty.” (87) 11. Dollimore is one of the few critics to emphasize properly the redoubled social cost of the sudden emergence of Roman imperial rule and its symbolic linkage to the love affair between Antony and Cleopatra. “Octavia speaks of the consequence of war between Caesar and Antony being as if ‘the world should cleave, and that slain men / Should solder up the cleave.’ (III. iv. 31–32; cf. III. xiii. 180–81; IV. xii. 41–42; IV. xiv. 17–18) It is a simple yet important truth: . . . to kiss away kingdoms is to kiss away also the lives of thousands.” (258) On the motif of piracy, cf. Barroll, Shakespearean Tragedy 250–51 and Battenhouse 175, both of whom cite proverbial wisdom as ancient as Cicero and Augustine linking rule without justice or benignity to piracy, the pillage of lawless thieves. 12. Felperin 111 speaks for the reigning orthodoxy: “The play cannot finally bring moral resolution out of what remains a double image, but it is precisely in its moral irresolution that its mimetic fidelity consists.” Cf. Danby for another incisive

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account of the play’s seemingly irresolvable dialectic of suspended judgment. Cf. Rosenberg’s posthumously published review of the divided judgment in the critical community throughout. 13. Alvis is the only critic I know to have made an explicit connection between the “erotic experience” of the lovers and “another ideal of love evident from the sonnets and comedies.” For him, too, “the lovers certainly transcend the Roman World . . . but at the same time the limits of their love are exposed, not so much by their Roman opponents as by their own actions.” (185) 14. Bernard Shaw’s abstemious rant still entertains: “after giving a faithful picture of a soldier broken down by debauchery, and the typical wanton in whose arms such men perish, Shakespeare finally strains all his huge command of rhetoric and stage pathos to give a theatrical sublimity to the wretched end of the business, and to persuade foolish spectators that the world was well lost by the twain.” (716) Fitz enumerates a wide variety of the more censorious evaluations of the lovers in her review of the history of critical reaction to Cleopatra. 15. I have added punctuation not evident in the Q manuscript version of this line so as to accentuate for the moment the single reading of this line I wish to foreground here. 16. Ornstein 88 contrasts Rome’s “enduring monumentality” with Egypt’s “melting evanescence.” Cf. Nevo 310–11. A more perfect union sought is a way to “make defect perfection” (2. 2. 231) that in their respective self-satisfactions neither Antony nor Cleopatra ever realize as an ideal possibility. 17. In “Spies and Whispers” 140, Charnes argues that for the lovers a new heaven and a new earth are not spiritual prophecy of apocalyptic transformation but “colonial images of new territories.” For them, “thinking in any terms other than those of an acquisitive expansionism seems to be impossible.” 18. At the end of Act 5 the lovers find themselves no closer to the consummation of the spiritual union they claim to wish devoutly than they were at the end of Act 1, ironically. Despite ample and recurrent yearning for one another, at the end as at the beginning their “separation so abides and flies” that they remain neither conjoined nor divorced. Cantor anticipates me in suggesting that in death the lovers are not united, not separated. (180)

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CHAPTER TWO

The Immortal Worm Caesar Augustus

The Obscure Motive for Malignity In a veiled metaphorical identification that can help direct and deepen our responses to the ostentatious theatrical pageantry leading up to the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare repeatedly intimates that in the basket of figs, metonymic representation of Cleopatra’s Egypt, Octavius (by his own later decree the august one, or Augustus), the hideous Roman imperialist, is the unseen ass(p) that “kills and pains not.” (5. 2. 244) The bite of this seemingly ubiquitous serpent, though deadly, shows little or no visible sign of its morbidity nor are the death throes it precipitates agonizing—not for the cold-blooded viper himself, Octavius, not for the lovers infected by its poison in turn, and, if Bradley and a small army of subsequent critics’ reactions are to be trusted, not even for audiences likely to be more charmed than horrified by the final acts of this ‘transcendent’ romance ‘to die for.’1 For those in whom eros and thanatos, desire and death, are endlessly and decadently coupled, whatever pains attend the serpent’s sting simply titillate: at passion’s height intensifying personal pleasure; at the point of near exhaustion, rousing the flagging desire to go on straining for unrealized satisfactions. For all the lost, the serpent’s “stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desir’d” (5. 2. 294–95) in that its fatal pinch is more intent on orgasmic release than a deeply felt internalization of the pain of loss or harm done to others and oneself in the process. This is most immediately apparent, of course, in the erotically charged language of death yearning in the lovers themselves. As if to reinforce the 19

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point, when avidly seeking the asp’s pinch, a proud and reckless Cleopatra makes a declaration that life in the flesh and those who share it with her are “not worth the leave-taking.” (5. 2. 296–97)2 Regrettably, this dismissal, at once grand and high-handed, extends even to her faithful servants and the children Caesar has threatened should the queen attempt to take her own life. She can muster no personal regard for them, let alone fear for any future harm that might come their way. Instead, the only new life in the flesh she hopes to nurture are the deadly asps she applies to her own breast: “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5. 2. 308–9)3 Despite Cleopatra’s brave yearning to present herself posed in this glowingly favorable “maternal” light, not everyone will find it appropriate or even possible to second her self-flattering request to “see” the application of a venomous serpent to her breast translated, in self-glorifying fantasy, into its innocent opposite: a nurturing tableau of infants feeding to their—and their nurse’s—hearts’ content any more than Dolabella can honestly or completely credit the queen’s heroic dream of Antony fashioned in wish-fulfillment a few scenes earlier. “Think you there was or might be such a [wo]man / As this I dreamt of?” The truthful response to both romantically air-brushed fictions must be: “Gentle madam, no.” (5. 2. 93–94) Indeed, if one attends carefully to the Shakespearean ambiguity generated by the elided subject of the participial in line 309, “asleep,” the mutually fulfilling tableau of the sleeping infant still gaining nurture and satisfaction from a nurse, even in its sleep, must be weighed against a darker scenario of neglect and irresponsibility toward others one cares for: unwitting dereliction in the well intentioned nurse, unable to proffer proper care or caution regarding her helplessly vulnerable charges when, induced by the quasi-erotic pleasure of the act of nursing itself, she yields to the unconscious unresponsiveness of sleep herself, her babes still waking, now unattended. Cleopatra’s theatrically auto-erotic verbal embrace of death’s prick represses the reality of any potentially damaging pain to or wounding of self and others in that mortal stroke, concentrating instead on straining solely and intently on pleasurable release. “Where art thou, death? / Come hither, come! Come, come, and take a queen / Worth many babes and beggars!” (5. 2. 46–48) Near the climax of the death scene, in a yearning expression of desire for reunion with Antony that likewise ambiguously hints of auto-erotic abandonment and self-preoccupation, she reiterates her cry for consummation: “Husband, I come!” (5. 2. 286) As to the “stroke of death” itself, she pronounces herself ready, even eager, to “die on’t” bravely (5. 2. 249), coincidentally dramatizing erotic self-concern even as she proclaims her nobility in facing death fearlessly. For his part, Antony likewise affirms

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an eager anticipation of the “joy of the worm” (5. 2. 259), when, about to fall on his own sword, he proclaims his apparently fearless yearning to “be / A bridegroom in my death and run into’t / As to a lover’s bed” (4. 14. 99–101), subtly transforming a fatal wound he must absorb into the giddy prospect of pleasurable gratification.4 If the symbolic serpent’s sting of death “kills and pains not” the lovers, its apparent victims, the “venomous fool” (5. 2. 304) who engineers the mortal strike could care even less. As they are being killed, they imagine the sting of death as more pleasure than pain; he, killing, feels no pleasure and even less pain still—not even when, in one of the play’s most notorious and intriguing surprises, Cleopatra’s suicide frustrates his plans to lead her alive in triumph through the streets of Rome. Exhibiting a composure and seeming indifference to the unanticipated fact as wondrous as they are chilling, Caesar greets the news of her having “beguil’d” (5. 2. 322) him without missing a beat, almost beguilingly. Without apparent anger or expression of frustration, he finds the disclosure of her death seemingly “diverting,” only his morbid curiosity piqued. Just as one might conceivably begin to soften toward him somewhat for his apparent declaration of a gracious compliment to his rival as a ‘good loser’ in the contest they’ve waged, one’s blood curdles to see him sniff and pore over Cleopatra’s body to determine the exact cause of death in a ghoulishly detached post-mortem. It is as if a poisonous viper, slithering almost casually over its kill, could think of perfecting its lethal craft further and muse: “One never knows when knowledge of a new venom may come in handy.” The clown speaks even more wisely than he knows when he declares: “there is no goodness in the worm” (5. 2. 265–66) at all. This “worm’s an odd worm” (5. 2. 257) indeed. So reptilian does Octavius appear to be throughout the play that he seems to “function in the tragedy not as a character figure compounded of accessible motivations, but as a quasi-impersonal force.” (Barroll, “Octavius,” 231) Though this quasi-impersonal force is surely that of the hunter relentlessly stalking the hunted, Caesar is not in the end most tellingly characterized by the passionate drive of a feral predator, its own blood up, bearing down upon an Antony, weakened by hunger, flight, and near exhaustion from the hunt itself and his previous wounds. His is a force just as deadly and even more harrowingly impersonal, the force of the powerful reptiles that kill with supreme efficiency, almost effortlessly, without wasted motion and yet with lightning speed and the subtlest deception. He devours prey indiscriminately, dead or alive, not in heat, but with a frozen, humorless smile that no one would ever mistake for joy or possible good will, a force no less vicious for all its apparent indifference to its kill or its killing.5 One can imagine a warm-blooded

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predator devouring one of its own species only under the most extreme duress, but to Caesar it’s all one. When the clown announces to Cleopatra that the viper will “do his own kind” (5. 2. 261–62), Shakespeare insinuates more than that the serpent will act according to his nature. However unwittingly, the clown warns her and us what that nature is: this serpent will cannibalize its own species without batting an eye. For Caesar, a meal’s a meal— “friendly” sycophant (Lepidus) or deadly foe (Pompey); treacherous turncoat (Alexas) or trusted kin (Octavia);6 the walking wounded reeling toward a fall (Antony) or even corpses now beginning to decompose (Cleopatra). He maneuvers all directly into harm’s way, then massively swallows each of them whole, not from the press of hunger exactly, but by cool prudential calculation against a day of possible want. The cold-blooded agent of a death that pains not as it “do[es] his own kind” is an indifferent “prick” indeed, the indiscriminate and repeated prick of a serpent, at once relentless and unconcerned, that simply persists in being itself: an implacably and imperturbably purposeful agent of destruction. In this, Octavius is, like Death himself, with his eyeless and humorless grin, no regarder of persons or rank. Ever the guarded and enigmatic stranger, shrouded from clear view even in company, he confides in no one, not even himself apparently, giving nothing away—not in the face nor from the hand. He only takes what he wishes, the master of shocking appearances and rogue emissary of arbitrary dismissals and venomous dispatch. In one of the rare moments when he apparently shows admiration for another human being, at Cleopatra’s death, the compliment he pays her—“being royal, / [she] took her own way”(5. 2. 34–35)—is but a dark mirror image of the licensed self-will he silently honors above all in himself. It is easy for him to celebrate her willfulness with grim self-satisfaction, parrying her thrust, because he has already determined within that in taking her own way he can still get and take his own. In a sense he had not appreciated earlier, his imperial “we” finds that it can save itself unnecessary labor just by remaining ready to “extenuate rather than enforce / [until Cleopatra] will apply” herself “to our intents.” (5. 2. 125–6) When departing from Cleopatra in that earlier exchange, Caesar declared: “I’ll take my leave.” (5. 2. 133) Not genuinely a ‘fare-well’ greeting, its deeper import is merely an arbitrary, if offhandedly delivered, insistence. No sign of genuine good will, it bears the unsettling sting of an implied threat, especially given the immediately previous promise of destruction for her children should she succeed in defying his wishes. Cleopatra rightly intuits the menace lurking in the high grass of Caesar’s apparent civilities and strikes back

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by means of an apparently subservient compliment that is as disdainfully insulting as it purports to be flattering. Caesar: Cleopatra:

I’ll take my leave. And may through all the world! ’Tis yours, and we, Your scutcheons and your signs of conquest, shall Hang in what place you please. (5. 2. 133–36)

The “serpent of the Nile” clearly imagines she can speak with as forked a tongue as any Roman lizard and in so doing outwit him; but she underestimates her antagonist. It may, indeed, ever be “paltry to be Caesar” (5. 2. 2), but he never is completely reduced to the “ass[p] / Unpolicied” (5. 2. 306–7) she fantasizes here and yet again later. Policy is as ineradicable in him as one of his middle names. What she has conceded in the quoted material is only too prophetic. In the end, Caesar does in fact manage to render Antony and Cleopatra, dead or alive, little more than embellishments to his triumph, ornamenting the chariot of his self-glorification as he “pleases” with these gaudy trophies of war.7 Caesar’s curious, seemingly paradoxical combination of indifference and arbitrary willfulness is the two-pronged skeleton key unlocking the shallow grave of his closely guarded inner being. Once captivated by the genuine strangeness of this serpent, alternately repulsed and fascinated by the prosaic yet harrowing little viper, we are provoked into a deeper comprehension of the mystery of this iniquity and the banality of its evil. Within minutes of hearing the news of Antony’s death, Octavius has already turned his attention to preventing a potential political backlash among those who might begin to sympathize with his rival now that he has been so woefully crushed by Caesar. In Act 1, Octavius had expressed his alarm at and contempt for the vox populi in this way: That he which is was wish’d until he were; And the ebb’d man, ne’er loved till ne’er worth love, Comes dear’d by being lack’d. (1. 4. 42–44)

Now fearful that the common people of Rome and—more surprisingly— fearful that even the highest officers in his own camp at Alexandria might withdraw their support from him and ‘defect’ to the fallen Antony, he summons his own officers to his tent to read to them his self-serving account of the war in which he claims that, “calm and gentle” in all things, he “hardly . . . was drawn into this war.” (5. 2. 74) Intended as self-exoneration, the

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transparent deceit of his words ironically communicates just the opposite, calling his auditors’ attention to two truths about Octavius he does not imagine he is revealing: the absence of any clear, truly compelling necessity for the deaths he has precipitated in this war and the absence of any passion in him as he engineered them. Caesar would have it known, both by the Roman public at large and by his most intimate military associates, that he was reluctantly forced into this showdown with Antony; but the claim is no less transparently preposterous than that Lepidus had “grown too cruel” (3. 6. 32) or that in the wide expanses of the conquered Roman territories there was insufficient room for Antony and Octavius to “stall together / In the . . . world” (5. 1. 39–40) at all after Actium when a defeated and demoralized Antony had surrendered his political power to the younger man and merely petitioned Caesar to “let him breathe between the heavens and earth, / A private man in Athens.” (3. 12. 14–15) “Drawn” into this war and the execution of Antony? Every one of his auditors and we who have witnessed the play must silently beg to differ: “hardly” so. When Antony had begged for his life, a “gentle” Caesar might well have spared him; but instead, deaf as an adder to his petition, he had proclaimed coldly: “For Antony, I have no ears to his request” (3. 12. 19–20), and, intent only on delivering a death blow, he insidiously schemes to bribe Cleopatra to do the dirty work for him. Likewise, with Antony dead and Cleopatra captured and stripped of power, one might well ask what necessity demands that Caesar further humiliate the completely defeated Egyptian queen by subsequently parading her through the streets of Rome to be reviled by rabble. What sort of credit or glory is the conquering hero certain to generate from displaying an aging and idle courtesan who had fled the battle of Actium in a fright as his greatest conquest in the war? Might it not backfire, instead arousing only contempt for this pathetic excuse for a triumph and Caesar’s heartless ascendancy? Anyone with much sense would wonder. Why does Caesar not do so? In unquestioning presumption, he enthuses: “her life in Rome/ Would be eternal in our triumph.” (5. 2. 65–66) If he has miscalculated in this regard, he will have converted the “eternal” nature of the triumph he dreams of into as much of a malapropism as the foolish clown’s boast that the bite of the asp is “immortal.” In the course of the play Caesar repeatedly rationalizes the lethal acts of this war he arbitrarily precipitates in terms of the “strong necessities” (3. 6. 83) of his and Antony’s “stars / Unreconciliable” (5. 1. 146–47), deaths on both sides “determin’d [by] destiny” (3. 6. 84) rather than by his own willful provocations performed in vicious meanness of spirit. The truth of his behavior throughout, however, is plainly told in the license he sanctions in

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one of his lieutenants when he sends him to deceive Cleopatra: “Make thine own edict for thy pains, which we / Will answer as a law” (3. 12. 32–33)— arbitrary whim masquerading as virtuous preordained necessity. Were he not at such a remove from his own acts, so diffident both in their performance and in his reactions to them once realized, one might satisfactorily characterize his meanness of spirit as the instrument of a deeply sadistic soul. In fact, however, the pervasiveness with which Caesar’s apparent indifference to his own acts are dramatically foregrounded calls into question the likelihood of sadism as an unambiguous explanation of his motives. Though he knowingly places both directly in harm’s way, he neither “hates” (1. 4. 2) Antony,8 nor does he truly love his sister, Octavia, despite appearances to the contrary (more on this later). The most mystifying and banal dramatic irony in Caesar’s saying he had been “hardly . . . drawn into this war” is, then, in point of fact, that in this contest of wills he takes nothing personally, despite how unquestionably selfish his stake is in the proceedings. None of it has deeply concerned nor affected him within; the war’s ‘engagements’ have fully occupied his strategic attention but not ‘engaged’ his heart or soul. He kills and pains not that he does so. He has “hardly been drawn into this war” at all. With no sign of profound personal animus against Antony, nor soldierly relish for the fray, nor sadistic enjoyment of his kills (in fact, he diffidently “laments” his “most persisted deeds” [5. 1. 28–29]), nor even cynical delight in destruction itself, Caesar’s relentless malignity, if invariably purposeful, would appear to be motiveless. Characteristically, he “formulates a plan of action in someone’s presence . . . dwelling on the general moral justification for his projected act. But he will never indicate why he personally may desire to effect such plans.” (Barroll, “Octavius,” 234) We know well enough, of course, that Caesar wants to own and control everything in sight, that he strives to become the “universal landlord” (3. 13. 72); but we are much less certain why he has arbitrarily converted this whim into a compulsive necessity that sanctions—even to himself apparently—endless and utterly unscrupulous predation. We are much less certain from what poisoned wellspring of the inner man’s sources and authorization he has been silently dispatched as death’s lieutenant. We do not know why, already more powerful perhaps than any previous figure in human history even before Actium, he will not rest until he has it all. Nor do we know why, once he has indeed realized that seemingly impossible dream of world dominion, he must humiliate his fallen adversaries further despite having demonstrated no clear signs of strong personal antagonism toward them in the past nor even at their deaths. Why, in short, is it that in souls like Caesar’s more than enough can never, paradoxically, be enough—an embarrassment of riches yet insufficient to satisfy?

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Apparently, Cleopatra is not the only character in the play whose claim to fame is to “make hungry / Where most s(he) satisfies.” (2. 3. 236–37) Whatever the underlying mystery of Caesar’s iniquity, it remains this consummately guarded man’s most carefully kept secret. This executioner is always hooded, even from himself. In a play notorious for withholding direct access to the inner workings of its principal characters, Caesar lurks at the furthest remove from view behind the drawn curtain of his dispatches and dismissals. As Barroll notes, he is “never given a soliloquy or, for that matter, even two or three lines alone.” (“Octavius” 232) Indeed, one may begin to wonder what interiority means to him at all. “Hard and smooth as polished steel” (Bradley), he is, in at least two senses, ever and unfailingly what a piqued and chastened Enobarbus only reluctantly threatens to become: a “considerate stone.” (2. 2. 110) Though we may never feel confident that her reports tell us the whole story of her inner life’s conflicts and anticipated satisfactions, we do at least get glimpses of Cleopatra’s “cares,” both good and bad. And Antony can clearly be “stirred” expressively by his relationship to Cleopatra and his own declining worldly fortunes in wild swings between positive and negative feeling. But the only things that stir Octavius are the “stirs abroad” (1. 4. 82) that alert his reptilian attention to the possibility of a kill and a meal. “Of stirs abroad,” as Lepidus knows and declares, Caesar, too, wishes to be immediate and ominous “partaker.” (1. 4. 83) Even the crocodile tears Octavius sheds by design over the absent corpse of Antony dry up immediately when an unknown Egyptian messenger “stirs abroad” in the Roman camp, ludicrously convincing him, before the Egyptian has spoken a single word, to silence forever his funeral eulogy in mid-sentence in order to get at the postburial meal he imagines Cleopatra will provide.9 With more than enough on his plate already—his chief and last rival for worldly dominion now flayed— Caesar is already thinking about his next meal. This is what it means to say that some hunger merely feeds on itself. The ass(p) in a bountiful basket of figs is a “venomous fool” indeed. Though unaware of the paradox, Caesar remains obsessively “consumed with that which [he] was nourished by.” (Sonnet 73) Octavius begins his funeral oration with the exclamation: “O Antony, I have followed thee to this!” (5. 1. 35–36) It is a puzzling thing to say. Given the framing context of open and general grieving over the dead Antony and Maecenas’s immediately preceding comment—“when such a spacious mirror’s set before him, / [Caesar] must needs see himself ” (5. 1. 33–34)—one might understandably imagine that Caesar’s first line is the initiation of some sort of memento mori, some show of sympathy with ‘kind’ and in kindness even to

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a fallen enemy, paid in tribute to a shared mortality; yet Caesar’s speech immediately veers away from any such potential pathos: “But we do lanch / Diseases in our bodies.” (36–37) Though the moment for it may be propitious enough, Caesar shows no signs here of the kind of interiority and interiorization necessary for such recognitions of oneself in the fate of others. His purposes are apparently much more mundanely strategic than humane. In a completely characteristic move, Caesar’s words merely intend to deflect responsibility for Antony’s death by vainly obscuring his own agency in it through a “strange . . . lament” for his “most persisted deeds” (5. 1. 28–29), to cite Agrippa’s apt description of the situation here. Who but the most mindless lackey could take seriously the claim that Octavius has merely “followed” Antony’s lead in this death-dealing? Followed? Would Octavius Caesar ever pay that deference to anyone? But in a dramatically ironic sense Caesar cannot appreciate, Shakespeare deftly suggests that Octavius has indeed “followed” Antony “to this”—not so much to a common mortality (though, of course, that too is a reality he continues to ignore), but to the situation in which Caesar himself, like the ever unsatisfied Antony, presently finds himself: hungry and irritable from vague dissatisfaction when he and we might have expected he surely would have been fully satisfied at least for one moment at last. For Caesar, too, apparently, “that he which [he] is was wish’d until he were.” (1. 4. 42) The disappointment and dissatisfaction that threaten to break through Caesar’s nearly unfeeling composure and self-assurance can perhaps be heard distantly in his immediate response, however consciously crafty, to the report of Antony’s death: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack.” (5. 1. 14–15) This is hardly a profound or even admirable response to a fellow human’s death one has carefully orchestrated; but one can nevertheless still hear in it the premonitory hiss preceding the serpent’s strike, the hiss of air leaking from the lungs of Caesar’s self-inflated composure. The report of Antony’s death almost disconcerts him. This is an unexpected death, “death” not with a bang but with a whimper—Antony’s, literally, but also Caesar’s little death and answering, half-conscious whimper of self-pity. He had expected a more explosive bang for his buck, more reward for his labor, more satisfaction from himself having publicly witnessed Antony’s defeat and publicly enjoyed the pomp of celebrating his triumph over his adversary, than merely seeing, himself encamped, Antony’s bloodied sword and hearing a cowardly assassin’s anticlimactic report of the manner of his adversary’s demise.10 Instead of omens, portents, natural catastrophes, and social upheaval to signal greatness passing, no profound or supernatural effects at all, only the small hiss of Antony’s last breath and this, Caesar’s answering sigh—only deflation.

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For a moment, before he regains his balance and composure and proceeds to patch the leak, he almost discerns “in [Antony’s] death, how [his] receiv’d shall be.” (1. 3. 65) He almost sees himself in the “spacious mirror” (5. 1. 34) of his rival’s death. For a moment, he may very well wonder with a shiver whether he, now the most powerful man on earth, might yet be as small and inconsequential as Antony has become. It may well be the slightest of spiritual tremors (“the breaking of so great a thing” as Antony “should make / A greater crack” in Caesar, too, than it does); but however minimal the pinch, dissatisfaction is its essence. Under the “considerate stone” we momentarily glimpse a vulnerable and contemptible little worm burrowing for cover instead of facing the light that would further expose him. The “venomous fool” is paradoxically also the “mortal wretch” (5. 2. 302) Cleopatra had condescendingly identified as her executioner. The ass(p), too, can himself feel the trivial sting of the bite that kills and pains not, the provoking pinch that merely spurs the desire to go on seeking as yet unrealized satisfactions. Very early in the play, in a seemingly unrelated context, Caesar had said of Antony: “at thy heels / Did Famine follow.” (1. 4. 58–59) In the emblematic tracery that can be discerned in Shakespeare’s characterization of Octavius, Caesar, the predatory reptile snapping at Antony’s heels throughout the play, is emblematically this “Famine” yearning in futility to satisfy its hunger. In the folly of his meanness, he has but “followed” Antony “to this.”11 At the beginning of Act 4, when Maecenas reports to Caesar that an enraged Antony has now been “hunted / Even to falling” (4. 1. 6–7), he forwards the following moralization: “Never anger / Made good guard for itself.” (4. 1. 8–9) In an apparent non sequitur through which he nevertheless corroborates Maecenas’s judgment without having to waste any words doing so, Caesar answers his officer’s personal observation about Antony’s plight with a dispassionately pragmatic battle calculation. He remarks offhandedly that defections from Antony’s forces, placed in the front lines, should be sufficient to “fetch him in” (4. 1. 14) in the following day’s engagement without taxing their own men and themselves. It is a fiendishly clever strategy Caesar likes having thought of so well he repeats it a few scenes later: Plant those that have revolted in the vant, That Antony may seem to spend his fury Upon himself. (4. 6. 9–11)

Octavius does not simply hope to defeat Antony; now that he can safely press his advantage, he also calmly trusts that he can mock and humiliate his desperately wounded rival in the same stroke, humorlessly laughing at

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Antony’s weakened plight as he had “laugh[ed]” at Antony’s angry challenge to “personal combat” (4. 1. 3) earlier. (E. M. Forster may not have overstated the case when he declared Octavius the most odious successful man in our literature.) “Hardly . . . drawn into this war” at all, Caesar not only declines a personal, hand-to-hand combat with Antony in the “brave squares of war” (3. 11. 40) when it does not “hold our best advantage” (4. 11. 4) to do so. He would if he could decline engagement in ‘personal combat’ of any kind because he does not need to be reminded that anger makes no good guard for the self. As the strategic use of Antony’s own men against him and his attempted manipulation of Cleopatra after Actium reveal, Caesar would prefer to stay at a safe remove from the fray—in a physical sense, of course, but also and more significantly, in an emotional sense—ever “deal[ing] on lieutenantry” while he personally keeps “his sword e’en like a dancer.” (3. 11. 35–36) Indeed, in the next day’s fighting, when Fortune momentarily smiles on Antony’s greater soldiership, Agrippa confesses: “We have engag’d ourselves too far. / Caesar himself has work.” (4. 7. 1–2) Caesar is no doubt not the least bit amused that he must work up a sweat in battle at all; nor, surely, will he ever contemplate getting used to the idea. Lieutenants like Agrippa, to borrow one of Caesar’s favorite phrases, must “see to” that as well. Men like Caesar have, it is true, ever won more in their officers than in person. But he would not consider that fact the subtle insult it was intended to be. In his emotional detachment, even from negative judgments of his own character, that is the way he prefers it. He does not even care whether the lieutenants he deploys are his own officers or his enemy’s. Nor is he convinced that negative emotions, such as anger aroused by battle scars, are the only threat to someone concerned with his own guardedness. He would go much further than Maecenas and say that his august and imperial highness must guard itself against emotional entanglements of every kind. The ruler who would successfully guard himself must learn to control every dimension of his emotional responsiveness to others of his kind, positive as well as negative. The effectiveness with which Octavius does so is apparent on any number of occasions. It is supremely evident in his selfcontrolled ability to bite his tongue at Antony’s high-handed treatment of him at Rome in Act 2, when Antony clearly does owe Octavius an apology. Thereafter, he reveals it again when Pompey completely disregards him to curry favor, instead, with Antony at the first meeting of the insurgent with the triumvirate. He shows it in his abstention from the festive abandonment and easy, convivial fellowship of the feast that follows on Pompey’s barge. It is likewise apparent in his ability to swallow his distaste for Antony’s personal excesses and his fears for the future likelihood of his sister’s shabby

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treatment—or worse—at Antony’s hands in order to cement a political marriage of convenience between his chief rival and himself. Then, as we have already seen, he manages superb control of his emotions when he hears the disappointing reports of Antony’s and then Cleopatra’s death. But perhaps the most symbolically telling illustration of Caesar’s willed detachment from all emotional entanglements is one Barroll rightly emphasizes in his depiction of Octavius. One of the flimsy excuses for his dereliction Antony awkwardly patches into whole cloth before Caesar at Rome in Act 2 is the unlikely claim that he could not control the rebellious actions of his own wife, Fulvia. There Antony forwards a disingenuously sheepish, self- and gender-deprecating attempt at humor designed to conciliate Caesar, when he declares that the ‘weaker sex’ is, as all beleaguered husbands know, sometimes more unruly and difficult to manage than spirited horses. Enobarbus seconds the jest by laughingly supplementing it with another and more reassuringly ribald one of his own. Perhaps Caesar forces a tight grin, but he is not amused. Refusing to join in their merriment, he ignores the jests completely and changes the subject, proceeding to enumerate instead another serious accusation in his bill of particulars against Antony. In so doing, Caesar demonstrates that he cannot or does not care to understand how a man who pretends to eminence could allow himself to be held hostage to a personal relationship or personal feeling for a fellow human being, not even one’s wife (or one’s sister, we might hasten to add). Caesar’s moral geometry only finds room for self-discipline and self-control; in no way will it urge upon itself the slightest “forbearance to weakness” (“Octavius” 242), the virtue in the name of which Antony disingenuously attempts to justify both his failure to ‘rein in’ Fulvia and, by silent and thus face-saving analogy, his failure to ‘rein in’ himself in Egypt as well. For Octavius the toleration of weakness is a vice, not a virtue. He will—almost literally—not ‘hear’ of it: not with regard to wives, sisters, or children; not in rivals with a ‘weakness’ for wine and women; not even in himself. No vulnerability to fellow feeling—positive or negative—can be tolerated if the self would make good guard for itself. One must simply turn an ass(p)’s deaf ear to it. Several of the most chilling moments in the play confess how effectively Octavius has trained himself in this regard, always acting completely ‘within himself’ as he contends with others. In 2.6, when Pompey has had time to realize that he is hopelessly outflanked due to the unexpected arrival of Antony’s forces from Egypt to join Caesar and having mulled the terms of the peace treaty the triumvirate has proposed in writing for his review, he meets with them to reveal his decision for peace or war near Misenum. Though the terms of the treaty must seem terribly one-sided—in exchange

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for control of Sicily and Sardinia he must “rid all the sea of pirates” and “send / Measures of wheat to Rome” (36–37) in tribute—the consolidated powers of the newly-reunited triumvirate make his response nearly a foregone conclusion. Betraying an understandable human weakness under the humiliating circumstances of this abject ‘defeat’ without a fight, Pompey tries at least to save face by attempting to provoke a brave war of words. He begins to justify his recently suspended aggression against the triumvirate, citing a son’s aggrieved responsibility to retaliate upon those who had insulted his father’s memory (“to scourge th’ ingratitude that despiteful Rome / Cast on my noble father” [2. 6. 22–23]), a veiled allusion presumably to Antony’s tawdry act of venality in refusing the payment when due for Pompey the Great’s home in Rome, confiscated by the government of the triumvirs and thus purchased by him with all the hypocritical appearance of legal propriety. If Pompey’s dudgeon may seem like the flimsiest pretext of virtue upon which to build a case for what may well be naked aggression and ambition in his turn, the aggrieved rhetorical force of his speech might well indicate genuine frustration and anger, nonetheless. At the very least, the self-flattering manufacture of his righteous indignation has very likely displaced for a moment in Pompey’s heart the abject sense of defeat implicit in the concessions he is about to make. Caesar’s laconic response, however, catches him up short: “Take your time.” (2. 6. 23) As is almost invariably the case, Caesar speaks out of both sides of his mouth; it is not wine, but the ever sober Caesar’s “own tongue / Splits what” this serpent “speaks.” (2. 7. 119–20) When one tries to establish the coherence of this apparently disjunctive response to Pompey’s splenetic foaming at the mouth, one might assume, being human, that Caesar is somehow touched by Pompey’s emotional upset. It might seem as if he is urging him to calm down, reassuring him that the assembled dignitaries will hear him out. But even if Caesar’s line is delivered soothingly and to this effect superficially, its deeper import barely veils its hidden fangs. Certainly the tack the conversation subsequently takes reveals that neither Pompey nor any of the others present take Caesar’s words as a soothing encouragement to continue in this vein. Just the opposite, in fact. Caesar’s chilling words, cold enough to take the breath away when one recognizes their darker intent, indicate that he could care less what feelings Pompey may harbor—for Pompey himself, for his father, or even toward the triumvirate, for that matter. He has already turned a deaf ear to everything Pompey is saying. His only concern is the bottom line. In a moment, Lepidus will say: “Be pleas’d to tell us / (For this is from the present) how you take / The offers we have sent you.” (2. 6. 29–31) Caesar hastens to second the sentiment: “There’s the point.” (31)

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Forbearing no human weakness or need, Caesar’s concern is not with persons or the personal, but only with “policy”—and that by self-protective and selfenhancing conscious design. Now that is a diabolical “design of darkness to appall”—if design should govern in a thing so small as Caesar is. For the greatness of Caesar, no meanness is too small to contemplate. When the lowly academician, Euphronius, schoolmaster to Antony’s children, is sent as his master’s newly dignified “ambassador” to Caesar bearing terms of surrender after Actium, the tutor swells fatuously, savoring his brief moment in the sun. In his newly assumed yet completely laughable selfimportance, he is intent that Caesar hear something about the admirable quality of the messenger before he delivers his woeful message of surrender. Such as I am, I come from Antony. I was of late as petty to his ends As is the morn-dew on the myrtle leaf To his grand sea. (3. 12. 7–10)

Rudely interrupting him—“Be’t so. Declare thine office” (10)—Caesar makes short work of this ‘needy’ prologue, coldly bumping off the messenger to rob him of a communique he was more than prepared to present if Caesar could have been the slightest bit patient. Stripped of the complications of his preamble’s emotional framework, the messenger confesses to Caesar that he lived as a non-entity until this moment. Caesar’s response both nonchalantly reconfirms that truth about the messenger’s past and in the same breath confers an identical non-entity upon his present and his future. He effaces him completely, cuts him dead. Without the slightest pretense of courtesy to Pompey or Euphronius from Caesar, “what [they] would have spoke / Was beastly dumb’d” by the “firm Roman” (1. 5. 48–50) on his high horse, eager only to be about the self-aggrandizing business of his wars. In so characterizing Caesar’s behaviors, perhaps we have begun to illuminate, after all, the mystery of iniquity eating obscurely at his seemingly self-contained spirit’s putrefied core. Malignity this unrelenting is not likely to convince us it is motiveless, however seemingly natural to the man. Though, as we have now seen, he bears no specific personal animus against—or for—anyone, that does not mean necessarily that he is without animus of some sort, a dark inner ‘soul’ (or maw, if you prefer) hidden from view but ever and only feeding in its futility on the very thin air he breathes there. Despite his being a man of many virtues the other major characters in the play never do command—among them, prudence, temperance, steadfastness, self-discipline, and seriousness of purpose—Caesar does not impress

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them or us with anything about himself but this deep-seated viciousness pervading everything he does and speaks. Whatever is gnawing at him, it grinds methodically and exceedingly small, always threatening to ‘belittle’ further the vanquished in defeat but also merely rousing in his victims their ‘belittling’ contempt for him in his unrelenting will to inflict harm. However controlled Caesar is in every other regard, the one visceral dimension of himself he cannot and does not even think to moderate is his own meanness of spirit—his own smallness. Though he is clearly power-hungry in conventional terms, possessing all the power in the world would not satisfy him because it is not, technically speaking, power he yearns for but only preeminence. In always holding to his own advantage and never giving anything away, he seems to stand apart from all mankind and even the gods and their beneficent laws. The generous source of the gift of life they confer, the gods live to exercise the power of creation and inspire acts of love. Caesar cares for neither of these things. His only desire is for tribute—not finally land or lucre, but the spiritual tribute of awe and admiration for his power that men as small as he is can never evince sufficient to their needs but ever feel compelled to elicit or enforce. Caesar’s exclusive preoccupation with exalting himself is, unbeknownst to him, his own hell within. The atmosphere in which his imperial highness breathes is very thin air to feed on—a void, in fact. Early on, Caesar declares his contempt for Antony’s attempt to fill the void in his life (his “vacancy”) with his “voluptuousness” (1. 4. 26); but the folly in Octavius’ yearning is unwittingly analogous. He would fill the void constituting his life—his vacancy—by letting his own unsatisfied self-determination and self-conceived “destiny / Hold . . . their way.” (3. 6. 84–85) In symbolic self-contradiction, he continues to insist that he is what he is not and that he is not what he is. Outraged by nothing specific, his loathing, if hidden, even from himself, is nevertheless pervasive. It is a lonely, cold, and abstract loathing for the very condition in which he presently finds himself: the human condition he prefers to deny, the condition of human subjectivity he myopically mistakes for mere subjection to inferiors. By sheer force of will, he would stand above it and the gods who ‘order’ it. It is inconceivable to him that the divine order could be anything other than an insult to his autonomy and powers of self-determination. His pride wounded by such a thought, he flatly refuses to ‘take’ any such order. In rank insubordination he would vainly attempt to live apart in his own alternate world and will, however empty and arid his autonomy and power. In so doing he reminds us more of the devil himself than more recognizably human sinners like Antony and Cleopatra. Like that other serpent in another

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middle-eastern garden of fertility, he would, in Milton’s famous phrasing of Satanic ambition and deceit, “put off / Human, to put on Gods, death to be wish’t” (PL 9. 714–15) in order to challenge any authority external to himself. Himself a curious paradox he does not comprehend, Caesar’s only objective, then, is to accept subordination to nothing and no one. His ‘imperial highness’ acknowledges no need of any regard for other beings or their worth, instead unwittingly preferring to remain the pointless slave of their slavish regard. No less self-defeating than the voluptuary’s life of dissipation, his goal, even if it could be realized, can only mean willful destruction: the exhausted prostration of all being and life itself in defeated tribute to his own vain control. Even its realization would leave him, as he ever is, dissatisfied and hungry for more. In unknowing futility, Caesar confidently asserts his will to “hold unbewail’d [his own] way” to destruction, himself purely and exclusively a self-“determined thing to [a] destiny” he mistakenly imagines he directs. The wretched pointlessness—indeed, the metaphysical absurdity—of a personal existence wholly given over to the assertion of this ‘will to power’ (a vacuous creation ex nihilo) manifests itself in the mirroring absurdity of the account of “strange serpents” (2. 7. 23) told aboard Pompey’s galley in Act 2. An anomalous digression only to the inattentive, this inanely malicious jest overtly directed at a drunken Lepidus covertly discloses its broader symbolic range of reference to those willing to reflect upon the odd sense of inconsequence with which it ends. Only those as self-intoxicated as Lepidus in their own right—the joke’s drunken perpetrators and the dead sober, if equally ‘self-intoxicated’ Octavius Caesar mirthlessly savoring the stupid gag—can find anything very meaningful in this mean-spirited putdown of one of their own. If the point of the jest is to expose a man of presumed greatness as a self-intoxicated dupe, then the clownishly inebriated engineers of the practical joke are as much the unwitting butt of Shakespeare’s humor as the chosen victim it is their intention to mock. Not Lepidus alone, but all four of these purportedly preeminent powers and personages unknowingly expose themselves at Pompey’s feast as self-intoxicated fools participating in a low comedy drinking bout whose mean-spirited, dimwitted hijinks are without any more dignity or substance than their more serious games of geopolitical leapfrog. The man the others would ostracize as their hapless whipping boy is, though they never realize it, the generic emblem of their common condition, each himself the victim of his own auto-intoxication and obsessive vanity. And among these strange serpents, surely the strangest of all is Caesar Augustus.

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The intent of the practical joke is to induce Lepidus to make himself ill by the group’s continuing to pretend to toast his health—literally ad nauseam. The foolish Lepidus has imbibed far too much and he knows it; but he is too flattered by being the focus of attention to put a halt to his own victimization, instead allowing “determined things to destiny / Hold unbewail’d their way” with him. As his condition continues to deteriorate, the conversation lurches to the topic of abiogenesis, the ‘spontaneous generation’ of Egypt’s strange serpents, including the crocodile, from the “slime” and “ooze” of the Nile’s lifeless mud. In ludicrous jest, Antony responds to Lepidus’ query about “what manner o’ thing is your crocodile?” (2. 7. 38) by reciting a litany of apparently meaningless tautologies as clarification by circularity: It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. . . . And the tears of it are wet. (39–46)

In dully assuming this makes any kind of useful sense at all, Lepidus obviously makes himself into a laughingstock. That point gets reinforced when Caesar, in a fastidious show of disgust for his rival’s drunken near delirium, asks in wonder: “Will this description satisfy him?” (47), probably shaking his head in mock pity and admiration as he does so. The joke that brings the great man low depends upon the audience’s totally clear-headed agreement with Caesar that nothing can meaningfully define itself in terms of itself; the attempt to do so is patently absurd, a futile circularity. It is a lesson Octavius might well have heeded in his seemingly more sober efforts to define himself exclusively on his own terms. To say—as he implicitly says of himself and his behaviors throughout the play—that a thing is what it is effects no explanation of value to anyone but a person in a self-intoxicated stupor. In the end, it matters little whether that stupor is literal, as in Lepidus’ case, or figurative, as in Caesar’s. Given the darker symbolic burden of this Shakespearean conceit, then, in which Caesar himself figures both as the serpent whose strange nature confounds and as the self-intoxicated fool whose greatness he himself vainly presumes (Lepidus being but his comical Roman double), Caesar’s smug assumption of superiority to his inebriated Roman rivals could not be more blindly ironic. In the end, in what we can only hope is genuine pity and wonder, we are left to ask of him—not he of Lepidus—whether he could possibly be satisfied with this description of himself as a strange serpent

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spawned from the lifeless depths of his own inner emptiness. An abiogenetic ‘self-conception’ of this sort is, nonetheless, the absurd and absurdist definition of himself Caesar contemplates in stupefied self-satisfaction and then parades before the world in dim-witted parental pride. He seems more than content with himself so, a being who is nothing more than a tautological selfassertion, a being whose self-referential claim to his own importance is without relevance to anything but itself by which to define its meaning or with which to confirm its value above and beyond its own arid self-proclaiming insistence. To say without self-correcting qualification what in effect Caesar does say repeatedly in the play: “I am solely what I will myself to be” or “I am what I say I am” is to rest easy in a grave simple-mindedness. It is the absurd definition of the strangest of the strange serpents to be found on this earth. No one but Caesar or his ilk (with apologies to Nietzsche’s genuine greatness) is very likely to mistake either of those self-assertions for the unnamable “I am that I am” of divine eminence and worth that the man who will one day soon rename himself Augustus imagines they declare. In conscious, willed disconnection from everything and everyone who might define a more ample and meaningful identity, Caesar has strained to satisfy himself simply by doing as he would, ever taking only his own “leave,” in both senses of that term. In doing so, he has figuratively deserted every moment of beneficial engagement with the world merely to feed in it and on it (it is ironic that in his misogynistic dismissal and contempt for women generally he declares that they—not he—are meant but to “Feed and sleep.” [5. 2. 187]) Strange serpent that he is, he has been satisfied to “live” like the crocodile “by that which nourisheth” his being (2. 7. 41) but only in the sense that he would devour whatever he comes upon, without explanation or apology or even the recognition that there just might be something else to do with being and time besides laying waste to them. He has not cared or thought to reflect that one can live more richly by cultivating that which “nourisheth” us rather than merely hunting it to its extinction. As we have seen earlier, this strange monster’s “tears . . . are wet” (2. 7. 46); but it is no sign of grief. The crocodile’s tears, ancient emblem of deceit, really fool no one but the beast himself. In “unbewail’d” and unbewailing self-deception he holds to his own way. As self-intoxicated as his fellow triumvir, Caesar may, like Lepidus, have some glimmer of an intuition that he “is not so well as I should be” (2. 7. 29); but he’ll “n’er out” (29) either, too drunk with shows of his own celebrity to recognize such acclaim for what it is: false and empty regard for oneself. Aeschylus’s aphorism applies here: human society facing its rulers often reduces and debases itself into little more than a fawning mirror of the proud.

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Egypt is a rich middle-eastern garden of fertility. Once the floods have receded, the Nile delta “shortly comes to harvest” (2. 7. 22), even without cultivation. The soothsayer declares that the human inhabitants fully share in this fecundity; if “every one of ” Charmian’s “wishes had a womb / And fertile every wish,” she would give birth to a “million” children. (1. 2. 35–6) They do have strange serpents there; but, as we now know, the strangest and most lethal serpent in this garden of fertility is not native to the place. It is an alien (and unknowingly alienated) being, an invader, Caesar Augustus, incarnation of the Roman spirit of imperialism and domineering suppression of all ‘others,’ whether that otherness manifests itself in gender, culture, or, more metaphysically, in the human heart itself (his own not excepted).12 In its selfappointed claim to superiority, the imperial spirit would dominate and feed on everything it perceives as vulnerable to attack merely to sustain its vacuous sense of its own superiority and eminence. The only monstrous abiogenesis here does not spring from the slime and ooze of the Nile flood plain, but from the lifeless void within Caesar’s imperial highness itself, endlessly propagating its bestial animosities. Charmian’s children “have no names” (1. 2. 33), not, as she laughingly assumes, because declining fortunes may come to channel her procreative urges into illegitimate births, if necessary, but because one of the gratuitously vicious effects of Caesar’s rapacity means that because of her premature death her children will never be conceived or born at all. It would be difficult to overstate how terrible a waste that is. But it is not, finally, the most horrifying fact about this serpent in Egypt’s garden. When, having fed on itself, it can feed no more (“the elements once out of it”), the imperial spirit does not simply die or transcend itself by entering another and higher state of being. It simply “transmigrates” into another beast. In that sense alone it is indeed an immortal worm, each of us its potential host and victim.

II Caesar and Antony: Unity of Opposites Though professional critics have generally agreed that Caesar’s personal manner and character are despicable, a few nevertheless maintain that in the virtues he espouses and the vices he notes in Antony he represents some sort of moral yardstick against which Antony’s behavior comes up wanting, especially given how clearly Antony’s dissolute ways and reputation are displayed in the first two acts.13 But even such guarded praise gives Octavius more credit than he deserves. The good impression he might leave at first is just a case of the devil quoting ethical scripture. Caesar does not in truth ‘stand

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for’—in either of the senses the phrase may imply—the virtues he praises or against the vices he deplores in Antony. All his moralizing is merely hypocritical pretense designed to advance himself, his only standard of value. As we’ve already begun to see, Shakespeare takes care to demonstrate that Caesar is, in fact, even more unscrupulous and licentious (in the root sense of the word) than the rival he condemns for these very vices. In most regards, it is true, Shakespeare does cast Antony and Octavius as mighty opposites—in their destinies, of course, but also in their characters. Antony is as voluble as Caesar is terse; as poetical as the younger man is prosaic; as spectacular in his manner and protestations as Octavius is understated, matter of fact, and ploddingly methodical. The one wears his heart on his sleeve, playing the heroic lead in a declamatory theatrical melodrama; the other wears the self-effacing mask of a nameless functionary processing his missives, directives, dispatches, and dismissals in detachment. Oddly enough, it is the younger man who is ever prudent, measured, and temperate whereas the man of years proves improvident, exaggerated in his gestures and recklessly intemperate: the one subject to violent swings of volatile feelings; the other, perfectly composed and in masterful control of his emotions, apparently subject to no disturbances whatever. If a stone-cold sober Caesar Augustus is never caught off emotional balance by betrayed expectations, Antony, ever drunk in his self-indulgence, finds himself repeatedly unbalanced and dizzied by the shifting tides of his fortune. He always feels the full personal force of betrayed expectations revealed in Caesar’s contemptuously expressed paradox about the common man: “That he [read Antony] which is was wish’d until he were.” (1. 4. 42) Ever the self-indulgent soldier or sailor ‘on leave,’—metaphorically—he “tipples,” “tumbles,” and “reels” (1. 4. 17–19) from one extreme of feeling to another, alternately maudlin or exaggeratedly festive and companionable among fellow revelers he hardly knows. (In his deeply “divided disposition” [1. 5. 53], Antony is always in symbolic truth what Alexas unknowingly reports of him at one point: neither truly “sad nor merry” [52]—not fully enjoying what he conquers nor truly grieved by what he has lost.) An undiagnosed figurative version of a bi-polar disorder, his manic swings between giddy self-exaltations and overwrought plunges into melancholy dizzy him so that he does not know whether he is coming or going. “Antony is,” paradoxically, ever both valiant, and dejected; and by starts His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear Of what he has and has not. (4. 12. 6–9)

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Not only hope of what he has and fear of what he has not, nor only hope of what he has not and fear of what he has; but hope and fear of what he has divided against hope and fear of what he has not. No wonder he’s dizzy. Caesar seems to know exactly what he is about; but Antony seems to have no idea where he’s going or what he’s coming to. Perhaps that is what endears him to us despite his pervasively intemperate behavior. Caesar may know nothing about passion or disgust; but Antony is endlessly buffeted by a bewildering siege of contrary feelings, bandying him violently from Egypt’s fierce erotic attraction to Roman disgust with the “fetters” (1. 2. 109) of sensual enslavement to Cleopatra; from passionate dreams of comfort in his lover’s arms to despair over her possible disloyalty; from violent pride in his heroic character to bitter shame and penitence at his failure to live up to it—in other words, from passionate attraction to disgusted repulsion; from the blissful dream of possession to the jealous fear of loss; from exaggerated heights of anticipated joy to equally exaggerated depths of imagined woe, and back again, endlessly. Ever without Caesar’s single-mindedness and the younger man’s unwavering self-determination, Antony sways with and is swayed by changing circumstances, like a “vagabond flag,” ever adrift until he simply “rots himself with [his own] motion.”(1. 4. 45, 47) If Antony is, when we meet him, a decadent voluptuary offering up a “kingdom for a mirth” (1. 4. 18), Octavius is a puritanical scold who would joylessly suppress all mirth to pursue the straight and narrow path to his own self-contained kingdom of glorious tribute. Caesar is relentless as he seizes empires he does not yet possess, never deigning to explain himself; by contrast, an ever relenting Antony’s identifying gesture is to give away treasures and empires he’s already won (or could win again)—personal treasures and political empires—to do little else but make earnest efforts to explain to himself and others near him why he continues to do so. If Caesar lives wholly and contentedly in the imperative mood and the present tense, Antony lives divided between the bravado and assurance of the declarative mood and the self-doubt and querulousness of the interrogative, just as he lives, not in Caesar’s continuous present, but in suspended animation between a visionary future and an idyllic, elegiac past. Ever shadowing the flattering perpetuation of the memory of earthly glory his past as a conquering Roman hero represents to him is the dark omen of a future in which, aging, he might already have become, the truth be told, a ‘has been’ living on past accomplishments, foolishly trying to win anew the irrecoverable glory that never meant as much when he actually had it as it does now that he’s tossed it aside. Shadowing the visionary future of unearthly glory with Cleopatra (the “new heaven, new earth” [1. 1. 17] he vaguely promises her at the play’s

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inception) is the ignominious reflection that he is hardly the first (nor perhaps the last) Roman conqueror to become this aging courtesan’s dupe: she his “triple-turn’d whore” (4. 12. 13) and he, “a strumpet’s fool” (1. 1. 13) whispered of among servants. If Caesar is unwaveringly single-minded in advancing himself, Antony is ‘of two minds’ about everything that matters, wavering indecisively as he endures an endless siege of fretful cross-purposes and contradictory freaks of feeling that continue to torment him unabated even as his horizons darken in the fitful zigzag of his travels until a mood of gathering darkness overtakes him completely. Always at something of a loss as to whether he’s coming or going, he eventually comes to explicit recognition of his mystified condition: “I am so lated in the world that I / Have lost my way for ever.” (3. 11. 3–4)14 But if these two men’s ways are diametrically opposed, this does not imply that the triumphant upstart in their battle to the death is the moral arbiter of his aging victim or, for that matter, that Caesar’s successful campaign in the world is any less questionable morally than Antony’s life of more conventional dissipations. As I maintained several pages ago and shall attempt to illustrate presently, in his odd way Octavius successfully ‘rivals’ Antony in unscrupulous and licentious behavior, just as he does in everything else. At Pompey’s galley, Antony’s apparently good natured advice to Caesar to become a “child o’ th’ time” serves only to elicit the younger man’s immediate and curt rejoinder: “Possess it.” (2. 7. 96–97) This emblematic exchange succinctly demonstrates how utterly opposed these contestants’ attitudes are toward life in time. Their contrasting approaches to experience reveal that even in matters as seemingly inconsequential as how to pass the time of day there is, indeed, between them, as Octavia fears, “no mid-way / Twixt these extremes at all.” (3. 5. 19–20) But in terms of moral propriety and substance, however, neither of these “extremes” clearly distinguishes itself from the other for merit or approbation. Their temperamental opposition merely masks a more profound identity in corruption. Beneath the surface charms of Antony’s gregarious invitation to Caesar to join the revelers in happy submission to the time being is the unintentional hint of a personal confession that insofar as Antony remains time’s perpetual “child” he feels no moral obligation to identify and live out a responsible adult’s will of his own; for his part, Caesar’s apparently healthier concern with self-determination barely masks its own vice: the steely inflexibility and domination of a heartless tyrant. Neither the child completely absorbed in the moment nor the domineering tyrant controlling it can be maturely and fruitfully ‘engaged’ with and to time’s being.

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It has often been noted that Shakespeare stages the details of the arranged marriage between Antony and Octavia more nearly as a marriage ceremony between Antony and Octavius (2. 2. 44–46) than one between the widower and his new bride; but while this symbolic tableau is unquestionably the playwright’s intent, their apparent union should eventually direct our attention to an even deeper union in corruption between them that, although fully shared, nevertheless keeps them perpetually disjoined. Each man does not truly marry the other here—nor even desire to; as we shall see, each pretender—not Antony merely—“marries but his occasion here” (2. 6. 126–27), imagining an opportunity to manipulate the other for his own private purposes. They merely exchange “mouth-made vows / Which break themselves in swearing” (1. 3. 30–31), ones very much like the vows of fidelity to Cleopatra Antony earlier made knowing he was about to abandon her. If the tyrannical attempt to “possess” the time, as if it were something to be trapped and killed, is no appropriate corrective to squandering the moments as they pass, neither is Caesar’s unswerving self-determination a righteous alternative to Antony’s confused bi-polar swings between selfinflation and exaggerated despair. With Antony, experience is ever a matter of feast or famine; surely the antidote to such wearying oscillation cannot be a steady diet of famine alone. The ever secretive spider hungering alone in calm malevolence and the gregarious, profligate bee feeding from flower to flower, despite obvious differences of manner and temperament, both bear an analogous power to sting that pains not but that has been known to kill. The opposition between Antony and Octavius, though mighty, is not complete. As we have previously noted, Caesar’s signature phrase is: “I will take my leave”; Antony’s, the surprisingly similar: “I look on you / As one that takes his leave.” (4. 2. 28–29) Despite significant differences in tone and intent, these closely related, symbolically telling self-identifications intimate a common corruption we would do well to assess further. In Acts 2 and 3, whenever Enobarbus meets with the subordinate officers of Caesar and Pompey, these hardened campaigners trade good natured, if edgy, barbs and try to impress one another with their plain-spoken, ‘inthe-know’ assessments of the policy meetings and exchanges between their superior officers which, like us, they, too, have just been personally witnessing. In case we may have been insufficiently attentive to the extent of the duplicities in the testy exchanges between Antony and Octavius and each general’s hidden agenda, Shakespeare utilizes their choric commentary to frame the mighty rivals’ verbal contests, casting these subtle maneuvers in a light consistently unflattering to both men.

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Once Antony has wed Octavia, for example, a confident Enobarbus, in responding to Menas’s suggestion that “policy,” not “the love of the parties” (2. 6. 114–15), made the marriage, correctly predicts both that Antony will soon return to Cleopatra and that Octavia, presently the marital “band” binding Caesar and Antony, will become the “very strangler of their amity” (116–18), Antony having “married but his occasion here.” (126–27) Enobarbus’ witticism while taking Menas’s hand in greeting moments earlier—“if our eyes had authority, here they might take two thieves kissing” (2. 6. 95– 96)—resonates beyond the present moment it describes; it is perhaps an even more telling characterization of Caesar’s dealings with Antony throughout their encounters at Rome and Misenum in Act 2. Each of the mighty opposites puts on a show of good will toward the other, on the one hand, while the other hand is trying to pick his purported ally’s pocket—and what’s more, both parties know it. Both their apparent deference to one another in greeting in Act 2 and their farewell “embrace” in Act 3 are in reality shows of superiority masked as good will in a poorly hidden contest for control. At 2. 2. 25–27, Antony and Octavius immediately follow up Antony’s empty flourish in greeting with another, equally empty one, the edgy dance of precedence debated momentarily between them before they both agree to take their seats simultaneously. The charade of polite regard and mutual deference fools neither man because both are up to the same trick—the public demonstration of his own superior position and spirit of largesse. Their farewell in 3.3 proves equally queasy. One can easily imagine the extent of the delight a standoffish Caesar experiences when Antony presumes to embrace him, declaring: I’ll wrestle with you in my strength of love. Look, here I have you; thus I let you go, And give you to the gods. (62–64)

From within this pretext of affection attempted verbal intimidation disconcertingly obtrudes. A loving embrace has been converted into a contest of bodies and minds in which Antony has declared himself so handily the winner that he disdains to pin his weaker adversary. Nor is the analysis of their moments together between their greeting and farewell in any way more heartening. Just before Antony and Octavius are to meet to determine what may be done to oppose Pompey’s insurgency, an anxious Lepidus worries Enobarbus about the danger that any signs of imperiousness or belligerence from Antony might jeopardize a strategic reconciliation between Caesar and his rival. When he declares, “Tis not a time / For private stomaching” (2. 2. 8–9), Lepidus is presumably counseling against

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allowing any personal sense of grievance from scuttling a political marriage of convenience within the triumvirate. But his use of the feeding metaphor opens the way to Shakespearean polysemy, especially when one considers that immediately subsequent to the triumvirate’s colloquy, a surprised and relieved Maecenas declares to Enobarbus how their commanders have “well digested” (176–77) matters between them. The fact that the two leaders manage to forge a temporary reconciliation for the purpose of answering Pompey without openly antagonizing one another further does not intimate that their respective exhibitions of self-control have produced a complete transcendence of private stomaching, just that “present need” can occasionally “speak to atone” (101–2) even sworn enemies for brief periods of time. In each man a “private stomaching” of another sort remains, in fact, very much the mirroring order of their feast of mutual politeness and apparent forbearance. The mutually analogous pattern of their behavior throughout the reconciliation and the proposal and acceptance of their marriage of convenience demonstrates that each privately imagines that if for a short while he can swallow his pride hard and eat a bit of humble pie—even if it does not ‘sit well’ with him—he will have had the other for lunch. In this sense, their “stomaching” is nothing if not private and their digestion not a shared mingling of elements but a wholly separate meal for each at the other’s expense, a conclusion confirmed later when, hearing of Lepidus’ execution, Enobarbus declares that the world now hast a pair of chaps [i.e., jaws], no more; And throw between them all the food thou hast, They’ll grind the one the other. (3. 5. 12–14)

“Let his shames quickly / Drive him to Rome” (1. 4. 72–73): that is Octavius’ prayer for Antony when he arraigns his absent ally before Lepidus for failing to live up to his oath to provide arms and aid when needed. The prayer proves prophetic enough, but not in the terms Caesar had hoped for. At no point in the play does Antony show the slightest sign that he is concerned about his ally’s military requirements and discomfiture or feel genuine remorse for having failed to live up to a sworn promise and obligation. The “shames” that “drive him to Rome” bear rather upon more egoistic concerns: the sudden onset of a fear of his dependent status slavishly “fettered” to Cleopatra and, relatedly, but even more centrally, fear of being displaced from his self-conceived and publicly recognized preeminence as a commanding military figure without parallel in the world.15 The Roman messenger to Antony in Act 1 is savvy enough to realize that the really bad news he has

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to report is not that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and his brother are waging an indifferently successful war against his sworn partner. The messenger has no trouble getting that out on the table for fear of upsetting Antony; the thing he fears may endanger his own well-being is the need to report Labienus’s successful campaign at the head of Parthian forces overrunning the empire’s eastern dependencies while Antony luxuriates feebly at Alexandria, entangled in Cleopatra’s embrace. This news and the letters Antony refers to from friends at Rome reporting Pompey Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands The empire of the sea [while] our slippery people . . . begin to throw Pompey the Great and all his dignities Upon his son,

an upstart who now “stands up / For the main soldier” (1. 2. 176–77, 179– 83)—these things, not his vow to Caesar or his ally’s difficulties, waken him from his Alexandrian torpor. When Antony declares that Pompey, Rich in his father’s honour, creeps apace Into the hearts of such as have not thriv’d Upon the present state,

such that “quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge / By any desperate change” (1. 3. 50–54), Shakespeare does not solely refer to the disaffected Roman commoners shifting allegiance to Pompey’s cause; he is also characterizing the truth about Antony’s own psychic state of disaffection from his “present state” in Alexandria. As Antony himself concedes when he meets the newly neutralized Pompey in 2.6, it was the latter’s military challenge alone “call’d me timelier than my purpose hither.” (51) But Antony cannot get on with suppressing Pompey’s challenge to his repute without first successfully contending with Caesar’s pique. Given how high-handedly he does so, however, he is just lucky that Octavius has his own selfish reasons for swallowing his pride a bit in order to mend fences, too. One of the complaints Octavius earlier expressed about Antony was that the older man “hardly gave audience” to the messages Caesar sent him in Egypt “or / Vouchsaf ’d to think he had partners” (1. 4. 7–8); “with taunts” he “did gibe my missive out” (2. 2. 73–74) of his presence. We could very well say the same thing of his manner with Octavius himself at their reunion in Act 2. At a time when, given his past dereliction and the chastening “message” in rebuke Caesar could be presumed to be about to deliver, Antony

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might be expected to fall all over himself in deference and apology, the “soft and gentle speech” (2. 2. 3) Lepidus urges. But, instead, Antony immediately takes the offensive: “I learn you take things ill which are not so, / Or being, concern you not” (2. 2. 28–29), seemingly treating his co-equal as an underling who has stepped out of line. In striking first to put his rival on the defensive, Antony, as Octavius himself notes, simply “praises [him]self / By laying defects of judgment” (54–55) on Caesar, hardly the most promising path to effecting a reconciliation under the circumstances, one might think. If, in speaking thus to his already offended partner, he does not quite take Enobarbus’s aggressive advice to “look over Caesar’s head and speak as loud as Mars” (2. 2. 5–6), he is closer to that than he is to any penitent expression of remorse. During this entire scene, in fact, he never does apologize for any of his past behavior, instead merely “excusing his foils” (1. 4. 24), as Caesar had earlier insisted he must not. The most he can manage is a staged effort to “play the penitent to” Caesar “as nearly as I may”—that is, badly—because, Antony declares imperiously to Caesar, my “honesty shall not make poor my greatness.” (91–93) It is as if, in his dismissive hauteur, Antony may honestly believe: “when good will is show’d, though’t come too short, / The actor may plead pardon.” (2. 5. 8–9) The symbolic confirmation of all this amusingly declares itself in a short speech Antony makes about one of Caesar’s previously dispatched messengers, a speech likewise a propos of his own insulting treatment of Caesar himself in the present scene. When Antony refuses to acknowledge Caesar’s charge that he had “gibed” Octavius’s messenger out of audience, he fails to realize that his dismissive self-justification also symbolically conveys to the audience a precise description of his own present treatment of Caesar here. Sir, He fell upon me ere admitted. Then Three kings I had newly feasted, and did want Of what I was i’ th’ morning; but next day I told him of myself, which was as much As to have ask’d him pardon. Let this fellow Be nothing of our strife. (2. 2. 74–80)

Antony wants everyone to know that he answers to no one unless he wishes to do so. He did not wish to do so then and he does not wish to do so now. He will not allow Octavius to fall upon him now accusingly without his permission any more than he would earlier entertain recriminations from Caesar’s messengers. The person who failed to live up to his end of a bargain

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when Octavius was in need simply was ‘not himself ’—neither when he did so then nor when called to an accounting for it now. Having now reestablished his purportedly ‘true self,’ he is presently here to tell the offended party so, just as he had done previously with Caesar’s envoy. That is all the apology anyone could possibly need in either instance. When Antony declares “next day / I told him of myself ” he must mean to suggest that he went so far toward lowering himself as to meet the envoy in person to tell him he was ‘not himself ’ the previous day; but the elliptical nature of his expression liberates an amusing Shakespearean ambiguity in it. Then and now, in place of needed apology, Antony is so completely full of himself that when others may legitimately expect expressions of regret he “tells [them] of myself,” a pattern that will repeat itself again and again, as we shall see, in his relationships with others much more meaningful to him than Caesar throughout the course of the play. Once Octavius swallows Antony’s latest insult, Caesar’s way is cleared to forward what his spokesman, Agrippa, openly calls a “studied, not a present thought” (2. 2. 138)—Caesar’s marriage proposal to Antony, utilizing Octavia as the ring or “hoop [that] should hold us staunch” (115), at least until Antony dispenses with the military threat Pompey represents. There can be little doubt that Antony intuits Caesar’s hidden agenda well enough because no sooner has the proposal been made and accepted than the bridegroom assures Octavius, as the first order of business, that he will meet Pompey’s military challenge directly. Though he has not yet even met the woman he is to marry, he turns the conversation immediately and with seeming enthusiasm to military concerns. Then, almost as an afterthought, he crudely urges that before the two generals “put ourselves in arms” he and Octavius “dispatch we / The business we have talked of ” (166–67), the sham marriage that is on both men’s parts an act of prostitution in which, pretending love for one another, they seek their own personal profit. Caesar would trade his sister for Antony’ pledge of military muscle and leadership against Pompey; Antony would trade his freedom and indifference to Caesar’s concerns for the opportunity to reassert and reestablish his ascendancy and repute as the greatest of Roman military men. Each looks a bit foolish in imagining he has outmaneuvered the other unobserved in his efforts to serve himself. In a compliment meant to impress his fellow soldiers in the rival camp, Enobarbus at one point declares of Cleopatra that she “make[s] defect perfection” (2. 2. 231);16 as readers of more exacting judgment and no need to impress or flatter, we might say the same thing—but in a critical sense— about Antony’s efforts at self-presentation in this reunion with Caesar and, for that matter, with others throughout the course of the play. Antony is

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not alone in this, however. As in all else, Octavius rivals and even exceeds him in immoral self-justification that would present defects of character as perfection itself. Like Cleopatra, each man’s “every passion fully strives / To make itself . . . fair and admir’d (1. 2. 50–51)—if without her charm or success in their enterprise. Caesar is clearly correct when he declares of Antony’s behavior here: You praise yourself By laying defects of judgment to me; but You patch’d up your excuses. (2. 2. 54–56)

What Octavius is not willing to admit or contemplate, however, is that to say so is to hoist himself on his own petard, though, instead of merely patching up excuses for his questionable behaviors after the fact, he also “patch[es] a quarrel” (2. 2. 52) with Antony before it without adequate ‘material’ to do so convincingly, as the latter himself correctly affirms. He provokes this quarrel with Antony not so much because Antony’s dereliction has discomfited him profoundly but because it yet might and because, as a power figure who always “deals on lieutenantry,” he imperiously wishes to dispatch Antony to the front as the “sword” with which Caesar plans to slay Pompey. Caesar may attempt to make himself look good by his many complaints about Antony’s defects delivered to Lepidus and his own military subordinates, but the discerning observer is not likely to be thus convinced that Octavius is the better man because in one fashion or another he shares in or exceeds every fault he remarks in the older man. From what we have repeatedly seen of Octavius’s behaviors and attitude, for example, Caesar’s complaint that someone else “hardly gave audience, or / Vouchsaf ’d to think he had partners” (1. 4. 7–8) can only seem like a ludicrous hypocrisy, however unrecognized on his part. We have no way to verify for certain whether Antony did, as Caesar claims, “gibe my missives out of audience” (2. 2. 73–74), taunting them; what we do know for certain is that Caesar does exactly that on several occasions later in the play when the situation is reversed. When he defends his imprisonment of Lepidus, Caesar’s outrageous rationalization of the act is no less flimsy than Antony’s explanation why he should not be held accountable for insulting Caesar’s messengers, each man mirroring the other in cavalierly impudent and unbending self-justification regarding very questionable behaviors. In 3.6 Caesar complains of Antony that he staged a public enthronement of himself, Cleopatra, and their children in Alexandria, “contemning Rome” (read Caesar), and then forwarded criminal accusations of Caesar to the populace in the capital. In his trumped

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up outrage, he fails to keep before himself that Antony’s doing so may well have been a retaliatory insult recording Antony’s comparable sense of outrage and slight when Octavius earlier declared himself an imperial law unto himself by taking unilateral action against Pompey and Lepidus and making “his will and read[ing] it / To the public ear” (3. 4. 4–5) at Rome, excluding Antony from any consideration in these matters. If Antony slights Caesar in Alexandria, it makes perfect sense to assume he does so because Caesar first “spoke scantly of me: when perforce he could not / But pay me terms of honour” (6–7) back at Rome. When they first meet in Act 2, Octavius has no trouble summoning the righteous indignation to indict Antony: “You have broken / The article of your oath which you shall never / Have tongue to charge me with.” (2. 2. 81–83) The only reason this statement proves true is not that Caesar’s word has greater integrity than Antony’s but only that Caesar would slice Antony’s tongue out first. We have every reason to suspect that the oath Octavius takes in his marriage of distrust and convenience to Antony thereafter is no more than a “mouth-made vow / Which breaks [itself] in swearing.” (1. 3. 30–31) In any case he breaks it openly and without direct provocation, hesitation, or consultation in making preparations for war against Antony when it suits his altered strategic circumstances and aims. Octavius finds convenient moral justification and cover for his aggressive aims against his rival in his purported concern for his sister, but that claim will not bear serious inspection. Enobarbus’s witty mockery of the inconsistency between Antony’s battlefield behavior and rhetoric at Philippi— “what willingly he did confound, he wail’d” (3. 2. 58)—describes Caesar’s treatment of his sister in the arranged marriage equally well. Octavius knows first-hand of Antony’s dissolute and fickle ways and the older man’s irresponsibility in keeping his word. Even before the marriage agreement has been sealed, he expresses suspicion that it “cannot be / We shall remain in friendship, our conditions / So diff ’ring in their acts.” (2. 2. 113–14) Given these facts, Octavius’s decision to put his sister at risk with Antony can only be read as a recklessly cynical act of political expediency. Though he is no voluptuary like Antony, he unwittingly condemns himself just the same as he does Antony when he berates those “who, being mature in knowledge, / Pawn their experience to their present pleasure / And so rebel to judgment.” (1. 4. 31–33) In entrusting Octavia to Antony’s irresponsible care, Caesar knowingly sets a thing of great value at serious risk for a fraction of its value merely to satisfy his “present need” (2. 2. 101)—the military campaign against Pompey. Despite superficial politenesses to her at every turn, both men act execrably toward Octavia, each treating her more like a hostage

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securing his safe personal passage through enemy territory than as the loving treasure she truly is toward both men.17 In disregard of her silent dignity and gracious, concerned expressions of good will toward both, the two of them, when together, remain preoccupied by possible slights to themselves from the other. Strutting and fretting in a relentless verbal sparring match, they alternately threaten and accuse one another, ever ready to take umbrage at the other’s words. Nor are they better to her when on their own with her. No sooner has Antony assured Octavia, once betrothed, that he will love her faithfully “by th’ rule” (2. 3. 7), even should they need to be parted, than thirty lines later, after hearing the soothsayer, he reconsiders privately: “though I make this marriage for my peace / I’ th’ East my pleasure lies.” (38–39) For his part, Octavius manifests even less devotion to his sister than does the new husband who deserts her before the wedding cake goes stale. Though it costs him nothing, at least Antony recognizes and pays disinterested respects to Octavia’s extraordinary merit in several spontaneous compliments (3. 2. 43–44; 47–50); but, having earlier recklessly jeopardized his sister’s safety in consigning her to Antony’s care (or so he claimed to believe, at any rate), her brother greets her unexpected return to Rome in Act 3, not with expressions of relief for her safety nor even with unmixed delight at this surprising reunion with her, but only with a peevishly self-regarding sense of slight at the meagerness of her train of attendants. Caesar speaks more truly than he knows, then, when, using the royal “we,” he declares to Octavia: The ostentation of our love, which, left unshown, Is often left unlov’d. We should have met you By sea and land, supplying every stage With an augmented greeting. ( 3. 6. 52–55)

Indeed, so. Both Octavia’s immediate declaration that she came as she did to Caesar of her own “free will,” (3. 2. 56) unconstrained, and Antony’s earlier generosity to her in parting, urging that her journey to Rome “command what cost / Your heart has mind to” (3. 5. 37–38), assure anyone observing the scene that the only insulted dignity worth considering here is not Caesar’s but his sister’s before him. His peevishness is groundless, manufactured in complete disregard for her fears, desires, or well-being, merely to reinforce and justify his own belligerent plans for a military strike. If Octavia has not figured in his thinking during her absence, she does so no more now that she is again in his presence. The laughably ironic inappropriateness of his response—“Welcome hither” (3. 6. 78)—to her expression of heart-divided

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misery because her brother and her husband have fallen out (a response Caesar makes well after their initial greetings) serves only to confirm that he is not really listening to a word she is saying. He has turned as deaf an ear to her as to everyone else in the play, preferring instead to determine silently that he is free to run roughshod over her concerns, patronizingly presuming that her upset is—like every woman’s—not about the two men she purports to care for so much, as it is about her own “content” (3. 6. 83) and “comfort” (3. 6. 89), both of which, he blindly assures her, will soon be reestablished by the very warfare she has journeyed to Rome to attempt to prevent. If Antony’s desertion of her for Cleopatra blithely negates Octavia’s declared value to him, her brother’s treatment of her here and throughout even more completely places her loving personal voice and identity under virtually complete erasure. Shakespeare hints just this irony and horror when earlier he had the brother deserting her declare of her to the husband who is likewise about to do the same: for better might we Have lov’d without this mean, if on both parts [She] be not cherish’d. (3. 2. 31–3)

But perhaps the most quintessentially revealing occasion upon which Octavius rivals and then surpasses Antony in striving to make defect appear perfection before the world is his last. As his own self-appointed historiographer (Mary Ann Bushman [Kehler and Baker 44] remarks upon how often, in effect, Octavius seems to be speaking into a recorder) Caesar deftly seizes the opportunity at the play’s end to refashion the narrative of Antony and Cleopatra’s deaths from what he knows it to be in truth—a vicious, demoralizing tale of thoroughly defeated political adversaries hounded to their deaths by fear of their merciless conqueror’s further humiliations—into a flattering tale of magnanimous tribute paid to lovers celebrated as the stuff of legend by dying for love, each unwilling to live unless for and with the other. In this one ingenious stroke, Linda Charnes notes, Caesar converts a mildly embarrassing strategic setback (though admittedly now twice repeated) at the hands of safely defeated adversaries into an opportunity to display to the Roman citizenry that he has a large enough heart and soul to honor the grandeur of spirit his enemies can occasionally display. By emphasizing the nobility of their dying for love of one another, he both disengages himself from any liability or blame for bringing about those deaths and effectively distracts the populace from the crassness of his motives in his unyielding quest for geopolitical power, substituting for that stark reality

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an elevated and seemingly edifying account of two lovers’ transcendence of such “worldly” concerns. It is a tragic . . . story that Caesar can inflate into legend precisely because it is “no less in pity than his glory which / Brought them to be lamented.” In the logic of his own terms, Octavius cannot elevate them enough, since whatever symbolic capital he produces by generating “pity” for their story is commutable into the surplus value of his own glory. (“Spies and Whispers”146)

If, as many critics have been, we are likewise tempted to make too much of the lovers’ triumph over Caesar and the ‘worldly’ values he incarnates, we would do well to recall Charnes’s troubling reminder that it is Caesar himself who cynically establishes and seeks to perpetuate this very myth of the lovers’ amorous preeminence in the kingdom of love. What’s more, he has done so with less conviction of the myth’s truth or regard for its substance than the suckers affirm who continue to buy the worthless placebo he has marketed. If he can insure that the lovers gain and sustain celebrity of this sort, however fictive its sham pageantry, he believes he will become the sole beneficiary of their glory.18 We ought to concede, I suppose, that to some extent at least Caesar’s effort to put this ‘spin’ on the lovers’ final gestures does work, just how well—especially in an occluded ironic sense—we will be assessing in subsequent chapters. But despite his gambit’s veneer of success in masking his embarrassment at his frustrated purposes and in emblazoning his fame among his countrymen at his triumphant return to Rome, we in the audience who have come to know him intimately are not likely to be totally fooled by the glitter of his tacky repute, no matter how high the gloss. Though his clever appropriation of the lovers’ deaths for his own aggrandizement confirms that he is never reduced to “ass unpolicied,” in no way does that even begin to shake our continuing confidence that it will always be “paltry to be Caesar.” He remains irredeemably what he has ever been, both “mortal wretch” and “venomous fool,” the strange serpent that compulsively kills and pains not. Insofar as Caesar’s last words to Dolabella—“see / High order in this solemnity” (5. 2. 363–64 )—are meant to characterize the lovers’ choice for suicide, assessing that phrase’s descriptive adequacy is no simple matter, as anyone reading the history of the play’s criticism can attest. Even were we to bracket the self-regarding use to which Octavius wishes to put the utterance, questions about the accuracy of Caesar’s seemingly reverential claim for their

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love, as the lights come up, must be measured against an equal but opposite judgment, uttered as the curtain was first raised on the play’s action, Philo’s comparably deictic, but wholly irreverent, “behold and see” a strumpet with her fool. (1. 1. 13) With regard to the lovers, the play ends as it began with a peripheral onlooker’s promise of a theatrical spectacle about to unfold, a promise that prejudices an audience’s reactions to the pair before there is sufficient opportunity to identify them by means of its own careful deliberation. One such extreme and comparably prejudicial directive to judgment may not be any truer than the other in the final analysis.19 Insofar as Octavius’s final speech may be taken to characterize his own proposed control of the lovers’ funeral pageantry, one subtly designed to enhance his own fame among his countrymen, that “solemn show” (5. 2. 362) of respect for Antony and Cleopatra only demonstrates just how factitious his sense of honor is in truth. Clearly, there is no “high order” in his “solemnity.” That much we know for certain. Even in his soberest moments, Caesar’s “own tongue” still “splits what it speaks.” If there is anything faintly genuine in the sentiments Caesar utters here about the lovers, it can be little more than a tourist guide’s admiration for his own proposed itinerary. Within seconds of Cleopatra’s death he has transformed Antony and Cleopatra’s liebestod into the eighth wonder of the world, a sight soon to be opened to the public at Rome but which, in the meantime, Dolabella ought not to miss since he’s here on business in Alexandria already anyway. The more likely force and intent in the word “see” that Caesar’s forked tongue hisses in his final command, however, is not so much hortatory as it is imperative. It represents less a well-intentioned hope than an imperious and impersonal directive to an underling to “see to it” that the public relations “show” of respect he has planned go forward immediately and without a hitch. That’s the Octavian inflection we have come to know and love.20 The most profound irony, however, in Caesar’s concluding remarks only emerges by means of the ambiguity of his declaration: “their story is / No less in pity than his glory which / Brought them to be lamented.” (5. 2. 159–61) On Charnes’s ironic reading of these lines, emphasizing Caesar’s knowing realization that whatever sympathy for the lovers he can engender will reward him at least equally in glory at Rome, should be superimposed a reading that communicates an even deeper, more complex irony that only the audience—not Caesar—can properly appreciate.21 Charnes’s interpretation develops most naturally if one assumes that the antecedent of “their” in “their story” is “a pair so famous” two lines above; but the antecedent might well be the vaguer phrase “High events as these” in the immediately preceding line, an antecedent liberating the possibility of a more far-reaching range

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of reference and self-implicating irony in what Caesar declares here. The “glory” that caused these pitiful events, including the unfortunate deaths of the lovers, is, of course, merely Caesar’s own self-glorification, a glory (for that very reason) no less pitiful and meager than the inglorious effects it realized. That is to say, the lovers’ story is no less pitiful—indeed, it may be more pity-inducing—than the inglorious self-glorification that brought about such needless destruction. Caesar may weep crocodile tears that the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra personally touched him (the intent of his word “strike” in line 359); but for an audience that knows better, the truth in what Caesar says is more generic than personal: “High events as these” merely “strike [all] those that make them.” (5. 2. 358–59) The “high events” that do no more than “strike those that make them” may ultimately prove no one glorious; instead, they may merely inject the strange serpent’s poison ever more deeply into their souls. These events—including, regrettably, the actions of the lovers themselves in the end and throughout—only recoil upon the actors themselves in fateful and lamentably destructive ways. The lovers and these high events are as pitiable and pitiless in their fashion as the self-glorifying agent of doom who brought them, one and all, to this lamentable end, each principal actor vainly affirming at every step of the way to anyone willing to listen with a straight face that the history of their defects is simply perfection itself.

Notes 1. In the past half century the vast majority of critics have, in the end, either bowed (though with varying degrees of reverence) to the lovers’ own exalted view of the mythopoetic, transhistorical distinctiveness of their relationship or else, in rejecting that claim, have done so with such an obvious sense of regret that there is little question how difficult they have found it to resist the fascination of the lovers’ intensely passionate rhetoric of mutual regard. A few, however, have been able to grant the lovers their considerable charms and yet not succumb to them or wish they could. One can generously sympathize with the lovers’ yearning for some interpersonal means to transcend Rome’s life of mean acquisition, duplicitous political expediency, and seemingly endless internecine warfare and still remain inclined, from first to last, to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the account of Antony and Cleopatra’s sad final days as one of our tradition’s great affirmations of romantic love. The handful of critics who have most influenced my thinking about the play— Alvis, Cantor, Barroll, Dollimore, and Charnes—have seen the drama as a fundamentally different sort of tale. For them, though the love relationship is foregrounded dramatically, it remains inextricably enmeshed in a broader political and/or spiritual critique of values Shakespeare is ultimately interested in exploring by means of their

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tragic story. For these critics, as for me, the lovers never come to stand beyond or above the controlling ‘Roman’ cultural imperialism they both implicitly honor and only intermittently deplore in their endlessly divided allegiances to their nations, each other, and even themselves. As Dollimore puts it: throughout the play the lovers’ “language of desire, far from transcending the power relations which structure this society [imperial Rome], is wholly informed by them.” (250) In evaluating the extent to which Antony and Cleopatra go to their respective deaths for love—that is, on each other’s behalf—we would do well to keep before us Marsh’s caveat: “the exercise of power that has been well-nigh absolute is something that they both enjoy, something that they can hardly imagine living without.” Arguably “it is the loss of this absolute authority as much as their love for each other, that makes them ready to die rather than live with diminished fortunes.” (167–68) Even Cleopatra’s seemingly grand finale to her own life may well be subject to the same challenge she uttered to Antony in Act 1: “Good now, play one scene / Of excellent dissembling and let it look / Like perfect honour.” (1. 3. 78–80) Little has been done to follow up on Cantor’s insight that there is but a “bedrock of nihilism underlying [the] mountainous passion of the lovers.” (166) The narrowly restricted focus of the play’s treatment of the lovers’ lives together in terms, first, of extravagant reports of “monstrous matter of feast” (2. 2. 183) almost immediately giving way to paired suicides succeeding one another suggests that in thinking about the celebrated couple Shakespeare took his cue from Plutarch’s distressed summation of their careers together: “in lieu of a formal marriage contract, Antony and Cleopatra assigned the names Amimetobion and Synapothanumenon to the successive stages of their union. The first word, coined in the time of their prosperity, North translates as ‘no life comparable and matchable with it’; the second, a slogan invented after Actium, North renders as ‘the order of those that will die together.’” (Alvis 186) Where but in the minds and hearts of the desperate, does romantic love, in order to qualify for true distinction, need to prove itself reckless about all costs, including even the self ’s destruction of itself? As Cantor sensibly reminds us, had the pair been willing to forego their lives of gaudy public spectacle (Nevo declares that for them the “world” was their “royal footstool” [318]), they could have stolen away at any time into the kind of anonymity the play reports they mime in their Alexandrian revels; but, in order to vanish so unrecognizably into ordinary humanity in all seriousness, they would have had to choose to ‘make a living’ together. (184–85) That they do not even consider this option in the play gives further credence to Cantor’s assertion that in some troubling way each of the lovers is, indeed, “worth more dead than alive” (168) to the other. If decadence can be said to manifest itself when art no longer serves life but, instead, when life begins to serve art and artifice, then the lovers would appear to have entered that corrupting (if alluringly exquisite) domain. In both Plutarch and Shakespeare, it would appear, Antony and his queen’s attitude to the world beyond their passion seems little less cavalierly dismissive than Villiers’s “As for living, we’ll let the servants do that for us.” Despite her obvious rhetorical exaggeration, there

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remain ominous overtones in Cleopatra’s declaration that she will “unpeople Egypt” (1. 5. 78) if necessary to keep up her desired communication with her absent lover just as there are similarly troubling signs of prodigal disregard for her subjects in the description of the tributes paid to her greatness at Cydnus by her citizenry: the “city cast / Her people out upon her” (2. 2. 213–14), more like flowers strewn before a royal progress merely to feed the vanity of an intemperate monarch parading in idle self-glorification than devoted subjects spontaneously reciprocating a kind ruler’s love and concern for her people. For his part, as we shall soon see in detail, Antony “commands what [ever] cost” (3. 5. 37) his heart’s profligate whims have a mind to, from the desertion of women he purports to respect and love to the reckless endangerment of his troops in repeated battles at sea conducted in shameless disregard and lack of consideration for their well-being. 2. Given how often the fact is overlooked, Champion appropriately reminds us that Cleopatra’s preoccupation with erotic desire is “decadent and enervating. Nowhere do the spectators have even the slightest sense of the queen’s concern for her kingdom and for the welfare of her subjects.” (241) Cf. Alvis 197: “their offspring are so little a part of their consciousness that we almost forget they exist.” Though ultimately Kinney exonerates Cleopatra from any blame in this, she does concede that her nurturing of asps comes “at the expense of her real children, whom Octavius has threatened to slay if she escapes him.” (185) 3. In recent years, in concert with a feminist rehabilitation of her image, Cleopatra’s theatrically self-conscious application of the asps to her breast has been variously cast in favorable lighting. (cf., for example, Kinney 177; Berggren 25; Neely 161) Loomba complicates the feminist perspective in her view of the matter: “the maternal image of the snake at her breast tames her own earlier identification with the serpent, replacing the deadly Eastern inscrutability with a comprehensible version of the Madonna. Of course, both are patriarchal constructions of women.” (210) Though Baines reads the import of the image in just the opposite fashion, she comes to the same conclusion about Renaissance patriarchal misogyny: “the serpent at the breast deconstructs madonna and child to reaffirm the intimacy between the serpent and Eve.” (35) For me, symbolic readings of any kind must come to terms with the play’s dramatic contrast between nursing poisonous vipers in explicit and selfconsciously ‘maternal’ tropes and total neglect and disregard for one’s own children. As Marsh puts it, the concluding tableau of Cleopatra shows her, ironically, “with death, not new life, at her breast.” (144) Cf. Battenhouse 167. 4. Several generations ago now, Danby identified the separate death scenes of the lovers as “autotoxic exaltations.” (145) Neely notes the explicitly auto-erotic (and sexually provocative) flavor of Cleopatra’s own description of her suicide only then to claim that the queen’s death nevertheless “symbolizes joyous marital consummation.” (162) But if, as Neely affirms, this is a symbolic marriage in which “sexuality” is liberated “from family, society, and history” one might well wonder how to distinguish logically the pleasures of this much desired union from companionate onanism. Likewise, it has appropriately been argued that Mardian’s report of Cleopatra’s

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death does indeed—as Antony’s potentially ‘leering’ remark about the bridegroom indicates—convert his “motives for dying from Stoic despair to Epicurean joy”; but, as the analysis of that scene in chapter 3 will show, such joy does not, as Bono further suggests, make Antony into a “transcendent erotic warrior.” (186) There is a considerable gap between the Epicurean’s attempt to maximize pleasure and a human love worth commending. 5. As Danby notes: “we might almost doubt whether Octavius has any personal appetite at all, even the lust for power. . . . He is the perfect commissar, invulnerable as no human being should be.” (144) Wilson adds: “even self-love hardly seems a clue to Octavius, for self-love should signify vanity and he appears to have none. Rather, he has a god-like impersonality, and unassailable sense of righteousness.” (160) 6. For Barroll, “Octavius” 261: “it is strange, too, that such a devoted brother should marry his sister, for mere political purposes, to a man who is ‘th’ abstract of all faults that all men follow.’” Barroll’s essay deserves special commendation, not simply because he gets so much right about the character of this strange beast of a man, but also because it is the only comprehensive treatment of this neglected figure in the odd symbolic love triangle among the principal players in the drama. 7. As it turns out, Cleopatra’s “life”—not her person, but her ‘legend,’ composed and narrated by Caesar himself—does indeed become “eternal in our triumph” (5. 2. 65–66) as Octavius predicted it would. Archer 161 notes that Plutarch cited Octavius’s use of a facsimile of Cleopatra in his triumph being bitten in the arm by an asp. Cf. Bushman 46 and Charnes, “Spies and Whispers” 145, who recounts how swiftly Caesar translates the lovers from “rebellious figures who escaped his control and punishment into legendary lovers.” While a number of critics “have observed that Octavius’ historiography ‘officially’ wins in the end, most tend to assume that Antony and Cleopatra have triumphed on ‘other’ grounds that are not, finally, Caesar’s. But such an assumption occludes the fact that it is Octavius himself who legitimates, and hypostatizes into frozen monumentality, this ground. In order to eliminate any lingering threat Antony and Cleopatra may still pose as exemplars of political rebellion, Octavius’s closing lines encase them in the frame of a tragic ‘story,’ which is then excised from the political arena and relocated in the realm of the transcendent Aesthetic.” 8. As Octavius himself declares, “it is not Caesar’s natural vice to hate / Our great competitor” (1. 4. 2–3); rather it is a cold-blooded and calculated pretext of resentment bred of expediency and the spirit of rivalry. His subsequent complaints to Lepidus about Antony’s behavior and character are largely disingenuous, more tactical than heartfelt: but a clever way to pressure Antony into service against Pompey in the building crisis while Octavius himself stays safely out of harm’s way. As Barroll notes: “Antony, one gathers, is presumably imperilling the safety of the whole empire through the tardiness which delays his arrival with requisite aid. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising to hear, at a later date, that Caesar and Lepidus have, almost as if casually, eliminated the great threat without any help from Antony at all.” (“Octavius” 235)

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9. Barroll declares how laughable it is that Caesar’s seemingly supreme grief for Antony at his demise should so readily and completely give way to ‘business comes first.’ (“Octavius” 267) 10. The cowardly Dercetas is in this a symbolic double for Caesar’s sickening role in Antony’s death. In his distressingly opportunistic way, Dercetas seizes the chance to administer the coup de grâce to the dying general—without animosity of any kind but for contemplated personal profit alone. Like Caesar, he takes credit for bringing down the great warrior when Antony himself did the lion’s share of the destructive work. 11. In this, Caesar is a fine illustration of the kind of Shakespearean characterization Diehl 113 cites as at once realistically representational and emblematically symbolic. 12. As an advocate of the now quaint humanism routinely hooted down these days by the imperious guardians of the current critical confederation of orthodoxies—the mavens of cultural studies, feminist poststructuralism, deconstructive relativities and the like—I must risk forwarding the amusingly naive suggestion that for Shakespeare the Narcissistic gazer’s misrecognition “of himself (or his image) as Other” (Gil Harris 416) is not simply an exhibition of every dominant culture’s sins or a gendered phenomenon and problem, but, indeed, a metaphysical absolute not amenable to deconstruction. Though it means reinserting a derided ‘essentialism’ into our communication with one another, for the Bard, it would seem, the truth underlying the Narcissus myth is not merely a male and/or ‘Roman’ phenomenon— though thanks to the reigning critical perspectives, we can clearly see that it is those things, too—but it is a transhistorical problem, a human universal. Why else would he labor so to address his Elizabethan contemporaries and posterity about the sins of their fathers in a culture long since dead unless he firmly believed that their demon seed would never cease its transmigration. 13. Cf. Smith 16 and Kalmey 275–79 for convenient summations of the range of modern critical opinion on the characterization of Octavius. 14. Bayley 98 calls Antony “a lost man from the very beginning,” whereas Caesar and Cleopatra have complete confidence in themselves and where they are going. She is as “unremittingly frivolous” as Caesar is “unrelenting” in his pursuit of power. (99) 15. Marsh 162 notes that the Roman thought which struck Antony was one of prestige and power, not any high sense of duty. Cf. Barroll, “Shakespeare and the Art of Character” 162–66. 16. Cf. Jacobson 104–5 and Charnes, “Spies and Whispers” 125. 17. Cf. 2. 6. 1–2 and 3. 2. 30–33. Probably because of her ineffectiveness and the ease with which she can be seen as a dramatic foil to Cleopatra, Octavia’s character and the heroism of her attempted mediation between husband and brother have not elicited the respect she deserves. See, for example, French 262; Neely 144 and 242 n. 12; and Dash 227.

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18. Alvis, anticipating Charnes, wonders “whether the issue of the play is really love contesting politics, as it is usually said to be, or whether it is not rather a quest for celebrity that takes precedence in the minds of Shakespeare’s protagonists” (185), yet another sign of a symbolic identity or at least linkage between the lovers’ characters and that of their sworn enemy, the soon-to-be crowned, imperial ruler of Rome. 19. Cf. Danby 130: “If it is wrong to see the ‘mutual pair’ as a strumpet and her fool, it is also wrong to see them as a Phoenix and a Turtle.” 20. Cf. Neely 164: “the ‘High order’ which Dolabella is urged to ‘see’ in the last line of the play is not that of the future empire but of Antony and Cleopatra’s funeral.” 21. Cf. Brower 345–46: “the lines on ‘their story’—especially, ‘No less in pity than his glory’—are ambiguous. If ‘their’ refers to ‘events’ then the story of these events arouses pity not less than the ‘glory’ it confers on the man who ‘Brought them to be lamented.’ If ‘their’ refers also to ‘a pair so famous’ their story is no less pitiable than Caesar’s glory is, and his glory is as ‘miserable’ as the changed fortune of Antony and Cleopatra.”

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A Wounded Chance Marc Antony

The Hero’s Emblem: Lingering Death If we think of the imperial spirit of Octavius Caesar as a morbidly poisonous serpent who knows only to strike, Antony proves again and again its hapless prey. Once stung, he cannot find within himself the strength or clear-headedness properly to heed the soothsayer’s warning (“make space enough between you” [2. 3. 22]) and, guided by noble self-determination, move far enough away from Caesar and his influence to stay safely out of the viper’s range, struggle manfully as he may to do so. As he lurches back and forth, literally and figuratively, between Egypt and Rome in a dazed and increasingly disoriented state of mind (the poison having penetrated to the very depths of his being) such life as remains to him—Enobarbus labels it Antony’s “wounded chance” (3. 10. 36)—merely evokes Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death because Antony cannot and does not think what best course to set for himself nor how to stay it. Instead, in the confusion and denial produced by the poison at work in his system, he only makes matters worse when he feverishly opts to “drown consideration” (4. 2. 45) of each and every sign of his psyche’s deepening disorientation and disquietude in passionate self-abandonment to feats of love and war. Though Cleopatra would simply have him exchange one form of psychological dependency for another were she successful to wrest from Fulvia and Octavius the control over him and his movements she fears they exert over him, she does, from the very outset, appropriately summon Antony’s attention to the essence of the persisting quandary and squandered opportunity in 59

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the drama of his life. In symbolic terms, the taunt she addresses to him soon after the play opens does double duty. It is most evidently meant as a sarcastic summation (however imperfectly understood on her part) of the tragic error he commits in remaining unable to choose definitively between Rome and her—ever ceding his powers of self-determination to others. But it is also and simultaneously a simple Shakespearean prescription for the antidote that might alone cure him, had he ears to hear. Fulvia perchance is angry; or who knows If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent His pow’rful mandate to you: “Do this, or this; Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that. Perform’t, or else we damn thee.” (1. 1. 22–24) (Italics mine.)

Threatened by the possibility Antony might desert her, the ravishing Egyptian queen has momentarily been transformed into hellcat quean, spitting fire. The prophetic truth she hisses is that Antony is not his own man and, hence, unworthy of the admiration she and we imagine and wish he could well earn. In her provoking efforts to shame his manhood, she taunts the ‘great’ general with actually being a hen-pecked yes-man and toady. The triple pillar of the world takes his marching orders from a woman or the “scarce-bearded” boy, Octavius Caesar—or what’s worse in her view, from both. In her intuition of a truth she does not fully comprehend, a shrewish Cleopatra’s sarcasm simultaneously utters the poet’s terse summary judgment on Antony’s character and destiny as he pitches and reels inconsequentially between the imperial commands of Caesar’s Rome and the subtler, if no less powerful, domination of Egypt’s alluring queen throughout the course of the play. As long as a man remains in such a demeaning state, he is damned in his own eyes if he does what he’s been told by either master and damned in the eyes of one or another of them if he doesn’t. Ill and unsteady in his movements from the vertigo produced by his “divided disposition” (1. 5. 53), a man ever faithlessly and half-heartedly serving two tyrannous masters—himself a “chronic deserter, forever changing sides” (Schanzer 135)—Antony is never healthy or sober enough to determine clearly for himself and rightly choose a healing domicile and homeland beyond the serpent of imperialism’s reach or create a destiny we would wish to have honored for its achievements.1 Notwithstanding the greatness Antony imagines and claims for his public and private careers, it is his entire dramatic life—not merely its final moments—that proves an inadvertently bungled suicide attempt. Every gesture he makes is an act against himself that only makes for a slow and tormenting

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death, sapping him of his reserves of strength and energy. The history of his self-divided reversals of course accomplishes nothing more than to lengthen out his misery until he “can no more.” (4. 15. 59) He remains true to form in this even as he expires. Mortally wounded by his own hand, he declares, “Now my spirit is going.” (4. 15. 58) We might well ask when it has been otherwise for this declamatory poet of impulsive and arbitrary farewells and departures?2 In symbolic terms, though he remains uncertain about where he is going or what he is coming to in his forced marches, he does nevertheless declare—most often with a sentimental tear in his eye—that he must be going. He even comes to conceive of the moment of his own demise, not as the final unwitting reenactment of the unvarying pattern of flight it truly is, but, in unwitting self-flattery, as a welcome new prospect in his legendary career. A touchingly rootless gypsy, Antony perpetually takes his own leave and excuses himself spiritually even as he takes his leave and excuses himself physically from various locales and situations in an unvarying series of abrupt and arbitrary evacuations. (As we have previously noted, the motto on this general’s “vagabond flag” reads: “I look on you / As one that takes his leave.” [4. 2. 28–29]) Ironically, then, an unconscious reflection of his bete noire, Caesar himself, Antony, too, will stop at nothing. In the end, we must share the wonder in Cleopatra’s protest in farewell: “Noblest of men, woo’t die?” (4. 15. 59) It is as lamentable for us as it is for her that a man of such greatness and desirability could depart from her embrace so anticlimactically. She cannot believe that his part in the drama of their love has simply come to nothing when they had so much between them in prospect to share and enjoy. Nor can we. But it is true nevertheless— both literally and figuratively so, in fact. Shakespeare’s orthographic pun in Cleopatra’s question only expands the terrible mystery and devastating irony in her agonized jest. Can Antony have “wooed” Cleopatra so poetically only to end his life cut off short of an enduring and satisfying union with her in the flesh? And beyond such considerations hovers a yet more troubling question, though one only the poet, not Cleopatra, invites us to ask. Is it possible that the only thing that an unwittingly self-destructive Antony has ever truly “wooed” is not Cleopatra at all but his own death?3 Shakespeare had symbolically indicated that if Antony were truly free he would “take in” (that is, ‘embrace,’ not, in imperialistic Roman fashion, ‘subordinate’ or ‘colonize’) one kingdom and “enfranchise” another; but Antony is so lost and disoriented by the poison Rome has fed him with the air he has ever breathed that he doesn’t really know where or how to find a home for his lost spirit. Never his own man, though he has obviously undergone dislocating intimations of the shallowness of Roman satisfactions along his mili-

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taristic way, he remains unable to distinguish with clarity or purpose what he loves or could love from what he hates or should hate, too damnably divided for such a definitive choice. In the end, he neither conquers Rome (and Caesar) nor frees Egypt (and Cleopatra). Nor does the restless and confused emigre, to put the matter alternatively, ever fully embrace Cleopatra’s fertile kingdom or “enfranchise” himself from Rome by completely renouncing its profoundly tainted and corrupting values. He dies, instead, mistakenly asserting his own nobility, trying to reestablish his frequently forsaken Roman persona as he attempts to enact an eminently ‘pure’ Roman death, one in which he need never fear losing his dignity or ever face defeat at hands other than his own. Rather than suffer being demeaned by a boy who keeps his sword like a dancer, Antony’s dauntless spirit makes a final heroic (and subtly imperial) attempt to “triumph on itself” (4. 15. 15)—though no more than half-successfully, as his botched attempt to fall on his sword symbolically intimates. Speaking more truly than he knows, then, he declares himself a self-destructively valiant “Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish’d,” (4. 15. 57–58)4 As he nears death, Antony’s self-congratulatory orgy of patriotic conviction in his eleventh-hour renewal of allegiance to Rome’s values does not, however, begin to acknowledge, let alone fully admit the compromising fact that the man who declares that renewed allegiance is at that moment consorting and conspiring with the sworn enemy of Rome, his conscience untroubled. His renewed identification with Rome is but a final instance of Antony’s inveterately duplicitous tendency to forge “mouth-made vows / Which break themselves in [the] swearing.” (1. 3. 30–31) What’s more, the very choice for suicide does not, as Antony assumes, confirm the dignity of his recovered powers of self-determination; rather it discloses the ironic fact that even in death an unquestioning Antony still takes his orders from a boy. His rival’s elimination is expressly what Octavius had desired. (Note the important distinction: Antony’s spirit triumphed “on” itself, not “over” itself) The viper has struck yet again from hiding. Like a foolish lackey committed to pleasing a master both tyrannical and indifferent to him, Antony has simply done Caesar’s dirty work for him without even being asked, his own sword eagerly turned on himself become the strange serpent’s fang that kills but pains not. Conversely, his show of loving concern for Cleopatra just prior to his death, a concern which might seem to imply a unilateral oath of allegiance to the values of Egypt, does not in the end, however, completely renounce a vestigial trust in Rome that Rome has never earned. Though it would appear he thinks he is doing Cleopatra a favor,5 he urges her to make peace with a Rome that proves unworthy of trust: the Proculeius in whom his confidence is misplaced and even, beyond one safe

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sentimental gesture, the Dolabella Cleopatra wrongly comes to imagine she may make a faithful convert to her Egyptian religion of love.6 Actium was not the defining moment in Antony’s career and characterization he assumes it to have been. Antony’s sudden panicky decision to leave Cleopatra for Rome in Act 1 is as much a desertion of Egyptian values and standards as his panic-stricken flight after her fleeing ships at Actium is a desertion of Roman military values and standards of conduct later—and, one might add, one no less morally compromising nor in its own way any less a cause for humiliating shame, unless, of course, one harbors a narrow prejudice in favor of exclusively Roman definitions of virtue. Though he may think so, he is not first stung by the viper’s bite in his humiliation and subsequent defeat in battle with Octavius at Actium. Figuratively speaking, recoil from the imperialist’s sting drove him in the first place from Rome to Egypt and Cleopatra’s arms in order to “drown consideration” of it there before the play has even begun. It is also what stung him a second time, on that occasion driving him back to Rome at the end of Act 1 and, then, yet a third time when in recoil he retraced his alarmed steps back to Egypt again well before he ever faced off against his little venomous rival in open animosities at Actium. As much the quintessential “figuration of the Roman ethos” (Barroll “Octavius” 231) as realistic dramatic presence, Caesar has already gotten his fangs into Antony long before the two principals square off against one another in overt battle for supreme power. Indeed, only a man already half-delirious from a poison working its way into his head and heart might ever have imagined a simple cure for the wounds he has already incurred in the public arena of Rome’s civil wars could be found in the sex ‘wars’ and conquest of hearts made and endured privately in Egypt. But that is the nearly delirious expectation Antony lives but to battle throughout the relationship he pursues with Cleopatra, most visibly in Act 4, when, bloodied but unbowed, he returns from yet another wounding engagement with the Roman forces that had defeated him previously, only to cheer himself and his bleeding comrades on to further self-laceration. Enter the city, clip your wives, your friends. Tell them your feats, whilst they with joyful tears Wash the congealment from your wounds and kiss The honour’d gashes whole. (4. 8. 8–11)

If scrutinized carefully, this desperate bravado discloses itself as but a fever’s hectic raving brought on by the serpent’s repeated sting. An Antony deeply “fretted” by his fortunes—himself, in his disorientation, at once both

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“valiant, and dejected” (4. 12. 7)—continues to exhort himself and his men to war against an enemy he no longer truly believes they can, or even must, defeat, confirming Enobarbus’s judgment in defection that Antony’s “valor” now “preys on reason.” (3. 13. 199) Seemingly mesmerized, he hopes to perpetuate—indeed, even celebrate—waging a losing battle with a poisonous snake. With theatrically magnificent but self-flattering verve, he affirms that the wounds and gashes caused in these mortal blows can be fully healed by self-glorifying tales of the grandeur of the great warrior’s own lethal exploits in sustaining them and the passionate embrace of consort and loved ones indulged between battle engagements. It is at best wishful thinking to imagine that war wounds washed with the “joyful tears” of loved ones could be the first step toward a cure, completed when anxious lovers then “kiss the honour’d gashes whole.” Paradoxically compounded of pride in acts of destruction, self-pitying grief and regret, and relief (at once celebratory and fearful) that the wounded warrior still lives to fight another day, such a bath can prove little more than a self-deluding placebo. A moth drawn to the flame, Antony merely incites himself and his men with (and to) reckless abandonment. The warriors’ private passions will not cure but merely resuscitate both public and private woes. Heedless of outcomes and even life itself, they persist in reckless endangerment and heroic dissipation; with all the strength thus revived in them, Antony and his men would, between battles, merely toast themselves and “drink carouses to the next day’s fate, / Which promises [a] royal peril” (4. 8. 34–35) they live alone to tempt.7 Shakespeare’s figurations clearly depict the folly he would have his audiences observe in this seemingly romantic posturing and bravado Yeats rightly identified as the suicidal “delirium of the brave.” If great warriors are fighting in a war they might hope to win, the last thing these newly wounded men need is a drunken carouse to sap their strength further in the following day’s fighting. To do so would, as Enobarbus rightly complains, “eat the sword it fights with.” (3. 13. 200) Nor would one wish, if healing were indeed the goal, to “wash” the congealment from fresh wounds at all. The only thing that accomplishes is to keep the wounds open and raw. Washing a raw wound with salt tears and kisses can only grotesquely intensify the wound’s sting and risk a deeper—and certainly a more morbid—infection, not deliver a wholesome cure. Moral victories of the sort Antony wishes to claim for himself and his men here can only be as profound as the true necessity of the physical obliteration in which they are won. If a fight to the death is not, however, a necessity, fighting with this kind of reckless abandonment is not heroism but suicidal despair, however brave the mask—something Enobarbus insinuates

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when he declares that in Antony’s state of rage (at himself even more that at Caesar) “to be furious / Is to be frighted out of fear.” (3. 13. 195–96)8

II The Civil War Within Well before the play had begun, the victorious general, weary of Rome’s civil wars (even those he had won), had furloughed himself on indefinite leave to Egypt. As the curtain rises, he has just been notified, to his annoyance and dismay, that these wars had not diminished in his absence but multiplied. Nor are the worrisome civil conflicts about which he’s been notified the only ones now raging. It is not alone Fulvia’s war on Caesar nor Pompey’s threatened challenge to the Triumvirate that alone calls out for Antony’s urgent attention: Act 1 depicts the ‘civil’ war between Cleopatra and Antony; Acts 2 and 3, that between Antony and Octavius; and all four in which Antony draws breath, the unyielding civil war within himself as to which one—if either—of these two he loves or hates the more. When Antony describes for Cleopatra how the equally matched forces of Pompey and the Triumvirate keep the Roman populace in a turmoil of shifting allegiances, he describes just as succinctly the civil war raging in his own soul regarding the equally poised forces in a power struggle between the Egyptian queen and her aging Roman general, between Antony and his younger fellow triumvir, and even between one side and the other of the soul of the hero himself who has ‘two minds’ about everything important to him. Equality of two domestic powers Breed scrupulous faction. The hated, grown to strength, Are newly grown to love. . . . creep apace Into the hearts of such as have not thriv’d Upon the present state . . . And quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge By any desperate change. (1. 3. 47–54)

In the ebb and flow of the competing attractions and repulsions buffeting Antony in Egypt, at Rome, and even in his journeying between these poles of value, such life as the play enacts in him proves an utterly futile tug-of-war in which the subordinate officers who hold his place for him on both sides (he, too, deals on “lieutenantry”)—passion (read Cleopatra) and renown (read Octavius); the libidinal pleasures of the East and

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Roman imperialism; shameless flattery and arbitrary fault-finding; changeable desires and faithless desertions; fascination and repugnance; reassurance and doubt; valor and dejection; comfort and despair—all battle each other within him, self-destructively, undermining his very integrity as a person. From start to finish, these aspects of himself in tug-of-war play Antony false, not only because in the end they fight to a stand-off for possession of his soul but also because, though nominally representing his best interests all along, they have already compromised and betrayed those interests before the contest ever began. For all the trouble the great general takes and the troubles he endures, in the conflicted life he leads there is no conceivable way he can ever benefit from it. Even if one lieutenant or another in the civil war within could ever triumph definitively, Antony would only diminish himself. Wars of this sort should not be fought in the first place. As he is pushed and pulled this way and that between corrupted allegiances to Egypt and Rome—Caesar and Cleopatra—each side advancing only to give ground to the other’s pull, over and over again, the continuing conflict within him serves only to wear and waste away Antony’s considerable resources and gifts. In the spiritual desert in which Antony benightedly wanders, a man without a country who eventually loses his way completely in the dark night of his soul, military triumphs and conquests in love prove little more than alternative oases at which he trades before continuing to press on, each stirring his soul but never to meaningful completion. In the end, too exhausted to make further headway in these infertile deserts, he dies weary and unsatisfied, yearning for yet more of the same on transcendent fields of dreams. There he imagines the wars of love may yet be won and Caesar’s triumph reversed. His hunger is like that of his conquering foe: it feeds but on itself. At his fleeing heels, only famine follows. Sonnet 144 depicts a tortured figure who sees, as the poem’s ars moriendi conceit reveals, that his sickbed is flanked on one side by a good angel and on the other by an evil one, each contending for the diseased man’s soul. Like him, Antony might well confess that he is torn between “two loves . . . of comfort and despair.” The apparent morality play in which Antony figures so prominently is not as black and white as it may look, however.9 It would appear that Cleopatra is Antony’s “good angel,” offering passionate spiritual comforts, while Octavius simply serves as the devil’s advocate, death’s own lieutenant, wholly and maliciously bent on Antony’s defeat and despair. But so long as Antony, like the sonnet’s speaker, remains a soul torn between the two, nearly lost “in doubt” (144: 13) about which spirit will eventually determine his soul’s destiny or even whether the two may not have secretly

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entered into a collusion to betray him, he cannot even declare with any conviction that the two competing loves are clearly distinct, morally antithetical agencies. Like the sonnet speaker who suffers woeful fears that his “better angel” (3) may already have been sexually corrupted by his evil one, Antony is recurrently besieged by the embittering anxiety that in addition to military defeat at Caesar’s hands he may need to confront Cleopatra’s personal betrayal in the youthful arms of his triumphant adversary as well—the vile stench of corruption then flanking the sick soul on both sides, threatening to envelop him completely at death’s door. Nor do torturing fears like these exhaust the sick soul’s moral confusion. When Antony and the sonnet speaker imagine that their spiritual woes (or unlikely redemption) will result from the competing agency of external forces seeking to win possession of their respective souls, neither looks deep enough within to suspect that the “two loves . . . of comfort and despair” contending there are not so much external forces and agencies as they are ones internal to each of their psyches. The collusion between Antony’s better spirit and the evil one threatening his soul’s salvation is not so much his gnawing suspicion of Cleopatra’s betrayal of him as it is his own betrayal of one of his “two loves” with the other and vice versa, from within, in faithless divided loyalties. In his love of sensual comfort in Cleopatra’s arms he faithlessly compromises his love for her in his despair that his comfort with her might ever become more than that alone; in his devotion to enduring despair honestly whenever necessary throughout the play he fails to recognize that he betrays the integrity of that feeling and response by seeking in those very moments to take and enjoy a hapless comfort in that very despair. No matter how deep his despairs become, they never grow profound enough to lead him to take a long, hard look at himself and assign responsibility for his deplorable condition and his grave impositions upon others at his own door. The idea of fidelity to such a despair as that is not one with which he would even dally. He imagines all his failures are the result of bad luck or, at worst, failures in his ‘performance’ to be redeemed soon enough by further acts of prowess—never hidden cankers deep within his own character.10 His own divided loves of comfort and despair collude shamelessly within him to betray Antony. His “dark lady” is not, except in a superficial sense, his tormenting Egyptian queen “with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black” (1. 5. 28); she is, in a much profounder sense, the lustful devil that has wormed its way into his heart and there despairs of the richer bounty the Egyptian queen honestly proffers to him. Tortured by his recurring anxieties that Cleopatra might yet betray him, he can never bring himself to place unqualified faith in her.11 (As Enobarbus declares with symbolic appropriateness, if in a

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seemingly unrelated context: defectors in an enemy camp—read Antony— can have “entertainment, but / No honourable trust” [4. 6. 17–18], not trust from others in them nor trust from them in those—read Cleopatra—to whom they have newly switched their allegiance) Instead, very much in the same spirit the lover of the “dark lady” of the sonnets exhibits, Antony haplessly concedes the debased condition of his love, at once taking comfort in his despair and despair in his comforts. He simply cannot resist the lascivious power of his dark lady’s charms, no matter how grave his suspicions of the blackness of her character. Indeed, he does not even desire to escape her wiles, a claim corroborated by the consistency and ease with which he repeatedly reconciles with Cleopatra on the flimsiest of pretexts, without extended discussion of her questionable behaviors or adequate apology from her for her wrongdoings. Luxuriating in his own dissolute slide into ruin in doing so, he merely toasts his passion for her and “drinks carouses to the next day’s fate / Which promises royal peril” to him as reckless and profound as any of the battlefield ‘engagements’ with Octavius do. Antony’s other faithless love, the deceptive devil of vanity coupling with this dark lady of lust to betray him, is not, except superficially, the fair face the sickly Octavius Caesar perpetually puts on everything he does in foolish self-satisfaction. It is true that, like the speaker addressing the fair young man in the sonnets, Antony can at times be seen to flatter the “scarce-bearded” boy without regard to any demonstrable worth in the younger man and— given Caesar’s obvious character defects—despite at other times clearly knowing better. In a profounder sense, however, the sonnets’ “man right fair” (Sonnet 144: 3) Antony praises more than his character deserves is less Octavius than the face he gazes at in his own mirror, that portion of Antony himself whose obvious flaws Antony overlooks or paints over in his ongoing need to bolster his own fading and threatened self-esteem, putting ‘a good face’ on all his actions just as Caesar does, albeit with far more charm than his cold-blooded rival can generate. By means of repeated assertions of his own worth and melodramatic gestures of apparent largesse, Antony consistently tries to convince himself and his friends that regardless of what he and they may do he can remain ever praiseworthy. In Narcissistic self-regard, he cosmetically masks an aging voluptuary as the picture of a fair young man; like the mirroring image of himself he loves in Cleopatra, he, too, would “make defect perfection” (2. 2. 231) itself. In vain yearning for this image of himself, he “drowns consideration” of any deeper introspection and selfscrutiny until, by the time of his literal suicide, his image of himself and true identity, like those of his blindly suicidal prototype in Ovid’s tale, have become as “indistinct / As water is in water.” (4. 14. 10–11)

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Antony might well have become a stellar luminary nurturing the development of many lesser spirits; instead, unfortunately, he contents himself with remaining but a vanity mirror reflecting sunlight on others, teaching them only to mimic his self-preoccupation and encouraging their sycophancy: “for he would shine on those / That make their looks by his.” (1. 5. 55) Above everything, above even life itself and the powerful attraction he feels for Cleopatra, Antony desires to “shine,” basking in his own reflected glory and the vain regard of others—not only in this world but in the next as well. On the verge of his suicide, death has nearly lost its sting because he imagines that in Elysian fields he and Cleopatra will parade in triumph before all other legendary lovers, effortlessly displacing them in prominence and causing legions of feeders and admirers to switch allegiance to him and his dead queen. (4. 14. 51–54) In some sense, then, Antony’s grandest passion is to think well of himself.12 When he looks in the mirror he should not see a “man right fair” without exception; sooner or later he should catch a disturbing glimpse of the family resemblance to the imperial lineaments of Octavius Caesar. If Caesar’s heart is a “considerate stone,” Antony’s is, oddly enough, likewise so, though in a more occluded and paradoxical sense. Caesar is a considerate stone because he lives solely by dispassionate calculation, without feeling of any kind; for his part, however, Antony is no better, despite a virtual absence of calculation and the diametrically opposed tendency to feel everything to drunken excess. If he is decidedly unlike Caesar in his immoderate and sentimental efforts ever to remain “considerate” to those he cares for, himself included, he is nevertheless very much like Caesar—though without the younger man’s malice and forethought—in that in the process he, too, kills and pains not. That is, he kills indifferently, too preoccupied with his own self-image to notice much else. The only significant difference between them in this regard is that Caesar is an indifferent assassin while Antony kills with kindness and unknowingly, a subject we will have more to say about shortly. For the moment, it is enough to note that Antony’s decision to do away with himself only triggers a chain reaction among those nearest and dearest to him. Prompted in large part by his seemingly heroic example and ‘subliminal’ instructions, Eros, Enobarbus, Cleopatra, and (indirectly) Iras and Charmian all emulate the greatness they imagine they see in him by doing away with themselves in rapid succession. Though one would not wish to deny that these actions represent a tribute of love and admiration in an important sense, still, were human beings regularly to inspire devotion of this sort from one another, the race would soon solve all of its problems in a most devastating way.

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III Pompey as Double Many of the preceding assessments of Antony’s character and fate are corroborated and synopsized in the figure of Pompey Shakespeare fashions as another of Antony’s prototypes. Pompey’s career, briefly sketched in Act 2, consistently illuminates Antony’s: here is another great Roman military man reduced to inconsequence by Octavius Caesar and then safely eliminated without nearly the fight he might have mustered (and even, perhaps, have won), all because he has lost any clear sense of purpose in his life beyond subtle self-congratulation. In his final moments on stage, Pompey challenges Antony to yet another drinking contest ashore, now that the drunken revelry aboard his galley has begun to wind down. Pompey’s last words to his rival— O Antony, You have my father’s house—but what? We are friends! Come, down into the boat— (2. 7. 123–25)

disclose a man, his interlocutor’s double, idly stalled by unresolved conflicts within himself, “not knowing his resentments from his affections, as he slides into drunken and maudlin bonhomie.” (Jacobson 100) Challenged earlier in the scene to seize his opportunity to become the “lord of the whole world” by Menas (2. 7. 59), he makes a fatal choice we have already seen Antony make in coming to Egypt. He throws over the absolute geopolitical power within his grasp for idle pleasures, professing cavalierly to “drown consideration” of the politics of power in drunken feasting. Like the victorious but weary general furloughed indefinitely in Alexandrian revels with Cleopatra, Pompey shows himself “more interested in cupping it with the best of them than in running the world single-handed.” (Jacobson 100) Moved as much by secret envy of his rival as he is by fear of him (a matter equally a propos of Antony’s subliminal attitude toward Octavius), Pompey foolishly chooses, as does Antony after him, to press for a pointless triumph over his rival regarding which of them has a greater capacity for self-intoxication rather than elect to make a whole-hearted effort to defeat the enemy he properly resents by taking him seriously enough not to trifle with the devil. Already too far gone in drunkenness to notice what he is doing, each of these great military men lurches unsteadily and inconsequentially between exaggerated conviviality and bouts of antagonism toward his fellow reveler/rival and back again. True of Pompey’s relationship to Antony on his galley, this is equally characteristic of Antony’s relationship to Caesar, as we have already seen, in Acts 2

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and 3 and, more ironically yet, to Cleopatra in Acts 1 and 4. With the mawkish sentimentality only the self-intoxicated can display, both men continue to waver feebly and fitfully between shameless flattery and reckless exculpation of their companions in dissipation, on the one hand, and fault-finding peevishness and accusations about being slighted or betrayed by those same revelers, on the other. In the drunken condition they’re in, they have neither the will nor the strength to bring their resentment or their emulousness to meaningful resolution. In the end, their alternating high spirits and depressions—lacking discrimination and point at both extremes—can only gutter out in stupor or worse. When Pompey squanders the seemingly great good fortune that has been offered to him by Menas, we can see in small the lineaments of Antony’s comparable prodigality with the fortune his own loving subordinate, Cleopatra, offers to him. Throughout the play and on numerous fronts, Antony’s characteristic tendency is to squander good fortune. This is perhaps most obviously symbolized by the consistency with which he gives away the ‘treasure’ he and Cleopatra could well combine in an authentic and committed union of these two comparably rich personalities. But it is likewise apparent in Antony’s military superiority on land squandered twice over: first at Actium and later, decisively, in Alexandria when he again abandons his land forces even though they have held in the face of his navy’s ignominious collapse.13 Finally, it is also apparent when, after defeats, Antony repeatedly tries to divide the spoils of past campaigns among the followers he would dismiss, faithful and faithless alike. (In so doing, ironically, he encourages them all to emulate him in a defection from loved ones he himself blindly continues to model for them.) It was rightly said that when Pompey “laugh(s) away his fortune” he could not ever “weep’t back again.” (2. 6. 102–3) Neither can Antony. Their attempts to do so only represent blind self-pity regarding painful losses not so much suffered as carelessly surrendered through their own wasteful prodigalities. Though they think just the opposite, the reason Antony and Pompey fail to seize the rich opportunities presented to them (whether imaged as geopolitical power or as the love of their faithful friends) has little or nothing to do with principle or nobility. Given Pompey’s willingness to have profited from Menas’s murderous impulses had they gone forward unannounced and undetected, it is clear that it is not “honor,” as Pompey claims, leading his “profit” (2. 7. 73–74), but merely repute. Like Antony, then, he “laugh(s) away his fortune” because, in the last analysis, he cannot bear to think badly of himself or be thought so by others. In an age decadently gone soft at its vital core of love and hate, a deconstructed age in which “(n)aught is but

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as ’tis valu’d” (Troillus and Cressida 2. 2. 52), Narcissism, Ostentation, and Repute form the triumvirate in command of a lawless and rudderless ship of fools. Spiritually adrift, both Pompey and Antony deal on lieutenantry and “feeders” as consistently as Caesar does. Even though their military gifts are clearly superior to Caesar’s, they expect their faithful subordinates—Menas and Cleopatra—to divine their will without guidance and deliver to them the ascendancy above all others they themselves have lost the will to seize or create for themselves with the help of those devoted to their cause.

IV The Nature of Antony’s Heroic Appeal It is, as I claimed earlier, a paradoxical form of loving tribute to him that Antony does not come to the end of his life nor depart from this world unattended.14 Indeed, all through the play, he almost effortlessly wins signs of eager and costly devotion from others for no other reason, it would appear, than the compelling force of personal magnetism and his heroic charisma alone. It is, it would seem, less the virtue in anything Antony himself ever does in the play than the feeling of devotion he inspires that continues to persuade those around him that he is a character whose worth must be acknowledged. But considering how erratic, fickle, and dishonorable his behaviors remain, how selfish and frequent his acts of betrayal, how vicious the calumnies he hurls when angry, and how self-pitying his response to personal setbacks, one may well wonder why and how he manages to maintain allegiance and sympathy even among those closest to him— theatrical audiences likewise included. The undeniable fact is, however, that he does. Shakespeare’s generous directive to us is delivered through the unlikeliest of sources, Octavius Caesar: “Mark how Antony becomes his flaw.” (3. 12. 34) As we witness the demeaning and disheartening spectacle of a great soldier habitually misbehaving, ever more completely becoming but his flaws, we must simultaneously concede that his flaws nevertheless manage somehow to “become” him.15 Just as Antony indulgently concedes Cleopatra’s bewitching charm even as he continues to suffer her withering abuse and doggedly irritating behavior in Act 1, so we, though sorely tried, must make a similarly appreciative concession about her lover. His personal charm, if less thoroughly enchanting than hers, does nevertheless also make Antony’s “every passion . . . strive / To make itself, in [him], fair and admir’d” (1. 2. 50–51), even while he, too, again like his Egyptian scold, continues to behave badly.16

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The two powerful legs upon which Antony’s magnetism most obviously stand are personal accomplishment and personal passion: his astonishing martial gifts and achievements and his eager appetite to celebrate the life he’s leading with his comrades. As a heroic military nonpareil, Antony had shown (and, indeed, in the play’s present, intermittently continues to show right up to the end) valor and endurance worthy of legend, having earned campaign triumphs so prodigiously overflowing that “realms and islands were / As plates dropp’d from his pocket.” (5. 2. 91–92) As for his eagerness to celebrate life—whether Antony is at Rome or in Alexandria, among friends and lovers or enemies and rivals—his modus vivendi is ever: “We’ll feast each other ere we part.” (2. 6. 60) The whole world loves a winner, and those of us fortunate enough to enjoy the cynosure’s acquaintance love that shining star even more eagerly when the man of extraordinary achievements so enjoys the company of mere mortals like ourselves that he seeks little more than to celebrate his human bond as ‘one of us’ with those around him. Already basking in the hero’s reflected glory, our delight in the luminary redoubles itself when we realize that among those of us “that make their looks by his” (1. 5. 55)—either in emulation or fawning sycophancy, or in both—the great man seemingly enjoys nothing more than to “shine” in his delight over us among us. Who would not be dazzled? It can only further enhance Antony’s ‘winning’ ways that neither the company he keeps nor audiences observing him in that company ever seriously suspect that he is trading on his charms self-consciously, even if those of us sufficiently detached from his immediate company to resist his spell somewhat may well come to conclude that in his reveling in these delights with his entourage he merely flatters them and, correlatively, merely flatters himself, too, as he luxuriates in the celebrity of their beaming regard in turn. Antony may need an army of admirers just as much as his consort, the more self-consciously theatrical actress, Cleopatra, needs an audience—and for much the same reason—but he does not seem even remotely aware that this might be so. If Antony may only be fooling others and himself, he does not know it. To combine a modern idiom with one from the playwright’s own day, in the charming spells he casts Antony is a ‘natural’: at once unusually companionable and unselfconsciously forthcoming in sharing his passional life and yet also unusually unreflective, even simple-minded, about it. Whether it is joy or woe, exaltation or mortification (even his moments of rawest shame he displays unabashedly before his friends), when Antony feels something, the world immediately knows it—though one must hasten to add that thereafter he does not examine his emotional inconstancies with self-critical eyes. In this sense, too, then, he remains a “child o’ th’ time,”

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married but to his emotional “occasions” as they pass, however discontinuous and even contradictory they may be. He may not have the personal maturity to ponder in its totality the emotional ‘text’ he’s writing about himself in his callowness; but the dramatic episodes he strings together form as open a book as any voluble schoolboy’s. With a heart ever as guileless as it is overflowing, Antony easily wins friends and continues to influence people in his passionate and wide-ranging self-display, whether, at any given moment, he tries to “laugh away his fortune” (2. 6. 102) in dissipation or suddenly experiences an opposing urge to “weep’t back again” (2. 6. 103) in drunken reflux. Neither we in his audience nor his fellow revelers may ever find it possible to hold him to his word, pledged in intoxicating and drunken bonhomie and assurances of good will, nor—to continue the figure—may we fully trust the truth and appropriateness of his bouts of tearful self-pity ‘in his cups’ either; but no one of us ever much doubts his earnest sincerity in making each one of these pronouncements. Enobarbus, Cleopatra, and Eros can (and, intermittently, do) gently take Antony to task for a disheartening mawkishness in his response to setbacks, doubting the wisdom of his responses; but they are too dazzled and touched by the seeming intensity and reality of his bouts of shamed grief ever to call into question the legitimacy of these experiences or show his sensitivities (almost wholly self-regarding in nature) anything but an exaggerated sense of consideration and respectful toleration. With such complimentary regard, kindliness, and apparently genuine good will does Antony treat the women he has privately decided to throw over—Egyptian and Roman alike—that he very nearly convinces them, us, and even himself that showing his back to them is not desertion but, in fact, confirmation of his continuing devotion. Antony may initially declare to himself with some sternness that Cleopatra’s “strong Egyptian fetters I must break / Or lose myself in dotage” (1. 2. 109–10); yet by the time he has won her skeptical leave to desert her at the end of Act 1, he has construed his departure, both to her and to himself, as a kind of crusade undertaken in her name, promising her the world he plans to conquer in his absence as tribute to her greatness and importance to him.17 Now he does not seem to think of his departure as casting aside a slavish dependency unworthy of himself but as a promissory tribute to the conqueror of his heart. Say the firm Roman to great Egypt sends This treasure of an oyster; at whose foot To mend the petty present, I will piece Her opulent throne with kingdoms. All the East, Say thou, shall call her mistress. (1. 5. 43–47)

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Can one say with confidence that Antony means this any less sincerely than he meant the remark declaring Cleopatra his “strong Egyptian fetters” when he said it? How can Antony be held to ordinary human account for desertion when, in seeming earnestness, he insists to the queen: That thou, residing here, goes yet with me And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee? (1. 4. 103–4)

If any of us were in Octavia’s shoes in Act 3, could we see through him or resist the charming blandishments with which he dismisses her? Despite having resolved privately to break vows to Rome, Caesar, and Octavia (“i’ th’ East [his] pleasure lies” [2. 4. 38]), he eases his getaway by construing this decision about allegiance, in his own mind and before Octavia herself, not as an arbitrarily selfish fait accompli, but as a contingent decision—one that she, not he, must freely make between guilty and innocent loved ones (read brother and husband, respectively). When he kisses her off in this grand gesture of consideration, his generosity seems to know no bounds as he urges her to spare no expense when forming her personal entourage for the fact-finding mission preliminary to her own choice of allegiance: Provide your going; Choose your own company, and command what cost Your heart has mind to. (3. 5. 36–38)

Who could be expected to see through such a scamp? The personal power of his charms in no way excuses his steady stream of unscrupulous behavior; but it does coax everyone (except Caesar)—even observers like ourselves in the theater audience—to make allowances for him almost despite themselves and their better judgment, joining Octavia and Cleopatra in allowing him to ‘get away’ with whatever he wishes. If we do not remain on our guard, we will probably behave as Cleopatra does at the close of Act 1. We, too, may well shake our heads at Antony’s behavior and remain distrustful of his virtue and credibility yet find ourselves unwilling and unable to write him out of our hearts, especially when the predator closing in on this babe in the woods throughout the remainder of the play so makes our skin crawl. In its volatile shifts and unexamined contradictions, the course of Antony’s emotional life may seem puzzling and problematic to his more reflective ‘readers’ in the audience; but to the play’s boyishly engaging hero who lives only in the immediacy of a series of disjunctive, seemingly discrete dramatic moments, that fact has not—nor, strictly speaking, will it ever—become a problem requiring his consideration. Like a child, he remains ever oblivious

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to the effects his choices have on the lives of others. It is, as it turns out, he, not Octavia, who, in gathering a retinue to attend one’s going, “commands what[ever] cost / [His] heart has mind to.” Nor will he ever mature sufficiently to render an adequate summational judgment upon his guilty soul for squandering the lives of all those who bravely served him to the bitter end. Indeed, in his faithless marriage to every moment of his life as but a sequence of “occasions” superseding one another in disconnection, himself easily seduced by each one’s momentary allure, he does not even feel any compelling need to reconcile the inconsistencies and reversals of his yearnings and aversions so as to ‘gather,’ re-cognize, and then identify them with his person and thus make real and reasonably self-aware some identity with himself to himself, however provisionally.18 As we saw earlier, in the last moments of his life’s many stops and starts, Antony does finally begin to recognize for the first time the full extent of the punishment he has unknowingly brought down on himself—bewilderment and attenuation of the meager sense of identity he nurses. This he images first in the figure of himself as lost sojourner and then in one of very nearly complete personal dis-integration just prior to his attempted suicide. But at no point does Antony have any inkling whatever of his own responsibility in visiting these punishments upon himself, even though, in the dreadfully occluded manner of the profoundest tragedies, the inevitability and even appropriateness of the punishment to the protagonist’s crime should be as plain to us and him as the nose on Antony’s face. Willed obliviousness to one’s integrity as a self (poststructuralists beware) slowly but surely dis-locates, disorients, and dis-integrates the life of the self—‘by its own hand,’ as it were. Thus it was, indeed, that Antony alone “triumphed on” Antony, bringing this inevitable catastrophe down on himself. Surely obliviousness can produce nothing more than oblivion; yet no more than the ancient Theban king fleeing Corinth did Antony have any clear sense of what he was doing to himself in setting this ruinous course for himself. His erratic life’s journey creates nothing but havoc and disaster for himself and his dependencies; but, one should hasten to add, his missteps, like those of Oedipus, remain blissfully ignorant and, thus, in some sense, innocent ones. The grave error of Antony’s ways does not completely alienate us from him, in part because of the extent of this ingenuousness in him and in part also because his very error is so near and dear to our own hearts as well. A life of boyishly unselfconscious simplicity and spontaneous responsiveness to the vagaries of human experience is an archetype of such charming allure to us all that none of us would willingly part with it completely. If such spontaneity may appear elementary, simple-minded, and finally irresponsible, it

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is also a simplicity that seems, no less than children themselves, a gift from the gods. If such simplicity seems irretrievably lost to us as adults, when we see it somehow surviving in another it only grows that much more appealing as a result. Such is the essential quality of boyish simplicity Antony unselfconsciously projects. Though his emotional alternations are complex, contradictory, and deeply troubling, he does not experience himself or them in that fashion. As was noted previously, Antony does not seem to doubt the genuine grandeur of the passion he expresses for Cleopatra on several occasions in Act 1 any more than he doubts that she is an Egyptian “fetter” he must find some way to escape in that same Act. Repeatedly in Acts 3 and 4, he becomes as completely convinced for a moment that she has betrayed him as, at other times, he can be as readily and firmly convinced that she has not—without a shred of corroborating evidence to support either supposition or any sign whatever that he is troubled with himself for the groundless license of his changeable regard for her. It would appear that he is as unreflectively convinced of his own blamelessness in his dealings with Caesar during his absence without leave from Roman battlefield duties as he is when he leaves Cleopatra in Act 1 or when he feels he must revoke newly-made vows to Rome, Caesar, and Octavia and fly again to Egypt in Act 3. Whether he is reneging on unequivocal assurances of support and fidelity to his public responsibilities in Caesar and Rome’s wars or to his private obligations to Cleopatra and Octavia’s loves, Antony seems privately untroubled and publicly at his ease defending himself against charges that there might be anything morally questionable about these behaviors. When he returns to his deserted Egyptian mistress in Act 3, no less than when, in Act 2, he had returned to Rome to a fellow campaigner he had also clearly let down, in each case he rejoins the deserted comrade of the moment without any sign of an explanation or even an admission that he had, in fact, ever truly failed the figure with whom he again hopes to renew an alliance for his benefit. In his dealings with Caesar early in the play as with the women he proceeds to desert with such consideration, for Antony it is ever as if “when good will is show’d, though’t come too short, / The actor may plead pardon” (2. 5. 8–9) and never answer for his inadequacies. Nor is it solely boyish ingenuousness or a conscience at ease that makes Antony’s “every passion . . . strive / To make itself in [him], fair and admir’d” (1. 2. 50–51) in our estimation, even as he continues to flaunt irresponsible misbehavior.19 Less readily apparent, perhaps, but even more essential to his “grave charm” are two other factors further assuring, paradoxically, that the “vilest things / Become themselves in” (2. 2. 238–39) Antony in as equivocal

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a way as they do in Cleopatra. The first is the unique dramatic prominence given his searing emotional neediness and vulnerability to intimations of his own psychic distress—however abbreviated his submission to their impact and self-absorbed his reaction to their disquietude. His acute attacks of panic, recurrent episodes of serious emotional and volitional dislocation, put audiences on notice that Antony’s arbitrary and changeable behaviors are a direct consequence of a deeper unease whose discordant assaults upon him awaken a substantial degree of pity for him from us, especially since he seems to have no idea what might be going wrong with him. The spiritual malaise he suffers in response to these crises—all restiveness and reversals of course—clearly renders a fitting judgment upon him, but it also represents a terrible ordeal whose mere endurance earns our admiration at the same time. Caesar, we know, remains an utterly alien presence to us, ever impervious to suffering emotional dislocations of any kind. More like her paramour, but gifted with greater psychological stability, Cleopatra can occasionally grow restive and subject to volatile, bi-polar swings of emotion regarding her relationship to Antony (though not, significantly, regarding her own emotional commitments themselves); however, her crises of personal desolation and passional claustrophobia recur only at those times when Antony is physically absent from the reach of her arms and/or charms. She feels the need for opiates to combat emotional vacuum and ennui only when she would “sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away” (1. 5. 5–6) at Rome. On only one other occasion, immediately after Antony’s death, does she wonder in dismay how and why she should “abide / In this dull world, which in thy absence is / No better than a sty.” (4. 15. 60–62) In the ordinary course of things, as long as Antony’s separation from her involves nothing more than absent-spiritedness on his part, she remains eagerly and unwaveringly focused merely on winning back his attentions. Antony’s unease, by contrast, the dis-ease in his very person she does not recognize nor herself share, is a more life-threatening and intractable condition. The slackness in his spiritual moorings is very nearly perpetual and, thus, more consistently troubling to our sympathies than his lovelorn queen’s occasional disclosure that she is at sixes and sevens because she can find nothing to interest her when Antony’s away. An inner void plagues Cleopatra’s spirit only so long as she cannot find a way to engage the beloved ‘other’; for better and worse, Antony’s recurs even when he is so engaged.20 In spite of monumental attainments in both the geopolitical and personal spheres, despite world domination and a passionate conquest of the most powerful, celebrated, and fascinating woman on earth, in both his public and private lives Antony recurrently suffers inklings of

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an inner aporia so profound and terrifying that panic reversals of course and strenuous repression of the possible import of these crises of will are the only ways he can imagine contending with them. In his private life as in his public career, everything that Antony has ever conquered soon palls (in the glut of his good fortune at love and war, for him the “present state” must ever anew “purge / By any desperate change” [1. 3. 52–54]); conversely, and contrary to his confident claim that the “past is done with me” (1. 2. 90), everything Antony has ever left behind or tossed aside as expendable soon enough entices him back again with renewed intensity. (Whether it’s his neglected military career and reputation or his loving regard for the various women he has deserted, for Antony, all is, like the departed Fulvia, once again “good, being gone.” [1. 2. 119]) If we consider Shakespeare’s portrait of Antony with care, we can make out a certain “grave charm” (4. 12. 25) in this man of the world plagued by disconcerting premonitions of the pointlessness of conquest—whether over empires or empresses. Such moments become recurring crises of will fed by the sickening aftertaste of possessive human passions sated, however grandly. Nor does this charm dissipate itself completely, even when we acknowledge that almost as soon as he begins to flirt with these moments of truth he deserts them in panic flight, almost as if he is hoping that abrupt changes of air and scenery could be enough to cure his queasy spiritual equilibrium and set him to rights again. Antony first intrigues us humanly almost as soon as the curtain rises when he expresses his distaste and contempt for merely plundering and pillaging the world’s far-flung territories in the tiresome name of Roman imperial expansionism and, instead, seemingly plumps for passion and Cleopatra: Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay, our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man. (1. 1. 33–36)

The distressing aftertaste of some comparable surfeit with geopolitical conquests must have had much to do with his deserting battlefield chores to seek Cleopatra’s welcoming embrace in the first place. Octavius Caesar may inhabit a spirit paltry enough to content itself with a dispassionate quest to become “universal landlord”; but from the start we have intimations that Antony’s quest is a grander and more appealing ambition, even though he may never be able to articulate for himself or us exactly what it is. His occluded desire is to vanquish his spirit’s exile, to find a comfortable home and

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secure refuge from vexed longing. In staying on in Egypt with Cleopatra to purge the wretched excess of seemingly endless wars of annexation, Antony’s hope had been to create a mansion for the spirit with Cleopatra within the vast, faceless edifice of the political empire he had already erected for himself. There he might take up residence, rejuvenate himself, and live richly, not obsessively add redundant new wings (or, even worse, merely monitor the security of old ones) in what was already the most imposing geopolitical superstructure the world had ever known. The spectacle of Caesar’s figurative imprisonment, condemned by his unswerving self-determination to pace the cold and vacant corridors of power without relief, with no changing of the guard he patrols, clearly can exert no allure remotely comparable to the easy gratifications promised by Antony’s pleasurable coupling of two imperial passions. Yet almost as soon as Antony sets up housekeeping to live regally with Cleopatra he finds himself troubled again by a recognizable twinge of dissatisfaction. True to her reputation, the impassioned queen soon “makes” Antony “hungry / Where most she satisfies.” (2. 3. 237–38) What Ventidius discovered on the battlefield, Cleopatra learns, to her confusion, in the bedroom: too much good fortune in passion, like too much battle success, can readily come to represent for the general under whom they both serve a “gain which darkens him.” (3. 1. 24) Antony may flee Roman battlefields to feed on sumptuous pleasures in Egypt, but “at [his] heels / . . . famine” nevertheless still “follows” (1. 4. 59)—not merely in the person of the hungry predator, Octavius Caesar, bearing down upon him; nor only in the unsatisfied appetites of his entourage of comrades and lovers “spanieling” him for the sweets he freely supplies (4. 12. 21–22); but, above all, in a destitution within himself that he neither recognizes nor can remedy: not in Rome nor in Alexandria. That hunger gnaws interminably at the edges of his consciousness but so unobtrusively that its relentless appetitiveness wastes him away to nothing before he ever recognizes it. This endless craving is the strange serpent’s poison, lodged in his own heart’s desire, to work there invisibly and painlessly, slowly but surely producing its lethal effects. From this dull hunger he knows no genuine relief: he can never fully enjoy anything he presently possesses or escape yearning for what previously he has cast aside in contempt. It is the same slow torture confessed by the speaker of Sonnet 64 who must die a thousand false alarms of death because his psyche “cannot choose / But weep to have that which it fears to lo(o)se” (13–14)—his own life itself and all he possesses or hopes to possess. (Can anyone really wonder why Antony so touches our hearts, despite a life of manifest profligacy?) For this soul lost in repressed terror of its own darkness, neither military success nor erotic

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passion ever fully satisfy in that “by starts / His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear / Of what he has and has not.” (4. 12. 7–9) Everything he possesses Antony simultaneously “has and has not”—his accomplished military renown, his enjoyment of Cleopatra, and even the sureness of his very sense of his own proper self-esteem and self-worth. In a world of plenty his psyche “makes a famine where aboundance lies.” (Sonnet 1: 7) In pursuing what he desires (even when, in periodic frustration at his loss of headway on one course, he reverses direction), he pursues himself and his way only to flee them, Ixion on his wheel. Ashamed at himself after Actium, Antony condemns what he believes was an isolated failure of nerve, an action that was ‘out of character’ for him. That is what he means to say when he declares in chagrin, “I have fled myself.” (3. 11. 7) The profoundest irony of this admission, however, is that his behavior there was in no way ‘out of character’ but wholly characteristic of the man. He never does anything but flee himself. A lost sojourner ever being overtaken by a darkness more inner than outer, he proves but a “child o’ th’ time” in this unusual sense, too, a child who in confused terror persists in a self-contradicting pattern of panic-stricken, ever criss-crossing flight rather than face out the reality of his own condition and calmly seek or wait upon more light by which to take his bearings. Take, for example, three plot-twisting reversals of ground about whose obscure motivations the play is so notoriously silent. We have previously cited the submerged fear of displacement from preeminent military renown that alone begins to explain Antony’s off-stage reversal of his initial refusal to hear the messengers from Rome when the play commences. It is true that the anxious remark he later makes about Egyptian “fetters” may tempt us to believe that fears of eroding powers of self-determination may also bear upon the panicky decision he makes there to break away from Cleopatra and her luxurious ways. However, the cavalierly unilateral and patronizing way he subsequently “breaks” (1. 2. 169) his news to her seriously diminishes the likelihood that Antony faces any imminent risk of emasculation. He has already made definitive arrangements for his departure with Enobarbus (1. 2. 168–71; 186–88) well before he presents the situation to her as a matter still to be decided and, with cynical disingenuousness, pretends to “get her leave to part.” (1. 2. 171) (Predictably, much significance has been mined recently in Cleopatra’s daring experimentation with gender-swapping role-reversals and playful cross-dressing; but, in the final analysis, there is regrettably little question who generally wears the pants in this relationship. Cleopatra’s bold erotic theater has more to do with enhancing sexual tension and allure than with an early anticipation of revolutionary gender politics.)21 It is not so much that Antony may not be man enough to defend his autonomy if he

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stays with Cleopatra, as he seems to imagine, but that his leaving her under the circumstances only proves that he remains far too much of a child. The territories he has conquered in Rome’s name lie discarded and neglected, like so many toys in a toddler’s playroom. As long as no one else competes with him for them, he has no use for them; but should someone else show an interest in any of them, even while he’s off playing happily with Cleopatra, he must immediately have them back. Likewise revealing is his shocking decision in Act 2 to desert Octavia and gratuitously squander his newly cemented political accord with Caesar in order to return to Egypt and his life of pleasure there. Absent any cause for alarm in Octavia’s considerate treatment of him, any apparent fissure at that point in the tenuous compact between Caesar and Antony, or even any sign of growing tension between the two rivals, Antony’s jittery response to the soothsayer’s warning and his resolve to flee Rome at the first opportunity can only be credited to a childish combination of thoughtless self-indulgence and pique. When Antony rationalizes his refusal to deal personally with Caesar at all any longer because of the younger man’s previous record of unfailing luck in their gaming, he seems like a flustered youngster who stalks off the playing fields entirely simply because of a run of bad luck, an especially childish sulk if one considers that thousands and thousands of lives depend upon the proper maintenance of a minimal accord between the political players here. Antony’s bolt from Actium represents an even more curious attack of panic. He cannot even explain to himself why he did what he did there. With the battle near its climax, victory as likely as defeat, and no sign of peculiar duress, Antony unaccountably darts after Cleopatra’s fleeing ships. Humiliated by his own behavior in so doing, when he next sees her, he tries to credit his defection to Cleopatra’s bewitching personal power over him. While it may be true that the only convincing explanation of Antony’s bizarre behavior at Actium may well be that his heart was “tied” to Cleopatra’s rudder and, thus, that she “towed” him after her (3. 11. 57–58), the strange fact should not be misconstrued as indicative of profound personal concern or even a grand passion for her in her lover. It is seldom noted that after his crisis of will at Actium Antony does not try to overtake and rejoin his lover: in fact, she must subsequently seek him out to take stock of his state of mind and the situation. His implicit rejection of any compelling allegiance to ‘Roman’ military concerns, made manifest in his departure from the battle, was not thereby a conscious personal commitment to his relationship to Cleopatra for all that. His betrayal of the Roman military code of behavior has left him completely isolated in ‘Roman’ shame at having done so, not seeking

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Cleopatra’s passionate embrace nor concerned in any discernible way with her welfare or lack of it. Surely if he were concerned about her, he would have sought her out immediately. If one were given to cynicism, one might simply conclude that his feelings for Cleopatra—though powerful—are very much like his feelings about his military preeminence: he’s really concerned about both of them only if he’s in some danger of losing them. But Antony’s spirit is not so consciously calculating as that. Earlier he had displayed anxiety about his loss of self-determination if he did not cleanly break from Cleopatra. Actium proves a psychoneurotic Scylla to that Charybdis. Losing touch with Cleopatra completely to function in exclusive self-determination apparently can prove just as anxiety inducing as its opposite, leading him to act in a manner that no one in his or her right mind would call calculating. Actium proves that Antony is tied to Cleopatra’s rudder in the same way that very young children can be tied to their mothers’ apron strings. When he “runst . . . after that which flies from thee,” he proves another incarnation of the desolate child in Sonnet 143, who holds its mother “in chase . . . whose busy care is bent, / To follow that which flies before her face: / Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent.” (5–9) When his mother leaves him in a room alone, a very young child may burst into tears and rush in the direction of her departure because the essence of his personal security has vanished with her. Though we must not confuse such desperation with love, this crying need cannot fail to awaken and sustain our sympathy for the anxious and threatened little spirit that suffers it, even if the pathetic child happens to be ruler of half the world. No matter how willful and repetitive Antony’s betrayals and derelictions throughout the play, our discerning in him an ever panicky child lost in the darkness of his frantic and confused reversals of direction has the effect of tempering judgment with pity and terror for him (and ourselves). Likewise, however self-absorbed, self-satisfied, and ultimately narcissistic we may finally conclude his deepest desires to be, his boyish earnestness and unyielding efforts to live up to or regain the idealized image he holds of himself as an honorable man assures that his “every passion . . . strives / To make itself in [him] fair and admired” in our reckoning, too, just as it does in his own. If we must reluctantly conclude that in this preoccupation with his own repute Antony is no less vain and self-regarding than the blatantly odious Octavius is, it certainly does not seem so on surface inspection. “All [Antony’s] efforts to be the man he thinks he should be” (Bamber 125) seemingly disclose him as someone striving for virtue and appear to distinguish him quite

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unambiguously from the malicious viper striking at him. The demoralizing fact that Antony ultimately is only half-hearted about all of his commitments does not completely vitiate Robert Hapgood’s admiring claim that even as his “judgment and sense of identity dissolve” in the course of the play, he nevertheless “remains large-hearted, open-hearted, tender-hearted, stout-hearted.” (10) Passionate, courageous, seemingly boundless in his generosities and forgiving even to a fault, he cuts a dashing and appealing figure as he continues to parade before us on his high horse. The soothsayer voices the complex truth: insofar as Antony attempts to “make space enough” between himself and Caesar (an injunction he fails, unfortunately, to understand or heed adequately) the “spirit which keeps” him does indeed promise to be “Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable” (2. 3. 19) in a way his coldblooded antagonist’s decidedly is not. Indeed, in Antony’s conscious reflections and amour propre, he seems so preoccupied with his own nobility and Caesar’s lack of respect shown for it that he can affirm with nearly persuasive sincerity to Octavia: “If I lose mine honour, / I lose myself ” (3. 5. 22–23), even as he remains oblivious to the hypocrisy of such a declaration’s being made to a woman he has already decided to betray. To his untroubled way of thinking, conventionally honorable behavior and honorable repute are such paramount considerations, such preeminent values, that without them life is not worth living and he personally without value, but an empty cipher. In Troilus and Cressida there occurs a richly quibbling verbal exchange between a palace servant and the old lecher, Pandarus. The servant, flouting Pandarus, asserts that the old reprobate is “in the state of grace” because the servant has just managed to get Pandarus to accede to the servant’s equivocal desire to “know your honour better.” (3. 1. 12–14) According to Pandarus’s witty tormentor, it is not that men improve upon acquaintance; rather, our newly made friends improve when they come to have a better sense of what honor means and then act on that knowledge. If we measure our hero by this same rule of thumb, Antony remains stalled at the threshold of spiritual reform and saving grace without ever crossing over to a life of genuine virtue. Even as he now grows increasingly apprehensive that his hard-won glory may yet slip away from him, he should be lauded for striving constantly to maintain the honor which, as a veteran campaigner, he feels he should sustain. It is also true and even more praiseworthy that he makes every effort to reestablish his nobility when he feels he has acted in a manner he considers unworthy of himself. But it is equally true that he never questions whether his initial conception of his own honor and/or honorable behavior represent an adequate understanding of the meaning of these concepts in the first place nor does he ever wonder

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whether he is called upon in conscience to improve upon his virtues, no matter how magnificent his worth and nobility may already be. A pampered cynosure not much given nor encouraged to pointed self-scrutiny, in neither of these essential regards does Antony care to “know his honour better.” The hero Bamber has heralded as one who makes every effort “to be the man he thinks he should be” is, on more exacting scrutiny, also a vain, self-satisfied figure who smugly presumes to know what his own greatness of spirit was once, is now, and can or might ever yet be. His is no pilgrim soul yearning for noble self-transcendence; never does he enter the state of grace that seeks to know his honor yet better. Immediately prior to his faithless desertion of his new bride, Antony seemingly offers Octavia some kindly advice: “Let your best love draw to that point which seeks / Best to preserve it.” (3. 5. 21–22) Since we know that he has already made plans to rejoin Cleopatra in Egypt before this farewell kiss-off with which he sends Octavia on her fact-finding mission to Octavius, these sentiments can hardly seem free of disingenuousness. Symbolically, the remark tells us at least as much about Antony’s own vanity and absence of critical self-reflection as it reveals genuine loving concern for Octavia. For him, one’s “best love” does not seek or imply a self-transcending ‘greater good’; it seeks, instead, and self-flatteringly, to secure one’s own current well-being and “preserve” one’s personal wealth from loss. More likely than not, he intends the word “Best” in line 22 as an adverb in the self-satisfied service of preserving one’s own riches; but even if Antony may be using the word “Best” as an abstract noun, its only intended semantic function is self-congratulation and self-gratifying vindication of his own superiority to Caesar. Since he is sending Octavia to Caesar to determine which of the two men in her life is the “best” man, once she discovers what Antony presumes to know—that he is that man—then her best love will naturally draw to that point which will seek to honor and preserve him and his loving protection. It awaits the generous counterexample of a true love, that flowing from the ever-burdened Octavia, to liberate the Shakespearean wisdom buried in Antony’s pronouncement. The “best love” that is in her “draws to that point which seeks / [the] Best” for all concerned in order to “preserve” that best for all, no matter what the cost to her in personal pains. Unwilling to make an either-or choice between the husband and the brother she loves, she pleads with both in the name of the well-being of all three and, what’s more, in the name as well of the thousands of “slain men” she rightly fears will “solder up the rift” (3. 5. 31–32) between Caesar and Antony if she cannot reconcile the two of them. By contrast, whether it’s on the battlefield or in the bedroom, Antony is only obsessed with his own performance rather than with what goods that

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performance might yet accomplish. Virtu may not quite be the same thing as virtue, but the history of critical estimates of his character confirms that the former mimics the latter well enough to have made the “vilest things / Become themselves in” (2. 3. 238–39) Antony with considerable impressiveness. Though his narcissism knows no bounds, he remains ever innocent of the realization that the true object of his every desire is an idealized, but lifelessly inert image of himself in the contemplation of which he is pleased to drown consciousness and consideration. Thinking he is bravely facing the contingencies of do-or-die battle at the beginning of Act 4, Antony characterizes his hopes to Enobarbus: Or I will live Or bathe my dying honour in the blood Shall make it live again. (4. 2. 5–7)

Antony complacently imagines that no matter which way the battle should turn he will find gratification since either alternative strikes him personally as a glorious consummation. We cannot be quite so certain, however. Symbolically speaking, it makes no critical difference whether Antony should live to fight another day or die on the morrow in the upcoming engagement because in either case his only purpose is a self-gratifying yearning to “bathe his dying honour in the blood” that will refresh and revive his dying honor, however diseased that honor’s true condition or costly and contaminating the restorative cure. Perhaps we could respect the stand Antony takes here more if the blood he imagines will be shed were merely to be his own, but, lamentably, it will not be so. The romance in his bravado turns repellent when we realize that his legions must pour out their own blood to draw the bracing bath that will allow their commander to feel better about himself once again after his fiasco at Actium. His own honorable death in battle or passing moment of victorious glory are not the two equally glorious alternatives Antony imagines but actually the same gruesomely selfish one. In either case, Antony would “command what[ever] cost / [His] heart has mind to” (3. 5. 36–37) to please himself, regardless of the health and well-being of those he purports to hold near and dear to him. A fratricidal bloodbath is the reflecting pool in which this Narcissus yearns to realize union with an image of himself he fatuously imagines can be embraced and realized there. In 4. 12, when his fleet suddenly capitulates to Caesar’s naval forces, Antony goes completely to pieces and for a second time in the play loses all presence of mind as a battle commander. In the throes of a new wave of panic and unreflective self-pity, now thoroughly dispirited, he dismisses Scarus

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with an order to disband his remaining land forces once and for all. No longer fighting to gain control of the ominous military situation nor even fighting to maintain control of himself, he surrenders abjectly to an hysterical rant directed solely at this “foul Egyptian,” his “triple-turn’d whore,” presuming in his fury and despair (though without substantiation of any kind) that Cleopatra has “sold me to this novice.” (4. 12. 10; 13–14) Further wounded by another military setback, he has become completely demoralized by the suspicion that his mistress has betrayed him, that she has “at fast and loose / Beguil’d me to the very heart of loss.” (4. 12. 28–29) Consequently, he vows that all his energies will hereafter be directed solely toward avenging himself upon her and then doing away with himself, presumably to avoid the worse humiliation of capture now that his forces have been disbanded. Clearly this is not the great general’s finest hour. With final victory or defeat yet able to be contested, with strategic retreat and regrouping still possible, this seems not the time or place to drop everything in order to settle a personal score against a traitor within one’s ranks, especially when, it would appear, the betrayal in question is nothing more than wild supposition at this point. Great generals must fight to keep their wits about them under duress. Antony should be trying to keep his head. Instead, he simply confirms Enobarbus’s fearful premonition voiced earlier: “furious” now at Cleopatra because he has been “frighted out of fear” of betrayal, Antony’s “valor preys on [his] reason” so completely that it has all but eaten away the sensible sword he once fought with. Now his sword’s only use as he sees it is to assault an unarmed woman and then himself—though even these thrusts, it turns out, he will deliver with more bark than bite. When he next sees Cleopatra, he merely sends her packing under a hail of verbal abuse. (4. 12. 30–39) Then, subsequently, though in actuality it is Eros to whom he will turn to perform the deed, Antony imagines it will be his own Herculean hands, hands that have “grasp’d the heaviest club,” which alone can “subdue my worthiest self ” and conquer him. (4. 13. 46–47) In his saying so, Antony has no idea how truly he speaks. If we discount the vaunting smugness exhibited in his words, Antony rightly affirms that he alone has been capable of subduing his worthiest self; but that deplorable eventuality does not await the bizarre final moments of his life. It is part and parcel of every moment he has been on stage. Antony consistently surrenders the greatness of soul of which we feel him capable to self-indulgence of some kind or another. Always it is he alone who subdues his worthiest self. Take, for example, the present moment about which we have already begun to speak. It is in the context of his fury and self-exculpation that Antony has identified the “false soul” of Egypt’s queen as the “grave charm”

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that first mesmerized and then “betrayed” him. Claiming that she sold him out in response to the great love he lavished upon her, he blames her alone for his downfall. Even were his worst suspicions about Cleopatra’s character to be confirmed definitively, however, that would not justify the blind fury of his intended response or his projection of exclusive responsibility for his folly and ruin upon her shoulders. He should exercise the self-scrutinizing judgment Cleopatra momentarily exhibits when she urges herself to restraint in handling the messenger reporting Antony’s marriage to Octavia: I will not hurt him. These hands do lack nobility, that they strike A meaner than myself; since I myself Have given myself the cause. (2. 5. 281–85)

But as I have been at pains to argue previously, Antony is in no way given to any such exacting self-scrutiny. Even a modest degree of critical selfexamination would disclose to him that it is as much, if not more, the “grave charm” within himself that has “beguil’d [him] to the very heart of loss” as any of Cleopatra’s more personable charms have. In symbolic terms, his confusing her grave charms with his own is the narcissist’s unwitting but wholly characteristic gesture of misapprehension and folly. As Jonathan Gil Harris recently put it, rightly identifying the ground of the trope, in every act of the narcissist the “spectator misrecognizes himself (or his [own] image) as Other.” (416) Such is the self-flattering ‘reflection’ Antony explores here, overlooking all his own personal flaws in his view of himself and his condition. In his mind’s eye, he curses Cleopatra as “triple-turn’d whore,” but from what we can objectively determine, her relationships with the men in her life have all been serially monogamous affaires de coeur and the passions she has felt for each of them, undivided and intense. It is Antony himself who has thrice forsworn binding personal commitments for the pleasure and profit of the moment: forsaking Fulvia for Cleopatra, Cleopatra for Octavia, and, then, Octavia, in turn, for Cleopatra once again; forsaking Rome for Egypt before the play has begun, Egypt for Rome in Act 1, and Rome for Egypt again in Act 3. Even if it could be determined that Cleopatra did, indeed, sell him out (Caesar’s extremely cautious approach to Cleopatra at the beginning of Act 5 would seem to argue the contrary, however), it is more truly he than his bewitching consort who has all along been a “right gypsy” playing “fast and loose,” fatally “beguil(ing)” himself “to the very heart of loss” he refers to. (4. 12. 28–29) Despite the etymology of the term, it is he, not his Egyptian lass, who proves to have the soul of a gypsy; for it is he, much more than

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she, whose winning ways obscure a character of doubtful trustworthiness, a character whose fickle waywardness discloses a fly-by-night spirit. Cleopatra never forgets either the country or the passion over which she reigns; Antony can never quite determine for himself which of the several empires available to him he prefers call his own.22 The undetected narcissism lurking in Antony’s seemingly imposing gaze makes an unintended but nevertheless terrible dramatic irony of the desire he expresses here to “revenge [himself] upon my charm” (4. 12. 16) by doing away with himself completely. Every assault he has ever made or might now make on Cleopatra will, in symbolic terms, more truly be but a further assault upon himself. To extend the metaphor even further, one could claim that Antony’s entire career has been an unknowingly self-destructive act of revenge upon the person he most admires, a slow but sure obliteration of his own considerable charms.

V Squandered Treasures The one thing that might have saved Antony from falling victim to his own grave charms is love; but that treasure, too, he surrenders, like everything else of worth in his life, to unreflective acts of self-indulgence and self-intoxicated irresponsibility. Among the most profoundly charming of Antony’s many winning ways are the great patience he exhibits under a barrage of withering abuse from his lover in Act 1; then, the eager readiness he displays to forgive her, both when she deserts him in Act 3 and after he discovers she has sent him false reports of her suicide in Act 4. Perhaps the most notable of all is his seemingly inexhaustible generosity both to her and his men on repeated occasions when, in defeat, he offers to reward them, faithful and faithless alike, with all the treasure remaining to him—every treasure, that is, but the sine qua non: the gift of himself. Sadly, he cannot find it in his heart to give that away. In so failing to extend the most fundamental gift of all, he vitiates the meaning and merit of his own best gestures. Though in all these many generosities there seems to me little reason to question whether Antony is consciously well-intentioned (Lepidus rightly declares that there are not “evils enow to darken all his goodness” [1. 4. 11]), the hidden truth of the matter remains that his good will cannot in the end be credited for virtue or true generosity of spirit. Ever something of a spiritual eunuch, Antony cannot finally ‘deliver’ on the goods he promises to extend to those he purports to love.23 As is the case with all souls that limp

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along thus, for Antony, too, though “good will is show’d . . . it comes too short” (2. 5. 8) of doing the required good. His well-intentioned acts “may plead pardon” for the actor; but they cannot finally win favor from a reflective audience. For, far from having actually delivered any benefits to those who have served him, he brings nothing but loss and grief to everyone he’s touched—even those of us sitting in the theater merely watching him come unraveled. In the final analysis, he only kills with his kindnesses—albeit unknowingly—because his heart, never thoughtfully open to those he thinks he loves, ever remains a “considerate stone.” He is satisfied to make of those closest to him, Eros and Cleopatra, but the “armourer(s) of my heart.”(4. 4. 7) As his Egyptian paramour reminds us, her Roman consort, like her, is by turns and always “quickly ill, and well”—that is, not merely fickle, but also simultaneously and in self-contradiction an “excellent falsehood,” both good and evil—“So Antony loves.” (1. 3. 72–73) At first blush, one cannot help but be greatly impressed by the restraint and continuing efforts at conciliation Antony demonstrates in his dealings with Cleopatra in Act 1, especially since, in her exchanges with him, she continues to “taunt [his] faults / With such full license as both truth and malice / Have power to utter.” (1. 2. 100–102)24 In the drawing room as in his legendary military campaigns, he demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to fight “with patience more / Than savages could suffer.” (1. 4. 60–61) But once we recall that Antony has privately made an arbitrary and unilateral decision to desert Cleopatra, his generous disposition to tolerance of her abuse takes on a more sinister coloring. What he says in farewell to his troops later is equally a propos here: he can dismiss her from his service as he can them because he has “resolv’d upon a course / Which has no need of you.” (3. 11. 9–10) He looks on her, as he looked on them, as one that takes his leave, a man at once ostentatiously sentimental in farewell and wholly autocratic in his decision making. The needs he is serving here in grandly patronizing Cleopatra are purely his own egoistic ones. Though he is deserting her, he still wishes to be able to think well of himself as he does so and, likewise, assure that she think well of him, too, so he can depart without any hard feelings at all. Our luminary would still shine on those that make their looks by his, even when he’s about to remove himself from their ken, perhaps for good. These self-regarding motives will dominate him both in his attempted dismissals of his troops later and with Cleopatra at his death by her side. Though he remains blissfully unaware of his own duplicity in moments such as these, the essence of his action in departure here is, indeed, what Cleopatra unsuccessfully attempts to correct in him: Antony would “play one scene / Of excellent

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dissembling [he is, recall, only pretending that her approval is the determining factor in whether he leaves for Rome or not] and let it look / Like perfect honour.” (1. 3. 78–80) It is probably no accident that Shakespeare presents the immediate sequel to Antony’s farewell to Cleopatra as a scene in which virtually the first words we ever hear out of Caesar’s mouth are that Antony “hardly gave audience, or / Vouchsaf ’d to think he had partners” (1. 4. 7–8) since he has been in Alexandria with Cleopatra. The juxtaposition of these words, so hard on the heels of the previous scene, invites us to apply them symbolically to the dramatic situation and relationship in the immediately previous action as readily as we might apply them to their overt referent, Antony’s disregard of Caesar’s messengers from Rome. Indeed, as our analysis of both Acts 1 and 2 have now disclosed, whether Antony’s in Rome or in Alexandria, he exhibits no real inclination to take anyone else seriously enough to allow that person to function as an equal “partner” in his affairs. In both worlds he merely “uses his affection where it is.” He does not consider either of the commitments he’s made to Caesar or to Cleopatra truly binding upon him. Though he declares sacred bonds to both in turn, he “married but his occasion” in each case. Like the foolish Lepidus searching to secure personal profit and a place of preeminence for himself as he strives to placate two mighty opposites, shuttling between them, Antony merely “plies both” Caesar and Cleopatra “with excellent praises” (3. 2. 14), though, in truth, “he neither loves.” (2. 1. 15) With people as with events, among potential lovers as much as among sworn enemies, Antony’s self-serving policy is ever the same: Bid that welcome Which comes to punish us, and we punish it, Seeming to bear it lightly. (4. 14. 136–38)

In both Acts 1 and 2, his responding so to Cleopatra and Caesar’s ire converts the seeming generosity of his praise, his civilities, and his patient efforts at conciliation with them from apparent virtues into a self-flattering and contemptuous condescension. Earlier we saw that when Antony embraced Caesar in farewell in Act 3, saying I’ll wrestle with you in the strength of love, Look, here I have you; thus I let you go, And give you to the gods. (3. 3. 62–64)

it proved an emblem of his relationship to Caesar throughout Acts 2 and 3: a strong man’s condescending show of superiority, idly and presumptuously

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masked as good will and pawned off as love. Oddly enough, it is also a surprisingly apt emblem of Antony’s relationship to and treatment of Cleopatra in Act 1. “Here I have you; thus I let you go”—declared in the midst of a token farewell embrace—exactly characterizes the perfunctory and half-hearted nature of the actual commitment Antony has been willing to make to Cleopatra. His arbitrarily abbreviated ‘embrace’ of his lover comes well short of what it should have been.25 He might have truly “wrestled with [her] in the strength of love”—that is, gone on grappling with her in an earnest and loving spirit of playful challenge, redoubling and deepening the strength of the love so exercised. Instead, in a self-conceived superiority and false show of good will, Antony ends the contention almost as soon as he has begun the match. The only wrestling with Cleopatra “in the strength of love” we see him take part in during Act 1 is a self-flattering verbal sparring match to determine whose love for the other should be acknowledged as the greater. And even in that light workout Antony abruptly and arbitrarily withdraws over her protests to declare himself the winner: Let us go. Come Our separation so abides and flies That thou, residing here, goes yet with me And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee. Away! (1. 4. 101–5)

Taking his leave, Antony presumes to have the final word. No doubt the firm Roman means this as a sincere compliment—to Cleopatra, of course, but also, if less winningly, to himself as well. Though physically she will have been left behind in Egypt, he trusts that Cleopatra’s spirit and thoughts will journey after him to Rome. In turn, he away, his heart will yet remain in Alexandria with her. But there is a profoundly ironic difference between this protestation of continuing devotion and those it may well call to mind—the Biblical Ruth’s adopting a home with her motherin-law amidst the “alien corn” rather than return alone to her country of birth or Eve’s declaring life by herself without Adam in paradise a hell and life with him, though expelled from Eden, a paradise, at the conclusion of Paradise Lost. Theirs are declarations of continuing devotion made despite unavoidable suffering; his is an arbitrary desertion made in no terrible distress. The troubling fly in the ointment with which he flatters Cleopatra here is that by Antony’s own admission it is an abiding “separation” between Cleopatra and himself he is celebrating. Antony’s claim for the uniqueness of their union here could with equal aptness be spoken at his death in Cleopatra’s arms. Nothing fundamental ever changes between the lovers.

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They cannot ever form a more perfect union any more than they can bear to keep their hands off each other. Their separation abides in Egypt and flies to Rome and even Elysium. The vital connection between them is also an ever separating one—and what is even more bizarre, they both continue to insist on celebrating these departures and evacuations. For each of them, absence makes the heart grow fonder, at once intensifying desire and rendering it more foolish. The worm is an odd worm, indeed. Antony’s reunions with Cleopatra in Acts 3 and 4 may seem at first to qualify or even challenge this harsh judgment somewhat; but on close inspection neither offers any substantial relief from Antony’s all-consuming self-regard, despite superficial signs of kindness and love he displays on both occasions. Antony may be open-handed after the fiasco at Actium when, in his despair, he tells his attendants to divide his treasure and fly from their places and duties by his side; but he can hardly be considered open-hearted in doing so. The act is more nearly an unknowing sign of desperate and highhanded contempt than the generosity he may imagine it to be. His personal despair and chagrin at what he has done to offend against his own former “reputation” (3. 11. 49) so preoccupy him that he does not even realize the import of what he says when he declares that by darting unaccountably from battle he has “instructed cowards / To run and show their shoulders.” (3. 11. 7–8) Apparently Antony has made a fine distinction in his own mind between the freakish and inexplicable dash he himself made from battle, surprising himself with his deplorable ‘weakness’ for Cleopatra, and the lessons the cowards among his troops took from it. Whatever one thinks of the incisiveness of this distinction he makes, one may well wonder what kind of effect he can be thinking it will have on the assembled auditors he is urging to analogous acts. How likely is it that battle-tested soldiers long faithful to Antony will prove themselves capable of deserting him now—even with his encouragement—when he prefaces his repeated offer of safety and monetary reward for services rendered with a comment of this sort? Between the frankness of his admission of profound shame at himself for having done so and these words of contempt for the cowards who followed his example and fled, is it any wonder no one immediately takes him up on his offer? They might be forgiven, however, if, on second thought, they were to reconsider. All along, the great general has never shown his soldiers’ virtue anything but liberal lip service. Absent any possible tactical reason to battle Caesar’s forces by sea (the only motive Antony mentions is a puerile one: “that he dares us to’t” [3. 7. 29]),26 Antony’s purpose in a naval engagement must be the subliminal one Caesar shares in his desire to take Antony alive: neither man can be content with victory alone. Each hopes to add the

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heightened pleasure of humiliating his rival to the joy of victory over him. Consciously or subconsciously, Antony must have assumed that if he could not defeat Octavius with one hand tied behind his back, so to speak, at sea, later he could always crush him by land, given his troops’ battle-tested superiority there. What he did not weigh in his equation, however, was the psychologically debilitating humiliation he subsequently brought on himself in unaccountably turning tail. In the face of his land forces’ sensible and repeated expressions of reluctance to engage the enemy by sea before the battle at Actium, Antony had simply “gibed [their] missive out of audience” (2. 2. 27) and arbitrarily insisted on his own way because he had no concern whatever for the troop losses he might incur there. As is his wont, Antony carelessly “commands what[ever] cost his heart has mind to.” Once the battle has been lost, he has no excuses or apologies to his troops for his poor judgment in joining forces with Cleopatra to wage war at sea or the unnecessary waste of life his actions have produced;27 instead, in blissful condescension, just as earlier, when he had finally met with Caesar’s messengers after initially snubbing their requests to be heard, Antony simply “tells them of myself.” (2. 2. 78) That is, he unabashedly shares with his men the personal embarrassment he suffers for having failed himself and openly records his shame at Cleopatra and himself for the emotional weaknesses they have demonstrated (“I follow’d that I blush to look upon” [3. 11. 12]); but he has no word for his soldiers’ pains and losses. Though never acknowledged, his profoundest shame is the one before which he “blushes” so that he cannot “look upon” it at all—the shame he ought to feel before them regarding his colossal indifference to them and their continued well-being. His desertion of them now, in his threatening to take “a course / Which has no need of you,” leaves them in the lurch just as completely as his shameful betrayal at Actium itself had but hours previously—though he does not remotely imagine his present action anything but a liberation for both them and him, not still another act of cowardice and desertion. It is true, as he declares here, that he has “lost command” (3. 11. 23); however, the remedy for that is not the further fit of panicky desertion he contemplates but the reclamation of that command, both over his faithful troops and over himself. Disciplined command, however, is not exactly what ensues when his reunion with a repentant Cleopatra abruptly lifts his spirits so quickly and completely that all thoughts of suicide are displaced by a sudden yen for food, wine, and a “kiss” from her by the short scene’s end. Extremely wary and tentative, virtually speechless with fright and at least as apprehensive about the danger to her own well-being from Antony’s hands as she is about the danger to his own from that same quar-

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ter, Cleopatra enters this scene, urged to attempted reconciliation by Eros and her own eros.28 So self-intoxicated is Antony that she has short work, indeed, to turn aside his depression and anger and win his favor to her once again. To be fair to her, it should be acknowledged that in truth her role in all this is but a very minor one, however. In his lonely despair and selfloathing, Antony is so concerned with flattering himself that the now curiously self-conscious temptress has only to let him take center stage to have his say, dully repeat her fearful and laconic request for “pardon,” and then ‘well up’ to convince her big lug that she loves him and that all may yet be well directly, all without any need to take stock of themselves. Without the slightest hesitation, he sheds his gloom at his deplorable behavior at Actium in favor of drowning further consideration of it in drunken feasting with his old serpent of the Nile. Cleopatra has much to answer for here to win back even a modicum of skeptical trust from Antony were he a sober and sensible leader, let alone a sane lover. But the merest reassurance from her wins him back as readily as will her equally questionable claim not to have betrayed Antony to Caesar’s messenger later in Act 3. No doubt the tears his strange serpent shows here are wet, but one might well ask in disbelief of Antony at this moment what Caesar had asked of the gullible dupe, Lepidus, at another drunken bout of self-intoxication: “will this description satisfy him?” (2. 7. 47) So selfintoxicated is Antony in this scene that the flimsiest pretext of Cleopatra’s affection—no matter its sincerity—is enough to convert him from maudlin fault-finding to giddy flattery and a shameless currying of his mistress’s favors: Fall not a tear, I say. One of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss. Even this repays me. (3. 12. 69–71)

Only someone thoroughly self-absorbed and self-infatuated could say such a thing under the circumstances and mean it, as, it would appear, Antony does. Especially to those of romantic disposition, these verses may represent a winning and grandly impressive gesture; but one cannot ignore that they are also as insensitive as they are fatuous. A kiss may indeed repay him more than adequately for the pains he has suffered, but could it even begin to repay those of his dead and wounded soldiers? If his passion for her is sincere, one of her tears might well rate more than any self-glorifying triumph over Caesar or any other adversary for that matter; but it is clearly decadent megalomania, hideously conspicuous consumption, for anyone even to imagine that one of Cleopatra’s tears might rate more than all the lives the two of them

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have idly risked and wasted at Actium, lives squandered merely to enhance momentarily the pleasure of their own despotic self-gratifications. Later in Act 3, in an even more sudden version of this same manic swing from fury and depression to giddy celebration and high spirits, Antony will exonerate Cleopatra of betrayal of him again on terms as groundless and premature as the wild accusations he had made of her moments before. When he berates her for playing up to Caesar’s messenger in order to win favor with Octavius ( cold-heartedly spurning Antony in his failing fortunes), Cleopatra replies in protest: Ah, dear, if I be so, From my cold heart let heaven engender hail, And poison it in the source, and the first stone Drop in my neck . . . The next Caesarion smite! Till by degrees the memory of my womb, Together with my brave Egyptians all, By the discandying of this pelleted storm, Lie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile Have buried them for prey. (3. 13. 158–67)

The grim spiritual wager she forwards here is sufficient to elicit a happy reassurance from Antony (his only response is: “I am satisfied” [3. 13. 167]) and a promise, as at Actium, of yet another “gaudy night” (3. 13. 183) of celebration with her. The tears in the eyes of these strange serpents do not prove that their grief is appropriately directed. Her description should not satisfy him, not only because words can be cheap, but also, and more importantly, because in it she declares she would wager all of Egypt and make of it an open grave to prove her own innocence and worth. Only someone already quite self-infatuated could find such a speech enough to satisfy him that his consort must genuinely love him; only an auditor as thoroughly self-preoccupied as its speaker could so relish this pronouncement without recording the queen’s seemingly cold-hearted and cavalier disregard for the well-being of everyone else she supposedly loves besides her current bed partner.29

VI Antony’s Shadow: Enobarbus Three other extraordinary shows of Antony’s generosity in Act 4 complete Shakespeare’s troubling portrait of a former nonpareil now in the intemperate

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process of destroying himself and his loved ones even as he continues to charm everyone to death—indeed, literally, to their dying breaths. The first of these winning gestures is the seemingly magnanimous way in which he responds to the defection of Enobarbus, forwarding to him in Caesar’s camp the treasure trove he had left behind and rewarding his turpitude with “gentle adieus and greetings” (4. 6. 14) rather than the curse we might naturally have expected for a turncoat. We are not likely to question the sincerity of Antony’s regret for a lost ally. (“O, my fortunes have / Corrupted honest men” [4. 6. 15–16]) Like Fulvia, Enobarbus is “good, being gone.” Nor have we reason to doubt the conscious good intentions in the commander’s more tangible efforts to repay his lieutenant’s former services. The sequel clearly shows, however, that, in a manner quite typical of Antony’s many generosities, this one, too, fails to deliver on its promise. That is not all or even primarily Antony’s fault, of course (gravely charmed, Enobarbus, in his terribly mistaken overestimation of the bequest’s nobility, bears that responsibility); but we cannot exonerate Antony completely for not even contemplating the effect such a ‘gift’ might have on a man of Enobarbus’s character and, consequently, for not questioning whether he should send it at all. Certainly the gift is not as magnanimous as it looks or Antony appears to think it is. Antony’s self-absorbed insensitivity and his subliminal woundedness, fury, and contempt transform his gesture from back pay into passive aggressive ‘pay-back.’ Some gifts bear even more lethal poison than Medea’s wedding gift to Jason’s new bride or the shirt of Nessus; this one manages to kill with kindness even though Enobarbus will avoid it like the plague. (Note the subliminally vindictive aural pun in “Dispatch. Enobarbus!” [4. 6. 15] in this regard at the end of Antony’s dictation of the message he wants communicated to the traitor.) Considering the level of hatred and contempt Antony feels for Octavius Caesar, it is difficult to rule out the possibility of subliminal ill will devouring from within the conscious expression of good will Antony dictates as his dismissal of Enobarbus: “Say that I wish he never find more cause / To change a master.” (4. 6. 15–16) Behind the overt well-wishing of this messsage lie hidden two fangs: “I gave you no cause to desert me” and “now that you have gone over to Caesar, I hope you find no cause to leave him in turn because the two of you deserve each other.” Furthermore, isn’t there more than a hint of contemptuous hauteur in Antony’s “busy” consignment of responsibility for writing his last words to Enobarbus to a common soldier? (In a sublime condescension, he declares to his new secretary: “I will subscribe” [4. 6. 13].) Wouldn’t his doing so accord with his most frequently voiced advice to himself in the play: when bad fortune “comes to punish us, . . . we punish it, / Seeming to bear it lightly” (4. 14. 137–38)?

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Enobarbus proves a more complex figure than one might at first suppose.30 No stereotypical coward, he does not flee Antony in fear for his life or the loss of the personal wealth he’s accumulated. The play is at pains to disclose that after Actium, when many other subordinate officers in Antony’s army did defect for these or even more venal reasons, Enobarbus reaffirmed his commitment to a man he already realizes might well prove a lost cause: I’ll yet follow The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason Sits in the wind against me. (3. 10. 35–37)

A few scenes later, when he sees Antony’s wounded fury deepen into laughable challenges to personal combat with his now victorious rival and threats of reckless daring with his own life in battle—disclosing to Enobarbus a leader whose “judgment” (3. 13. 37) has been fatally compromised— even then he can still rule out desertion in the name of maintaining a dignified and honorable “place i’ th’ story” by “following with allegiance a fall’n lord.” (3. 13. 46; 44) Only near the last, when he’s wrongly but understandably convinced by Cleopatra’s apparent defection (3. 13. 64) that the ship of Antony’s fortunes no longer has a “wounded chance” but is now certainly doomed because it is “so leaky” (3. 13. 63), does he consider abandoning the sinking hulk. His fear is that Antony will suck him down with him to an ignominious and anonymous grave: not in the dignified fame or repute of a brave soldier’s triumph or defeat in battle, but in the vortex of his master’s utterly degrading besottedness—all because he didn’t have enough good sense left to abandon ship when he still could have just as Antony did not abandon his own leaky vessel, Cleopatra, when he, too, could have. For a man who prides himself on being reasonable and whose ultimate goal is not to share in the love of friends but a “place i’ th’ story”—honorable repute in the world—what would motivate him to go down with Antony’s ship at this point? One can imagine him mentally applying his condemnation of Antony’s emotional dependence on Cleopatra at Actium to his own potential situation here: “Why should he follow? / The itch of his affection should not then / Have nick’d his captainship.” (3. 13. 5–7) He has great affection for and even devotion to Antony; but, though genuinely reluctant, he feels he must himself try to avoid what he imagines is Antony’s error: a self-destroying enslavement to blind emotional involvements with unworthy objects. In his effort to avoid Antony’s folly in this regard, Enobarbus never penetrates the irony that he has fallen into that very error himself twice over—first, when his blind admiration for

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his forsaken leader’s apparent generosity will convince him to yield up his spirit in despair and then, again, in his blind devotion to a self-flattering image of himself at his own death that likewise leads him into despair of the real self he has in fact become. Faithful in his faithlessness to his master until the end, himself fleeing after the fleeing fool he flees, Enobarbus, too, dies enslaved to blind emotional attachment to his own false ‘beloveds’—selfgenerated illusions of Antony’s generosity and his own reclaimed nobility at his own death in despair, each a false idol unworthy of his worship. Enobarbus did compromise himself very badly when he switched his allegiance from Antony to Caesar; but the cowardice he thus fell prey to is no common fear of death and his self-aggrandizement, in no way mercenary. The fearful selfishness he yields to is a more complex spiritual malaise. Like Antony and the others closest to him (even, as we are about to see, Cleopatra and Eros), his failure of spiritual nerve is that he cannot bear to continue to look upon someone he cares for in diminished or diminishing terms (cf., 3. 10. 1–4), however true those terms may be. That goes for his view of Antony, of course; but it likewise characterizes the way in which he and they look upon themselves as well. All of them, in fact, would and will rather die than face up to and courageously address these humbling truths about their friends and themselves. Thus it would seem that Enobarbus finally comes to desert Antony in his hour of need, at least in great part, from what passes for love in his unknowingly narcissistic musings. To the extent that he can admit to himself that the other aspect of his motivation is selfish or self-regarding, he has already rationalized that to himself as a proper and, indeed, virtuous necessity to preserve the self from corrupting circumstances. (“The loyalty well held to fools does make / Our faith mere folly” [3. 13. 42–43].) He fears that if he stays he will prove as self-deluded a fool as Antony has sadly become in his lieutenant’s eyes already. Like Antony, he would try to convince himself and others that his desertions are really signs of fidelity to the love he bears them or to his own “better” self. He leaves his accumulated treasure behind intentionally as a symbolic token that his motives in departure are not personal profit but honorable and high-minded, the tender-hearted tribute of a considerate soul. No doubt he, too, deserts his loved ones, under cover of his personal darkness, with a tear in his eye. Once in Caesar’s camp, however, Enobarbus almost immediately realizes he has made a terrible blunder. As soon as he sees how defectors are treated there, at best enjoying “entertainment but / No honourable trust,” he realizes that he will never be able to earn a reputable “place i’ th’ story” from his now definitively superfluous position in Caesar’s camp; consequently, his slippery loyalties swing back sentimentally to his former life with Antony,

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who now again seems “good, being gone.” The applicability of one of his earlier assessments of Antony’s degeneration to his own situation here shows that instead of standing above and clear of Antony’s folly, as he had hoped, he must now be growing fearful that he is in danger of falling into it himself. He now believes that he can see this much at least: in seeking help for his wounded dignity by taking Caesar’s side, he has become as much of a fool as Antony had been to dream Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will Answer his emptiness. (3. 13. 34–6)

When Enobarbus deserted Antony’s service at a critical juncture, he did so in a sudden attack of panic comparable to the one his former master had exhibited at Actium, both men fleeing hard on the heels of the woman they think is deserting Antony’s side. The depths of the demoralization Enobarbus subsequently suffers in Caesar’s camp likewise mirrors the deep horror at himself that Antony endured after his own defection at Actium—even down to its nearly complete self-absorption. Though neither man sees much beyond his own lost repute or cares to look back at or search out again the fates of those he left in harm’s way or perhaps destroyed by his desertion, both men do “look back” longingly, in bitter shame and regret, for the dignified images of themselves they formerly enjoyed and have now “left behind / Stroy’d in dishonour” (3. 11. 53–54) amidst years of wasted effort to make an honorable name for themselves in the world. In thus having “offended reputation” (3. 11. 49), they do not feel so much that they have done offense to others as they feel, deeply, how they have offended their own ‘better’ selves. In the throes of this self-regarding state of chagrin and regret Enobarbus feels with such force, the arrival of the treasure and Antony’s “bounty overplus” (4. 6. 22) prove a poisonously “crown[ing]” (4. 6. 34) blow to Enobarbus’s pride. The apparent generosity all but strips him of the only dignity he still cherishes by implicitly labeling him a mercenary paid in full and overplus in his slinking retreat, urging him in his vulnerable state to consider the former employer who profited from his labors a generous philanthropist above selfserving concerns. The ‘superior purity’ of the poison has its effect. Enobarbus virtually loses faith in himself completely: feeling that he is “alone the villain of the earth” (4. 6. 30); imagining Antony “nobler than my revolt is infamous” (4. 9. 19); and yearning for his own death as a speedy escape from a shame he feels he cannot bear. Like Antony when he wrongly imagines himself the recipient of generosities from Cleopatra and then Eros not much

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later, Enobarbus is made to feel unworthy and inferior to his benefactor. As in Antony’s case, he imagines that only his own death can thereafter win for himself a dignity or honor comparable to that of the giver of such gifts. The grave charm in these painful moments must not blind us completely to Enobarbus’s continuing cowardice, however. Even at his death, he can no more face himself than Antony ever can. Though he does now admit and condemn himself for having been a “master-leaver” (4. 9. 22), he is not willing to face the thought that he yet continues one as long as he does not return to serve his friend, denying his own potentially true self and Antony yet again to worship a fearfully complacent and illusory image of the only nobility remaining to him. In agony and despair, he dies a Judas-figure of desertion and self-damnation, in occluded pride affirming the arid superiority of his humiliation as a greater good than the possible power of forgiveness and love now beyond his recall and reach. Enobarbus feels deep chagrin and regret; but because he thinks self-protectively—not in loving concern for Antony—he squanders the richer possible treasure of repentance, atonement, and eventual redemption in reunion with and devotion to the man he purports to love. Like all lieutenants given over to self-regarding personal ambition rather than genuine love for the masters they declare they serve, Enobarbus would “rather make choice of loss / Than gain which darkens him” (3. 1. 23–24)—that is, gain which might upset Antony but, just as importantly, one which might darken or threaten the lieutenant’s own image of himself. By returning to Antony’s camp, Enobarbus “could do more to do Antonius good / But ‘twould offend him”; and so, rather than take the chance that in “his offence / Should my performance perish” (3. 1. 25–27), he makes Ventidius’s choice and continues to serve himself. Preoccupied by his shame, he does not even think to “safe the bringer [of the treasure] / Out of the host” (4. 6. 26–27), as the messenger in Caesar’s camp had enjoined him to do. That worthy soldier unloading his mule at great risk of life and limb is at once a figure for the neglected ‘other’ in Enobarbus’s considerations here and elsewhere, just as it is likewise a figure for Enobarbus himself, who would have done well to seek some sensible means of leaving what he now sees clearly is an enemy’s camp, and for Antony himself, who in sending the gift with conscious good will deserves to have Enobarbus return the favor by defending him from subsequent attack. Instead of turning away from all this treasure and its “bearers” in shame, Enobarbus should have been able to acknowledge these wages of his sin as his own (indeed, as his own deserving), not merely because the material accumulation of personal wealth is his by virtue of his honest labor, but also because, ironically, in spiritual terms the selfish accumulation of personal reward

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(a preoccupation with his own ‘worth’) was and still remains his only true motive for action. But Enobarbus lacks the spiritual courage and insight to acknowledge these facts. Indeed, in literal truth, he will not even look at the treasure that has been motivating him all along—not to save his life, not even to save his soul. Instead, like Antony after his second defeat, he seeks to redeem his lost repute as a brave soldier in a seemingly brave willingness to face his own death, isolating himself yet further from those he has offended. He dies desperately trying to recoup a “place i’ th’ story,” proving to himself at least, at the last, that simply by acknowledging and lamenting the past error of his ways he can somehow redeem his lost honor. He dies, as does his master, in futile self-regard trying to proclaim his own worthiness by an act against himself, one in virtual disregard for anyone against whom he has sinned—himself included. In Enobarbus’ final invocation of his absent master there is a rich ambiguity in this regard. Consciously, the words “Nobler than my revolt is infamous” (4. 9. 19) represent a high-minded but mistaken tribute to Antony’s moral superiority; but the syntactic ambiguity in the understood subject of the phrase allows the words “nobler than my revolt is infamous” to function, subliminally, as a high-minded yet equally illusory effort on the speaker’s part to transcend his infamy by proclaiming of the action he is about to take the imagined dignity of his yearning for self-punishment. In place of the apology he owes Antony in person and the acts of reparation that might bring them back together in love—a greater treasure, benefitting them both (“Let . . . best love draw to that point which seeks / Best to preserve it”)—Enobarbus instead addresses a self-flattering facsimile of a meaningful request for forgiveness to nothing but the thin air, pleading with it, not Antony, for a chance to redeem himself. For both Enobarbus and his master at their deaths, though they appear to be concerned with others they speak to, each is only concerned finally to “tell them of myself ” in an attempt to glorify his own passing. Though neither of them suspects it, of course, more than anything else they like hearing themselves talk. Except for his stereotypical Roman contempt for women, throughout most of the play Enobarbus functions as a level-headed raissoneur smartly taking the measure of others; but in his assessment of his own desertion of Antony he proves himself not nearly so clear-sighted. He is not, as he believes, Antony’s moral inferior, but his double, an unwittingly narcissistic mirroring image. Though they never realize it, both Antony and his shadow, the lieutenant who is “ever near thee” (4. 5. 7), go to their deaths proclaiming their own faithless faith as they continue to desert and betray the very

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people—themselves above all—they love and admire the most. Wounded but still proud, they both acknowledge, fleetingly, that they have themselves senselessly forfeited the honorable repute they formerly enjoyed. But, in their self-absorption and unwillingness to look upon themselves for long in diminishing or diminished terms, the only thing they can imagine doing to redeem their lost honor is to put a soldierly face on desperate acts of self-destruction when apologies and acts of reparation remain a real but neglected possibility, occluded from their thinking. In the process they turn their backs in shame on the personal treasures—both in themselves and in their loved ones—they need not have continued to squander. In sclerotic impenetrability, their hearts do not so much break as they simply fail them. Actium is symbolic paradigm: each man dies when his heart simply ‘gives out’ in the middle of a battle for his fighting spirit that might just as easily have been won, had they faced it out with courage. Careful inspection of Antony’s final two gestures of apparent generosity only further confirms this parallel between the general and his lieutenant. When Antony responds tenderly to the false report of Cleopatra’s suicide and then, subsequently, exaggerates the virtue in Eros’s decision to “escape the sorrow / Of Antony’s death” (4. 14. 94–95) by killing himself instead of Antony, the symbolic tables are turned on the protagonist; now, like his lieutenant before him, he, too, is suddenly made to feel a mistaken sense of moral inferiority to his loved ones and an emulous desire to “o’ertake” (4. 14. 44) them in their nobility by means of his own death.31 Antony’s ‘generous’ reaction to the report of Cleopatra’s death is quite surprising.32 Given the towering rage and condemnation he had voiced when he last saw her and his bitter repetition of the claim that she had betrayed him, made just moments before Mardian’s entrance with the false report (4. 14. 19), one would have predicted that vindictive satisfaction would greet the news; but, instead, a very different sort of spent satisfaction prevails.

Antony: Mardian: Antony:

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The last she spake Was “Antony! Most noble Antony!” Then in the midst a tearing groan did break The name of Antony; it was divided Between her heart and lips. She rend’red life, Thy name so buried in her. Dead, then? Dead. Unarm, Eros. The long day’s task is done, And we must sleep. (4. 14. 29–36)

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Once again, a self-intoxicated gull might well be asked how such a description could possibly satisfy him, but clearly, in some subliminally selfregarding way, it does. The report of Cleopatra’s death at once touches and gratifies his vanity, as she had hoped it would when she dreamed up this characteristically coquettish game of hide and seek to win his favoring attention back to her. For Antony’s duped delectation Mardian fantasizes the climactic moment of her death as a combination of erotic gratification in her over him and vanquishment of her personal defenses brought about by the mere thought and voicing of her conqueror’s “name . . . buried in her,” like sword or phallus, to its hilt. Easily taken in by this shamelessly outrageous flattery, Antony’s reaction, if consciously grief-stricken, is subliminally postorgasmic.33 Cleopatra had been unwittingly prophetic of this moment when she had upbraided Antony in Act 1: O most false love! Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see, In Fulvia’s death, how mine receiv’d shall be. (1. 3. 62–65)

Like his wife, Cleopatra has immediately become good merely for being gone; and the sorrow in him that attends her passing will prove but a superficial wound whose only long-term effect will be to inspire an even more extreme form of combat with his homosocial rival, Octavius Caesar. It is for Antony with regard to Mardian’s message what he had said it would be with reference to bad news generally: “who tells me true, though in his tale lie death, / I hear him as he flatter’d.” (1. 2. 91–92) More flattered than enlightened by her trick, Antony is moved to admiration for Cleopatra at her death: not so much perhaps for her personally as for the way her ‘beating him to the punch,’34 so to speak, has confirmed in him the notion that by doing the same, he may yet defeat Caesar as she has ‘defeated’ their common foe. In his self-infatuation, the report of her death does not make him stop to think whether she committed suicide from remorse for having betrayed him or, even more touchingly, from grief over having lost Antony despite her innocence of any such duplicity. He does not wonder whether beneath her reported rhetoric her real reason for suicide may not have been her terror of his wrath or the fear of the humiliation at Caesar’s hands he had predicted earlier, or both. The only important thing to him at this juncture is that she died paying tribute to him—no matter how true or false that tribute or genuine its priority among her motives. He does not think with any sympathetic fellow-feeling of the terror, guilt, or innocent longing with

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which she might have had to contend in death; nor does he wonder in sudden terror whether perhaps he could be responsible for having misjudged her and, thus, for having driven his innocent beloved to a lonely, unwarranted, and miserable end. For that matter, he does not wonder for even one moment whether the whole story can be at all trusted. It is enough for him that she died with his name on her lips. Intoxicated by this thought, he begins to luxuriate in fantasies of yet other “gaudy nights” of celebration with her in Elysian fields, attended by throngs of turncoat lovers swelling the couple’s triumphal march there.35 The lesson he takes away from Eros’s suicide is no less misguided, even though, unlike the report of Cleopatra’s death, his manservant’s gesture is not wholly meretricious. Even though Eros shows genuine feelings for Antony at his death, his servant’s seemingly self-sacrificial act of love should not be sentimentally romanticized and then emulated as nobility pure and simple. It is important to recognize that the acts of love that Eros/eros performs are no infallible sign of devotion. Indeed, such acts very often prove (this one being no exception) as much acts of desertion of the person so loved as convincing proof of personal regard. Eros wastes himself—as eros often does—in a selfish effort to escape the burden of emotional ties to the object desired and its problems. To characterize the situation here in those terms is at least as persuasive as calling his act one of unqualified devotion to Antony. His motives are as cowardly as they are heroic, as self-regarding as they are self-sacrificial. Insofar as Antony emulates him with unreserved admiration, he does so blindly and self-flatteringly. Each man’s literally turning away from the other at the crisis has figurative force: Antony and Eros are here so preoccupied with their respective agonies and private dramas that each has “turned away” from and deserted the other to live in self-absorbed apprehensiveness regarding his own impending suffering. As is often the case with eros, when the intensity of the moment reaches its climax, neither partner has a single thought for the other. When Eros makes his final thrust, he abandons Antony to deal with his frustrated anticlimax alone. To die as Eros dies is not a death Antony should glorify or hope to repeat. Despite the intrinsic pathos of Antony’s death agony before Cleopatra, a pathos enhanced by the regal couple’s heart-felt avowals of love for one another in the face of the separate agonies they are presently undergoing, there remain, nevertheless, numerous signs that something is seriously amiss here, too. On Cleopatra’s side, there is, first of all, her refusal to leave the false security of her monument to rush to her lover’s side, necessitating the awkward and agonizing spectacle of the mortally wounded man being hoisted (the stage direction reads “heaved”) to her in even more grievous pain than

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he had already been suffering. Then, she proceeds to beg his pardon for a comparative trifle—the fear of capture he had roused in her by painting it earlier in such vivid colors—when she has no word of apology for a much more egregious matter, the false report of her death that has indeed produced the disaster she had feared. Finally, in her overwrought state of mind and heart, she stubbornly resists yielding center stage to accommodate her bleeding lover’s request to communicate his dying wishes. For his part, the message in what Antony has to say in his final speeches disappoints the romantics among us profoundly as well. Despite the urgency and importance he seems to feel his pronouncements have, virtually everything he declares here seems predictable and somehow beside the point. Though this is his last chance to speak with his beloved, nothing he says to her appears intimate or even particularly personal. As when he was reunited to her elsewhere after defeats, he only ends up asking his Egyptian lass for some wine and “the poor last” (4. 15. 20) kiss of many thousand poor kisses before he goes to his death. Since even now we do not see Antony make any attempt to determine whether Cleopatra has in fact betrayed him to Caesar or not, when we hear him urge her to “seek your honour, with your safety” (4. 15. 46) from Caesar, his seemingly magnanimous gesture must at least vaguely recall his indiscriminate and repeated efforts in defeat to reward those who had served him, faithful and faithless alike, by providing them with material security when he, in desertion from them, had already embarked on a course that no longer had any need of them. Like other recipients of Antony’s hollow flourishes of gallantry, Cleopatra has been made to feel unworthy of his generosities without Antony ever knowing it. Here, too, he “hardly gave audience, or / Vouchsaf ’d to think he had partners” (to offer a suspected traitor material reward and security in Caesar’s ‘camp’ mirrors the benignly contemptuous condescension he had earlier accorded Enobarbus). When, nearing death, he wants to be heard, he merely “told [her] of myself ” in admiring self-regard. The miserable change now at my end Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts In feeding them with those my former fortunes, Wherein I liv’d the greatest prince o’ th’ world, The noblest; and do now not basely die, Not cowardly put off my helmet to My countryman—a Roman by a Roman Valiantly vanquish’d. (4. 15. 51–58)

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Though he thinks he has come to die in Cleopatra’s arms for love, in actuality, it is celebrity he seeks. As self-intoxicated as Lepidus on Pompey’s barge and, like him, wounded by his own hand, Antony may not feel at all well either, but he will “ne’er out” (2. 7. 29) of this drunken game whose foolish appeal involves his being toasted and celebrated by a fellow companion in revelry—whether sincerely or not. Nothing can make the auto-intoxicated reveler stop until he has been carried out. At first blush Lepidus could not seem more unlike the play’s hero; but symbolically, it turns out, he is for Shakespeare Antony’s shameful little secret, the great general’s alter ego writ small. A self-intoxicated, self-victimizing dupe and sad case of arrested development, bankrupt even in the great wealth he enjoys, he wastes his life seeking a place of prominence for himself between the genuine powers of two mighty opposites. A hapless go-between toyed with by both sides, he merely shuttles back and forth between them, superficially patching up quarrels without ever confronting the underlying corruption poisoning those relationships, insisting that the way to deal with them is to “touch the sourest points with sweetest terms.” (2. 2. 23) In the process, he only “flatters both, / Of both is flatter’d; but he neither loves, / Nor either cares for him.” (2. 1. 14–16) Owning only a “partisan [he] could not heave” (2. 7. 12)—neither in devoted passion for Cleopatra nor in all-out warfare against Caesar—Antony proves as morally compromised a eunuch as Lepidus had been. Pushed aside with relative ease by Octavius, he lives what’s left of his life completely under Caesar’s control. His “death,” like that of Lepidus, only “enlarges his confine.” (3. 5. 11)

Notes 1. Cf. Charnes, “Spies and Whispers” 110: “Cleopatra and Octavius—both of whom are representatives of ‘proper’ places—engage in a war of competing strategies; while Antony, the ‘displaced’ or uprooted agent who moves between the locations . . . is forced from a strategic into a tactical mode—a literal displacement which finally does him in.” 2. In Suffocating Mothers, Adelman notes how Antony is nearly always either departing or in transit. 3. What’s more, might not the witty Renaissance euphemism for sexual intercourse in the word “die” Cleopatra uses here further complicate the unwitting symbolic sense of her question as well, urging us to keep clearly in mind that all the romantic rhetorical extravagances of Antony’s courtship of Cleopatra have been compromised by impersonal licentiousness? The point may well be reinforced by a

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salacious pun in Enobarbus’s response to Maecenas’s astonishment at the extravagance of Alexandrian breakfasts: “we had much more monstrous matter of feasts” at Cleopatra’s court “which worthily deserved noting.” (2. 2. 183–84) (Booth informs us, “‘Noting’ was the usual Renaissance pronunciation of nothing”—a lewd euphemism for the pudendum. [Shakespeare’s Sonnets 164].) 4. Shakespeare’s subtle change from North’s Plutarch (deleting the “other” in “Roman by other Roman valiantly vanquished”) places greater emphasis on Antony’s ultimate responsibility for the ironic possibility of a catastrophic self-destruction even as he tries to congratulate himself for a self-vanquishment of a more positive sort. 5. Champion 251–52 is correct, I believe, to downplay Berkeley’s suggestion that Antony may be trying to double-cross Cleopatra when he urges her to trust in Proculeius. The weight of the evidence and common sense argue overwhelmingly for the contrary. 6. Dolabella is a symbolic double for the lovers: a sympathetic yet self-divided figure who finally answers to the imperialistic authority of Caesar, not love. 7. “Royal peril” should be taken literally as well as in the idiomatic sense Antony intends. 8. “Out of” may suggest both ‘beyond’ fear and so frightened ‘by’ fear of facing what terrifies one that fury becomes one’s means of repressing it. 9. “For in Antony and Cleopatra too we see a worldly prince flanked by figures of vice and virtue and engaged in a movement toward redemption in which the former is reluctantly but inevitably cast off and the latter embraced. Indeed, the large structural contours of the play, as seen from the lovers’, particularly Cleopatra’s viewpoint, could not be more transparently morality-derived . . . equating Caesar and the Romans with the temptations of the world, and herself and Egypt with a saving love.” (Felperin 107) 10. Stilling speaks of how Antony’s “chagrin . . . is self-serving, for he sees no real flaw or failure in himself, except inasmuch as he has been entrapped by a conniving female.” (281) 11. In place of trust and, with it, developing intimacy, Antony merely calls upon Eros/eros—both literally and figuratively—to provide him “mine armour” (4. 4. 1) against a more significant human relationship to his beloved. Moments later, in a related Shakespearean double entendre, the warrior addresses his queen (and, symbolically, his relationship to her as well) as “the armourer of my heart. False, false.” (4. 4. 7) It is no accident, it seems to me, that later in the Act, when the hero imagines Cleopatra has betrayed him, the poet has Antony allude to the tortured suicide of Hercules by declaring: Eros, ho! The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me, Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage. Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o’ th’ moon; And with those hands, that grasp’d the heaviest club, Subdue my worthiest self. (4. 12. 42–47)

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The shirt of Nessus was fashioned from the ‘poison’ of his frustrated lust by the defeated centaur in retaliation for the loss of Deianeira to Hercules. Deianeira unwittingly activates it again when, fearful of losing her husband to his newly revealed infatuation with Iole, she sends it to Hercules in the hope it will prove the irresistible love charm the centaur had said it would be. Not only does uncivilized erotic desire only serve to destroy Hercules as it had the centaur, but as with Antony, in destroying the hero, it also deprives a needy world of a champion whose labors might well have continued to generate great civilizing good—in other words, poisonous lust may be said to have “subdued” Hercules’s “worthiest self ” by his own suicidal actions just as it did in Antony’s case. 12. Cf. A. L. French 221 for an anticipation of this observation. 13. Shakespeare altered this detail from Plutarch’s account, apparently to allow for this irony. 14. In the lovers’ life of pageantry and spectacle, ever fixated either on captivating others or testing the fidelity of followers, it is clear they are unwilling to make their royal ‘progress’ through life without an attentive audience of subordinates. But in their refusal to leave the world unattended in this sense, they nevertheless leave the world completely unattended in a more tragic ethical sense. A milieu in which the fidelity of followers has become more of a preoccupation than victory bears disturbing signs of decadence: a just victory answers to the needs of the common good; the fidelity of followers may serve little more than the leader’s egoism. Cf. Cantor 148, 156. 15. Cf. Goldman 120. 16. Brower 348–49 emphasizes that Antony appears in a much less admirable light in Plutarch. Shakespeare minimizes Antony’s cruelties, his weakness for enticing other men’s wives, and any signs of brazen lustfulness. 17. As Ornstein 92 suggests, in the first scenes Antony partly believes what he tells Cleopatra about the strength of their love and partly believes what he tells himself about her. 18. Cynthia Marshall’s feminist/poststructural critique of the play argues for the positive value of Antony’s dissolving sense of identity. Despite acknowledging the fact that the general experiences his coming apart at the seams negatively, she affirms its ultimate value, following Kristeva, in that it occasions a “‘metaphysical lucidity’ that can reveal ‘the absurdity of bonds and beings.’” (392) A second (to my mind, questionable) benefit is that it “preys on the humanistic vision of the consolidated self.” (393) 19. This subtle symbolic linkage to his paramour is aptly noted by Ornstein when he remarks that, like Cleopatra, Antony makes a career of “play[ing] on the feelings of those who love him.” (93) 20. Cleopatra repeatedly objects to Antony’s behaviors but never seems to question the value of her love for Antony himself. Antony, by contrast, will tolerate and even forgive any behavior, however ‘poisonous,’ from his pet “serpent of old Nile” (1. 5. 25), but on repeated occasions he appears to find her very person thoroughly objectionable. He insults her variously as a “boggler” (3. 3. 110) who was “half

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blasted ere I knew you” (3. 13. 105); but a half-eaten “morsel” found “cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher” (3. 13. 116–17); and, at the height of malicious disgust, a “triple-turn’d whore.” (4. 12.1 3) 21. “Cleopatra understands that the powerful attraction she holds for Antony depends on the extent to which their life together disrupts the role he is required to play in the imperious Roman master narrative.” (Charnes 111) 22. Cf. Charnes 110. 23. Neill begins to elaborate the importance of this trope in explaining the dynamics of the ‘engagement’ of the lovers with and to one another when he declares of Antony’s first entry with his Egyptian queen: “the bathos of a martial heart successively reduced to a blacksmith’s bellows and a courtesan’s fan is given a startlingly burlesque life in the carefully placed visual pun of the stage direction ‘eunuchs fanning her,’ which implicitly reduces the superbly masculine hero to a mere instrument of the emasculated drones who surround the queen.” (72–73) However, the irony cuts both ways. Cleopatra is likewise “reduced” throughout the play to the metaphorical status of eunuch when, playing the part of a contrary coquette, her actions and speech prove little more than the bellows and fan simultaneously designed to cool and inflame the ardor of her gypsy’s lust. Both lovers, with the capacities to do and be more, unknowingly settle for degraded status as inconsequential eunuchs. As Neill himself notes in other contexts, the play demonstrates—in keeping with this figure—a consistent “gap between expectation and performance.” (68) Its method is one of “anticlimax.” (99–100) 24. Her “full license” before the Roman commander confirms that the lovers are strumpet and fool all right, but not in the expected order. She is the imperial Antony’s all-licensed (if truth-telling) fool and he is, as we saw earlier, her “tripleturn’d whore.” 25. A submerged figure involving coitus interruptus makes his directive to Enobarbus in Act 1 apply even more profoundly to his relationship to Cleopatra than it does to the mechanics of his exit from the Alexandrian court: “Say, our pleasure, / To such whose place is under us, requires / Our quick remove from hence.” (1. 2. 186–88) 26. Given Antony’s contempt for Octavius’s soldiership generally, Markels’s argument that he agrees to fight by sea as a testimony to “honor” (129) seems unlikely. 27. Indeed, later, in the third battle, he will do so all over again, without a second thought it would appear. 28. As Markels 140 puts it, she is “left speechless and nonplussed. She resorts to fragmentary, stuttering, disingenuous attempts to placate Antony and fend him off until she can gauge his mood and learn to respond accordingly. From the time of Actium until Antony’s death, almost all of Cleopatra’s speeches are attempts to defend herself against Antony’s railing or to reinstate herself in his pleasure.” 29. See, for illustration, 3. 11. 50–55, wherein what Antony has left behind, destroyed in dishonor proves not to be his troops, as one would expect, but his own repute.

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30. Ornstein declares: “yet the place which Enobarbus wins is not as ignoble as he thinks, for we sense that his desertion of Antony is, like his death, an act of love. He leaves Antony when he can no longer bear to watch Antony’s failure as a general, and he is redeemed by his response to Antony’s generosity even though he has no chance to express to his master the full measure of his devotions.” (93) Though I will argue this is too generous an assessment of the lieutenant’s character, it begins to capture the direction of Enobarbus’s human depth. Jacobson 104–8 and 121–23 makes the most insightful remarks about Enobarbus’s character and manner that I have read in the critical literature. 31. Does this “o’ertake” mean ‘join in conciliatory reunion’ or ‘surpass/outdo’? 32. Marshall argues, unconvincingly I believe, that Antony’s attempted suicide is not performed in emulation of Cleopatra’s reported death (his faith in her fidelity restored), but is a symbolic attempt to kill her spirit in himself: “to kill the Cleopatra incorporated as love object within himself .” (391–92) Cf. Wilcher’s more positive account of Antony’s sudden reversal of attitude toward Cleopatra, 114, though his interpretation differs significantly from my own. 33. To the extent that Antony takes Cleopatra’s reported death as “confirmation of her love and courage” (Neely 150), in the absence of any attempt to corroborate Mardian’s story or even to attempt to see his dead beloved one final time, for that matter, the world-weary general’s response cannot in the final analysis be esteemed as more than a self-flattering and presumptive wish fulfillment—not for her death, of course, but for a conclusive sign of her fidelity to and passion for him. If, as a number of critics believe (e.g., Wilcher 114; Stephen Shapiro 29; Bamber 110—to name three who speak specifically of this scene), the report of her death causes a positive change in Antony’s character in that it lays to rest (along with Cleopatra herself, one cannot resist noting) his recurring anxieties about betrayal and the fear that Cleopatra could well prove him to be the strumpet’s fool he knows others imagine him to be were she to throw him over for another. If that high-priced relief somehow satisfies Antony, it should not therefore be taken as a hopeful sign of a sudden liberation of ‘true love’ in him for her, as Bono 186, for example, argues. Indeed, I would argue that relief of this sort has nothing to do with true or truer love at all. In matters of the heart just as profoundly as in matters of religious faith, William James’ observation holds true that belief (or trust) is often hampered by the small-minded fear of being duped. Bamber declares: “only when he believes she is dead . . . can he act from a love unmixed with fear and suspicion. Antony’s fears are for his place in history as well as for the returns on his love. He has trusted his reputation to Cleopatra; if she is untrue to him, his fate will have been that of a strumpet’s fool.” (110) One may well ask, as France does Burgundy, what do calculations of the sort Bamber rightly notes in Antony here have to do with a love worthy of the name. “Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand” so “Aloof from th’ entire point. Will you have her? / She is herself a dowry.” (KL 1. 1. 238–41) Does love have only to do with the relief of a lover’s needs and fears of this sort? Is its action and life conditional on

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these kinds of pleasing returns on one’s investment in it? Must the beloved always count for nothing in herself? Antony’s wish-fulfilling satisfaction (he has, after all, no proof) with having finally secured Cleopatra’s devotion may be a foolish sigh of relief, but it does not possess love’s animating power or other-directedness—neither to her nor to the world. “If the fiction of Cleopatra’s death restores Antony’s faith in her love, it does not restore his energy for life . . . the withdrawal of her presence [and attentions, one might add] destroys any vestige of interest he has in the world of the living.” (Gohlke 160) As ever, Antony will take his leave, a self-regarding narcissist ready to leave the world unattended. If the crocodile’s tears flow, they do so in the curious fashion that greeted the news of the death of Fulvia: mawkish selfpity masquerading as grief. (As Jacobson notes, Antony’s reaction to Fulvia’s death “sounds as though it would like to be remorse. But it isn’t. . . . Detached and distant, he muses merely upon the oddity of things, the strange inconsistency of human passions, the impermanence of all desires. He toys with compunction as he toyed with indifference, plausible in neither.” [107]) 34. My less than romantic reading of this event is corroborated symbolically, I believe, moments later when, having misinterpreted the suicide of a self-destroying Eros/eros as nothing but great-souled magnanimity (no less a misinterpretation of the same sort occurs in the lovers’ sense of their own suicides, one might add), Antony is deeply shamed that his manservant and his paramour (lesser beings both: he condemns himself as long as he should “lack / The courage of a woman” [4. 14. 59–60]) have now beaten him to the execution of a noble death. The parallelism between the unnerved general’s two reactions tends to subordinate grieving personal loss and passion to a still-proud warrior’s shame, the desperate yearning to re-assert personal honor, and at least a symbolic triumph over Caesar yet as the predominant motives for Antony’s suicide. Fitz 305–6 helpfully summarizes the indications of the many motives for the lovers’ suicides, most of them shared. 35. As Cheadle has declared of the lovers’ relationship generally, Antony’s love here “seeks a validation in the world’s envy of it as an extravagant show.” (92)

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CHAPTER FOUR

An Honoured Gash Cleopatra

Playing Defect to Perfection As the previous chapters have noted, the action of Antony and Cleopatra proves a surprisingly inclusive, if poorly lit, hall of mirrors. In it the cast of narcissists who compete shamelessly among themselves for the lead in this pageant masque of rival claimants to imperium do little else but strut and fret before one another, each symbolically caught out gazing fatuously at his own imagined preeminence among men. For her part, Cleopatra need not join the pageant since she is already the true queen of Egypt, a passionate and gifted woman of the noblest birth graced with natural advantages that are the envy of all the world—compelling beauty, confidence in her royal power and station, mercurial wit, a grand stage presence, and a seemingly boundless, thoroughly charming appetite for life. What’s more, she seemingly stands apart from and above the company she keeps because, despite the erotic celebrity they accord her, the acquisitive Romans myopically suppress her true identity and worth, keeping the ‘colonized’ queen’s otherness under virtually complete erasure.1 The Roman soldiery, and even Antony himself, either mystify and mythologize her as exotic femme fatale, thrilling to their own arid frisson of delectation in doing so, or in equally self-gratifying fashion, they strip her down in their minds, whenever the need is felt, to lash her verbally as “gypsy,” “strumpet,” or “triple-turn’d whore.” In this way they can self-righteously rationalize yet another cheap thrill even as they continue to mock and abuse her contemptuously.2 (Hence the double-edged appropriate-

113

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ness of the ironic epithet “honour’d gash” [4. 8. 11] as a Shakespearean emblem of her obscene dehumanization at the hands of the Romans, no matter whether she is worshiped as sexual icon or ‘whipped’ as whore.) Yet neither our sense of her native grandeur, ironically, nor even our continuing sympathy for her—given Rome’s neglectful treatment of her—can insulate Cleopatra from a share in the criminal indictment that condemns the Roman invaders who hold her down and violate her person. If more sinned against than sinning, in the final analysis she proves no wiser or more spiritually self-conscious than the three generations of Roman conquerors and would-be emperors she leads on such a merry chase before yielding to each one’s subtle debasement of her in his turn. In accord with the vast majority of theater-goers and critics who cannot resist her spell, we may well and happily concede that the sheer force of Cleopatra’s stage personality nearly everywhere commands our awe and admiration—if not always or often our unqualified respect—for her fierce self-determination and great cleverness. This is especially so in Acts 1 and 5, our first and last views of the passionate and proud queen unceremoniously torn from the embrace of the consort she yearns for, when she is forced to rely solely on her own considerable devices in reacting to wrenching separations from Antony she has no choice but to endure. Though as an audience we fear that she is doomed to certain defeat, initially by the private decision to desert her we know Antony to have already made by the middle of Act 1 and then by Octavius’s political decision to appropriate and humiliate her in Act 5 once the war has been won, she nevertheless manages to rivet our attention in both crises as she bravely holds her own in the battle against these seemingly overpowering forces massed against her. Nor should we fail to register or undervalue the subliminal human sympathy evoked in us for her as a woman Shakespeare consistently presents as suffering for love from the first scene to the last. Yet, when all is said and done, despite the factors heightening our admiration and sympathy for Cleopatra, the stubborn fact remains that the Egyptian queen herself always compromises her own greatness in her apparent need to make little else but a theatrical ‘spectacle’ of herself and her declared love for Antony in everything she does. In this true “princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (5. 2. 325–26), there ever remains a vain, meretricious, and seemingly compulsive need to impress, a fascination with exerting her power as a woman over men3 and, even more broadly speaking, with commanding everyone’s attention at any and every opportunity. All and together these shameless exhibitions leave her at her death—as, indeed, they do throughout her stage life—with the “crown” of her genuine regality cocked “awry” (5. 2. 317), her royal identity sadly demeaned.4

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Though his characterological purposes in the omission are not often properly appreciated, Shakespeare never presents Cleopatra as an ‘off-stage’ personality, let alone as a woman engaged in episodes of reflective self-consciousness. (The poet “beggar[s] all description” of the queen’s “own person” [2. 2. 197–98] just as definitively as Enobarbus does, but for more telling reasons than the lieutenant’s juvenile need to show off before his fellow soldiers.)5 Shakespeare knows that the lamentable truth in this matter is that Cleopatra herself unknowingly conspires with her oppressors to sacrifice her rich, uniquely capable human identity as a gifted noblewoman for no better reason than to heighten and perfect a limited run of purely theatrical star turns.6 She may concentrate brilliantly and effectively on playing her own defects to perfection, but for all that they do not cease to be defects. Even in Act 5, when profound grief over her dead lover, a nerve-wracking fear of humiliation at Caesar’s cold-blooded hands, and a longing to emulate the nobility she imagines and admires in Antony’s suicide all raise our sympathy and respect for her to heights never previously roused in us, even then, in the counterplot designed to foil Octavius, her preoccupation with her own glittering showmanship proves that she is at least as concerned with the manner of her final exit from this great stage as with what productive point such an exit may ultimately make, let alone what horrifying consequences it might have on those—the Egyptian people, her attendants, and her children—who depend upon her loving protection for any hope of their continued wellbeing. Throughout the play Shakespeare has presented the tempestuous and temperamental grand dame as an actress who is absorbed, to the willful exclusion of more serious purposes and obligations, in laboring to steal any scene in which she is asked to make so much as a token appearance. In the final scene, when feeling that Caesar’s triumph is about to force her from the center of the stage she so loves, she decides in desperation to try to stop the show completely with one last dramatic exit scene meticulously orchestrated and rehearsed for its regal effect. Whether or not she firmly believes in the grand illusion of reunion with Antony in Elysium or if she seeks in her own death primarily an alternative less personally degrading to her than humiliation at Caesar’s triumphant hands, in her declaring the world not worth leaving-taking and herself a “queen / Worth many babes and beggars” (5. 2. 47–48), what we do learn for certain is that her conception of the life she leaves behind is apres moi, le deluge. Even her apparent generosity to Charmian, her “more beloving than beloved” (1. 2. 21) lady-in-waiting, is laden with ambiguity that qualifies her consciously generous sentiments as those of an unwittingly self-absorbed woman of privilege.

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Now, Charmian! Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch My best attires. I am again for Cydnus, To meet Mark Antony. Sirrah Iras, go. Now, noble Charmian, we’ll dispatch indeed; And when thou hast done this chore, I’ll give thee leave To play till doomsday. (5. 2. 226–32)

Cleopatra’s preoccupation with rejoining Antony in this passage makes us wonder exactly who the unexpressed subject of the infinitive “play” in the final line may be. But even if we put aside the amusing possibility that her comment to Charmian is not so much a token generosity directed to a faithful servant as it is a self-regarding fixation upon an impending bliss she is imagining for herself, the more conventional reading of the line is not wholly flattering to Cleopatra either. To imagine that Charmian could play till doomsday once she has been freed from Cleopatra’s service is, on the one hand, a pampered patrician’s unthinking insult to the loving devotion the servant clearly bears to her mistress (an insult directly comparable to Antony’s self-pitying dismissal of his troops after Actium) and, on the other, a spoiled monarch’s cavalier disregard for how imminent such a doomsday may well be for a newly unemployed servant without connections dismissed from the queen’s service, even if that servant could somehow miraculously manage to escape from Caesar’s wrath. The self-preoccupied royalty of the ancien regime have very little on Cleopatra here. Antony may well disclose to us more of Shakespeare’s summary assessment of his Egyptian queen than he knows when he declares of her that were it not that Cleopatra’s “royalty / Holds idleness (her) subject,” we “should take (her) / For idleness itself ” (1. 3. 91–93); but if, with Antony, we, too, affirm that her idle theatricality cannot destroy her regal impressiveness completely, unlike her lover trying to flatter her with these words, the poet who wrote them would have audiences honestly conclude that such behavior compromises her nobility profoundly enough to make it tragic. In her, a spirit of titanic proportions and capacities ever fatefully accommodates and confines itself to a round of petty intrigue, demeaning her royal birthright and awesome prerogatives of power to posture as an aging prima donna who never acts—however serious her purposes at any time may be—without doing so for effect. The spirit of ‘play’ to which she is thrall is not finally a natural joi de vivre or a convivial jeu d’esprit, but a trifling theatrical artifice. Though she has been generally indulged when not gushingly celebrated for her theatricality by her many admirers—and understandably so—still one might wonder

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why she has not more often been called to some account for fiddling while Egypt and its glorious queen burn.7 As Carol Cook has recently noted, most often we see Cleopatra assuming or “playing” stereotypical female roles “with a certain exaggeration, as well as a certain self-consciousness, as though (she) were always presenting herself in quotation marks.” (Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender 252) We might well consider in more detail some of the more dramatic highlights in this series of ‘performances’ in which she takes such open delight. In Act 1, having contented herself merely to taunt and torment Antony rather than sooner or later dare the greater thing, a genuine and direct challenge to his departure, the queen ‘plays’ the jilted mistress to the hilt only to let Antony off the hook in the end and send him packing to Rome with her ironic ‘blessings.’ But, sir, forgive me: Since my becomings kill me when they do not Eye well to you. Your honour calls you hence; Therefore be deaf to my unpitied folly, And all the gods go with you! Upon your sword Sit laurel victory and smooth success Be strew’d before your feet! (1. 3. 95–101)8

Even on the odd chance that Cleopatra’s sudden capitulation here is earnest and straightforward, one should not mistake it for a generous gesture of subordination of her selfish desires to higher purposes. It is rather the tell-tale sign of a pinch that “hurts but is desir’d” in self-absorbed hope of satisfaction. Without the slightest indication that she thinks his desertion of her any less unkind or any less a proof of his total disregard for her passionate wishes, her sudden yielding to him is not generous but only a capitulation to what she is convinced is evil—a cynically pragmatic concession from which she feels she might yet snatch a victory for herself from the jaws of seeming defeat.9 Knowing he is about to leave in any case, rather than risk a total fracture in their relationship by resisting too strenuously, she gives way to smooth the path, not simply for the renown on a world stage he seeks for himself, but to smooth the way for his return to her and a vicarious triumph for her in that return to her arms. Hence the provocative erotic innuendo she directs toward Antony at his departure in declaring her seemingly fond wish that soon upon “his sword” may “sit laurel victory.” If he triumphs on the world’s stage, she may trump his triumph in the subsequent victory celebration in their chambers when he returns to her an even more peerless world figure than the man presently deserting her.10 No doubt a flattered Antony is already drooling.

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But the far greater likelihood, given her characteristically tempestuous temperament, is that Cleopatra’s seemingly submissive parting gesture to Antony is simultaneously a baited hook, a withering barb aimed with elegant indirection to taunt her lover for monstrous self-absorption and the lack of any shred of concern for the effects his actions have on her. Reluctantly playing the fool she said she knew she was not, she forwards an acidic irony: “Be deaf to my unpitied folly.” No matter how one interprets these lines, though, in them Cleopatra unaccountably offers her sheepish lover convenient cover for his escape from her justifiable fury when he had no real hope of otherwise gaining it. In doing so, she has herself become, like him, but a craven flatterer, her consort’s mirroring image. In the midst of a battle she might yet have bravely won, she inexplicably turns tail and deserts the field. Like Ventidius (and no less secretly ambitious) she only pretends to content herself with subordinate status in order to curry favor with the general who firmly believes her place is under him, “making choice of loss” rather than strive for a gain that might darken him. Her verbal fencing throughout this scene and especially her final words eerily remind us of Antony’s smug condescension to Caesar in Act 3: I’ll wrestle with you in the strength of love, Look, here I have you; thus I let you go, And give you to the gods. (3. 3. 62–64)

Her farewell to him, no less than that of Antony to Caesar later, is but a subtly condescending show of superior strength, idly and theatrically masked as good will and pawned off as love. She has taken a page from his book of battle strategy: the way to torment an adversary is to Bid that welcome Which comes to punish us, and we punish it, Seeming to bear it lightly. (4. 14. 136–38)

The conclusion bears in upon us that it is not Antony alone who is equally divided by the competing allure of passion and power, nor is he the only creature in this relationship tragically divided by half-hearted commitments in love. A bit later in Act 1, Cleopatra makes another impressive ‘scene.’ She mopes and vapors like a lovesick adolescent schoolgirl, blithely ignoring all serious obligations of state and self-rule, though even her attendants hint to her rather boldly that she is ridiculously long in the tooth to play the part of an ingenue. Subsequently, in Act 2, she proceeds to throw a jealous prima

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donna’s violent tantrum, abusing the messenger who innocently reports to her Antony’s marriage to Octavia; and then, demeaning herself again, she proceeds to award herself the prize in an imagined beauty contest with a rival she has never even seen. Thereafter, in Act 3, she makes her idle and stage-center insistence upon equal rank and military standing with Antony in battle (in a more public version of wearing “his sword Philipan” [2. 5. 23] while Antony is here again too self-intoxicated—figuratively in this case—to resist). It is as if the war preparations at Actium were but a frivolous parlor diversion played for mock-serious bragging rights at the victory celebration and feast to follow immediately after the forgone conclusion of a battle has been won. Lastly, in Act 4 there is her recklessly ill-conceived deception of Antony in having her death falsely (but flatteringly) reported to him in order to win him back to thinking well of her by means of a coquettishly libidinal game of hide and seek. Indeed, throughout the play Cleopatra seems far more ready and eager to ‘make scenes’ than she is to chart any wise or even coherent course through them, a pattern which should be kept in mind when assessing the wisdom and virtue of the magnificent death she stages for herself. As long as she can continue to command the attention she craves from making yet another scene, she does not linger over the need to question the point of any of her behavior or its damaging consequences. She does not judge herself with conscientious objectivity for willfulness and self-absorption or ever even question her irresponsible ways. Even when, momentarily, she attempts to play the penitent with Antony after the debacle at Actium—a more serious and therefore unfamiliar part to her—her self-pitying and self-protective demeanor with her retainers there, the ambiguous wording of her tonguetied contrition (“oh, my pardon” [3. 11. 61]), and even the ease with which Antony cheers her up and on to another night of drunken excess disclose that she remains at least as concerned with her own minor discomfort and its relief as she is with her thoroughly demoralized lover’s humiliation and her sorry part in causing it by the cowardice she showed at Actium, a cowardice she reprises in a more personal context at this very moment of seeming reconciliation with him. As Bamber has rightly claimed: in Cleopatra’s sense of herself “there is no gap between what she is and what she ought to be, only a gap between what she wants and what she has.” (Bamber 124) For our galvanizing but now aging leading lady slipping into an inevitable decline in her allure, remaining the center of attention ever continues to take precedence over what she might fruitfully accomplish by being there. Cumulatively, this self-centered pattern, a self-intoxication within her soul easily as grave as the lovers’ earthier excesses, takes a hideous toll upon her.

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The “sweating labour” of her “idleness” never delivers into the world any new and richer life from within herself to be shared with the world for their mutual benefit. Nor can it result in accomplishments she might legitimately celebrate. In Cleopatra’s witty rejoinder to Antony’s flattering insult about her royalty’s idleness, we see the queen take understandable satisfaction in the fact that she can hold her own and more in any verbal war with him, however painful the circumstances that seemingly force her to do so. But what she does not and will not assess in her own words is the graver resonance of what she says about herself in these lines if they are taken by the audience to characterize her behavior and plight throughout the play, not just as an idle jest of the moment. Hers is sweating labor that never does anything more than nurture her own idleness. It does not exhibit any real attempt to deliver the living burden within her from the idleness others urge upon her or from her own unreflective inclination to trivialize herself. In other words, her sweating labors of idleness come to be mere ‘carryingson,’ never a true deliverance, not even at her death. Her endlessly gnawing hunger to be recognized for great performances only feeds on itself and her own person, slowly but surely eating away at her passionate and true stature just as inexorably as Antony does his own in his more conventional forms of dissipation. Unlike him, however, she goes to her grave without any intimation at all that this might be the catastrophic meaning of her unrelentingly theatrical way of life. Quite the contrary, in fact. Cleopatra would have us and herself believe that the easeful “death” (sexual pun intended) she seeks for herself in Act 5 literally, and throughout her stage life, figuratively, is a thing to be applauded by her dazzled spectators. Such a talented actress is she that she has completely convinced many and very nearly convinces the rest of us as well that this grand illusion may be a reality to be trusted when the stage lights dim and the house lights go up. For reasons that we are about to see are not altogether her own doing, there is never a single occasion in her relationship to Antony when Cleopatra trusts herself or him enough to suspend this self-conscious game of hide and seek, even momentarily, in order to ‘be herself ’ and, thus, ‘become herself ’ with and before him. Instead, she thinks it necessary and artful to concentrate her attention exclusively on letting the “vilest things” (not only her own willfulness but also Antony himself, figuratively, and the corrupted values of all the Romans) “become themselves in her.” (2. 3. 238–39) Not the least of these vile things is the interpolated Roman inclination to indulge a self-inflating, bombastic rhetorical voice. From the start to the finish, with Antony always figuratively “away” (“where is he?” [1. 3 .1] she keeps asking)

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and his person a satisfaction she seeks that is nearly absent from her life,11 Cleopatra is again and again left merely to idle away her time in fantasy, dreaming insubstantial dreams of fulfillment with her general even as she seems to recognize with the one eye she always keeps open that these grand illusions are perhaps nothing more than mirages in the Egyptian desert whose realization may well remain beyond her reach in some visionary future as they do now in her present longing for her skittish consort. Since absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, the idle grandiosity of her fantasy life arouses itself in inverse proportion to the absence of any real and substantial engagement with the man himself. To the extent that she is forbidden any honest interaction with the man of her dreams, she is likewise prevented from putting any of these overblown fantasies to a test of their authenticity and staying power. In her dreams of fulfillment, she invariably feels compelled to magnify and translate the human drama of their couplings into a quasi-divine pageant on a mythopoetic stage. In her poignant, yet vainly grandiose fantasy life, only the pomp and ceremony reserved for divine beings on parade comes to seem for her adequate representation of the union with Antony she desires. When, near death herself, Cleopatra recounts to Dolabella her impossibly hopeful dream of Antony visiting her sleep as an “emperor / whose face was as the heav’ns” and “whose legs bestrid the ocean,” like the fabled colossus, while his “rear’d arm / Crested the world” (5. 2. 76; 79; 82–83), we should not (as many dazzled critics have) make too much of her charming delusions of his grandeur. This touching freak of fantasy, compounded of loss, distracted grief and vanity, is not a sudden new visionary afflatus elevating Cleopatra beyond the capacities of dull sublunary lovers’ loves. Her grand vision of Antony is, rather, the predictable culmination of a pattern of mythmaking magnification and overcompensation evident in her musings about the love affair all along whenever Antony’s been “away.” It is not alone when the “injurious gods” have taken Antony from her for good that she can claim “this world did equal theirs / Till they had stol’n our jewell” (4. 15. 76–78); that is precisely the overcompensational way she has conceived of the ‘divine’ nature and possibilities of their relationship from the beginning. At Antony and Rome’s self-intoxicated instigation, she has even—in both senses of the word—‘vainly’ imagined Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss in our brow’s bent, none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven. They are so still. (1. 3. 35–37)

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From the play’s opening scenes, she has mythologized Antony as the “demiAtlas of this earth” (1. 5. 23) and herself as worthy to be “publicly enthroned” in a “chair of gold” (3. 6. 4–5), ritually decked out “in the habiliments of the goddess Isis.” (3. 6. 17) Near death, Cleopatra orders her attendants to “show me / like a queen” so she may go “again for Cydnus” (5. 2. 227–8) to win Antony’s attentions to her in Elysium as she had once before in Alexandria. Her doing so is not the first time we have witnessed her sweating theatrical labors of overcompensation make “fancy outwork nature.” (2. 2. 201) She has always had the sweating labor to win over her lover by calling exaggerated attention to herself in a vain masquerade as Venus, the true queen of love. If, in Act 5, there is no reason to doubt the new intensity of her yearning for Antony nor her grief over the loss she feels, there is likewise no reason to doubt that her going “again to Cydnus,” however earnest her desire to do so, is just as much an ostentatious venereal masque as was the gaudy earlier pantomime on her barge. In the emotionally charged interim, her desire for physical union with him has intensified but not deepened into a more profoundly personal realm of experience and feeling than the erotic display of dominance she proved upon him at Cydnus and reiterated in Act 1, when, acknowledging her “fierce affections,” she had hoped to re-stage with Antony “what Venus did with Mars.” (1. 5. 17–18) Her identification with what Venus did with Mars is not finally or alone a humorously unverifiable boast about her own pent-up erotic needs, though, superficially, it is that, too. More to the point, it is a dramatically ironic expression of her true desire: a yearning more for a renewed demonstration of her power over him than a desire for the man himself.12 If she cannot reach the man himself, her consolation prize (albeit one hidden even from her) is to magnify herself by disarming her god of war, the mighty Antony. Since she does not know Antony in the slightest before Cydnus, her theatrical impersonation of Venus or “Love” is not, Shakespeare assures us, a true ritual identification with the goddess herself but a compensatory fiction, a dream of power over the most powerful man in the world. In propria persona, then, Cleopatra is ever as good as the first pronouncement she makes on the subject: “I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.” (1. 1. 16) In 1.5, not fifteen lines after throwing down the gauntlet in the sex wars with Antony she would resume again if she could, Cleopatra vividly recalls her past triumphs in earlier skirmishes with Gnaeius Pompey: he Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow;

There would be anchor his aspect, and die With looking on his life. (1. 5. 32–34)

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While her rapid shift to thinking passionately about another man’s subjugation does not necessarily discredit the authenticity and intensity of her desire for Antony’s return to her arms, it does, however, tend to undermine our sense of any uniquely personal and other-directed dimension to the passion she feels for him. Though she would very likely dispute the claim with all her heart, the object of Cleopatra’s desires is not finally a living human being, let alone a relationship to one. It is a flattering image of herself as femme fatale, a seemingly divine but lifelessly self-gratifying image she generates within herself, a cloudier Echo(ing) version of the image in the pool Narcissus finds so enchanting.

II Long Lost Relations: Cleopatra, Deianeira, and Echo The passion Antony and Cleopatra share is but a deliquescent spume that plays upon the ghostly paradigm organizing Shakespeare’s thinking about the legendary pair. That quasi-allegorical paradigm is neither the Romans’ contemptuous dismissal of the lovers as “strumpet” and “fool” (1. 1. 13) nor the lovers’ equal and opposite error in exalting themselves as Atlas and Isis, Venus and Mars. The ill-fated tragic union of Hercules and Deianeira provides a more suggestive archetype in that in it, too, a great warrior—himself also to commit suicide later in anguish—does callously supplant one love interest with another only to have the discarded female lead, desperate for the return of the warrior’s attentions, make a disastrously impetuous effort to win back the lover’s affections. Fearing that their impulsive gestures of conciliation may produce disastrous results, both Cleopatra and Deianeira try to undo the potential damage their “gifts” might produce but too belatedly to stave off disaster for all concerned. An even more telling and fundamental paradigm in the play, however, is the myth of Narcissus and Echo recounted in Ovid. By the time Shakespeare reworked the Plutarchan materials he inherited, Antony and Cleopatra, like Narcissus and Echo, had already achieved legendary status as lovers more famous for the curiously woeful manner of their successive deaths than for anything at all about the quality or merit of their lives together. Each lover a mirroring image of his or her partner and, thus, each couple together a direct reflection of the other, these unloving lovers all merely waste away as they focus solely on courting insubstantial images of perfection, self-regarding creations of their own imaginations that have no genuine contact with the real world a beloved ‘other’ inhabits.

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Like Echo, Cleopatra, too, remains exclusively a creature of reactions rather than initiatives. Each proves but a mimicking voice “talking back” (or in Cleopatra’s case, to be more exact, rehearsing a wholly scripted part) rather than an autonomous, sensibly self-directing individual alive to the unfolding drama of her own life. Like her Ovidian counterpart, Cleopatra, too, wastes her precious time longing for a man who persistently flees her fondest desires. No less thrall to this narcissistic image of her own after Antony’s death than Echo is after the death of her fantasy lover, Cleopatra likewise goes to her own death continuing to long for a lover she never really knew, in grief over the loss of a man who could never truly be said to have been hers in the first place. Like Cleopatra with Antony, an ever famished and empty-handed Echo can only imagine what loving her Narcissus reciprocally would be like. Mirror images of their male counterparts, both women have no inkling that the narcissistic objects of their desires are not primarily the men who rebuff them but, even more sadly, the insubstantial voids in themselves from which they imagine, flattering themselves as they do so, that they can somehow yet summon the power to win love. Charmian rightly warns both Echo and Cleopatra: “if you did love him dearly, / You do not hold the method to enforce / The like from him.” (1. 3. 6–8) A symbolic reflection of the narcissistic Antony, Cleopatra blindly attempts to fill her “vacancy with . . . voluptuousness” (1. 4. 26); but she can no more “kiss the honoured gash whole” than Narcissus can his reflection. Cleopatra’s hopes are as doomed to failure as Echo’s vain and completely isolating yearning and grief. It may well be true that Cleopatra “makes” men “hungry where most she satisfies.” But, ironically, men are not the creatures she tantalizes most excruciatingly. “Other women cloy the appetites they feed” (2. 3. 236–37), but not Cleopatra and Echo; they go to their deaths alone, continuing to feed a hunger within themselves that only feeds on an aching void in their emotional lives.

III The Myth that Dies Hard: The Alluring Fiction of the Femme Fatale In a powerful dramatic irony Shakespeare communicates the terrible human price his echo of Echo unknowingly pays for her compulsive theatrics when he makes the queen describe her love for her Narcissus as “sweating labour / To bear such idleness so near the heart / As Cleopatra this.” (1. 3. 93–95) Not the least of the doublenesses in this short passage is the way “near the

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heart” directs us both to the stifling pains of a laborious pregnancy and the deep satisfaction of something held near and dear. The “idleness” to which Cleopatra confesses perversely gratifies even as it pains her. It is a curious metaphysical extension, then, of the “lover’s pinch” she speaks of later that for her both “hurts and is desir’d.” (5. 2. 294–95) Ironically, the serpent of the Nile strikes at herself even before the reptilian Octavius Caesar can, herself figuratively inducing the sting of the immortal worm that “kills and pains not” long before she literally embraces the deadly asp at her exit from the stage. Her words about sweating labor reveal that long ago, without consciously knowing it, she began to hold close to her heart her gender’s undisclosed and unshared burden of male callousness and disregard toward the female, simultaneously wincing from the insult and yet subtly enjoying the very pain of victimization for the self-righteous superiority and selfsatisfaction it so readily and naturally bred there. In the last chapter we saw that Antony’s bungled suicide, slowly draining him of his vitality and life, was not, in symbolic terms, a single belated act of desperation but an emblem of his self-destructive behavior throughout the play. Clearly something similar should be said of Cleopatra’s erotic embrace of the asp that kills her. That heroically self-destructive gesture is not simply a last desperate act performed in a mysteriously self-glorifying auto-intoxication designed to trump Caesar’s triumph or at least escape his humiliation of her. It is even more significant as a symbol of her decision to frame her entire life in terms of idle erotic availability and that availability’s capacity to obscure, both for her and us, the tragic self-diminishment resulting from her attitude toward and relationship to men. The chosen manner of her death is an emblem of her chosen life. In that choice, it seems, her subconscious hope has ever been the welcoming embrace of a knifing eros in a doomed effort to “kiss the honour’d gash whole” and ‘get her own back’ from one eager prick after another. In her trumping quid pro quo for the witty insult-wrapped-in-flattery Antony had just addressed to her in the previous lines, Cleopatra presumably thinks that the clever mockery in her own bon mot does nothing more significant than deftly turn the tables momentarily in the eternal battle of the sexes. In the flattering insult she fires back at him, she seems to be declaring that if Antony’s prior claim about her idleness is true, she is more to be pitied than censured for it. One hook in her barb is a knowing irony she forwards that the true idleness her innocent royalty holds subject is not her own ‘hysterical female’ overreaction to his departure Antony’s accusation implies, but rather the trifling ‘male’ callousness and deceit in Antony’s ‘idle’ if persistent protestations of love even as he prepares to desert her.

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Either that or she is claiming—with comparable self-exculpation—that if the idleness he speaks of has indeed become hers, then he is the snake responsible for planting its demon seed deep within her. If she is carrying an unmistakably pregnant burden of idleness and badge of shame within her, its painful weight is hers alone to bear now that its progenitor has heartlessly and shamefully toyed with her affections only to abandon her to carry it in pain “near her heart.” (Of course, since much of this wit may well be wasted on Antony, that, too, is likewise an added dimension of the undelivered burden she presumes she must keep to herself.) Because here, as everywhere, a gashed Cleopatra (she, too, is but a “wounded chance”) enjoys taking her hacks at Antony and other men with such confidence, élan, and even local success, we may in the end underestimate—as she surely does—the tragic, demoralizing cost of the maimed spectacle she has chosen to make of herself in doing so. If her gendered experience of the world has brought home to her that such skirmishes are but inconsequential engagements with an enemy who cannot finally be swept from the field, she has learned to comfort herself and even enjoy—or at least numb her pain—by means of the very thrust and parry of the local skirmishes themselves. To dignify her wounds, to honor the gash she has become (one is reminded of the doomed Coriolanus exulting in his many wounds but ashamed to expose them openly), she would do everything in her power to triumph over every man in her life with shining demonstrations of her prowess in combat, ‘captivating’—if not truly capturing—as many of the enemy as possible, until, as finally happens with the sickly and affectless Octavius Caesar, she can no longer rouse them to raise a sword against her.13 Cleopatra’s seemingly loving embrace of a knifing eros engenders only the sweating labor of idleness borne near the heart, the gender’s undisclosed burden and satisfaction that she carries, as have numberless legions of her violated sisters, silently to the grave. The Roman soldiery and its brass are not, however, exclusively to blame for the reduction of magnificent monarch to honored gash. In unwitting collusion with the enemy she is trying to keep at bay, Cleopatra demeans herself, too. Blindly appropriating the heartless values of her oppressors under the guise of legitimate self-defense, she defects to the enemy, joining the Romans in a wholesale preoccupation with the charms of a flamboyantly erotic exhibitionism. She transforms herself from an honorable incarnation of legitimate majesty and power into a shameless tease, a mere figure of libidinal allure who, substituting the part—her ‘part’—for the greater whole, beggars all description of her person. A woman ever eager to keep her edge in the war of the sexes, Cleopatra remains intent only on “elicit(ing) judge-

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ments, not making them” about herself. (Bamber 129) Since she insists on playing the lead in every dramatic spectacle she stages, it comes as no surprise that she expresses great fear of humiliation to her image should Caesar parade her in triumph at Rome. Given such sensitivity to slight in the queen, only a profound aversion to self-scrutiny can begin to explain why she never seems to have the slightest inkling that she may be doing something comparably humiliating throughout the play when she parades her sexuality so openly before everyone in her presence. Why should she fear the possibility that the Roman rabble might parody her true “greatness / i’ th’ posture of a whore” (5. 2. 220–21) at Caesar’s triumphant return when she has already done so herself in symbolic fact and consistently in her own palace and home at Alexandria. Inviting the embrace of the deadly ass(p)s that eventually destroy her is not alone the final desperate gesture of Cleopatra’s life; it is, in occluded fashion, the very emblem of a stage lifetime obsessed with erotic enticement and luxuriant but half-hearted engagement with the selfish pricks who can and do poison her life. In a life idly given over to playing with fire, a life of reckless abandonment courting “royal peril” as senseless and counterproductive as the desperate bravado a wounded Antony indulged in his fight to the death with Caesar’s forces after Actium, the only serious purposes the Egyptian queen ever pursues are indeed but “conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die” (5. 2. 353–54)—that is, figuratively speaking, ways to do away with her very person while seeking erotic satisfaction from strange serpents along the way. Antony’s humiliating fate before Caesar in defeat is prophecy of Cleopatra’s before the men in her life, even Antony himself. In neither his own nor her case does the enemy with all the advantages give either of them a chance to win back the honorable satisfaction the lovers each believe they have the right to seek. Both Caesar and the men in Cleopatra’s life refuse to take Antony and Cleopatra’s respective challenges to their dominance seriously when they already have each of them exactly where they want them. Instead, they dismissively laugh off their challenges to a fight on equal personal footing, though they do not relinquish in any way their vicious desire to degrade their weakened adversaries yet further until they collapse for good. Notwithstanding the commanding bravery with which the lovers go to their respective deaths, by committing themselves with reckless abandon and in suicidal self-intoxication to fighting in wars they do not believe they can win—wars of a sort, therefore, that should not be fought at all—neither Antony nor Cleopatra accomplish anything but a grievous personal diminishment. The two share a single disastrous conception of personal honor,

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‘holding one’s own’ bravely—he, on the battlefield; she, in the bedroom— no matter what the consequences. For all the human cost each of them is willing to pay in the service of their heroic labor and pain to maintain that dignity, in the end and throughout their efforts only prove a tragic vanity at once unknowingly self-regarding and futile. In unwittingly using her sex in the lost cause of getting her own back from men, Cleopatra always suppresses the energies of the majestic woman within her who wishes she could live lovingly to settle instead for the endless reenactment of an auto-erotic daydream: her empty hope in this life to have “died on” (5. 2. 249) the immortal worm to gain the satisfaction she seeks. Though like countless other women she suffers profoundly at the hands of men, Cleopatra must herself share the responsibility for allowing her noble desire to live lovingly beating within her to remain but a nearly suffocating burden—an unborn but viable progeny—rather than a living treasure delivered to the world. She herself opts to engender nothing more beneficial in her days in the Egyptian sun than to “sleep out this great gap of time,” daydreaming, like Echo, about the absent embrace of a phantom lover she is as powerless as the play’s male eunuchs are to secure in this way. Whether the lovers are half-heartedly together or half-heartedly apart, Antony and Cleopatra’s “separation” from one another “so abides” that even at her death, as everywhere else in her life, Cleopatra—tragically—is ever left wanting, though from hurt pride and vanity she remains intent on passing herself off to herself and before us as a wholly enviable figure of libidinous provocation and allure. A woman whose claim to fame is ever, as Enobarbus’s lewd pun avers, a peerless “celerity in dying” (1. 2. 137), the queen remains true to form at her death when she once again ‘presents’ herself (in the process, mis-representing her buried “self ”) as nothing more than a yawning invitation to violation and a naked moan of raw physical need for her enemy’s violating phallus/fang deep within her. Indeed, even as her wounds are sapping what strength she has left, she would have everyone believe, herself included, that she’s still ‘dying for it.’ Flattering herself and her kind as much as she flatters men in doing so, Cleopatra spends her last moments in a cosmetic and theatrical effort to ‘make herself up’ before our very eyes, vainly posed (and herself merely posing) as an artificially heightened dramatization of fetching female desire in a man’s world. Her last act is to ‘present’ herself obscenely, a quasi-pornographic icon in a subliminally sado-masochistic pageant, the holy-wholly-hole(y) goddess of a poisonous male fantasy of the gratification of absolute and lethal power over another. In her last breaths, breaths that honor her “gash” but not the utterly neglected

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self that continues to “beggar all description,” she would subconsciously urge those she plays up to to think of the essence of her majestic reality as a ‘cunt who is just asking for it.’ It should not come as much of a surprise, then, that men (and women)—including many in her theater audiences—admire and oblige her by perpetuating this alluring but disastrous myth of the quintessence of female identity as femme fatale. Despite the vitality and liveliness Cleopatra consistently evidences, then, she has also always been, a deeper truth be told, a profoundly wounded worshiper of death and dying. Absent the courage to abandon lost causes and the time wasted on trifles, absent a reflective belief in oneself and others and the courage to act on that faith14 so as to engage in a legitimate war that might yet be won, absent a whole-hearted assault on her enemy’s smug selfregarding attitude toward her person (and hers toward him) which, at least in Antony’s case, might yet vanquish his ignorance and thus allow him to grow from enemy to friend—absent these things, in the void within her that she fills instead with voluptuousness, Cleopatra’s world view is unwittingly compromised by a subtly self-pitying defeatism. It is the kind of fatalism, a worship of fatality, that she clearly communicates when she concludes that Antony is marching to a certain doom after Actium. Rather than act in some way on behalf of his well-being (and her own), she offers, instead, no protest or potential alternative but only a dreary apostrophe to his back murmured under her breath into the void that remains unbridged between them: He goes forth gallantly. That he and Caesar might Determine this great war in single fight! Then Antony—but now—Well, on! (4. 5. 36–38)

The extent of the conscious agony Cleopatra expresses here doubles when we realize that the inevitable defeat she expects for her lover will also mean, pari passu, her own ruin as well. It likewise seasons the defeatism with which she views Antony’s fate with an unhealthy dose of pity for her own doom that will follow as the night follows the sun’s setting on their empire; but she does not care deeply enough—neither for him nor for herself—to search her inner resources and make every effort to envision what else might be done to steer a more hopeful course. Already defeated, then, before their most important battle has ever been joined, she can only second his suicidal course, wanly: “but now—Well, on!” Substitute ‘Antony’ for ‘Caesar’s’ role in the passage and ‘Cleopatra’ for ‘Antony’s’ and one succinctly formulates her own lethal course in and exit from the play:

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She goes forth gallantly.That she and Antony might Determine this great war in single fight! Then . . . but now—Well, on!

Having ceded the possibility of single combat with Antony—a battle to the death, if necessary—over the corrupted nature of their relationship, a war she might yet have won, she simply yields to the downward trajectory of the catastrophic course they have already set and even half recognize as such. The failure of nerve at Actium is as much a symbolic representation of a pivotal crisis in Cleopatra’s life as it is in Antony’s: she, too, inexplicably loses heart in the midst of a battle that she might have won to turn tail and content herself with a lover she can no longer wholly admire but without whose attentions she feels no desire to live. In Cleopatra’s merely ‘carrying on’—theatrically, self-pityingly and, yes, even bravely and with noble love longing to the end—we may well recognize how she, too, “goes forth gallantly”; but there is never really any more hope for her in her doing so than she had envisioned for Antony in his challenging Caesar to the death. Merely ‘carrying on,’ holding one’s own, even when it involves sweating labor to do so, cannot redeem lost time and past mistakes; only the birth of some new life from within can. The Elysian pageant of selfish imperial triumph and flattering defections Antony imagines before he dies as his and Cleopatra’s appropriate future fame (and which Cleopatra then seconds in Act 5) demonstrates that the “new heaven, new earth” (1. 1. 17) he had promised Cleopatra at the play’s beginning was not truly a wholesale spiritual renovation for them both but only the old heaven and the old earth transposed to another part of his imaginary kingdom, one not essentially different from the worldly stage we already know only too well as the empty illusion mere celebrity confers. In any genuine new heaven and new earth mere ‘carrying on’ by and for oneself must at some point give way to the desire for the deliverance of another life. A painful new birth from within, it cannot be a vain effort to ‘show others up’ nor a cosmetic effort to ‘make (or shore) oneself up’ but a profound effort to ‘make over the self ’ again and again, an attempt at reformation deep within the self that involves the audacious and arduous effort to re-deem, re-form, and thus re-new one’s being in a relationship to another life than the one we have previously been privileging in ourselves. As Sonnet 115 would have it, true “love is a babe.” Humans in relationship to one another can either neglect or even kill this life they have created together or they can nurture its growth and power to continue to transform itself and others. Absent any sign of that painstaking ‘delivery’ and deliverance from within in either of the lovers, they do not make way for or generate any new

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life for themselves; but, like Octavius, they simply carry on with the same old story, stung by ‘the old Serpent’ of cupidity that “kills and pains not,” feeding a hunger that feeds on itself, feeding a hunger that feeds on nothing but the thin air of their own self-consoling delusions of grandeur.

IV Internalizing the Values of the Oppressor To the hardened Roman campaign veterans, women, even magnificent, regal women, are but mock battle “fronts” to be assaulted and taken (1. 1. 6), fields to be ploughed (2. 2. 228), horses to be mounted and ridden (2. 2. 61–66; 225–26; 235–38), or, at best, meaty feasts for the eye and stomach (2. 2. 183–85; 2. 3. 235–38; 3. 13. 116–20) to bolster the fighting spirit in between more important bloodlettings. In response to Maecenas’s expression of envious disbelief in the rumor that Antony and Cleopatra had “eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast” (2. 2. 180) for only a dozen people, Enobarbus boasts that they had “much more monstrous matter of feast” (2. 2. 183–84) than that while furloughed in Alexandria. Maecenas’s seeming non sequitur in response—“She’s a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her” (2. 2. 185)—symbolically communicates that for the sex-starved Roman invaders the two primal satisfactions readily coalesce in their imaginations. Whenever Enobarbus enjoys the company of his fellow soldiers and even his superiors, he boldly seasons his speech with bawdry about the ‘fairer sex,’ frequently in circumstances one would have thought utterly inappropriate for such badinage. When, for example, we first meet Enobarbus engaged in conversation with his commanding officer, he misses no opportunity to make a series of lewd jests (for which he is never even rebuked) about the woman we had moments earlier heard Antony declare the love of his life. The lieutenant must be very certain of his and Antony’s shared level of secret esteem for women to speak so confidently to his commanding officer in this presumptuous and dehumanizing idiom without fearing that he may be taking his life in his own hands to do so. He puns pruriently on Cleopatra’s insatiable appetite for sexual intercourse (1. 2. 137), her identity as pudendum (she is “nothing but the finest part of pure love” [1. 2. 139–40]) and even on the ambiguous “winds and waters” (1. 2. 140–41) that may call to mind more demeaning excretory functions than the romantic “sighs and tears” Enobarbus interjects just in the nick of time to save appearances (wink, wink). Even Antony’s subsequent bombshell—the news that his wife, Fulvia, is dead—cannot silence his subordinate’s lewd patter. Without so much

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as a remonstrance from the husband who moments earlier was surprised to record something approaching grief in himself for Fulvia, Enobarbus’ sexist banter resumes without interruption: women deserve no shred of human regard even at their own deaths. When “old robes are worn out, there are members to make new.” (1. 2. 157–59) “If there were no more women but Fulvia, then had you indeed a cut” (1. 2. 159–59); “old smocks,” when worn and frayed, expose “new petticoats” (1. 2. 161) for priapic delectation. A bit irked and embarrassed, perhaps, but not truly offended by such talk, Antony attempts to shift the subject by referring to the political factionalisms Fulvia has “broach’d” in the Roman state; but not to be outflanked, Enobarbus returns to his assault by reminding his boss that the problems Antony faces in Rome will pale by comparison to those he is about to face when he tries to depart from Cleopatra’s embrace. He describes that extrication, figuratively, as trying to shut off the flow from the cask of Cleopatra’s intoxicating spirits Antony had “broach’d” (1. 2. 165) by tapping into it when he first arrived in Egypt. In the end, only by pulling rank can Antony find a way to shut off Enobarbus’s shamelessly licentious patter. But if the smug misogyny of Rome’s soldiers is both predictable and demoralizingly ‘male’ even in our own day, what remains quite surprising is Cleopatra’s own unmistakably enthusiastic appropriation of these insulting Roman identifications of her person and situation in her own speech and thought. Even as we witness her bravely go to her death continuing to resist Roman geopolitical rapacity, fearful yet nobly defiant of the personal humiliation that it might mean for her, we are reluctantly forced to conclude that while she has been distracted by the more overt dangers of Roman imperialistic colonization, she has failed to identify and resist the subtler poison of Roman influence that has surreptitiously conquered her very soul already without her knowledge. In an ironic interpellation of Roman assumptions about male dominance, she has unknowingly internalized—indeed ‘embraces’—the impaling ideology of patriarchal hegemony and forced subordination to her Roman masters she imagines she is resisting to the death. We have already seen and will have yet more to say about her ‘Roman’ identification of all human relationships with matters of power and control alone and the trivialization of female identity involved in reducing it to mere fascination with sexual gratification; but even from the minor tropes he employs to define this irony it is evident that Shakespeare would have us note how pervasively Roman presumptions have infiltrated and compromised the queen’s noble sense of herself. When, for example, her enemy conceives of her solely as a feast for the eyes and tongue, it is more than curious that she speaks with such obvious

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and unqualified enthusiasm about having been “a morsel for a monarch” (1. 5. 31) to describe her youthful liaison with Julius Caesar. Subsequently, she compares the intensity of her love for Antony to that for Julius Caesar by implicitly contrasting her youthful “salad days,” when she was “green in judgement, cold in blood” (1. 5. 73–74), to the hot and bloody main course she currently has on her plate in her more mature hunger for Antony. With ample and appropriate admiration for her wit and the apparent sincerity of her passion for both men, we may still wonder if Shakespeare does not intend a dramatic irony when, in the midst of a direct comparison of the two lovers and two seemingly dissimilar eras of her life, Cleopatra refers to My salad days, When I was green in judgement, cold in blood, To say as I said then. (1. 5. 73–75)

Shakespeare’s subtle syntactic trick of the eye and ear in the final line of the quotation makes it uncertain whether Cleopatra’s greenness of judgment and cold-bloodedness are an immature and superficial thing of the past, as she believes, or in reality still very much a factor in her present “say” about the general she is currently bedding and with whom she is sharing herself as “monstrous matter of (their) feast.” One should beware of Romans, especially the alpha males, bearing gifts, no matter how attractively they may dangle their impressive manhood before one. She should take a cue from Pompey’s tragic mistake: there’s a world of difference between an offer of a ‘piece of the action’ (whose hidden goal is one’s very elimination) and a genuine peace/piece offering. As Antony and Caesar suggest to Pompey, Cleopatra should very carefully “weigh / What [Rome’s offer] is worth embrac’d.” (2. 6. 32–33) Instead, without much evident reflection at all and in apparent presumption, thinking she is personally more clever than the men in her life are, she simply agrees to go along for the ride. When the greatest Roman generals want to mount and ride her in eager succession, working her into such a lather that in the end she can ‘go’ no more, for her part, Cleopatra is literally flattered to death by the attentions of her high and mighty conquerors’ swords. Imagining she can both take her own pleasure and yet manage them from this position under them, the Egyptian queen foolishly yields to their spurs. Cleopatra contents herself with—nay, enthuses over—simply being their bloodied but preferred mount. With enviable spirit but no evidence of reflection that could refine her choices or deepen her understanding of her situation, in loving Antony she never questions whether it is humanly sufficient merely to yearn to be

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a “happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony.” (1. 5. 21) In her eager passion for and self-satisfaction in being mounted (or, as often as not, in merely dreaming of it), Cleopatra does not even once seem to consider the cost to her and others this concentration on her famished appetites may entail. On one of the many occasions when Antony, her sole satisfaction, is absent, Charmian wisely upbraids her: “you think of him too much.” (1. 5. 6) Cleopatra’s response—“O ’tis treason” (1. 5. 7)—is an appropriate assessment; but the treason is not Charmian’s, as she believes, but her own. To think of Antony so obsessively and in the manner in which she does so is to betray the greater love he might develop for her with her proper encouragement (just as it is likewise a treason to herself and her own well-being as a person); but, most troubling of all, it is literally a treason to the Egyptian people whose queen she should not forget she is. When, in Act 1, she thinks only of flouting Antony in mock dismay, not, as she should, of likewise judging herself and him in earnest, Cleopatra has no idea of the deeper truth she declares in saying: “my oblivion is a very Antony / And I am all forgotten!” (1. 3. 90–91)15 She should not forget herself (and her self) so. No more than her poor (but none too distant) cousin, Shakespeare’s Cressida, does Cleopatra have any suspicion of the folly of the posture she has assumed in which to handle snakes in a world as swarming with them as Cleopatra and Cressida’s are. Asked by the panderer who would compromise her for his pleasure and profit at what “ward” she lies, Cressida laughingly replies: “Upon my back, to defend my belly.” (T&C, 1. 2. 243) A most provocative babe in the woods, she naively imagines that whether she’s in the Trojan or the Greek camp she can trust her own sexual devices to “defend her belly”—both her own basic self-interest and her erotic appetites. However, since both camps are crawling with men in full battle armor, spears ever at the ready, it is sheer insanity on an unarmed woman’s part to assume that by lying openly before them on her back she will do anything whatever but recklessly expose her vulnerable underbelly to lethal assault rather than fill it to her satisfaction. It is for a woman in such a world as Diomed declares it is: “To her own worth / She shall be priz’d” (4. 4. 131–32)—not, under patriarchal premises, to the extent of her intrinsic or true value, of course, but to the value she herself sets for her own person. If she sets herself at naught, she will surely be held as ‘naught.’ The ‘naught’ is but as ’tis valued: the womb of woman can either be the sacred incubator of new life or a profane hole, a latrine for human waste. Whether ‘protected’ by the unconsciously predatory hypocrite Troilus or the more overtly odious Diomed—in the Trojan or the Greek camp—Cressida foolishly allows the men in her life to suit themselves in

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setting her value as nothing more than a “sleeve” for their swords. (5. 2. 65) Since Troilus is terribly anxious to leave her side as soon as their passion has first been consummated and since he does not raise his voice or finger to resist her being handed over to the Greeks, it is clear that her value to the men in both the Greek and Trojan camps is roughly the equivalent of a spittoon. The “sleeve” given to her by Troilus as a purported token of their devotion to one another and later rudely demanded in the Greek camp by her new protector, Diomed, proves to be nothing more than a faithless substitution for a substantial love, a mere ‘battle prize’ over which warriors contest, not because of any intrinsic value they find in it (read Cressida), but only to demonstrate each contestant’s self-regarding sense of preeminence among his rivals gained from its possession. A self-victimized Cressida does not have to wait in anxiety to be handed over without a fight from the spineless Trojans to the shamelessly lewd and grasping Greeks. Herself as faithless as they, traitor to both sides and herself, she has already yielded her self completely to their tokenism without the slightest protest on her own behalf, honoring whatever value they should wish to assign to her. (cf. 4. 4. 69; 5. 2.68; 82) Her kissing cousin, Cleopatra, is born with certain advantages Cressida clearly does not enjoy: a social position of considerably greater independence and power and a lover with more openness to redeeming human involvement with her than Troilus or Diomed display. These facts only heighten the irony regarding the absence of any immediate or compelling necessity for the Egyptian queen to trade her sceptre for a sleeve as the emblem she chooses with which to embody her majesty. No matter how self-glorifyingly the lovers regard the wounds they have both absorbed in their battles—public ones in Antony’s case, private, in Cleopatra’s—each is only living in a fool’s paradise in his and her efforts to “kiss” those “honour’d gashes whole”; doing so, in fact, only helps the two of them “kiss away / Kingdoms” (3. 10. 7–8)—not only the lands and political preeminence their reckless lifestyle has squandered, but the greater joint ‘kingdom’ in relationship to each other they might have cultivated had they not so cavalierly kissed it off. In the female version of the double standard men in patriarchal cultures have used for eons to bedevil their outraged and dismayed women, Cleopatra freely allows herself the very thing she would forbid and condemn in her mate. While she would have her lover held completely under her sway and helplessly tied to her, she feels free to desert him, figuratively, whenever she pleases, to settle for much less, idling shamelessly with the merest piece of ass(p). With a heart divided between her yearning for raw passion and for power, between lust and vanity, Cleopatra, like her paramour, remains a person equally and inconsequentially torn between “two loves”—not genuine

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love for two different partners, but torn between her desire for comfort, on the one hand, and her despair in the greater power of genuine love, on the other. The new Narcissus and Echo are, like their prototypes, most notable for their self-destroying love, each but the mirror of the other’s compromising and compromised, relentlessly self-regarding souls. Perhaps the most compelling instance of this mirroring effect is the spectacle of mutual ill-will masquerading as sorely tried good will toward the other in each of them as they face off against one another inconclusively in Act 1. When, after Actium, Octavius Caesar, a man Antony despises but whose power he respects, refuses a challenge to fight with him, man-to-man, on equal footing, Antony is outraged and deeply distraught by the slight. But throughout Act 1, when Cleopatra, a woman he claims to love, but whose power he does not respect nearly so much as he does Caesar’s, insults him in very much the same way Octavius had—not showing the slightest willingness to fight with him on equal footing—he is neither outraged nor even upset but only indifferently bemused. He treats her more like a natural catastrophe (just another obstacle in a battle campaign he “fought against . . . with a patience more / Than savages could suffer” [1. 4. 59–61]) than as a fellow human being prized as a person of equal standing with himself who can wound and herself be wounded. Though Cleopatra repeatedly refuses to allow him an uninterrupted word to defend himself while they are feuding, stepping all over his lines to insult him ever more avidly, to our initial amazement Antony remains far more charmed than outraged throughout the ordeal. The explanation for this inconsistency is not, however, far to seek. In the first place, her fighting with him in this seemingly needy way rather ludicrously flatters his male vanity in a way Caesar’s expression of contempt obviously would not. Secondly, it is of some consequence that Cleopatra stands directly before him when insulting him as Caesar did not. Had she behaved in this way but not been present before him, Antony’s reaction would not likely have been so measured. In face to face encounters, we have repeatedly seen that Antony’s preferred strategy in a fight is to “bid that welcome / Which comes to punish us and we punish it, / Seeming to bear it lightly.” (4. 14. 136–38) It is a tactic that proves as effective here in his feud with Cleopatra in Act 1 and in his recriminations with Caesar in Act 2 as it did in other battle setbacks. Its tactical cleverness aside, however, his tack represents a shameful refusal to take another human being seriously, revealing an attitude of dismissive contempt merely masquerading as toleration and patience. Indeed, his phlegmatic manner, not allowing himself to ‘be bothered’ by anything that is bothering her, is the reverse mirror image of Cleopatra’s sharp-tongued irascibility that won’t let him get a word in edgewise in his own defense.

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Neither party is truly willing to listen to a thing the other has to say nor pay the other any mind: that is, neither truly “gave audience or / Vouchsaf ’d to think (s)he had partners.” (1. 4. 7–8) They are more companions in dissipation—drinking chums and bedmates—than friends who share confidences with one another (that we know of ) or for that matter any true confidence in one another (recall that self-seeking defectors in an enemy’s camp may have “entertainment” there “but no honourable trust”). Each harbors nothing but an occluded contempt for the other—though not, one hastens to add, a comparable contempt for the quality of their own treatment of the other person they would have the world and themselves believe is dearly beloved. It is not alone the political factions in the civil war at Rome that have transformed the closest of relations into enemies when they should have been friends. In Antony and Cleopatra the most intimate human relations have likewise rudely transformed themselves into rival claimants to empire battling with “civil swords.” (1. 3. 45) Here, too, as at Rome, the “equality of two domestic powers / Breeds” not friendship and familial love but “faction.” (1. 3. 47–48) Indeed, their inconclusive face-off in Act 1 is more than incidentally reminiscent of the clash of “civil swords” involving Caesar and Antony in Acts 2 and 3, identified earlier as “two thieves kissing,” one hand of each thief shaking the other’s in farewell greeting while the other hand foolishly imagines it can pick the other’s pocket without the contemned dupe’s catching on. Antony has come to Cleopatra feigning reluctance to leave her in order to cover his tracks and even secure her approval of his betrayal. She, in turn, feigns offering her blessing for his departure; secretly congratulating herself that by doing so she can still control his movements and in fact pilfer from his ‘take’ further upon his return to her. Both smugly imagine they have practiced their deceits without detection or even suspicion in their patsies. At one point in their bickering, Cleopatra rightly names Antony an “excellent falsehood” (1. 1. 40) in that he can “play one scene / Of excellent dissembling, and let it look like perfect honour.” (1. 3. 78–80) She accuses him of just putting on a well-acted facsimile of a grand passion, even as he is secretly making plans to desert his beloved. The deeper truth of the matter she does not recognize in taunting him with such a crime is that they are both guilty of the same dereliction, a perfectly matched couple unwittingly deserting one another at every moment of their apparent intimacy. In response to his pretense, acted out before her, that he can barely summon the will to tell her he must leave for Rome (“I am sorry to give breathing to my purpose” [1. 3. 14]) Cleopatra pretends—twice in fact—that she must soon faint from the emotional blow:

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Help me away, dear Charmian! I shall fall. It cannot be thus long; the sides of nature Will not sustain it. (1. 3. 15–17; cf also 1. 3. 71–72)

The pair of them may pretend that they may not be able to summon the strength to go on—that, in other words, they do not have the heart to carry on without the other—but the irony in their semi-transparent deceits is that they are both misrepresenting the truths they speak though they do not know it. They do have the heart simply to carry on without the other or any true concern for that ‘other.’ They may think that they have lost their hearts to one another, but the tragedy is that they go to their deaths, like the traitorous Enobarbus, not with hearts broken by love but each and together having lost heart completely. At the core of the mountainous passion they share lies only considerate stone. At Antony’s death, Cleopatra reverts to the touching fear that neither of the lovers can shake in their constant testing of each other’s love throughout the play. As he breathes his last, she cries: “hast thou no care of me?” (4. 15. 60) In this emblematic motto to the visual enactment of their love relationships in the play, she means to ask on her own account what Antony repeatedly comes back to question in his own right as well. She asks, in effect: “Do you really love me?” and, even more touchingly, “What am I going to do without you?” Yet the ambiguity in Shakespeare’s wording includes an even more alarming, if, for the lovers themselves, an unasked question: “Do you really have no healing or nurturing care from me?” Narcissists in love never ask the latter question; only the former worries make them wince. Whatever genuine passion and good will they show toward their lovers is pervasively compromised, indeed, tragically sabotaged by their unacknowledged and unapprehended self-regard. In the way that males often do, the Roman soldiery have things predictably oversimplified when they identify Antony and Cleopatra as a fool and his strumpet. (1. 1. 13) Antony himself is no less a faithless pretender to love merely seeking his own personal profit than his paramour is; and whatever Antony’s follies, it is Cleopatra, in Act 1 most literally, who continues to “seem the fool I am not” (1. 1. 42), playing an all-licensed court jester whose barbed wit is but uneasily tolerated by her indifferently bemused emperor. As a female ‘captive’ in a man’s world, she, much more than he, might properly be seen as an unseminar’d eunuch whose only task, now that her gender’s dignity and capacities have been maimed by the powers that be, is to act as “bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy [emperor’s] lust” (1. 1. 9–10)—simultaneously cooling the ardor of her Roman conqueror’s roving heart with her

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biting wit only to fan his smoldering appetite with every flustered beat of her clipped wings in his gilded cage. Antony unknowingly admits this, symbolically, when Shakespeare shows him responding with as much erotic pleasure as anger to Cleopatra’s tonguelashing in the midst of their feud: “You’ll heat my blood. No more.” (1. 3. 80) In speaking thus, Antony intends only to give Cleopatra fair warning of potential danger from the anger (and sexual aggression) the powerful Roman occupier is restraining; but, given an alternative inflection, Shakespeare’s wording slyly gives the audience an indication of the grave odds against Cleopatra in her efforts to be taken more seriously than court fools generally are. When Cleopatra complains that she must play the fool she is “not” while “Antony will be himself,” Antony tries to defend himself with an interjection designed to flatter her—“But stirr’d by Cleopatra.” (1. 1. 43) Shakespeare invites us to read his response differently, however. The essence of Antony’s “being himself ” is that he is “but stirr’d by Cleopatra”: that is, he, too, is a metaphorical eunuch merely titillated sexually by her. He is a man not in love with the person before him but with “the love of love and her soft hours” (1. 1. 44), with “some pleasure now” and “sport tonight.” (1. 1. 47) Having plumped for these delights and no more, if he could have his way he would reject all need to “confound the time with conference harsh” (1. 1. 45), no matter how legitimately troubled or angered Cleopatra might be. Though he does not know it, from start to finish, his queen is never anything more to him than an incitement to the rioting in his blood, no matter what she might do to be taken more seriously. To live perpetually under the threat of this subtly demeaning contempt and domination from the untrammeled power of a succession of Roman vanquishers is to live in a curiously flattering state of terror. If one cannot summon from within the greater bravery of an outright refusal to play with the powers that be on their terms, one’s only option is to live dangerously even as one lives in fear, taking one’s life in one’s own hands, as Cleopatra does from the play’s beginning to its suicidal end. Cleopatra’s condition and choice are the ones that all colonized peoples face. One must somehow contend with the thrilling temptation to risk playing with the big dogs in the desperate hope of making oneself matter there. The irony in such enterprise, however bravely ventured, is that even if one could succeed in the death-defying act of daring, one would only fail oneself because to matter to cruel beings one has to beat them at their own game. One has to become more terrible than the enemy whose greatest and only weapon is terror. Self-enhancement of this sort ends, paradoxically, only in diminishment of oneself. Making oneself count in this way to reprehensible beings is merely to cooperate in

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transforming the glory of the human spirit into a dead or dying animal, not ‘making oneself matter’ so much in the idiomatic sense as making oneself into brute matter ravening itself and its own best impulses. The relevance of this paradox to Cleopatra’s condition and character in the play was intimated by Proser long ago now. “Cleopatra’s passion for Antony is so tightly interlocked with her own self-esteem that it may seem her hero is nothing more to her than another jewel in her crown of conquests—conquests not of territories but of those giants who conquer territories.” Ironically, he continues: “she herself is the prize and booty” should she triumph. (194) To compound the irony, even the accomplishment of a catastrophic triumph of that sort is anything but assured. As Enobarbus and Cleopatra both learn to their dismay, it is not, as Enobarbus once believed, “better playing with a lion’s whelp / than with an old one dying.” (3. 13. 94–95) Living dangerously with either Antony or Octavius will in every likelihood only serve to get oneself mauled. Cleopatra half knows this, but she never can resist the dare, the challenge of taming the beasts herself. Until such time as one gets fatally mauled, the thrilling price of living dangerously is fear. Once one has grasped the mane and flesh of the beast one rides (or, more literally, is ridden by), so possessed by fear can one become that all one can think to do is to hold on for dear life. Given the sexual gratification Cleopatra repeatedly associates with pain (1. 5. 28; 2. 5. 12–13; 2. 5. 24; 5. 2. 295), we are led to conclude that with every bruising thud that “hurts and is desir’d” from the Roman beasts she rides, Cleopatra, clinging there, cannot stop “weep(ing) to have that which she fears to loose.” (or ‘lose’) Critics steeped in the classical tradition have occasionally likened Cleopatra’s role in Antony’s life to Circe or Dido’s role in that of the ancient epic heroes, luring them temporarily from public obligations to private pleasures;16 but the truth is more mundanely painful to contemplate. She is more Deianeira than either of those deserted enchantresses. Like her, she is a woman whose social position (despite her royal station) and very existence are dependent upon the man in her life, and therefore a woman who is terrified of losing that man even if he is an unfaithful and abusive cad, a woman poisoned and herself unwittingly poisoning further the man she would hold for herself with the allure of a ‘gift’ born of the centaur’s own poisonous lust. Even at her most commanding moments, fear dogs Cleopatra. When she provokes Antony in Act 1, “Cleopatra’s taunts disguise anxiety as much as they flaunt power.” (Nevo 308) Even at her magnificent final exit from the stage, both the fear of not achieving a gratifying reunion with Antony and frightened terror of Caesar’s possible power to prevent it and humiliate her make her grand composure there tremble. Indeed, as long as she subliminally

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conceives of Antony more as an enemy than a full partner, as long as she remains a traitor in an enemy’s camp enjoying entertainment but no honorable trust, fear can be her only companion as she rides the one-eyed beast. A lying Thidias can have no more clue than the Egyptian queen does about the hidden truth with which he speaks of her condition when he declares to her that the imperial powers of Rome know “You embrace not Antony / As you did love, but as you fear’d him.” (3. 13. 56–57) And what Seleucus betrays to Octavius about her is an even more relevant and significant truth about all her relations to men, including Antony: out of terrified and yet futile selfinterest, she has kept back for herself at least as much of her personal wealth as she has handed over, seemingly vanquished, to her conquerors, all the while only pretending compliance and trust in them. Nor does Cleopatra, when outraged by her servant’s betrayal of her on these same foolishly selfinterested grounds, have any idea how aptly she condemns herself when she turns angrily on Seleucus to indict him as a “slave, of no more trust / Than love that’s hired.” (45. 2. 154–55) In a less figurative way than Antony, the Queen of Egypt, too, stands accused of having “given (her) empire / Up to a whore.” (3. 6. 66–67) Only paid professionals, actresses all, love the way Cleopatra does. However bold and genuine her displays of passion, in her self-interested terror and anxiety, searching for power and the chance at the upper hand, giving and taking only sexual gratification, all the heart has gone out of her dealings with men without her even knowing it. Hardened and hoping to be yet more coldblooded, she goes to her death seeking to become “marble constant,” “with nothing / Of woman in me.” (5. 2. 238–40)17 She beseeches her servants “to take the last warmth of my lips” not alone as a show of her favor to them but also as one final favor they might offer her. Then, disporting herself almost literally “in the posture of a whore,” she loses heart so completely that she doesn’t even have the strength of will to take her own life directly but instead beckons the asps to do the task for her. In view of her disregard for her servants and children at her death, one may even wonder whether Antony is the only understood referent of “that huge spirit now . . . cold” (89) when Cleopatra presumptuously speaks for all ladies-of-the-night-in-waiting, herself included: Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion And make death proud to take us. Come, away! This case of that huge spirit now is cold. Ah, women, women! Come; we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end. (4. 15. 87–91)

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Can Antony be the only “case” of a “huge spirit” grown cold if Cleopatra can speak, while arbitrarily sentencing her servants to probable death with her, of having no friend but the endurance of “the briefest end”—the prick that kills and pains not, the briefest end of a piece of ass(p)? Given her “huge spirit,” her greater capacities and genuine desire for love, it is a terrible irony that Cleopatra allows herself to become a subtly pornographic fantasy of womanhood, a male fantasy of a female voluptuary who goes to her death just begging for it, playing nakedly to a rapt crowd in the recumbent posture of a whore.

V The Re-Deeming Thoughts of Love Declined The tragedy, of course, is that she could and should have been so much more. She could have realized her “huge spirit” but not by dreaming of what Venus did with Mars. (She has conveniently forgotten the humiliating self-exposure that escapade yielded.) To realize her huge spirit, she and the lovers together would have had to seek, instead, the neoplatonic marriage of Venus and Mars, the discordia concors or marriage of opposites, in which the only valor worthy of the name would have to be performed in love for one another, not the secret enmity of the gender wars, a marriage of opposites in which the only love worthy of the name would necessarily be wed to a spirit personally committed to war on its and their behalf.18 In such a union the queen would not ask “why should not we / Be there in person” (3. 7. 5–6) for the sole purpose of winning her “place in the story” at grandstand shows like Actium. As often as it should become necessary, she would fight in the brave squares of war on her own and Antony’s behalf in the name of a truly personal relationship between them they could only achieve in concert and under fire of full personal engagement with one another day after ordinary day. That alone is the sacred marriage of Venus and Mars, Love and Strife, which can give birth to the goddess, Harmonia. Its dynamic is not the simple opposition of mirth (Egypt) and duty (Rome), one that breeds only mutual contempt and impatience. It is the marriage of two principles that creates the kind of human happiness symbolically intimated and incarnated in Cleopatra’s marvelous servants, especially as we see them in their charmingly convivial mock-warfare with one another (and Cleopatra herself whenever they dare) as they consistently demonstrate their uncomplaining devotion to her, even going to the “edge of doome” with her. The “best love,” the only true love, “draws to that point which seeks / Best to

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preserve it” (3. 5. 21–22), not in the sense of the passage that implies some self-interested desire for the upper hand, but in the sense that records a longing to realize greater goods—indeed, the “best” of goods and preserve them. The result of such an engagement and intercourse is the good life generated in love, the “babe” that Sonnet 115 attests “still doth grow,” miraculously, even as it endures difficulties of the most challenging sort. Love’s endless battle against self-protectiveness and self-pity makes the infamous battle test at Actium seem like the foolish child’s play that it is. Though just the opposite of that battle’s staged opportunity for a grandstand show of the self ’s preeminent glory, love, too, is a battle, indeed an unending one, whose salience is that it might yet be recurrently won if it were not for the principals’ loss of heart. Its periodic victories cannot be purchased by the faint or half-hearted, by unseminar’d eunuchs who are “but stirr’d” by their lovers, their blood heated but “no more”; its triumph cannot be purchased by emotionally castrated beings whose only hope is a vain one: to “stand up / For the main soldier” (1. 2. 182–83), in a priapic show of preeminence. Even if they should somehow manage that feat, they might well be asked what good they are to love’s war effort if they fatuously “stand up peerless” (1. 1. 39), but with nothing higher to aim at nor any desire to realize in battle a consummation devoutly to be wished. Love’s battles cannot be won by those, among them Antony, whose view of engagement is nothing more than retreat (his idea of lovemaking is but a face-saving and patronizing rationalization for premature withdrawal: “Say, our pleasure, / To such whose place is under us, requires / Our quick remove from hence” [1. 2. 186–88]); nor can they be won by those, among them Cleopatra, whose idea of engagement is to wait vainly for reinforcements before joining the fight at all. When she beseeches Antony: “I would I had thy inches! Thou shouldst know / There were a heart in Egypt” (1. 3. 40–41), whether she intends her remark as a punning incitement to sexual riot in Antony or as a frustrated petition made to an enemy to grant her adequate ‘stature’ for a fair fight, in either case it is clear that she is only wasting her own time faint-heartedly rationalizing her absence “in person” from a war she clearly senses she is duty-bound to fight. Excuses of that sort on her part are but a cowardly failure of nerve, no matter how seemingly compelling the causes for self-pity and resentment. Love’s battles are alone won by those joined together as partners in full intercourse with one another, an ‘intercourse’ commingling passion and dispute, Love and Strife, that once joined can produce surprisingly lively and treasured results. Such lovers don’t lose themselves in an impoverished life of hopeless longing for past glories that inevitably slip from one’s grasp with the

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passage of time nor in delusions of future grandeur and fulfillment tantalizingly out of reach. Instead, they delight wholeheartedly in the enjoyment of their time being together, ever harvesting the present of its surprising richness. Theirs is the happiness of “weighing the worth” of their own golden moments “embraced,” not Cleopatra’s famished longing to feel the mere weight of her absent lover upon her, able to delight only in her imagined power to move the skittish rider she can, at best, continue to carry, herself but a beast of burden, until she can ‘carry on’ no more. Though Antony and Cleopatra are a perfect match for each other in the dividedness of their hearts, their agonies, though perhaps equal, remain separate: his the restlessness of perpetual satiety; hers the subliminal restlessness of perpetual longing and anxiety. She never possesses the object of her desire long or firmly enough to feel the full weight of satiety.19 It is difficult to say whose agony is worse, but hers seems perhaps the crueler fate. One has only to recall her parting apostrophe to her dead lover in Act 5, “Husband, I come” (5. 2. 286) to feel its grim poignancy. Her touching expression of aroused yearning is doubly painful to contemplate in its irony. If one reasonably hopes for a satisfying consummation, declarations of nearly realized desire for companionship and physical communion like this one should not need to be addressed to the absent ghost of a phantom lover but to one intimately present in one’s life. What’s more, should one reflect upon the sociological irony of her pronouncement, the Egyptian queen’s yearning for the pathetic legitimacy of the “title” of Roman matron (“Now to that name my courage prove my title!” [287]), within a culture of marauding conquerors whose wives live so repressively under strict male control, only further suggests Cleopatra’s self-diminishment. Egypt’s hungry queen has been duped into trading her majestic birthright for a mess of porridge. After death an empty cenotaph, the cold case of Cleopatra’s huge spirit remains in life but a monumental mausoleum housing only its single resident’s earthly disintegration. Given her fiery temperament and strategic boldness generally, it comes as something of a dramatic shock suddenly to come upon her cowering in her monument at the end of Act 4; but in emblematic terms it has been true all along that her huge spirit has always been “lock’d” there (4. 14. 120), “confin’d in all she has, her monument” to herself (5. 1. 53), like the similarly “unseminar’d” Lepidus, imprisoned until death “enlarges [that] confine.” (3. 5. 11) Like him, too, she allows herself to be flattered to death in a self-intoxication urged on by the willingness of others to celebrate her, however questionable their sincerity. Having ceded all true selfdetermination and any more positive sense of initiative, she waits there in vain self-imprisonment merely to determine what the men of the moment

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in her life will decide to do with her, all the while trusting that by reading and then reacting to their moods and actions she can adequately protect herself. Though she is never without guile and the willingness to use it, when her servant reports to Caesar on her duplicitous behalf that she is securely locked away in her monument, a defeated captive who compliantly “desires instruction” of Caesar’s “intents” (5. 1. 54), beneath the surface of her clever double-talk and continuing hope to yet gain some incidental advantage over him, there lies the sobering symbolic message that an unreflective Cleopatra is ever unknowingly answering to Caesar (and all men’s) “intents,”—not her own. Her sole concern is ever “that she preparedly may frame herself / To th’ way she’s forced to” (5. 1. 55–56) in the subservient manner of a soul securely occupied by an invading force. In her monument for and to herself and her unique destiny, a monument constructed in vain, self-protective anxiety isolating her from others, she sits awaiting what Antony and then Caesar will decide to do with and about her, ever fearful and wary “lest [she] be taken” (4. 15. 23)—whether in the fully human intercourse with Antony love urges or in nobly unvanquished resistance to the imperial spirit of Caesar in war. Like the ‘husband’ she simultaneously honors and contemns, she remains equally divided between love and hate of her beloved, on the one hand, and the love and hate of the imperial power threatening that beloved’s and her own well-being, on the other. That is a significant portion of the insight the soothsayer voices when he declares to Antony: Thy demon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable Where Caesar’s is not; but near him thy angel Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered. Therefore Make space enough between you. (2. 3. 18–22)

For his part, Antony imagines the seer is characterizing Antony’s own relationship to Caesar alone in this passage, but the quote doubles nicely as a clue to our comprehension of Cleopatra’s role in his life as well. She, too, is a daemonic/demonic spirit that could lead Antony to noble exaltation somewhere beyond ordinary human achievements; but when her spirit comes too much under the influence of the imperial spirit of the Rome of the Caesars she becomes possessed by fear for herself and consequently only leads him and herself to ruin instead. To the extent that her passion for Antony is contaminated and compromised by concerns about power over him, to that extent she fights on

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Caesar’s side in the wars, a traitor in Antony’s camp. Hence the redoubling ironies in several of her cagey responses to Thyreus, Caesar’s deputy. Thinking he needs to win her from allegiance to Antony, Caesar’s emissary hints that Cleopatra “should make a staff / To lean upon” (3. 13. 68–69) from Octavius’s better fortunes in the war. But he need not tell her “Caesar entreats” her “not to consider in what case thou stand’st / Further than he is Caesar.” (54–55) Subliminally, she has already done just that. However unwavering her conscious allegiance to Antony may well be even now after Actium, in her heart’s most intimate recesses she has already taken Thyreus’s advice about how to think of her ‘condition.’ To flatter the victor at Actium with a deceit, she may say: If Caesar please, our master Will leap to be his friend. For us, you know Whose he is we are, and that is Caesar’s. (3. 13. 50–52)

Consciously, no doubt, she means just the opposite in that she despises and fears Octavius even more than she may subconsciously contemn and fear Antony. But Shakespeare’s contorted syntax invites a simpler construction of sense here, generating a dramatic irony condemning both Antony and Cleopatra for having failed to keep enough space, figuratively, between themselves and Caesar. They are “Caesar’s”—and have ever been so—not solely in the sudden reversal of their fortunes at Actium. When she sends Thidias back to Caesar, declaring “in deputation I kiss his conquering hand” (3. 13. 74–75), Cleopatra does not realize that the irony in her intended deception of Caesar’s deputy is also self-implicating. In Caesar’s physical absence from her life she has nevertheless been functioning as his deputy, too, acting only on his imperious behalf. That neither she nor Antony have kept enough space between themselves and Caesar is likewise artfully implied in Antony’s accusation of her before Thyreus, one in which he accuses her of betraying her love for him by “look(ing) on feeders.” (3. 13. 109)20 As upset by the total disregard in which he is now held by Caesar after Actium as he is by Cleopatra’s apparent behavior with the enemy emissary who ignores him, Antony flies into a rage about her dispensing signs of her favor not only upon “his excellency” exclusively but also, in an intolerable insult to his dignity, upon common servants as well. Without appreciating the full extent of the irony he announces there, Antony accuses his beloved of sharing her favors with false flatterers, “feeders,” self-serving beggars who are only too glad to take any scraps offered by their ‘betters,’ all the while expressing gratitude that masks their true desire to get something for nothing. Figuratively speaking, however, this

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is precisely the way in which both of them love one another—acquisitively, controlingly, demeaning each other’s excellency to settle for whatever each one can get from the other. In the manner of Octavius Caesar himself, theirs is an unnecessarily “paltry” way in which to behave toward one another. Thinking she still has a chance at triumph, a thoroughly defeated Cleopatra unknowingly confesses the true extent of what she has already yielded to Caesar: “I am his fortune’s vassal and send him / The [only] greatness he has got.” (5. 2. 29–30) Though she bravely goes to her death thinking she is still resisting the vicious power of Caesar, a tragic Cleopatra has already yielded her greatness to the mean-spirited enemy without so much as a fight. Even in their parting gestures to one another, despite the misleading poignancy of their surface expressions of undying love for one another, Antony and Cleopatra remain true to form in the gratuitous paltriness of their underlying affection toward one another. For his part, in addition to doing little else but talking about himself at his death, without any discussion at all of her possible betrayal of him to Caesar’s forces, Antony’s seemingly generous gesture in urging her to “seek your honour, with your safety” from “Caesar” (4. 15. 46) could as readily be construed as dismissive contempt and yet another ‘testing’ of her loyalties to him as a genuine desire to see her well. Just as with his troops, when, similarly, he failed to distinguish between the faithful and faithless, he would take his leave of her (her useful services now rendered) with an insulting assumption of her rootedly mercenary motives. As he had with his other lieutenant, he would send treasure after a subordinate he assumes has already (or will yet) become a traitor to him. The “safety” he urges upon her, however consciously well-intentioned as a token gesture of love, may well mask the contempt with which he ‘kissed-off ’ the eunuch, Mardian, earlier: “that thou depart’st hence safe / Does pay thy labor richly.” (4. 14. 36–7) For her part, having refused to risk her self-protective imprisonment within her monument to ‘go out’ to the dying Antony and having added insult to his injuries by having him painfully heaved into her presence, she proceeds merely to make another round of erotic jokes about bearing the weight of Antony. (4. 15. 32–34) Then, as in Act 1, in yet another departure scene she again persists in stepping all over his lines as he tries to “tell her of [him]self.” Once he dies, she likewise repeats her characteristic tendency to mythologize his greatness in order to compensate for his real absence from her life. As was the case with Enobarbus, for Cleopatra, too, the treasure Antony would send after her as the reward for her betrayal of devotion to him is a reward her dignity and selfesteem immediately and definitively refuses. It becomes, instead, as it did for Antony’s other lieutenant, a mere burden of guilt that causes her to lose heart completely and die still seeking to find some “place in the story,” emulous of

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her master’s wholly factitious nobility. Each of these legendary lovers dies glorifying only his and her own departure. As in Antony’s case, Lepidus is a surprising emblem of Cleopatra’s lost soul and enterprise. A self-intoxicated and self-victimizing eunuch, bankrupt even in the great wealth she enjoys, she truly loves neither Antony nor Caesar; nor does “either care for [her]” (2. 1. 16), though she “flatters both / Of both is flatter’d.” (2. 1. 14) Wasting her precious time in a foolish search for a position of prominence between two mighty fools in their own right, she simply becomes a hapless go-between toyed with and merely patronized by both sides, a being, like Lepidus, “denied rivality” once they “made use of ” her (3. 5. 6–7) and imprisoned until death enlarges her confine. Too selfintoxicated to reserve enough sense to question, let alone end, the drunken pretense of friendship and factitious celebrity in which she is involved in her relationships to both men, she merely “touches the sourest points with sweetest terms” (2. 2. 23)—both sexually and verbally—never daring to confront the underlying corruption and deceit poisoning her relationships to them. Eros of this sort is, as Helen affirms in Troilus and Cressida, “the love” that threatens to “undo us all.” (3. 1. 100) Whether we consider Antony’s “wounded chance” or Cleopatra’s “honoured gash,” cupidity is the dart in Love’s bow Shoots buck and doe The shaft confounds Not that it wounds But tickles still the sore (T & C, 3. 1. 106–10)

Cupidity is the prick that “kills and pains not”: the nearly irresistible human impulse to scratch the itching scab of our selfish yearnings, that in tickling lust’s sore is “enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight” (Sonnet 129, 5) in our compulsive reenactments of the momentary and superficial pleasures that keep the infected wound below it raw. As always in the world of this play, the corrupted spirit of Caesar that has tragically ‘triumphed’ over all is granted the last word on the lovers and himself (though not, of course, the profoundest irony and truth of its desolate meaning). High events as these Strike those that make them; and their story is No less in pity than his glory which Brought them to be lamented. (5. 2. 358–61)

Such is the barren half-life that prevails in Antony and Cleopatra. All hail Caesar.

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Notes 1. The point has been variously made in recent feminist and cultural criticism. Citing Loomba, Charnes declares that the Egyptian queen is a “nonidentity” to the Romans, an “other” on three fronts: “gender, race, and nationality.” (111) Hamer claims that in the Roman males’ homosocial economy (Irigaray’s term) living women are not acknowledged. (70) Cleopatra is not so much a subject as she is an object of representation, one “which tells us not about femininity, Egyptian or otherwise, but about the Western masculinity that has fantasized her into existence.” (Callaghan 53) A transmutation of the binary goddess/whore mythos, she is “ego ideal and scapegoat” (Baines 31) in a love/hate relationship subject to recurrent alternations of “idealism and cynicism” by which the real woman continues to be “marginalized, erased, displaced, allegorized.” (Gajowski 19, 22) Trapped in subaltern status, Cleopatra, Callaghan concludes, “cannot undo her erasure.” (51) Though I would not take issue with these insights, I would argue that Shakespeare’s assessment of Cleopatra’s situation vis a vis the Romans is yet more complex still; his irony, double edged. It is not simply that the Romans remain incapable of generously recognizing Cleopatra’s rich “otherness”; it is also, as we shall see momentarily, that Cleopatra herself does not properly value or defend that otherness in herself either nor grant Antony his in turn, thus acting in unknowing complicity with her callous oppressors in a plot that becomes nothing more, symbolically, than a war to the death against their own shared humanity. 2. Cf. King Lear 4. 6. 160–63: Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back; Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind For which thou whipp’st her.

3. Cf. Proser 190. 4. Cf. Rackin 209: “For the crown is the emblem of Cleopatra’s royalty, and when she puts it on here, it establishes in a fully theatrical manner the nature of this queen who is so thoroughly involved with the world of art and illusion that she is incomprehensible except within its terms . . . for the characters onstage, as well as the audience, the likeness becomes reality.” Though Cleopatra’s manner here is certainly consummately “theatrical,” it is not nearly so certain that this unnecessary show effectively transforms itself into a trustworthy reality. Our response to Rackin’s overly enthusiastic claim should be a sympathetic, “Gentle Madame, no.” Since Cleopatra already is a genuine queen, one might well wonder why she asks her attendants to help her make of herself a superficial spectacle—“show her,” in her words, “like” one. This brave show, devoid of a true queen’s political role and responsibility as leader and benefactor to the people she loves and cares for, can only mean that however boldly she wears her crown, she wears it, nonetheless, in the final analysis, “awry.” Bayley sees Charmian straightening the dead queen’s crown “like a nurse removing a toy” from a sleeping child. (107)

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5. In commenting on Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra’s barge to his fellow Roman soldiers, Jacobson remarks upon the fact that Shakespeare seems to be enjoying how men “half create the legend they are offering to judge.” In thinking of Cleopatra’s Egyptian extravagances the Roman soldiery “sweat, drool, and ogle” and Enobarbus “plays the story for all it’s worth.” (104) 6. Gordon Ross Smith describes the queen as “capricious, despotic, amoral, licentious; . . . utterly possessed by her erotic appetites, seemingly, she still has self-possession enough always to seek her own immediate self-interest, to lie, cheat, swagger, and swear, to be humble and sly, and to betray anyone, even Antony or her children, for her own enormously egocentric satisfactions.” (16) Though his assessment is as one-sided in its own right as are the more recent feminist celebrations of her theatrical refusal to be identified or controlled by patriarchy (see note 7), no reading of Cleopatra’s character that does not keep these dimensions of her behavior in mind can hope to generate an adequate portrait. We cannot simply repress Smith’s telling observations when we come to assess whether Shakespeare is bent on ‘beatifying’ her at the finale. 7. A commonplace in discussions of her characterization historically, Cleopatra’s theatricality has sprung to new life as an important dimension of the current critical dialogue. In the past decade, under the interpellated internalization of the reigning cultural imperialism and hegemonic discourse—poststructural feminism and cultural studies—the ‘dominant ideology’ of the moment, Cleopatra’s construction of ‘self ’ as a series of impromptu fictionalized theatrical performances, when not greeted with standing ovations, has at least been met with a respectful, unquestioning approval by the new orthodoxy. In one of those uncritical essentialist moves so deplored as the exclusive and hopeless folly of their adversaries, many of these critics identify the queen’s theatricality as the salvific characteristic of her gender and deconstructed self set against the sins of patriarchy and imperialistic oppression. To Baines, for example, Cleopatra is the “consummate performer” whose infinite variety makes her “uncontainable” and “sacred.” (35–36) In her histrionic self-presentation she is a positive representation of female power. (Jankowski 161) For Hamer, in the end, it is not her relationship to Antony but herself that has “moved to the centre of the stage.” (87) In connecting femininity to performance, “Cleopatra models her exuberant, indeed almost comic, delight in plural subjectivity.” (Marshall 408) In her feminine jouissance “she puts into question the very notion of a unified, stable identity.” (Singh 309) For Cook, “Cleopatra seems an apt figure for a larger principle at work in the play, a fluid principle which destabilizes principles.” (246) She makes of her death “not a conquest over feeling and the body but a culmination of eros and play.” (264) “In her infinite variety, Cleopatra is always and never identical with herself: her identity is the refusal of identity, of essence, of the kind of stability which can be made property to serve Rome.” (252) Though Charnes qualifies this final claim significantly, still she asserts that Cleopatra’s histrionic ways demonstrate that in her person “subjectivity is posited as a kind of theater.” (199 n. 28) Cf. also Bushman 39 and 43–47; Gajowski 96; Bamber 131–32.

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Quite apart from the collateral damage conveniently neglected in such glowing accounts of Cleopatra’s performative resistance to Roman rule (take, as just one example, her playfully oblivious disregard for what effects the report of her ‘staged’ suicide might have on Antony’s fragile mental stability) what, one might well ask, are we to make of the unexamined possibility in these readings that the unrelentingly theatrical dimensions of her behavior in the play may be for her as much an ill-considered battle strategy as it is a free-standing proto-feminist stance? What if her purported jouissance may be mingled contradictorily or perhaps completely compromised by an unwitting yet earnest desire to satisfy the dominant culture’s conquering norms. What if her theatricality is not so much a successful effort to outsmart or overturn the imposition of an unjust and ‘self ’-annihilating domination but itself an unsuccessful, indeed, tragically self-annihilating appropriation of the desire to dominate in her turn. 8. Even if these words are not delivered with bitter sarcasm but more nearly in the grand tones of self-sacrificial capitulation to Antony’s ‘higher calling’ her generous love manages to summon, there is still a very good chance that Cleopatra is simultaneously confessing here a self-regarding hope for a handsome return on her investment in the near future—not simply the return of Antony as an even more celebrated warrior / conqueror but also a share in the spoils of victory, both literal and figurative. 9. Simmons 137 cites Wilson and Mills as precedents for bitterly ironic interpretations of Cleopatra’s capitulation to Antony’s wishes. 10. Ornstein’s generic claim applies to the crisis of the moment: “Where the masculine hunger is for sexual possession and domination, Cleopatra’s womanly desire is to be possessed, and to triumph in surrendering.” (85–86) However passionate the expression of their desire and regard for one another (even perhaps in Cleopatra’s longing at her death) not love, as it appears, but a ‘Romanizing’ imperial triumph seems to be the predominating motivation of both protagonists. 11. Dollimore makes the compelling point that repeatedly, even at Cleopatra’s death, “we are never allowed to forget that the [lovers’] moments of sublimity are conditional upon absence, nostalgic contemplation upon the fact that the other is . . . gone.” (146) 12. Cf. Proser 194; Charnes 138–40. 13. Cleopatra speaks for any woman for whom the loss of physical allure to the ravages of time represents a nearly crushing blow when she laments of Thidias’s unceremonious entry into her presence: “See, my women! / Against the blown rose may they stop their nose / That kneel’d unto the buds.” (3. 13. 38–40) This further confirms the suspicion that until the end Cleopatra, though admittedly a woman of a certain age, may well be contemplating one more test of the libidinal waters with Octavius, even as she had with successive generations of his Roman predecessors. Cf. Levin. 14. What Cleopatra declares in disillusionment to Proculeius resonates well beyond that moment in aiding our comprehension of her character. She speaks more

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truly than she knows when she asserts: “I do not greatly care to be deceiv’d / That have no use for trusting.” (5. 2. 14–15) 15. Hooks argues that this comment by Cleopatra “reveals the extent to which erotic consubstantiality has all but erased a reality principle” (42) in the queen. She claims further, that what Melanie Klein termed the ‘depressive phase,’ in which the self’s capacity to recognize objects as separate and distinct from the self ’s parameters, an ability learned in the weaning process, is largely absent in the dynamics of both Antony and Cleopatra. (37) 16. Seen from within the heroic conventions of Renaissance epic, “Cleopatra is no longer a figure of the saving power of love and grace, however displaced or redefined, but a figure of deceit and corruption, seducing the hero from his true mission of self-realization through heroic conquest. Cleopatra is assigned, through the Romans’ language and imagery, a place within a long line . . . stretching from Venus, Omphale, Circe, and Dido of the classical tradition to the Armida, Duessa, and Acrasia of more recent renaissance epics.” (Felperin 108) 17. This reading of the figure gains support from Nevo’s persuasive interpretation of 4. 15. 73–91, her paradoxical qualification of the romanticized reading of the passage as an uplifting—if anomalous—moment of humility in the queen, an acknowledgment of “the common humanity that binds her to those who have loved her.” (Traversi 185) Nevo rightly emphasizes the ambiguity in the queen’s response to Iras and Charmian when her servants address her as their “sovereign” and “Empress” in order to revive her after she faints at Antony’s death. Awakening to their alarmed calls, she responds: No more but e’en a woman, and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks, And does the meanest chores. (73–75)

For Nevo the speech need not be a sudden recognition of common humanity at all but “a rebellion, a reaction against this great leveling power of woman’s sorrow, . . . [an] expression of a profound scorn for her condition as an ordinary female, making this moment consistent with her subsequent desire to become ‘marble constant,’ ‘with nothing / Of woman in me.’ (5. 2. 238–40)” When not pressed into the service of a pious moralism, “no more but e’en a woman,” as Nevo explains it, “refers not to her love but to the fainting spell, a mark of physical or emotional weakness appropriate in a kitchen wench but unworthy of a Queen for whom the demi-Atlas of the earth kissed away kingdoms and provinces. The connotations of ‘poor’ in “poor passion” are the crux of the matter. Poor as ‘pitiful’ could express the humility of great grief; poor as ‘mean’ could not.” (341) Furthermore, if one allows the import of this short passage to broaden into a summation of her entire career as a lover, it discloses a Shakespearean irony Cleopatra cannot comprehend in that, defiant and contemptuous of the quality of love ordinary women may feel, she proceeds to emulate the ‘self’-destructive course her suicidal

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paramour has already taken. In following her ‘Roman’ lover’s botched lead uncritically, Cleopatra, though literally a queen, shows herself in the end no more than a woman “commanded / By a poor passion”—one that turns away from humanity (and, indeed, her own humanity as well) to death, a “poor passion” that proves a pitiful and mean passion, notwithstanding her show-stopping display of grandeur, bravery, and devotion. (Cf. Brower 326) 18. Citing the Neo-Platonic distinctions between the two Venuses, the one encompassing amore celeste and amore humano and the other, amore bestiale, Bono reminds us that in Book 4 of The Faerie Queen “a woman named Concord reconciles the opposed half-brothers, Love and Hate.” (177) 19. Mack 91–92 notes that the play is dominated by yearning and surfeit. 20. Thidias, the ‘feeder,’ “is a ‘Jack’ not only in the sense of a ‘low-bred servant’ but of a ‘stand-in,’ or, as the OED puts it, something ‘which in some way takes the place of a lad or man.’ He serves Antony as a whipping-boy for all those who have betrayed him—Caesar, Cleopatra, his men, and himself .” (Hapgood 11) Hillman insightfully adds that Antony’s having Thidias whipped and, in turn, his whipping Cleopatra verbally in this scene, are both “displacements of self-flagellation.” (445)

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Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. ———. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” and “The Tempest.” New York: Routledge, 1992. Alvis, John. “The Religion of Eros: A Re–Interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra.” Renascence 30(1978): 185–98. Baines, Barbara J. “Girard’s Doubles in Antony and Cleopatra.” In Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Nigel Wood, 9–39. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996. Bamber, Linda. “Antony and Cleopatra.” In Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1982; reprinted in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Harold Bloom, 109–35. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Barroll, J. Leeds. Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition, and Change in “Antony and Cleopatra.” Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984. ———. “Shakespeare and the Art of Character: A Study of Antony.” Shakespeare Studies 5(1969): 159–235. ———. “The Characterization of Octavius.” Shakespeare Studies 6(1970): 231–88. Battenhouse, Roy W. Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1969. Bayley, John. “Determined Things: The Case of the Caesars.” Shakespeare and Tragedy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; reprinted in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Harold Bloom, 93–107. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Berggren, Paula. “The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.” In The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Lenz,

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Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, 17–34. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Bono, Barbara. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Brower, Reuben. Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco–Roman Heroic Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Bushman, Mary Ann. “Representing Cleopatra.” In In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothy Kekler and Susan Baker, 36–49. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1991. Callaghan, Dympna. “Representing Cleopatra in the Post–Colonial Moment.” In Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Nigel Wood, 40–65. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996. Cantor, Paul. Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. Champion, Larry. Shakespeare’s Tragic Perspective. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Charnes, Linda. “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Antony and Cleopatra,” reprinted from Textual Practice 1(1992) in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. “Spies and Whispers: Exceeding Reputation in Antony and Cleopatra.” Chapter 3 in Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, 103–47. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Cheadle, Brian. “‘His Legs Bestrid the Ocean’ as a ‘Form of Life,’” in Drama and Philosophy, ed. James Redmond, 87–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cook, Carol. “The Fatal Cleopatra.” In Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, 241–67. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Danby, John. Poets on Fortune’s Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1966. Dash, Irene. “Union of Roles in Antony and Cleopatra. Part 3, Chap. 8 in Wooing, Wedding and Power: Women in Shakespeare’s Plays, 209–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Reprinted in Cleopatra, ed. Harold Bloom, 134–57. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Diehl, Huston. “Iconography and Characterization in English Tragedy, 1585–1642.” Comparative Drama 12(1978): 113–23. Dollimore, Jonathon. “Virtus under Erasure.” Part 3. Chapter 13 in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Reprinted in New Casebooks: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. John Drakakis, 248–61. London: Macmillan, 1994. Drakakis, John, ed. New Casebooks: “Antony and Cleopatra.” London: Macmillan, 1994.

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Felperin, Howard. Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. Fitz, L. T. “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 28(1977): 297–316. French, A. L. Shakespeare and His Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. French, Marilyn. Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. New York: Summit Books, 1981. Gajowski, Evelyn. The Art of Loving: Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Tradition in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Gilman, Ernest. The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Art in the 17th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Gohlke, Madelon. “‘I Wooed Thee With My Sword’: Shakespeare’s Tragic Paradigms.” In The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Green, and Carol Thomas Neely, 150–70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Goldman, Michael. Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Hamer, Mary. “Reading Antony and Cleopatra through Irigaray’s ‘Speculum.’” In Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Nigel Wood, 66–91. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996. Hapgood, R. “Hearing Shakespeare: Sound and Meaning in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Survey 24(1971): 1–12. Harris, Duncan. “‘Again for Cydnus’: The Dramaturgical Resolution of Antony and Cleopatra.” Studies in English Literature 17(1977): 219–31. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “‘Narcissus in Thy Face’: Roman Desire and the Difference It Fakes.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45(1994): 408–25. Hillman, Richard. “Antony, Hercules, and Cleopatra: ‘the bidding of the gods’ and ‘the subtlest maze of all.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 38(1987): 442–51. Homan, Sidney. “Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra.” Philological Quarterly 49(1970): 460–68. Hooks, Roberta. “Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: Power and Submission.” American Imago 44(1987): 37–49. Jacobson, Howard. “Antony and Cleopatra: Gentle Madame, No.” In Shakespeare’s Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families. W. Sanders and Howard Jacobson, 95–135. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Jankowski, Theodora. “Exercising the Body Politic: William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” Chapter 6 in Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Kalmey, Robert. “Shakespeare’s Octavius and Elizabethan Roman History.” Studies in English Literature 18(1978): 275–87. Kinney, Clare. “The Queen’s Two Bodies and the Divided Emperor: Some Problems of Identity in Antony and Cleopatra.” In The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, eds. Anne Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky, 177–86. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

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Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Mack, Maynard. “The Stillness and the Dance: Antony and Cleopatra.” Chapter 10 in Everybody’s Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Markels, Julian. The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Development. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Marsh, Derick. Passion Lends Them Power: A Study of Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1976. Marshall, Cynthia. “Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44(1993): 385–408. Neely, Carol. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Neill, Michael. “Finis coronat opus: The Monumental Ending of Antony and Cleopatra.” Chapter 9 in Issues of Death, Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Nevo, Ruth. Tragic Form in Shakespeare. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Ornstein, Robert. “The Ethic of the Imagination: Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra.” In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Mark Rose, 82–98. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977. Proser, Matthew. The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Rackin, Phyllis. “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature and the Golden World of Poetry.” PMLA 87(1972): 201–11. Roche, Thomas. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequence. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Antony and Cleopatra. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Shapiro, Stephen. “The Varying Shore of the World: Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra.” Modern Language Quarterly 27(1966): 18–32. Simmons, J. L. Shakespeare’s Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia, 1973. Singh, Jyotsna. “Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” Renaissance Drama 20(1989): 99–121. Reprinted in New Casebooks: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. John Drakakis. London: Macmillan, 1994. Smith, Gordon Ross. “The Melting of Authority in Antony and Cleopatra.” College Literature 1(1974): 1–18. Stilling, Roger. Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Traversi, Derek. An Approach to Shakespeare. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956. Reprinted in Discussions in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, ed. Maurice Charney. 235–61. Boston: Heath, 1964. Wilcher, Robert. “Antony and Cleopatra and Genre Criticism.” In Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Nigel Wood, 92–124. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996. Wilson, Harold. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto, 1957.

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Index

abiogenesis, 35–36 anamorphic perspectives, 16n3. See also figure/ground paintings Adelman, Janet, 17n9, 107n2 Aeschylus, 36 Alvis, John, 17n8, 18n13, 53n1, 54n1, 55n2, 58n18 Baines, Barbara, 55n3, 149n1, 150n7 Bamber, Linda, 83, 85, 111n33, 119, 127, 150n7 Barroll, J. Leeds, 16n5, 17n11, 21, 25, 26, 30, 53n1, 56n6, 56n8, 57n9, 57n15, 63 Battenhouse, Roy, 17n11, 55n3 Bayley, John, 17n9, 57n14 Berggren, Paula, 55n3 Bono, Barbara, 56n4, 111n33, 153n18 Booth, Stephen, 7, 16n2, 108n3 Bradley, A. C., 19, 26 Brower, Reuben, 10, 58n21, 109n16, 153n17 Bushman, Mary Ann, 50, 56n7, 150n7

Callaghan, Dymphna, 149n1 Cantor, Paul, 10, 18n18, 53n1, 54n1, 109n14 Champion, Larry, 55n2, 108n5 Charnes, Linda, 17n8, 18n17, 50–51, 52, 53n1, 56n7, 57n16, 58n18, 107n1, 110n21, 110n22, 149n1, 150n7, 151n12 Cheadle, Brian, 112n35 Cook, Carol, 117, 150n7 Danby, John, 10, 11, 17n12, 55n4, 56n5, 58n19 Dante, 12 Dash, Irene, 57n17 Diehl, Huston, 57n11 Dollimore, Jonathan, 17n10, 17n11, 53n1, 54n1, 151n11 Felperin, Howard, 17n7, 17n12, 108n9, 152n16 figure/ground paintings, 3 Fitz, L. T., 18n14, 112n34 Forster, E. M., 29

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Index

French, A. L., 57n17, 109n12 Frost, Robert, 15 Gajowski, Evelyn, 149n1 Gilman, Ernest, 16n3 Gohlke, Madelon, 112n33 Goldman, Michael, 109n15 Hamer, Mary, 149n1 Hapgood, R., 153n20 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 57n12, 88 Hillman, Richard, 153n20 Hooks, Roberta, 152n15 Jacobson, Howard, 57n16, 70, 111n30, 112n33, 150n5 James, William, 111n33 Jankowski, Theodora, 150n7 Kalmey, Robert, 57n13 Kierkegaard, Soren, 59 Kinney, Clare, 55n2, 55n3 Kittredge, G. L., 16n1 Loomba, Ania, 55n3, 149n1 Mack, Maynard, 153n19 Markels, Julian, 110n26, 110n28 Marsh, Derick, 54n1, 55n3, 57n15 Marshall, Cynthia, 109n18, 111n32, 150n7 Milton, John, 34 Mirror for Magistrates, 6 Neely, Carol, 55n4, 57n17, 58n20, 111n33 Neill, Michael, 110n23 Nevo, Ruth, 17n7, 18n16, 54n1, 140, 152n17 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36

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Oedipus, 75 Ornstein, Robert, 17n10, 18n16, 109n17, 109n19, 111n30, 151n10 Ovid, 68, 123 parable of the talents, 12 Paradise Lost, 92 Plutarch, 54n1, 56n7, 108n4, 109n13 Proser, Matthew, 140, 149n13, 151n12 Rackin, Phyllis, 149n4 Roche, Thomas, 16n4 Rosenberg, Marvin, 18n12 Shakespeare, William: Antony and Cleopatra: Antony: audience identification with, 72–84; as bipolar, 38–39, 60; as chronic deserter, 11, 60, 63, 66, 74–75, 78, 91–92, 94; contrasted to Octavia, 84–87; contrasted to Octavius, 37–40; and Enobarbus as double, 96–103; as eunuch, 89, 97, 107, 139; and Hercules/Deianeira archetype, 109n11; and Oedipus, 75; and Pompey as double, 70–72; selfdivision (civil war) within, 8, 11, 61–62, 65, 66–67; Caesar: as figure of Death, 22, 25; and motiveless malignity, 23, 25–26, 32; as singleminded imperial will. 34, 37, 48; as strange serpent, 21, 22–24, 34–36, 53, 59, 93, 95; Cleopatra: as colonized figure, 113, 139–41; contrasted to Milton’s Eve, 92; contrasted to the biblical Ruth, 92; as Deianeira figure, 123, 140; as Echo figure, 123–24, 128, 136; as femme fatale, 113, 123–24, 129; her

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Index •

love as grand illusion, 115, 120–21; and the interpellation of “Roman” values, 126, 128, 130, 132, 145–47; as parallel to Cressida, 134–35; and sexist dehumanization, 114, 125–26, 131–34, 138–42, 144, 149n1; Minor characters: Agrippa, 29, 46; Alexas, 22, 38; Charmian, 37, 69, 115–16, 124, 134, 149n4, 152n17; Dercetas, 57n10; Dolabella, 20, 51–52, 58n20, 63, 108n6; Enobarbus, 26, 30, 41–43, 45–46, 48, 59, 64, 67, 69, 74, 81, 86– 87, 96–103, 108n3, 110n25, 111n30, 128, 131–32, 138, 147, 150n5; Eros, 69, 74, 87, 90, 95, 99, 100, 103, 108n11, 112n34; Euphronius, 32; Fulvia, 30, 44, 59, 65, 79, 88, 97, 112n33, 131–32; Gnaeius Pompey, 122; Iras, 69, 152n17; Julius Caesar, 133; Labienus, 44, 103; Lepidus, 22, 24, 26, 31, 34–36, 42, 45, 48, 56n8, 89, 91, 95, 107; Maecenas, 26, 28–29, 43, 108n3; Mardian, 55n4, 103–04, 111n33, 147; Menas, 10, 42, 70–72; Octavia, 17n11, 22, 25, 40– 42, 46; Philo, 11, 52; Pompey, 10, 22, 29–32, 34, 40–44, 46–48, 56n8, 65; Proculeius, 62, 108n5, 151n14; Roman messenger, 43, 45; Scarus, 86; Seleucus, 141; Soothsayer, 37, 49, 59, 82, 84, 145; Thidias, 146, 153n20; Thyreus, 146; Ventidius, 80, 101, 118; Organizing dramatic tropes in the play: defectors in enemy camps who enjoy entertainment but no honorable trust, 68, 137, 141; flight from battles (in love and war) that might well yet have been won,

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14, 18n16, 18n18, 87, 103, 118, 120, 126, 129, 135, 137–38, 141–43; hunger that feeds on itself, 15, 26, 66, 80, 124, 131; narcissism/lust misidentified as love, 2, 4, 7–10, 12– 13, 16n4, 20, 57n12, 86, 92–93, 99– 100, 102, 104–6, 111n33, 112n34, 115, 118, 136; self-intoxication, 10, 34, 36, 68–71, 89, 95–96, 99, 101, 104–5, 107, 119, 123, 127, 137, 148; sting of the serpent that kills and pains not, 9, 13–15, 16n5, 19–20, 25–28, 30–31, 33, 37, 41, 51, 55n3, 59, 62–63, 69, 90, 97, 100, 117, 125, 127, 131, 142, 148; Coriolanus, 17n10,126; Hamlet, 15; King Lear, 149n2; Sonnet 1, 12, 14; Sonnet 2, 5; Sonnet 16, 16n4; Sonnet 64, 80–81; Sonnet 71, 5; Sonnet 73, 26; Sonnet 74, 5; Sonnet 76, 16n4; Sonnet 76, 16n4; Sonnet 103, 1, 5–8; Sonnet 135, 7; Sonnet 136, 7; Sonnet 143, 7, 83; Sonnet 144, 66, 68; Troilus and Cressida, 72, 84, 134, 148; Venus and Adonis, 7, 9, 13 Shapiro, Stephen, 16n6, 111n33 Shaw, Bernard, 18n4 Simmons, J.L., 151n9 Singh, Jyotsna, 150n7 Smith, Gordon Ross, 57n13, 150n6 Stilling, Roger, 108n10 Traversi, Derek, 152n17 Wilcher, Robert, 111n32, 111n33 Wilson, Harold, 56n5, 151n9 Yeats, W. B., 64

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About the Author

William F. Zak (PhD, University of Michigan) is emeritus professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland. Long fascinated by ancient Greek drama and Shakespeare, his previous work includes a study of King Lear entitled Sovereign Shame (1984), The Polis and the Divine Order: The Oresteia, Sophocles, and the Defense of Democracy (1995), and A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare’s Sonnets as Curious Perspective (Lexington Books, 2013). In addition to this present work, a study of Hamlet (Hamlet’s Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate) will also appear from Lexington in 2015.

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