4
Antony
Early seventeenth-century tragedies that express their concern with personal monarchy in gendered terms—those that insist on Elizabeth I’s reign as a context—often include virulent representations of sexually active and lubricious older men. The two plays that Steven Mullaney claims address the conundrum of Elizabeth’s aging body are cases in point. Both Hamlet (1600–1601) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) feature young men who vie with despised elders for the favors of a regal woman.1 That both premiered at the Globe would have underscored this shared pattern of cross-generational triangulation. In a repertory situation, an actor’s past roles shape reception of new ones, a phenomenon enhanced by the association of actors with certain types, like that of the aging lover or the revenger.2 Richard Burbage, who pioneered the role of Hamlet, likely appeared as Vindice, while Middleton’s “royal villain” (3.5.146) may have been played by John Lowin, the actor who had played Hamlet’s “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” (2.2.581) in 1603. Claudius poisons his older brother to gain access to Gertrude’s bed and to the throne of Denmark. By translating his sexual service to Gertrude into a crown, he lives out the darkest fantasies of Elizabethan England, succeeding where the Leicester of anticourt polemic had failed. Claudius’s analogue in The Revenger’s Tragedy is also a “royal lecher” of “silver years” with a penchant for poisoning, who presides over a court given over to “Dutch lust, fulsome lust” and “Drunken procreation” (1.1.1, 1.2.11, 1.3.56–57). Given that his topic is “the transgression of aging sexuality,” Mullaney’s focus on the female characters to the exclusion of these male representatives of “marrowless age” (Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.5) is a little strange.3 Neither Hamlet nor The Revenger’s Tragedy construes generational violations as the exclusive purview of female characters.4
On the contrary, Middleton premises his play on a savage contempt for superannuated male sexuality. If Hamlet sometimes shifts “contaminating agency from Claudius to the female body” of his queen, as Janet Adelman argues, The Revenger’s Tragedy identifies the aging male body as a primary source of cultural contamination.5 Middleton borrows from medical discourses that condemned “intemperate and riotous living” in older men, inviting us to share in a pervasive disgust with his “old, cool duke” who is “as slack in tongue as in performance” (1.2.74–75).6 Clutching the skull of his dead lover, Vindice vents in his opening soliloquy a murderous rage against this “dry” figure of “grey-haired adultery,” a “parched and juiceless luxur” with “spendthrift veins,” who has “scarce blood enough to live upon” but who nonetheless “riot[s] it like a son and heir” ( 1.1.8–11). One of several “exc’llent characters” drawn from court satire (1.1.5), the Duke indulges the excesses that medical authorities argued hastened aging. Immersed in “sensuall lustes and voluptuous appetites,” neither he nor Claudius manages “the pageaunte . . . of their age” according to socially approved protocols.7 Such “old men lustful,” Vindice maintains, relying on the conventional theatrical metaphor, “do show like young men, angry, eager, violent, / Outbid like their limited performances. / Oh, ‘ware an old man hot and vicious: / ‘Age, as in gold, in lust is covetous’” (1.1.34–37). From his abstract personification of “Age . . . in lust” to his biting references to role-playing and generational cross-dressing, the terms of Vindice’s denunciation are familiar: he confounds dramatic and sexual “performance” to express outrage with the categorical violations that the Duke commits. The Duke helpfully endorses Vindice’s judgment, describing himself as being in his “old days . . . a youth in lust,” and acknowledging “Age hot” to be “like a monster” (2.3.126–129).
By the simple expedient of naming the object of all that monstrous senescent lust Gloriana, after Elizabeth I’s public persona, Middleton teases out Hamlet’s latent political implications. According to Adelman, “the subjection of male to female” is “the buried fantasy of Hamlet.”8 While she reads this submerged fantasy in psychoanalytic terms, Middleton’s brilliant coup de théâtre emphasizes its historical, political, and cultural dimensions instead. The skull that Vindice brandishes functions simultaneously as a memento of Shakespeare’s haunted play and of the deceased queen, identifying one with the other. Historicist scholars have long linked Shakespeare’s masterpiece to the Elizabethan succession crisis, but Hamlet’s particular investments are sometimes hard to discern, because analogies between the Danish and the English court are woefully imprecise.9 Emboldened by Elizabeth’s death, Middleton evokes her court more directly than Shakespeare does. Where the sexually active Gertrude is an imperfect match for the Virgin Queen, for example, Gloriana’s “purer part” resisted the “palsy lust” of the Duke (1.1.33–34), like Lyly’s Cynthia stayed Endymion’s passion, or Elizabeth Leicester’s. By withholding Gloriana’s name until the climactic third act, Middleton makes the connection between memories of the queen and memories of Hamlet a retroactive one, inviting audiences to participate in a historically informed revision of the opening soliloquy and the old play it recalls. No wonder critics have found The Revenger’s Tragedy to be a “dramatized interpretation” of Hamlet’s “Elizabethan undertones.”10
The villainous old man in lust who plays a starring role in this interpretation epitomizes the deceased Gloriana’s troubling powers over her men. Blazoning his beloved in the Petrarchan tropes of the court, Vindice claims that even the “uprightest man” would break “custom” under the influence of her “two heaven-pointed diamonds” (1.1.19–24). Vindice also repurposes Hamlet’s favorite metaphor to describe how Gloriana made even “a usurer’s son / Melt all his patrimony in a kiss” (1.1.26–27). In keeping with such themes, The Revenger’s Tragedy depicts a world in which “place is governed by ambition” and sexual charisma “rather than the proprieties of due succession,” a world of “carnality and licentiousness” familiar from Elizabethan anticourt polemics.11 Like Cardinal Allen’s Elizabeth I, who reduced English noblemen to “effeminate dastardie,” Gloriana casts such a powerful spell over the nation’s sons that they lose masculine rigor and forgo patriarchal duty.12 Vindice acknowledges his complicity in this state of affairs, chiding himself “for doting on [Gloriana’s] beauty” (3.5.69–70). It takes him fully nine years to recover from the one he refers to ambiguously as his “poisoned love” (1.1.14).
By blending motifs of Hamlet with the topoi of anticourt polemics, The Revenger’s Tragedy exhumes the earlier play’s “buried” engagement with the Elizabethan court. True to the genre after which he is named, Middleton’s tainted protagonist struggles with putting that past behind him but ends up repeating it instead. Vindice’s revenge outdoes Hamlet’s in both the sharpness of its allegory and “the quaintness of [its] malice” (3.4.109). Where Gertrude is collateral damage in the earlier play’s finale, the “form that living shone so bright” (3.5.67) becomes the favored means of punishment in the later one, showcasing Vindice’s posthumous control over Gloriana’s maidenhead, and, by extension, Middleton’s over the queen’s.13 A potent Petrarchan relic, Gloriana’s “quaint piece of beauty” (3.5.54) retains enough charisma to lure the “slobbering Dutchman” (3.5.164) to his death. The Revenger’s Tragedy stages a macabre parody of Elizabethan courtship, in which the poisonous skull, dressed like “an old gentlewoman in a periwig,” puts the “old surfeiter” (3.5.113, 53–54) to sleep, permanently, with a kiss. For good measure, Vindice and his brother Hippolyto then assault this latter-day Endymion, while forcing him to watch his illegitimate son replace him in the arms of his duchess. Three different young men contribute to the extended “hell” endured by the “old Duke” (3.5.184, 208). Modern police procedurals would call this overkill. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s infernal scene of punishment—with its emphasis on cross-generational violations, its violent contempt for the “poor lecher” (3.5.158) at its center, and its grotesquely material caricature of Neoplatonic claims about the spirituality of kisses—clarifies that, like the anonymous writers of Leicester’s Commonwealth, Middleton was no fan of Gloriana’s aging court.
Although Vindice dies at the end of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Richard Burbage returned shortly thereafter to the Globe in yet another play about a judgmental young man and a dissipated older man. This time, however, Burbage played the “amorous surfeiter” (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.1.33) who fills his “vacancy with his voluptuousness” even though “the dryness of his bones / Call on him for’t” (1.4.26–28). Regular theatergoers must have wondered at the migration of the age-in-love role from the clown Will Kempe, who first played Bottom and Falstaff, to the burly player John Lowin, who had recently played Claudius and Falstaff, to the lead actor Richard Burbage, who played Antony (and had probably played Orsino).14 Burbage, who turned forty in 1607, was just entering the stage of life known as green old age. While he may have forfeited the role of Octavius because he gained weight as he aged, the casting of the company’s lead player in the role of Antony also signals a radical shift in perspective and values.15 As Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern note, the “heroic ‘type’” for which Burbage was known constitutes “an invitation to command the stage, and more often than not the audience’s sympathies.”16 Antony and Cleopatra pits generational opposites against one another, as Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy do. Deviating from established pattern, however, Shakespeare assigns the central male role to the aging lover, not the eager “young man” (3.11.62) who orchestrates this surfeiting elder’s “declining day” (5.1.38).
While historicist critics have long identified in Cleopatra a distorted reflection of Elizabeth I, they have little to say about Antony. Theodora Jankowski examines the political uses that Cleopatra makes of her sexuality and her theatricality, for example, but dismisses Antony as having “no talent for regal spectacle.”17 Arguing for “a perceived shift from Elizabethan magnificence to Jacobean ‘measure,’” Paul Yachnin reconstructs a seventeenth-century Antony and Cleopatra rich in topical meanings—all deriving from the confrontation between Cleopatra, a version of Elizabeth, and Octavius, a version of James.18 Katherine Eggert, too, finds a play constituted of “Cleopatran displays” and “Roman reactions,” in which Antony plays the passive role of a privileged “playgoer.”19 Like Claudius or Middleton’s old Duke, Antony is near invisible to critics interested in reconstructing the historical context of the play.20 Yet he shares top billing with Cleopatra, and the other characters speculate and gossip about him as much as they do about her. If we accept that the political resonances of Antony and Cleopatra “must mean something” in context, then Antony must have a part in this meaning-making process.21 Reading Antony in light of the Elizabethan tradition on lecherous old men, I show that his connection to the dead queen’s court is more encompassing than previously suspected. The “greatest soldier in the world,” Antony is also its “greatest liar” (1.3.38–39) and its greatest lover, a composite made out of Shakespeare’s favorite materials, and designed to recall other “scene[s] of courtship,” actual and theatrical.22 Through its male protagonist, Antony and Cleopatra puts into play a whole range of memories about Elizabeth and her favorite men, including the oft-repeated allegations that these provided her with sexual services.
As we have seen, the Elizabethan senex amans shared his affinity for the theater with Elizabeth’s courtiers, who, according to Ben Jonson, borrowed “play-particles” to woo the queen.23 Shakespeare makes this theatrical approach to courtship, evident also in Falstaff or Malvolio, a defining feature of Antony. Cleopatra highlights her lover’s theatrical agency, by directing him both seriously and mockingly in his scenes of “excellent dissembling” (1.3.78–79). Although she exerts control over these ad hoc performances, she also acknowledges her deep dependence on Antony’s sexual, military, and theatrical virtuosity—she needs his “inches” to show “there were a heart in Egypt” (1.3.39–40). Like Elizabeth I at Tilbury, whose legendary speech she here echoes, Cleopatra recognizes the gendered constraints that require her to use a male proxy, who can act in her stead. She wishes “as the president of [her] kingdom” to “appear there for a man” (3.7.16–17), but cannot do so without the “soldier, servant” who “makes peace or war” as she affects (1.3.70–71). Most scholars nowadays agree that Elizabeth assumed “the heart and stomach of a king” so as to outrank her men and that Cleopatra’s desire for a male body politic reflects this rhetorical strategy.24 Read in its entirety, the Tilbury speech also compensates for the perceived failings of the queen’s body natural by proposing a male substitute, Elizabeth’s “lieutenant general,” the Earl of Leicester. “Never” has a “prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject,” Elizabeth asserts, identifying their collaboration as an essential feature of her rule.25 Under patriarchal conditions, the “heart” of female rule can only manifest through such “noble” performances, although these may take the individuals involved to the “heart of loss” (4.12.29), because they violate normative standards of masculine behavior. While Antony and Cleopatra’s Roman characters sound like the antigovernment pamphleteers of the 1580s and 1590s in their strident denunciations of the protagonists, the play itself wonders if defect might not generate perfection, in the form of new and more expansive notions of masculine excellence.
The rest of this chapter focuses on Shakespeare’s remarkable final contribution to the theatrical “fashion” for “old man’s venery,” the great general who loves a queen whom “no other of nature can match or of art imitate,” like the Earl of Essex’s Elizabeth.26 During the Jacobean vogue for elegies of Elizabeth, Shakespeare was berated for offering no public comment on her death.27 A few years later, he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, a play that Eggert and Leonard Tennenhouse describe as an “elegy” in dramatic form.28 While Antony and Cleopatra does indeed celebrate “queenship with the full weight of nostalgia,” it distinguishes itself from other elegies by emphasizing the prospective aspects of this longing.29 A generic hybrid, which blends elegy and other modes, Antony and Cleopatra situates the utopian possibilities of queenship not just in the past, as I have argued Twelfth Night does, but also in the “new earth, new heaven” (1.1.17) of the future. It achieves this turn to the future by revising the overdetermined figure of the aging lover, normally used to satirize the “limited performances” of Elizabeth’s courtiers, into an unlikely model for masculine mimesis. Rather than being merely elegiac, Shakespeare’s approach to his male protagonist has the immediate force of a eulogy, a rhetorical genre with deep associations to Antony and his classical forebear, who both use Caesar’s funeral oration to reshape Rome’s political future. Antony and Cleopatra is characteristically Shakespearean in its interrogation of its own generic impulses; a play about a man famous for giving a eulogy, in which characters obsessively eulogize one another, it cautions against the emotions that make people “good, being gone” (1.2.126), even as it summons these emotions to redefine key historical figures from the recent and the classical past.
Plutarch’s Elizabethan translator, Sir Thomas North (yet another client of Leicester’s) urged his readers to turn to the Parallel Lives for the analogues that might help them achieve sound political judgments about the past.30 As its title indicates, this work pairs descriptions of Greek and Roman worthies to clarify their individual contributions and achievements. In his dedicatory letter to Elizabeth I, North extends these comparisons to contemporary English persons, asking the queen “who is fitter to revive the dead memorie of their fame, than she who beareth the lively image of their vertues?”31 While not specifying whose “dead memorie” and ancient virtues the “lively image” of Elizabeth revives, the prefatory materials present Plutarch’s biographies as a rich trove of political knowledge. The “Scholemistresse of Princes,” ancient “historie” is relevant to all those interested in “publike . . . affairs” and eager to achieve “judgement and knowledge,” regardless of rank. Inviting his readers to play the role of the prince, North emphasizes civic and political applications; in contrast to the “private” knowledge generated at “Universities,” the Parallel Lives produce the more “profitable” knowledge fit for “cities.” Plutarch’s “stories” should be valued for what we might anachronistically call their public-making potential—they “reach to all persons, serve for all tymes, teache the living, revive the dead.” Because they promote the ability to forge connections over time while imparting political competency, these “examples past” teach readers “to judge of things present & to foresee things to come.”32 Like the “fantasies of the past” that Svetlana Boym describes, North’s translation, “determined by needs of the present,” aims for “a direct impact on realities of the future.”33
Shakespeare took the invitation to profit from the Parallel Lives to heart. Plutarch’s Lives was one of the playwright’s favorite books, and “The Life of Marcus Antonius” was his favorite part of that book, providing source material for three different plays and numerous allusions. James Shapiro speculates that Shakespeare returned to Antonius late in his career “because he was discovering in it connections to new cultural preoccupations, or because he found himself identifying with the character of Antony.”34 At this stage in his life, the forty-four-year-old Shakespeare may indeed have identified with the aging Roman general rather than with his youthful opponent, the “scarce-bearded Caesar” (1.1.21), especially given Antonius’s proclivity for all things theatrical. Caesar’s favorite “passed away the time in hearing of foolish plays” (Plutarch, 183), surrounding himself with “tumblers, antic dancers, jugglers, players, jesters and drunkards” (195).35 Plutarch describes his subject as a real-life braggart soldier, moreover, famous for his “Asiatic” eloquence and “full of ostentation, foolish bravery, and vain ambition” (175). Like Antony, the mature Antonius played “many pretty youthful parts” to entertain the women in his life (185). Shakespeare presents Antony in more positive light than Plutarch does, by glossing over some unsavory aspects of Antonius’s career, like his responsibility in Pompey’s murder.36 Given this tendency to idealize the male protagonist, we might expect him to downplay Antonius’s histrionic tendencies, which consistently arouse Plutarch’s condemnation. Instead, Shakespeare magnifies them, making theatricality a defining feature of his Antony.
That Antonius sacrificed his reputation to this love of theater had become a commonplace by the time the playwright first took up the topic. Stephen Gosson illustrates the pitfalls awaiting playgoers by describing how “Antonius . . . gave him selfe daily to beholding Playes, for which he grewe into contempte among all his friendes,” for example.37 In Julius Caesar Brutus evinces the conventional contempt toward Antony, regarding his rival as no threat because he is “given / To sports, to wildness, and much company” (2.1.189–90). Brutus’s judgment is famously shortsighted, however, and the funeral scene shows Antony’s embrace of theater to have been neither vain nor foolish. Most critics would agree with Palfrey and Stern when they describe Antony’s eulogy of Caesar as “about the power of the theatre to move great assemblies.” Where Brutus appeals to reason in his funeral oration, Antony channels his audience’s grief to political purpose, in a superb display of Ciceronian eloquence. Although we might find in Antony’s “demonic Shakespearean charm” evidence of troubling demagoguery, Caesar casts a positive light on his favorite’s theatrics, basing his preference for Antony over Cassius on the fact that the latter “loves no plays / As thou dost, Antony” (1.2.203–4).38 Mocked by some, feared by others, Antony’s love of the theater is valued by his Roman superior, as it is later by the Egyptian queen, and by his English creator. To Shakespeare, Antonius was first a lover of plays, a man who patronizes theater by sponsoring it, attending it, performing in it, and applying its lessons to politics.
As he grew older, Shakespeare glimpsed in Antonius’s biography other resemblances that had escaped him at an earlier age. Plutarch presents Antonius’s love of Cleopatra, “the last and extremest mischief of all” (199), as an extension of the general’s lifelong enthusiasm for the theater; together, they fashion the queen’s identity as “a new Isis” (243) and indulge in “foolish sports” and “fond and childish pastimes,” including amorous role-play (206–7). Antonius is at once a theatrical artist and the lover of a queen, which explains why he and Cleopatra became identified with Elizabeth I and her men by the turn of the seventeenth century. The general’s willingness to play the lover to a self-styled moon goddess conformed to a pattern that Shakespeare had used throughout his career to think about the court. When he returned to “The Life of Marcus Antonius” life near the end of his own, this pattern came to dominate his presentation of the ancient Roman and his love for a mercurial queen.
While she was still alive, the Virgin Queen had welcomed the turn to the classics for a parallel that might bring into perspective her unorthodox reign. Besides assuming the guise of various classical goddesses, including Venus and Diana, the English queen also promoted an association with the historical Cleopatra, renowned as Elizabeth was for her “voice and words,” which “were marvelous pleasant; for her tongue was an instrument . . . which she easily turned to any language” (Plutarch 203).39 The Blessedness of Brytaine or a Celebration of the Queen’s Holyday (1588), a panegyric poem dedicated to the Earl of Essex and “published with Authoritie,” celebrates this quality in Elizabeth, praising her as
The Starre of Women Sex, Grave Wisdoms store:
Sententious, speaking Tongs in filed phraze,
Profoundly learnd, and perfect in eche Lore,
Her Fame, no Rav’ning Time shall ever Raze
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What should Nymphs, or Goddesses Recount?
Or Ægypt Queenes, or Roman Ladies name?
Sith as Supreme, our Sov’raigne dooth surmount.
In choise of Good, the cheefe of all those same?
For to compare the Great, with simple small,
Is thereby not to praise the Best at all.
All those “nymphs,” “Goddesses,” “Roman ladies” and “Ægypt Queenes” are citations, which help the author establish Elizabeth as comparatively “Supreme.” She “dooth surmount” previous embodiments of feminine excellence, just as Enobarbus claims Cleopatra overpictures “that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature” (2.2.200–201).40 Marguerite Tassi argues that Enobarbus’s famous description “directs his onstage and offstage auditors to imagine . . . a particular painting of Venus in association with Cleopatra”; like other comparisons in Antony and Cleopatra, this one also directs offstage audiences to remember Elizabeth, who cultivated a resemblance to both Venus and Cleopatra.41 In the wake of the Spanish Armada, The Blessedness of Brytayne proposes a specific way in which the English “Starre” eclipses her Egyptian forebear, namely through successful resistance to “cursed Circes” and “Fell Raging Rome.”42 There would be no defeat at Actium for Elizabeth.
The queen encouraged these flattering classical comparisons in other venues as well. At Greenwich, she displayed a bust of Julius Caesar, for example. The royal garden there also included a “tower,” located on “the Venus Hill,” containing tapestries on classical themes and inscribed with a Latin motto, translated by Thomas Platter as “‘When Antonius the eloquent was compelled by war to seek help of the queen, this inscription was made.’” The allusion is to the battle of Actium, but the inscription followed by the dates 1581 and 1585, suggesting a more proximate reference, when another general (Leicester?) had made a similar request for help to another queen.43 Like Cleopatra’s, Elizabeth’s iconography featured snakes, including the embroidered specimen displayed on the sleeve of her magnificent gown in the Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600–1602), where she appears as Cynthia, the “Queen of Love and Beauty.” Roy Strong argues that the snake, which holds a jeweled heart in its mouth, signifies judgment’s successful conquest of passion, another way perhaps that Elizabeth had bested her Egyptian analogue.44 Symbols of wisdom and immortality, snakes had long been associated with the moon goddess Isis, whose persona the historical Cleopatra had adopted, as her Shakespearean counterpart does, and as Elizabeth adopted that of the moon goddess Cynthia.45 Cleopatra’s suicide by asp, which cemented her claims to immortality and her identification with Isis, became a favorite topos of Western literary and historiographical descriptions after Plutarch. Another portrait of Elizabeth dating from the 1580s or 1590s and now housed at the National Portrait Gallery evokes this iconographic tradition more forcefully, by showing the queen grasping a snake with her hand. Although someone eventually painted flowers over the snake, the original recalls Plutarch’s description of “Cleopatra’s image, with an aspic biting of her arm” carried in Octavius Caesar’s triumph, the source for Shakespeare’s tableau of the dying Cleopatra (Plutarch, 293).
Fig. 6. Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1600–1602). By permission of Hatfield House Library and Archives, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England.
In both royal portraits, the snake conveys Elizabeth’s mastery over emblematic animals, a reading substantiated by a piece of fabric still in existence today, which once belonged to Elizabeth and may have come from the Rainbow Portrait’s gown.46 Embroidered with flowers and smaller animals, including birds, a frog, and a bear, the fabric evokes bowers “over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine,” places where “the snake throws her enamell’d skin” and Circean queens do favors to men transformed into “bear or wolf or bull” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.251–55, 180). The snake portraits offer a visual equivalent for the queen’s metamorphic powers over men, another quality Elizabeth shares with Plutarch’s queen of Egypt, and with Shakespeare’s “serpent of old Nile” (1.5.25). Indeed, those who compared Elizabeth to Circe borrowed a tactic of Octavian propaganda; Plutarch, too, makes his Cleopatra a Circe-like enchantress, who uses “charms and amorous poisons” to subject the “effeminate” Antonius to her every whim and plunge him in a “deep sleep” (249, 241, 208). If both queens were ranked among “the daughters of Circe,” it was because both were considered “charming and enchanting,” but not always “safe company” for men.47
Under such circumstances, Plutarch’s Antonius, “subject to a woman’s will” and no longer “master of himself” (248–50), became one of North’s examples from the past that “teacheth us to judge of things present.” Antonius’s character and the contours of his career lent themselves to parallels with a number of Elizabethan courtiers. Although nowadays we may not think about the great Roman general as a favorite, for example, Plutarch presents him as one, claiming Antonius became the “chiefest” man in Rome because he secured Caesar’s favor (182). His position as Caesar’s General of the Horsemen paralleled that of Leicester and Essex, who had both served as Master of the Horse before becoming Elizabeth’s generals.48 The Roman general’s vaunted eloquence, his status as an upstart, and his patronage of plays and players—all aligned him with specific Elizabethan favorites, including Leicester, who was scorned for surrounding himself with players, and Sir Walter Ralegh, who had seduced Elizabeth by the sole means of “a bold and plausible tongue.”49 Like Cleopatra, who had been romantically tied to three great soldiers, Elizabeth I “loved a soldier,” and “her prime favorites” all had “a touch or tincture of Mars in their inclination.”50 That Antonius was the “valiantest man and skillfullest soldier of all those that” Caesar “had about him” (Plutarch, 182) made him a natural point of comparison for Essex, whose biographer describes him as pathologically anxious to “preserve his own status as the indisputable colossus in English military affairs,” and for Leicester, Elizabeth’s general at Tilbury.51 Leicester’s detractors often associated him with classical figures noted for ambition, in fact, explaining that the earl did “tread upon his equales, thinkeinge with Pompie to have no equals nor yet with Cesar to have no rivals.”52 Like the ambitious Leicester, Antonius had inspired love and condemnation in equal measure, and became a favorite subject of gossip because he had devoted himself so absolutely to his queen that others believed “he was not his own man” (Plutarch, 258).
These numerous parallels go a long way in explaining the popularity enjoyed by the classical lovers in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Before Shakespeare took up their cause, Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra had already been the subject of several closet dramas, including Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594), revised early in James’s reign to emphasize the resemblance between Elizabeth and Cleopatra.53 Notably, Daniel dedicated the first edition of his play to Leicester’s niece, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.54 In the aftermath of Leicester’s death in 1588, the classical lovers appear to have held special appeal for members of the earl’s immediate circle. Mary Sidney translated the companion piece to Daniel’s play, Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), in 1590, and Philip Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville wrote a play on the same topic between 1595 and 1600. The Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie focuses on the plight of its hero, whose wife “movd’e [his] queen (ay me!) to jealousie,” who sacrificed his life and “honor” for that queen’s love, and who as a result became “scarse maister” of himself. A “slave” to Cleopatra, Antony describes himself in his final moments as breaking “from the enchanter that him strongly held,” and denounces his beloved in familiar terms, as a “Sorceres,” complete with “poisned cuppes.”55 The popularity of Mary Sidney’s translation—it was printed in 1592 and again in 1595—attests to a robust public appetite for her depiction of extreme masculine subjection. Shakespeare turned to it for help with fleshing out his Antony, who worries about the “poisoned hours” that “had bound me up / From mine own knowledge” (2.2.90–91), and finds that “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break” (1.2.117). When Shakespeare transforms Antonius’s story “into a narrative of male masochism” that challenges “conventional notions of heroism and masculinity inherent in the Classical tradition,” he was working with literary and historical precedent.56
Although we no longer have a copy of Greville’s Antonie and Cleopatra, Sidney’s friend left us the best evidence that the classical lovers functioned as an “example” of the queen’s transformative powers over men. A member of Leicester’s and Essex’s factions at court, Greville consigned his Antonie to the fire around the time of Essex’s fall, fearing that the “irregular passions” and “childish wantonesse” on display were “apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors, and government.”57 While scholars assume Antonie posed a problem because it predicted Essex’s disgrace, Greville describes his self-censoring act in a biographical sketch of Elizabeth I, which defends the queen more generally against the charge of favoritism, contrasting her practices in these matters to “the latitudes which some moderne Princes allow to their Favorites.”58 Echoing John Knox on the emasculating effect of female rulers, Greville absolves Elizabeth of the “tyranny” associated with favoritism, the “metamorphosing prospect” of which would “transforme her people into divers shapes of beasts, wherin they must lose freedome, goods, fortune, language, kinde all at once,” making them resemble “Circes guests.”59 More was at stake for Greville than the deceased queen’s reputation. His apotheosis of Sidney as a “true modell of Worth”—a “man fit for Conquest . . . or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest amongst men”—hinges on denying Elizabeth I’s “metamorphosing” powers over men.60 In addition, Greville had himself been a royal favorite, the one who had “the longest lease and the smoothest time without any rubs.”61 Like Hatton and, for most of his adulthood, Leicester, this self-proclaimed “Robin Goodfellow” had deviated from aristocratic norms by choosing the single life to serve the queen.62 Greville’s denials of tyrannous wrongdoing are thus on par with his suppression of his manuscript. By consigning his “Aegyptian, and Roman Tragedy” to a fiery “sepulture,” Greville obscured his own participation in the “irregular passions” at court, laying the groundwork for his revisionist history of an “unmatchable Queen and woman,” who, in contrast to Circe and Cleopatra, allowed her men to remain their own man.63
As we saw already in previous chapters, men in Greville’s circle had in fact granted Elizabeth the rhetorical power to “transforme” them into “into divers shapes of beasts” while she was alive. In one poem, she addresses Walter Ralegh as a “silly Pug,” a diminutive term of endearment “often applied to a plaything, as a doll or pet.”64 Elizabeth had similarly described Leicester as her “lapdog.”65 And she reportedly called the rebellious Essex an “ungovernable beast” who “must be stinted of his provender.”66 The queen’s men echoed her figurative language by combining animal and bondage metaphors to convey their submission; according to Hatton, Elizabeth I “did fishe for men’s souls, and had so sweet a baite, that no one coude escape hir network.”67 When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra contemplates baiting her “bended hook” and drawing up “tawny-finn’d fishes,” imagining each one “an Antony” (2.5.12–14), she recalls a court in which all men agreed to be the queen’s “fishes.” Even Sidney, Greville’s epitome of immutable manhood, reproduces equivalencies between successful courtiers and domesticated animals; in one self-referential sonnet, Stella’s “ambitious” bird, “brother Philip,” creeps into her “favour” by singing “love ditties,” while in another sonnet Astrophil imagines himself competing with a dog for Stella’s favors.68 Rather than being aberrant, the production of what Catherine Bates calls, in reference to Sidney’s lyrics, a “masculinity . . . not masterly but mastered” was a pervasive feature of court culture.69 Men displayed their submission to the queen frequently, publicly, and visibly. A shocked Platter reports that the great aristocrats at court even “play[ed] cards with the queen in kneeling posture.”70 The English treated Elizabeth “not only as their queen, but as their God,” according to Platter, and England seemed a veritable “woman’s paradise” where “the women have more liberty than in other lands, and know just how to make good use of it.”71
If Elizabethans felt compelled to retell Marcus Antonius’s story, it was because the Roman general provided a classical referent for extremes of masculine subjection, as did the gods Mars and Hercules with whom Plutarch associates Antonius. When the star-dazzled Astrophil compares himself to a “prancing” Mars (53.6), inspired by Stella to perform, he draws on a long tradition likening Elizabeth’s powers over her courtiers to Venus’s power over Mars. This tradition dates back at least as far as the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth, where the metamorphosed Deep Desire, a figure for Leicester, assured the queen that “Mars would be your man,” thereby inviting her to take the role of Venus.72 In Endymion, Cynthia mocks the doting Corsites, who “having lived so long in Mars his camp” is now “rocked in Venus’s cradle” (4.3.126–28). According to Adelman, “any woman who managed to disarm any man could be seen as reenacting” Venus’s “victory over the war god.”73 At the Elizabethan court, however, “what Venus did with Mars” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.18) became a shorthand for a male courtier’s metamorphosis by a queen, just as had been the case for Plutarch’s Antonius, and is the case for Shakespeare’s Antony.
Elizabeth I knew her rule hinged on her ability to elicit submissive performances from her powerful male courtiers. The Armada years had taught the queen “just how difficult it was for a woman ruler to assert control over the execution of policy in wartime,” for one thing.74 Isolated in her palaces, far from the scenes of military conflict, Elizabeth operated through male proxies, like Leicester or Ralegh, who fought the Spanish “in [her] stead” in 1588.75 Mary Nyquist finds in Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra as “an epistolary heroine” an attempt to relegate the Egyptian queen to the domestic sphere.76 Anyone who has read a biography of Elizabeth I knows, however, that in crises the queen resorted to a barrage of letters to ensure that her men enacted her will. According to Simon Adams, Leicester’s “‘often sending’ to her when away was expected.”77 Not all of her men responded well to such directives; Essex ignored Elizabeth’s letters, questioned her judgment, and sought to impose his own. When he developed a reputation for being “not rulable,” Francis Bacon advised Essex that instead of flying “the resemblance or imitation of my Lord of Leicester and my Lord Chancellor Hatton,” he should take them as “authors and patterns.” Although Bacon shared Essex’s misgivings about the elder favorites, he knew “no readier mean to make her Majesty think you are in your right way.”78 Years after Leicester and Hatton had died, the queen still considered them “patterns,” and still pressured younger men to act like them.
Elizabeth’s point of view may have more merit than Bacon acknowledges. Leicester, “a lover of stage plays and a notable patron of the theatre,” had orchestrated the speech to the troops at Tilbury, thus engendering the legend of “the Warrior Queen [Elizabeth] had never really been,” as John Guy puts it.79 Few acts of political theater have been more successful in earning a woman a place in history than that one. Although Leicester’s gamble paid off, it was a risky move; and a recurring question in late Elizabethan versions of the “Life of Marcus Antonius” is whether Antony “should . . . then to warre have ledd a Queene?”80 Nothing Leicester did was uncontroversial, of course, so his contemporaries often refused to allow that Elizabeth favored him with “desert or reason.”81 Male biographers have followed suit, categorizing the earl along with Hatton as “creatures entirely of her private preference rather than her political judgment.”82 In fact, Elizabeth’s preference for her elder favorites shows a canny sense of what constitutes masculine “desert” in a gynocracy. For several decades, Leicester and Hatton had helped Elizabeth appear as “president” of her kingdom. Leicester also helped her defeat “Fell Raging Rome,” as manifested in the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England. When Enobarbus tells Cleopatra that only Antony is at fault for the defeat at Actium, he may be crediting another general with victory for another battle at sea. In these matters, at least, the comparison to Antonius redounds to the Elizabethan general’s credit.
Shakespeare draws on all the theatrical resources at his disposal to strengthen the resemblances between long-dead classical figures and recently deceased Elizabethan ones in Antony and Cleopatra. Other scholars have detailed the ways in which Cleopatra’s behavior appears modeled on Elizabeth’s, from her bouts of bad temper to her treatment of rivals to her preference for transportation by barge.83 Cleopatra also shares Elizabeth’s “pose of sexual availability,” even if she delivers on that pose as Elizabeth never did; watching “Cleopatra sitting on her throne and decked in her royal robes and crown,” Eggert argues, “Shakespeare’s audience might recall their magnificent, if sexually ambiguous, former queen.”84 The gestures that Shakespeare assigns to his boy actor would have abetted this process of remembrance. The Virgin Queen was famously proud of her hands, telling the French Ambassador that “her hands were very long by nature and might, an nescis longas Regibus esse manus.” In a well-rehearsed bid for politically productive intimacy, Elizabeth removed her glove and showed de Maisse her hand, which “was formerly very beautiful, but it is now very thin, although the skin is still most fair.”85 When Cleopatra theatrically proffers her hand for Caesar’s messenger to kiss the “bluest veins,” specifying that this “a hand that kings / Have lipp’d, and trembled kissing” (2.5.29–30), she recalls another queen given to showing her hands as a sign of ancient sovereignty. Hands were associated in the period with agency and judgment, and, in such moments, Cleopatra insists on the primacy of her political identity. Her royal status is briefly eclipsed by Antony’s death, which makes her “No more than e’en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chares” (4.15.73–75). But even here Shakespeare ensures that we do not forget Cleopatra’s majesty by having her borrow a favorite analogy from Elizabeth, who repeatedly likened herself to a milkmaid to highlight the constraints that she operated under by virtue of her political role. A widely circulated anecdote held that when the queen was imprisoned by her sister, for example, she “often declared that nothing would give her greater happiness than to be a milkmaid like those whom she saw out on the field.”86
The visual, verbal, behavioral, and gestural correspondences between Elizabeth I and Cleopatra matter because, among other things, they attest to Shakespeare’s investment in his female protagonist as a ruler-figure. For most adults in the original audiences, who had been born during Elizabeth’s long reign, the queen had defined what it meant to be a monarch. Cleopatra’s performance prompts these spectators to remember that they have seen some majesty, and that they, like Antony, should know it again. Nearly fifty years ago, Kenneth Muir proposed that the resemblances between Cleopatra and Elizabeth I give the lie to Roman readings of Antony and Cleopatra, which value public duty over private desire, and treat the Egyptian queen as the unworthy and apolitical object of the Roman general’s lust.87 L. T. Fitz cautioned soon thereafter that this interpretative tradition, along with its counterpart celebrating the lovers’ “transcendental love,” was the product of sexist assumptions about the nature of women that made a “reasonable assessment of the character of Cleopatra” impossible.88 Yet modern readers persist in finding that “neither Romans nor Egyptians regard [Cleopatra] as a political figure, and she doesn’t take herself seriously either,” and that “Shakespeare is assuredly less interested in the politics that envelop Antony and Cleopatra than in their love.”89 These views are hard to reconcile with the evidence described above, and with the facts of the play, in which Cleopatra insists on her role as “Egypt,” and other characters, including Antony, consistently address her as queen.90 The modern interpretative traditions on Antony and Cleopatra may reflect the fact that, unlike Shakespeare’s original audience, we have no recent memories of female rule to draw on. When actors “play something like” the Elizabethan past for us (Hamlet, 2.2.595), we do not always recognize what Shakespeare asks us to recognize. Reading Shakespeare’s plays against other works from the period, like The Revenger’s Tragedy, can help in this regard. If Middleton’s Vindice poses the dead Gloriana in the posture of a whore, Shakespeare shows his “great fairy” like a political artist of infinite variety—immortal because she is not only changeable in herself but also the cause of enduring change in others.
Because Antony and Cleopatra so persistently evokes the Elizabethan past, I think it safe to assume, with Yachnin, that it must have meant something different to its original audiences. And I think that difference must have affected perceptions not just of the female protagonist, but also of the male protagonist, and of the relationship between the two. Trying to reconstruct those perceptions is valuable for a number of reasons, including the fact that it sheds light on our own prejudices. Notably, even those critics who view Cleopatra as a political operator tend to relegate her love for Antony to the private realm. So Jankowski finds that Cleopatra’s relationship with Antony causes her to “abandon her previous successful strategies for rule.”91 This tendency to separate the private and public aspects of the relationship imposes modern norms on a classical setting and an Elizabethan context. As they were for Elizabeth, collaborative relationships with men (including Caesar and Pompey) are among Cleopatra’s most “successful strategies for rule.” She rules through Antony. Cleopatra explicitly values her lover’s military prowess; “the demi-Atlas of the world,” he is to her “the arm / And burgonet of men” (1.5.23–24). His departure upsets her because it restricts her ability to enact her political will: “That Herod’s head / I’ll have,” she complains, “but how, when Antony is gone, / Through whom I might command it?” (3.3.4–6). And she reacts violently to criticism of Antony because it calls into question her “judgment” about his merits, an intolerable thing for a monarch (1.5.72–74). When this “wrangling queen” chooses to “to chide, to laugh, / To weep” (1.1.48–50) in an effort to control her lover’s behavior, she is not abdicating political authority. She is enacting it. That Cleopatra loves Antony, in addition to finding him useful, is arguably the source of her tragedy.
Although Antony and Cleopatra concerns the intersections of love and politics, private desire and public duty, it does not treat these as opposites. Rather, in its “mutual pair” (1.1.37), it recreates a queenly mode of publicity that blends the two, at considerable cost to the individuals involved. Egypt is as much a political realm as Rome, and the dramatic conflict involves two distinctive approaches to politics—one that is associated with the past, and makes room for individual emotion, and therefore women; and one that is associated with the present, and insists on relegating individual emotion, and therefore women, to the private realm. Writing about Cleopatra, Irene Dash suggests that women in power have “the unusual opportunity of combining sexual and political selves.”92 I would say, though, that female rulers in premodern societies were forced take this synthetic approach because of the misogynist assumption that women naturally privileged “will before reason.”93 The political is always personal for queens, to invert the old feminist saw, and any man who serves a queen perforce risks the accusation that he “make[s] his will / Lord of his reason” (3.13.3–4). Elizabeth had sound reasons for preferring men like Leicester and Hatton, who agreed to serve her faithfully to the detriment of their families and their reputations. Essex never could resign himself to those conditions. Yet, even though his resemblance to Antony consists of being “a great general in decline,” Essex is the royal favorite most frequently identified with Shakespeare’s hero.94 History and literary history alike have been far kinder to that troubled nobleman than they have been to his predecessors, a fact that I suspect Elizabeth would find infuriating, and that reflects continuing discomfort with men like Leicester or Antonius, whose subjection to a woman makes them no longer master of themselves. At least some of Elizabeth’s contemporaries recognized that the queen had “wisely judged of [Leicester’s] vertues, and worthily rewarded his loialtie and paines.”95 When we fail to recognize what is at stake in Elizabeth’s preferences for such men, we allow ourselves to be blinded by rationalist biases inherent in the bourgeois public sphere, which requires that private emotion be bracketed off, and which has therefore problematized all forms of feminine participation in politics since the seventeenth century.96 It is no coincidence that these criteria for political participation were first developed in response to the particulars of Elizabeth I’s reign, by men “anxious to control and prime popular opinion and report” on matters like their ruler’s marriage and succession.97
Near the end of his career, Shakespeare set about revising Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Antonius” to alter negative perceptions of female rule that he had helped to perpetuate, with increasing qualms and misgivings, in earlier plays. Strategically, he counters impressions of queenship generated by “the common liar” (1.1.60) not by rejecting the old patterns associated with the age-in-love trope, but by staging them again, shifting the generic register this time to the tragic mode. Antony and Cleopatra forces audiences to reexperience old “play-particles” by endowing them with new emotional resonance. Using his actors as “medium[s] for raising the dead,” Shakespeare engages in a layered act of “surrogation,” replacing unsatisfactory substitutes for historical figures, like Bottom and Titania, or Falstaff and Hal, with alternatives in the form of Antony and Cleopatra.98 As we have seen, although Shakespeare’s earlier age-in-love figures provoke judgments that enforce patriarchal norms of behavior, many also elicit affective responses that temper those judgments. Even Claudius gets the opportunity to court audience sympathies in his soliloquy (Middleton never grants his Duke the same privilege). As a group, these lecherous old men attest to Shakespeare’s desire for a “public life” that blends “strong feelings with rational debate and collective judgment.”99 With Falstaff or Malvolio, the need for “collective judgment,” in the form of a baiting or a banishment, eventually subordinates those strong feelings. Such is not the case with Antony, whose ability to arouse passion and affection in others unsettles all attempts at stable judgment.
If Antony’s “great fairy” channels the historical Elizabeth I, she also recalls the many fairy queens who had stood in for Elizabeth over the years, including Lyly’s moon goddess, Middleton’s Gloriana (the name “Cleopatra” means “glory of the fatherland”), and Shakespeare’s own Titania. Like these precursors, Cleopatra takes the “fleeting moon” as her planet (5.2.240), and exerts a powerful spell over the men in her vicinity. Shakespeare highlights her advanced age, moreover, thereby forging tight connections with previous works critical of the Elizabethan court. While the historical Cleopatra was thirty-eight at the time of her death, just at the cusp of green old age, Shakespeare’s wrinkled queen often appears much older. The frequent mentions of her ancient lineage endow Cleopatra with an “aura of age,” according to Adelman, and in the two protagonists—as in the subplots of Endymion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Twelfth Night—“the folly of love is explicitly associated with the folly of old age.”100 Onstage observers are often disturbed by the ways in which the “charms of love” survive Cleopatra’s “wan’d lip,” taking this as evidence that in the Queen of Egypt “witchcraft” has joined “with beauty” (2.1.21–23). As it did for the Catholic polemicists who raged against Elizabeth, that age cannot wither Cleopatra confirms her unnatural powers over men.
In Plutarch’s Marcus Antonius, Shakespeare found rich material for his revision of the aging lover. Antonius was at the time of his death around fifty-six years of age, roughly of an age with Falstaff, and equally given over to “riot and excess.” The Roman general spent a lifetime indulging in the “banquets and drunken feasts” that physicians thought would cause some to “become old men” at “fortie.”101 Shakespeare’s Antony calls attention to his advanced age on a number occasions, as when he sarcastically proposes that Cleopatra “To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head” (3.13.17). He shares with his historical counterpart and other senescent stage surfeiters a taste for wine, a tendency to play the lover, and a desire to hear the chimes at midnight.102 Like Falstaff, Claudius and Middleton’s Duke, Antony is subject to the onstage judgments of abstemious youths because he “drinks, and wastes / The lamps of night in revels” (1.4.4–5). That last metaphor, recalling as it does Cicero’s injunctions against carnal “surfette,” in which he compares the aging body to “a Lampe, if to muche oyle bee infused into it, burnethe not brightly,” shows just how significant age is to a consideration of Antony’s character.103 In love with a queen who is “wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.29), this monumental Roman—“Here’s sport indeed! how heavy weighs my lord” (4.15.32), Cleopatra complains—is rooted so deeply in Elizabethan stage satire that he at times recalls Lyly’s preposterous Sir Tophas, the fat knight who loves old wines and old matrons. Both are characteristically Elizabethan hybrids of the miles gloriosus and the senex amans, the two types evoked at the opening of the play, when Philo describes his captain bursting out of Roman armor to be “transform’d / Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.12–13). Taking his cue from his precursors, Antony ends the play as Endymion, Tophas, Bottom, Falstaff, and Middleton’s Duke do, yet one more superannuated lover laid out prone on stage before his queen.
The multiple patterns that link Antony to his stage predecessors may have eluded critics thus far because Antony and Cleopatra takes a fundamentally different attitude than earlier plays toward older men who break rules and have not “kept [the] square” (2.3.5–6). A generic hybrid, “shap’d” only “like itself” (2.7.42), it transforms comic and satiric tropes to show a figure normally painted as a gorgon who comes to resemble a god instead.104 Omissions can be as telling as repetitions in this regard; although Antony seems like a “doting mallard” (3.10.19) at times, he is never called an ass (Caesar is). The bearbaiting trope, a device for courting contempt in previous plays, appears only as a ghostly trace, in the lovely image of Antony surrounded by “hearts / that spannell’d [him] at heels” (4.12.20–21). Antony’s claims to being like Mars register differently than Tophas’s claims to being “all Mars and Ars” (Endymion, 1.3.96), because Shakespeare avails himself of the historical Antonius’s identification with Hercules to remind us that some braggarts make good their claims. As Janet Adelman puts it in what is still the best reading of the play, the “miles gloriosus and hero are two sides of the same coin.”105 Shakespeare also elevates the derided figure of the old man in lust by endowing Antony with select touches of Endymion. The lover of Egypt’s “eastern star” has his thoughts “stitched to the stars” and “higher” (Endymion, 1.1.5–7), like Lyly’s moon-lover. Far from requiring the Neoplatonic sublimation celebrated in Endymion, however, Antony’s transcendence has carnal and even Bacchanalian dimensions. I argued in the previous chapter that Twelfth Night gives us fragments of the age-in-love figure to counter the attacks of the satiric “substractors” who hounded the Elizabethan court. Antony and Cleopatra goes further still, reassembling these fragments “by Isis” to arrive at the “well-divided disposition” of its paragonal “man of men” (1.5.53, 71–73), a new Osiris.106
The changes that Shakespeare makes to his source encourage audiences to help in this process of reassembly by remembering certain key figures. Shapiro, who acknowledges that Antony and Cleopatra is a political play, nonetheless holds to the position that it contains no “reductive and dangerous one-to-one correspondences between ancient and modern figures.”107 Although there is nothing reductive about him, Antony is nonetheless a composite designed to produce a series of connections between “ancient and modern,” real and virtual figures. Plutarch’s virile Antonius had “seven children by three wives” (294), but Antony claims that he has “forborne the getting of a lawful race” for Cleopatra (3.13.107), for example. When he rates his love for Cleopatra over the generative obligations of the aristocratic male, Antony evokes not just his classical forebear, but also courtiers like Greville or Hatton who chose the single life to serve Elizabeth, and characters like Endymion, who chooses the “solitary life” to devote himself to Cynthia.108 As might be expected, Antony and Cleopatra reproduces the transfiguration metaphors that characterized critical and panegyric discourses about Elizabeth’s relationship to her men. Yet another “old ruffian” (4.2.4), Antony has all the traditional traits of Circe’s victims: effeminacy, beastliness, drunkenness, and sleepiness.109 From the first, the Romans portray Cleopatra as a witchlike figure whose charms have brought this “triple pillar of the world” (1.1.12) down. The pillar was a commonplace of Elizabethan political discourses; Leicester was at once “the chef[est] pillar” on which Elizabeth “wholy relies and puts all hir truste,” for example, and “the only handsaw that shall hew the maine p[illars]and postes. . . . a sunder and ruinate all of this noble land.”110 One need not be a Freudian critic to see that this vision of fallen “pillars” and “postes” trades in anxieties about national castration, made explicit in works like Allen’s pamphlet, News from Heaven and Hell, or Leicester’s Commonwealth, and manifest also in the way Shakespeare’s Romans react to Antony. Without the hard pillar-like property that defines him, Antony becomes in Caesar’s estimation “not more manlike / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (1.4.5–7). Such sentiments echo those who condemned men like Leicester for serving Elizabeth’s “filthy lust.”111
Although Antony inspires the contempt reserved for surfeiting older men, he also excels at undermining the contempt he inspires, and transforming it into a paradoxical form of admiration. Like The Revenger’s Tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra opens on the spectacle of an aristocratic older man who has succumbed to erotic impulses. When Philo complains about his general’s “dotage” (1.1.1), he chooses a word that conflates senility and infatuation, used in the period to condemn amorous old men.112 Cicero’s English translator explained, for example, that “libidinous volupte” is a quality “founde in younge men” but when “this folishnes . . . entangleth and captivateth the senses of old men,” and these “keep not them selves within the limittes of reason” it “is commonly called Dotage.”113 As we have seen, Elizabethan playwrights relied on such views of superannuated sexuality to provoke the “wonderfull laughter” of the “commen people.”114 Following conventional wisdom on senescent sexuality, Philo argues that Antony’s passion “O’erflows the measure” (1.1.2). His indictment borrows from the same vocabulary and the same assumptions as Vindice’s indictment of the Duke (or Maria’s indictment of Malvolio, or Hamlet’s indictment of Claudius, for that matter); as always, the recourse to generational criteria of judgment has a leveling effect, enabling an inferior’s critical attack on a superior guilty of breaching social decorum. Convinced that his view is rational and therefore accurate, Philo instructs all present to “take but good note” and “see” for themselves (1.1.11–13), inducting the audience into the processes of evaluation thus initiated.115
But here the similarities between Middleton’s opening scene and Shakespeare’s end. Vindice delivers his assessment of “grey-haired adultery” in a soliloquy, an appropriate choice for a play that solicits agreement for age-related behavioral norms, in which even the elderly lover finds “age hot” to be “monstrous.” In contrast, Philo responds to Demetrius, who must have offered a more positive reading of Antony’s behavior, since it prompts Philo’s contradiction (“Nay, but” [1.1.1]). Demetrius’s disagreement haunts the conversation, undermining the views Philo expresses, and destabilizing a set reaction to Antony’s spectacular shattering of norms. Although Antony may be under the “wonderfull thralldom” of a Circean sorceress, I doubt Philo’s monologue provokes “wonderfull laughter” in audiences. For one thing, Philo feels more conflicted than he acknowledges, since his speech borrows not just from the discourses that condemned aging sexuality, as Vindice’s soliloquy does, but also from the heroic conventions of the epic, as Vindice’s does not. The image of Antony’s “great captain’s heart” bursting out of his buckled armor (1.1.8) is especially ambiguous, since the heart connotes both passion and courage, qualities Antony has in spades, and the Roman armor comes then to stand for rigid, perhaps undesirable, and certainly ineffective constraints on these qualities. It is hard to know which of the two qualities makes Antony more godlike: his capacity for passion or his superhuman courage. The difficulty is compounded by Philo’s allusion to Mars, by Mars’s dual status as god of war and Venus’s lover, and by the licentious behavior of these classical gods. This confusion is prologue to the play that follows, in which Shakespeare takes materials with a long history of eliciting contempt and magically transforms them into a character who eludes categorization and judgment. Although Shakespeare assembles his Protean hero out of a familiar “mixture and shreds of forms,” Antony never becomes “truly deformed,” as Ben Jonson’s Amorphus does.116 His “dotage” may overflow the measure, but it makes him something other than a monster.
An emasculating passion that disregards social, political, and cultural prohibitions at great personal cost might even require a superhuman form of courage. Antony is vulnerable to the Roman discourses that seek to regulate his sexual behavior; at times, he reproves his own “white hairs” for “doting” (3.11.13–15), and becomes “unqualitied with very shame” (3.11.44) because of his relationship to Cleopatra. He repeatedly overcomes these mechanisms of sociocultural control, however, including his sexless marriage with Octavia, to return again to his “Egyptian dish” (2.6.126). Although Antony knows he should “from this enchanting queen break off,” he elects to lose himself “in dotage” (1.2.128, 114), embracing the behavior rejected by Lyly’s Endymion, who avoids “a dotage no less miserable than monstrous” (Endymion, 1.1.30). According to Ovid, a major influence in this play as in the others I have examined, passions like Antony’s have the power to turns lovers into beasts or gods. Where Endymion, Hamlet, or The Revenger’s Tragedy consider only the former possibility, Antony and Cleopatra considers the latter, too. When Antony comes on stage promising to exceed all limits in his search for “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17), we see something more than the familiar “strumpet’s fool” (1.1.13)—we see Burbage and not Kempe, for one thing—and the expectations that we brought into the theater about “age in love” are shattered accordingly.117
The explosive combination of traits contained in Burbage-playing-Antony troubles conventional thinking about masculine merit throughout the play, in a way that engages onstage audiences in debate. As we have seen already in the case of Falstaff, elderly rule-breakers have a stimulating effect on other people’s evaluative powers. The “desire to judge . . . correctly”—the same desire that North attributes to his readers—is among the “dominant passions” of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is one endowed with distinctly political and historiographical dimensions.118 In their efforts to come to terms with Antony, other characters habitually compare him to past or mythic figures; although Cleopatra threatens Charmian with “bloody teeth” for contrasting her “man of men” to Caesar (1.5.70–73), she finds later that “In praising Antony I have disprais’d Caesar” (2.5.107). Octavius, careful not to compare his rival with other worthies, measures Antony against a past version of himself. The young Antony was the very pattern of immutable manhood—his “cheek / So much as lank’d not” (1.4.70–71) under the most severe hardship. Through such comparisons, characters model the retrospective behaviors that North assured his readers “teacheth us to judge of things present.” While these frequent comparisons imply that Antony is exemplary, onstage observers disagree about what to make of that example, a situation exacerbated by the opacity of the protagonists’ motivations and their common status as the subject of incessant rumors.
In the endless chatter about the titular characters, Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes the specific desire to judge those who are “in the public eye” (3.6.12). Shapiro points out that Antony is “so habituated to being observed”—and talked about—“that he expects this will hold true even in the afterlife.”119 Much of this talk testifies to the “aspiring minde” of the talkers, as one defense of Leicester put it.120 Inferiors by virtue of class, age, or military ability, the other male characters spread the “perception of [Antony’s] sexual subjection” in an effort to attain “parity” with the famous general, who, as the sole survivor of Rome’s heroic past, is “the pine . . . that overtopp’d them all” (4.12.24–25).121 All this amplifies a pattern found in Plutarch, whose Herculean Antonius also violates expectation, and is therefore also the subject of malicious report and gossip, including the “rumour in the people’s mouths that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia” (201–2). The numerous messengers charged with bringing “good news” (1.3.19), “bad news” (2.5.86), “strange news” (3.5.2), and even “stiff news” (1.2.100) report on Antony’s Egyptian behavior to the Romans and his Roman behavior to Cleopatra.122 Even Enobarbus, Antony’s closest companion, sounds like a reporter, offering a play-by-play analysis of his master’s behavior—“He will to his Egyptian dish again” (2.6.126); “’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp / Than with an old one dying” (3.13.93–94); “Yes, like enough! high-battled Caesar will / Unstate his happiness, and be stag’d to th’ show, / Against a sworder!” (3.13.29–31).Through frequent metatheatrical devices, like Enobarbus’s asides, or Philo’s opening instructions, Shakespeare “deliberately” draws his audiences “into the act of judging,” turning us into “the characters who stand aside and comment.”123 As we formulate comparative judgments about the male protagonist, we become conscious of our own participation in retrospective processes of evaluation.
Designed to encourage comparisons with the past, Antony’s character raises problems of assessment specifically for those who think in conventional ways about surfeiting older men. Pompey, who recognizes that Antony’s “soldiership / Is twice” that of Octavius and Lepidus, nonetheless dismisses the “ne’er lust-wearied Antony” as an “amorous surfeiter” (1.5.32–38), deeming him incapable of quick action. Antony’s efficient military campaign shows Pompey’s judgment of his great rival to be as faulty as Brutus’s was in the earlier play. Jacobean audiences must have shared in Pompey’s surprise, since they shared in his prejudices about the effects of lust on older men, having long feasted on contemptuous depictions of old lechers. Sir Tophas, Falstaff, Claudius, Middleton’s Duke—all provoke derisive laughter, on- or offstage, for abandoning themselves to “surfette.”124 But “almost nothing” in Antony and Cleopatra is “easy to judge,” the hero least of all.125 Plutarch is baffled that Antonius, having “committed the greatest faults,” manages to secure such “wonderful love” from others (178–81). Shakespeare presents these apparently contradictory traits as integral to one another, allowing his actor to arouse the tragic emotions of empathy and admiration that help audiences overcome preexisting judgments. Antony commands allegiance and affection not despite his sensual surfeit or his love of the theater (which the audience presumably shares), but because of them. These are consistent features of his allegedly inconsistent character, fully realized in his love for a shape-shifting queen. A man willing to give himself up to “sport,” “soft hours,” and constant “pleasures” (1.1.45–47) at the risk of his reputation must needs register differently to theatrical artists, themselves purveyors of lowly pleasures, than to a classical historian. By the same token, those playgoers who respond with pleasure to the actor’s performance of Antony can only condemn the character’s embrace of “soft hours” and “sport” by condemning it in themselves.126
Antony is most vital when indulging the behaviors that hasten aging and death; to paraphrase Eugene Waith, he is most himself when giving himself away.127 This paradox enables Shakespeare to retain Antonius’s well-established reputation for surfeit, while changing perceptions of such behavior. Consider 2.7, a scene in which all the major characters are thoroughly inebriated. This state of general intoxication has the odd effect of bracketing off moralistic and rational judgments about drunkenness, “that beggarly damnation,” deemed the “worst of all the deadly sins” by Middleton’s vengeful brethren (4.2.182–83). Left without the crutch of conventional thinking, we have to adjudicate a contest that I, for one, think Antony handily wins. Where Lepidus slurs his words, and Octavius’s slippery “tongue / Spleets what it speaks” (2.7.123–24), Antony becomes more articulate and expansive under the influence. The reluctant Caesar finds drunkenness “monstrous labor” (2.7.99); in contrast, Antony’s embrace of “the conquering wine” that “hath steep’d our sense / In soft and delicate Lethe” has positively ecstatic dimensions. In Caesar’s telling phrase, “the wild disguise hath almost / Antick’d” all, with the ironic exception of the oldest man on stage, whose bounty is replenished rather than depleted by wine. Although we might laugh with Antony in this scene, we never laugh at him, as we do at the other drunken men onstage, or at all the other lubricious old men who haunt this play. Indeed, Antony’s ability to surpass others in “Egyptian bacchanals” compares favorably to that of the “monarch of the vine,” “Plumpy Bacchus” (2.7.104–25). According to Leonard Barkan, this “quintessentially metamorphic divinity,” associated with “extremes of emotion,” “half-prophetic and half-destructive madness,” and “the ascendancy of the female principle,” is a god of “a nonrational and ecstatic sort”—an appropriate counterpart to a man who makes his “will / Lord of his reason.”128 In contrast to his precursors, whose emasculation by Circean queens made them like the unfortunate Actaeon (see previous chapters), Antony appears here like a god, the one celebrated for his fertility, his ability to regenerate, his love of women, and his affinity with the theater (according to Gosson, “Playes were consecrated unto Bacchus for the firste findinge out of wine”).129 Cleopatra’s lover shares a propensity for “belly cheer” and a tendency to drink “like the god Backus out of his cuppes” with all the old men described in this book, including Falstaff and the Leicester of anticourt polemic.130 Strikingly, however, in Antony such behavior strives to make itself “fair and admired” (1.1.51).
Characters in Antony and Cleopatra agree on very few things. One of them is that Antony is notable: “note him, / Note him, good Charmian, ‘tis the man, but note him” (1.5.54). A constellation of linked words—“news,” “report,” “reporter,” “fame,” “note”—make Antony a celebrity, the embodiment of “the character traits most revered” and most feared by his community.131 Like his classical forebear, or Hercules and Mars, Antony signifies supreme masculine prowess—“there appeared such a manly look in his countenance as is commonly seen in Hercules’ pictures,” Plutarch writes about Antonius (177)—and the willing subjugation of that prowess to a woman’s pleasure. Patriarchal societies legitimate themselves by reference to men’s physical superiority to women, a principle that Antony, as the “the pine . . . that overtopp’d them all” embodies and should enforce. When this self-proclaimed “man of steel” (4.4.33) bends and kneels to a queen instead, he relinquishes his place of privilege, affirming her power at the expense of normative gender structures. The oldest and the highest-ranking man in Rome now “comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony” (1.1.58–59). Like the complaints about his desertion, the fallen pillar imagery indicates how profoundly Antony’s surrender to Cleopatra shakes the structural foundation of his society. By turning his broad back on gerontocratic Rome, and electing to let “the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall” (1.1.33–34), Antony threatens to undo the ideological basis of Western patriarchy. Predictably enough, he becomes, like the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester, “the subject of all pleasant discourses at this day throughout the realm.”132
Antony’s ability to unsettle norms and set tongues a-wagging worries Caesar, who finds his rival dangerous precisely because he is “th’abstract of all faults / That all men follow” (1.4.9–10). While Caesar could mean that Antony concentrates in himself all men’s faults, according to the OED, “abstract” here also means “a perfect embodiment of a particularly quality or type.”133 A perfect embodiment of faults makes those faults perfect, causing “all men to follow” him. The phrase captures Shakespeare’s strategy in Antony and Cleopatra, which is to endow Antony with the most derided faults only to make these faults overwhelmingly attractive. Lepidus confirms the subversive effect of Antony’s charm when he describes his rival’s faults as like “the spots of heaven,” made “more fiery by night’s blackness” (1.4.12–13). The “night’s blackness” stands for the ostensible subject of his praise, Antony’s “goodness” (1.4.11). But the image reverses representational norms by stellifying Antony for his faults. Intentionally or not, Lepidus revises Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the “Romane Capteynes wyfe, the Queen of Aegypt” and her lover are dismissed in favor of the traditional male heroes Aeneas and Caesar, who are lifted “among the starres that glister bright.”134 The early modern tendency to describe political, heroic, or erotic ideals as stars derives from this passage, and conveys the power that some individuals have to guide and inspire others, as the English “Starre” guides the English, and Stella inspires Astrophil. An amplification of Plutarch’s Antonius, Shakespeare’s fallen “star” (4.14.106) is “even more astonishing in his ability to inspire others to outdo themselves.” Not only does Shakespeare “exalt” Antony for this “talent,” so do rival characters, who cannot criticize Antony without also paying tribute to him.135 What is so worrisome about Antony from the Roman point of view, then, is not just that he commits faults but that his commitment of those faults makes them attractive and exemplary, confounding conventional wisdom and setting new “patterns” for others to emulate, to borrow Bacon’s locution. Antony is an “example” from the past that “we may knowe what to like of, & what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschew,” all at once. No wonder the Caesars of this world feel threatened.
The idea of Antony as an “abstract . . . that all men follow” recalls Hamlet’s description of players as the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524–26), while endowing Antony’s performances with an idealizing force. Antony does not just represent certain past behaviors—like that of Antonius or of Elizabeth’s favorites—but he also models future behaviors (including that of the actors who will play him in years to come). After Antony dies, Caesar’s henchmen recognize that a “rarer spirit never / Did steer humanity” (5.1.31–32). In another echo of Hamlet’s concern with theatrical personation, Agrippa then likens the deceased Antony to a “spacious mirror” in which a diminished Caesar “must needs see himself” (5.1.34). Raised again for each performance, the fallen Antony continues even now to reduce Octavius Caesar to a mere “boy,” a trick that Shakespeare manages by deploying generational against gendered categories. Men who violate generational decorum lose their privileged gender status in earlier plays, becoming foolish asses, or impotent “old boys.” In contrast, Antony is never anything other than a fully-grown man, an old lion who retains the ability to transform other men into whelps, even after he is dead.136 The phallic puns that attend Antony’s demise absolve him of impotence, promising a rich harvest of virtuoso performances. When Cleopatra bids Antony “O, come, come, come” and “welcome, welcome” (4.15.37–38), we are left in little doubt about his renewable talent for dying. “Age in love” comes to be associated as a result not with diminished but with enhanced masculine capacity; at play’s end, the fallen pillar becomes the “soldier’s pole,” making all other men appear like boys and girls. “Though grey / Do sometimes mingle with our younger brown,” an undaunted Antony tells Cleopatra, rejecting all conventional wisdom on the subject, “yet ha’ we / A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can / Get goal for goal of youth” (4.8.19–22). Under such conditions, achieving masculine excellence involves becoming more like Antony.
Seizing on Marcus Antonius’s uncanny ability to render “things that seem intolerable in other men” attractive (Plutarch, 177), Shakespeare makes Antony simultaneously a subjected male and aspirational model, thus upending the values that the Circe myth normally enforces. Like all the other aging male characters who populated the Renaissance stage, Antony endures “a metamorphosis and change” under female rule like “the companyons of Ulisses.”137 But where the myth endows the female enchantress with agency, representing the men who fall victim to her sexual allure as entrapped animals, Antony emphasizes his agency in embracing Cleopatra. He claims that “our dungy earth alike / Feeds beast as men,” acknowledging the common charge that old men who give into lust are like animals only to assert “the nobleness” of his choice by kissing Cleopatra (1.1. 35–38). Over the course of the play, his choice to return to her again and again enacts “the relocation and reconstruction of heroic masculinity.”138 Odysseus subjects Circe with his sword, thereby reestablishing the normative distinctions between men and beasts, and men and women. Antony voluntarily blurs these lines, ceding his sword to Cleopatra who wears it in their sexual play, while he dons her tires and mantles (2.5.25). This moment restages the cross-dressed Falstaff’s scene of courtship in a different key, releasing the protagonists into a gender convergence facilitated by age. Although he struggles with his Roman thoughts, Antony ultimately celebrates his union with Cleopatra as defiant of Rome’s repressive values and the male heroes who embody them: “We’ll hand in hand / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. / Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops / And all the haunt be ours” (4.14.51–54).139 Insofar as we accept the play’s claims about the exemplary nature of Antony’s transformative passion—and a number of critics, including A. C. Bradley, have—we learn to look at the much-maligned figure of “age in love” in an entirely new way.140
Rather than embodying defect, Antony might even represent a new kind of perfection, a possibility most ardently articulated by the lovers themselves in the final few acts. Invoking familiar Neoplatonic tropes of transcendence, Antony and Cleopatra from the first present themselves as capturing “Eternity in our lips, and our eyes” (1.3.35). Antony affirms this initial vision repeatedly, until he lays “of many thousand kisses the poor last” on Cleopatra’s lips (4.15.20–21). According to Anne Barton, each kiss “asks to be read as an attempt to regain the kind of wholeness, that primal sexual unity” found in the creation myth of Plato’s Symposium—the same creation myth Shakespeare drew on to fragment his age-in-love figure in Twelfth Night.141 Shackled by his Roman thoughts, Antony worries about dissolving into shards at times, but Cleopatra works hard to reassemble her lover into a new whole during his death scene. Begging Antony to “die when thou hast liv’d / Quicken with kissing” (4.15.38–39), the Egyptian queen evokes both Lyly’s Cynthia, whose kisses quicken, and Middleton’s Gloriana, whose kisses kill. When she doubts that her “lips” have “that power” (4.15.39), she even recalls Ovid’s Aurora, who lacks the power to rejuvenate her lover. Cleopatra evokes all these precursors to overcome them, first elevating the fallen Antony visually, by hoisting him up, and then verbally, by immortalizing him as “the crown o’th’earth” (4.15.64). Nor does his elevation imply a rejection of carnal desires, as Endymion’s does. “Give me some wine,” Antony calls out as Cleopatra labors to lift him up, in a heavenly bit of “sport” (4.15.32) calculated to eclipse all previous instances of “sportful malice” involving lusty old men (Twelfth Night, 5.1.365).142 Drinking, dying, and rising, Antony invokes Endymion and Falstaff at the same time, canceling out the rote responses that they provoke, and challenging the patriarchal worldview they uphold. Even the critics who insist Antony’s suicide is “botched” must contend with the optics and poetics of the death scene, which, along with Cleopatra, strain conventional thinking, and which endorse Antony’s triumphant claim that he is “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish’d” (4.15.56–57).143 Among the things that Antony vanquishes in this coming together with Cleopatra are prejudices about his dotage. Shakespeare, meanwhile, vanquishes decades of rumor, gossip, slander, and satire about the queen’s men. The sexual innuendoes in Antony’s death scene glance at punitive accounts of royal favorites at their ladies’ feet, like Middleton’s Duke, or Falstaff in Merry Wives, or the “bere whelp” in News from Heaven and Hell, whose “pricke of desire” is turned “into a pillor of fier” by the “lady with the supported nose.”144 While these precursors are all destined for hell (the “bere whelp” is there already), Shakespeare secures a different afterlife for Antony, who ascends to “the golden world” of poetry, and haunts a transformed Elizium with his Cleopatra.145 This fallen star is no mere Fallstaff. Shakespeare finds it sweating work to assign new meanings to all these old patterns; by sheer dint of theatrical labor and sublime poetry, however, his queen succeeds in “draw[ing]” her “amorous surfeiter” high enough to “set” him “by Jove’s side” (4.15.30–36).
Antony and Cleopatra’s divided catastrophe, which isolates Cleopatra among boys and women and thus reinforces her resemblance to the aging Elizabeth I, imbues this new masculine ideal with the persuasive force of felt emotion. Indeed, when it comes to the circumstances that inspired Shakespeare’s revision of old materials, we need look no further than the death of his queen, which prompted a series of public reevaluations echoed in Antony and Cleopatra. As Catherine Loomis points out, while the Privy Council prepared for a smooth transition to James’s reign, the “literary response taught the country how to mourn and remember the Queen, and how to welcome and accept the new King.” Pamphlets like Englands Caesar (1603) and Ave Caesar (1603) likened James’s accession to that of Augustus Caesar, cementing Elizabeth’s association with Cleopatra and heralding the new king’s identification with the Roman emperor—a cornerstone of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the victorious Octavius.146 Elizabeth’s public mourners imagined her showing like a queen in death, surrounded by the material signs of her sovereignty, “Tryumphant drawne in robes so richly wrought / Crowne on her head, in hand her Scepter,” which is how Shakespeare shows his Egyptian queen.147 Anticipating Charmian’s final tribute to her “eastern star” (5.2.308), one poem hailed Elizabeth as a “celestiall starre, / Earthes ornament, whom heaven smiles to see,” describing her grave as a “great monument,” containing a “farre more pretious shade” than any Egyptian “Piramis.”148 The English queen lay “like a sweet beauty in a harmlesse slumber” in her grave; Shakespeare, meanwhile, has his Egyptian queen look “like sleep” in her monument (5.2.346).149 And just as Cleopatra takes “the stroke of death” as “a lover’s pinch” (5.2.295), Elizabeth’s mourners found that
Death now has ceaz’d her in his ycie armes,
That sometime was the Sun of our delight:
And pittilesse of any after-harmes,
Hath veyld her glory in the cloude of night.150
Because planetary tropes had featured prominently in Elizabeth’s cult, eclipse imagery now conveyed grief at her death. In what is thought Shakespeare’s sole comment on Elizabeth’s death, the sonnet speaker mourns “Our mortal moon” who “hath her eclipse endured” (107.5). Antony thinks about a different queen when he fears that “our terrene moon / Is now eclips’d” (3.13.153–54). But he chooses the same metaphor, which came burdened with communal mourning for Elizabeth. We might well ask, with Cleopatra, “what does he mean?” (4.2.23). And we can take Enobarbus’s answer for our own: “to make his followers weep” (4.2.24).151 Like Antony, Shakespeare knows of old that tearful “passion . . . is catching” (Julius Caesar, 3.1.283). If Antony and Cleopatra meant something different to the original audiences, it also did something different to them. Using “odd tricks which sorrow shoots / Out of the mind” (4.2.14–15), Shakespeare embraces his hero’s rhetorical prowess as his own, making his audience reexperience powerful feelings of grief, loss, guilt, and regret associated with Elizabeth’s death.
A common refrain among those mourning Elizabeth concerned the lack of adequate comparison by which to measure their loss, which some blamed on those who had remained silent, even as “Cynthia,” the “fayrest Rose, the sweetest Princely Flower” was “with’red now by Death’s coold nipping power.”152 Like Greville, who labeled Elizabeth “unmatcheable,” Henry Chettle found that “no Princesse ever-living in the earth can be remembered to exceede her. Her wisedome was without question . . . unequalled. . . . So expert in Languages that she answered most Embassadors in their Native tongues.”153 While some did allow that she was “preteritis melior, better than those which went before hir,” and thus left open the possibility that she might function as “a precedent to those that shall followe hir,” the idea that Elizabeth was sui generis gained traction around the time of her death.154 The Earl of Northumberland assured James that the English wished for “noe more queens, fearing we shall never enyoy an wther lyke to this.”155 A friend of John Manningham’s similarly recalled “Wee worshipt noe saintes, but wee prayd to ladyes in the Q[ueenes] tyme,”and wished that the practice might be “abolished . . . in our kinges raigne.”156 Even those men who had found with Astrophil that there was pleasure “in the manage” by a queen seemed eager to forget the unorthodox arrangements to which they had consented.157 Cast as a form of praise, superlative representations of Elizabeth I as a “peerelesse Princesse” contained the disturbing implications of her reign.158 These comments isolated Elizabeth and rendered her unique and inimitable—not a “modell of true worth” but an aberration of history. “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous,” Caesar claims, as he attempts to consign Antony and Cleopatra to a similar fate (5.2.359–60).
In this context, we might see Shakespeare’s “lass unparalleled” (5.2.316) as supplying the missing parallel for the “unmatcheable” Elizabeth. Among the old servants Chettle berates for omitting to honor the English queen is Shakespeare, that “the silver-tongued Melicert,” who should “mourne her death that graced his desert.”159 The passage is a stinging one; Shakespeare stands accused of betrayal and ingratitude, behaviors he condemns in play after play, including Antony and Cleopatra. They stop their nose “Against the blown rose” that “kneel’d unto the buds” (3.13.39–40), Cleopatra observes bitterly, using language Elizabeth might have used. Enobarbus deserts soon thereafter, even though his tendency to become “onion-ey’d” around his master shows that he loves Antony. The old soldier fears, as so many Elizabethan men did, that his powerful emotions might transform him into “an ass” or a woman (4.2.35–36). He quickly comes to regret his decision, however, which registers as a self-betrayal: “I am alone the villain of the earth / And feel I am most so” (4.6.29–30). In turning his countenance from Antony, Enobarbus has turned away from his own feelings, and thus from a version of himself. Calling as witness his “sovereign mistress,” “the blessed moon”—Cleopatra’s planet and Elizabeth’s—he begs for forgiveness, proposing “the world rank” him “a master-leaver and a fugitive” (4.9.11–20). An “inveterate judge of men” and perennial skeptic, Enobarbus is sometimes seen as a spokesperson for Shakespeare.160 He utters some of the play’s most emotionally wrenching lines, becoming an unlikely conduit for overwhelming shame and regret. That Enobarbus’s epiphany is precipitated by a reminder of his patron’s generosity matters; “how would thou have paid, / My better service,” he wonders, “when my turpitude / Thou dost so crown with gold!” (4.6.31–33). Through his pathetic death, which “blows” our “heart” as much as his (4.6.33), Antony and Cleopatra disowns the view that emotion “preys on reason” and that what restores the “heart” must needs diminish “the brain” (3.13.197–98), arguing instead that we should let emotions guide our judgments of other people.
Like all the other likenesses and comparisons discussed in this book, the one between Enobarbus and Shakespeare invites us to think not just about similarities, but also about differences. After a career-long struggle with the complex feelings that the Elizabethan court had inspired in him, Shakespeare elects in Antony and Cleopatra “to follow with allegiance a fall’n lord,” thus conquering “him that did his master conquer” (3.13.44–45). That means securing a better “place i’th’story” (3.13.46) for those who had “graced his desert.” According to Loomis, “the literary response to the death of Queen Elizabeth reveals not only a terrible sense of loss, but also a concerted effort, made mostly by male authors, to reconstruct a new and improved version of the Queen, one that refuses to grow old, make demands, or die.”161 Shakespeare chose a different approach than his contemporaries, giving us a queen who does grow old, make demands, and die. Living, Elizabeth I revived the dead Cleopatra’s “memorie” and “vertues,” including her ability to answer “Embassadors in their native tongues.” Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in turn revives aspects of the dead Elizabeth, including her ability to elicit stunning performances from her male subjects, an attribute that many survivors of the reign appeared eager to forget. By reminding his audience that Elizabeth had a precedent (the historical Cleopatra) and by giving her a successor (the theatrical Cleopatra), Shakespeare implied that Elizabeth might serve as a model (she serves as his model) and thus paid tribute to the transformative potentialities glimpsed in her reign. No one was better suited to this task of rememorialization than the poet who had spent a career thinking about Elizabeth I’s effect on men, and whose imagination was, like Antony’s, stirred by this extraordinary woman to create great art.
In Antony and Cleopatra, the spirited debate about the protagonists culminates in series of eulogies of Antony, which underline the idea that “what our contempts doth often hurl from us / We wish it ours again” (1.2.123–24). The idea that people are “good, being gone” (1.2.126) resonated in Jacobean England, Loomis argues, because the recently deceased Elizabeth was “appreciated more after her death.”162 The same is true of the men who served the queen. Implicitly comparing himself to Antonius and Endymion, the eponymous narrator of Leicester’s Ghost complains about being forgotten:
Who consecrats Colosses to my prayse?
Who studies to immortalize my name?
Who doth a stately Pyramid upraise
T’entoombe my corps, that slept in Cynthias days?163
But some writers did seek to “immortalize” the deceased earl, whom all the world admir’d,” depicting him “Not as a man, though he in shape exceld / But as a God, whose heavenlie wit inspir’d, / Wrought hie effects.”164 Indeed, those who honored Elizabeth after she died often praised the men associated with her. Celebrating “that more glorious time,” William Herbert reviews the contributions of these male courtiers, presenting “Much honor’d Dudley,” as “valiant,” “wise,” and
Patient in perill, prone to every good,
Belov’d of men, and graced by soveraigne eyes,
Cleere was thy thought, as cleere as cristall flood,
Loyall thy love, and royall was thy blood:
Fain’d rumour shuns all trueth, beleeve not fame,
She staines the white as snowe, the purest name.165
Antony and Cleopatra shares Herbert’s anxiety about how “fame” and “fain’d rumour” might distort accounts of the “Loyall” men who had served a celebrated queen. This anxiety informs “the complex longing” that surrounds Antony, whose “heroic grandeur is always constructed retrospectively, in his—and its—absence.” Through her dream of an “Emperor Antony” (5.2.76), Cleopatra performs what Janet Adelman describes as “an impassioned act of memory,” which aims in part to prevent “quick comedians” from bringing Antony “drunken forth” and boying her “greatness / I’th’posture of a whore” (5.2.216–21).166 In a play where the retrospective and the prospective are confounded, the future revels preempted by the classical queen sound like the past revels that her offstage audiences remember. All come together in an instant.
Eulogies, like other forms of history, can help transform retrospective judgments into future potentialities by creating the desire for a return to the past. Such nostalgia forges a “relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory,” and thus transforms the past for future use.167 Plutarch’s Elizabethan translators believed in their obligation to pass “the remembrance of things past to their successors.” They thought history served as “instruction of them to come,” and valued it because “There is nether picture, nor image of marble, nor arche of triumph, nor piller, nor sumptuous sepulcher, that can match the durableness of an eloquent history.”168 Plays may be better suited still to assuring the survival of “things past” than histories, because they stage the past as something that happens again and will happen again.169 Their superior eloquence conjures the present emotions that forge the necessary connections between “personal and collective memory.” According to Francis Bacon, “the minds of men” watching a play “are more open to affections and impressions than when alone.”170 Seizing on this aspect of playgoing, Antony and Cleopatra pushes auditors to mourn the dead again by making them weep, as Antony makes Eros, Enobarbus, and Cleopatra weep. Every time Burbage succeeded in eliciting tears for Antony, the actor altered perceptions of those “graced by soveraigne eyes,” a group of men that had been widely mocked and that, according to Herbert, included Shakespeare. By such means, Antony and Cleopatra aims to transform all spectators into women with a “private affection and respect, or partialitie” for the dead.171 It may have had some success in doing so; in 1616 the satirist Robert Anton complained of Bacchanalian women “growne . . . mad” and “impudent” by “irregular motion” at “base Playes” featuring “Cleopatres crimes.”172 To be sure, not all spectators of Shakespeare’s play are thus moved (George Bernard Shaw was not). But those who are learn to take on a queen’s perspective, which does not bracket off emotion or affection in judging merit. Insofar as Cleopatra moves “slippery people / Whose love is never link’d to the deserver / Till his deserts are past” (1.2.185–87) to love Antony, she calls the abstemious Caesar, and all those misogynistic young men that populated Elizabethan plays, “ass / Unpolicied” (5.2.307–8). The ability to inspire such emotion may well be worth “all that is won and lost” (3.11.70) after all.
Shakespeare identifies in the unorthodox relationships of the recent and the classical past possibilities of mutuality and collaboration that seemed threatening at the time, but that now are “good being gone.” According to Adelman, he “exploits the conflicts of opinion which are built into the traditional accounts of the lovers”—and, I would add, of the Elizabethan figures they shadow—to show that tradition is “the common liar.”173 Not only does Shakespeare force a reevaluation of his two sets of historical lovers, but he also uses his lovers to force a reevaluation of the theater, intimately bound to them throughout. Antony plays Osiris to Cleopatra’s Isis, Mars to her Venus, her lover, her soldier, her servant, her general, and, finally, her husband. Their collaboration, which has erotic, aesthetic, political, and affective dimensions, defies decorum to generate unconventional definitions of masculine merit.174 To accept Antony as a “man of men” means learning to prize men for their capacity to arouse and experience passion, rather than for their ability to control or repress it. Steven Mullaney, defining theater as an “affective technology,” describes emotions as “boundary phenomena . . . hard to contain in rigid or exclusive categories because they are, by their very nature, things that happen betwixt-and-between.”175 They overflow the measure, taking us beyond the limits of rational discourse. Shakespeare, who shares his hero’s gift for summoning and cultivating adulterating emotions in others, personifies this affective aspect of the theater in his hybrid colossus, whose legs bestride oceans, and whose capacious heart bursts out of all constraints. In elevating Antony, the playwright exalts his own craft, while acknowledging its deep dependence on female rule. Among other things, Antony’s love for Cleopatra models the relationship between a loyal audience and the theater, which generates emotions that are at once degrading and elevating, depending on one’s perspective. The central pair evoke not just the relationship between play and playgoer, but also the relationship between two players, “stirr’d” by the one another into performing “Excellent falsehood” (1.1.40–44). Between the two lovers, between the lover of plays and the play, and between the two players, passion proves transformative and ennobling, leading to a “new heaven, new earth” inaccessible to judgmental young men like Vindice or Hamlet, puritan naysayers like Gosson, anticourt satirists like Jonson, or rationalist politicians like Octavius Caesar.
Through his divided catastrophe, Shakespeare also allows Cleopatra the last word on “age in love,” ceding the stage to the queenly perspective on such matters for the first time. Ever since Bottom first dreamt of his fairy queen, the playwright had allowed rational considerations to overcome the seductive appeal of his deviant old lovers. Like Hal, Titania turns her countenance from her monstrous minion, after a painful disillusionment, in which her “visions” are punctured, and she recognizes that she was “enamor’d of an ass” (4.1.76–77). Once her “eyes . . . loathe his visage” (4.1.79), she resumes her submissive position in patriarchal culture, which means deferring to male judgment about the differences between a proper man and a “hateful fool” (4.1.49). A Midsummer Night’s Dream toys with the idea that masculine merit might look quite different from a feminine perspective—Hermia does not look with the same eyes as Egeus, either—but it works hard to contain the subversive implications of that idea. Antony and Cleopatra makes no such efforts. Cleopatra remains faithful to her vision of Antony to the end, offering us “Nature’s piece ‘gainst / fancy, condemning shadows quite” (5.2.99–100). Here, she recalls the epilogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as if making amends for all those old shadows that have now come to offend.
Harnessing the emotions released by the play’s echoes and resemblances, Cleopatra makes us wish Antony ours again in the fifth act. Twenty years after Leicester’s death, and four years after Elizabeth’s, another old adulterer devoted to a “terrene moon” becomes a figure of mythic “bounty” and generosity, an “autumn” that paradoxically grows “the more by reaping” (5.2.86–87). Besides endowing him with the power to confound all manner of convention, Antony’s Bacchanalian properties have kept the possibility of a resuscitation alive all along, “if only as desire,” in Barbara Bono’s haunting phrase.176 It is a desire that Cleopatra’s final tribute expertly fans. Co-opting the Circe myth to feminocentric ends, her “eyes . . . so royal” (5.2.318) render Antony’s immersion in delight “dolphin-like,” showing his “back above / The element they liv’d in” (5.2.88–89). His face “like the heavens,” his voice like “rattling thunder,” his “bounty” without winter in it, all testify to the outsize feelings of wonder, admiration, and gratitude that Antony (through Burbage) inspires in others (5.2.78–92). Like Dolabella, those of us who are susceptible to Cleopatra’s eulogy apprehend far more than we can comprehend in this description. That our feelings may be out of proportion to the youthful body of the boy playing Cleopatra or to the aging body of the actor playing Antony matters little—indeed, this contradiction may even be an asset. As Elizabeth I had demonstrated, performances that overcome bodily weaknesses associated with age generate the impression of virtuosity and greatness. Those of us who have felt Antony’s power to overcome misogynistic prejudices must therefore needs approve Cleopatra’s claim that “t’imagine / An Antony were nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy.”177 There have been such men—we have seen them, onstage if not in life—and Cleopatra’s dream urges us to believe there “might be such” men again (5.2.93). Even Caesar thinks that Cleopatra looks “like sleep / As if she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.346–48). By calling attention to the performer who only looks like death, the medium who has just so successfully revived the dead, he reminds us that Cleopatra will rise again, and again, and again. In a utopian future, every man may learn through such repeat performances to think himself another Antony.