[In the following essay, Rozett compares the comic elements in the endings of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare more successfully dramatized the comic factors of a tragic situation.]

In tragedies of love, as distinct from tragedies in which love is made subordinate to revenge, ambition, or some other emotion, the two lovers theoretically have equal claims on the role normally reserved for a single protagonist. In the Shakespeare canon this equal claim is signaled by the title: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and, if one wishes to include a play that is not generically a tragedy, Troilus and Cressida. Although love tragedy, broadly defined, was eventually to become a popular form on the Jacobean stage, the genre was a new one when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1594 or 1595. As Clifford Leech observes, until Romeo and Juliet appeared, love on the public stage seems to have been solely an element in comedy or in those romantic plays which Sidney mocked in his Apology for Poetry.¹ In choosing the well-known Romeo and Juliet legend for his first tragedy of love, Shakespeare either stumbled upon or deliberately sought out a solution to the major problem inherent in the two-protagonist tragedy: that of orchestrating an ending in which two characters separately yet jointly undergo tragic downfalls and deaths. What particularly interests me about the pattern of events with which Romeo and Juliet ends is that Shakespeare used it again, several years later, in Antony and Cleopatra. Both love tragedies conclude with a tragic sequence consisting of the feigned death of the heroine, followed by the suicide of the lover, then the heroine's "resurrection," and finally, a second suicide. This pattern confers upon each of the four title characters a role characteristic of the tragic protagonist—that of causing the death of another. Each lover indirectly and inadvertently brings about the death of the beloved, and each dies nobly by his or her own hand, believing that death is preferable to life without the beloved.

Tragic as such endings are, they also function as resolutions to dramatic structures exhibiting a number of comic traits. As critics have frequently observed, Shakespeare mingles comedy and tragedy in many of his plays. But what makes Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra unusual among Shakespearean tragedies is the way the principal characters' identities as lovers shape the action and determine the denouement. As love stories in which women share the protagonist's role with men, moreover, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra give to their heroines a prominence that links them more closely with the women of the comedies than with the women of the tragedies. Shakespeare places Romeo and Juliet, and to a lesser extent Antony and Cleopatra, in typically comic situations: both sets of lovers must overcome social and political obstacles to be united; both are surrounded by variations on comic character types who contribute to the complications in the love plot; and both entangle themselves in tragic renditions of the pattern of misunderstanding and confusion leading to clarification and reunion so prevalent in Shakespeare's romantic comedies. While some of these comic elements are present in Shakespeare's other tragedies, most notably Hamlet and Othello, the love tragedies conclude very differently from the tragedies that center upon isolated single protagonists. Both Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra end with a resounding affirmation of the power of love to resolve differences and elevate the human spirit, leaving the audience feeling that what they have just experienced is not altogether tragedy.²

Notwithstanding these similarities, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are very different plays in respect to plot, tone, and characterization. What the differences—and the similarities—reveal about Shakespeare's use of comic strategies in tragic contexts will be the main focus of this essay. In particular, I wish to examine the comic structures implicit in the double suicides, which in both plays turn upon essentially comic acts of trickery. In comparing the two endings, I hope to show that Shakespeare had become more comfortable with the comic aspects of a tragic situation by the time he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, and that he more successfully exploited the comic possibilities he found in his source.

I

By the time Shakespeare discovered it in the 1590s, the Romeo and Juliet story already had a long history. Arthur Brooke's long poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet," first published in 1562, was sufficiently popular that Tottell reprinted it in 1582 and it was reissued again in 1587. Brooke based his poem on Boiastuau's French adaptation of an Italian novella by Bandello, which in turn was an adaptation of da Porto's version of the story, published in 1530. The device of the sleeping potion goes back much further, however, to the Ephesiaca of Xenephon of Ephesus (fifth century A.D.), in which the heroine's feigned death is one of a string of escapades, rather than the culminating event leading to tragedy.³

As the history of drama reveals, the dangerous adventure of feigned death and promised resurrection was one of the oldest and most popular comic traditions on the English stage. The resurrection of a seemingly dead character was the central event in the mummers plays, for example, which celebrated the miracle of seasonal renewal by dramatizing the death of the old year and the birth of the new. And once the drama ceased to be so closely linked to religious ritual, the resurrection motif continued to appear in comic plots. As an ironic reversal of expectations, it constituted a moment of festive triumph over the inevitable exigencies of time and death, for characters and audience alike.⁴

Shakespeare used the device of the heroine's feigned or reported death and subsequent reappearance in five of his comedies and romances: Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. Each time, the play concludes with a reunion of the married or betrothed couple.⁵ In every case the heroine's feigned death is part of a sequence of events that tests her virtue and endurance. Even when much of the action occurs off-stage, she generally emerges as a strong (or at least stronger) character who overcomes adversity and upholds the play's comic values—perseverance, loyalty, and the ability to forgive. Frequently assisted by friends who help devise the deception, she engages in an act of trickery that is intrinsically comic. Her false death is a form of disguise, misleading the lover or husband about her identity and serving as a trap (All's Well) or a penance (Much Ado, The Winter's Tale) that is curative or corrective in typically comic fashion. Her discovery of her true identity may take the form of an unmasking (Much Ado), a return from afar (Pericles), or a more elaborate enactment of resurrection (The Winter's Tale). In the romances, in particular, it is one of the many revelations and discoveries with which the play ends.

In nearly all of Shakespeare's comic renditions of the false death and resurrection motif, timing is an essential element. The comic characters suffer temporary setbacks and mishaps due to accidents of timing, but ultimately good fortune, assisted by the manipulative skills of the stage manager character, brings events to a satisfying conclusion. In his discussion of "chance" or "accident" in Shakespearean Tragedy, A. C. Bradley observes that while such occurrences have a role in most of the tragedies, Shakespeare "really uses it [chance or accident] very sparingly," since "any large admission of chance into the tragic sequence would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe." Bradley adds in a footnote that comedy is quite different, for there "the tricks played by chance often form a principal part of the comic action."⁶ The final scenes of Romeo and Juliet, although tragic in outcome, are comic by nature inasmuch as everything hinges on accidents of timing. Capulet's unreasonable insistence on an early marriage date, the wholly unprepared-for plague which prevents Romeo from receiving Friar Laurence's letter, and the Friar's tardy arrival at the tomb are all examples of timing gone awry, as is the way Juliet awakens a mere twenty-five lines after Romeo dies, an interval so ironically brief as to be reminiscent of the comic near misses in A Comedy of Errors.⁷ Not all of these accidents are part of the Romeo and Juliet story in its original form. The da Porto and Bandello versions had kept Romeo alive until Juliet awoke, but Shakespeare followed the sequence introduced by Boiastuau and retained by Brooke, whose narrative draws attention to timing with the line "an houre too late fayre Juliet awaked out of siepe."⁸ Shakespeare's awareness of the comic aspect of this kind of accidental event becomes all too evident when one compares Romeo and Juliet with its slapstick parody, the Pyramus and Thisby play in A Midsummer Night's Dream. There the arbitrary and unlikely presence of the lion, the misleading evidence provided by the bloodied scarf (a case of inadvertent trickery), and the speed with which Pyramus dispatches himself all contribute to the comic effect of the tedious and mirthful tragedy.

The basic situation Shakespeare found in Brooke's poem contained traditionally comic character types whose relationships to one another were at least potentially comic: the young lovers, the obdurate father, the loquacious and devoted Nurse, and the wise and manipulative Friar. In writing Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare successfully grafted onto Brooke's narrative some of the most effective comic strategies of the early comedies: practical joking, bawdy wordplay, flights of poetic fancy, teasing, and comic testing. Most of these elements stand apart from the forward progress of the plot, however, consisting as they do of humorous interludes focused on secondary characters. Generally these comic moments are designed to elicit laughter rather than delight, to use Sidney's distinction in An Apology for Poetry.⁹ Brooke's poem does, interestingly enough, introduce and then reject one comic idea that Shakespeare would develop elsewhere. Brooke's Juliet responds to the prospect of Romeus' exile by offering to disguise herself as a servant and accompany him. Romeus dismisses this suggestion as the counsel of "rashe hastiness and wrath" and advises her to obey "the lore of reasons skill" and await the change of inconstant Fortune in Verona (Bullough, I, 327-28). In omitting this exchange, Shakespeare quite wisely chooses not to mention a comic possibility that, if entertained, might weaken whatever tragic inevitability the ending possesses. He also emphasizes Romeo's passivity and immaturity; rather than giving advice, Romeo succumbs to despair and must be counseled by Friar Laurence and the Nurse. Juliet is similarly dependent on the Friar and the Nurse, although unlike Romeo she has some of the comic heroine's strength of character and ability to take charge of the situation in which she finds herself. This is evident early in the play, when she forthrightly cuts off Romeo's elaborate vows ("O, swear not by the moon . . .") and expeditiously directs the discourse to the matter of marriage, the traditionally comic outcome of honorable love affairs. This potential strength of character is overshadowed, however, by her growing dependency on the Friar.

The lovers' frequent consultations with the Friar have very few counterparts in Shakespearean comedy; in the comic world the heroes and heroines are capable, by and large, of bringing about a festive ending with little or no assistance (Measure for Measure is a striking exception). The Friar is nevertheless an intrinsically comic character type, with analogues in those comedies and romances which employ the false death and resurrection motif. Like his counterparts in Much Ado or The Winter's Tale, the Friar has a plan to extricate the heroine from the disastrous events which have suddenly disrupted her life; unlike his counterparts, however, he proves to be an ineffectual manipulator, and certainly no match for Fortune, which works against the star-crossed lovers at every turn. In a variety of ways, Shakespeare makes us realize that, notwithstanding our desire to believe in Friar Laurence's ability to set everything right, the play has fixed its course toward a tragic outcome.

One way in which Shakespeare does this is through comedy; unlike Brooke, whose Friar is an unambiguous repository of wisdom, Shakespeare makes his Friar ever so slightly pompous in his first scene (II.iii), displaying some of the characteristics of comic old men with his penchant for aphoristic pronouncements. The Friar's final line in the scene, "Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast," reveals him to be utterly out of step with the rest of the characters in this fast-moving play, and he is sometimes played as a doddering old man trying unsuccessfully to impose his ways on others. Although we do not develop the kind of contempt toward the Friar that we feel toward a character like Polonius, we remain aware that he never succeeds in transcending his comic origins, even in his most sensible and prudent moments. Indeed, part of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet stems from the fact that the sensible and prudent have no place in a world of impetuous and passionate creatures.

Shakespeare continues to use comic strategies in Romeo and Juliet until the very end of the play, even though, according to the laws of tragedy, a comic resolution becomes impossible once Tybalt and Mercutio are dead, just as, once Hamlet kills Polonius, he is doomed to die.¹⁰ The play's depiction of the other members of the older generation—the Capulets and the Nurse—offers particularly good examples of the way Shakespeare transformed a tragically ironic error in perception into a series of incidents that reveal the comic blindness and folly of characters in positions of authority. In Brooke's poem, there is no mention of a match between Juliet and Paris until after Tybalt's death, when Lady Capulet, who is profoundly distressed by her daughter's inexplicably prolonged grief, stumbles upon the notion that Juliet envies her married friends and would be revived in spirit by the prospect of a husband. Juliet fiercely resists her mother's solution, whereupon Lady Capulet involves her husband, a "testy old man," as Brooke calls him, who announces that he has promised Juliet to County Paris and that he will marry Juliet to the County on "Wensday next" (Bullough, I, 335-36). Shakespeare's Capulet is testy like his predecessor, but he is also comically foolish in speech and manner, so much so that the Nurse scolds him to his face and Lady Capulet tells him he is "too hot." Betrayed by her parents, Juliet turns to the Nurse for "comfort" and "counsel." In one of the most interesting additions he makes to his source, Shakespeare has the Nurse abandon Juliet as well. In the spirit of practical accommodation to the inevitable, the Nurse advises Juliet to marry the County. Her homely comparison of the two men ("Romeo's a dishclout to him") is a daring use of comic language in a situation that is inherently tragic (III.v.175-219).¹¹ Juliet's expectations of loyalty and support—and the audience's similar expectations—are cruelly overturned and Juliet is truly alone.

In a comedy this challenge posed by Juliet's dilemma would rouse the heroine to new heights of ingenuity. In the Romeo and Juliet story, however, it reduces Juliet to suicidal desperation, and she places herself in the hands of the Friar. Surrounded by preparations for the marriage festivities with which comedies so often end, Juliet has a tragic scene that, perhaps more than any other part of the play, anticipates moments of decision in the later tragedies. Although he follows Brooke quite closely in staging Juliet's "dismal scene," Shakespeare introduces an element of doubt that brings his heroine closer to tragedy than her predecessor. Whereas Brooke's Juliet worries about becoming "the peoples tale and laughing stocke" (p. 346) if the potion fails to work, Shakespeare's Juliet experiences deeper fears: she wonders if the Friar is trying to kill her to save himself from disgrace. This suspicion parallels Juliet's disillusionment with the Nurse, further unsettling the certainties she has relied on up to this point. For a moment, she experiences a fear of betrayal, followed by a horrifying vision of madness and loss of control brought on by the sights and sounds of the corpse-ridden tomb. Through an extreme act of will, she rouses herself from these nightmare imaginings and ends her speech with a desperate and courageous version of a festive toast: "Romeo! Here's drink—I drink to thee" (IV.iii.58).

The aftermath of Juliet's apparent "death" returns us to the comic world. The preparations for the feast, the arrival of the bridegroom, and the comic business between Peter and the musicians are briefly interrupted by fifty lines of stiff and formal lamentation, concluding in the Friar's moralizing speech offering the traditional consolation that Juliet is better off in heaven. Very few of the 400 lines that intervene between Juliet's soliloquy and Romeo's death focus on Romeo's feelings about her; instead the stage is given over to other kinds of business—the purchase of the poison, the return of Friar John, the fight between Romeo and Paris. Romeo's "mistake" thus becomes part of a series of comic errors: he is misled by his well-meaning servant, betrayed by his own impatience and self-pity, and like the other, less perceptive characters, unable to see through Juliet's disguise.

As events rush toward their inevitable conclusion, the audience acquires the kind of discrepant awareness—focused on facts the characters do not know—which makes the endings of Hamlet and Othello ironic. Also similar to the later tragedies is the accumulation of deaths. In adding the death of Paris to the story he received from his source, Shakespeare makes Romeo's subsequent suicide even more tragically inevitable. Although Paris has not engaged our sympathy to any great degree, we feel a pang of regret that he must die needlessly, caught up in a tragedy of nature of which he is entirely ignorant. Shakespeare explicitly contrasts Paris, for whom there will be no lovers' union, however tragic, with Romeo, who finally approaches the wife he parted from in Act III, scene v. His last speech is a celebration of Juliet's beauty, transforming death into an amorous lover who sucks the honey of Juliet's breath and keeps her as his paramour. Romeo's directions to himself ("Eyes, look your last! / Arms take your last embrace . . .") make it seem as if he is playing a role, like the actors in the Pyramus and Thisby play whose valedictories his speech curiously resembles.¹² Like Juliet, Romeo consumes his potion with a toast, and dies immediately. When Juliet awakens, she bravely dismisses the Friar, whose fearfulness is a comic characteristic inasmuch as it causes the audience to feel scornful toward him. She then turns to her husband and chides him: "O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop / To help me after?" (V.iii.163-64). Then she unhesitantly embraces death with "a cheerful alacrity" (to use Leonora Brodwin's words)¹³ that looks forward to Cleopatra's final moments.

Unlike Cleopatra's last scene, however, Juliet's dying speech is so brief that it is nearly lost in the confusion of the watchmen's arrival. As the stage fills up, the lovers are quickly relegated to the background, for Shakespeare has left himself a lot of explaining to do. This kind of fifth act, filled with the unraveling of evidence, lengthy revelations, and acts of forgiveness, is more common to comedy and romance than to tragedy.¹⁴ The audience's attention is focused on the two families, whose recognition of the costly lessons their children's deaths have taught them overshadows the lovers' union in death.¹⁵ In this respect the ending anticipates the mature tragedies, where the survivors prepare to carry on the business of living and preside over a restored body politic. Any resemblance to comedy the ending retains is due largely to the long-awaited reconciliation which culminates in celebratory tokens of concord, the golden statues of Romeo and Juliet.

II

The deaths of the lovers in Antony and Cleopatra seem to occupy a much larger part of the play than do those in Romeo and Juliet; indeed, critics have frequently commented upon the drawn-out sequence of events that begins with Antony's resolution to die in IV.xiv and ends some 565 lines later with Cleopatra's death and Octavius' final speech.¹⁶ Antony and Cleopatra are simultaneously legendary characters of heroic proportions and aging lovers whose flaws and follies invite a critical appraisal more proper to satiric comedy than to romantic tragedy. The play's prolonged ending has the extraordinary effect of focusing our attention on the lovers' grandeur while reminding us repeatedly of their comic fallibility. At the end, when their greatness transcends their failings, the final effect is exhilarating; we share in their triumph over Caesar and join Cleopatra in celebrating a love that defies time and circumstance. And yet we cannot altogether forget the betrayals, the self-deluding posturing, and the violent outbursts that have preceded the lovers' union in death.

Shakespeare's use of the device of the reported death in Antony and Cleopatra is strongly reminiscent of the comedies. Whereas in Romeo and Juliet the heroine's false death is a test of her own courage and devotion, the reported deaths in Much Ado, All's Well and Measure for Measure each represent a deliberate act of trickery contrived against a character who has wronged the heroine. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's adaptation of North's Plutarch emphasizes the comic aspects of the situation, although like North, Shakespeare is ambiguous about the issue of betrayal. Plutarch's description of the decisive battle comes immediately after the mysterious account of the music signaling Hercules' departure. Plutarch observes that "it seemed that this dance went through the city unto the gate that opened to the enemies, and that all the troop that made this noise they heard went out of the city at that gate." This apparent act of abandonment is then repeated in the battle scene: when Antony's galleys approached the Roman ones, according to Plutarch, "they first saluted Caesar's men, and then Caesar's men re-saluted them also, and of two armies made but one, and then did all together row toward the city." Seeing this, Antonius "fled into the city, crying out that Cleopatra had betrayed him unto them with whom he had made war for her sake." Neither in Plutarch nor in Shakespeare is there any indication that Cleopatra actually did so, however. Indeed, the succession of defections that precedes this scene in the play could lead the audience to conclude that she had nothing to do with this final betrayal. Our uncertainty about Cleopatra's behavior qualifies our sympathy for Antony, and leads us to wonder whether he is, indeed, "more mad / Than Telamon for his shield" (IV.xiii.1-2). North reports that Cleopatra fled into her tomb and "sent unto Antonius to tell him that she was dead."¹⁷ Shakespeare's adaptation gives Charmian credit for the idea: in her role as loyal confidante and clever servant, she suggests the deception, taking charge of events in typical comic fashion. Despite her fright, Cleopatra rather enjoys the prospect of hearing how Antony will respond to the news. "And word it, prithee, piteously," she instructs Mardian, "And bring me how he takes my death." Whether or not Cleopatra has been unjustly accused, her false death seems more a self-protective ruse than a device designed to achieve reconciliation. In this respect it is a little like Falstaff's comically anti-heroic feigned death at the end of 1 Henry IV.

Antony's violence is short-lived, and gives way to thoughts of suicide even before Mardian arrives with his news. The hero's suicide is frequently described as "bungled," and critics are divided about whether or not it debases Antony in the audience's eyes.¹⁸ In contrast with the noble Eros, Antony seems oddly lacking in courage, as he himself observes:

I, that with my sword
Quartered the world and o'er green Neptune's back
With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack
The courage of a woman—less noble mind
Than she which by her death our Caesar tells
'I am conqueror of myself

(IV.xiv.57-62)

That he is honest enough to acknowledge this falling off elevates him in stature, as does the audience's knowledge that Cleopatra is even less courageous than Antony at this moment. However hesitant and clumsy, his deed is nevertheless nobler than hers, although he doesn't realize it. Part of the comic effect here is owing to Shakespeare's reiteration of the trickery motif: having just been tricked by Cleopatra, Antony allows himself to be tricked again by Eros, who deliberately arouses Antony's—and the audience's—expectations, and then shocks both his master and us by stabbing himself. When Antony rushes toward death like a bridegroom to a bride, only to be deceived a third time ("How? not dead? not dead?") the effect is ironic, to say the least. Antony continues to behave like a gulled, ineffectual comic figure for most of the scene, as he pleads unsuccessfully with his followers to kill him, and as he listens to Diomedes' revelation that Cleopatra is alive. Not until he is borne aloft by the guardsmen and carried off the stage does he begin to regain his heroic stature.

Shakespeare's deftly comic handling of a tragic situation becomes even more apparent when Antony is brought to Cleopatra's monument in Act IV, scene xv. "A heavy sight" becomes "sport indeed" as Cleopatra and the others make puns on the word "heavy" while Antony's body is hauled awkwardly aloft. The poignancy of the leave-taking is further tempered by the fact that the lovers are comically at odds: "let me speak a little," begs the dying Antony, only to be cut off by Cleopatra, who says "No, let me speak, and let me rail so high. . . ." Antony's parting words of advice are dismissed and ignored by Cleopatra, and when he breathes his last the final words he hears are her querulous complaint: "Has thou no care of me? Shall I abide / In this dull world, which in thy absence is / No better than a sty?"

Interspersed with these comic touches are the parting embraces and marvelous speeches of two lovers, who appeal to us precisely because their dramatic posturing, as they themselves sometimes seem to realize, is both rhetorically splendid and slightly absurd. Again and again, they regard and admire themselves, commenting, as if from a distance, on the spectacle they are presenting to their onstage audience, but with a maturity of historical perspective, tempered with ironic self-awareness, that Romeo and Juliet, in their impetuous passion, lack. Here, for example, is Antony, describing his own death: "Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony / But Antony's hath triumph'd on itself; he is, as he grandly proclaims, "a Roman, by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish'd." Cleopatra's roles are more varied; she sees herself at once as the woman "commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chores" and as a defiant queen throwing her sceptre "at the injurious gods, / To tell them that this world did equal theirs / Till they had stol'n our jewel" (IV.xv.14-78). This role-playing motif becomes much more explicit in the highly theatrical final scene.

The trickery motif returns in Act V, scene ii, as both Cleopatra and the audience are surprised by the seemingly kindly Proculeius. Relieving Proculeius of his charge, Dolabella listens respectfully as Cleopatra delivers her magnificent celebration of Antony's greatness, while time seems to stand still and the horrors of captivity magically recede. When Caesar enters, Cleopatra is prepared for him, since Dolabella, won over by her poetry, has betrayed his master by revealing Caesar's intentions to lead her in triumph. There follows a scene of elaborate play-acting in which Cleopatra enacts the humble and self-belittling captive and Caesar the gracious captor.

The ambiguous scene with Seleucus can be viewed as a carefully staged trick designed, in Willard Farnham's words, "to mask a full-formed intention to die by giving the appearance of wanting to live."¹⁹ That Cleopatra is fully aware of Caesar's efforts to deceive her is evident in her mocking comment upon his performance: "He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself (V.ii.191-92). The differences between North's Plutarch and Shakespeare's play are particularly significant in this scene. North notes that Cleopatra successfully deceived Caesar; but rather than emphasizing the comic aspects of her sense of triumph, he dwells at length upon her grief over Antony's death. He recounts an incident that Shakespeare deliberately omits, in which Cleopatra is carried to Antony's tomb; there in Plutarch she delivers a long, tearful lament to her beloved, dwelling upon her fear of being carried away to Italy, and begging him to intercede with the gods "to let me be buried in one self tomb with thee." This is the last speech by Cleopatra recounted by North; the remainder of his narrative passes quickly over the manner of her death. Shakespeare chooses instead to dramatize the scene with the clown and its aftermath, inventing his own dialogue for this purpose.

Her spirits restored by her success in tricking Caesar, Shakespeare's Cleopatra embarks upon preparations for her final act with a contagious liveliness that makes the characters seem as if they are participating in a comic resolution—which, in a sense, they are. Like Rosalind orchestrating the multiple marriages at the end of As You Like It, Cleopatra does not reveal her plan to the audience; instead she whispers something to Charmian, then asks for her "best attires," complete with "crown and all," all the while gloating that "that's the way / To fool their preparation, and to conquer / Their most absurd intents" (V.ii.224-26).

The comic interlude with the clown is reminiscent of Hamlet's conversation with the gravediggers. In much the same way, Shakespeare introduces a common workingman whose relationship with death (or, in this case, the agent of death) is so matter-of-fact and casual that we are compelled to see death from a radically different perspective. The clown's cheerful farewell, "I wish you joy of the worm," ironically reminds us that this is a joyful occasion, and that Cleopatra's impatience with him is caused by her eagerness to embrace death. As soon as the clown departs, the festive preparations resume, with the ritual of attiring performed onstage. Characteristically conscious that she is about to perform an "act," Cleopatra transforms the moments preceding her death into the procession that leads to the wedding celebration: "Husband, I come: / Now to that name my courage proves my title!"

Dying is a sensual experience ("The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch"), as the Elizabethans' punning use of the word "die" affirms. There is even a joke concerning sexual jealousy; when Cleopatra realizes that Charmian is dying, she hastens to kill herself lest Charmian "first meet the curled Antony" and he "make demand of her, and spend that kiss / Which is my heaven to have." Cleopatra's language in these final speeches brings together the marriage ceremony, its consummation, and the bride's subsequent anticipation of motherhood, all important aspects of the traditional comic resolution's celebration of fertility and the perpetuation of the social order. The asp, now become "the baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep," is metamorphosed from an instrument of death to a symbol of new life (V.ii.260-310).²⁰

Cleopatra's joyous pleasure in taking her own life owes as much to her triumphant sense of having tricked Caesar as it does to her "immortal longings" for reunion with Antony. She thinks she hears Antony mock Caesar's "luck," a deceptive gift "which the gods give men / To excuse their after wrath," and she revels in the imaginary prospect of the asp calling "great Caesar ass / Unpolicied" (V.ii.286-87, 307-8). As the culminating event in a carefully planned trick (one is again reminded of As You Like It, or The Winter's Tale) and as a marriage ceremony, the final masque-like tableau has far more in common with comedy than tragedy.²¹ Janet Adelman remarks that "the play is essentially a tragic experience embedded in a comic structure."²² As in comedy, the lovers have triumphed over the obstacles that repeatedly threatened and delayed their union, and have achieved a form of release from the realities of daily life that would forever impede such a union. That this release and triumph take the form of death may seem tragic. But as Anne Barton notes, "In a way for which there is no parallel in any other Shakespearean tragedy, we want Cleopatra to die."²³ What makes the ending an extraordinary fusion of comedy and tragedy, however, is the audience's realization that the lovers' deaths remain, in Derek Traversi's words, "the inevitable end of a line of conduct in which folly and self-indulgence have consistently played their part," even as they also recognize that these deaths constitute a triumphant achievement and an instrument of release.²⁴

In contrast to the ending of Romeo and Juliet, timing in Antony and Cleopatra works to the protagonists' advantage; Cleopatra succeeds in dying just before the Romans return. Furthermore, Shakespeare has stripped away nearly all of the comic character types who are so central to the traditional comic sequence in which confusion is ultimately resolved by a series of unmaskings. The stage manager figure (Friar Laurence), the parents, the authority figure who presides over the resolution (Prince Escalus)—these have no counterparts in Antony and Cleopatra. There remains only Octavius Caesar, who bears a curious resemblance to Paris in the triangular structure of the two plays—except, of course, that Paris is among the dead in Romeo and Juliet. Inasmuch as he is both "beguiled" and left to assume controls, Caesar displays some aspects of the overruled parents and the presiding authority figure who participate in comic resolutions. He has lost the battle but won the war, and in keeping with the comic tone of the ending, he joins the audience in celebrating Cleopatra, who, he says, looks "As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace" (V.ii.347-48). The spirit of successful trickery persists to the very end, as Caesar and his retinue puzzle over the manner of Cleopatra's death. They nevertheless join in the conciliatory spirit of the comic ending. Although he has been thwarted in his effort to reap political profit by belittling a captive Cleopatra, Caesar announces that he will give the lovers the solemn show their greatness deserves. He thus contributes his share to the satisfying resolution, and emerges as a more sympathetic character than he has been at any other point in the play.

III

With Caesar's announcement that the lovers shall be buried together, "no pair so famous," Antony and Cleopatra arrives at an ending seemingly reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. The atmosphere, however, is utterly different: while in Romeo and Juliet the speeches are filled with the language of sorrow and punishment, sacrifice and woe, and an emphasis on the survivors' ability to learn from their mistakes, in Antony and Cleopatra the scene is best summed up by the dying Charmian, who triumphantly responds to the Guardsman's reproach with "It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings." The triumph Charmian feels suffuses the ending; for all three women, "this vild world" is a place no longer "worth leave-taking" (V.ii.326-27, 314, 298). The stage littered with bodies is thus not the tragic spectacle one would expect it to be, for it serves as a reminder that all the deaths in the play are voluntary and self-imposed acts which assert the individual's power over his or her own fate. How different, then, is Antony and Cleopatra from Romeo and Juliet and the later tragedies, where death is violent, arbitrary, and caused by treachery and misunderstandings, abruptly cutting off the lives of characters who unwittingly find themselves caught up in the tragic momentum of the play. For the characters in Antony and Cleopatra suicide is a noble gesture, an assertion of love toward a friend or lover, a positive and purposeful act, triumphant in the way that the deaths of saints and heroes are. This sense of triumph has no place at the ending of Romeo and Juliet, where the intrinsically comic structure of false death and resurrection is rendered tragic by the irrevocable losses and the burden of guilt that confront the survivors. As Romeo and Juliet draws to an end, the audience has nothing corresponding to Cleopatra's magnificent vision of Antony dolphin-like in his delights, bestriding the ocean and dropping realms and islands from his pockets. Instead, we are left with the Prince's moralizing scolding and a keen sense of regret at the waste of five young lives resulting from the follies of the older generation.

It would be interesting to know whether Shakespeare was thinking of Romeo and Juliet when he decided to dramatize North's translation of Plutarch's "Life of Marcus Antonius." We can speculate that the untapped dramatic potential in the pattern of double suicides was one of the things that attracted him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, and that he was conscious of the structural echoes as he wrote the play. He was clearly at a turning point in his work; by 1606 or 1607 the four big tragedies were completed, and a year or so later he would begin writing the romances. Although Antony shares certain characteristics of the complex and self-destructive protagonists of the tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra looks ahead to the romances in a number of ways. Like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, it ranges freely through space and time, encompassing a large cast of characters and a dazzling succession of events. But while the romances move successively from tragic complication to comic resolution, Antony and Cleopatra combines comedy and tragedy into an integrated whole. There are very few self-contained humorous interludes like the ones in Romeo and Juliet (for example, Romeo and Mercutio baiting the Nurse or the Nurse teasing Juliet by withholding her news). Instead, there is an overarching comic vision that is elastic enough to contain deaths and defeats, because it is founded upon the powerful attraction that binds the audience to the protagonists.

Shakespeare sifted through the wealth of detail in North's Plutarch, culling incidents and descriptions from which he created two unconventional lovers whose comic potential stems from their own mixture of flaws and greatness, rather than simply inhering in the structure of events in which they find themselves. Antony and Cleopatra delight us with their poetry, with their unpredictable—and sometimes predictable—responses (an example of the latter is Cleopatra's treatment of the messenger who brings news of Antony's marriage to Octavia), and with their ability to command the love and admiration of the people around them. In a way that Romeo and Juliet never do, they repeatedly delight us with comic insights into the mysteries of human nature. Foremost among these mysteries is the paradoxical way in which lovers alternately torment and celebrate one another, which is one of the most timeless subjects of comedy.

Notes

¹ Clifford Leech, "The Moral Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," English Renaissance Drama: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Doran and Mark Eccles, eds. Standish Henning, Robert Kimbrough, Richard Knowles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 59-60.

² Cf. Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979). In her study of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Snyder shows how "traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape tragedy." Her approach has been helpful to me, particularly in its premise that "literary convention can operate to shape and enrich a work that is moving in a direction opposite to that convention" (pp. 4, 16).

³ Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), I, 169-73.

⁴ C. L. Barber remarks that in the folk plays the miraculous cure of St. George or the Fool "is the ultimate turning of the tables on whatever is the enemy to life," and notes that the most popular of Elizabethan jigs, "The jig of Rowland," involved "a device of playing dead and pretending to come back to life which may well be a rationalized development of this primitive resurrection motif." See Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), p. 154 n.

⁵ For a discussion of the false report of a lady's death as a recurrent situation in Shakespeare's plays, see the Appendix to Paul V. Kreider, Repetition in Shakespeare's Plays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), p. 286.

⁶ A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; rpt. New York: Fawcett World Library, 1965), p. 23.

⁷ About this kind of accident of timing, Susan Snyder observes that "Too late is not in the comic vocabulary. There is always time to keep the appointment, to undo the mistake, or even to neglect the action altogether for a display of wit or clowning. In tragedy, our sense that time is limited and precious grows with our perception of an inevitable outcome, time cut off (p. 28).

⁸ Bullough, I, 355.

⁹ Sir Philip Sidney, "An Apology for Poetry," Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), I, 199. Sidney distinguishes laughter from delight as follows: "laughter almost euer commeth of things most disproportioned to our selues and nature. Delight hath a ioy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter hath onely a scornful tickling. For example, we are rauished with delight to see a faire woman and yet are far from being moued to laughter."

¹⁰ Leech, p. 74; Snyder, p. 109.

¹¹ This and all other quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

¹² Shakespeare belabors this device to comic effect in Pyramus and Thisby's sing-song rhymes in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Pyramus: Come tears, confound
Out, sword, and wound
The pap of Pyramus

Thisby: Tongue, not a word!
Come, trusty sword!
Come, blade, my breast imbrue!

(V.i.295-97, 342-44)

The similarity is even more striking when Romeo addresses the poison: "Come, bitter conduct, come unsavory guide!" (V.iii.116).

¹³ Leonora L. Brodwin, Elizabethan Love Tragedy: 1587-1625 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), p. 61.

¹⁴ It is perhaps worth noting that there are comparable moments in Othello and King Lear that have similar comic overtones, and that slow down the final tragic conclusion in a slightly awkward way—one thinks, for example, of the letters found in Roderigo's pocket and Edgar's and Kent's unmaskings.

¹⁵ In his discussion of Romeo and Juliet, Leech wonders if the play is really tragic. He feels that the Prince's long speech undermines any "sense of mystery" with its emphasis on reconciliation and the "lesson" the survivors have learned. Friar Laurence's speech, he adds, is "too much like a preacher's résumé of the events on which a moral lesson will be based" (pp. 68-70).

¹⁶ See, for example, Anne Barton's discussion of the "divided catastrophe" in "'Nature's piece 'gainst fancy': The divided catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra," an inaugural lecture delivered at Bedford College, University of London, in 1973. Barton notes that the divided catastrophe is rare in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, and that most dramatized versions of the Antony and Cleopatra story avoided it (p. 11).

¹⁷ T.J.B. Spencer, ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and Coriolanus, in the translation of Sir Thomas North (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 275-77.

¹⁸ For the view that the suicide is bungled, see, for example, Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), p. 182; Barton, "'Nature's piece 'gainst fancy,'" p. 8; Matthew N. Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 189 ff. For a contrary view, see T. McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum (New York and London: Macmillan, 1973) and Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).

¹⁹ Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 199.

²⁰ Sidney R. Homan, "Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra," Philological Quarterly, 49 (1970), 460-68. Homan notes that in fewer than twenty lines (V.ii.294-312) Cleopatra manages to translate even the horrors of death into the pleasures of love: ". . . we have the almost sentimental family tableau of the mother embracing her husband and their sleeping child . . ." (p. 464). See also J. L. Simmons, "The Comic Pattern and Vision in Antony and Cleopatra," ELH, 36 (1969), 493-501. As Simmons describes her, Cleopatra "steps forward like the queen of comedy, arranging the happy ending of marriage and thereby winning the admiration and approval of the Roman world's highest moral sense. The comic purging and reconciliation take place to our delight while we are moved by the tragedy of its requiring the lovers' death" (p. 503).

²¹ Mark Rose, "Introduction," Twentieth Century Interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977), p. 13; Ruth Nevo, "The Masque of Greatness," Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967), 111-28; and Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972). Nevo notes how different Shakespeare's ending is from North's, which describes Cleopatra in her "smocke," in "a little low bed of poor estate" (p. 353).

²² Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 52. Cf. Simmons, who sees a "merging of the tragic with what is essentially the comic vision," and adds that death is a victory, with Cleopatra triumphant and Caesar "defeated" (p. 493). The comic tone in the play was noted first by A. C. Bradley.

²³ Barton, p. 16.

²⁴ Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 203.