Love and Tyranny
i
The love of Antony and Cleopatra, as we have seen, cannot be regarded simply as a form of private as opposed to public life. Though their passion leads them away from conventional forms of “publicity” for love, such as a marriage contract, when their experience becomes oppressively subjective, when they seem to be left with nothing but dreams and visions to rely on, they make a partial return to the realm of the public, seeking out at least a small following of believers in their love. But Antony and Cleopatra are not indifferent to public life even in the ordinary sense of the term. Before assuming that they sacrifice politics for love, one ought to consider the straightforward question: “Why don’t Antony and Cleopatra ever consider abdicating in order to be free to love each other as they choose, if their political positions really mean nothing to them at all?” To point to Antony’s request to live “a private man in Athens” (III.xii.15) is not a sufficient answer, for Antony’s suit is joined with a request that Cleopatra retain her crown (III.xii.16–19), and he may be looking to create a new romantic situation of “Queen loves commoner.” In any case, the only point of his request would be to avoid becoming a fugitive, to reserve his right to appear in public. Otherwise he would have no reason to ask Octavius to grant him the right to live in Athens. Presumably if Antony and Cleopatra were willing to give up public life entirely, they could steal away at any time and lose themselves in the mass of humanity the Empire encompasses. We know how easily they blend into the populace of Alexandria (I.iv.18–21).
But one would hate to think of a Mr. and Mrs. Mark Antony living somewhere under an assumed name, hiding from Caesar’s legions. Once having renounced the public world, they would no longer be the Antony and Cleopatra we know, and one can imagine to what bitter recriminations the decision to abdicate would lead. To be out of the reach of the arm of the law, they would have to be out of the sight of the public eye, and if out of sight is out of mind, they might soon be forgotten by even their most devoted followers. Certainly the glamour of their romance would be gone, and they would have to confront the day-to-day necessities of making a living. The only thing that would be left for them if they truly gave up politics for love would be to settle down into the comfortable but dull relationship that they have been trying to avoid all along. The fact that one cannot conceive of Antony and Cleopatra restricted to private life and still retaining their identities suggests that there is something essentially public about the life of love they desire for themselves.
To prove Antony’s indifference to public life, critics usually cite his first speech:
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus—when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,
[On] pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.
[I.i.33–40]
Only by ignoring the second half of this passage can one maintain the customary interpretation of it. In the very speech in which Antony is usually taken to be rejecting his public role, he feels compelled to invoke his political authority, to “bind” the world on “pain of punishment” to acknowledge the uniqueness of his love. To be sure, Antony voices disenchantment with his ordinary political role, but that does not mean he intends to renounce public life. On the contrary, the love he seeks out is itself a form of public life, and is perhaps a substitute for conventional political office, which has lost its attractiveness in the new Roman Empire.1 Antony does not want to be burdened by the responsibilities of politics, but he does covet the advantages that come with high public office, especially the feeling that all eyes are turned on him. Despite his doubts about the worth of Roman politics, Antony will not accept a humble or obscure position in life. Since he cannot do without a sense of being noble, he must revalue nobility, making it a matter of excellence in love, not politics.2
Antony’s “nobleness of life” speech shows that in addition to confirmation of their love, he and Cleopatra seek recognition of it from the world, an acknowledgment that they are the greatest of lovers. Antony and Cleopatra want to excel in love just as the Republican Romans want to excel in war, which explains why, like Coriolanus, they desire the competition of worthy rivals (in their case not Aufidius but Dido and Aeneas). To distinguish themselves from the common run of lovers, Antony and Cleopatra conceive the notion of a noble love, which can take place only between two persons raised above the ordinary necessities of life, hence free from mercenary motives and capable of bounteously expressing their emotions. Antony and Cleopatra want their love to be “liberal” in the classical meaning of the word, the love of free men and women as opposed to that of “mechanic slaves” (V.ii.209). When Antony defines “the nobleness of life” as love, he makes it clear that not just any love at all will do. He immediately adds the qualifier “when such a mutual pair / And such a twain can do’t,”3 excluding ordinary mortals from the ranks of noble lovers. If he gestures to the surrounding court with these words, alluding to the lavish scale on which he and Cleopatra conduct their affair, Antony indicates why such a love is beyond the means of all but a privileged few. For Antony and Cleopatra, love is no more governed by economic considerations than war is for the patricians in Coriolanus, and thus it requires the conventional privilege of wealth. Only a woman born to wealth could bring herself to spend quite as much as Cleopatra does in preparing to receive Antony at Cydnus. For anyone else the temptation to economize on perfume, or at least to hold the line on Cupids and Nereids, would be just too great. In trying to understand fully the love of Antony and Cleopatra, one must not forget that Antony conceives of the opposite of his liberal love as “beggary” (I.i.15), and that he intends by his love to “stand up peerless” (I.i.40).4
The love of Antony and Cleopatra is not unmixed with pride, and the two are not as free of ambition as many critics suppose. At times the love of Antony and Cleopatra seems to be not an alternative to the Roman quest for public eminence, but rather an alternative path to a new kind of public eminence itself. As soon as one realizes that in addition to pure eros, pride is at work in the love of Antony and Cleopatra, one begins to see how extraordinarily complex their relationship is. As we saw in analyzing Republican Rome, pride and eros are ordinarily two separate forces, working against each other and thus moderating each other. But for Antony and Cleopatra pride and eros have become united: since they take pride in their love, their pride only serves to increase the force of eros in their lives. Once Antony and Cleopatra derive their sense of achievement from their status as lovers, they begin to demand a great deal more from love than most men and women do, and they also allow love to assume an importance for them that goes well beyond its usual role. Love of course is the central concern in Cleopatra’s life: she has truly made a career of it, with as many glorious victories to her credit as any Roman legion:
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch; and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow.
[I.v.29–32]
Cleopatra’s achievement in having “a hand that kings / Have lipp’d, and trembled kissing” (II.v.29–30) is perhaps her way of showing that she is somehow above politics, that politicians must bow to her, not she to them. In this sense, far from being nonpolitical, her ambitions are in effect transpolitical: she wants to be able to rule the rulers of Rome.5
Antony has not devoted himself as singlemindedly to a career in love, and does have some conventional military triumphs to his credit. Nevertheless, as the play progresses it becomes clear that Antony has staked his whole sense of his worth as a man on the fact that Cleopatra loves him, for ultimately he chooses her as the only competent judge of his deeds. At times Antony seems to fight for no other reason than to win Cleopatra’s praise, occasionally showing off or bragging in front of her like a schoolboy:
O love,
That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew’st
The royal occupation, thou shouldst see
A workman in’t.
[IV.iv.15–18]6
Antony’s boast conceals a serious doubt, that as he grows older he is losing his capacity for both love and war, a suspicion that can approach the surface only in his moments of greatest self-confidence:
Mine nightingale,
We have beat them to their beds. What, girl, though grey
Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha’ we
A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can
Get goal for goal of youth.
[IV.viii.18–22]
Antony’s consciousness of his age may affect his relationship with Cleopatra deeply. Despite his claim: “Things that are past are done with me” (I.ii.97), he and Cleopatra are all too aware that they approach each other with long and somewhat tarnished histories in love, their record spotted by specific instances of betrayal and surrounded by general suspicions of infidelity.7 The notion of a life of unending infidelity in love is introduced in the play by the barely comic prophecies of a queen who widows one great husband after another (I.ii.26–28) and of a man with a limitless succession of wives, who are apparently unable to satisfy him but somehow manage to cuckold him over and over again nonetheless (I.ii.63–67). With a little imagination, these visions transpose into a “parody” or “nightmare version” of the careers of Cleopatra and Antony in love.8 Perhaps their desperate need to believe they are loyal to each other, evidenced in the readiness with which Antony accepts Cleopatra’s denials of her infidelity,9 is to be traced to their conviction that this love is their last chance to redeem their reputation as lovers, to earn a name for faithfulness, not faithlessness, in love. Antony, for one, does not want his “remembrance” to “suffer ill report” (II.ii.156).
The need of the lovers for each other is in many ways clearer in Antony’s case than Cleopatra’s, for his despair at the thought of her infidelity breaks out with greater force. Antony’s whole world, together with his sense of personal identity, seems to melt away when he thinks Cleopatra has betrayed him (IV.xii.20–29, IV.xiv.1–20). Antony has staked his entire self-conception, his sense of manhood, on his love with Cleopatra, hence on her love for him. In warfare Antony always likes to keep his options open, to leave himself something to fall back upon (III.vii.52–53). As a result, he and his soldiers do not fight with all the fury of men feeling their backs against the wall until it is too late (III.xiii.177–82). But in his love with Cleopatra, Antony has no place to retreat to if he suffers a defeat. Ordinarily a man faced with a setback in love can at least try to make up for it by turning to satisfaction in other areas of his life. But Cleopatra has become involved in all aspects of Antony’s life, and he certainly cannot look to military victories to console him for amatory defeats when his wars have been in the service of his love. Only in love does Antony at last come face to face with real necessity, only in love does he finally experience the true need that calls upon the deepest resources of his soul. Only in love can Antony finally learn what it is to feel “the very heart of loss” (IV.xii.29).
In their effort to achieve independence and preeminence as lovers, Antony and Cleopatra become overwhelmingly dependent on love itself. Love gradually extends its dominion in their lives until it becomes the sole value for them, and hence an unconditional value. According to them, no other value can even be compared to love, and nothing could possibly compensate for its loss. This situation could not occur in the Rome of Coriolanus, with its compartmentalization of life: love is love and war is war, and the one activity is not allowed to run over into the other. The city keeps the activities of its citizens distinct and within their proper bounds, so that no single activity can become the whole of life and absorb the full attention of a citizen, for the city itself claims to be the only true whole. Virgilia does not attempt to become involved in her husband’s life as a warrior but is, as we have seen, content to stay at home while Coriolanus does his fighting. If Virgilia’s respect for the Roman “threshold” (I.iii.75) means she cannot be at the battlefield to give aid and comfort to her husband, it also means that she does not add to his worries when he most needs to have his mind free.
By the time of Julius Caesar, love has evidently begun to increase its role in Roman life. Portia claims the right to share her husband’s state secrets, involving herself in his public affairs to an extent that Virgilia would think presumptuous (Julius Caesar, II.i.280–82, 291–302). Though Brutus may find comfort in unburdening himself of his secrets to his wife (II.i.302–8), he thereby endangers his great enterprise, for Portia almost betrays the conspiracy against Caesar by her suspicious conduct in Act II, scene iv. Refusing to be sequestered within a corner of Brutus’ life, Portia chafes under the limits the Republican regime sets to love:
Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort or limitation.
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
[II.i.282–87]
Portia hits the point precisely: love is in the “suburbs” of Brutus’ life, for Rome is at the center. Portia’s moderate wish to be something more than a domestic companion to her husband is a faint prefiguration of Cleopatra’s immoderate urge to take part in every phase of Antony’s existence, above all, to accompany him right into battle. Cleopatra’s presence might conceivably add something to Antony’s fighting spirit, but it also distracts him from the real business at hand, as Enobarbus warns the Queen:
Your presence needs must puzzle Antony,
Take from his heart, take from his brain, from’s time,
What should not then be spared.
[III.vii.10–12]
But Cleopatra disregards Enobarbus’ warning, for she cannot allow Antony any activity that is not in some way bound up with his love for her. To admit that he had any legitimate interests outside their love would be to acknowledge objects as worthy of Antony’s devotion as she herself. That is why she must transform the battle of Actium into a test of love: it is her way of proving that she is all that really matters to Antony (III.xi.69–71). By contrast, Virgilia is content to share Coriolanus with the city, and would not dream of demanding from him a kind of unconditional surrender to his love for her. Even when she and Volumnia try to talk Coriolanus out of his march on Rome, although at first they couch their appeal in personal terms, it gradually becomes apparent that they are speaking in the name of the city (V.i.73, V.iii.44, 186). One could imagine their argument going no further than this: “You’re right not to care about Rome, Caius Martius, but you ought to care about us, your loved ones. For our sake, and our sake alone, don’t destroy the city. If you really love us, you won’t do this terrible thing.” As such, their appeal would have been a straightforward test of Coriolanus’ love, much like the suit of Menenius that failed so miserably. But Volumnia emphasizes that she and Virgilia are not asking Coriolanus to sacrifice his honor in the name of his love for them; they are there to show him the path to his true honor (V.iii.131–55), to convince him that he needs his native city to preserve his good name intact. They do not want to prove the power they presumably hold over Coriolanus, but rather the power the city of Rome holds, in part of course through them as his Roman family. The notion of an unconditional love is wholly alien to them. Volumnia loves her son only on the condition that he remain the valiant Roman she raised him to be, for she cannot love him as a Volsce (V.iii.178–80). Cleopatra, on the other hand, cannot love Antony as long as he feels any remaining allegiance to the cause of Rome (I.ii.82–83). By making an unconditional demand upon Antony’s devotion at the battle of Actium, she is able to win from him an admission that her command over him is absolute:
Egypt, thou knew’st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings,
And thou should’st [tow] me after. O’er my spirit
[Thy] full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.
[III.xi.56–61]
Cleopatra experiences a feeling of power in love. Using her own metaphor, one might say she is fishing for Antony’s soul (II.v.10–15), and thinks she can reel him in anytime she wants.10 By playing upon Antony’s infinite need for her, she is able to exert a form of rule over him that, in view of her absolute demands upon him, one might call an absolute rule, or, to put it differently, a tyranny. The metaphor of desire as a tyrant is common enough, and Shakespeare often suggests in passing a connection between love and tyranny in his plays.11 But in Antony and Cleopatra the idea that love can become a kind of tyranny is basic. Once the value of love becomes infinite or absolute, refusing its demands becomes impossible, and one might answer Antony: if there’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned, there’s slavery in the love that cannot. A boundless desire plays the same role in a man’s soul that a tyrant plays in the city, overpowering all other desires and making them follow its lead just the way the tyrant crushes all opposition in order to have his own way.12 Cleopatra certainly exerts as strong a hold over Antony as the city of Rome does over any of its citizens, as witness the fact that Antony finds it at least as difficult to leave Cleopatra as Coriolanus does to leave Rome. Even when Antony becomes aware of his bondage to Cleopatra (I.ii.116–17, 128) and wants to “break off” from her, his will falters or his motives are suddenly transformed, and he presents his leaving Egypt as a sign that Cleopatra’s hold over him is increasing, rather than decreasing.13 Antony’s departure only serves as “an honorable trial” to prove his love (I.iii.74–75), for his wars are in Cleopatra’s service and will be governed by her will (I.iii.43–44, 68–71). In the absence of the security provided by the city and its conventions, Antony and Cleopatra are forced to cling to each other with a new and deepened passion. Although their exploration of the subjective world seems like the conquest of a whole new kingdom, it also requires a surrender of self-control to certain forces within their own souls which the ancient city had held in check. Hence their freedom from the city turns into a freedom to become enslaved to each other, under a “benevolent” despotism to be sure, but a despotism nonetheless.
ii
In exploring the relation of love and tyranny in Antony and Cleopatra, one finally realizes how inextricably intertwined the realms of public and private life have become in the world of the play. For if the lovers’ conduct toward each other can be understood as tyrannical in a metaphorical sense, their conduct toward their subjects can be viewed, as we shall see, as tyrannical in the literal sense of the word. Thus one can say that they are governed in their public and private lives by the same principles. Their inability to keep their public and private roles clearly separate is in fact almost a defining characteristic of Antony and Cleopatra. We have already seen that they never make any attempt to keep their love affair strictly private but are instead proud to flaunt it in the public eye. Examination of their conduct as rulers shows that they also make no attempt to prevent private motives from obtruding upon their handling of public affairs. Above all, they allow their private demands and needs to warp their political judgment. Since so much is at stake in their love, it would be remarkable if they could keep their political judgment unclouded by despair when they feel unloved. Moreover, for these monarchs of love, every domestic quarrel takes on the scope of an international incident, since any slight they feel as lovers is magnified into an affront to their dignity as rulers. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that their political authority is not entirely independent of their love, but threatens to crumble away along with it. In Cleopatra’s case, whatever real political power remains to her depends upon her hold over Antony. She is so shaken by the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia that she wants to have Herod beheaded, but she suddenly realizes that if she has lost Antony’s love, she has at the same time lost the power she needs to vent her anger:
That Herod’s head
I’ll have; but how, when Antony is gone
Through whom I might command it?
[III.iii.4–6]
Believing herself unloved is doubly frustrating for Cleopatra because she loses her feeling of power over both Antony and her subjects. Antony’s political authority is not as derivative as Cleopatra’s, for he has battalions of his own. Nevertheless, since his cause has become bound up with the fact that Cleopatra loves him, any signs of infidelity on her part weaken the hold he has over his followers, as Enobarbus observes:
Sir, sir thou art so leaky
That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for
Thy dearest quits thee.
[III.xiii.63–65]
The reverse side of the exhilarating sense of power Antony and Cleopatra feel in love is a frustrating sense of impotence when their love seems threatened.14
If the deepest desire of Antony and Cleopatra were simply to give up politics for love, one would expect them to welcome any loss of power, since that would truly free them from all public obligations. But both Antony and Cleopatra are deeply shaken by the prospect of losing their authority because they derive their sense of dignity from their public eminence. Cleopatra’s self-regard is threatened by the lack of regard others show her in defeat:
What, no more ceremony? See, my women,
Against the blown rose may they stop their nose
That kneel’d unto the buds.
[III.xiii.38–40]
However much Antony may boast of his indifference to political power, when he finds he has lost command, he bitterly regrets that men are no longer at his beck and call:
Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried “Ho!”
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth
And cry, “Your will?”
[III.xiii.90–92]
Antony has particular reason to fear the loss of his political position, given his knowledge of Cleopatra’s special taste for public figures in love.15 Once he no longer seems a worthy successor to Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, perhaps Cleopatra will abandon him; that at least seems to be Antony’s suspicion in Act III, scene xiii, where he begins to wonder whether the change in their fortunes has now made Octavius the more attractive of the two to Cleopatra. Earlier, Antony even worries that his loss of personal preeminence might affect his relationship with Octavia:
If I lose mine honor,
I lose myself; better I were not yours
Than [yours] so branchless.
[III.iv.22–24]
The inability of Antony and Cleopatra to separate their public and private roles makes one complication lead to another in their lives. A threat to their love gives them cause to doubt their political authority (this is particularly true in Cleopatra’s case). By the same token, a threat to their political authority gives them cause to doubt their love (this is particularly true in Antony’s case). For them, insecurity in one area of life quickly spreads to another, an inescapable consequence of their attempt to make their love into the whole of their lives, a whole that turns out to have the shape of a vicious circle. In Act II, scene v, and Act III, scene xiii, where we see first Cleopatra and then Antony experiencing a sense of frustration in both love and politics, we realize how truly vicious this circle can become.
In Act II, scene v, Cleopatra responds to the messenger’s gradual revelation of Antony’s marriage to Octavia with a frantic alternation of moods of benevolence and cruelty:
I’ll set thee in a shower of gold, and hail
Rich pearls upon thee.
Thou shalt be whipt with wire, and stew’d in brine,
Smarting in ling’ring pickle.
[II.v.45–46, 65–66]
What the messenger receives for his errand will bear no relation to his own merits or demerits, but will be strictly in proportion to Cleopatra’s momentary moods, which vary between exultation and despair. Cleopatra will richly reward news to her liking (II.28–30, 68–69), and horribly punish news to her distaste (II.33–35, 73), thereby working to corrupt the basically honest messenger by making it extremely tempting for him to lie and highly imprudent for him to tell the truth. Hence the basic injustice of Cleopatra’s conduct: she sets the messenger an impossible task, to fulfill the contradictory demands of telling her the truth and telling her what she wants to hear, and then punishes him for failing to do what was clearly beyond his capacity (II.100–1). In her wrath, Cleopatra completely ignores the principles of ordinary justice, dismissing all thoughts of the difference between guilt and innocence: “Some innocents scape not the thunderbolt” (1.77). Unspeakable tortures leap to Cleopatra’s lips with frightening ease. When Antony seems to fail her, she begins to feel insecure and must reestablish her self-image as a powerful woman by forcing the poor messenger to grovel before her. His cowardly submission is to make up for what appears to her as Antony’s manly defiance.
The connection between insecurity and the will to lord it over others is even clearer in Antony’s parallel conduct toward Octavius’ ambassador in Act III, scene xiii. Antony tries to shore up the tottering realm of his pride with the prop of Thidias’ humiliation. Antony’s frustration as a lover and as a ruler reaches its peak in this scene, and quickly transforms his usual generosity toward men into an extraordinary cruelty. The more he has cause to doubt his power as a ruler the more he needs assurance of Cleopatra’s love for him, but he finds that the very incident that made him feel his authority was melting away also creates doubts about Cleopatra’s fidelity:
To let a fellow that will take rewards
And say “God quit you!” be familiar with
My playfellow, your hand, this kingly seal
And plighter of high hearts!
[III.xiii.123–26]
Obsessed by the thought of his former strength and current weakness (II.140–47), Antony apparently must prove to himself he still has power over others in the basest way, by having Thidias savagely whipped. Antony wants to see him whimper:
Whip him, fellows,
Till like a boy you see him cringe his face,
And whine aloud for mercy.
[III.xiii.99–101]
In his fury, Antony becomes completely indifferent to the welfare of his old subject Hipparchus, whom Octavius now has in his camp:
If he mislike
My speech and what is done, tell him he has
Hipparchus, my enfranched bondman, whom
He may at pleasure whip, or hang, or torture,
As he shall like, to quit me. Urge it thou.
[III.xiii.147–51]
Antony has evidently become blind to any normal standards of human accountability: he punishes Thidias for what is Octavius’ responsibility, while Hipparchus is to be punished for what Antony himself has done.
The way Cleopatra treats the messenger in Act II, scene v, is almost a parody of what one expects from a tyrant, indeed a caricature of an Oriental despot; Antony’s treatment of Thidias is not at all amusing, but it is equally tyrannical. Antony and Cleopatra are as moody in rule as they are in love. As a lover, Cleopatra will not allow herself to be governed by Antony’s moods but wants instead to make him accommodate himself to hers (I.iii.3–10). She realizes that this is the way to exert a form of mastery over Antony, and the principle by which she rules in love is the same by which she—and Antony—rule in politics. They are both constantly trying to make their subjects’ moods correspond to their own, as is evident if one compares Act IV, scene ii, with Act IV, scene viii. Since Antony’s soldiers “make their looks by his” (I.v.56), they become infected with the frantic alternation of his moods:
Antony
Is valiant, and dejected, and by starts
His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear
Of what he has, and has not.
[IV.xii.6–9]
In particular, when Antony and Cleopatra feel miserable as lovers they are not averse to using their political power to spread the misery around among their subordinates. At times they seem to care about the happiness of their subjects only when it is required for their own, to bolster up their faltering spirits (III.xiii. 182–90), and occasionally they talk as if they did not care at all what happened to their subjects.16 They would never call out in public for the destruction of Rome and Egypt if they were at all concerned about accommodating themselves to ordinary notions of how rulers should behave.
In this respect, their conduct is in sharp contrast to that of Octavius, who seems acutely sensitive to the problem of laying an adequate foundation for his rule in a world in which old forms of political legitimacy have lost their force. Octavius is always careful to give a good account of himself, to offer reasons for his political decisions and to justify publicly his course of action, especially the wars he conducts against Antony:17
Go with me to my tent, where you shall see
How hardly I was drawn into this war,
How calm and gentle I proceeded still
In all my writings. Go with me, and see
What I can show in this.
[V.i.73–77]
One might object that Octavius’ regard for public opinion is all “show” or sham, that he merely wants to “let the world see / His nobleness well acted” (V.ii.44–45) and does not care at all for justice in itself. But Octavius’ concern for public justification is not immaterial, since it causes him to act moderately and prudently as a ruler, and therefore, in a limited but significant sense, justly.
By contrast, Antony proceeds as if he had no need to justify himself to anyone, except perhaps Cleopatra, and thus he is tempted into acting immoderately and imprudently as a ruler, and, in a basic sense, unjustly. The most important decision he makes as a commander is to fight the battle of Actium at sea. When asked to explain why he is doing exactly what Octavius wants him to do, he replies curtly: “For that he dares us to’t” (III.vii.29). Antony will not explain why fighting Octavius is necessary or why doing so at sea is a rational course of action. He feels he has said enough if he can show that his personal honor has been challenged. Because he is unwilling to consider the objections raised by his followers, Antony dangerously overestimates his capabilities (III.vii.49–53). Canidius and Enobarbus advance weighty reasons against the decision Antony has made (II.30–48), and one of his “worthy” soldiers points out that in fighting at sea Antony is going against his own tradition (II.61–66). But in politics, as in love, Antony scorns both prudential reasons and custom. He refuses to give an account of himself, simply keeps on repeating his original decision, and finally puts an end to all further discussion. The sum total of his arguments against his counselors amounts to no more than this:
By sea, by sea.
. . . . .
I’ll fight at sea.
. . . . .
Well, well, away!
[III.vii.40, 48, 66]
Antony’s arbitrariness as a commander serves as a love-test of sorts for his soldiers, who must obey his commands no matter how surprising or even absurd they seem in the circumstances. Antony assures that whatever loyalty his men have for him will be the result not of habit or prudence, but of pure faith in him as a leader. But if his rule is as unconditional as his love, it is also as insecure, for his arbitrariness works to drive even his most loyal followers to desert him (III.xiii.194–200).18
What unites in principle the love and rule of Antony and Cleopatra is a certain lack of moderation or prudence, based on a contempt for whatever seems reasonable or traditional to ordinary men. More specifically, the element common to their love and rule is an attempt to do without law. We have already seen that their personal relationship can be understood as at best a marriage outside the law, and the clearest definition of tyranny is “rule without law,” first in the sense of rule established illegally, but more importantly in the sense of arbitrary rule, that is, rule according to the sovereign’s personal will and not according to publicly promulgated statutes.19 It is characteristic of Antony and Cleopatra as rulers that, unlike even the revolutionary tribunes in Coriolanus, they never appeal to law or custom in making or announcing their decisions.20 Laws would circumscribe their authority, and one may see in their lawlessness as rulers the same drive to go beyond all limits that manifests itself in their love. Their rule is, so to speak, as unconventional as their love, as uniquely their own and as free of external constraints. In public as in private life Antony and Cleopatra never do the expected thing, as if they were as unwilling to issue a hackneyed command as they are to give a trite pledge of love. Recalling that the highest claim that can be made for Cleopatra is that “custom” cannot “stale her infinite variety,” one might say that the guiding principle of Antony and Cleopatra in both public and private life is open hostility to stale custom.
Once we see the rule of Antony and Cleopatra as the mirror image of their love, we can understand why judgments concerning their characters diverge so widely. For what appears quite positive from the perspective of private life is not so attractive when viewed from the perspective of public. The same absoluteness that makes Antony and Cleopatra look glorious as lovers makes them appear despotic as rulers, even though they pursue the same goal in rule that they do in love, namely, to bring reality into accord with their own desires, to have their world exactly the way they want it, without compromise. The tyrant lives in a private universe just as the lover does, for the tyrant is as likely to substitute illusions for reality when he is surrounded by sycophants and flatterers. As is clear from the scenes of Cleopatra with her messenger, tyrannical behavior shields her from unwelcome truths and leaves her in a world built up by her own hopes and wishes. After the beating the messenger receives in Act II, scene v, he returns in Act III, scene iii, apparently having learned how to adapt his speech to the queen’s vanity. He simply lets her construct in her mind’s eye as unflattering a portrait as she likes of Octavia, his “good judgment” (III.iii.25) affording a spurious confirmation of Cleopatra’s fantasies. Cleopatra is clearly living in a dream world in this scene, indulging herself in thoughts of her supremacy as a woman, but because the messenger and Charmian spring forward to second her every observation, she remains unaware of the subjectivity of her vision.
Although we might be tempted to allow Cleopatra to enjoy her pleasant (and essentially valid) thoughts of her power as a woman, we react differently when she overestimates her power as a monarch: “I have sixty sails, Caesar none better” (III.vii.49). The same sort of vanity is at work here, but it has dangerous consequences, tempting Cleopatra (and through her, Antony) into a foolhardy battle. Somehow the fantasies of a ruler seem less innocent than those of a lover, and Antony and Cleopatra cannot lay claim to the self-defense of Donne’s lover in “The Canonization”:
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What merchants ships have my sighs drown’d?
Unlike purely private lovers, Antony and Cleopatra do not live in a self-contained world of harmless metaphor. On the contrary, they try to use the real world as a metaphor for their love, and Antony ends up with a “drown’d ship” or two on his conscience. In short, a trait that seems acceptable in a lover—faithfulness to his desires—is unacceptable in a ruler, where the same trait appears as selfishness, arbitrariness, and willful blindness to reality. Whether one allows one’s evaluation of the rule of Antony and Cleopatra to color one’s view of their love depends on whether one chooses to interpret their love story in light of their tendency as rulers to live in a world of flattering illusions.
iii
We have seen that, rather than sacrificing public for private life, Antony and Cleopatra give up security for the excitement and novelty of going their own way, a description that fits their conduct both as rulers and as lovers. Hence Enobarbus’ criticism of Antony’s military strategy at Actium expresses the principle of his strategy in love as well:
[you] quite forgo
The way which promises assurance, and
Give up yourself merely to chance and hazard
From firm security.
[III.vii.45–48]
This decision to live dangerously, to sail into uncharted seas, is what is fundamentally heroic about Antony and Cleopatra, for it represents a forthright response to the fundamental fact of their world, the dissolution of the ancient city and the resulting hollowness of old conventions and traditional values. In this sense, to understand the special case of Antony and Cleopatra is to take a major step toward understanding life in general under the Imperial regime. For the insecurity the lovers encounter in their attempt to live without the support of convention, the difficulty of validating subjective modes of thought and feeling, is the characteristic problem of life in the Empire. It is, for example, precisely the dilemma facing Enobarbus, who, with the city gone, is left entirely on his own to answer the difficult question: What is loyalty and what is treason? He clearly cannot appeal to any authority when his whole problem is deciding what authority he should accept. How the characters in Antony and Cleopatra react to this feeling of being at sea, of suddenly being without guidance in a morally perplexing world of divided allegiances, seems to be the only true test of heroic fortitude remaining to them.
Enobarbus for one allows himself to be destroyed by his inability to find anything he can believe in. Other characters, foremost among them Octavius, seem content with the changed terms of life in the Empire, lowering their sights and following a prudent course of moderation. Satisfied with being “the universal landlord” (III.xiii.72), the unheroic administrator of an imperial bureaucracy that could just as well operate without him (III.i.16–17, III.xi.38–40, III.xiii.22–25), Octavius is apparently willing to forgo the old Roman sense of personal preeminence, in particular the heroism of being willing to fight to the death for mastery (III.xiii.29–31, IV. i.3–6, IV.ii.1–4). Only Antony and Cleopatra struggle against the leveling effects of the Imperial regime (IV.xv.65–68), fighting to remain above the common run of men, whose aspirations do not exceed “sleep and feeding” (II.i.26, V. ii.187). Since Antony and Cleopatra are unable to find values in traditional sources, they are forced to create values for themselves.21 With the Empire no longer able to supply its citizens with the sense of wholeness the Republic provided, Antony and Cleopatra try, as we have seen, to make their love into the whole of their lives, to use their own passion as a narrower but more intense focus for the meaning of their existence. Hence of all the characters in the play they are the only ones who can be said to respond heroically to the challenge presented by the dissolution of the Republican regime. No longer provided with a definition of nobility, they do not give up the pursuit of nobility out of bewilderment or complacency, but try to find a new path to nobility, beyond the city’s borders, however dangerous that search proves to be.
Viewed in this light, the story of Antony and Cleopatra reveals its inner unity with that of Coriolanus. In taking the uncharted sea as their element and seeking out “new heaven, new earth,” Antony and Cleopatra resemble Coriolanus setting out alone from the gates of Rome in hopes of finding “a world elsewhere.” In trying to live without the city, all three exhibit the same pride and daring, the same urge to transcend the conventional limits of humanity. Hence Antony and Cleopatra are characterized by the same pattern of god-beast imagery we observed in Coriolanus. On the divine level, Antony plays the roles of Mars and Jove, while Cleopatra appears as Venus and Isis. On the bestial level, Antony is generally associated with horses, and Cleopatra most frequently with serpents, although occasionally the two turn up in more curious metaphoric garb, Cleopatra, for example, compared to “a cow in June”22 and Antony to a “doting mallard” (III.x.14, 19). Cleopatra neatly sums up the double perspective in the imagery when she says of Antony: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars” (II.v.116–17).
The god-beast imagery in Antony and Cleopatra has the same significance it does in Coriolanus: it reflects the new possibilities that have opened up in the world of the play to rise above or sink below the ordinary human level, possibilities facing all men, however, and not just someone like Coriolanus, banished from his native city. For the world of Antony and Cleopatra is essentially cityless from the beginning, and exile has become the basic human condition, as the characters find themselves displaced and disoriented in a new order. “Illrooted” in shifting soil and “quicksands,” they sometimes feel as if “the least wind i’ th’ world will blow them down” (II.vii.2–3, 59). In a moment of defeat, Antony gives voice to the feelings of confusion that are never far from the surface in the play:
I am so lated in the world, that I
Have lost my way for ever.
[III.xi.3–4]
Antony’s bewilderment, here and elsewhere, reminds us that the absence of boundaries implies the absence of guideposts. The freedom from the restrictive world of the ancient city the Romans experience when the Republic dissolves is thoroughly problematic: boundlessness is also rootlessness, and if the liberation of eros creates new opportunities, it also closes off certain old ones and brings new difficulties in its wake. Somehow the independence that makes for an intoxicating spectacle in the case of Antony and Cleopatra provides a sobering sight in that of Enobarbus. Finding a new source of nobility is difficult enough for Antony and Cleopatra; for those who lack the imaginative resources necessary to forge a private world in accord with their own desires, the public world of the Empire becomes desolate indeed. If the dissolution of the Republic cannot be said to be an unequivocal gain, then one understands why the situation of Shakespeare’s Romans is fundamentally tragic. While the Republican regime exists, it works to check their aspirations, but once it dissolves, they are no longer sure what to aspire to. To put it another way, the Romans, at least the greatest of them, chafe under the regime’s restraints or even rebel against them, but if successful in breaking out of the city’s control, they find they have difficulties living without its guidance. In that sense, Coriolanus’ story reveals most clearly the dilemma of Shakespeare’s Romans: Coriolanus finds he cannot live within the city, but he finds he cannot live without it either.23
It is to achieve this perspective on the Roman plays that one must read Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra as companion pieces. If one read Coriolanus alone, one might wonder what could be positive about the restrictive nature of the ancient city. By the same token, if one read Antony and Cleopatra alone, one might accept as a given the hollowness of political life in the play, and not consider whether alternative regimes might be possible, in which politics would nourish the public spiritedness of men. The two plays are therefore complementary, since the one helps to define what is lacking in the world of the other. The Rome of Coriolanus curbs its citizens in their aspirations, but at least it provides them a home, giving their lives meaning in the context of the city. The Rome of Antony and Cleopatra permits its characters their “immortal longings,” but by their very nature these longings can no longer be satisfied within this world, and force the characters to seek out a world beyond. Either Rome, Republic or Empire, is potentially tragic in the disparity between human aspirations and the reality they encounter. Ultimately the source of tragedy in Rome can be traced to the fact that the Republic seems to offer men nobility only at the price of wisdom and self-knowledge, while the Empire offers freedom in private life only at the price of a lasting and meaningful public context for nobility. Reading Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra in light of each other, one comes away from Shakespeare’s Rome with the impression of a city great because of the kinds of human greatness it fosters, and yet tragically at odds with the full and independent development of that greatness.
In the end, however much one may gain from treating Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra as companion pieces, one cannot escape the fact that the plays make entirely different impressions on almost all readers. One rarely finds a critic who even attributes to the two the same level of artistic achievement.24 At the moment, Coriolanus is generally discussed in the shadow of Antony and Cleopatra, like a well-formed but plain child who must be kept from pushing his way into the spotlight with a more famous and handsome brother. One quality that apparently elevates Antony and Cleopatra above Coriolanus in the minds of most critics is that the issues in the play seem broader in scope and less partisan in nature, reaching far beyond the rather mundane disputes of patricians and plebeians. However, instead of regarding Antony and Cleopatra as one of Shakespeare’s wide-ranging works, in opposition to the “narrowly conceived” Coriolanus, we can view the universal character of the former as the complement to the parochial character of the latter. It is above all the cosmopolitan setting of Antony and Cleopatra that is responsible for the impression of universality the play makes, and this expansiveness is but the reverse side of Coriolanus’ restriction to the narrow horizons of a single polis. Both plays revolve around the same issue, namely, what is meant by being bounded by the city and what is meant by being free of it, or, alternatively phrased, what is meant by being rooted in the city and what is meant by being uprooted from it. Though Coriolanus seems to focus on man confined within the city, the play does open up in the direction of universality with the hero’s attempt to leave Rome. Similarly, though Antony and Cleopatra ranges all over the Mediterranean world, it gradually narrows its scope to the confines of a single tomb, as the lovers seek a stable refuge within their rootless cosmopolitan life.25 The plays thus approach from different angles the one problem of the relationship of the city and man. And in revealing the potentially tragic nature of this relationship, the tension between the heroic character and the political community, the two Roman plays provide a profound clue to the nature of Shakespearean tragedy in general.