The Liberation of Eros
i
We have seen that Antony’s tragedy is rooted in his specific political and historical circumstances. He is not simply a man who has been seduced away from a standard Roman career of military conquest by the enchantments of an Egyptian witch. The view that, but for Cleopatra, Antony would have been a Roman warrior of the old stamp, voiced by Philo in the opening lines of the play, can be held only by someone who assumes that the Imperial Roman way of life is so obviously choiceworthy that any deviation from it must be explained by reference to occult powers. But Antony has no such blind attachment to the Roman cause, and sees more clearly than most of his contemporaries the questionable aspects of public life in the Empire. If, as we have seen, conquests have become “vile,” if military victories can no longer establish a man’s honor but may on the contrary cost him the devotion of his followers, if, in short, success no longer has the value it once had in Rome, then Antony’s half-hearted conduct as a soldier has a certain logic to it, a peculiar logic perhaps, but one that may be more appropriate to his world than the concentration on victory of a Coriolanus. From what we know of Antony, we might speculate that even if he had never met Cleopatra he would have found it difficult to pursue singlemindedly a military and political career in Rome. Perhaps Antony’s failure to find satisfaction in Imperial politics is what makes him so susceptible to Cleopatra’s charms. In any event, searching for a fit object of his allegiance, Antony finally chooses Cleopatra as the noblest cause he can fight for. Paradoxically, Antony’s love for Cleopatra is really in harmony with his deepest political purposes, if one understands that he regards the abiding loyalty of his followers as more important than the temporary triumph of military conquest. His love for Cleopatra provides him with a noble justification for the losses that bind his men to his cause, while Cleopatra herself, as the most faithful of his retainers, provides a model of devotion for his men to follow (IV.iv.14–15).
Similarly, the love story of Antony and Cleopatra cannot be understood apart from its political dimension.1 In talking about them as lovers, one cannot ignore the fact that they are emperor and queen, because their political positions lend stature to their love. Moreover, one can detect a strategy in their love, a policy they pursue which is remarkably similar to the plan of “choice of loss” outlined by Ventidius as the appropriate course in Imperial politics. In defeat Antony is able to bind his followers more closely to him than ever before, and similarly adversity proves to strengthen the bond between him and Cleopatra. The ultimate test of love in Antony and Cleopatra is how much one is willing to sacrifice for one’s beloved, so that Antony’s military losses become a pledge of his faith to Cleopatra, and her willingness to stand by him in his downfall becomes in turn her token of allegiance. Once again we see that the problem of fidelity is the bridge that connects the political story and the love story in Antony and Cleopatra.
The love of Antony and Cleopatra is a curious mixture of deep passion and profound insecurity, and seems all too ready to pass over into its opposite, a deeply felt hate, or at least a bitter mistrust of each other’s fidelity. Their love follows a pattern of doubt succeeded by reassurance, the new proof of love apparently lasting only until the next occasion for doubt arises. At first sight, the lack of faith in each other that Antony and Cleopatra display might seem to belie the depth of their passion, but a consideration of the special nature and circumstances of their love will uncover the close connection between their passion and their insecurity. The distinctive qualities of the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra are best seen by contrast with the thoroughly different relationship of Antony and Octavia.
Antony and Octavia celebrate what ought to be a standard Roman marriage, familiar to us from the world of Coriolanus. Octavia should make the perfect partner for a Roman general, since Enobarbus describes her in terms that recall Virgilia: “Octavia is of a holy, cold, and still conversation” (II.vi.122–23). Antony can be certain that the chaste Octavia will be faithful to him, and she has reasons to believe that he will remain faithful to her. After all, a great deal depends on this marriage: it is entered into for weighty reasons of state, and if Antony breaks faith with Octavia, he will have to face serious consequences (III.ii.24–33). The marriage, in short, has everything in favor of it, including the full support of the highest political authority. Unfortunately, the marriage proves to have too much in its favor. The fact that it is politically motivated means that the love of the partners is at best a secondary element, as Menas observes: “I think the policy of that purpose made more in the marriage than the love of the parties” (II.vi.118–19). Thus the political support which ought to give Octavia security in her marriage actually works to undermine it. Precisely because Antony has good cause for giving the impression of loving her, she can never know if he really does love her, that is to say, love her for herself and not out of prudential considerations. The marriage of Antony and Octavia is a fully conventional relationship, made along conventional lines, supported by the conventional authorities, and restricted to the most conventional expressions of love (II.iii.1–8, III.ii.43–44, 47–50). Even if Antony really did love Octavia, to convince her of his sincerity he would face the difficult task of breaking through the wall of conventions that in one sense holds them together, but in a deeper sense keeps them apart.
The loveless marriage of Antony and Octavia is another token of the hollowness of traditional Roman institutions in the Empire, especially when contrasted with the marriageless love of Antony and Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra cannot derive any external support for their love because it occurs outside all authority except their own. The various trans-Mediterranean invocations in the play, Octavius’ of Antony (I.iv.55ff), Cleopatra’s of Antony (I.v.l8ff), and Pompey’s of Cleopatra (II.i.20ff), stress the physical distance that can separate the lovers, but they have an even wider gulf to overcome. One can get a sense of the nature of this gulf by recalling that they do not worship the same gods, that Antony understands his love for Cleopatra as a kind of impiety to his gods (III.xi.58–61). Since Antony and Cleopatra do not recognize any higher authority in common, their love can find support only in their own wills, and the closest they come to a marriage ceremony is a rite that they must perform on their own, in which they themselves act as the presiding deities (III.vi.1–19). No law can bind them together, for they are a law unto themselves.
The love of Antony and Cleopatra is a thoroughly unconventional relationship, and its cosmopolitan or transpolitical character is the source of both their insecurity and their passion. The fact that no civic authority supports their love means that they have cause to doubt each other’s fidelity. No one will step in to enforce their love vows when no one encouraged them in the first place. Antony and Cleopatra have no “reasons” for loving each other, no prudential considerations that recommend their match. On the contrary, everything seems to be working against their love. At different times their closest advisers counsel them against their mutual involvement, and events repeatedly conspire to make it in the interest of one to betray the other. These considerations cannot help but arouse in them doubts of each other’s faithfulness: hence their insecurity. But at the same time, the precarious character of their love offers them continuing evidence of its genuineness. Since nothing forces them to love each other—no marriage contract, no family pressures, no political necessities—they know that if they are loyal to each other it is only out of love, and not at all out of prudence. Ultimately they derive the strength of their love from the feeling that they stand together against the rest of the world. As Cleopatra understands (I.iii.1–10), a love that runs smoothly loses its force, and the opposition she and Antony encounter works to keep their passion alive, providing the relish in the “cloyless sauce” (II.i.25) of their love.2
To sum up the problem raised by the disjunction of marriage and love in Antony and Cleopatra (I.i.41), a conventional relationship offers a security of a kind, but the emotions involved may go dead; an unconventional relationship can maintain and even increase the original force of its passion, but only at the price of radical insecurity. For this reason, a love that runs counter to conventions is potentially tragic, whereas a love that is ultimately in harmony with conventions is comic. The relation of conventions and love is a pervasive theme in Shakespeare’s plays, and one would have to go well beyond Antony and Cleopatra to give an adequate treatment of it. The basic difficulty is that while conventions provide form and structure for emotions, they threaten to kill them in the very act of giving them stability. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies explore the ways in which social masks and poses can interfere with genuine expressions of emotion, and the comic antics in these plays, especially the mistaken identities, serve to break the hold outworn habits of thought and feeling have on men’s minds, thereby revitalizing the life of society. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example, the plot to deceive Claudio and the plot to deceive Beatrice and Benedick both have the result of founding or refounding a true love. Claudio must be brought to drop his pose as the idealizing young Petrarchan lover and accept the fact that he is to marry a flesh-and-blood woman, while Beatrice and Benedick must be tricked into dropping the opposite, and equally sterile, pose of cynical doubters of love, a stance which is in part a matter of pride and in part just a matter of habit.
The language of love is one of the conventions that Shakespeare often shows interfering with love. Language is after all socially acquired, and the fact that lovers must resort to language reveals their problematic relation to the society in which they live. On the one hand, language facilitates communication and understanding between lovers, but, on the other, if it becomes too conventional, in the sense of hackneyed, it actually prevents communication. Since love language tends to be poetic, and lovers do not usually invent their own metaphors, they are especially dependent upon the language of the great poets of love. But the metaphors of poetry may lose their meaning through overuse, as Shakespeare’s Troilus understands when he speaks of “truth tir’d with iteration” (III.ii.176). Thus speeches of love may be insincere in the sense of being trite (not to mention the possibility of their being simply false, since, as the saying goes, “talk is cheap”). Lovers are therefore forced to go beyond speeches of love to deeds of love in order to guarantee the genuineness of their emotion. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, Romeo begins as the conventional idealizing lover in his devotion to the fair Rosaline, and his language is appropriately poetic, as Mercutio indicates: “Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flow’d in” (II.iv.38–39). But in the course of his love for Juliet, the stock language of love, Petrarchan figures of speech like “brawling love” or “loving hate” (I.i.176), which have become stale from overuse, acquire a new meaning as the oxymorons spring to life in the actual situation of the young lovers (III.ii.73–79), culminating in a frightening realization of the most tired of love’s clichés, the living death.3
The affinity of Romeo and Juliet with the world of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies has often been noted.4 If, for example, the metaphors of tragic love become hopelessly trite, and their translation into action remains unconvincing because of faulty dramatic illusion, one has the play-within-the-play of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “most lamentable comedy” of Pyramus and Thisby. Even the tragic love story of Antony and Cleopatra seems at times to border on comedy, for example in Act II, scene v, in which Cleopatra receives the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia. As she herself admits (II.v.82–83), Cleopatra is at her most petty in this scene, and the comedy stems from the incongruity of a queen’s acting like a common jealous housewife.5 Our amusement at this scene is a good reminder that sexual jealousy is usually a theme of comedy rather than tragedy; in particular, the problem of fidelity in love was always a subject for comic treatment in classical literature, never for tragic.6 The fact that one cannot simply laugh at the jealousy of Antony and Cleopatra, not even in Act II, scene v, is one more proof of the new importance fidelity has acquired in their world. Because their love means so much to them, Antony and Cleopatra react to suspicions of infidelity with a depth and authenticity of passion that would be completely out of place in a comedy. In the middle of her antics with the messenger, Cleopatra’s despair breaks out with such force that her jealousy ceases to be laughable (II.v.78–79).
The magnitude of the stakes involved in the love of Antony and Cleopatra is ultimately what lifts their suspicions above the level of the jealousy of lovers in domestic comedy. That is one reason why their public status is integral to their special kind of relationship: they must act out their passions on a grand scale. Their political power allows them to create a hyperbole of deeds to correspond to their hyperbole of speeches.7 Anyone can mimic Antony in his sweeping rhetorical gesture to express his love:
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d empire fall!
[I.i.33–34]
But only a Roman Triumvir can work to bring this result about, in other words, to translate the speech of love into a deed of love. Antony’s strategy is to prove his love in his actions; more specifically, the test of his love is how much he is willing to sacrifice for his beloved. Antony has his main chance to prove his love for Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, where he gives up victory to follow his queen’s ship. He at first regards his flight as a disgrace to his honor, but when confronted with Cleopatra’s contrition, he finally treats his loss as just one more gambit in their continuing love game:
Fall not a tear, I say, one of them rates
All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss.
Even this repays me.
[III.xi.69–71]
Cleopatra’s love is more important to Antony than any victory, but the magnitude of his loss is necessary as a true measure of the depth of his passion.
Cleopatra undergoes a love test shortly after Antony’s at Actium. She has the opportunity of betraying him in order to win the favor of Octavius (III.xiii), and her politic handling of the situation calls forth from Antony a jealous rage that exactly parallels hers in Act II, scene v, even to the point of his basely mistreating a guiltless messenger. One can see in this scene that the trouble with deeds is that they are ambiguous: since deeds cannot speak for themselves and must be interpreted, they are open to being misinterpreted. The source of the quarrels of Antony and Cleopatra is invariably misunderstanding, an uncertainty about reading each other’s minds from ambiguous deeds that leads them to answer questions with further questions:
Cleopatra. Not know me yet?
Antony. Cold-hearted towards me?
[III.xiii.157–58]
In this scene, Cleopatra is able to silence Antony’s doubts with a hyperbolic declaration of her love, a curse upon herself, her issue, and her land if she has been unfaithful (III.xiii.158–67). When, two battles later, Antony is again convinced that she has betrayed him (IV.xii.9–15, 24–29), Cleopatra, realizing that speeches will no longer serve to calm her lover, sends Antony word of a deed to restore his belief in her fidelity. She knows that the final proof of her love for him would be her willingness to die for him, and therefore dispatches a messenger to tell Antony she has killed herself. This sincere deception has the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy (IV.xiv.120–21), for it sets in motion a train of events that finally does bring about Cleopatra’s suicide. The plot works to show each lover’s reaction to the other’s death, so that we feel each dies for the sake of the other, a dramatic construction Shakespeare had used earlier in Romeo and Juliet (something similar happens with Cassius and Brutus in the last act of Julius Caesar). Suicide promises to be the ultimate test of love, involving as it does the irrevocable sacrifice of everything for the sake of the beloved. Antony and Cleopatra each find no value in a world that does not contain the other (IV.xiv.45–49, IV.xv.60–68), and their deaths bring to life another cliché of love: they prove they cannot live without each other. Their loyalty in defeat must finally extend to loyalty in death, and suicide seems to offer the one unambiguous—and hence final—deed of love.
ii
The connection between love and death in the story of Antony and Cleopatra merits further exploration. Anyone familiar with the legend of Tristan and Isolde should be prepared to find that the deaths of Shakespeare’s lovers are not accidental to their story but in some sense its proper fulfillment.8 They actively seek out their tragedy to avoid becoming trapped in a world they find dull and stale. Conventional happiness is beneath them and is even, as they see it, a barrier to their higher aspirations. Theirs is a kind of infinite yearning, a search for a satisfaction that is not to be found in this world. The love of Antony and Cleopatra carries them to the borders of ordinary life and, at least in their eyes, beyond this world into the realm of death. If all this sounds like Romantic ranting, it is only a paraphrase of the opening words Antony and Cleopatra speak to each other:
Cleopatra. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
Antony. There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.
Cleopatra. I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.
Antony. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
[I.i.14–17]
The self-proclaimed boundlessness of their desire for each other is what drives Antony and Cleopatra beyond any given moment of satisfaction, for the only image of an infinite love in the finite human world is a love that seems to grow without limit. The notion that love for Cleopatra is an insatiable desire, ever on the increase, is of course the point of the most celebrated description of her:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
[II.ii.234–37]
In the end, however, Antony and Cleopatra must face the fact that no earthly act is adequate to express their limitless love, for all acts in this life are finite by nature. As Troilus tells Cressida:
This [is] the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confin’d, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.
[III.ii.81–83]
Antony and Cleopatra certainly learn to measure their love on the grandest scale, in terms of whole kingdoms (I.iv.18, I.v.43–47, III.x.7–8), but finally not even this extravagance is enough. Since a kingdom is after all a patch of land with definite boundaries, it represents a finite value. The limitless expanse of the sea provides a fitter image of the passion of Antony and Cleopatra, but ultimately they cannot weigh their boundless love against anything in this world, but only against the world itself.
Paradoxically though, at the moment Antony and Cleopatra are ready to use the whole world as a measure of the value of their love, the world has come to seem worthless to them, and thus their ultimate sacrifice is reduced to a form of self-indulgence. An infinite yearning not only fails of satisfaction in this world, it also tends to make this world pale by comparison. Remove the infinite value of the beloved from the world, and the world becomes completely valueless as a result. Consider Antony’s reaction when he hears of what he believes to be Cleopatra’s death:
I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and
Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now
All length is torture; since the torch is out,
Lie down and stray no further. Now all labor
Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength. Seal then, and all is done.
[IV.xiv.44–49]
Cleopatra’s reaction to the death of Antony is even more extreme:
Noblest of men, woo’t die?
Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty? O, see, my women:
The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord!
O, wither’d is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fall’n! Young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon. . . .
. . . It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods,
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stol’n our jewel. All’s but naught.
[IV.xv.59–68, 75–78]
The bedrock of nihilism underlying the mountainous passion of Antony and Cleopatra is here finally exposed, or, to vary the metaphor, the oasis of their love is at last revealed to be surrounded by a spiritual desert. We have already seen in Antony’s case that it is his loss of faith in all his old values that makes his love for Cleopatra assume such a vast importance for him. Thus the world-weariness which his love for Cleopatra held in check returns in full force once he thinks she is dead. And Cleopatra, too, finally betrays a contempt for the world as the basis of her worshiping Antony with such devotion. The consequences of her longing for a heaven on earth (ll.77–78) are clear from her speech: the fading of the Roman dream of earthly glory (ll.64–65), a general leveling of orders of rank (ll.65–68), and finally an abdication of worldly power (ll.70–75), perhaps even a transfer of the Imperial “sceptre” to the gods (ll.75–76). No wonder Cleopatra at first seems to follow Antony immediately into death (ll.67–68).
If life is worthless and death desirable, then suicide for the first time in the Roman world threatens to become a sin because it is now a selfish act:
Patience is sottish, and impatience does
Become a dog that’s mad. Then is it sin
To rush into the secret house of death
Ere death dare come to us?
[IV.xv.79–82]
Suddenly we find the pagan attitude toward suicide transformed, and by implication the pagan attitude toward death. To be sure, the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra are in part “after the high Roman fashion” (IV.xv.87), familiar to us from the examples of Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar.9 By killing himself, a Roman prevents his enemies from disposing of his life; death is the alternative to slavery (Julius Caesar, I.iii.89–100). The Roman who commits suicide judges that living without liberty is not worthwhile, and hence Roman suicide is actually based on the conviction of the value of life, albeit a certain kind of life, and not life simply. These motives do appear in the suicide of Antony (IV.xiv.62–68, IV.xv.14–15, 55–58), and even that of Cleopatra (IV.xiv.60–62, V.ii.51–52, 208–26). Nevertheless, motives of honor are not sufficient to explain why the lovers approach suicide with eagerness, not resignation:
But I will be
A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t
As to a lover’s bed.
[IV.xiv.99–101]
For Cleopatra, too, death has ceased to be a fearful, or even a painful thing, as she observes in the case of Iras:
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desir’d.
[V.ii.294–96]
The joy with which Antony and Cleopatra greet their deaths indicates that they no longer understand suicide purely in the traditional Roman manner. Roman suicide is based on the premise that death is simply the end of life and as such the end of all human pains (Julius Caesar, II.ii.32–37). But Antony and Cleopatra view death as the prelude to new pleasures, for their last speeches are unintelligible unless they are expecting to meet again in another world (IV.xiv.50–54, V.ii.228–29, 301–3). Their infinite love has driven them to thoughts of an afterlife; it has awakened “immortal longings” in them (V.ii.281). They are the only characters in all three Roman plays to think of their personal survival after death, as opposed to the immortality of their names through fame.
Given the changed estimates of life and death in Antony and Cleopatra, the paradoxical situation arises in which the loved one is in some way worth more dead than alive. Once dead, Antony exists only in Cleopatra’s imagination, thus setting her free to idealize him as never before.10 At times the living Antony had disappointed her expectations and failed to live up to her image of him. But in his absence, Cleopatra becomes free to indulge herself in fantasies about her godlike lover:
O Charmian,
Where think’st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
Do bravely, horse, for wot’st thou whom thou mov’st?
The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm
And burgonet of men. He’s speaking now,
Or murmuring, “Where’s my serpent of old Nile?”
(For so he calls me). Now I feed myself
With most delicious poison.
[I.v.18–27]
In her imagination, Cleopatra is able to reconcile the contradictions in Antony’s character; what can be exasperating in fact, the variation in his moods, becomes exhilarating in fancy:
O well-divided disposition! Note him,
Note him, good Charmian, ’tis the man; but note him.
He was not sad, for he would shine on those
That make their looks by his; he was not merry,
Which seem’d to tell them his remembrance lay
In Egypt with his joy; but between both.
O heavenly mingle! Be’st thou sad or merry,
The violence of either thee becomes,
So does it no man’s else.
[I.v.53–61]
This vision of Antony is his absence prepares the way for Cleopatra’s dream of him in his death,11 in which he appears as a lord of contraries:
his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder.
[V.ii.83–86]
Only in Cleopatra’s dreams is Antony able to reach perfection, and that in effect means only in death.
The idea that a person can gain new status by dying is prevalent in Antony and Cleopatra, summed up somewhat callously by Antony when he hears of Fulvia’s death: “she’s good, being gone” (I.ii.126). Cleopatra understands death as a way of escaping the imperfections of life, more specifically of putting an end to the doubts that have infected her love for Antony:
And it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change.
[V.ii.4–6]
Having lived all her life as a goddess of mutability, resisting any efforts to predict her actions (I.i.48–51, I.iii.1–10), Cleopatra is seeking a form of stability in death. To achieve stability, she thinks she must experience the freeing of her spirit from her body:
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
[V.ii.289–90]
In death Cleopatra must abandon what had always been the source of eros for her—her body—but she thinks that eros will be purified when separated from bodily appetite. If from one point of view her suicide appears as self-indulgence, from another it is an act of asceticism. But this is only an apparent contradiction: by repudiating bodily pleasure, Cleopatra hopes to achieve a more secure satisfaction, as symbolized by the fact that she regards her death as the marriage she never achieved in life (V.ii.287–88).
One curious fact remains to be observed about this marriage-in-death of Antony and Cleopatra: like any lawful ceremony it seems to require the presence of at least two witnesses. Cleopatra assumes as a matter of course that her servant Iras will accompany her wherever she goes:
If she first meet the curled Antony,
He’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have.
[V.ii.301–3]
Whether Antony expects Eros to follow him in another world is unclear, but in any case Antony’s vision of an afterlife has room for a whole army of followers:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.
[IV.xiv.51–54]
Death at first appears to be the final way for Antony and Cleopatra to escape from “the world’s great snare” (IV.viii.18), but when Antony comes to imagine a paradise, he does not insist, as Andrew Marvell does, that “the grave’s a fine and private place.” The other world is to provide Antony with a whole new audience, even the opportunity of winning followers away from famous rivals. Perhaps death will only mean a new type of command for Antony, with a more satisfactory loyalty from his new troops. Shakespeare has introduced the notion of an afterlife into Antony’s story,12 and the way Antony pictures the fulfillment of his love may be an important clue to its nature. When Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde come to die, they give no further thought to Kurwenal and Brangäne. Nor do they imagine themselves ascending to a resurrected Valhalla to steal away the following of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Antony and Cleopatra more closely resemble the lover in Donne’s “The Canonization,” who, beginning with an impatient desire to be left alone—“For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love”—proceeds by means of a mysterious love-death to become canonized as a saint of love, claiming the right to be worshiped by the whole world. Apparently even after exploring the connection between love and death in the story of Antony and Cleopatra, one must still account for the distinctive form of love-death they picture for themselves.
iii
As we shall see in the next chapter, Antony’s imaging of the afterlife is in part a matter of pride, a very Roman desire to have competition, though on the new battlefield of love. But he and Cleopatra have a more basic reason for wanting followers in an afterlife. In the end they feel they need some sort of objective recognition of their subjective experience. Cleopatra’s dream of Antony reveals the problem raised for the lovers by the intensely private character of their love. Cleopatra’s grief breaks the hold the world has on her, and a dream of her beloved overpowers her sense of reality. Antony seems to her more real than anything in the world, as if the very thought of him were enough to assure her of his existence, as if in Antony’s case, and in his case alone, there were no gap between appearance and reality:13
But if there be, nor ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine
An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
[V.ii.96–100]
Cleopatra’s dream fulfills all her desires, but the question remains, Does it do so in deed or only in speech? Despite her conviction of the truth of the dream, Cleopatra must be in some way uncertain of its reality. Otherwise she would keep the dream to herself, in all the assurance of subjective certainty, and not profane it by attempting to share the experience with Dolabella. She knows that practical men make fun of lovers’ dreams:
You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams;
Is’t not your trick?
[V.ii.74–75]
Yet she goes ahead and narrates the dream anyway, despite all signs that Dolabella does not understand what she is talking about. She wants to convert him to her belief, for if he could accept the vision too it would no longer be merely a dream:
Cleopatra. Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
Dolabella. Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods!
[V.ii.93–95]
Cleopatra’s oath reveals how much it would mean to her for Dolabella to relieve the burdensome loneliness of her vision. Shakespeare often portrays the dreamlike quality of an intense experience of love, most fully of course in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also in its tragic companion piece, Romeo and Juliet. The beloved so fully absorbs the lover’s attention that he loses sight of all the rest of reality, until it becomes difficult to distinguish dream from reality (Romeo and Juliet, V.iii.79). At one point, Romeo’s experience of love is so powerful that he begins to doubt its truth:
O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard,
Being in night, all this is but a dream,
Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.
[II.ii.139–41]
Precisely because Romeo’s experience is so in accord with what he wishes, he has to wonder if it really happened to him. Perhaps Cleopatra has such doubts about her perfect vision of Antony when she seeks confirmation of it from Dolabella. She too must worry that “wishers were ever fools” (IV.xv.37).
Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Romeo and Juliet, have some objective evidence of the existence of their love, even if subjective experience has a certain dreamlike quality. But in the unreal world of comedy, where everything is possible, Shakespeare shows that the most perfect experience of love would necessarily be indistinguishable from a dream, and hence imperfect. The most unusual and therefore the most absurd and in a sense the most archetypical love match in all of Shakespeare is the romance of Bottom and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom is the only character in Shakespeare’s plays to be granted the love of an authentic goddess. But the price he pays for the vision he is vouchsafed in the woods outside Athens is that he will go on wondering for the rest of his life if he ever truly experienced it at all:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about [t’] expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but [a patch’d] fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
[IV.i.204–14]14
In the words of Cleopatra, Bottom has truly had a dream “past the size of dreaming.” Yet he can never have any evidence of its truth, for he must always keep it to himself. He would like to share the experience with his friends, but he knows that they would only laugh at him and in any case never believe his story. One can sense his bewilderment when he returns to the city, the conflict between his eagerness and reluctance to talk of his vision:
Bottom. Masters, I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am not true Athenian. I will tell you everything, right as it fell out.
Quince. Let us hear, sweet Bottom.
Bottom. Not a word of me. All that I will tell you is, that the Duke hath din’d.
[IV.ii.29–35]
Bottom’s vision is perfect as pure vision but, like a dream, it is private and incommunicable, and in that sense imperfect.
The comic episode of Bottom’s dream reveals that the lover achieves gains in love only by retreating into a subjective world where he is open to a new form of uncertainty. Antony and Cleopatra are free to idealize each other without limit in the moment of their deaths, for once they exist only in each other’s eyes, they become in effect the free creations of each other’s imaginations.15 But if their vision ever were to become fully private, they would no longer have any guarantee of its truth. And even on the verge of death their love has not entirely transcended the need for confirmation. Antony must die, after all, with a new instance of Cleopatra’s duplicity fresh in mind, and she must hear him returning to the theme of his Roman honor with his last words (IV.xv.51–58), instead of paying her a final tribute. Moreover, just before his death Antony apparently tests Cleopatra once more with the temptation of betraying his memory with Octavius (IV.xv.45–46), and Cleopatra, just before her death, seems to be having jealous thoughts about Antony’s behavior in the other world (V.ii.301–3). And the fact is they make their greatest speeches of mutual devotion out of earshot of each other, so that they themselves do not have the evidence we possess for evaluating the meaning of their suicides. One could easily make too much of these slight hints of insecurity surrounding the deaths of the lovers. Certainly the keynote of their last speeches is their final assurance of their mutual faith. But this conviction is, when all is said and done, only a personal and subjective feeling, the power of which may well suspend judgment. Objectively considered, the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra at the end of the play is no less shrouded in ambiguities than it was at the beginning. If anything, untangling the complex web of motivation in their last actions might be more difficult than ever. In considering suicide, Antony talks as much about the shame of being taken alive by Octavius as he does about the shame of outliving Cleopatra (IV.xiv.72–77), and she, in turn, does not actually kill herself until she is certain that Octavius intends to lead her in triumph through the streets of Rome (V.ii.198–226). Again, the point of such seemingly cynical observations is not to question the sincerity of Antony and Cleopatra, but only to show that even at the moment of their deaths the facts in their case have not altered, only their view of the facts. In the end, as in the beginning, they have only each other’s words as a pledge of their faith, magnificently eloquent words to be sure, but words nonetheless.
The marriage-in-death that was to put their fidelity beyond question turns out to be the greatest leap of faith Antony and Cleopatra have to face. For that reason, they want their love story not to end with death, but to continue in an afterlife, and Antony craves followers wherever he goes. Again like the lover in Donne’s “The Canonization,” Antony and Cleopatra ignore the world’s criticism of their love, but welcome its approval. Precisely when they decide to stand alone, they long for a crowd to applaud the nobility of their decision. Their love affair is by no means clandestine, but is emphatically carried out in the public eye.16 No doubt the faith of others in their love strengthens their own faith in each other. When Antony is told “the worship of the whole world” “lies” in his “noble countenance” (IV.xiv.85–86) and Cleopatra learns that Dolabella “makes” a “religion” out of his “love” for her (V.ii.199), they both have some sense that they are not alone in their high estimation of themselves and their love. Antony’s notion of paradise reveals that he really covets praise, provided he receives it on his own terms. He is not averse to being honored, only to having to adapt his conduct to someone else’s standard of honor. It would unquestionably relieve some of the burden of uncertainty he has been forced to live with to know that he will be remembered as a faithful and noble lover (V.ii.358–60). To the end he is genuinely moved by the thought of the loyalty of his followers (IV.xiv.135–40).
The need Antony and Cleopatra feel to verify their experience of love is made more acute by the unsettling effect of their gradual entrance into a private and subjective world as the play progresses. The Roman world portrayed in Coriolanus is one of hard, solid objects, palpable to the touch and thus unquestionably real. In Antony and Cleopatra this tangible world begins to dissolve into a realm of shadows that seems to hide the true reality. Images of melting or “discandying” are among the most frequent in the play, especially toward its close.17 Antony finally feels he is losing his hold on physical reality, even on his own body, to the point where he must actually check with his servant to see if he still exists:
Antony. Eros, thou yet behold’st me?
Eros. Ay, noble lord.
Antony. Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A [tower’d] citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs.
They are black vesper’s pageants.
Eros. Ay, my lord.
Antony. That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Eros. It does my lord.
Antony. My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
[IV.xiv.1–14]
In a sense this is the moment Antony has been waiting for—Rome, and everything else, melts as he once desired (I.i.33)—but characteristically once his wish is granted the result appals him. He feels his body dissolving, but finally free of its limitations he now fears the loss of his identity. Sensing himself being absorbed into the shapeless world of the clouds, he feels he will no longer have anything definite to depend on, anything just to tell him he exists. His only recourse is to reach out for the nearest human being and try to get a firm grip on common reality. At least his servant can assure him he is still visible to other men.
Antony’s vision of the clouds at last reveals fully the paradoxical basis of his love for Cleopatra. He rejects the thought of melting, even though dissolution is the ultimate aim of his erotic longing. Eros seeks union with its object, and in the fullest case requires the overcoming of the separateness of lovers, and hence the annihilation of their distinct personalities until they are able to lose themselves in each other precisely “as water is in water.” The pervasive imagery of melting in Antony and Cleopatra, particularly of one thing dissolving into another (I.ii.192–94) and finally in Antony’s cloud speech of all things losing their distinct shapes and blending together into a formless whole, is closely related to the prevalence in the play of erotic vision, which seeks to overcome the articulation of the world into separate parts. Only in music was Wagner able to give a kind of form to the formlessness infinite desire seeks out, but even these bare lines from the libretto of Tristan und Isolde give some indication of the one possible resolution for a boundless eros:
Isolde. Du Isolde.
Tristan. Tristan du.
Isolde. Tristan ich,
Tristan. ich Isolde,
Isolde. nicht mehr Isolde!
Tristan. nicht mehr Tristan!
Tristan & Isolde. Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen
Ewig!
Neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen,
Endlos!
Tristan and Isolde struggle to express their ineffable yearning, first by claiming to exchange identities, then by denying their identities entirely. To be without names would mean to be without the possibility of separation, eternally and endlessly. But unlike Tristan and Isolde, or for that matter Romeo and Juliet (II.ii.33–51), Antony and Cleopatra are unwilling to renounce their names, holding on to their separate identities tenaciously when challenged (III.xiii.92–93, 185–86).
This difference remains in force to the end of their story, giving their love-death its distinctive character. Unlike the Romantic Tristan and Isolde, who sink unconsciously and blissfully into a form-obliterating night-world of love and death, Antony and Cleopatra regard death as a way of reasserting their identities, of reliving former “victories” and perhaps achieving new ones:
I am again for Cydnus
To meet Mark Antony.
[V.ii.228–29]
The way Antony and Cleopatra pull back at the last moment from the logical fulfillment of their erotic longing perhaps explains the striking reversal of imagery that occurs at the end of the play. Cleopatra, normally associated with soft and melting things, finally pictures herself as something hard and unyielding:
My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing
Of woman in me; now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.
[V.ii.238–41]
The same reversal occurs in Coriolanus when the hero, normally pictured as a solid rock, claims to melt. Similarly, Coriolanus, who consistently rejects food and drink, at last is brought to call for wine, while Cleopatra, the epicure, finally refuses to eat or drink anymore:
Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sir;
. . . . .
. . . Now no more
The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip.
[V.ii.49, 281–82]
The fact that Cleopatra, the virtual high priestess of eros, ultimately displays this spirited contempt for appetite suggests the impossibility of developing one side of human nature to the total exclusion of another. When Coriolanus tries to push his spiritedness to an extreme, he finds he is still subject to the promptings of eros; when Cleopatra tries to live a life of pure eros, she finds she is still too spirited to allow her identity to be submerged completely in her beloved or in death. The reversals of imagery in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra suggest that man cannot become simply a part of a larger whole with no separate identity (like a bee in a hive), nor simply a whole unto himself (like a god). Coriolanus’ spiritedness demands that he try to be self-sufficient and stand alone, but he learns that ultimately he is in need of others and is part of a larger whole, his family and his city. Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, feel radically deficient without each other and want to merge into a greater whole, but hesitate when they realize their separate identities will become lost in that whole.18 Obviously the seeds of tragedy lie dormant in this conflict of desires. We have already seen Coriolanus tragically torn between his will to be independent of Rome and his need for a city to serve. Now we see a similar tragic contradiction at the heart of the love story of Antony and Cleopatra.
The mutually contradictory desires Antony and Cleopatra experience are what drive them quite literally in and out of each other’s arms, and help explain why they create obstacles for themselves—tragic obstacles—at just the moment they seem on the verge of achieving erotic fulfillment. Since in one sense their desire is driving them toward mutual annihilation and loss of self, they must work to prevent its total satisfaction just to prolong their enjoyment. Their love thus swings back and forth between moments of union and separation, and, to adapt Volumnia’s words (Coriolanus, I.iii.3–5), they in some respects “freelier rejoice” in each other’s “absence” than in the “embracements” of their “bed where” they “would show most love.” Antony formulates their paradox explicitly:19
Our separation so abides and flies,
That thou residing here, goes yet with me;
And I hence fleeting, here remain with thee.
[I.iii.102–4]
Once one understands that being apart can somehow bring Antony and Cleopatra closer together, one can see why death tempts them as the fitting culmination, though in their eyes not the end, to their story. In talking of their suicides, they stress how death will eventually reunite them, but they also dwell on how for the moment it has opened up a gap between them (IV.xiv.44, 50, V.ii.286). Death somehow seems to allow them to be forever near each other and yet forever remote from each other. Or to put it differently, once dead they can in a sense never be united again, but in another sense they can no longer be separated. Death cannot resolve the paradoxes of their love, but it can fix them in a final form for all time.20
iv
The paradoxical nature of the love of Antony and Cleopatra is emphasized by the aura of uncertainty and even mystery surrounding their deaths. The key to the complication of our response at the end of the play is Cleopatra’s strange conversation with the rustic who brings her the means to her suicide, the “pretty worm of Nilus.” This brief interlude goes well beyond injecting a moment of comic relief into the high tragedy being acted out. With the naiveté of a rustic or the license of a clown, the “rural fellow” goes ahead to cast doubt on the grand proceedings that are about to take place. Beginning ominously by confusing mortality and immortality (V.ii.246–47), he leaves the matter of the effect of the worm’s bite in multiple uncertainty: “those that do die of it do seldom or never recover” (ll.247–48). Here is a man who by virtue of his trade should have knowledge of death, if any man does, but his speech is full of riddles (many of them sexual puns) that conceal whatever wisdom he has won from long acquaintance with the dying (ll.249–50). He talks in paradoxes (ll.251–52), yet his puzzling speech does revolve around a serious question: How can the living ever hope to have knowledge of death, if one must die to find out what it is like? The rustic can only go by a “report o’ th’ worm,” and perhaps he realizes that what people say about suicide may be quite different from the act itself: “he that will believe all that they say, shall never be sav’d by half that they do” (ll.255–57). All that is certain in suicide is the deed itself (“how she died of the biting of” the worm); any report of the subjective experience of suicide (“what pain she felt”) must be taken on faith (ll.253–54).
The rustic’s riddling speech resembles closely the words of the Jailer in Cymbeline, who in a similar situation (talking to Posthumus on the day he is to be hanged) raises the same doubts about knowledge of life after death:
Jailer. Look you, sir, you know not which way you shall go.
Posthumus. Yes indeed do I, fellow.
Jailer. Your death has eyes in’s head then; I have not seen him so pictur’d. You must either be directed by some that take upon them to know, or to take upon yourself that which I am sure you do not know, or jump the after-inquiry on your own peril; and how you shall speed in your journey’s end, I think you’ll never return to tell one.
[V.iv.174–84]
The Jailer perhaps gives a fuller and clearer account of what the rustic in Antony and Cleopatra is trying to say. In any case, the gentle undercurrent of skepticism the rustic introduces moderates any exultation at Cleopatra’s death.21 She thinks the worm is sending her to meet Antony, but all its keeper can pronounce with certainty is that “the worm’s an odd worm” (ll.257–58), and his attempts at expanding this enigmatic statement only add sinister overtones to it (“there is no goodness in the worm,” “it is not worth the feeding”), until finally it sounds as if the worm will do the devil’s work (ll.266–67, 269–70, 272–76). In the end the rustic seems to offer Cleopatra a sort of fifty-fifty chance (ll.255–56, 276–77). The worm cannot itself provide knowledge of death, for one must already possess wisdom in order to make use of it: “Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people” (ll.265–66). The rustic’s knowledge never really goes beyond a thoroughly ambiguous and hence empty tautology: “You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind” (ll.262–63), that is to say, the worm will do what it will do.
The rustic’s wisdom, which seems about as clear “as water is in water,” reminds one of the knowledge of Egyptian mysteries Antony parades before the drunken Lepidus:22
Lepidus. What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?
Antony. It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
Lepidus. What color is it of?
Antony. Of its own color too.
Lepidus. ’Tis a strange serpent.
Antony. ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.
[II.vii.41–49]
Antony shows how easy it is to disguise ignorance as wisdom, especially with men curious about exotic subjects who are willing to take words for facts. As long as the rustic sounds as if he is saying something profound, Cleopatra, like Lepidus, is tempted to assume she is being initiated into a mystery, in her case the mystery of death. But what from one point of view seems infallible, by a simple and perhaps innocent slip of the tongue, is seen to be from another point of view “most falliable” indeed (V.ii.257). The cloud cover that obstructs the prospect of the skies promises to dissolve and lift at the end of Antony and Cleopatra (V.ii.299), offering new vistas to the eyes of man, but what lies beyond “black vesper’s pageants” remains unclear. The mood of uncertainty with which the play closes is expressed in a different context by Macbeth:
function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
[I.iii.140–42]
With its unusually complex texture—its puzzling blend of dreams and visions, riddles and paradoxes—the ending of Antony and Cleopatra underscores the subjectivity of the lovers’ experience. To the moment of their deaths, particularly at the moment of their deaths, their vision remains their own, never fully shared by those around them. Nevertheless, they speak as if they wanted to share their experience with others. If their love cannot be accepted by the world they live in, Antony would like to find or found a new world in which their status as lovers would be recognized by all. In their last moments, their vision has a certain hallucinatory quality, and no doubt Eros is as puzzled by Antony’s attempt to explain his experience of the clouds as Dolabella is by Cleopatra’s narration of her dream. Cleopatra’s last moment is one of pure hallucination, but she tries to make Charmian verify it for her, to confirm her private vision:
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
[V.ii.309–10]
To the extent that Antony and Cleopatra take their private vision with them to the grave, their story remains a tragedy. But to the extent that they do leave behind them believers in the legend of their love, their story becomes a comedy. Moreover, although from one point of view their story, like a tragedy, ends in death, from another, like a comedy, it ends in marriage (IV.xiv.100, V.ii.287). That it why, of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra has the least painful ending. The hero and heroine suffer defeat, but if one can accept their subjective view of events, they achieve a form of triumph. Although they cannot be married in the Roman world, at least as they see it, “there is a world elsewhere.” In the end, however, one is forced to add: for their story to be a comedy, it would have to be a kind of divine comedy.