SOURCE: “Mark Antony and the Tournament of Life,” in Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition, and Change in Antony and Cleopatra, Folger Books, 1984, pp. 83-129.

[In the following essay, Barroll examines the way in which desire and its “strangeness” inform the characterization of Antony.]

I

Mark Antony is one of Shakespeare's most complexly imagined tragic heroes. For this we thank, of course, Shakespeare's human empathy and genius. But the compelling quality of Antony's humanity owes as much to strategy as to genius. And if, in the end, these are perhaps the same thing, then the strategy by which genius brings Antony to life, makes him a tragic “character,” is Shakespeare's emphasis on desire. For this in us is a complicated and deeply implicated phenomenon whose entangled state is much more specifically human than is grief, anger, or fear. These responses animals share with us. But our humanity is delineated by the kaleidescopic focusings and terrible steadiness of our wishing.

That the strangeness of desire is Shakespeare's basic framework for “talking about” the character of Mark Antony is apparent at the outset. We are immediately confronted with a life being torn between “Egypt” and “Rome.” But Rome and Egypt, in turn, are mere geographical or political expressions that, in the end, oversimplify everything. Indeed, if we allow the idea of Egypt and the concept of Rome to act as allegorical stations we lose the point. West tugging with East over Antony's fallible but attractive Renaissance soul; psychomachia pitting Duty vs. Lust, Love vs. Greed, or Imagination vs. Reason—these are all attractive dualities. But Shakespeare's drama is a tragedy about an imagined human being, not an Essay on the Good Life in which Antony is to be significantly manipulated from pillar of Roman virtue to post of Egyptian inebriation. Ancient Rome and ancient Egypt in Shakespeare's drama are suggestions about confusion, not the panels of a medieval painting. Desire is not a simple duality: that is why it is complex.

Enobarbus, that careful (but often careless) observer of Antony, says about him, “Antony will use his affection where it is.” And, in the long run, Enobarbus cannot help but mislead us too. For in Shakespeare's time, as today, “affection” was a multiplex word for a difficult envisioning, more complicated than what Enobarbus seems to intend by his words. After Antony follows Cleopatra's prematurely panicking battleship, thus fatally confusing his fleet and losing the empire of the world, the lamentations and shock are succeeded by a quiet scene in which Cleopatra reflects about what has happened.

Whose fault is all this? she asks Enobarbus and again he talks about “affection.” The battle, he says, was lost by

Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason. What though you fled
From that great face of war, whose several ranges
Frighted each other? Why should he follow?
The itch of his affection should not then
Have nick'd his captainship, at such a point,
When half to half the world oppos'd, he being
The meered question.

(3.13.2-10)

“Affection,” we are to understand, then, is that thing in Antony which draws him from his true Roman interests to Cleopatra and the Egyptian life.

Symmetrical enough—at least for Enobarbus—but for Antony himself the choices do not seem quite so cut and dried. “I'th'East my pleasure lies” was indeed the frank statement of one kind of allegiance, but other statements, other allegiances render and blend “affection” into something complexly hued beyond dualities. What happened at Actium denied any neatly distributed, defined, and scaled hierarchies of value in Antony. For there, fighting not simply against something, but for something—for his relationship with Cleopatra—and with everything to gain from victory, he nevertheless allowed himself to lose.

And having lost, why could he not have been content with Cleopatra, the world well lost for love? Indeed, his passion, his anger, his regrets force us to seek Antony somewhere within the complex of these contradictions, beyond the pale of Enobarbus's adages. Our quest begins at Actium in these Antonian writhings.

Hark, the land bids me tread no more upon't,
It is asham'd to bear me.

(3.11.1-2)

And, to Cleopatra here.

O, whither has thou led me, Egypt? See
How I convey my shame out of thine eyes
By looking back what I have left behind
’Stroy'd in dishonor.

(3.11.51-54)

There is much in this play of Antony and shame. Very early on, Caesar talks about it. Antony's “shames” should from luxurious Egypt “quickly drive him to Rome.” But in this case Antony is not so affected. Free from a sense of guilt despite the spate of moralisms which have surrounded him (and us) since the play began, Antony in Rome responds to the Caesarean lecture as if he came from another planet. Antony, we gather, cannot be held responsible for the activities of relatives or of wives fomenting civil wars. Nor, for that matter, can he be expected to inconvenience himself for messengers who come too early in the morning from Caesar, especially when one might have a hangover. Caesar urges that Antony broke his oath—but Antony will not stand for this either.

                                                                                as nearly as I may,
I'll play the penitent to you; but mine honesty
Shall not make poor my greatness, nor my power
Work without it.

(2.2.91-94)

And it is presumably with the same aplomb that Antony will later alternate infidelities. Barely speaking four lines, he will agree to marry Caesar's sister to establish stronger political ties with him. Barely speaking two lines, he will desert Octavia for Egypt, and for war with Caesar, whom he sought to reassure by marrying Octavia in the first place.

No, Antony is not ashamed to have been truant—in fact, so little is he affected on this Roman score that one wonders why he left Egypt at all. For indeed the play began with this awakening. But the drama began too by making it clear that Antony departs from the East for reasons which do not wholly embrace ideas of Roman imperium. Otherwise, why, on his way to Rome, did he send back a pearl to Cleopatra with the message that he would “piece her opulent throne with kingdoms?”

When it comes to shame, Antony will know his own personal cue.

                                                                                                                        Since Cleopatra died
I have liv'd in such dishonor that the gods
Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword
Quarter'd the world, and o'er green Neptune's back
With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack
The courage of a woman—less noble mind
Than she which by her death our Caesar tells,
“I am conqueror of myself.”

(4.14.55-62)

Honor and nobility—to Antony these mean one thing: bravery, physical courage. As when Eros, having put a sword through himself before his master did, elicits this:

                                                            Thrice-nobler than myself!
Thou teachest me, O valiant Eros, what
I should, and thou couldst not. My queen and Eros
Have by their brave instruction got upon me
A nobleness in record.

(4.14.95-99)

In the wreckage of Actium, that central point in tragedy, this, for Antony is the only, the real, issue. For the very notion of seeming to flee, of seeming to act the coward by following Cleopatra's retiring ship arouses in Antony a sense of self-destroying more profound than he ever experienced leaving Rome for revels in Egypt. At Actium, one has “instructed cowards” and thus one has left oneself. He has lost his way forever and he is most profoundly ashamed. “I follow'd that I blush to look upon.” “For indeed,” as he dismisses his friends, “I have lost command.” Yet, in our sense, how could he have been a coward? He followed Cleopatra's ship when she herself fled. True. That following broke up the order of the fleet and of course brought disaster is true too. So Antony worried about the queen and became a tactical imbecile. Yet he thinks “coward,” not “imbecile.”

Contrast this with a future mood, the élan of the second, strategically futile battle before Alexandria. “You that will fight,” he calls to his soldiers, “follow me close. I'll bring you to't.” And from this fight—the only one we ever see him win—we watch him come and note his high celebration. But not as a general—he has won nothing. As a successful gladiator.

Through Alexandria make a jolly march,
Bear our hack'd targets like the men that owe them.(1)

(4.8.30-31)

Euphoria overwhelms as he paints his magnificent hyperbole.

Had our great palace the capacity
To camp this host, we all would sup together,
And drink carouses to the next day's fate,
Which promises royal peril. Trumpeters,
With brazen din blast you the city's ear,
Make mingle with our rattling tamborines
That heaven and earth may strike their sounds together,
Applauding our approach.                              Exeunt.

(4.8.32-39)

This is a tragedy about love, as critics all must tell us, but love is not a single, simple thing. In the dawn before his battle, when Antony meets a soldier armed and ready, he says:

Thou look'st like him that knows a warlike charge.
To business that we love, we rise betime,
And go to't with delight.

(4.4.19-21)

Antony, as his queen noted, is up early himself. Strange then that Actium should be such a terrible failure.

But what is not so strange by these lights is how the play itself begins; this soldier sense in Antony makes his “awakening” clear. Our earliest cue for him in this play has always seemed to be Cleopatra's when she tells us that Antony was inclined to mirth, but now “a Roman thought hath struck him.” Yet the only “Roman” thoughts available up to now have been the opening remarks of those two shadowy figures, Demetrius and Philo. (But if these two had actually hailed each other by name, they would have struck their seventeenth-century auditors not as Roman, but as Greek.) It is they who tell us, anyhow, that Antony, the once-great leader, has now become “the bellows and the fan to cool a gypsy's lust.” Sometimes, too, we gather, “when he is not Antony, he comes too short of that great property which still should go with Antony.”

Thus emerges the first Antonian “self” molded from the sensitivities of Roman (?) soldiers (?). But when Antony himself comes to prove Cleopatra's accuracy about Roman thoughts—to show some second “self”—he has not become a Roman. Hearing that Labienus and his Parthian forces are on the move against him, Antony urges his faltering messenger:

Speak to me home, mince not the general tongue;
Name Cleopatra as she is call'd in Rome.
Rail thou in Fulvia's phrase, and taunt my faults
With such full license as both truth and malice
Have power to utter. O then we bring forth weeds
When our quick winds lie still, and our ills told us
Is as our earing.(2)

(1.2.105-11)

“These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,” he mutters, “or lose myself in dotage.” Perhaps there is here some Roman “shame,” but it is an oddly aphoristic and mannered guilt, contrasting with the passions to come at Actium. Here all this weed-growing seems small stimulus.

The news of his wife's death prompts proper regret and muted encomium—“there's a great spirit gone”—and even some properly moral words about Cleopatra:

I must from this enchanting queen break off;
Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,
My idleness doth hatch.

(1.2.128-30)

But, as the messengers succeed one another to inundate him with news to which he now responds—if not attends—it becomes quite clear that government affairs are not the issue.³ The challenge is Pompey.

Antony speaks to Enobarbus about him at length, and then to Cleopatra too. Caesar also speaks of Pompey, far away in Rome, but when Caesar talks about him and the danger he poses, the Roman leader tends to comment in Tudor words appropriate to Shakespeare's Henry IV: giddy rebelling Roman multitudes surging behind some Roman Jack Cade. Antony dutifully moves in the fringes of these ideas too, but the thrust of his meaning is elsewhere.

                                                                                                              Sextus Pompeius
[Hath] given the dare to Caesar, and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never link'd to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who, high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life, stands up
For the main soldier.

(1.2.183-91)

This is the concept that engages Antony.⁴ Some one else is acting the “main soldier.” And Antony describes Sextus to Cleopatra—he speaks to her about him too—as “the condemn'd Pompey, rich in his father's honor.” The “main soldier” is merely riding on the military reputation of Pompeius Magnus whom the tribunes lamented at the beginning of Julius Caesar.

In Rome, Antony turns to the subject with Caesar. His words here are not the quintessence of realpolitik. They are almost chivalric, redolent of tournament.

I did not think to draw my sword 'gainst Pompey,
For he hath laid strange courtesies and great
Of late upon me. I must thank him only,
Lest my remembrance suffer ill report;
At heel of that, defy him.

(2.2.153-57)

The news, however, is bad.

Ant.
What is his strength by land?
Caes.
Great and increasing; but by sea
He is an absolute master.
Ant.
So is the fame.
Would we had spoke together!

(2.2.161-64)

“Speaking together” means “joining battle.”⁵

The triumvirate meet with Pompey, who begins the proceedings with a passionate speech of defiance. Caesar responds in his usual matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it tone. What we hear from Antony is something else.

Thou cans't not fear us, Pompey, with thy sails;
We'll speak with thee at sea. At land, thou know'st
How much we do o'er-count thee.

(2.6.24-26)

Caesar has already mentioned the hopelessness of trying to match the pirate-leader on the water, but Antony must, it seems, respond. And if there is more emotion than reason in Antony here, it produces that cautious compliment of a later exchange. Pompey (significantly) shakes hands with Antony before he does with the others, saying

                                                            Let me have your hand.
I did not think, sir, to have met you here.
Ant.
The beds i'th'East are soft, and thanks to you,
That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;
For I have gain'd by't.

(2.6.48-52)

We must attend this Antony, for although it is not all of him, it is part of his sense of himself, and that is all of him. “O love,” he says to Cleopatra before that victorious, futile battle toward the end of the tragedy.

That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew'st
The royal occupation, thou shouldst see
A workman in't.

(4.4.15-18)

“I'll leave thee now like a man of steel.” And even after the final disaster his language figures forth his vision of the warrior supreme. “Bruis'd pieces go, you have been nobly borne.” Later, in rage, this supremacy is of almost Herculean transcendence.

                                                            Teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'th'moon,
And with those hands, that grasp'd the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self.

(4.12.43-47)

Antony's private feeling of self lives away from all those judging notions of his duties which others of the play are always so ready to envisage for him. From these judges we hear many versions of what Antony “is” and what he should be—from Pompey, Lepidus, Enobarbus, Caesar, and Cleopatra—but it is interesting that, in the end, not one of these judging or supposedly knowing characters can avoid being surprised, startled, or disappointed. For in Antony's world, honor, baseness, duty, nobility achieve their definition not in conventional terms, but, perhaps, in a context illuminated by Antony's own metaphor when he breaks in upon the tearful farewell between his bride, Octavia, and her brother to whom she clings for a moment. Antony takes Caesar's hand in farewell.

                                                                                                    Come, sir, come,
I'll wrastle with you in my strength of love.
Look, here I have you, thus I let you go,
And give you to the gods.

(3.2.61-64)

The wrestling is figurative, but Antony is the victor. The moment, light and fleeting enough to die under the hand of analysis, tells in the silent language of drama of one of Antony's worlds, more real than Egypt or Rome.

II

If Antony were wedded to physical courage—to some naïve concept of “manliness”—he would have anticipated the Hemingway ideal by three hundred or so years. But Shakespeare endowed his tragic hero more complexly, beyond the dimensions of Ajax, whose solution to most problems, in Troilus and Cressida, was “pashing” some one. Antony seems related to a general pattern of behavior in what Shakespeare's contemporaries would have termed “pleasure,” that conglomeration of yearnings for sensual stimuli of all kinds, as well as an attraction to physically induced and totally enjoyed euphoria to which the dramatist Thomas Lodge and his contemporaries interestingly gave the name of “sloth.”⁶ Such moral terms need not overconcern us—they concern Caesar and his fellow Romans too much already, ever anxious as they all are to wrap up the hero squirming into the amber of a morality drama in which he can forever play sinner to Caesar's redeemed man. But we must all the same—and without Caesar's eager help—take note of Antony's propensities.

There is, for example, love—not a simple thing in Mark Antony's universe.

Now for the love of Love, and her soft hours,
Let's not confound the time with conference harsh;
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now. What sport to-night?

(1.1.44-47)

Here is Antony, the much-discussed voluptuary, fond of physical beauty. At Cleopatra's first banquet he “for his ordinary pays his heart for what his eyes eat only,” as Enobarbus put it. And even to Octavia, Antony is not totally indifferent. These are his words about his new wife as she talks weepingly to her brother, Caesar, the hero making his remarks beyond their hearing:

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can
Her heart inform her tongue—the swan's down feather,
That stands upon the swell at the full of tide,
And neither way inclines.

(3.2.47-50)

Enobarbus speaks of “our courteous Antony whom ne'er the word of ‘No’ woman heard speak” and it is obvious that women indeed do something for Antony. It is as if they help his imagination. When he prepares for the Battle of Actium he takes Cleopatra with him, much to Enobarbus's consternation as he argues this out with the queen. But “we'll to our ship,” Antony announces in grand exit with the Egyptian queen:

Away, my Thetis!

This was the sea-nymph of the silver feet who danced on the dark waves with her sisters in the moonlight before the secret and astounded eyes of Peleus who bravely entwined with her Protean and savage forms to win her and engender in her Achilles.

But let us not rush to implicate Cleopatra as the only begetter of Antony's sensualities and thus to make his woes a tale of her fashioning. It is important that we allow the queen to stand apart. Voluptuousness is Antony's own leaning, as is emphasized by the Roman banquet which presents the only revels we observe in the drama. This celebration is a triumvirate affair and Caesar predictably complains of unseemly levity and of washing the brain with wine, which makes it dirtier. But it is our Antony who urges things on. “Be a child o'th'time,” he tells Caesar, and Antony and Pompey, their host, respond with alacrity as Enobarbus celebrates:

                                                                                          Ha, my brave emperor!
Shall we dance now the Egyptian bacchanals
And celebrate our drink?
Pom.
Let's ha't, good soldier.
Ant.
Come, let's all take hands,
Till that the conquering wine hath steep'd our sense
In soft and delicate Lethe.

(2.7.103-8)

So they dance, and shout the refrain: “Cup us till the world go round!” If we search for Cleopatra in this entertainment, we will find that she is far away, in Egypt. For we are now in Italy.

Where Shakespeare makes Antony especially interesting is in the fact that the hero is proud of this voluptuary mode in himself. In truth, the pleasures of the flesh and of combat and of the idea of women are his personal way to a sense of exaltation which he sees as the gates to a kind of transcendence. The ambition of his soul achieves its natural mode of expression in these domains. To be preeminent in existence is the core of ambition, and if “existence” resides especially in life's physical feelings and beauties, then preeminence must be there too—somehow.

Thus self-admiration is everywhere in his physical life. The queen quotes him.

                                                            When you sued staying,
Then was the time for words; no going then;
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven.

(1.3.33-37)

It is a state that can even extend beyond death.

Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.

(4.14.51-54)

So Antony's opening statement is wholly appropriate to him.

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus … when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do't, in which I bind,
[On] pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.(7)

(1.1.33-40)

So, what of it? To love these things and to think this way—to live with feasting, battle, women—is not necessarily to court disaster. Indeed, Philo speaks of a “great property” in Antony. Pompey says of the hero's soldiership that it is indeed “twice the other twain.” Antony is not deluding himself about his military reputation. For these opinions about him are reinforced further with the words of Eros. In Plutarch's Life of Antonius, Shakespeare's primary source for events in this play, Antonius lost badly to the Parthians, but in Shakespeare, when Eros refuses to help Antony kill himself, he mitigates this Parthian disaster:

Shall I do that which all the Parthian darts,
Though enemy, lost aim and could not?(8)

(4.14.70-71)

Antony's soldiership also receives the praise of the scarred soldier, Scarus, after the land-battle at Alexandria, when he corroborates Agrippa's surprise at the military reversal of Caesarian momentum.

Oh my brave Emperor, this is fought indeed!
Had we done so at first, we had droven them home
With clouts about their heads.

(4.7.4-6)

Yet there is an irony in Scarus's words, just as it lurks in Caesar's magnificent description of that Antony to whom even he must yield respect.

                                                                                                    When thou once
Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow, whom thou fought'st against
(Though daintily brought up) with patience more
Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at; thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou brows'd. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on; and all this
.....Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.

(1.4.56-71)

For despite all this, there are the facts. Antony lost at Modena, he lost in Parthia, he loses at Actium, and he will lose the last battle. When he triumphs in the fighting celebrated by Scarus, Antony gains little but the desertions which collapse the last battle around him. And when there is a victory in Parthia, it is won by Antony's general, Ventidius, who tells his lieutenant that

Caesar and Antony have ever won
More in their officer than person.

(3.1.16-17)

For Caesar this is not important—he has no personal military aspirations. For Antony, it is crucial. Is it true?

“Now Antonius was made so subject to a woman's will that though he was a great deal stronger by land, yet for Cleopatra's sake, he would needs have this battle tried by sea,” writes Plutarch. Cleopatra again emerges as the destructive femme fatale. But in one of the most significant deviations from this source in the whole play, the line Shakespeare adopts is not this at all. The hero speaks to his general Canidius.

Ant.
Canidius, we
Will fight with him by sea.
Cleo.
By sea, what else?
Can.
Why will my lord do so?
Ant.
For that he dares us to't.
Enob.
So hath my lord dar'd him to single fight.
Can.
Ay, and to wage this battle at Pharsalia,
Where Caesar fought with Pompey. But these offers,
Which serve not for his vantage, he shakes off,
And so should you.

(3.7.27-34)

It is of the utmost importance to note that Shakespeare's version of why Antony chose a naval battle has little to do with what Cleopatra does or does not want, no matter how much her subsequent flight may obscure this. The point is even reemphasized by the scene before the final battle wherein Caesar, having lost the land-battle at Alexandria, apparently has less concern for his own “honor.”

Ant.
Their preparation is to-day by sea,
We please them not by land.
Scar.
For both, my lord.
Ant.
I would they'ld fight i'th'fire or i'th'air;
We'ld fight there too. But this it is: our foot
Upon the hills adjoining to the city
Shall stay with us—order for sea is given,
They have put forth the haven.(9)

(4.10.1-7)

Again this is not Plutarch; this is Shakespeare's Antony and his response to what he sees as a “dare.”

It is not possible to restrain Antony in these things, any more than it is possible for the soothsayer to reveal the unpleasant fact of Caesar's dominance. “Speak this no more.” Antony always rejects the idea that his subjectivity may not be all-sufficient, and this adamantine streak in his geniality is always there. Ventidius was afraid to follow up his victory against the Parthians.

I could do more to do Antonius good,
But, 'twould offend him; and in his offense
Should my performance perish.

(3.1.25-27)

This is what must be done to avoid irritating Antony:

I'll humbly signify what in his name,
That magical word of war, we have effected;
How with his banners, and his well-paid ranks,
The ne'er-yet-beaten horse of Parthia
We have jaded out o'th' field.

(3.1.30-34)

Before Actium, in his effort to persuade Antony to avoid that seabattle, Enobarbus alters his own characteristically blunt way of speaking to adopt the same “magical-word-of-war” line. “By sea, by sea,” Antony persists, and Enobarbus:

Most worthy sir, you therein throw away
The absolute soldiership you have by land,
Distract your army, which doth most consist
Of war-mark'd footmen, leave unexecuted
Your own renowned knowledge.

(3.7.41-45)

The fact, however, is that Shakespeare's Mark Antony tends to view military problems with the moods of a swordsman rather than with the detachment of a general. And though his performance in the battle line itself is always formidable, in concepts of strategy his predispositions render him indifferent or inept. Before Actium, speaking of Caesar's deployment, he sounds naïve.

                    Is it not strange, Canidius,
That from Tarentum and Brundusium
He could so quickly cut the Ionian Sea,
And take in Toryne?

(3.7.20-23)

More news of Caesar. He has indeed taken Toryne.

Can he be there in person? 'Tis impossible
Strange that his power should be.

(3.7.56-57)

In all justice, Canidius, and the other soldiers too, share this wonder.

Can.
This speed of Caesar's
Carries beyond belief.
Sold.
While he was yet in Rome,
His power went out in such distractions as
Beguil'd all spies.

(3.7.74-77)

This justifies Antony's own amazement, but it does impose certain important limitations on Pompey's dictum about Antony's soldiership as “twice the other twain.” Apparently, one of the “other twain” is an astounding master of the art of troop movement. Whether this counts for “soldiership” depends on the viewpoint, but it is clear that for Antony such matters do not induce the boredom of familiarity.¹⁰

There are debates on the strategic issues before the battle of Actium. Shakespeare allows Enobarbus to expand on details which have little actual relevance to the battle we experience—we will only need to be told that the hero followed Cleopatra's flight. But Enobarbus's “details” are important for us simply because Shakespeare shows Antony ignoring them. Why should Antony not fight at sea? Well, Enobarbus says,

                                                            Your ships are not well mann'd,
Your mariners are [muleters], reapers, people
Ingross'd by swift impress. In Caesar's fleet
Are those that often have 'gainst Pompey fought;
Their ships are yare, yours heavy. No disgrace
Shall fall you for refusing him at sea,
Being prepar'd for land.

(3.7.34-40)

It would, in one way, be a relief if Cleopatra were at the bottom of all this, for then we could simply say that Antony acts as a man infatuated. But she is only agreeing with Antony and he, reacting to Caesar's dare, ignores all else, even though the soldier Scarus, showing his wounds, hints at the mood of an infantry nervous at the prospect of fighting on unstable ships against a fleet of experienced pirates. But Antony only remarks “Well, well. Away,” and exits.¹¹

Antony's attitudes and needs are continually at odds with the reality he must comprehend to survive a war, and the time after Actium emphasizes this. Muttering to himself in his shame, reminiscing about Philippi, he says of Caesar that

                                                                                                                        he alone
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had
In the brave squares of war; yet now—No matter.

(3.11.38-40)

Sharing with Iago that contempt for the theoreticians, for those who delegate authority, who ignore prowess as the crucial stuff of war, Antony's remark is no casual one, penned by Shakespeare unthinkingly. The motif has been developed through the play until its eloquent articulation in Antony's response, after Actium, to the messenger from Caesar. Caesar sends a refusal to grant Antony's highly interesting request to be allowed to live “a private man in Athens.” “To him again!” says Antony.

                                                            Tell him he wears the rose
Of youth upon him; from which the world should note
Something particular. His coin, ships, legions,
May be a coward's, whose ministers would prevail
Under the service of a child as soon
As i'th'command of Caesar. I dare him therefore
To lay his gay comparisons apart,
And answer me declin'd, sword against sword,
Ourselves alone. I'll write it. Follow me.

(3.13.20-28).

“Coward,” “child,” “dare.” The whole complicated mechanism of war which under Caesar's guidance has swept over Antony at such a speed as even to astound the generals is, here, relegated to the realm of the superficial.¹² Toy baubles fit for a child, these forces are unreal, cloudlike wisps which trivially obscure that ultimate and profound moment, the determination of manhood: “sword against sword, ourselves alone.”

It is not strange that Antony should look at war like this, for he cannot even look at life in any other way. This would be to deny himself. And often when he cannot deny himself, he harms himself the most. It is true that military daring can be decisive too, no matter the dictates of theory, and it is true that Antony was holding his own quite well at Actium before Cleopatra's flight—vantage like “a pair of twins” appeared. But Antony cannot put daring into a larger perspective. For in defeat, he responds with rage and rationalization. It is as if victory were not determined by victory, but by bravery. Perhaps Caesar “cheated” but he won and the answer he sends Antony's duel-challenge points the difference between them. For this answer precipitates a moment of stunning naïveté as Antony tries to comprehend a challenge that, unlike Sossius's generalship in Africa, the hero has no power to waive from existence.

Ant.
He will not fight with me, Domitius?
Eno.
No.
Ant.
Why should he not?

(4.2.1-2)

“Antonius being thus inclined,” runs Shakespeare's source, “the last and extremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love of Cleopatra) lighted on him.” Although Plutarch's slant is misleading for the play, his attribution of the love affair to other than strictly sexual penchants in Antony is suggestive. For in Shakespeare's play, Antony's relationship with Cleopatra simply reinforces and illustrates elements that we see in his personality when romance is not his immediate concern.

                                                                                                    As for my wife,
I would you had her spirit in such another;
The third o' th'world is yours, which with a snaffle
You may pace easy, but not such a wife.

(2.2.61-64)

“There's a great spirit gone,” he said at the beginning of the play when he heard of her death, and it is clear—especially by contrast with his attitude toward the meek Octavia—that Antony admires Fulvia for the kind of qualities he finds in himself. Cleopatra has caught this to use it for her own purpose. She not only flatters Antony's self-portrait but replicates it when accusing him of infidelity early in the play. She recalls to him his words in this manner:

                                                                                                                        none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven. They are so still,
Or thou, the greatest soldier of the world,
Art turn'd the greatest liar.
Ant.
How now, lady?
Cleo.
I would I had thy inches, thou shouldst know
There were a heart in Egypt.

(1.3.36-41)

She plays the “great spirit,” acts masculine. She gives the astonished Antony the lie and wishes she were big enough to back up her insult (or big enough to compete with him in other suggestive ways).

And Antony does admire Cleopatra as a mirror of himself. When she taunts his surprise before Actium at Caesar's speed of maneuver, he is happy to be impressed.

                                                                      A good rebuke,
Which might have well becom'd the best of men,
To taunt at slackness.

(3.7.25-27)

But she is something more than mirror. This is clear enough early in the play as he leaves Egypt. He says to her:

Quarrel no more, but be prepar'd to know
The purposes I bear; which are, or cease,
As you shall give th'advice. By the fire
That quickens Nilus' slime, I go from hence
Thy soldier, servant, making peace or war
As thou affects.

(1.3.66-71)

This when leaving for Rome.

But perhaps what we see is merely his indifference to politics. War is what he treasures to himself. What then are we to make of an episode the queen relates to Charmian?

                                                                                next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.

(2.5.20-23)

What principles in Antony's life are most important? He leaves her, and Egypt, marries Octavia, yet he follows her in flight at Actium. And though Antony forgives Cleopatra after Actium when he considers himself unmanned, he will be ready to kill her when he thinks she has betrayed him. How does she fit in?

There is Antony's answer to her after Actium when she says she hadn't thought he would follow after her fleeing ship.

                                                                                          You did know
How much you were my conqueror, and that
My sword, made weak by my affection, would
Obey it on all cause.

(3.11.65-68)

It is Enobarbus's use of “affection.” But if Antony here wishes to blame Cleopatra by constructing an allegory that reminds us of the revels described earlier by Cleopatra, what he said a moment before was naked of moral attitudinizing.

                                                                                                              O'er my spirit
[Thy] full supremacy thou knew'st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.

(3.11.58-61)

This is not totally true. There are other tugs at him, else Antony would not be so disconsolate now. But he seems to be saying that she is almost as important to him as his soldier “self.” As he leaves Egypt, the psychology of interchange, despite its manifest Platonism, is complex.

                                                                                                              Let us go. Come;
Our separation so abides and flies,
That thou residing here, goes yet with me;
And I hence fleeting, here remain with thee.
Away!

(1.3.101-5)

It is as if in some important way, Cleopatra actually expressed the soldier principle for Antony. For if he were merely “her soldier” as protector, he would not necessarily react as he does when he hears of her death. At that time we see an impressive piece of behavior, accompanied by appropriate imagery and activity emphatically visible to the audience. Brooding about the betrayal of his fleet, he speaks dispiritedly and despairingly. But when he hears the queen is dead, he immediately begins to take off his armor.

All length is torture; since the torch is out,
Lie down and stray no farther. Now all labour
Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength.

(4.14.46-49)

Strength has lost its meaning, as if the queen had, in Antony's life, been the ideal in terms of which his existence was to be organized. A force usually exerted by a philosophy, a creed, or a god—this was the “grave charm”

Whose eye beck'd forth my wars and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end.

(4.12.26-27)

This is something more than drunken companionship with the flesh-pots of Egypt. At the same time, ideals are not essentially products of altruism. They tend to be defined in accordance with those traits loved in the self, and if Antony holds Cleopatra more important than politics, it is not only understandable but inevitable. “The nobleness of life is to do thus, when such a mutual pair and such a twain can do't,” and “nobleness” is defined as that which Antony thinks good. He sees himself preeminently suited to enact this end, and Cleopatra is part of the enactment.

What would happen then, if the queen flouted this great Idea (whatever it is)? We see when she lets Caesar's messenger, Thidias, kiss her hand. Antony, on fire, rages:

                                                                                                    what's her name,
Since she was Cleopatra?

Cleopatra is not “herself” anymore if she does not share Antony's opinion of the grandeur isolating him, with her, from the rest of the world. So instead of being grief-stricken and faithfully continuing to love Cleopatra as if he were her slave, Antony thrusts her from the crucial circle of his self-esteem into the “Roman” context, the Caesarean mode.

You were half blasted ere I knew you; Ha?(13)
Have I my pillow left unpress'd in Rome,
Forborne the getting of a lawful race,
And by a gem of women, to be abus'd
By one that looks on feeders?
Cleo.
Good my Lord—
Ant.
You have been a boggler ever,
But when we in our viciousness grow hard
(O misery on't!), the wise gods seel our eyes,
In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us
Adore our errors, laugh at's while we strut
To our confusion.(14)
Cleo.
O, is't come to this?
Ant.
I found you as a morsel, cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher, nay, you were a fragment
Of Cneius Pompey's—besides what hotter hours,
Unregist'red in vulgar fame, you have
Luxuriously pick'd out; for I am sure,
Though you can guess what temperance should be,
You know not what it is.

(3.13.105-22)

We need not see this speech as any kind of orthodox repentance of the error of his ways: Antony, by “temperance,” simply means that Cleopatra should only be intemperate with him. His true attitude emerges from another figure.

                                                            Alack, our terrene moon
Is now eclips'd, and it portends alone
The fall of Antony!(15)

(3.13.153-55)

Cleopatra seems to be the “objective correlative” of his own being when she acts appropriately. But when she does not enhance his self-esteem she is no longer “himself.” And when this living symbol of his own identity, as he sees it, is gone, what is to become of him? She is his conception of himself made flesh.

III

For the most part the Antony of the first half of the tragedy has been mild-mannered, but then events come to change things. In the scenes following Antony's perplexing and paradoxical defeat at Actium, he begins to be oppressed by a sense of dualism, an inconsistency which he sees between those qualities which he thinks should gain triumph in war and those which have actually beaten him. After he has forgiven Cleopatra his thoughts deal only with Caesar.

Caesar is the “young man.” One must go to him now and “dodge and palter in shifts of lowness.” But the edge is physical.

Yes, my lord, yes; he at Philippi kept
His sword e'en like a dancer, while I strook
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas I
That the mad Brutus ended.(16) He alone
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had
In the brave squares of war; yet now—No matter.

(3.11.35-40)

The light and graceful slimness of the “dancer” and the wrinkled leanness of a Cassius. Between the two, better than both—a golden mean—stands Antony, the victor of Philippi. It is a way to think well of oneself. One is at neither extreme and also—neither extremely old nor laughably young.

My very hairs do mutiny; for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them
For fear and doting.

(3.11.13-15)

It is important for Antony to think this way. He must be the physical supreme. But whether this “golden mean” is really the blossoming point of the purely physical life, that “rose” which Antony says Caesar wears upon him—this is something the hero has not yet worked out.

He feels his loss repaid by Cleopatra's repentant tears: her strong reverence for his own concept of himself. But inevitably, once this sadness has somewhat fretfully been laid to rest, he turns to other comforts.

                                                            Love, I am full of lead.
Some wine, within there, and our viands! Fortune knows
We scorn her most when most she offers blows.

(3.11.72-74)

Despite the pseudo-Stoicism, however, this matter of military prowess is not fully settled. In fact, it has just begun to raise its ugly head.

We learn that the hero has sent his schoolmaster, the only available ambassador he has, to ask something of Caesar.

Lord of his fortunes he salutes thee, and
Requires to live in Egypt, which not granted,
He lessons his requests, and to thee sues
To let him breathe between the heavens and earth,
A private man in Athens.(17)

(3.12.11-15)

Since Shakespeare's Athens was not distinguished for sobriety or temperance of life, Antony's plea is hardly a wish to study philosophy. It is as if his sense of unworthiness has led him to try to settle for what remains. Lear would wish to be with his Cordelia like “birds in a cage”; Antony wishes to retire with Cleopatra among the sensual descendants of Troy's opponents. For that, presumably, is what remains when the military life is gone.

But Antony's request is evasion, and Antony, as tragic hero, will not be allowed to evade. Events will more closely probe him.

                                                            Enter the Ambassador with Antony
Ant.
Is that his answer?
Amb.
Ay, my Lord.
Ant.
The Queen shall then have courtesy, so she
Will yield us up.
Amb.
He says so.

(3.13.13-16)

The hero's response is complex. He says to Cleopatra:

To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head,
And he will fill thy wishes to the brim
With principalities.

(3.13.17-19)

It is as if he challenges her to weigh things as he himself weighed them when he said kingdoms were clay. Are they “clay” to her too? And he adds pathos: the queen may either yield to a “boy” or stay faithful to the “grizzled” one. Youth and age still people his thoughts as he responds:

To him again, tell him he wears the rose
Of youth upon him; from which the world should note
Something particular. His coin, ships, legions,
May be a coward's, whose ministers would prevail
Under the service of a child as soon
As i'th'command of Caesar. I dare him therefore
To lay his gay comparisons apart,
And answer me declin'd, sword against sword,
Ourselves alone.

(3.13.20-28)

Now this is a struggle for survival and Antony simply must lash out—but characteristically, always characteristically. For in addition to the “unfairness” that lies in the “mere” paraphernalia of power—coins, ships, legions—there is the subtler taunt of Caesar's very youth, which Antony so exaggerates. It is the “child” Caesar with the rose of youth upon him that he wants to get at. It is Antony alone who stands as the virile epitome. Actium was a “gay comparison.” The true test is elsewhere. Sword against sword, ourselves, alone. Of course. He will even do the writing of the message himself. This is too intimate an affair for go-betweens.

But when he leaves, Thidias comes. Caesar has spoken to him about the “eloquence,” “inventions,” and “promises” he is to produce to win the queen, and a description in Plutarch suggests what Shakespeare might have made visually available to his audience. Caesar, according to Plutarch, sent Thyreus (Thidias) “one of his men unto her, a very wise and discreet man, who bringing letters of credit from a young lord unto a noble lady, and that besides greatly liked her beauty, might easily by his eloquence have persuaded her.” Plutarch's sexual hint seems realized in Caesar's directions. He told Thidias to “win” Cleopatra from Antony. Caesar's messenger may therefore be quite the elegant young man.

Plutarch further narrates that Thyreus “was longer in talk with her than any man else was, insomuch as he made Antonius jealous of him. Whereupon Antonius caused him to be taken and well-favoredly whipped, and so sent him unto Caesar.” Shakespeare's changes are significant. His Thidias is not quite so “very wise and discreet” as is Plutarch's. Thidias patronizes Enobarbus and is suggestive to Cleopatra. This makes Enobarbus run to get Antony who, when he arrives, finds Thidias kissing the queen's hand.

                                        Favors? By Jove that thunders!
What art thou, fellow?
Thid.
One that but performs
The bidding of the fullest man, and worthiest
To have command obey'd.

(3.13.85-88)

One fervently hopes that Thidias refers simply to his being there, not to his current performance with Cleopatra, but as Antony snaps, this ambiguity is lost in the threats of disintegration multiplying around him. He shouts for his attendants.

Approach there!—Ah, you kite!—

But nobody comes.

Now, gods and devils!
Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried “Ho!”
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth
And cry “Your will?”

Under this triple assault—the sexual threat, the insolence, and the tardiness of mere servants who seem to bear Thidias out—the hero struggles for very existence. And moving from paralyzed despair to a frenetic activity, he attains a loud but shadowy rebirth.

                                                  Have you no ears?—I am
Antony yet!

When one servant finally answers, distressing in his singleness, Antony's order is simple.

Take hence this Jack and whip him.(18)

Jacks are young men (with overtones of social-climbing, overelegant worthlessness) trying to presume upon their betters.¹⁹ Such a one needs to be put in his place—and in a specific way.

                                                            Whip him, fellows,
Till like a boy you see him cringe his face,
And whine aloud for mercy.(20) Take him hence.
Thid.
Mark Antony—
Ant.
Tug him away. Being whipt,
Bring him again; the Jack of Caesar's shall
Bear us an arran't [errand], to him.

When Thidias is returned, we see what it was that Antony had in mind.

Ant.
Is he whipt?
Serv.
Soundly, my lord.
Ant.
Cried he? and begg'd'a pardon?
Serv.
He did ask favor.
Ant.
If that thy father live, let him repent
Thou wast not made his daughter, and be thou sorry
To follow Caesar in his triumph, since
Thou hast been whipt for following him. Henceforth
The white hand of a lady fever thee,
Shake thou to look on't.

Thidias has been forced to receive one of the worst punishments that Antony thinks he could possibly have inflicted: to turn a man girlish. The aggressive challenge to Antony's masculinity must be revealed for what it is: a merely contemptible presumption that masks unmanliness—the anti-Antonian principle. For it is Antony who drank the stale of horses: and when he did so, “his cheek lank'd not.”

                                                                                                    Get thee back to Caesar,
Tell him thy entertainment. Look thou say
He makes me angry with him; for he seems
Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am,
Not what he knew I was. He makes me angry,
And at this time most easy 'tis to do't:
When my good stars, that were my former guides,
Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires
Into th'abysm of hell.

(3.13.89-147)

He is “Antony yet,” a presence unchanged by mere ill fortune. He can, after all, still make men cry like girls.

Despite Cleopatra's subsequent reassurances, however, this Thidias episode shakes something in Antony: he needs to nail things down again. He has shambled in shame through the last few scenes. And if to be ashamed is yet to feel basically worthy, Thidias challenged even this by seeking for himself a Cleopatra who was the reward and symbol of Antony's own essential manliness. So if Antony should now, under this pressure, begin moving, it is because he needs to make himself worthy again. But “worthy,” it seems, has something to do not with Caesarean behavior, but with the bravery of the twelfth-century chevalier. The queen vows love, he says “I am satisfied,” and then:

Caesar sets down in Alexandria, where
I will oppose his fate. Our force by land
Hath nobly held; our sever'd navy too
Have knit again, and fleet, threat'ning most sea-like.
Where hast thou been, my heart? Dost thou hear, lady?
If from the field I shall return once more
To kiss these lips, I will appear in blood;
I and my sword will earn our chronicle.
There's hope in't yet.
Cleo.
That's my brave lord!

(3.13.168-76)

In this huge talk of navies and armies, in the midst of these “gay comparisons,” the queen herself fondles him almost maternally with her words while he pursues the delirium of his great need. There must be one final, vital gesture, a pulling out of all the physical stops to outface the real ghost, the specter of unmanliness which all Antony's frenetic rhetoric has not laid.

I will be treble-sinew'd, hearted, breath'd
And fight maliciously; for when mine hours
Were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives
Of me for jests; but now I'll set my teeth
And send to darkness all that stop me. Come,
Let's have one other gaudy night. Call to me
All my sad captains, fill our bowls once more;
Let's mock the midnight bell.

(4.1.177-84)

He is still worth love, even though the trials of physical strength belong to youth. Never mind. He will be that youth, no matter the impossibility.

                                                                                                    Come on, my queen,
There's sap in't yet. The next time I do fight,
I'll make death love me; for I will contend
Even with his pestilent scythe.

(3.13.190-93)

But reminders crowd. Shakespeare shows Caesar's cynical rejection of the duel challenge we had almost forgotten about, and then we observe Antony's own plaintive and naïve wonderment that Caesar will not take up the challenge. Why? he asks Enobarbus, who answers that Caesar doesn't need to bother. But Antony cannot stand the idea that because Caesar is “twenty times of better fortune, he is twenty men to one.” “Tomorrow, soldier,” he answers Enobarbus,

By sea and land I'll fight; or I will live,
Or bathe my dying honor in the blood
Shall make it live again.

(4.2.4-7)

Yet hard on this baptismal image do come thoughts of a new kind, ideas which events have now shot into his periphery.

“Woo't thou fight well?” he asks Enobarbus suddenly. This question reflects his sense that he has not yet redeemed himself on the battlefield. And so he feels he owes his men something, just as, after his flight at Actium, he was ashamed enough to tell all his followers to leave him. He has to make it up to them now.

Enter three or four Servitors.
                                                                                          Give me thy hand,
Thou hast been rightly honest—So hast thou—
Thou—and thou—and thou. You have serv'd me well,
And kings have been your fellows.

Enobarbus calls this one of those odd tricks which sorrow shoots out of the mind. It is more than this.

                                                            And thou art honest too.
I wish I could be made so many men,
And all of you clapp'd up together in
An Antony, that I might do you service
So good as you have done.

Make as much of me, he tells them, as when my empire was “your fellow”—at least for a little while, waiting on him at their meal. After that,

                                                                                          Mine honest friends,
I turn you not away, but like a master
Married to your good service, stay till death.
Tend me to-night two hours, I ask no more,
And the gods yield you for't!

(4.2.10-33)

This appeal is an extremely personal sort of encounter going beyond the mercenary relationships that have informed the desertions of this play. “There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd,” he said to Cleopatra, and it is clear that for such a one as he, service is much more than a contract. It is a mutual love. Pretend I am what I was on the battlefield, he seems to say here, and in exchange I promise to redeem myself tomorrow. Thus your service will not have been misdirected after all. Help me to become “me” again and I'll be someone worth your being a servant to—even if it kills me.

The weeping that this causes is good. It reassures Antony's men and allows him to console them with other visions of himself. When Enobarbus reproves Antony for making the men (and himself) tearful, Antony can almost luxuriate in the effort not to cheer himself but others in this hopeless cause. After all, it is he who has everything, because they love him, his “hearty” friends.

                                                                                                    Ho, ho, ho!
Now the witch take me, if I meant it thus!
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, did desire you
To burn this night with torches. Know, my hearts,
I hope well of to-morrow, and will lead you
Where rather I'll expect victorious life
Than death and honor.

(4.2.36-44)

But Shakespeare reminds us that the depression is hard to shake off. Back to more immediate and external comforts. “Let's to supper, come, and drown consideration.”

We next see Antony (4.4) in the morning. His gaiety and optimism, even his playfulness, show him in the happiest mood that Shakespeare ever allows him in the tragedy. He is up early and becomes involved in the comedy of Cleopatra's posture as squire and armorer. References to morning multiply as his men come to join him.

                                                                                'Tis well blown, lads.(21)
This morning, like the spirit of a youth
That means to be of note, begins betimes.

(4.4.25-27)

But as he gaily puts on his armor his boasting too reminds us of the continuing intensity of his personal crisis.

                                                                                          O love,
That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew'st
The royal occupation, thou shouldst see
A workman in't.

His parting from Cleopatra is of a piece with this.

Fare thee well, dame, what e'er becomes of me.
This is a soldier's kiss; rebukable
And worthy shameful check it were, to stand
On more mechanic compliment. I'll leave thee
Now like a man of steel. You that will fight,
Follow me close, I'll bring you to't. Adieu.
                                                                                                                                            Exeunt.

(4.4.15-34)

Remember me as a soldier. The nobleness of life is to do thus. Especially a soldier's kiss (rather than the mechanic compliments of such a one as Thidias who ties Caesar's “points”).

All this may be so, but reality returns with Scarus, whom he meets on the way.

Scar.
The gods make this a happy day to Antony!
Ant.
Would thou and those thy scars had once prevail'd
To make me fight at land!
Scar.
Hadst thou done so,
The kings that have revolted, and the soldier
That has this morning left thee, would have still
Followed thy heels.

(4.5.1-6)

Antony had rejected that advice indeed because he was lured by a dare. The soldier's dry rejoinder shows what “daring” does. For Antony was urged by all his professional soldiers to fight by land, not because it was the brave thing to do, but because it was the smart thing to do. But now, before his second battle, when Antony belatedly follows this advice for his own reasons, Scarus undercuts the bluff soldierly comradeliness to point the irony. Antony may think he is once more reconciled to his troops, but the news about Enobarbus shows the opposite. It is precisely because of the land-battle that that soldier deserted. Now, fighting by land is not the smart thing to do, even if it is “brave.” The hero's sense of union with the scarred soldier is illusory. Antonian principles of war are not those of a Scarus, a Ventidius, or an Enobarbus. He is, in the end, not their kind of “soldier.”

So too Antony's reaction to Enobarbus's departure is characteristically obtuse.

                                                                                          O, my fortunes have
Corrupted honest men!

But Antony's fortune was one element that Enobarbus specifically rejected as grounds for desertion. He lingered on because of something other than fortune; “I'll yet follow the wounded chance of Antony,” he said after Actium, “though my reason sits in the wind against me.” What ultimately alienates Enobarbus is the fatuity of Antony's emotional stance.

                                                                                                              I see still
A diminution in our captain's brain
Restores his heart. When valour [preys on] reason,
It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek
Some way to leave him.

(3.13.196-200)

Antony must have the land-battle, the minor victory, the profuse thanks to his men, and the sentimental picture of their friends and wives weeping for joy over the noble tokens of their valor. So Antony has proved himself (as when he left Egypt to refute Pompey)—something to be made clear to someone whose hand dawdled under the lips of a “jack” like Thidias,

                                                                                                    Run one before,
And let the Queen know of our [gests].

(4.8.1-2)

To this “great fairy,” Antony tells Scarus, the scarred soldier, “I'll commend thy acts, make her thanks bless thee.”²² For Cleopatra is the transcendent principle. And she may now, must now, accept his claim. That “self,” the self for which she has been symbol and avatar, he has reunited with. He has recaptured himself and her. This is the grand conceit he uses as he greets the one he calls his “day o'th' world.”

Chain mine arm'd neck, leap thou, attire and all,
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing!

(4.8.14-16)

The heart she commands also rules his exertions as the saddle rules the horse. His heart is the saddle on the panting endurance of his physical virility—the “horse”—which carries Cleopatra in triumph. His very physical effort he sees as her real tribute. But if Cleopatra is glorified by riding this particular “horse,” it is nevertheless a horse of Antony's own making, at a time in English culture when reason was customarily compared to the rider, bestriding the beast of blind forces.²³

Less abstractly, however, there is a vital point Antony must make.

                                                                                                    Mine nightingale,(24)
We have beat them to their beds. What, girl, though grey
Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha'we
A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can
Get goal for goal of youth.

(4.8.18-22)

No longer is his head grizzled, and no longer is his younger brown simply a token of rashness, as after Actium. He is young again, a mature, distinguished, aging … youth.

We end where we began. The poet departs from source especially here as scarred Scarus receives a blessing.

                                                                                                    Behold this man,
Commend unto his lips thy [favoring] hand.
Kiss it, my warrior; he hath fought to-day
As if a god, in hate of mankind, had
Destroyed in such a shape.

Antony's “playfellow” can be familiar with the lips of another, if need be, but not with those of the jack of some boy who kept his sword like a dancer at Philippi. Scarus is the kind of fellow you want for this sort of hand-kissing thing.

Antony leads the processional exit with Cleopatra in a march, her hand held by the conqueror. The queen is his again: his bravery has reclaimed his rights here. He is Antony again, as he was when he held the hands of Caesar and Pompey leaving Pompey's ship. And here he ends the victor scene.

                                                                                                    Trumpeters,
With brazen din blast you the city's ear,
Make mingle with our rattling tambourines,
That heaven and earth may strike their sounds together,
Applauding our approach. Exeunt.

(4.8.22-39)

IV

“Their preparation is today by sea,” observes Antony to Scarus in their next appearance. But the young man's army is also prepared for a land-battle. Even so, it would seem that Antony's euphoria and sense of the dare are at their height again.

I would they'ld fight i'th'fire or i'th'air;
We'ld fight there too.

(4.10.3-4)

Caesar has repeated the Actium ploy and because Antony has again accepted the gambit of the sea-battle, we know he has not changed. So do others. For when it comes, the reversal is quick. Antony himself announces it to us.

                                                                                                    All is lost!
This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me.
My fleet hath yielded to the foe, and yonder
They cast their caps up and carouse together
Like friends long lost. Triple-turn'd whore!
                              'tis thou
Hast sold me to this novice, and my heart
Makes only wars on thee. Bid them all fly;
For when I am reveng'd upon my charm,
I have done all. Bid them all fly, be gone

(4.12.9-17)

The strands wrapped up at the end of the second battle come loose once again, but it is vital for us to understand just what happened—Antony's reports of what he has seen versus his judgments about them. His fleet has yielded and there is much exuberant friendliness between the now-mingled armies. That is the report. But why is this? Did Cleopatra betray Antony, or was this the doings of the troops themselves? Plutarch's account is a checkpoint.

When by force of rowing they were come neere unto them, they [Antonius's men] first saluted Caesars men, and then Caesars men resaluted them also, and of two armies made but one, and then did all together row toward the citie. When Antonius saw that his men did forsake him, and yeelded unto Caesar, and that his footemen were broken and overthrowen: he then fled into the citie, crying out that Cleopatra had betrayed him unto them.

(6:78-79)

In Shakespeare's tragedy, what Antony sees is happy soldiers, and it is this joy which breaks things up for Antony. His judgment? Cleopatra, of course, has betrayed him.

He had no rage after Actium, or even after the desertion of Enobarbus, but here things are far different. How can he now merit desertion? Was he not preeminently brave and “military” again, worthy again of love and service? What is happening is therefore clearly impossible, and impossibly painful.

O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more,
Fortune and Antony part here, even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
That [spannell'd] me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd,
That overtopp'd them all.

(4.12.18-24)

He is talking, we see, not about power but about alienation of affections, even though he is not now thinking of the queen. If his men desert him when he is worthy … this is to court annihilation. So then there is the lurch to the easier alternative. There has to be some other cause. He thinks of it.

                                                                                                    Betray'd I am.
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,
Like a right gypsy, hath at fast and loose
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.
What, Eros, Eros!
                                                            Enter Cleopatra
                                                                                                    Ah, thou spell! Avaunt!(25)

(4.12.24-30)

Vanish, he tells her, “or I shall give thee thy deserving.” His fear drives him beyond all restraint of love as he envisions desertion and defeat almost as a loss in virility at the hands of the “young Roman boy.” And his groping for her as a reason for his failure is a blind gesture to “drown consideration” again, to thrust out violently and killingly at himself.

                                                                                                                        'Tis well th'art gone,
If it be well to live; but better 'twere
Thou fell'st into my fury, for one death
Might have prevented many. Eros, ho!
The shirt of Nessus is upon me; teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'th'moon,
And with those hands, that grasp'd the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. She dies for't. Eros, ho! Exit.

(4.12.39-49)

His speech of Nessus tells us much. It recalls Othello's final duality of “ideal” against “fallen” self. Here Hercules is Antony's idealization of the physical strength and power within himself. The club-wielding hands are the means of suicide and also of killing, but we do not know whether the hands themselves belong to Hercules or Antony. Indeed, what is it to speak of suicide and to go off seeking to kill Cleopatra? Her own ambiguous role in the Hercules metaphor emphasizes Antony's confusion. Is Cleopatra a Lichas, the innocent tool who brought Hercules the poisoned robe from his wife, or is she Antony's “worthiest self?” Is she the “witch” that anointed the poisoned robe, Deianeira, Hercules' wife? Whatever a literal dissection of the logic would allow, we are left with the feeling that Antony's aggressive thrust to the killing of Cleopatra is roughly compared to the suicide of Hercules—to avoid … pain.

There is irony too in his metaphor. Cleopatra is likened to the innocent Lichas, and indeed she is no more than Lichas where responsibility for Antony's situation is concerned: Lichas was merely the messenger. But messengers do not fare too well in this tragedy. So Cleopatra's own metaphor in response has a melancholy appropriateness too. She speaks of the mad Ajax. Unable to win the Achillean armor he so dearly wished, Ajax insanely took out his rage on the sheep which he fell to slaughtering. “He is more mad,” she says, “than Telamon for his shield.”

The calm beginning of scene 14 subtly recapitulates the Antonian motives for self-extinction. Images of himself and Cleopatra interweave their colors.

Ant.
Eros, thou yet behold'st me?
Eros.
Ay, noble lord.
Ant.
Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A [tower'd] citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants.
Eros.
Ay, my lord.
Ant.
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Eros.
It does, my lord.
Ant.
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony;
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt, and the Queen
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine—
Which, whilst it was mine had annex'd unto't
A million moe (now lost)—she, Eros, has
Pack'd cards with Caesar's and false-play'd my glory
Unto an enemy's triumph.
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros, there is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.

(4.14.1-22)

The paradox bemuses him. How can his “self” betray his self? The queen has been inconsistent with the ideology and, what is more, has even deprived him of the “million” other hearts which he thought he compositely was. “O thy vile lady,” he says to the entering Mardian, “she has robb'd me of my sword.” It is as if she had violated the trust of mutual identity, deprived Antony of the profound means of self-definition which the sword embodies but which she herself ultimately expresses. What then, indeed, the hero seems to ask, is a self?

Mardian comes and his story is well told. Cleopatra's last act and her very last words are the ultimate tribute and motion of recompense. She said: “Antony! Most noble Antony!”

Then in the midst a tearing groan did break
The name of Antony; it was divided
Between her heart and lips. She rend'red life,
Thy name so buried in her.

(4.14.31-34)

This action is more valuable than her tears at Actium. But it shatters him. So much so that, contrary to what he said at the beginning of the play about forebearance to messengers with bad news, he tells Mardian: “That thou depart'st hence safe does pay thy labor richly. Go.” For this is not mere bad news; it is annihilation.

There follows the visible stage business. “Unarm me, Eros. The long day's task is done and we must sleep.”

                                                                                                    Off, pluck off,
The sevenfold shield of Ajax cannot keep
The battery from my heart. O, cleave, my sides!
Heart, once be stronger than they continent,
Crack thy frail case! Apace, Eros, apace.
No more a soldier. Bruised pieces, go,
You have been nobly borne.

This sense of a real end, of the tangled pointlessness of living, this sure motion, like that of the repentant Ajax toward suicide, defines Antony's real allegiance and the focus of his identity. For if Cleopatra's “treachery” robbed him of his sword, her death robs him of his soldiership. In Antony's one specific sense, there is now no reason to “be” any more.

                                                                                                                        for now
All length is torture; since the torch is out,
Lie down and stray no farther. Now all labour
Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength.

(4.14-37-49)

Strength and force were indeed in Antony's universe, but they are nothing if not illuminated by the “torch” which was the idealizing light. There can be no meaningful pilgrimage toward a meaningful heaven through meaningful striving. There is only the continuing complicated effort at self-coherence.

                                                                                                    Since Cleopatra died
I have liv'd in such dishonor that the gods
Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword
Quarter'd the world and o'er green Neptune's back
With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack
The courage of a woman.

Now her death has restored his concept of their meaning together, and Antony is prepared to move his illusions to the Elysian Fields. But getting there is difficult, even now. To assault one's own flesh: this goes against everything Antony values in life. Eros can slay himself without much comment, but Antony must speak of bravery and he lingers in his beloved soldier's and lover's flesh. Emulating the dead Eros, his servant, he tries to be “a bridegroom” in his death, to “run into it as to a lover's bed.” Even so, he cannot but help go astray. This is an awful sort of combat for which his psyche is just not prepared.

                                                                                          How, not dead? not dead?
The guard, ho! O, dispatch me!
                                                                                          Enter [Decretas and] a Guard
1 Guard.
What's the noise?
Ant.
I have done my work ill, friends. O, make an end
Of what I have begun.

The pattern seems complete. The pride in and love of flesh which were Antony's have made this task almost impossible, this cutting act which, in the end, must be a despising and repudiating of oneself as flesh. That Antony, with his visions of his “sprightly port” in the Elysian Fields, is not prepared to turn himself into that “mangled shadow” which he had previously described to his sad captains is the real issue here. Whether his plea now derives from physical weakness or from the end of courage is something that only the original production could clarify. The source suggests the physical weakness, but it does not offer what Shakespeare added to Antony's words:

I have done my work ill.(26)

He has run on the sword, all the same, and the action is a victory not so much over Caesar as for himself. Yet in the horrible twilight life which Antony has to endure for yet a little while, Shakespeare turns the screw once more, as if to show the torture that Antony's own beliefs and desires can inflict upon him.

Ant.
Let him that loves me strike me dead.
1 Guard.
Not I.
2 Guard.
Nor I.
3 Guard.
Nor any one. Exeunt.

Antony's silence throughout the remainder of this scene is the apex of Shakespeare's work, the culmination and tour de force of the characterization which has been so well established that, coasting on its own momentum, it guides the empathic sensitivity of an audience to the concept of Antony's probable anguish, even though he, for a long time will not utter a single word. His guards have left him, despite the plea in the name of love, lying silent and alone with a sword protruding from him. Alone, except for the body of the bravely dead Eros, and except for Decretas, one of the guards, who now stands above him. Will he perform the act of love?

Thy death and fortunes bid thy followers fly.
This sword but shown to Caesar, with this tidings,
Shall enter me with him.

Thus is Antony robbed of his sword in a most profound sense. This instrument and metaphor of death and love is torn from his body to become the tool for one of his own private bodyguards to enter himself as a sycophant to the young boy who keeps his own sword like a dancer. What could Antony possibly say to this? The eloquence of silence follows Decretas hastening to his embarrassed exit past the arriving Diomedes.

Diomedes' news is one of those impossible moments in drama, and Antony's reticence crowns it.

Diom.
Most absolute lord,
My mistress Cleopatra sent me to thee.
Ant.
When did she send thee?
Diom.
Now, my lord

(4.14.117-19)

And who knows how long Antony remains silent, as he lies there, before he says simply,

Where is she?

And, at this point, as if there could be no further depths, things begin to move upward for Antony. Never does he achieve self-knowledge, but Shakespeare gives him something. It may fog the intellectual issues, sparing Antony, but it reminds us of how he is, profoundly. Diomedes tells his story, concluding, “and I am come, I dread, too late.”

Ant.
Too late, good Diomed. Call my guard, I prithee.
Diom.
What ho! the Emperor's guard! The guard, what ho!
Come, your lord calls!

Then, significantly: Enter four or five of the Guard of Antony. Is there again the slowness shown by the servants during the Thidias episode? If so, it does not matter. They come. Antony asks them to carry him to Cleopatra. It is, he says, the last service he will command them. A guard responds:

Woe, woe are we, sir, you may not live to wear
All your true followers out.
All.
Most heavy day!

This is the greatest comfort the deserted Antony could have been offered, and it makes him gracious and loving again: he has his soldiers back.

Delusion does not leave him in his final moments. He is carried to his queen and hauled up to her in the monument, where his visions lead him to die in a dream, comforting Cleopatra, whose sorrow lends him final identity. He reasserts it in terms of all the old dilemmas that his life was ever about. “Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony, but Antony's hath triumph'd on itself.” The paradox enables him to lie there supreme, even though, a moment later:

The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I liv'd, the greatest prince o'th'world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman—a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd.

(4.15.51-58)

It would be good to believe all this of Antony, but since we have lived with him over the expanse of the play and noted the sordid falsification which was the immediate cause of his death, must we not see this speech as describing what Antony would infinitely wish to have been? The “greatest” because the bravest, most “noble” because most virile, and forever aspiring to his queen who is to him his double, his self.

V

Just before his death, Antony gave Cleopatra some advice. It was puzzlingly wrong enough to make us wonder.

Ant.
One word, sweet queen:
Of Caesar seek your honor, with your safety. O!
Cleo.
They do not go together.
Ant.
Gentle, hear me.
None about Caesar trust but Proculeius.
Cleo.
My resolution and my hands I'll trust,
None about Caesar.

(4.15.45-50)

Because Antony's advice is also to be found in Plutarch, along with its inaccuracy, it has been dismissed by critics either as a slip of the Shakespearean pen or, strangely, as not significant to the play.²⁷ But we cannot dismiss events in Shakespearean plays merely because they come to him from Plutarch, for Shakespeare never wrote merely to prove that he had followed his source. And if the dramatic tension of Antony's death and Cleopatra's moving lament follow so closely upon the hero's advice about Proculeius as to obscure it, a later sequence is suggestive. For after Antony's death, when Caesar has heard Cleopatra's message of submission (5.1), he singles some one out.

Come hither, Proculeius. Go and say
We purpose her no shame. Give her what comforts
The quality of her passion shall require,
Lest, in her greatness, by some mortal stroke
She do defeat us; for her life in Rome
Would be eternal in our triumph. Go,
And with your speediest bring us what she says,
And how you find of her.
Pro.
Caesar, I shall. Exit Proculeius.
Caes.
Gallus, go you along. [Exit Gallus]
Where's Dolabella,
To second Proculeius?

(5.1.61-70)

In the next scene, after Cleopatra has given her initial speech:

                                                                                                    Enter Proculeius
Pro.
Caesar sends greetings to the Queen of Egypt,
And bids thee study on what fair demands
Thou mean'st to have him grant thee.
Cleo.
What's thy name?
Pro.
My name is Proculeius.

And, in case we have forgotten:

Cleo.
Antony
Did tell me of you, bade me trust you, but
I do not greatly care to be deceiv'd
That have no use for trusting.

(5.2.9-15)

Proculeius engineers the queen's capture, proving the hero wrong. What are we to make of this? Was Antony revengeful, desiring to trick Cleopatra into the fate she was so manifestly anxious to avoid? If so, then when he prefaced his remark by saying “Of Caesar seek your honour, with your safety,” he meant that Caesar would offer the queen both honor and safety. But this meaning implies a use of “with” statistically unusual for the play, (“with” as “by means of” occurs in at least thirty of the thirty-three times the word appears).²⁸ So Antony most probably was saying: “Of Caesar seek your honour by means of your safety.” He sincerely wanted to protect her.

Given Antony's good will, he therefore trusted Proculeius, and so we may want to think that Proculeius is not actually responsible for the queen's capture. “Gallus,” it is sometimes suggested, comes up the back of Cleopatra's monument without Proculeius's knowledge, captures Cleopatra, and thus leaves Antony's Proculeius with no choice but to play along. But Caesar himself assigned Proculeius the leading role in the projected deceit, and when he comes to Cleopatra in 5.2, he shows us that he is following instructions to the letter. Cleopatra should “fear nothing,” he tells her, and even after she has been captured, Proculeius counters Cleopatra's fear of being led in triumph with these reassurances:

                                                                                                    You do extend
These thoughts of horror further than you shall
Find cause in Caesar.

(5.2.62-64)

But we know this is a lie, for Caesar has already told Proculeius that he wants to have Cleopatra in his triumph. He sent Proculeius to keep Cleopatra alive for this purpose.

Then comes Dolabella to the captured Cleopatra and says:

                                                                                                    Proculeius,
What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows,
And he hath sent for thee. For the Queen,
I'll take her to my guard.

Doubting the sincerity of Proculeius's allegiance to Caesar, editors have often reassigned one of Proculeius's speeches. The text of the First Folio of 1623, the only authoritative edition of this play, is as follows:

Pro.
This Ile report (deere Lady)
Haue comfort, for I know your plight is pittied
Of him that caus'd it.
Pro.
You see how easily she may be surpriz'd:
Guard her till Caesar come.
Iras.
Royall Queene.
Char.
Oh Cleopatra, thou art taken Queene.
Cleo.
Quicke, quicke, good hands.
Pro.
Hold worthy Lady, hold:
Doe not your selfe such wrong, who are in this
Releeu'd but not betraid.
Cleo.
What of death too that rids our dogs of languish.

The second “Pro.” speech above most editors give to “Gallus,” the effect of the “emendation” being to remove from Proculeius the relatively contemptuous comment upon Cleopatra. And thus a contrast: the sympathetic Proculeius vs. the unsympathetic Gallus.

What about Gallus? We first encounter him when Caesar has given Proculeius his directions. I quote from the First Folio again.

Pro.
Caesar I shall. Exit Proculeius.
Caes.
Gallus, go you along: where's Dolabella, to second Proculeius?
All.
Dolabella.

Editors generally assume that Gallus leaves with Proculeius—although the form “exit” (as opposed to “exeunt”) does not help this concept. Gallus is not in the First-Folio version of the capture scene at all: Proculeius enters alone. Gallus will enter only with Caesar, Maecenas, Proculeius “and others of his Train,” after the queen has been captured. Even then, he is mute, saying nothing while on stage.

How then do editors make “Gallus” relevant to Proculeius's activity? They arrange a series of suggested stage directions according to which either Proculeius or Gallus ascends the monument by a ladder while Proculeius (or Gallus) either is or is not talking to distract Cleopatra. But, most editors to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no “monument” to climb. It is true that Cleopatra enters “aloft” for the dying of Antony, so that she can have him raised to her, but for 5.2, the last scene of the play, the situation is different. “Enter Cleopatra, Charmain, Iras, and Mardian” reads the stage direction, and the actors enter (understandably) to use the whole stage through Cleopatra's death-scene, Cleopatra never leaving the stage until she is borne off dead at the end. To “surprise” Cleopatra, therefore, soldiers do not need to climb at all. They need only to enter.²⁹

At the same time the repetition of Proculeius's name-tag during the previously quoted sequence does not require us to substitute some other character, Gallus, to make the contemptuous remark. For in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic texts, it was common to repeat a speaker's name-tag if his speech had been interrupted by stage business.³⁰

Finally, we cannot assume that “Gallus” would tell Proculeius to “guard her till Caesar come.” Gallus was supposed to “second” Proculeius. And since it is Proculeius who asks Cleopatra to give him some message for Caesar, it is clear that it is Proculeius who intends to leave, not to stay. And it is Proculeius who is designated to give the order in the Folio text.

Pro.
You see how easily she may be surpriz'd:
Guard her till Caesar come.

The onus of deceit can only be laid on the shoulders of a “Gallus” with some straining. It lies more plausibly on the only figure to receive characterization at all in the pair that exited from Caesar—on Proculeius, whom Antony said that Cleopatra should trust.

But if Proculeius does not bear out Antony's prediction, should he not be more obviously “untrustworthy”? Here lies the point of the whole thing, I think. Trustworthiness is a relative concept, especially in this play. If Proculeius goes against Antony's particular expectations, this need not indicate that he is excessively guileful. For while it is true that Proculeius has the Thidias-like function of plying Cleopatra with flattery, Thidias himself forfeited audience sympathy through the patronizing tone he adopted toward both Enobarbus and Antony. But Proculeius is never portrayed as a “jack.” Even if he does come near losing the audience's favor as he continues to reassure the captured queen about his master Caesar's “bounty,” he does indicate other sensitivities. Here is his response to Dolabella.

Dol.
Proculeius,
What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows,
And he hath sent for thee. For the Queen,
I'll take her to my guard.
Pro.
So, Dolabella,
It shall content me best. Be gentle to her.
To Caesar I shall speak what you shall please,
If you'll employ me to him.

(5.2.64-70)

Proculeius does, it is true, have a certain amount of slickness, but apparently he is not quite slick enough to be given a delicate mission all by himself. Rather, it is Dolabella who seems generally in charge. And he, when talking to Proculeius, speaks of Caesar as Proculeius's “master”—“What thou hast done, thy master Caesar knows.” Body- and table-servants, guards, and soldiers of undetermined rank such as Enobarbus have “masters,” but Proculeius is obviously no table-servant. Putting Cleopatra in a situation in which she is, he says, easily “surpris'd” and then effortlessly prevented from killing herself, he then supervises the guard until relieved by Dolabella.³¹ Obviously he is some sort of professional soldier with the social status of an Enobarbus and with a talent for smooth talk. With an ability to improvise on orders which he has not the faintest idea of disobeying, but with limited authority. Capable not only of a professional contempt for Cleopatra's “fortified” position, but also of an impulse of sympathy for a beautiful and tragic queen, he is one with Scarus and Enobarbus.

Thus Proculeius has an important bearing on Antony's last advice to Cleopatra. Antony assumed that someone around Caesar would not act in Caesar's own best interests, but would help Cleopatra. For this task it is obvious that the elegant Dolabella, in the hero's books, would not do at all. Recalling why Antony allowed the soldier Scarus to kiss the queen's hand, we may assume that he would trust no one but a “true soldier,” like Proculeius. But it does not necessarily follow that, to Proculeius, “soldiership” will mean the same thing it does to Antony.

Indeed, his very violation of Antony's expectations is the final Shakespearean comment on Antony. For though Proculeius may indeed prove himself a “man” through his flash of pity for the queen, he is one with all the other soldiers of the play. They are all quite politically clear-eyed. For better or for worse, to be a soldier in this play is to respect not only force and bravery, but also “policie.” And it is in this context that Antony makes his last misjudgment, reemphasizing the ideological assumptions which define him and isolate him and his grand design from those around him. Because he admires Proculeius as a soldier he expects Proculeius, like him, to be Cleopatra's soldier.

It is Cleopatra who, in the end, shows the other side of this Antonian matter. She rejects the hero's advice, and it is she who turns out to be right. The way in which she is right, too, puts Antony's own viewpoint in another and final perspective. For another brush-stroke in Antony's characterization is the milky Dolabella.

Described in the source as “a young gentleman,” Dolabella is one who introduces himself to Cleopatra in this ludicrous fashion.

Dol.
Most noble Empress, you have heard of me?
Cleo.
I cannot tell.
Dol.
Assuredly you know me.

(5.2.71-72)

It is he who later speaks of Cleopatra's “command, which my love makes religion to obey,” and informs the queen twice of Caesar's intentions. Putting Cleopatra before his political duty, he violates the high trust implicit in Caesar's commands to him at the very end of the play, performing a betrayal of which Enobarbus, Demetrius, Philo, and Scarrus would strongly disapprove. For women, we recall from Enobarbus, are to be esteemed as nothing in comparison with “a great cause.” And Proculeius is certainly true to this soldierly view.

But if the ideals of Dolabella are not close to those of a Proculeius, they are close to those of Antony. Indeed, is not Dolabella the one who acts in the spirit of the hero's wishes? The two of them united in their own way by this bond, Dolabella himself stands as an indirect clarification of that “soldiership” which Antony has pursued to his dying breath. As the group assembles there on the stage, with the rest of Caesar's train entering to them, the audience knows who, among all that stand there, is ironically, for the hero, Antony's true spiritual heir.

And if Proculeius is indeed the obvious, tough soldier, then the physical contrast between his and the delicate Dolabella's simultaneous presence on the stage cannot but suggest to the audience a wider vista of more profound contrasts, polarities which include the tragic shapelessness of Antony's identity. For he is neither Dolabella nor Proculeius, but perhaps, on a more expansive scale, a little, or too much, of both.

Notes

1. The naïveté of worshipping masculine strength and physical bravery as “manliness” was a familiar subject. Jonson's Alchemist gives us Kastrill, while the “roaring boys” were ubiquitous. Castiglione tells us of “true manlinesse” in The Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1577), sig. T. The pieties of G.B. in The Narrow Way (London, 1607), sig. G, instruct us about what “manhood and fortitude” really are. Earlier in the sixteenth century Medwall's Nature (STC 17779) presents Sensuality who dismisses Innocency, calling him “boy” and urging every one to “play the man” by indulging in various vices.

2. “Earing” is a pun. R. H. Case in his Arden edition of the play calls attention to the ploughing context and we may look forward to the remarks about Pompey and the pirates: “the sea … which they ear and wound.”

3. Shakespeare's First Folio, the authoritative and only text for this play, should be followed more closely than it has been when this portion of the drama is reprinted. For the various editings of J. Dover Wilson, Kittredge, and Evans obscure the fact that the F stage directions put three messengers on stage at the same time. Editors change one or two of them to “attendants” presumably because Antony enters with one messenger, sends him off, receives a second messenger who enters, speaks with a third messenger who seems to be on stage, and receives still a fourth messenger. Editing to tidy up traffic is useful, but the purpose of all these messengers seems obvious.

4. The motif is not in Plutarch. “But by good fortune, his wife Fulvia going to meete with Antonius, sickened by the way, and dyed in the city of Sicyone: and therefore Octavius Caesar, and he were the easelier made frendes together. For when Antonius landed in Italie,” etc. (6:30).

5. Cf. Cor. 1.4.4. Antony will later threaten Pompey: “We'll speak with thee at sea.”

6. In “Shakespeare and the Art of Character”, Shakespeare Studies 5 (1970): 222 n. 16, I was interested in the oddity of Antony's Elysian view as compared to the Aeneid. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 68-78, has presented an interesting survey of the Dido and Aeneas legend as it may relate to Shakespeare's play.

7. This early and important statement needs clarification. The Variorum takes “mutual pair” as tautology, but contemporary usage does not bear this out. See Tit. 5.3.71: “Knit again / This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf” as opposed to Lr. 3.1.19ff.: “There is division, / Although as yet the face of it be cover'd / With mutual cunning.” Cf. also L. Vives, Introduction to Wisdom, ed. M. L. Tobriner (New York: Teachers College Press, 1905), p. 132. “the mutual bond of love between man and man.” Antony's “mutual” operates as a synonym for something like “tightly integrated” or even “made into one.” Antony's words thus suggest something like “the nobleness of life is to do thus when a pair such as we, in our unity and in our duality too, can do it. And in all this I command the world to note that this combining is peerless.”

8. Cf. Plutarch (6:38-55) where, in Parthia, Antonius lost eight thousand men from exposure because he forced them through unseasonable marches in his haste to rejoin Cleopatra at the end of the campaign. This was one more sorry episode in what was a disastrous military campaign.

9. The change from Plutarch emphasizes the intent here. Plutarch (6:78-79) sees the last battle as a combined operation exhibiting the weakness of Antonius's defensive position. He gathers his few footmen around him and waits to see what his soldiers in the galleys can do first. Caesar's troops overthrow these footmen. Shakespeare's Antony dismisses his land-troops in personal and desperate exasperation.

10. Two other Antonies suggest by contrast what Shakespeare had in mind for the present characterization. In JC, when Octavius shows alarm at the advance of the republican forces down the hill at them, Antony there comments: “Tut, I am in their bosoms,” and then diagnoses with accuracy the basis of the strategy we watched Brutus and Cassius debating earlier. The second Antony is Plutarch's. His Antonius, prior to Actium, engages in a series of naval maneuvers that culminate in a series of subtle moves adroitly cutting Octavius off from his water supply (6:65). In AC, Shakespeare is depriving his Antony of those strategic abilities with which Plutarch endowed him and to which the dramatist himself earlier subscribed.

11. “Well, well” was a kind of Elizabethan negation whose flavor can be partially reconstructed. In MM 1.2.59 ff., Mistress Overdone interrupts the bawdy conversation between Lucio and the First Gentleman: “Well, well! There's one yonder arrested and carried to prison was worth five thousand of you all.” Compare King James's reluctant remark as Buckingham and Prince Charles took leave of him for their dubious Spanish adventure. To make the journey secret they all cooperated in the following reported conversation. “The King told them, ‘See that you be with me upon Friday night.’ Then Buckingham replied, Sir, if we should stay a day or two longer, I hope your majesty would pardon us!'—‘Well, well,’ quoth the King; and so they parted.” See G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 346.

12. Regarding single combat as a determinant of war, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Bacon—two sufficiently different persons—both had no great use for the idea. See The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 398. and Francis Bacon, Essays (London, 1606), sig. E7. For other background, see Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), pp. 112-15.

13. In the study of the drama of a vanished age, retrieving the meanings of the interjections common to speech, but not necessarily to essay or poem, is important. Written forms of these interjections now tend to be conventional to modern times and thus misleading. In Antony's case here, his use of “ha!” (F:Ha? [where ? conventionally stands for !]) is not, for example, like Falstaff's, who, when he thinks both ladies have come to him in the woods, is pleased with the success of his plan and disguise. Thus, in the spelling of F: “Am I a Woodman, ha? Speake I like Herne / the Hunter?” (see The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1968), p. 77. Antony's exclamation is closer to what may be implied by the accusing speech of Leontes in WT who says that if the “guilty” Hermione is praised for virtue, then there will immediately be (F): “The Shrug, the Hum, or Ha, (these Petty-brands / That Calumnie doth use)” (p. 300). The virtuosity of “ha” can be noted merely within AC when Cleopatra, in her boredom, says (F): “Ha, ha, give me to drinke Mandragoru.”

14. The reading of these lines is greatly facilitated if we read “droop” for “drop.” For similarities and confusions, cf. the one auspicious and one “dropping” eye of Claudius in Hamlet and cf. OED: Drop, sb. for drop-droop affinities. “Droop” was also used transitively (OED, droop, v. 6.: “A withered Vine, That droupes his sappe-lesse Branches to the ground” and “He droopes his eye”). E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 2:687 can find no conclusive distinction in pronunciation between “drop” and “droop.” In H5, finally, the compositor (A?) of Folio Henry V sets “dropping” (V.ii.47) which, in F2-F4, is emended to “drooping.” See Charlton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 2:515, for compositor identity here.

15. Antony, however misguidedly, bases his remark on the equation of the moon with Cynthia and chastity. For background and for “eclipses,” see F. A. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 10 (1947): 72-73.

16. Cf. Bertram complaining (AWW 2.1.30-33) that if he is detained in court and kept from the wars, he will be delayed “till honor be bought up, and no sword worn / But one to dance with.” Cf. Tit. 2.1.38-42.

17. Although Plutarch details this Athenian request, with Antonius likening himself to Timon of Athens, our skepticism about Antony's inclinations in these philosophical respects may be justified by recalling the traditional view of Athens as a center for sensual self-indulgence. This is the Athens of Shakespeare's Timon where its savior, Alcibiades, has his courtesans. This is also an Athens suggested by the term “Merrygreek” so often punned upon in Shakespeare's Troilus. See also William Goddard, A Satyricall Dialogue (Dort? 1616?: STC 11930) where one of the operating assumptions is that Athenian women are whores (sig. A4, for example).

18. Whipping was a standard and specific punishment for a “rogue” (i.e., a “valiant, strong, or sturdy beggar and vagabond”) a term embracing all tricksters, from one pretending to be an “Egyptian” or gipsy to any wandering unlicensed loiterer. See William Lambard, Eirenarcha or the Office of the Justices of the Peace (London, 1602), sigs. 2C^v-2C2^v; MSS of the … Duke of Rutland (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1888), 1:402. For the motif in drama, see Robert Wilson, Three Ladies of London (London, 1592), sig. F^v ff.; Nobody and Somebody (London, n.d.), sig. C.

19. As with all slang, it is difficult to reconstitute the nuances of “jack,” but I suggest (1) social climber, (2) a young and impertinent late adolescent and thus, (3) a term which might be used by an older man to describe a youthful competitor. For (1) there is the ubiquity of the phrase “Jack will be a Gentleman” to be found as a gloss on the social complaints of Palingenius, The Zodiake of Life, trans. B. Googe (London, 1576), sig. F5^v. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape-Lore (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952), traces the association of “jack” with “ape,” and hence “jack” as an imitation of a “real man.” (2) is illustrated by the comment of Simonides in Middleton's The Old Law (London, 1656), sig. F3^v: “Ah sirrah my young boys, I shall be for you, / … You shall find / An alteration, Jack-boys, I have a spirit yet.” Cf. George Wilkins, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (London, 1607), sigs. B3-B3^v; Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Induction, 1:21; Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, 3.3.29-32, where the father calls his “peevish girl” an “ape.” See also 2 Return from Parnassus in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949), ll. 9 and esp. 923. Shakespeare's usage is various, but an important point is ignored in the Henry IV plays if we do not note the nuance of “Jack Falstaff.” Jack Cade is also suggestive. In MWW 3.1.85, Caius pulls motifs together as he threatens Evans to duel: “By gar, you are de coward, de Jack dog, John ape!” Sonnet 128 puns extensively on the meaning of “jack” as harpsichord key and this may parallel Antony's way. “I envy those jacks that nimble leap / To kiss the tender inward of thy hand” and “Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, / Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.”

20. Cf. Aufidius's use of “boy” to precipitate Coriolanus's rage at the end of the play: “Name not the god [Mars], thou boy of tears.” Whipping may “boy” one in another sense. As Lawrence Stone observes: “Those of gentle birth were flogged like the rest so long as they were children, and between 1500 and 1660 they were also flogged as adolescents …. It was only when a young gentleman went down from the university that he left his adolescence behind him. As a man of birth and breeding he could be assured that from now on he was immune from corporal punishment, an indignity reserved for those of lower social status.” Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) p. 35.

21. Case, Arden ed., (4.4.25n.) summarizes arguments about the meaning of “well blown.” There is the flourishing of trumpets, the “blossoming” of the morning, and also, we find in OED, blow v. 13, as “proclaim,” and blown, ppl. a. 11.a4 as “breathed out,” as in Othello's “exsufflicate and blown surmises.” Perhaps Antony's way of saying “That's the way to talk, lads!”

22. Bernard Beckerman in his exciting discussion of the tragedy does not share my sense of Antony's mood after the second battle. He thinks that the hero “shows none of his former excess of emotion or changeability. It is his follower Scarus who boasts of their success.” See “Past the Size of Dreaming,” written for Antony and Cleopatra: Twentieth Century Views, ed. Marc Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 111.

23. For Scarus and the scarred soldier as textually the same character, see Barroll, “Scarrus and the Scarred Soldier,” Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1958): 31-39.

24. Antony's speech is based on the well-known concept of the kiss as uniting lovers' souls. Antony's version is not without its ironies since the result is that bodies, not souls, must meet. Volpone wanders in the same area when, trying to seduce Celia, he speaks of the amorous shapes in which they can disguise themselves (Europa and the bull, etc.). He concludes: “I will meet thee, in as many shapes: / Where we may so transfuse our wandering souls, / Out at our lips, and score up sums of pleasures” (3.7.233-35). The term “nightingale” is unfortunate, for despite OED's silence, one notes Francischina, the whore, who sings in Marston's Dutch Courtesan (London, 1605), sig. B2^v: “The dark is my delight, / So tis the nightingale's. / My music's in the night, / So is the nightingale's. / My body is but little, / So is the nightingale's. / I love to sleep 'gainst prickle, / So doth the nightingale.”

25. Case (Arden ed.) refers us to LLL 1.2.162 and 3.1.104, for “fast and loose,” where the context is suggested by the latter reference: “To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose.” Nevertheless all this talk of gypsies, charms, and spells need not be taken as seriously as it often is, for such remarks in the tragedy derive from admirers of Cleopatra, such as Antony and Pompey. And parlance in other Jacobean plays employs “witchcraft” as a slang term for the usual female wiles. “I could be coy, as many women be,” says Jane in Shoemaker's Holiday: “Feede you with sunne-shine smiles, and wanton looks / But I detest witchcraft.” See Thomas Dekker, Dramatic Works ed. F. T. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 3.4.65 ff. Cf. Ben Jonson's Poetaster (4.9.97 ff.). What may have been intended as elements in some pattern of imagery is, of course, a different consideration, and for general witch terminology see David Kaula, “Othello Possessed,” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 112-32.

26. In such matters, Plutarch's Cato served as the ideal. After stabbing himself, he is found, and a doctor puts his bowels back into him—“But Cato coming to himself, thrust back the physician and tare his bowels with his own hands and made his wound very great and immediately gave up the ghost” Plutarch (5:178). Justus Lipsius, speaking of Antony's suicide, talks of Antony's “womanish hand” in one contemporary translation: Two Books of Constancy, trans. Sir John Stardling and ed. R. Kirk and C. M. Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1939), p. 168.

27. For comments on the sequence itself, see David S. Berkeley, “Antony, Cleopatra, and Proculeius,” Notes and Queries 195 (1950): 534-35, whose brief note sees Antony's advice as indeed a crux, and Cynthia Grill, “Antony, Cleopatra, and Proculeius,” Notes and Queries 205 (1960): 191. Grill states that “Antony is utterly incapable of base treachery” and that “his erroneous advice” is “the price he has paid for making his will lord of his reason.” On the other hand, Bertrand Evans argues that Antony intentionally betrayed Cleopatra because “it is inconceivable” that he should not have known Proculeius was untrustworthy: see Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 265-68.

28. Examples of additive “with”: 1.2.117; 2.10.3; 3.13.164 (“together with”). Causative “with” appears in 1.1.45; 1.2.5, 23, 105; 1.4.26, 47, 50; 1.5.46; 2.1.25; 2.2.24, 63, 127, 141, 178, 210; 2.5.65, 71; 2.6.21, 24; 2.7.43; 3.6.20; 3.10.7; 3.11.44, etc., etc.

29. Richard Hosley, “The Staging of the Monument Scenes in Antony and Cleopatra,” Library Chronicle 30 (1964): 62-71, alludes to the tradition of textual criticism on the matter of the monument, supporting Harrison, Ridley, and Phialas in the reasoning for abolishing an “aloft” scene in 5.2.

30. See ibid., esp. p. 70. Regarding the lack of stage direction for an entrance of help for Proculeius, Hosley quotes Hinman (2:508) on the problem of the casting off of copy for this page producing the omission of an s.d., but the half-line “Of him that caus'd it” leaves room for a brief entrance-designation, as Hosley observes. There is room, but the s.d. is not there.

31. See, for instance, Barnabe Barnes, Four Books of Offices (London, 1606), sig. 2A, on the subject of the Romans and “surprisal.” Cf. 1H4, 1.1.93; Mac., 4.2.204, and Tit., passim.