SOURCE: “‘The World's Great Snare’: Antony, Cleopatra, and Game,” in Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, University of Delaware Press, 1997, pp. 116-53.

[In the following essay, Lewis identifies a Christian analogue to Antony's character and argues that understanding this parallel puts into perspective the various attitudes professed in the play regarding Antony's self-sacrificial love.]

From the moment that Antony believes Cleopatra to have given him cause to kill himself—her suspected treachery in 4.12—Antony is repeatedly subjected to the ridicule normally reserved for the most foolish of Shakespeare's fools. For example, in 4.14 he is provoked to commit suicide by the mere show of Cleopatra's death, a manipulation so transparent through familiarity that Enobarbus punctures it long before this moment (1.3.133-44). Next, calling upon his trusted servant Eros to fulfill his duty, Antony is disgraced when Eros, “[t]hrice-nobler” than his master, kills himself instead (81-84, 95, 94). Then Antony, having failed to dispatch himself with a degree of his servant's elegance, pitifully calls out to his guards to finish the deed: “Let him that loves me strike me dead” (108). Three guards refuse to comply, hinting that they, like Eros, love him too much to end his pain (108-10), whereupon Decretas cruelly increases that pain by removing the sword for purposes of self-advancement (111-13). Diomedes then enters, not to put Antony out of his misery, as Antony again requests, but to inform him that Cleopatra has had second thoughts about her bungled ruse (113-27). Diomedes is, ironically, “too late” (127). The grim humor of 4.14, arising mostly from Antony's inability to complete his own demise, peaks when Antony's guards, again protesting love for him, inadvertently crack the first of several jokes to come about Antony's dead weight: asked to bear him “where Cleopatra bides” (131), they quibble on the notion that Antony “may not live to wear” his “true followers out” and exclaim together, “Most heavy day!” (133-34).

Cleopatra reprises that jest in the next scene, 4.15, when she unthinkingly refers to the burden of hoisting Antony to the monument—“How heavy weighs my lord!”—and then recovers her fumble with a pun converting his physical weight to her sorrow: “Our strength is all gone to heaviness, / That makes the weight” (32-34). But the company of onlookers reinforce the physical gag of lifting Antony aloft with another reference to his weight: “A heavy sight” (40). In this scene, as in the preceding one, the characters' concern for Antony contains a component of ridicule—sometimes verging on terror—apparently unintended by the speakers and yet unavoidable to their auditors. Hence, for instance, when Cleopatra refuses to come down to Antony from the monument (21-29), she escapes capture (which would further dishonor Antony) even as she snubs Antony and makes necessary the visually awkward and embarrassing “sport” of lifting him (32). Similarly, in her very attempt to comfort and ennoble him as he dies, Cleopatra comically subverts his efforts to muster dignity. She interrupts him when he asks “to speak a little” so that she can “rail,” and she conceives of his passing in terms of her own loss: “Hast thou no care of me?” (a line, by the way, that glances back to her tactic in 1.3.90-91 for making Antony feel guilty about returning to Rome—“O, my oblivion is a very Antony, / And I am all forgotten”) (42-43, 60). She twice refutes his advice to trust Caesar and Proculeius (45-50). Never mind that she is right. Her insistence to the suffering Antony that she is right robs his death scene of grandeur, replacing tragic respectability with what Jonathan Dollimore calls “bathos.”¹ Until Antony finally expires and Cleopatra has full scope to exalt him in death (62), his suffering seems as much an occasion for mockery as a cause for compassion.²

I am not the first reader of Antony and Cleopatra to sense a troublesome mixture of tone in the play's conclusion. W. B. Worthen, for example, notices that the audacious hoisting of Antony in the monument scene “threaten[s] a slapstick catastrophe, as Antony plummets to the stage” and speaks of the scene's “possibly distracting humor.”³ Brian Cheadle believes the episode to be “ludicrous” as is because of Antony's “pitifully bungle[d] suicide attempt,” his “being winched laboriously aloft … by Cleopatra and her handmaidens,” and his “utter lack of judgment” in urging the queen to trust Proculeius. Robert Ornstein, remarking on the way that Cleopatra's interchange with the clown complicates the tone of the ending, is joined by Martha Tuck Rozett, who also sees touches of the “absurd” in the final treatment of the dual protagonists. Ornstein and Rozett look forward to the commentary of Barbara C. Vincent, who studies the relationship between tragic and comic forms throughout the work. Focusing solely on the monument scene, Leslie Thomson grounds an entire reading of the play on the stage picture of Antony's cumbersome ascent to Cleopatra: “In the political world Caesar rises as Antony falls. But countering this, and complicating our response, is that as Antony falls in that context, he is raised, both literally and figuratively in another: the world of love.”

Yet, with virtually no exceptions, critics seem largely uncomfortable with the dark humor in the play's closing scenes, particularly with Antony's buffoonery, which I have opened this discussion by cataloging in order to press home its abundance. Some readers altogether ignore the ridicule directed at Antony.⁴ Far more reduce it to inconsequentiality. Such readings minimize the amount of mockery in the last scenes, however, as well as the effect it has on both the tragic elevation of Antony and Cleopatra and the audience's sympathetic identification with them. Fairly representative of these critics is Rosalie Colie, who, while acknowledging the proclivity of Antony's suicide and death toward foolish “excesses,” argues that what we finally remember about the protagonists is their “beauty of character” and “that in such excess, life itself can reside.”⁵

Even critics who assert, as I would, that a production of the play should preserve the ridiculous next to the high-minded strive for interpretations that ultimately dilute the comedy. Inevitably, these readings insist in some form on the protagonists' triumph over impediments to their love: Caesar's imperialism, other values of this world, their own character flaws. In short, critics are loath to accept and deal with the full measure of irony aimed at the tragic conclusion—a conclusion that also, admittedly, invokes inspiring romanticism. But when that romanticism is permitted, in either production or reading, to suppress the irony, Antony's characterization becomes lopsided; his seemingly total surrender to his love for Cleopatra is being forced at the last to make him appear above derision.⁶

My purpose in returning to the problem of tone, especially as it involves Antony, is to place in perspective the play's competing views of his and other characters' self-sacrificial love. Recognizing the debt of Antony's characterization to the traditions linked with Saint Anthony of Egypt clarifies the work's central issues and sharpens perceptions of Antony, Cleopatra, Caesar, and others. What's more, it opens up further discussion of how Shakespeare used many other Christian analogues in Antony and Cleopatra, some of them veiled to modern audiences.⁷ Both the saint and the conqueror, for instance, are tempted by the flesh, and both face their trials in Egypt. Indeed, in Antony and Cleopatra, where a name like Eros or a gesture like crowning likely points beyond itself to added meaning, the conflicts in Antony's character, recalling those of Saint Anthony, launch anew the exploration of charity in this world. Surrounded by other characters who amplify and extend qualities of his own love—mainly Enobarbus, Cleopatra, and Octavia—Antony offers Shakespeare's most complex, if least accessible, study of folly.

I

The framing in 1.1 of Antony and Cleopatra's mutual devotion by Demetrius and Philo's negative judgment does more than establish an immediate opposition between Roman and Egyptian values. It also instantly identifies the audience with Demetrius, who remains silent until the scene's end, and it insists, through Philo's repeated imperatives, that audiences formulate their own opinions about what they, along with Demetrius, are witnessing:

                                                            Look where they come!
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool. Behold and see.

(10-13)

Although Philo can count on Demetrius's affirmation of what he beholds and sees, the nature of this dramatic situation encourages the audience to look beyond the viewpoints of either the critical Romans or the spotlighted lovers. While Philo and Demetrius deplore Antony's inattention to duty and devalue his passion for Cleopatra, the audience can appreciate the lovers' extravagance from the lovers' point of view while also detecting the limitations of the entire dichotomy at hand. In the context of Renaissance tradition, Mark Antony's very name outlines the twin poles of his character: war (Mars) and love (Saint Anthony). But the love for which he dismisses the concerns of war is as worldly in its own way as is Caesarian empire.⁸ In some real sense, Antony is a “strumpet's fool” (13), much as Cleopatra is also the true “fool” she fears becoming in this opening scene (42). They are prisoners of their lust and egotism. Yet, as Antony finds himself jostled between the equally worldly alternatives of Rome and Egypt, war and love, Caesar and Cleopatra, his ambivalence develops in the context of yet another dichotomy, that between the worldly and the spiritual. As his characterization unfolds, in fact, his choice becomes less and less a horizontal one between the exclusively worldly values of Rome and Egypt and more a vertical one between foolish folly—attachment to this world—and wise folly—renunciation of the world.⁹

The inadequacy of this world to provide spiritual fulfillment is continually recapitulated in paradigms that echo Antony's impossible choice between the options embodied in Caesar and in Cleopatra. For instance, Antony understands from his grief over Fulvia's passing that human desire feeds on what it lacks:

What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution low'ring, does become
The opposite of itself. She's good, being gone;
The hand could pluck her back that shov'd her on.

(1.2.123-27)

The “revolution” that Antony describes here could as easily apply to the opposition he feels between his attraction to both Rome and Egypt, as could Caesar's description to Lepidus of how popular allegiance has shifted to Pompey:

It hath been taught us from the primal state
That he which is was wish'd, until he were;
And the ebb'd man, ne'er lov'd till ne'er worth love,
Comes dear'd by being lack'd.

(1.4.41-44)

Pompey himself mentions the fleetingness of desire and its objects when he complains to Menas of his delayed gratification from the triumvirate: “Whiles we are suitors to their throne, decays / The thing we sue for” (2.1.4-5). The passions of this life fade.

So widespread is this pattern of one affection giving way to another that it is parodied when Agrippa and Enobarbus mock Lepidus's vacillation between extolling first Antony, then Caesar:

Eno.
Caesar? Why he's the Jupiter of men.
Agr.
What's Antony? The god of Jupiter.
Eno.
Spake you of Caesar? How, the nonpareil!
Agr.
O Antony! O thou Arabian bird!
Eno.
Would you praise Caesar, say “Caesar,” go no further.
Agr.
Indeed he plied them both with excellent praises.
Eno.
But he loves Caesar best, yet he loves Antony.
.....Agr.
Both he loves.
Eno.
They are his shards, and he their beetle, so.

(3.2.9-20)

If at this point we remember Pompey's claim about Lepidus's loyalties—that he “flatters both, / Of both is flatter'd; but … neither loves” (2.1.14-15)—this rendition of Lepidus's hyperbole conjures more cynicism than humor. And the image of the encasing and potentially suffocating beetle's shards pointedly looks forward to the “pair of chaps” that devour Pompey, Lepidus, and the civilized world until they “grind th' one the other” (3.5.13-15). Such images, in other words, suggest the peril, well known to Antony by his life's end, of taking sides, although to be in the world makes doing so unavoidable. Nowhere is that peril more clearly represented than at the celebration on Pompey's galley, whose very rocking, together with the swaying brought on by drunkenness, imitates the instability of politics—portrayed, for instance, in the ease with which Menas proposes to turn on the triumvirate and the hair's breadth that prevents Pompey from capitulating, leading Menas to desert him (2.7.61-84). Enobarbus's warning to Antony as he descends into the boat is almost too blatant a reminder of his impending doom: “Take heed you fall not” (2.7.129).¹⁰

Octavia, too, first frozen between her “heart” and her “tongue” in parting with Octavius (3.2.47-50), eventually finds herself embattled by irreconcilable loyalties to both her husband and her brother:

                                                                      A more unhappy lady,
If this division chance, ne'er stood between,
Praying for both parts.
The good gods will mock me presently,
When I shall pray, “O, bless my lord and husband!”
Undo that prayer, by crying out as loud,
“O, bless my brother!” Husband win, win brother,
Prays, and destroys the prayer, no midway
'Twixt these extremes at all.

(3.4.12-20)

In this world, even the augurs “[s]ay they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly, / And dare not speak their knowledge,” so befuddled are they as to who will prevail at Actium (4.12.5-6).¹¹

Octavia's private lament also portrays the larger tragic vision of Antony and Cleopatra, whose characters, principally Antony, waver between choices because both guarantee tragedy. Although the Soothsayer can “read” but “a little” of the future's secrets (1.2.10-11), he can tell Antony that Caesar will always defeat him at worldly “game” (2.3.25-29), making a life with Cleopatra, even one of “dotage” (1.2.117), less repugnant than losing all to his adversary. Antony, like Octavia, has good reason for feeling paralyzed by indecision. Yet, as Antony reminds Octavia, she will have to choose between himself and Caesar: “Let your best love draw to that point which seeks / Best to preserve it” (3.4.21-22). So must Antony choose between Rome and Egypt. From an earthly perspective, his tragedy lies in the stifling absence of comic possibility. He can only fall, though he is free to choose his route.¹²

For Antony, then, the only way out is up. That is to say, the play's dichotomy between this world and the next emerges in response to the bankruptcy of material gain and physical pleasure, Antony's earthly options. Does Antony's death, then, represent a change in his love for Cleopatra and thus a severing of his foolish attachment to the world? Does he elect to join Cleopatra out of pure love? So Antony would make us believe when he reacts to the rumor of her suicide: “I will o'ertake thee, Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon” (4.14.44-45).¹³ That his death-wish stems from love of her rather than from self-love seems confirmed by myriad details from this point on—especially by his concern for her welfare once he is gone and she is in Caesar's custody (4.15.45-48). At the same time, Antony's final motives also smack of escapism. In this he recalls the behavior of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, who would bypass the hardships of this life. Antony's announcement to Eros, for instance, that “there is left us / Ourselves to end ourselves” arises not from disenchantment with worldly gain but from shame that a woman could cheat him of his “glory” (4.14.21-22, 19). Here, Antony is not resplendent in his defeat of mutability, as a romantic reading would stress. Nor does his sense of having failed to achieve glory for himself square completely with the Roman ideal of honor.¹⁴ Rather, Antony appears self-involved at best and vindictive at worst, as when he hopes that Caesar will “hoist” Cleopatra up “to the shouting plebeians” in Rome (4.12.33-34). Ironically, he wishes on her the very humiliation that he in fact receives when he is “hoist” two scenes later.

I am suggesting, first, that the ridicule to which Antony is subject, particularly at the play's end, has two possible sources. Either he becomes a wise fool who gives up even lust for love's sake, in which case his ineptitude at such political matters as guiding Cleopatra to a Roman she can trust signals his positive spiritual removal from the world. Or his foolishness derives from his ineptitude at leaving earthly matters far behind. Or both. In the pagan Mark Antony, who forfeited one third of the world all for Cleopatra, Shakespeare's original audience would also have recognized a typological association with Christ, whose spiritual kingdom and love were about to displace the triumvirate's empire and self-interest.¹⁵ Caesar's famed pronouncement in 4.6—“The time of universal peace is near” (4)—looks in two directions, one toward the Augustan peace and the other toward Christ's birth, so as to involve the play's action in both. I also want to suggest, then, that the intertwining of traditions in Antony's very history renders him an especially plastic version of the Antonio character-type. Shakespeare's two earlier Antonios operate exclusively within clear Christian tradition: the first, in The Merchant of Venice, falls short of the Christian charity he professes, and the second, in Twelfth Night, practices an authentic Christian charity that, as the play ends, seems indefinitely divided from the world that needs it. But Mark Antony is prevented from attaining literal Christian charity by his cultural heritage. He cannot enact what he historically predates. Still, Antony's link with Christ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries puts in perspective his frequent tendency toward saintly behavior. That behavior implies, at the least, a prefiguration or analogue of Christ's idea of love.¹⁶ But it also sketches, within a pagan context, the ultimately Christian problem of reconciling the flesh and the spirit. Antony's particular wavering between self-love and selfless love preserves the distinction between earthly and spiritual empire without discrediting the claims of the former on Christian grounds. In this Antonio, Shakespeare returns to the matter that pervades The Merchant of Venice and marks the conclusion of Twelfth Night: whether worldly and otherworldly values can be married. Through the twin protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra, he also extends the question to whether they should be.

II

The opposing impulses in Antony—to respond to either his own needs or to those of others—form a method of characterization. Examples of his self-centeredness pepper the play, mixed in with those of his generosity. His initial reason for returning to Egypt is not love of Cleopatra but knowledge that he cannot win against Caesar and so may as well indulge in “pleasure” (2.3.14-15, 41). Yet later, having succumbed to Caesar at Actium, he will generously insist that Cleopatra be informed of the chance to exchange Antony for Caesar's “courtesy” toward her (3.13.13-19). Ventidius expounds on Antony's pride for an entire scene (3.1), though he might have been spared the trouble, since Antony's ego speaks for itself. When he squanders victory at Actium to fight by sea, for instance, he does so, he says, because Caesar “dares” him to (3.7.29).¹⁷ The same Antony, however, will retreat at sea purely for love of Cleopatra (3.11.56-61), risking Caesar's and his soldiers' ridicule. Craving good opinion of himself, he is consumed by insecurity when Caesar has “[s]poke scantly” of him: “If I lose mine honor, / I lose myself” (3.4.6, 22-23). Even so, he has a penchant for learning the painful truth about himself, and to hear it he will urge on a messenger (1.2.97-111), tolerate Enobarbus's venting (for example, 1.2), and encourage Octavius to pinpoint his grievance when the two confer about Antony's “broken … oath” (2.2.81-98). Such frank confrontations contrast tellingly with those in which Cleopatra beats a messenger for honesty, bullying him into later flattering her (2.5, 3.3).

They also bear resemblance to the many instances in which other characters attempt to bait Antony but discover that he is too temperate to be ruffled. Caesar and Pompey both needle him about his weaknesses for things Egyptian (2.2.120-22, 2.6.62-70, 2.7.96); each time, Antony responds with equanimity. His similar forbearance with Cleopatra, whose efforts to control his emotions are at one point compared to the sport of fishing for and catching him (2.5.12-15), suggests the bounteous spirit for which Plutarch had once praised him.¹⁸ Not that Cleopatra cannot incite Antony—she does so whenever he suspects her loyalty (3.11, 4.12). But the point is that the same man who coolly endures repeated taunting from her and others is also, in other cases, nervously dependent upon external validation of his worthiness. When his fragile ego is crushed at the sight of Thidias's lips on Cleopatra's hand, he pathetically scrambles to reestablish his identity by having Thidias whipped (3.13.85-152); when he temporarily beats back Caesar, he relishes his prowess and, in symmetry with the earlier episode, offers Cleopatra's hand to Scarus (4.8.11-13). Taken together, all of these examples conflict, portraying, by turns, one Antony who is insecure, vindictive, and enmeshed in worldly affairs but another who is self-assured, forgiving, and free of the world's fetters.

A few of Antony's scenes so conflate these two perspectives on him as to render his actions and motives thoroughly ambiguous. Yet the ambiguity is so subtly crafted that the audience may be unaware of what it does not fully understand without the benefit of reflection, which a production, fleeting as it is, cannot afford. Read closely, however, the text can account for the confusion, however subliminal it may be. In one key scene, 3.11, Antony accepts military defeat and gives up his fortune with a grace reminiscent of Saint Anthony himself:

                                        Friends, come hither:
I am so lated in the world, that I
Have lost my way for ever. I have a ship
Laden with gold, take that, divide it; fly,
And make your peace with Caesar.

(2-6)

But the language of liberality, pure as it sounds, may issue less from Antony's humility than from his humiliation, the “shame” that, Iras says, has him so “unqualited” (44). His revulsion toward Cleopatra, whose flight at sea he holds responsible for his situation, would seem to confirm that his loss of dignity, not his magnanimity, causes him to surrender his earthly possessions (25-68). Still, his quickness to pardon Cleopatra at the scene's end reestablishes his largess.

Such comingling of perspectives on Antony's character is later recalled and yet further complicated when Antony again bids farewell, this time to “three or four Servitors” in Cleopatra's palace (4.2.10, s.d.). As Fichter has pointed out, 4.2 alludes to the Last Supper, Antony's triple plea that his followers attend him at one more “bounteous … meal” linking him to Christ (4.2.10).¹⁹ Shakespeare so qualifies the link, however, that the scene might be taken as a parodic inversion of its Christian counterpart. That Cleopatra twice asks Enobarbus the meaning of Antony's behavior underscores the obscurity of his intent. Enobarbus, by now jaded toward Antony's emotional displays, reads this one as a conscious manipulation of his servants' feelings (24), a charge that, once Enobarbus voices it, Antony strenuously denies: “Ho, ho, ho! / Now the witch take me, if I meant it thus!” (36-37). Antony's next lines emphasize the charity he is claiming for himself: “Grace grow where those drops fall, my hearty friends! / You take me in too dolorous a sense, / For I spake to you for your comfort” (38-40). The difficulty of reading Antony's nature here epitomizes the same difficulty until the play's end, the precise problem, for purposes of establishing tone, being that of how to take Antony's apparent self-denial.

Enobarbus, of course, offers his own final answer to the question, and it is a persuasive one. For all of his earlier skepticism toward Antony's judgment, his former master's decision to reward his betrayal with riches defines his dying admiration for Antony's willingness to turn the other cheek (4.6, 9). His route to that conclusion is nevertheless winding, and the variables in Enobarbus's character can elucidate those in Antony's.

As exemplified in Enobarbus's skirmish with Lepidus before Caesar and Antony begin to negotiate (2.2.1-14), his chief concern is a version of Antony's: he is continually torn between meeting his own needs and fulfilling his duty to others, between self and self-sacrifice. To Lepidus he defends the practice of “private stomaching” and proceeds in 2.2 to speak his mind, dispensing with the decorum reserved for the more “courteous Antony” (8-10, 222). Lepidus correctly identifies Enobarbus's “passion” as the “plainness” that Pompey later implies is famous (2.2.12, 2.6.78). Far from acting solely as the voice of reason in reaction to Antony's irrationality, Enobarbus has his own passion, a counterpart of sorts to Antony's Cleopatra: it is truth to himself at all costs. Without this indulgence of his own, he would be unprepared to sympathize with Antony's, as he does in the celebrated “barge” speech (2.2.190-239).²⁰

That sympathy notwithstanding, he must inevitably choose between the “honesty” he reveres and a “loyalty” that may spell disaster for him personally:

Mine honesty and I begin to square.
The loyalty well held to fools does make
Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fall'n lord
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place i' th' story.

(3.13.41-46)

The distinctly pagan sentiments behind Enobarbus's dilemma here should not fully obscure the Pauline terms that associate it with Antony's struggle between earthly and spiritual values. His anxiety over becoming a “fool” for “faith” in Antony, together with his ambition for worldly fame, is of a piece with that one trait of Enobarbus that, more than any other, portrays him as a foolish fool—that is, his fear of love.

For all his bluster about speaking as he feels, Enobarbus repeatedly shrinks from feeling itself, using his supposed plainness—and often his sarcasm—as protection against a dreaded loss of self-control. Not surprisingly in a play brimming with misogyny, Enobarbus conceives of that loss in both himself and Antony as one of manliness. He pronounces his fear most openly late in the play, in reaction to Antony's emotional valediction to his servants: “Look, they weep, / And I, an ass, an onion-ey'd. For shame, / Transform us not to women” (4.2.34-36). Already aware of his intent to leave Antony, Enobarbus may be especially unresponsive here to his master's emotional claims on him. But such explicit resistance to acknowledging his own feeling prompts the audience to reconsider such earlier instances as his unwillingness to recognize Antony's grief for Fulvia or his derision of Cleopatra's grief over Antony's imminent departure (1.2). Not until he embraces and returns Antony's love for him is he truly honest with himself or anyone.

In fact, Enobarbus's great triumph is his foolish—indeed lethal—endorsement of Antony's unconditional love:

                                                                                                                        O Antony,
Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid
My better service, when my turpitude
Thou dost so crown with gold!

(4.6.30-33)

To accept that love is to expose his former preoccupation with truthfulness as a mere pretension and to discover real passion in rejecting self-interest.²¹ Among the many desertions in this play—including those of Menas, Hercules, Decretas, and Antony—Enobarbus's stands out for illustrating the final poverty of worldly gain. Beginning with his realization that, ironically, Caesar's idea of “universal peace” does not extend to trusting renegades from Antony's camp, Enobarbus's abandonment lends him an appreciation of Antony's steadfastness (4.6.4, 11-19). He even dies remarkably like Elizabethan accounts of the despairing Judas—repulsed by lucre (4.6.23), bursting from heartbreak, and falling down in a field (4.9.12-23)—thus furthering the association between Antony's loyalty to him and Christ-like love.²²

To understand Enobarbus's reversal as the last comment upon Antony's character, however, would be simplistic. For one thing, Antony's altruism toward Enobarbus forms, as we have seen, only part of his characterization, and, for another, as we have also seen, selfless behavior in this play often comes under its own fire. True enough, the play's world proves hostile to self-interest like Enobarbus's, also consuming Pompey, whose preoccupation with his own private concerns remains unsurpassed by any other character's egotism. Pompey directs his political negotiations with the triumvirate away from empire and toward his anxiety over Antony's acquisition of his family's home and Antony's failure to thank him for giving his mother sanctuary (2.6.26-29, 39-46); these are personal grudges that, to Menas's dismay, mean more to him than obtaining lands: “Thy father, Pompey, would ne'er have made this treaty” (2.6.82-83). Yet, if the minute attention to trivialities of personal honor, virtually caricatured in Pompey, leads to personal loss, so does utter inattention to the world and one's own place in it.

Such terms describe Octavia, in whom Shakespeare exaggerates selfless loyalty much as he does its opposite in Pompey. She has every opportunity to break faith with either Caesar or Antony and yet, much like Enobarbus, instead suffers a broken heart, hers “parted betwixt two friends / That does afflict each other!” (3.6.77-78). Likewise, Shakespeare has every opportunity to reveal just one advantage to Octavia of her unwavering commitment. But our last impression of her lies far afield of spiritual fulfillment. As Caesar and Maecenas disabuse her of her blind trust in Antony, who has betrayed her, she passively responds, “Is it so, sir?” (3.6.96), the reaction perhaps not of a woman maintaining her belief in her husband at any cost but of one slightly shaken by suddenly confronting her ignorance and trying to maintain her poise. Caesar knows how to thrive in the world that has made Octavia its victim. Her folly, spawning no strength of conviction or transcendent vision, seems awkwardly out of touch, and her discomfort in Caesar's world, although not a source of ridicule, resembles Antony's awkwardness during his protracted death.

Ridicule toward Antony persists even after he has died. In 5.1, Caesar, Maecenas, and Agrippa join the ranks of other characters, like Enobarbus, Pompey, and Octavia, whose degree of charity or self-love implicitly comments upon Antony's characterization. Under the guise of mourning Antony and commending his virtues, the three Romans actually damn him with faint praise. On hearing Decretas's news of Antony's demise, Caesar sets the tone: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack” (14-15). Literally saying that Decretas has understated the significance of Antony's passing, he implies that Antony's influence on the world has so dwindled by the time of his death that it lacks power enough to “make / A greater crack.” Agrippa and Maecenas sustain the theme of Antony's ineffectuality:

Agr.
strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.
Maec.
His traits and honors
Wag'd equal with him.
Agr.
A rarer spirit never
Did steer humanity; but you gods will give us
Some faults to make us men.

(28-33)

Caesar, ostensibly “touch'd” (33), concludes by belittling Antony into a “[d]isease” that he was compelled to “launch” (36-37).²³ Granted, the Romans' backbiting says at least as much about them as about Antony, yet, significantly, it also threatens to lower our esteem for Antony as a hero, demeaning him for his worldly failures.

The last major insight into Antony's characterization may also be the most important. It looks back to and implicitly comments upon all preceding—and conflicting—references to Antony's folly. It is his revisitation of Cleopatra in act 5 in the form of the Clown.

A production of the play in 1993 by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express doubled the actor who played Antony in the role of the Clown, a choice that, I have come to believe, faithfully mirrors Jacobean practice.²⁴ If so, the doubling enriched immeasurably the original audience's association of Antony with the tradition of wise folly. The role makes literal the identification of Antony as a fool, and Cleopatra's paradoxical statement about the Clown could be applied to any of Shakespeare's wise fools, particularly Lear's natural: “What poor an instrument / May do a noble deed!” (236-37). By “noble deed” Cleopatra refers to the delivery of the asp, her means to end her life. But what truly makes the Clown “noble” takes a kinder form, which she is too single-minded to appreciate fully. Despite Cleopatra's instructing him three times to leave her (259, 261, 264), he lingers until the fourth (278). The content of his speeches in response to her repeated farewells is, overwhelmingly, concern for her well-being. Simple as he is, he knows why she has ordered him to leave the snake, and, though he cannot help boasting about his expertise on the “worm,” his chief purpose is to warn her, as Antony has warned her about trusting “none … but Proculeius,” from tempting the asp further than she intends (4.15.48):

You must think this, look you, that the worm will do its kind. … Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people; for indeed, there is no goodness in the worm. … Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding.

(262-70)

Cleopatra's rejoinder to this last direction—“Will it eat me?” (271)—combines an appreciation of the Clown's bawdry, a last pinch of the fear that the Clown hopes to elicit, and a plea for assurance that her plan will work. At this point, even he can see that she is not to be dissuaded: “I wish you joy o' th' worm” (279).

The Clown, then, reincarnates all the essential elements of Antony's character. To his lustiness he adds strict attention to Cleopatra's welfare, limited understanding of her own designs, and, above all, a gift for botching practical endeavors, shown particularly in his language: “I would not be the party that should desire you to touch [the worm], for his biting is immortal; those that do die of it do seldom or never recover” (245-48). But even such blunders signify a capacity for higher understanding, meaning, and gesture than has as yet been attained in this life: as so many critics have remarked, the Clown's “immortal” is a malapropism that speaks more wisely than he knows and that Cleopatra returns to in earnest when she cites her “immortal longings” (5.2.281). Like Antony's suicide, a misfired shot at what Seneca calls a “becoming exit” from the world,²⁵ the Clown's verbal bungling briefly figures forth, in a complementary context, a fundamental discord between practical competence and charitable practice. Likewise, Antony, seeking to free himself from the constraints of this life, seems to become ever more mired in them.

As C. W. R. D. Moseley has demonstrated by studying the play's emblems of wisdom, Hercules traditionally proves wise at the crossroads when he chooses Virtue over Pleasure.²⁶ Hercules' desertion of Antony (4.3), in this light, can perhaps be seen as Antony's loss of prudence, a certain kind of wisdom.²⁷ But the Colossus to which Cleopatra compares Antony after death is, as Moseley has also shown, another Renaissance emblem for wisdom (5.2.82-92), demonstrated in examples from the work of George Wither. Sometimes it is a wisdom so potent that it can subdue the unruly world under its sway, sometimes a wisdom that actually transcends the earth, like Saint Paul's “wisdome of this world,” which is “foolishnesse with God.”²⁸ This transition in emblems for Antony's wisdom tempts the audience to infer a progression in his history: the practical prudence of Hercules, witnessed in Antony's youthful worldly success, gives way to a higher, transcendent wisdom, found in his only apparently foolish surrender to love.

Though such an outline may bear some truth, it is an all too facile account of Antony's final inability to escape what Cleopatra playfully calls “the world's great snare” (4.8.18). Even if he dies for love, it may be love of himself. Even if he dies for love of another, his dignity as a martyr is significantly undermined. As we have observed, he is not alone. Even Eros, acting out his name in self-sacrifice for Antony, expresses mixed motives: “Thus I do escape the sorrow / Of Antony's death” (4.14.93-94). This is self-sacrifice of the most dubious order. Whether because Antony's martyrdom is diluted by escapism, or because his half-failed suicide represents an only half-hearted willingness to die for love, or because he is unlucky, life will not let him go without an awkward struggle. And death insists on humiliating him. Something there is in Antony and Cleopatra that doesn't love saintliness—or, at the least, Antony's approach to it as a fool for love. Cleopatra's enterprise is to find it out.

III

Over the course of the play's last scene, Cleopatra sees to it that Caesar is made every bit the foolish fool that Antony has just seemed in his final hour. Caesar covets the chance to humiliate her publicly.²⁹ Instead, she humiliates him privately by controlling her own destiny. Her objective—to play fortune to Caesar's luck, thus making him her fool—is clear from her first lines in 5.2: “'Tis paltry to be Caesar; / Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave, / A minister of her will” (2-4).

Her success at her goal is stressed repeatedly at the point of her death, first by her lines to the asp: “O, couldst thou speak, / That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass / Unpolicied!” (306-8). After her passing, Shakespeare relies on the dramatic irony of Dolabella's lines to underline Caesar's defeat. Once the guard has announced that “Caesar's beguiled” (323), Dolabella, having secretly betrayed Caesar's trust, makes sure the audience appreciates how ridiculous the emperor appears:

                                                                                                    Caesar, thy thoughts
Touch their effects in this: thyself art coming
To see perform'd the dreaded act which thou
So sought'st to hinder.

(329-32)

and

O, sir, you are too sure an augurer;
That you did fear is done.

(334-35)

That Caesar remains ignorant of Dolabella's role in thwarting his plans intensifies our sense of his folly: at least Antony recognizes when he has been demeaned. And because the audience knows how Cleopatra accomplished her death, Caesar's deliberate investigation of the premises—the women's bodies and the aspic's “slime” (345-48, 351-53)—appears slow and dull-witted. His embarrassing ignorance of being duped lasts until the play's closing lines, where Caesar is still commanding Dolabella, this time to accord Antony and Cleopatra the “glory” for which, unbeknownst to Caesar, Dolabella has made way (362, 365-66). Charnes writes of this moment that Caesar “swiftly translates [the lovers] from rebellious figures who escaped his control and punishment into legendary lovers” so as to minimize their political power, yet his efforts are just as swiftly undermined and implicitly derided by the audience's awareness of Cleopatra's sway, which is greater than Caesar's, over Dolabella.³⁰ Through Cleopatra's agency, then, Antony has accomplished vicariously what the Soothsayer declared he never would himself (2.3): he wins against Caesar in a contest for worldly control. The wheel has come full circle. Caesar is now the “strumpet's fool” (1.1.13).³¹

Nor is Cleopatra's project a simple one. Caesar plays to win. Laura Quinney has remarked on his politically deft use of messengers (who swarm around him) for purposes of both “self-dissemination” and gathering information.³² Indeed, in his first scene, his knowledge of state affairs, kept current by a stream of messengers, clearly surpasses Lepidus's (1.4.81-83). He later indicates that he has spies on Antony (3.6.1-31), and at Actium a soldier marvels at the “speed” of his approach, which “[c]arries beyond belief” (3.7.74-75). In the last scene, when Dolabella relieves Proculeius from attending Cleopatra, he attributes to Caesar an Orwellian omniscience: “Proculeius, / What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows” (5.2.64-65). The end of Caesar's game is nothing less than total control over himself and the world—control that Cleopatra “bolts up” despite Caesar's prowess (5.2.6).³³

At the very least, then, Cleopatra's victory over Caesar discloses a political focus and cunning that may come as a surprise after her initial characterization. Until the middle of act 3, her very reason for being seems to be her gift for oblivion, for losing herself in pleasure and luring Antony along with her. She bids him ignore Caesar in the first scene, wallows in self-pity when he determines to rejoin Caesar (1.3), and longs to “sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away,” fantasizing that, while gone, he will “[t]hink on” her, as did Caesar and then Pompey, for whom she was “his life” (1.5.27-34). Outdoing the younger Pompey in self-indulgence, she draws the world in to her and refashions it in her own image.³⁴ From this inwardness ensue inversions of the natural: her professed love for Antony (or Caesar or Pompey) seems narcissistic, and her “repent[ance]” for having terrorized the messenger, once he has spoken her wishes (3.3.39), appears an ironic foreshadowing of Enobarbus's authentic change of heart, brought about by his discovery of the truth.

Perhaps Shakespeare is counting on his audience to understand that Cleopatra's ostensible retreat from the practical demands of political life is a mere façade, that her frequent threats to dissolve Egypt and Egyptians rather than see her most trivial desire unmet cloak a keen awareness of her political ambitions and of her options for achieving them. After all, when Antony first arrived in Egypt, her experience at protecting her regime from the clutches of foreign empire was extensive. Her method was also based on sexual seduction, if not love, and could therefore belie her political acumen. Her impressive capacity for self-preservation to date suggests that, in the play's early scenes, she has yet to avail the audience of her full characterization. Nor would her skill at throwing off Caesar likely spring up out of nowhere.

In any case, an apparent transition in Cleopatra's character begins occurring in 3.7, where she is inclined less to abandon and more to focusing on such outward matters as military strategy and royal responsibility. Here, she struggles between supporting Antony's bad decision to fight Caesar at sea and expressing her dissatisfaction with other of Antony's poor judgments.³⁵ Her line, “Celerity is never more admir'd / Than by the negligent,” not only “rebuke[s]” Antony (24-25) but also looks back to Enobarbus's rebuke of her own “celerity in dying” (1.2.144). This Cleopatra almost seems beyond such nonsense. While she quizzes Enobarbus honestly about the way he has “forspoke” her presence at Actium (3)—as she will later question him again when she seeks to understand Antony's behavior (4.2)—her demeanor is less that of vamp than of pupil. She appears both motivated and quick to learn more about military and political science, as though the necessity of guarding her own interests has snapped her to attention.

Indeed, this same juncture—where Caesar's bid for control becomes ever more blatant and unavoidable, and where Cleopatra becomes more attuned to political exigencies—is also where the difficulty of penetrating the reasons for Cleopatra's conduct becomes increasingly pronounced. For a time this difficulty parallels that of discerning what prompts Antony's behavior. The challenge of sifting through the action of 3.13 epitomizes the problem of reading Cleopatra's motives, which resurfaces in the closing scene.

Any production of Antony and Cleopatra will present a viewpoint on Cleopatra's intentions toward Thidias in 3.13, and any viewpoint will seem slanted. If, throughout this scene, Cleopatra clearly means to remain faithful to Antony and is only toying with Caesar by playing up to Thidias, then the audience faces the vexed question of why it can detect Cleopatra's irony toward Thidias and Enobarbus cannot.³⁶ Maybe Enobarbus's powers of perception are imperfect—he of course fails to comprehend his own feelings toward his master—but the unwavering trait of his comments on and to Cleopatra is an incisiveness furnished by objectivity. Witness his earlier discrimination in interpreting Cleopatra's behavior, particularly in the “barge” speech, where he pinpoints her attractiveness to Antony and to all men (2.1.190-239). How, then, if Cleopatra is only having at Thidias, can we account for Enobarbus's impression that Cleopatra is betraying Antony?: “Sir, sir, thou art so leaky / That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for / Thy dearest quit thee” (63-65). To argue that Enobarbus is looking for a last reason to desert Antony or is so jealous of Cleopatra's hold over Antony that he hears what he wants to in Cleopatra's language is unconvincing. So is the explanation that Enobarbus is pulling strings in order to see Thidias punished, even though he taunts him in an aside: “You will be whipt” (88).³⁷

Yet, if Cleopatra plays the scene without irony—so that she is aggressively campaigning for Caesar's good graces—it becomes equally skewed. Enobarbus's judgment may be vindicated; Cleopatra's is not. As Ornstein comments: “How foolish of this cunning woman to plan a betrayal of Antony in the presence of Enobarbus!”³⁸ In this reading, the audience is left disenchanted, halfway through the play, with an overtly obtuse, treacherous Cleopatra and with an Antony too credulous to be believed himself when he forgives Cleopatra's duplicity. Surely the audience is not meant at this point to feel as sour toward these protagonists as does Enobarbus (3.13.194-200). Otherwise, Enobarbus's reversal in act 4 will not work theatrically.

The very purpose of a scene like this one is, seemingly, to raise questions about what is driving Cleopatra. How can an actor playing Cleopatra claim any assurance about the tone of her response to Thidias's first gamble for her allegiance?:

Thid.
He [Caesar] knows that you embrace not Antony
As you did love, but as you fear'd him.
Cleo.
O!

(56-57)

Evidence of her tone is no more lucid in her longer speeches to Caesar's man:

                                                            Most kind messenger,
Say to great Caesar this in deputation:
I kiss his conqu'ring hand. Tell him, I am prompt
To lay my crown at 's feet, and there to kneel.
Tell him, from his all-obeying breath I hear
The doom of Egypt.

(73-78)

What could only be construed as sarcasm in most other characters' mouths is here perfectly matched with Cleopatra's usual hyperbole. Once Antony has erupted over the sight of Thidias's lips on Cleopatra's hand, ambiguity continues to surround her intent toward Thidias. Although she insists that Antony has failed to apprehend her true meaning and even identity—“Not know me yet?” (157)—what incentive she could possibly have for teasing Thidias remains unstated. (Is she just having fun? Does she mean to buy time and flexibility with Caesar through persuading Thidias that she will switch loyalties? Is she hoping that Enobarbus will retrieve Antony so that the vision of her tête-à-tête will provoke him to positive action?) Furthermore, the pivot by which she turns Antony around from his anger is dubious at best: is Cleopatra's vow to sacrifice her children if she is guilty a mode of finessing him or a legitimate defense of her innocence (158-67)? How naive is Antony's response to her vow: “I am satisfied” (167)?

On paper such cruces would appear insoluble. And although in performance some stance on them would no doubt prove inescapable, something of their indeterminacy needs to be preserved in a production calculated to tap into the play's rounded portrayal of Egypt's queen. The shading of Cleopatra's plausible motives into each other—the one narrow and self-serving and the other serving Antony and Egypt's larger political cause—involves her in the play's wider inquiry into wise and foolish folly. The cryptic quality of her inner life—the mystery about what, exactly, she is up to—both resembles the uncertainty about Antony's motives and yet suggests greater self-control, more self-knowledge, and a facility exceeding Antony's at managing her worldly enterprises in tandem with her spiritual needs.

In the last analysis, Cleopatra may not fully reconcile earthly and transcendent values. But she succeeds at both toppling Caesar's designs on her and rejoining Antony in death. The intertwining of her self-preservation and her self-sacrifice continually results in further ambiguity about her objectives—when she takes on Caesar, for instance, is she satisfying herself or trying to champion Antony? Her indistinguishable motives also illuminate how she fulfills her apparently antithetical desires and energies relatively unscathed by the ridicule that dogs Antony and Caesar. Neither confining herself to Caesar's political game nor retreating from the “world's great snare,” she embraces this life without deceiving herself about the limits of its rewards. Unlike any other character in the play, Cleopatra, aided by the generosity of her two attendants, accepts her own humanity and thereby (paradoxically) moves toward surpassing it. Refusing to act as a saint—insisting in fact on experiencing her suicide as the consummation of her marriage (5.2.287-313)—she nearly approaches saintliness.

IV

Cleopatra's penultimate act—her pretended suicide—matches in recklessness Antony's final deeds. Her last act, however, rejects such uncalculated behavior in favor of careful orchestration, made possible in part by what Harry Levin calls the “purest Stoicism” of her approach to real suicide.³⁹ Cleopatra's highly controlled leaving of this world, while necessitating an emotional removal from it, also leads her to immerse herself, characteristically, in earthly affairs. In Cleopatra, then, merge motives self-interested and otherworldly, such that we are hard-pressed to know one from the other. In Cleopatra emerges a harmony between the claims of this world and the next that would seem opposed to the conflict between those values in Antony. In Cleopatra intermingle attachment to and detachment from Caesar's game, such that her most basically human gestures may connote divinity.

Her handling of Dolabella illuminates this paradox. Caesar's intent to use Dolabella as a player in a meticulously staged drama is made increasingly clear once Caesar whisks Decretas offstage at the close of 5.1 with blatant self-promotion:

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.

(73-77)

Decretas, twice prompted to “go with” Caesar and “see” as Caesar would have him see, is an audience to the emperor's “show”—propaganda that Caesar has painstakingly crafted by saving his “writings” to document his innocence and generosity toward Antony.⁴⁰ That his staff has already been briefed on his program, which is also meant to subdue Cleopatra through a display of his apparent magnanimity, becomes evident moments later, when Proculeius reiterates Caesar's self-description to Decretas in his instructions to Dolabella: “Be gentle to her” (5.1.75, 5.2.68; emphasis added). Dolabella's role is that of prop, a surrogate for Caesar whose mission, as Caesar conceives of it, is to fulfill his master's will.

Cleopatra conquers Dolabella—and through him Caesar—by awakening his own will, which quickly supplants Caesar's in his sense of allegiance. He, of course, invites her manipulation of him with his overture to her—“Most noble Empress, you have heard of me?” (5.2.71)—by which he strays from Caesar's rigid agenda to fond thoughts of himself.⁴¹ Given the opportunity, Cleopatra sets immediately to degrading his lack of imagination and insisting that he indulge her in her vision of the colossal Antony (5.2.73-100). Within minutes, Dolabella is divulging Caesar's secret ambition to “lead” her back to Rome “in triumph” (5.2.109-10). For someone like Dolabella, Cleopatra's alchemy must partly consist in the flattery toward him that she implies in her praise of Antony: if she immortalizes Antony so extravagantly, Dolabella must be thinking, how might she remember the man who rescues her from Caesar?

But more significant is Cleopatra's appeal to Dolabella's feeling. Even if he never fully subscribes to her glorification of Antony (5.2.93-95), she has touched his capacity for sympathy:

                                                                                Hear me, good madam:
Your loss is as yourself, great: and you bear it
As answering to the weight. Would I might never
O'ertake pursu'd success, but I do feel,
By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites
My very heart at root.

(5.2.100-105)

Caesar's mere “show” of concern is supplanted by Cleopatra's genuine “grief,” and the old joke about Antony's heaviness (recalled all the more by the internal rhyme on great and weight) is transformed into an article of true sorrow. Again paradoxically, Cleopatra profits from the good deed of converting Dolabella, who, because she helps him “feel,” hastens to sacrifice his own aspirations in her service. When he reenters in 5.2, confirming Caesar's plans to abuse her, his reference to his “love” for Cleopatra as “religion” portrays him as more than a courtly lover (199): through pursuing her own ends, Cleopatra (whom even the priests bless when she is riggish) has transported Dolabella to an authentic self that he then becomes willing to abnegate in her behalf.

Such interwoven motives are for Cleopatra but a scion of those she seems to harbor for her suicide. By now, the futility of ascribing that act to either her devotion to Antony or her yen to undo Caesar is critical commonplace.⁴² Indeed, here again, through subverting Caesar and protecting her own interests she simultaneously demonstrates her love for Antony, who can defeat Caesar in no other way than by imping his wing on hers. And here again, the final difference between Antony's and Cleopatra's dying choices is that, for whatever reason, he at least seems to renounce the world on which she relies. Her success at realizing any and all of her hopes—to defeat Caesar, to save her earthly reputation, to join Antony in perfect love—depends entirely upon her openness to the potentially corrupting experiences of human life that Antony would apparently just as soon reject. In the case of her suicide, in order to bequeath her earthlier elements to “baser life” (5.2.289-90), she must come to terms with those elements, whether by testing Caesar's vulnerability to her flirtations (5.2.111-90), manipulating Charmian and Iras with threats of public degradation (5.2.207-26), or dressing herself in her finest clothes to end her life (5.2.280-81). She is determined not to be “hoist” as Antony has been (5.2.55-57). Never completely escaping the claims of “baser life” on her image, she nevertheless transfigures the baser images of that life into something more than earthly through a stunning imposition of will.

Such transfiguration occurs nowhere more stunningly than in the complex iconography of Cleopatra's death scene, the last eighty lines or so of the play. In particular, the images of the serpent and the crown—common emblems in early seventeenth-century England—cut at least two ways. The serpent, which for a Christian audience cannot possibly elude association with the Fall, is, in this play, largely representative of fecundity.⁴³ But Moseley has pointed out the additional, well-substantiated connection between the serpent and wisdom:

Snakes, whatever their other less attractive characteristics, have always been associated with subtlety, wisdom, and knowledge—Hermes' caduceus and Our Lord's “Be ye wise as serpents” [Matthew 10:16] both draw on a common and very ancient association. (According to Alciati, the frequency of whose editions shows how much he was regarded in the XVIth Century and later, the serpent was an Egyptian symbol of royalty. Shakespeare could well have been alluding to this too.)⁴⁴

Moseley goes on to catalog several Renaissance pictorial illustrations in which great rulers, including the allegorical queen Prudence and Elizabeth I of England, are shown with serpents, symbolizing “wisdom with self-rule and political rule” (127-28). He conjectures that, finally, Cleopatra's triumph over Caesar, an “ass Unpolicied” at her “metaphorical feet,” suggests the transformation of her “(apparent) conventional unwisdom” into true wisdom, facilitated by the serpent at her breast (128).

Moseley's reading of Cleopatra indicates a link between the last stage picture we have of her and the Pauline tradition of wise folly.⁴⁵ In fact, although Moseley never mentions that tradition outright, he concludes that Antony and Cleopatra's love, seemingly immoral from a Roman perspective, may constitute “a paradoxical wisdom that is no plant which grows on mortal soil.”⁴⁶ In other words, he sees Cleopatra's ostensibly unwise love as a higher, transcendent wisdom.

I believe, however, that we can pursue the iconography of Cleopatra's death scene more specifically. When Cleopatra, crowned, enthroned, and flanked by her two votaries, describes the asp, a familiar emblem of wisdom, as a baby who “sucks the nurse asleep” (5.2.309-10), she unavoidably alludes to scores of icons, from the mid-thirteenth to well into the early seventeenth century, of Maria lactans—the nursing mother of Christ.⁴⁷ These images, ranging in provenance from Italy, to the Netherlands, to England, are known to date as far back as Early Christian times in Egypt, where, according to Gertrud Schiller, they “are connected with early Egyptian representations of Isis.”⁴⁸ In the West, they began taking root in the late fourth century.⁴⁹ By the time they enjoyed popularity during the fourteenth century and throughout the Renaissance, they had remained predominantly Northern in number and character.⁵⁰

Gail McMurray Gibson, writing about the “complex and omnipresent … Marian devotion” in fifteenth-century East Anglia, discusses at length one approach to the meaning of Maria lactans.⁵¹ Gibson's example is Our Lady of Walsingham chapel, site of “miraculous healings, especially after returning crusaders presented to the shrine a phial said to contain drops of milk from the Virgin's breasts” (140). Pilgrims to the shrine—a favorite of Henry VIII, who ensured its prosperity until the Dissolution—could glimpse the phial “[i]n return for a suitable offering” (140-42). This relic is emblematic of Mary's maternity, the essence of which, says Gibson, is the “principle, both incarnational and linguistic, of saving fecundity” (139).

The relationship between the nursing mother Mary and her salvific nurturance is longstanding. According to Millard Meiss,

The representation of the Madonna suckling her Child had a special significance in late medieval art and thought. Since it showed that situation in which the Virgin was most concretely and intimately the mother of Christ, it set forth that character and power which arose from her motherhood, i.e. her role as Maria mediatrix, compassionate intercessor for humanity before the impartial justice of Christ or God the Father. … [T]he act of nursing signified moral qualities, such as benevolence and mercifulness. … In the Middle Ages the Virgin was believed to be the mother and nurse not only of Christ but of all mankind.⁵²

Theresa Coletti concurs: “The Virgin's milk serves as an analogue to the salvific nourishment of Christ's blood, and consequently images of Maria lactans inevitably evoke association with the redemptive promise.”⁵³ Nor must the nursing image involve Mary specifically to represent divine charity, though most do. For instance, the figure of Ecclesia, sculpted by Giovanni Pisano for the Duomo in Pisa (1302-10), envisions the Church as nursing her congregation and thus recalls Paul's metaphor for the Church's teachings: “I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh” (1 Cor. 3:2-3).

The implicit comparison between Cleopatra and the Virgin is far from thorough or allegorical. To assert otherwise would be patently absurd. Instead, I would argue that the comparison is selective and precise and that, furthermore, its incompleteness is essential to how it works. In Cleopatra, the worldliness of her roles as illicit lover and as ruler and as mother are never denied or forgotten.⁵⁴ Still, by virtue of her final appearance, as well as her verbal self-characterization as a nursing mother, she connects herself with the wise folly of redemptive love, or charity. Her characterization, in the fullest sense of that word, interrelates, fuses even, the secular and the holy.⁵⁵ Renaissance audiences were well-versed in how to tide the gap between such disparate traditions; as Gibson points out, Elizabethans had already long practiced the “transference of the cult of the Virgin to the political cult of the Virgin Queen.”⁵⁶ One especially telling example involves the Puritan preacher Andrew Willett, who in the late sixteenth century published a book of double acrostic emblem poems whose shaped verses (what Moseley calls “figured forms”⁵⁷) replace the visual images that normally accompany the poetry. His first poem, in praise of the dedication to Queen Elizabeth, Willett himself glosses thus:

The Queen our Prince is a great succour to all; … this famous maiden denies not milk to her peoples—to them, immediately [they need it], she their sweet nurse has already sent help by her own hand.⁵⁸

Willett's choice of metaphors—a mother's milk—evinces the post-Reformation ease with reappropriated religious iconography, in this case applied to secular (though God-fearing) politics.⁵⁹ In short, the nursing metaphor was portable, applicable in various contexts. The well-known association between Elizabeth I and the Virgin Mary no doubt also cooperated with that between Cleopatra and Elizabeth I to further the third one between Cleopatra and the Virgin.⁶⁰

Shakespeare's Cleopatra, then, arrives at the emblem of nurse through several doors—by virtue of her association with divinity, with royalty, and with motherhood. But the particular transference of Mary's salvific love onto Cleopatra is advanced by other details—for example, her earlier appearance in the image of the pietà, the dying Antony draped across her lap (4.15.38-91).⁶¹ In this instance, too, she is gaudy Egyptian queen, grieving the loss of a foolish soldier, yet so visionary in her eulogizing this “crown o' the earth” as to redeem his image quite. The figure of the crown, moreover, recalls vividly Antony's untarnished love for Enobarbus, whose “turpitude” the betrayed master “crown[s] with gold” (4.6.32-33). It also looks forward to Cleopatra's appearance as she prepares “again for Cydnus / To meet Mark Antony” (5.2.228-29).⁶² That particular crown symbolizes her royalty but also the “bounty,” like Antony's toward Enobarbus (4.6.31), about her suicide for Antony's sake. What's more, it further relates our last impression of Cleopatra to popular representations of the Virgin.

As Meiss explains, the attribution of the heavenly crown to Mary, whose “nursing … signifies her mercy,” stems, paradoxically, from her reign as queen of humility.⁶³ Through refusing grace to none, she descended to the level of meanest human sin, often demonstrating her lowliness by sitting on the earth, rather than in a throne, in fourteenth-century portrayals. Her humility, however, released her to become enskied and sainted, as her identity began to combine with, as Meiss puts it, “the awesome Woman described in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse: ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’” (153). This amalgam is exemplified, down to the crown of exactly twelve stars, by Albrecht Dürer's woodcut entitled “The Virgin on the Crescent.” The poem that accompanies the figure preserves Mary's identity as intercessor in behalf of humanity, using her power to save her supplicants from the shifting fortunes of earthly life.

Not that Cleopatra's crown confines her to an association either with the virtue of humility or with the Apocalypse, nor that the crown itself is limited only to symbolism that is religious at base. In early seventeenth-century Europe, the crown emblem proliferated, ranging in meaning from worldly vanity, as in Wither's effigy of a naked soul rising above earth-bound fame, to political security, the theme of an emblem by Henry Peacham: two prudent serpents guard the realm (the “Soveraignes crowne”), while the poem warns would-be usurpers (like Caesar?) that their ill-considered “abuse” of “tha'nointed Diadem” will be “reuenged.” Still, the majority of crowns in Renaissance emblem books connote something akin to the heavenly crown—for example, the “Vertue” of lasting love over Wanton affection in Wither's emblem of the fickle woman. Thus, the image of Cleopatra's crown points in several directions, some of them opposed to features of the humble Madonna, and some not: in a final example of this blending, the queen's momentary lure of Caesar himself with her “strong toil of grace” speaks to the universal appeal of her physical loveliness, as well as her abundant love. Caesar, perhaps in spite of himself, commemorates both in burying her next to Antony (5.2.358).

But the most suggestive detail about Cleopatra's crown is that, in the course of the strong toil that is her death, it shifts “awry” (5.2.318), faintly burlesquing those hundreds of pictures in which the Virgin's perfection remains inviolate, eternal. Every inch an earthly queen, Cleopatra must contrive to idealize her outward looks through artificial means, as by avoiding the unsightly “swelling” induced by poisons (5.2.345-46). For this vanity, she is herself lightly mocked, her crown embarrassingly, if only briefly, askew. Charmian's last act of adoration, to “mend” the crown's angle (5.2.319), portends her self-sacrifice through suicide—both gestures in which exemplary devotion mixes with a lower form of folly, bred of fleeting efforts to control human destiny. Doomed as may finally be the attempts of these women to manipulate Caesar and their reputations after death, their pains meet with some success.

Cleopatra never transcends this world, whatever protests she may make about discarding her earthlier “elements” (5.2.289-90). Her frank engagement in Caesar's game leads her, in some true sense, to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.⁶⁴ So doing, she embraces her humanity. Though her characterization is riddled with instances of her pride, her struggle to take down Caesar while also eluding him establishes, paradoxically, her humility: she is not above playing by Caesar's rules, turning his tactics against him, or risking loss at his hands. Also paradoxically, her openness to worldly folly seems inseparable from—the very grounds for—her apotheosis of Antony and Shakespeare's of her.⁶⁵

Shakespeare's Mark Antony reflects the saint whose name he shares by at least appearing to exchange earthly “glory” for pure love and his “pardon” (4.14.19, 45). But Shakespeare's Cleopatra recalls, in her peculiar way, Caxton's story of Saint Anthony and the bowman, in which the monk makes no apology for worldly game, which has its holy purpose. … In the broadest sense, Saint Anthony's wise folly traditionally includes a worldly playfulness that he is also, finally, willing to put at risk and, if need be, sacrifice. For Cleopatra, the wisdom of this world is divine foolishness in something of this uncanny sense. It is foolishness with this world in all its splendor and inadequacy—what Caesar calls “noble weakness” (5.2.344). Because her defeat of Caesar and her ennobling of Antony are forever tainted by her commitment to the goals, standards, and passions of this life, audiences will be forever tempted to take the part for the whole and respond only negatively, only to her familiarity with the mutable, corrupt world. Or they will minimize her worldliness and protest that her love for Antony cancels it or rises above it. To do either, however, is to derange the careful balance of a play that, insofar as it concerns the problems of living in and leaving this world, remains deeply suspicious of endeavors to avoid it. As Antony grows increasingly uncomfortable on earth, so does Caesar, who, recoiling from bodily pleasures (for example, 2.7.98-125), takes refuge in conquest and pride in self-control. If Cleopatra evades a good share of the folly that visits these two soldiers, it is not for lack of loving this life.

Notes

1. Jonathan Dollimore, “Virtus under Erasure,” in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 211.

2. I am indebted for some items on this list to the 1993 production of Antony and Cleopatra by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, which was especially sensitive to the humor implicit at the end of act 4. The director of that production, Ralph A. Cohen, later published an essay in which he lists his own set of jokes aimed at Antony (“Staging Comic Divinity: The Collision of High and Low in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Bulletin 13.3 [Summer 1995], 5-8). Not surprisingly, our lists overlap somewhat. Cohen's perceptions of the humor and the uses to which it is put, however, differ widely from mine. For instance, to his mind the tone of the joking is lighter than I am describing it. For elaboration on the contrast between his interpretation and mine, see n. 64, below.

3. W. B. Worthen, “The Weight of Antony: Staging ‘Character’ in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in English Literature 26 (1986): 295-96. Citations for the rest of the paragraph follow: Brian Cheadle, “‘His legs bestrid the ocean’ as a ‘form of life,’” in Drama and Philosophy, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama Series, 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 88. Robert Ornstein, “The Ethic of the Imagination: Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 82. Martha Tuck Rozett, “The Comic Structures of Tragic Endings: The Suicide Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 160. Barbara C. Vincent, “Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and the Rise of Comedy,” English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 53-86. Leslie Thomson, “Antony and Cleopatra, Act 4 scene 16: ‘A Heavy Sight,’” Shakespeare Survey 41 (1988): 83.

4. Margaret Lamb's appendix on staging the monument scene in her history of Antony and Cleopatra on the English stage mentions no humor at all (“Antony and Cleopatra” on the English Stage [Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980]). In a different key, Lucy Hughes-Hallett sees the double suicide as utterly somber, lending “significance and purpose to [the characters'] lives” but also “condemn[ing]” them to death brought on by a “sterile” passion (Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions [New York: Harper & Row, 1990], 149). In her view, then, Antony is not so much derided as rejected for his immorality.

5. Rosalie Colie, “The Significance of Style,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 83.

   Most critics who sense the distancing humor at the play's end hasten to deny its persistence. Examples would include Ornstein, who believes that the play finally upholds the “honesty of the imagination” over the “facts of imperial conquest” working against Antony and Cleopatra (“Ethic of the Imagination,” 84), and Bernard Beckerman, who, entertaining the opportunities for awkwardness about Antony's being lifted to Cleopatra's monument, concludes: “Despite the obstacles, … Antony was raised in a manner which, we must suppose, was not ludicrous” (Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609 [New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1962], 231).

6. Examples here would include Janet Adelman, for whom Antony becomes the embodiment of the play's most positive valuation of love (The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973], 139) and Evelyn Gajowski, who believes Antony gradually matures in his ability to love (The Art of Loving: Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions in Shakespeare's Tragedies [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992], chap. 4). Anne Barton sees not Antony's suicide, but Cleopatra's, as the act that “redeems” Antony's “bungl[ing]” and that settles the conflict in the play's tone between “the sublime and the ridiculous, the tragic and comic” (“‘Nature's Piece 'Gainst Fancy’: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1988], 53, 51). Significant exceptions to the critical trend of overapologizing for Antony present themselves in such authors as Thomson, for whom Antony's love, though great, remains ever flawed (“Act 4 scene 16,” 90); J. Leeds Barroll, who locates Antony's tragedy in the final failure of his love to endure the ravages of Caesar's world (Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition, and Change in “Antony and Cleopatra” [Washington: Folger Books, 1984], 269, 272); and Jonathan Dollimore, who views the play without a shred of romanticism and Antony as a true fool, because his self-centered infatuation for Cleopatra leads him to “kiss away kingdoms” and thus “also the lives of thousands” (“Virtus under Erasure,” 215).

7. Two critics in particular who have discussed the role of Christian references in Antony and Cleopatra are Andrew Fichter (“Antony and Cleopatra: ‘The Time of Universal Peace,’” Shakespeare Survey 33 [1980]: 99-111) and C. W. R. D. Moseley (“Cleopatra's Prudence: Three Notes on the Use of Emblems in Antony and Cleopatra,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft West 1986: 119-37), both of whose work I shall address in more detail below. See also the brief comments of Northrop Frye (Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986], 138-39).

8. Several critics have lately challenged the apparent binaries in the play. Jonathan Gil Harris takes a political-sexual approach, arguing that the alleged differences between things Roman and Egyptian are really just a false front for Roman narcissism (“‘Narcissus in thy face’: Roman Desire and the Difference it Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 [1994]: 408-25, passim). Linda Charnes finds the superficial distinction between public politics and private love a mere mask for Antony's entrapment by both: “Although the play encourages us to misrecognize Antony's love for Cleopatra as an alternative to the identity and project he bears for Rome, we see that in his role as Cleopatra's Antony he is put to similar use” (Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 141-42, passim).

9. Other critics who have, in different contexts, treated the dichotomy between the worldly and the spiritual include Adelman (Common Liar), Peter Berek (“Doing and Undoing: The Value of Action in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 [1981]: 295-304), Fichter (“Time of Universal Peace”), William D. Wolf (“‘New Heaven, New Earth’: The Escape from Mutability in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 [1982]: 328-35), and A. S. Weber (“New Physic for the Nonce: A Stoic and Hermetic Reading of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” Renaissance Papers 1995: 93-107).

10. Although M. R. Ridley, editor of the New Arden Antony and Cleopatra (New York: Methuen, 1981), believes that this line is meant for Menas, his reasoning seems stretched. The printing of the folio makes somewhat unclear Enobarbus's addressee, but the sequence and sense of the speeches makes Antony the logical choice.

11. Several readers have examined the world of Antony and Cleopatra as one marked by “flux,” as Maynard Mack calls it (“Antony and Cleopatra: The Stillness and the Dance,” in Shakespeare's Art: Seven Essays, ed. Milton Crane [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973], 89), and thus as one that defies the characters' vision much as the play resists our neat explanations. See especially Mack, Adelman (Common Liar), Margot Heinemann (“‘Let Rome in Tiber Melt’: Order and Disorder in Antony and Cleopatra,” in “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. John Drakakis, New Casebooks [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994], 167-73), and, on multiple perspectives in the play, Sidney R. Homan (“Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra,” Philological Quarterly 49 [1970]: 460-68). The paradigm of unyielding choice that I am discussing here is, I believe, a feature of this ever-changing world, which keeps propagating new and yet unsatisfying alternatives.

12. In a psychoanalytic study of Antony's melancholy and audiences' responses to it, Cynthia Marshall writes of how Antony is affected by a virtual crisis of identity: “He feels himself to be coming apart” (“Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 [1993]: 392). In Marshall's analysis, as in Charnes's, Antony's identity is the “terrain” on which the “real battle” of the play—“that between Caesar and Cleopatra”—is waged (Charnes, Notorious Identity, 112).

13. Susan Snyder expresses the same idea thus: “Antony can bring together incompatible modes of life only when he has no more life to live” (“Patterns of Motion in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Survey 33 [1980]: 120).

14. This, of course, is a difficult statement to support in few words. Suffice it to say that English Renaissance society generally thought of Roman moral values in a way that reflects the ancient Romans' conceptions of themselves: that is, as founders of government whose individual talents and energies were to be directed toward that public good. Indeed, according to Charles Wells: “[In the Roman tradition], softer feelings had no place in public affairs of any kind” (The Wide Arch: Roman Values in Shakespeare [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992], 159). John Ferguson points out that, although these Roman “public” virtues “were not easily compatible with the gentler virtues of humility and compassion,” eventually peace within the empire “[saw] other qualities thrusting themselves to the fore, generosity, and forethought, and clemency” (Moral Values in the Ancient World [London: Methuen, 1958], 178). In addition, some writers whom Shakespeare knew, principally Virgil, sought to reconcile imperial “single-mindedness” with “compassionate feeling” (178). That the problem in the Aeneid of reconciling public duty with private desire is on Shakespeare's mind in Antony and Cleopatra appears clear from Antony's reference to Aeneas and Dido in 4.14.51-54. But the point about the issue at hand—Antony's motivation for suicide—is that, even judged against imperial Roman values, it may appear somehow craven. See also Beverly Taylor on the medieval view of Antony's suicide as motivated by selfish desires, not real martyrdom (“The Medieval Cleopatra: The Classical and Medieval Tradition of Chaucer's Legend of Cleopatra,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 [1977]: 261, 263).

15. For a fuller discussion of Erasmus's identification of Mark Antony with wise Christian folly, see chap. 1 [in Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, University of Delaware Press, 1997]. Although Christopher Wortham argues that, since Antony is an antitype of Hercules and Hercules is a type for Christ, Antony is, by extension, a virtual antitype of Christ, Wortham has not considered Antony's associations with Christ through the figure of Saint Anthony (“Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra,” Comparative Drama 29 [1995]: 20).

16. The notion is partly that, because Christian tenets are natural, they predated Christianity in pagan form. This belief was popular among Christian humanists like Thomas More and Erasmus. See, for example, Raphael Hythloday's description of “Religions” in book 2 of More's Utopia. The Utopians received Christianity so quickly because they had already arrived at its tenets independently (i.e., naturally) (124).

    While I agree with Fichter that Antony and Cleopatra are unaware of the religious significance of the many Christian references and allusions surrounding them, I think that the relationship between the two perspectives he identifies—that of pagan-secular/Christian-religious—implies more than that the pagan is about to give way to the Christian in thirty years or so; it also shows that the characters' worldliest acts can appear holier than their apparently saintlier behavior (“Time of Universal Peace,” 99-101, passim).

    See also Phyllis Rackin's superb discussion of two worlds and two perspectives in Antony and Cleopatra grown out of Cleopatra's skill as an artist (“Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” PMLA 87 [1972]: 201-11).

17. As Heinemann points out, this view of Antony (as well as of Octavius and Lepidus) as “self-seeking heirs of Julius Caesar” with an “insatiable ambition for power” derives ultimately from the republican view of Roman history that characterized Plutarch (“Order and Disorder,” 175).

18. Plutarch, The Life of Marcus Antonius, T. J. B. Spencer, Shakespeare's Plutarch (London: Penguin, 1968), 178, etc.

19. Fichter, “Time of Universal Peace,” 105. Fichter actually cites J. Middleton Murry as the source of the observation (Shakespeare, 1965 ed. [London: John Cope, 1936], 303), but himself dilates upon it.

20. Enobarbus is often viewed as the voice of temperance against Antony's intemperance. See, e.g., Adelman: “Enobarbus is a figure of moderation who attempts to live in a world of excess” (Common Liar, 131). I believe he has his own excesses, which reflect Antony's. Allyson Newton approaches such excesses in an intriguing way by observing that Enobarbus's “emphatic denials almost always wind up making powerful claims for belief … that strain against the resolve of his seemingly pragmatic skepticism” (“‘At the Very Heart of Loss’: Shakespeare's Enobarbus and the Rhetoric of Remembering,” Renaissance Papers 1995: 89).

21. Gajowski shares this view, albeit in a different context, when, having remarked on Enobarbus's fear of losing his manhood (Art of Loving, 99), she comments on his change: “In the end, Enobarbus embodies the value of honor in love, not war. … He epitomizes Roman control of emotions, yet he dies out of love for Antony. … Enobarbus dies heartbroken, speaking with the same density of feeling as the lovers” (110). I cannot agree with Ornstein that Enobarbus's desertion is itself an “act of love” (because he cannot endure watching Antony's fall “[Ethic of the Imagination,” 93-94]); rather, it is a part of a process toward love.

22. Fichter refers to Enobarbus's betrayal of Antony as “Judas-like” but does not elaborate (“Time of Universal Peace,” 105). See especially the Bishops' Bible, Acts 1:18 and the Bishops' and Geneva Bibles, Matthew 27:3-8.

23. Caesar's “tears” here (41), suggesting genuine sympathy, are problematic in light of an earlier reference to his expression of sorrow in 3.2.50-59. Enobarbus and Agrippa imply between themselves that both Caesar's and Antony's public displays of grief are mere self-conscious extensions of their political personae. Enobarbus's word rheum to describe Antony's weeping over Julius Caesar and Brutus mockingly suggests crocodile tears (for similar uses of the word, see, e.g., Much Ado about Nothing 5.2.83, King John 4.3.108, Richard II 1.4.8, Coriolanus 5.6.45, and Othello 3.4.51).

24. Doubling is necessitated in this company's productions by its historically accurate size of twelve players. This particular example contradicts Stephen Booth's alluring theory that, originally, Antony was doubled with Dolabella (“Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare's Plays,” in Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension, ed. Philip C. McGuire and David A. Samuelson [New York: AMS Press, 1979]). Even if Antony and Dolabella were doubled, that fact would not entirely eliminate the possibility that the same actor also played the Clown. I do think, however, that Dolabella's appearance at the opening of 5.1, a split second after Antony's corpse has been borne off stage, raises serious suspicion about the possible doubling of Antony and Dolabella.

25. Seneca, as quoted in William D. Nietzmann, “Seneca on Death: The Courage to Be or Not to Be,” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): 89.

26. Moseley, “Cleopatra's Prudence,” 124-25.

27. Although Moseley uses the words prudence and wisdom interchangeably, I wonder if, even in his own examples, they are always the same. The one seems to connote practical ability (“careful management,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992]); the other, often, “understanding” (American Heritage). Obviously, I think Shakespeare sometimes distinguishes between the two ideas.

28. Moseley (“Cleopatra's Prudence,” 122-23) discusses the two emblems of the Colossus that I am including here from George Wither's A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London: Printed by A. M. for Robert Allot, 1635; rprt., Brookfield, Vt.: Gower Publishing, 1989). The poem for the one in book 1 (xxxi) reads noticeably like the Pauline theology at hand:

    The Soule of Man is nobler then the Spheres;
    And, if it gaine the Place which may be had,
    Not here alone on Earth, the Rule it beares,
    But, is the Lord, of all that God hath made.
              Be wise in him; and, if just cause there bee,
              The Sunne and Moone, shall stand and wayt on thee.

    See also Barbara J. Bono on the ambiguity of the Hercules/Antony analogy (Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 154).

29. Historically, Caesar renamed himself Augustus because his triumph over Cleopatra occurred in August, so important to him was that conquest (Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, 32). Furthermore, the historical Caesar may have deliberately manipulated Cleopatra into committing suicide through making her believe that he would treat her badly if she remained alive; he could thus easily eliminate the difficult problem of what to do with her (Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, 31-32). Although I am not suggesting that Shakespeare knew or made use of this precise theory, its mere existence speaks to the intensity with which Caesar pursued Cleopatra, on which Shakespeare capitalizes.

30. Charnes, Notorious Identity, 145.

31. Of all the criticism I have perused, only Gajowski's seems to me to acknowledge the irony with which “[n]early every character on stage … accentuates Cleopatra's victory and Octavius's defeat in this final battle of wills and wits” (Art of Loving, 116-17). Barroll, however, does comment on the “absurd post-mortem” and the irony of Caesar's continued trust in Dolabella (Shakespearean Tragedy, 222). Also of interest here may be the information that, according to Taylor, in medieval lore Octavius was seen as both “perfect earthly ruler” and as “partial prefiguration of Christ,” not as foolish fool (“Medieval Cleopatra,” 267).

32. Laura Quinney, “Enter a Messenger,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. Harold Bloom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 158.

33. Barroll offers a rich discussion of Caesar's obsession with control, down to his abstinence from drink (2.7) and his icy exploitation of Octavia's feelings to trap Antony (3.6) (Shakespearean Tragedy, chap. 5).

34. Thomson sees Cleopatra's ability to draw Antony and others to her as a “key organizing principle” of the play (“Act 4 scene 16,” 78).

35. Although Plutarch assigns purely selfish motives to Cleopatra for encouraging Antony to fight by sea (Marcus Antonius, 250-54), I can only agree with those critics who point out that Shakespeare handles the matter differently, neither giving Cleopatra any clear motivation to indulge Antony's choice, nor showing Cleopatra to push Antony in that direction. See, e.g., Ornstein (“Ethic of the Imagination,” 94-95) and Ronald Macdonald (“Playing Till Doomsday: Interpreting Antony and Cleopatra,” English Literary Renaissance 15 [1985]: 89).

36. Apologists for Cleopatra are prone to this ironic reading of Cleopatra's tone in 3.13. See, e.g., Gajowski's certainty that Cleopatra's lines to Thidias are “rich” in “sarcasm” and that Enobarbus “readily misinterprets the exchange” (Art of Loving, 104). But such is the rule, not the exception, among all critics who write about this scene; nearly all make assumptions about Cleopatra's tone that would be extremely difficult to prove.

37. Ornstein argues that Enobarbus uses this occasion to exact his “jealous revenge” on Cleopatra, but does not explain how Enobarbus has suddenly become so gullible as to mistake Cleopatra's irony (“Ethic of the Imagination,” 94-95). She could, of course, be insincere without adopting a clearly ironic tone, but in that case the audience would be unable to follow what was happening.

38. Ibid., 94.

39. Harry Levin, “Two Monumental Death Scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15, 5.2,” in Shakespeare, Text, Language, and Criticism: Essays in Honor of Marvin Spevack, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador (New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1987), 157.

40. See, e.g., 3.6.30-37.

41. Levin aptly refers to Dolabella's “naive vanity” (“Monumental Death Scenes,” 158).

42. The debate over Cleopatra's motives for suicide has been approached from many angles besides the obvious contrast between Shakespeare's ambiguity and Plutarch's relative clarity. For example, Mary Ann Bushman argues that Cleopatra's inscrutability, especially in her speeches, “invite[s] the audience to complete” her unfinished characterization (“Representing Cleopatra,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker [Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991], 40). Jyotsna Singh sees Cleopatra as a natural improviser, changing her mind as she progresses (and thus threatening male audience members) (“Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” Renaissance Drama 20 [1989]: 99-121). Wolf, among others, simply acknowledges that her motives are mixed (“Escape from Mutability,” 334). I particularly favor Charnes's emphasis on the provisionality of Cleopatra's motives: “The play posits two versions of love: … love that is ‘to die for’ and love that is to die for if nothing else can be worked out” (Notorious Identity, 144).

43. Adelman elaborates on negative correspondences between the serpent and women (see especially Common Liar, 64). Rozett notices that, as the asp “sucks the nurse asleep” in 5.2.310, it “is metamorphosed from an instrument of death to a symbol of new life” (“Comic Structures,” 162).

44. Moseley, “Cleopatra's Prudence,” 127.

45. Here again, that association may be somewhat obscured by Moseley's easy interchange of the terms wisdom and prudence, which, though synonymous in the early seventeenth century (as per the Oxford English Dictionary), no longer share quite the identical meaning.

46. Moseley, “Cleopatra's Prudence,” 129.

47. To show the striking resemblance between the last stage picture of Cleopatra and these icons, I have reproduced but a few of the many pertinent images. Not all of them picture Mary flanked, crowned, and enthroned; a subcategory of the nursing Mary image is, in fact, the so-called “Madonna of humility,” who is humble by virtue of sitting on the ground rather than on a throne. Yet not all the elements of flanking, crown, and throne need be present for Cleopatra, asp applied to her breast, to mirror Maria lactans.

    Also important to note is the post-Reformation plainness of Willem Basse's etching in particular (1628-48). Although the prevalence of the nursing Mary image declined in the North after the early sixteenth century, it continued to thrive on the Continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern examples include Peter Paul Rubens's Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (c. 1615), and a later Italian instance is Francesco de Mura's Charity (1743-44) (both in the Art Institute of Chicago). Like so many icons in Protestants' hands, the nursing Mary was sometimes refashioned by Northern artists to appear nearly secular, thus furthering the viewer's identification with, not idolatry of, the portrait's subject. In fact, Basse's portraits of the nursing Virgin tend to be indistinguishable from his portraits where the subjects are common nursing mothers. See n. 59, below, for more discussion of the image's post-Reformation history, and see chap. 1 (sec. 2) [in Particular Saints: Shakespeare's Four Antonios, Their Contexts, and Their Plays, University of Delaware Press, 1997] for an outline of the similar history that images of Saint Anthony underwent.

48. Gertrud Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1966-), 1:122n. 186.

    Hughes-Hallett discusses the assimilation of Egyptian and early Christian theology into Roman culture as one in which the overlapping of deities, a common phenomenon, included the identification of Isis with the Virgin Mary. So, by extension, did Cleopatra, who often appeared publicly as Isis the mother, historically come to be associated with Mary (Cleopatra, 80-84). Hughes-Hallett elaborates:

    The idea that Cleopatra, known to us, as she was to her Roman contemporaries, as the profligate libertine, could have any link with the Virgin Mary seems almost laughable. … Yet to her subjects she must have embodied just those qualities of self-denying love, fidelity and compassion which the Virgin Mary shares with Isis. Isis the Great Mother was her favourite role model.

    (83)

    Laura Severt King has also written about the correspondence between the Cleopatra of act 5 and the Virgin Mary, yet in a context and with a thrust very different from mine. King sees Cleopatra, in the end, “trading the iconography of Isis for that of the Virgin Mary” (“Blessed when they were riggish: Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Christianity's Penitent Prostitutes,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 [1992]: 429). The exchange, she reasons, results from a split in Cleopatra's two natures—the profane and the holy—and results in Cleopatra's tragic fall, such that the last “tableau” of her with the asp “simultaneously travesties the Madonna and child and acknowledges their ascendancy as models” (449). I also perceive this ascendancy, but not at odds with or at the cost of Cleopatra's worldliness. In addition, the reference specifically to the nursing Mary, as will become clear in my text, is of most crucial importance to my reading.

49. Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographic der Christlichen Kunst (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1980), 4:2:22.

50. Ibid., 4.2:180.

51. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 137.

52. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century, Harper Torchbook ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 151.

53. Theresa Coletti, “Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays,” Comparative Drama 11 (1977): 37. The association between Mary's milk and saving grace, as Coletti states, seems to derive from another association between Christ's open wound, out of which pours redemptive blood, and Mary's freely offered breast. The two images are often paired in medieval and Renaissance art. For a fascinating discussion of the parallels between Christ's wound and Mary's breast, see Caroline Walker Bynum (Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion [New York: Zone Books, 1991], 93-211).

54. Further evidence of the lack of contradiction between Cleopatra's worldly and spiritual aspects lies in an emblem by Cesare Ripa, from Iconologia (1611), that I discovered in Jeanne Addison Roberts's The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender ([Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991], 11). Entitled Natura, the emblem represents Nature herself as a lactating mother, thereby illustrating that the image applies to physical, as well as spiritual, nurturance. Indeed, Cleopatra's reference to nursing the snake does not ally her with virginity but with the Virgin's maternal sustenance.

55. The doubleness I am describing here comes very close to Adelman's perception of Cleopatra as the “potential site of both generation and regeneration”—of the mortal and the redemptive (Suffocating Mothers, 183). Furthermore, Cleopatra's transformative power over Antony (and, as I have argued, over Dolabella) is, in Adelman's psychoanalytic analysis, related to the female act of “remembering” the “dismembered” male (as when Cleopatra reinfuses the figuratively emasculated Antony with new masculinity in the dream she recounts to Dolabella) (183-85). Through this power, Adelman contends, the capacity for spiritual/psychological healing is “transferred from the divine to the human plane in Cleopatra” (185).

56. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 138.

57. C. W. R. D. Moseley, A Century of Emblems (Brookfield, Vt.: Gower Publishing, 1989), 111.

58. Ibid., 111.

59. The importation of religious images of lactation into secular and quasi-secular contexts was common in the English Renaissance. Willett's own case may have been influenced (at least subconsciously) by the image of his Cantabrigian Alma Mater lactating knowledge, as pictured in the device of the Cambridge University Press, which came into use at the turn of the seventeenth century. (Although the earliest known example of the device dates to 1600 and thus postdates Willett's emblem book in question, another of Willett's books, published in 1605, bears the lactating Alma Mater Cantabrigia. Moreover, the image may have existed at Cambridge long before it was adopted by the press. For the image itself, see Ronald McKerrow, Printers' and Publishers' Devices in England and Scotland, 1485-1640 [London: Cheswick (Bibliographical Society), 1913], nos. 325-27, 329.) Spenser and others (some, much earlier) also appropriated the icon to the figure of Charity (Faerie Queene, bk. 1), an association that comes, I think, especially close to Shakespeare's application of it to Cleopatra.

60. For a recent discussion of the first association, see Hackett (Virgin Maiden), and for studies of the second parallel, see, e.g., Helen Morris (“Queen Elizabeth I ‘Shadowed’ in Cleopatra,” Huntington Library Quarterly 32 [1969]: 271-78), Keith Rinehart (“Shakespeare's Cleopatra and England's Elizabeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 [1972]: 81-86), and, more recently, Theodora A. Jankowski, “‘As I am Egypt's Queen’: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and the Female Body Politic” (Assays V [1989]: 91-110).

61. In criticism to date, I can find only one acknowledgment—Gajowski's—that the icon at play here is the pietà. She writes: “The emblem of Cleopatra embracing the dying Antony conflates the grief of the pietà and the nurturance of the Madonna” (Art of Loving, 112). As Fichter has shown, Charmian's reference to Cleopatra as “eastern star” also involves her in the notion of holy nativity (“Time of Universal Peace,” 109). From a psychoanalytic perspective, Cleopatra's identity easily “elides,” in Marshall's words, “with that of the mother” (“Man of Steel,” 395). See also Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (passim).

62. These crowns appearing later in the play stand separate from ones mentioned earlier in 2.5.40 and 2.7.116.

63. Meiss, Painting in Florence, 152-54.

64. In discussion, Ralph A. Cohen has used this biblical verse to describe the action of Antony and Cleopatra, but differently from me (Discussion at Workshop, “From Critic to Director: Teachers Staging Shakespeare,” Folger Shakespeare Library, 19-20 March 1993). While he sees Antony and Cleopatra jointly surrendering the things of this world to achieve spiritual union together, I see just one of them, Cleopatra, as fulfilling herself spiritually through behaving most humanly. Commentators in Renaissance Bibles, especially the Geneva version, take pains not so much to oppose the political and the heavenly kingdoms that are mentioned in this verse as to stress their interdependency. And although those commentators' context is far afield of Shakespeare's (in that they envision the magistrate as God's appointed servant on earth who must, therefore, be obeyed), the spirit in which they interpret Christ's words to the Pharisees approaches the play's acknowledgement, as I see it, of the place of humanity on earth (see, e.g., gloss of Geneva Bible to 1 Peter 2:17-20).

65. Several critics of late have stressed the inclusiveness of the play's values by the end, the openness of the work to multiple viewpoints, and the lack of friction among Cleopatra's many aspects. See, e.g., Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 191-92; Marshall, “Man of Steel,” 408 (“Cleopatra models an exuberant, indeed almost comic, delight in plural subjectivity.”); and, in another key, Heinemann, “Order and Disorder,” 177-79. Of an entirely different mind is Peggy Muñoz Simonds, whose rich study of emblems in the play is brought to the narrow conclusion that Antony and Cleopatra are exclusively of this world and, in failing to transcend it, must be purged from it before the Christian era (and any true spirituality) can begin (“‘To the Very Heart of Loss’: Renaissance Iconography in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Studies 22 [1994]: 220-76, passim).