SOURCE: “That I Might Hear Thee Call Great Caesar ‘Ass Unpolicied,’” in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3, Summer, 1997, pp. 244-64.

[In the following essay, Levin studies three conundrums appearing in the negotiations of Cleopatra and Caesar, and examines how these episodes illuminate the battle of wits between the two characters. This examination helps to inform Levin’s understanding of Cleopatra's decision to commit suicide.]

Near the end of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen apostrophizes the deadly asp which she takes to her bosom: “O, couldst thou speak, / That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass / Unpolicied!” (5.2.300-02).¹ Were Cleopatra only claiming that her suicide affirms a love for Antony nobler than any value in Caesar's world of cold political calculation, we would endorse her assertion. But her claim is disingenuous to the extent that until this moment she spoke of suicide yet sought favorable terms of surrender. That Cleopatra suppresses her efforts to survive most critics would agree, while arguing among themselves about when she fully commits herself to death. Another claim implied in her boast, one she herself probably believes and which is endorsed by almost all critics, is that she makes her decision to die possessing correct information about Caesar's secret plans for her in captivity.² To establish when Cleopatra irrevocably settles on suicide, and whether at this moment Caesar's “policy” prevails or fails, are our specific goals in this essay.

We set these goals because the attempt to reach them leads to the examination of an important issue affecting the shape of the closing action of the play. From the time that Cleopatra's (and Antony's) military situation begins to decline, Caesar and Cleopatra negotiate the terms of her possible surrender, yet at every stage of the negotiation their tactics and purposes are opaque. As a result we may fail to understand both the nature of his conquest and of her defeat, and also the momentous conclusion of the play, when Caesar stands peerless in the Roman world.

The negotiations of Caesar and Cleopatra include three well-recognized conundrums. In his dying words, Antony had besought Cleopatra to “seek [her] honour, with [her] safety” by putting her “trust” in Proculeius alone among Caesar's subordinates (4.15.48-50). If Proculeius nevertheless betrays her, as he appears to, offering false assurance about Caesar's intentions, then we must conclude either that Antony knowingly misled her or that he erred disastrously, two seemingly unacceptable alternatives. How, then, to interpret Proculeius's interview with Cleopatra is one conundrum. A second emerges from the interaction between another of Caesar's subordinates, Dolabella, and the Egyptian queen. As he has Caesar's complete trust it seems odd that he should, without advantage to himself, disclose his master's plan to humiliate her, and thereby enable Cleopatra (as it seems) to foil Caesar by taking her life. A third puzzle involves Cleopatra and still another subordinate, this one her own, Seleucus, a treasurer. When she presents an unsolicited inventory of her wealth to Caesar, her motive is unclear, as it remains when Seleucus, possibly speaking on her cue but possibly betraying her, exposes her inventory as fraudulently incomplete. She berates Seleucus's treachery when we are not sure he is treacherous. These conundrums, associated with the names of Proculeius, Dolabella, and Seleucus, are often pushed to the margins of critical discourse, as if they were either loose threads the dramatist failed to tidy up or inconsequential complications. It is much better to understand these conundrums as challenges to an audience, posed so that it will enter a political thicket and trace, as best it can, a duel of wits between Caesar and Cleopatra. As success depends on correct detection of a series of intricate moves, for heuristic purposes this essay will say little of Caesar and Cleopatra as complex characters with motives, some conscious, some unconscious, often at variance with the strategies they adopt in dealing with one another.

Antony and Cleopatra opens while Caesar shares power as part of a triumvirate, whose power is itself limited by the challenge of Sextus Pompey at sea. Once Pompey, made an ally, serves the triumvirate's purposes, Caesar moves against him, then against Lepidus, the weaker of Caesar's co-rulers, and finally against Antony. Were such a conqueror “unpolicied” by Cleopatra it would be the more remarkable in that he is a politician in the Renaissance sense of the word, a Machiavel, one who is both cunning and ruthless in the pursuit of ambition. Caesar's strength is not as a soldier but as a strategist; keenly observant and aided by spies, he knows and exploits the weaknesses of others. One example is worth considering, for it may anticipate Caesar's indirection with Cleopatra. When the triumvirs meet together, he has a hidden goal—to effect a marriage between his sister Octavia and Antony. Caesar keeps Antony on the defensive about his relationship with Cleopatra. Therefore, when Caesar's underling proposes the marriage, Antony quickly accepts it. Caesar's trap is sprung and Antony is caught.³

When Antony describes Cleopatra as “cunning past man's thought” (1.2.141), he does not mean she is a politician in the Renaissance mold, for she depends upon the power of the Romans whom she seduces—Pompey (either the brother or the father of the Pompey of the play, Shakespeare seems uncertain⁴) and Julius Caesar before the play opens, then Antony. She boasts to her gentlewomen, Charmian and Iras, of her capacity to “hook” Antony as a fisherman hooks a fish (2.5.11-15) and to control his moods by adopting contrasting moods; she remembers laughing him “out of patience,” then “into patience” and then into an exchange of attire that leaves her wearing his sword Philippan (2.5.19-23).

Early hints suggest that matched against Caesar, Cleopatra might not fare well. Caesar keeps well-informed about Cleopatra's wiles, and he impugns Antony's unmanly submission to her, presenting himself as “mature in knowledge” and unlike those “boys” who “pawn their experience to their present pleasure” (1.4.31-32). The abuse Caesar hurls on a sexuality that fascinates him suggests he guards against his own repressed desires; he is far likelier to revile a woman than to succumb to her. Finally, Caesar is aware that Cleopatra's influence over Antony diminishes Rome's sway. Caesar makes early note that Antony has given her a kingdom (1.4.18). Later, poised for battle in the east, Caesar scrutinizes the expansion of Cleopatra's dynasty. Antony has not only confirmed her rule of Egypt; he has “made her / Of lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia, / Absolute queen” (3.6.9-11). Caesar further notes that Antony has made various sons of Cleopatra “kings of kings”; to one son, Alexander, he gave “Great Media, Parthia, and Armenia” (3.6.16). Caesar eyes territories under Cleopatra's control.

The initial diplomatic exchange between Caesar and Cleopatra takes place when Antony and Cleopatra, following their defeat at sea near Actium, send an emissary to Caesar, Antony petitioning to live the life of a private citizen, Cleopatra asking to keep “the circle of the Ptolemies for her heirs” (3.12.18). Caesar sends the emissary back to report that while Caesar has “no ears” (3.12.20) for Antony's request, Cleopatra will not “sue unheard” (3.12.24) if she either kills Antony or yields him up. Since to “sue unheard” is not necessarily to sue successfully, Caesar's promise is equivocal. More treachery lurks in Caesar's next move, which is to open a covert channel of communication between himself and Cleopatra. While authorizing Thidias to tempt her with the promise of gifts, Caesar insinuates that Thidias might best bait Cleopatra with hints of Caesar's sexual interest. “Try thy eloquence,” Caesar tells Thidias, suggesting he act the courtier. Then Caesar ruminates: “Women are not / In their best fortunes strong, but want will perjure / The ne'ertouched vestal” (3.12.29-31). Thidias is to infer that if a vestal virgin will break her virgin vow, Cleopatra's vows will not withstand temptation. “Try thy cunning,” Caesar concludes, confident that Cleopatra can be trapped into hoping for influence with him.

Thidias insinuates Caesar's interest by telling Cleopatra that Caesar, recognizing that she “embrace[s]” Antony out of “fear” and not love, “pit[ies]” the “scars upon [her] honor” and regards them as “constrainèd blemishes” (3.13.57-60). Pity signals a courtly lover's readiness to grant favor to a beseecher; it would “warm [Caesar's] spirits” if Cleopatra would leave Antony and place herself in Caesar's protection (3.13.70-73).

Cleopatra knows as well as Thidias that his offer is not what it seems to be, for Caesar, through his other diplomatic channel, has asked her to yield nothing less than Antony's “head” (3.13.17). When she asks Thidias to tell Caesar, “I kiss his conqu'ring hand” (3.13.76), either she is merely acknowledging again that she must sue for terms, or she is giving tacit encouragement to Caesar's sexual overture. Thidias, choosing to assume the latter, implies his master's readiness by asking that he himself be allowed to kiss her hand. She proffers it, remarking: “Your Caesar's father oft, / When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in, / Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place, / As it rained kisses” (3.13.84-87). Julius Caesar (great uncle and adoptive father of Octavius Caesar) paid Cleopatra homage not by giving up his territorial ambitions but by deflecting them away from her. Cleopatra's motive must again be guessed. Either she is asking whether Caesar would make a like sacrifice for her, or she is sardonically noting a contrast between Julius Caesar and Octavius, the former choosing to love her and the latter choosing to intimidate her.

Where Thidias and Cleopatra are headed cannot be known, for Antony suddenly enters and jealously rages at Cleopatra, who, he assumes, is signaling Caesar her availability. Antony recalls her prior moves from Roman conqueror to Roman conqueror. He himself had “found [her] as a morsel could upon / Dead Caesar's trencher” (3.13.119-20). Before that time, this Caesar took her as a “fragment,” a leftover, at her lover Pompey's death. Though Antony's fit ends as abruptly as it began and is followed by renewed affection for Cleopatra and fresh alacrity for battle, he repeats his accusation when her ships surrender to Caesar's at the climactic battle near Alexandria; she is, he says, a “triple-turn'd whore” (4.12.13)—the third turn the anticipated one from Antony to Octavius Caesar. The difficulty we ourselves face trying to decide whether Cleopatra would make such a move in Antony's lifetime is beyond the scope of this essay; we do need to recognize that already, well before Antony's death, Cleopatra knows, or thinks she knows, of a possible way to recoup her worldly position. Also pertinent is evidence that Cleopatra makes moves to protect herself. In the face of Antony's anger over the surrender of her ships, she withdraws to a monument. From there she sends Antony first news of her death, then of her survival. When he mortally wounds himself believing her dead, she declines to leave the monument, expressing fear that Caesar might capture her, so that Antony must wait for her to raise him by a mechanical contrivance.

Told by her dying lover to “trust” Proculeius, Cleopatra says “My resolution and my hands I'll trust, / None about Caesar” (4.15.51-52). After Antony dies, she movingly eulogizes him and seems to ready herself and her ladies-in-waiting for death. Yet some in the audience, and not necessarily those unfavorably inclined towards her, may detect inner indecision and outward deception.⁵ Of most interest is the possibility that the death she speaks of is not death at all but a metaphor for sexual orgasm. Orgasm as death is a familiar Elizabethan figure and an iterative image in the play. Cleopatra has already used it repeatedly in this scene;⁶ Enobarbus employed it earlier in the play when he taunted Antony with the suggestion that Cleopatra would use her wiles to prevent his return to Rome: “Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying” (1.2.136-40).

That Cleopatra will try to survive in Caesar's world is made clear in the next scene. Her emissary arrives at Caesar's court and announces:

                                                            The queen my mistress,
Confined in all she has, her monument,
Of thy intents desires instruction,
That she preparedly may frame herself
To th'way she's forced to.

(5.1.52-56)

If Cleopatra's words are taken metaphorically, she is asking as a defeated leader for instructions from the victor; if literally, she is asking how she should physically position herself so as to be ready to accede to what “she's forced to.” The sexual subtext extends to her “monument,” which is bawdy term for the vagina, especially a widow's.⁷ Cleopatra, having retreated to the confines of her body, tests whether Caesar will let her negotiate what he might take by force.

Though Cleopatra has responsed to Caesar's enticement, he has become unsure how to proceed. Moments earlier, Dercetus had arrived with a bloody sword, which he identified as the sword with which Antony took his life (5.1.19-26).⁸ News of his death puts before Caesar, as in a “spacious mirror” (5.1.34), Antony's “rarer spirit.” Caesar is shaken enough to confess that he pursued Antony's death. Yet Caesar is also relieved by Antony's death, because it occasions no momentous upheaval in the order of things (5.1.14-19). Moreover, Caesar no longer has need of Cleopatra to eliminate Antony, and her death would complete Caesar's conquest of the east. He has only to muster the brutality and to mask his motives.

After sending Cleopatra's messenger back with the assurance that “Caesar cannot live / To be ungentle” (5.1.59-60), Caesar instructs 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.

(5.1.61-66)

Caesar is generally understood as desiring Cleopatra's survival so he can march her in his triumph. Yet Caesar's phrasing—his fear of “some mortal stroke”—suggests that he realizes that death is only one of several ways by which Cleopatra could seek to mar his triumph. Caesar's failure to respond to Cleopatra's sexual enticement suggests that he wishes to appear implacable to her and thereby prompt her suicide.

By the time Caesar sends Proculeius off, he is no longer the man Caesar wants for the mission. Caesar calls for Dolabella who is absent, then mysteriously remarks of him that “he shall in time be ready” (5.1.72). Confident now of his plan, Caesar discloses it neither to his subordinates nor to us.

The next scene begins with Cleopatra again thinking about suicide:

My desolation does begin to make
A better life. 'Tis paltry to be Caesar;
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will. And it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accident and bolts up change,
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar's nurse and Caesar's.

(5.2.1-8)

Cleopatra does not go so far as to say that her “desolation” makes her ready for the “better life” of death; rather, she asserts only that her “desolation does begin” to make her ready. Since she is not yet fully resolved on death, it may be inferred that she is still trying to decide whether to be or not to be. When Cleopatra says it is “paltry to be Caesar,” she may mean that it is paltry to be alive even in the best of circumstances, or she may mean that it is paltry to be alive and at the top of fortune's wheel, for from the top one can only move downward.⁹ When Cleopatra goes on to describe death as that which “shackles accidents and bolts up change,” she identifies not only the glory but the tragedy of death, its finality.

Proculeius enters and addresses Cleopatra: “Caesar sends greeting to the Queen of Egypt, / And bids thee study on what fair demands / Thou mean'st to have him grant thee” (5.2.9-11). Proculeius superficially conforms to Caesar's instructions, yet he goes beyond them in inviting Cleopatra to draw up a wish list of “demands.” If Proculeius does intend to help her, he is likely to do so in just such a cautious manner, avoiding open defiance of Caesar. The interview between Proculeius and Cleopatra is further complicated by the possibility that Cleopatra also chooses to be indirect. That she may have a motive to be so emerges at once, for before conversing she asks for and learns Proculeius's name. Then she says that Antony “did tell me of you, bade me trust you, but / I do not greatly care to be deceived / That have no use for trusting” (5.2.13-15). Cleopatra may be indifferent to her fate (and therefore indifferent to deception) or she may affect indifference as a caution before soliciting Proculeius's help.

Cleopatra returns to the same objective she advanced earlier:

                                                                                                              If your master
Would have a queen his beggar, you must tell him
That majesty, to keep decorum, must
No less beg than a kingdom. If he please
To give me conquered Egypt for my son,
He gives me so much of mine own as I
Will kneel to him with thanks.

(5.2.15-21)

Cleopatra's sarcasm veils what she wants: retention of her kingdom. Cleopatra also hints a path to her goal by alluding to the now lost but once familiar ballad, “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” in which a beggar woman marries a king who falls in love with her.¹⁰ Cleopatra is hoping for the opportunity to work her charms on Caesar.

Proculeius's recommendation for Cleopatra carries hints that he is concerned for her and no naive believer in Caesar's good intentions. Proculeius starts by rallying Cleopatra's spirits (as a caution, in case they need rallying), and then hints Caesar's untrustworthiness by exaggerating his trustworthiness (excessive repetition of initial “f” reinforces the effect): “You're fall'n into a princely hand. Fear nothing. / Make your full reference freely to my lord, / Who is so full of grace that it flows over / On all that need” (5.22-25). Caesar must be manipulated, Proculeius implies, and suggests that she kneel in submission before making her requests of Caesar. When she accepts his suggestion and suddenly remarks of Caesar that she “would gladly / Look him i'th'face” (5.2.31-32), Proculeius quickly agrees to “report” this key request to his master.

Proculeius suddenly helps Roman soldiers covertly enter the monument and take Cleopatra captive.¹¹ It might seem that he has betrayed Cleopatra, yet if she really inclines to suicide she is safer as his prisoner. When she responds to capture by taking out a concealed knife to attempt suicide, Proculeius wrests the weapon from her, saying that he has “relieved, but not betrayed” her (5.2.40). With Roman soldiers now present, he needs to be especially cautious in what he says.

In all likelihood, Cleopatra's effort at suicide is earnest, for she is shocked by her capture. With her path to death blocked, she sets about to determine whether her fears are justified; her strategy is to express these fears in a manner that will move Proculeius to sympathy. She speaks loathingly of captivity at Caesar's court—“Shall they hoist me up / And show me to the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome?” (5.2.54-56)—and describes three terrible hypothetical deaths, each of which, she says, she would prefer to captivity. These deaths she lists in three parallel clauses, each beginning with “rather” and one describing death in a manner that warrants our attention: “Rather on Nilus' mud / Lay me stark nak'd and let the water-flies / Blow me into abhorring!” (5.2.57-59). Cleopatra's imagery “takes on an erotic suggestion, one that couples sexuality and death” (5.2.59n).¹² Cleopatra's overt claim is that she would prefer a tormented death to humiliation. Her implied claim is that she would prefer a pleasurable death to a tormented one. Before Dolabella's entry interrupts Proculeius, he tries to quiet her fear: “You do extend / These thoughts of horror further than you shall / Find cause in Caesar” (5.2.61-63). Since not a word in the play supports the notion that Caesar intends ignominy for Cleopatra on the scale she imagines, Proculeius speaks the truth.

Dolabella dismisses Proculeius: “What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows, / And he hath sent for thee” (5.2.64-65). “What” Proculeius has “done,” how Caesar has learned of it, and why it is cause of Proculeius's dismissal are deliberately left unclear, but surely Dolabella has Caesar's trust and Proculeius does not.¹³ Moreover, even as he departs, Proculeius is ready to help Cleopatra. He urges Dolabella, “Be gentle to her” (5.2.67) and asks her if she wishes him to carry a message to Caesar. The code Cleopatra employs, as well as the substance of her reply, is consistent with her earlier remarks to Proculeius: “Say I would die” (5.2.69). Cleopatra would die to avoid humiliation but given the choice of physical or sexual death, she would choose the latter.

Dolabella is Thidias's true successor; both men make “cunning” use of “eloquence” in efforts to betray Cleopatra.¹⁴ Dolabella, now Cleopatra's principal guard, ingratiates himself: “Most noble empress, you have heard of me?” (5.2.70). To Cleopatra's “I cannot tell,” he blandly insists, “Assuredly you know me.” Dolabella presents himself as if his way had already been paved by Antony's endorsement; Dolabella acts, indeed, as if Antony had mistaken Proculeius for himself. Dolabella's name means “fine trick” (Smith 208)—Cleopatra asks him whether it is his “trick” (5.2.74) to laugh at the dreams of boys and women. But he is her only remaining lifeline and so she tries to win his sympathy. That she chooses so unusual a way to appeal to him as to pay moving homage to Antony suggests Cleopatra draws on a depth of feeling; yet Thidias rightly sees where she is leading him when he replies: “Would I might never / O'ertake pursued success but I do feel, / By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites / My very heart at root” (5.2.101-04). Cleopatra takes the bait and inquires whether Caesar intends to “lead [her] in triumph” (5.2.108). “He will, I know't,” Dolabella confirms. Dolabella's forthrightness, so unlike Proculeius's caution, may express fearless devotion or it may be a trap, if (as we can't yet tell) Caesar wants Cleopatra to take her own life.

Caesar enters and with the antagonists face-to-face fires the opening salvo, appearing not to recognize Cleopatra: “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” (5.2.111). His intention is to show both his entourage and Cleopatra that he is immune to her charms. Cleopatra, unable to counter Caesar's move, adopts Proculeius's suggestion: she kneels to Caesar. Caesar graciously tells her to rise, then says he is prepared to ignore “the record of what injuries you did us, / Though written in our flesh” (5.2.117-18). Cleopatra interrupts him, for by establishing her record of bloodshed, Caesar leaves open the possibility that he will hold her accountable for it. Cleopatra sees, moreover, that Caesar has addressed her neither as a man nor a woman but as the leader of a defeated army. She therefore shifts attention from her military improprieties to her improprieties as a sexual being and a female, “confess[ing]” that she has been “laden with like frailties which before / Have often shamed our sex” (121-23).¹⁵

Caesar ignores Cleopatra's flirtation and adds a sudden twist to his statement. Not only would he revoke his offer of clemency if Cleopatra committed suicide; he would deal mercilessly with her children, putting them “to that destruction” which, he says, he will “guard them from” if she chooses life (5.2.127-32). It is possible that Caesar threatens Cleopatra to discourage her from committing suicide but more likely that he threatens in order to lay a moral foundation for the possible seizure of her dynasty. If, however, Cleopatra does not commit suicide, then, if he keeps his word, he will be seen as a kindly conqueror, and if breaks his word, he will have captive Cleopatra to grace his triumph. Whether Caesar hopes that Cleopatra will live or die cannot be known for sure, yet only her suicide will provide him territorial advantage, and Dolabella has prompted her to choose death over humiliation.

When Caesar tries to close the interview, Cleopatra desperately extends it; to his intended exit line, “I'll take my leave,” she adds: “And may through all the world! ‘Tis yours, and we, / Your scutcheons and your signs of conquest, shall / Hang in what place you please” (5.2.133-35). As David Bevington notes, “Cleopatra plays on Caesar's [phrase], conventionally said on the point of intended departure, in a punning sense: ‘You may take your leave, have your will, anywhere in the world’” (5.2.133n). Caesar, then, may do as he pleases, may place Cleopatra where he pleases. “Hang,” “place,” and “please” are suggestive terms which Cleopatra uses to renew her offer of sexual submission.¹⁶ She is ready to begin a seduction as imaginative as her seductions, recalled at earlier points in the play, of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. After her lover Pompey died, Cleopatra initiated her next affair by having an accomplice deliver her in a mattress to Julius Caesar. While alluding only briefly to this incident (2.6.70-72), the play elaborately recalls her conquest of Antony. After Caesar's death, Cleopatra, with the collaboration of her court ladies, presented herself on the river Cydnus to Antony's viewing. “For what his eyes ate,” we are told, he “pays his heart” (2.2.235-36).

Cleopatra suddenly hands Caesar an inventory of her wealth:

Cleopatra.
This is the brief of money, plate and jewels
I am possessed of. 'Tis exactly valued,
Not petty things admitted. Where's Seleucus?
Seleucus.
Here, madam.
Cleopatra.
This is my treasurer. Let him speak, my lord,
Upon his peril, that I have reserved
To myself nothing. Speak the truth, Seleucus.
Seleucus.
Madam, I had rather seal my lips
Than to my peril speak that which is not.
Cleopatra
What have I kept back?
Seleucus.
Enough to purchase what you have made known.

(5.2.137-47)

Why does Cleopatra submit this list to Caesar? Plutarch's “Life of Marcus Antonius,” Shakespeare's main source, explains that she wishes to lull Caesar into thinking that she desires to live (Bullough 5:314). In Samuel Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra (Bullough 5:406-49), a probable minor source, the same motive is ascribed to her when her interview with Caesar is anticipated, but at the interview itself Cleopatra speaks seductively, then with the simplest of conjunctions, “and,” proceeds to hand Caesar her inventory.¹⁷ Shakespeare appears to have taken his cue from Daniel. Cleopatra says that her inventory is complete “not petty things admitted” (5.2.139). Had she said “not petty things omitted” emphasis would fall on the inclusiveness of the list rather than on what it has excluded, “petty things.” These are possibly sexual “things,” “jewels” with non-monetary value and recalling those “signs of conquest” Caesar may place where he pleases.¹⁸ Cleopatra asks Seleucus to testify to the “truth,” that she has reserved to herself “nothing,” a common vulgarism for the vagina. Seleucus, seeming to speak on cue, says that he fears to lie, to speak “that which is not” (5.2.145). Since “that which is not” is nothing, Seleucus hints at Cleopatra's concealed possession, which he then blazons by saying that she has retained “enough to purchase what [Cleopatra has] made known” (5.2.147). Cleopatra now confesses that she has withheld both “some lady trifles” (5.2.164)—ambiguously trifles meant for ladies and trifles unique to women—and also “some nobler token … kept apart.” Cleopatra claims to have withheld the latter so that she can give it as a gift to induce Caesar's wife and sister to intercede for her; yet a “token” was often a love token, love tokens were often rings, and rings, well, we know about rings.

A lady-trifle displayed well is no trifle in the eye of the beholder. Cleopatra, having drawn attention to her trifle, is ready to hint its attractiveness. She creates a drama casting Seleucus and Caesar in the role of her former and prospective lover respectively. She is her own chorus when she explains “I shall show the cinders of my spirits / Through th'ashes of my chance” (5.2.172-73). She is taking the “chance” of the moment to show her smoldering passion. Towards Seleucus, it takes the form of vengeful anger, for he, though a “servant” of love, has proven of “no more trust / Than love that's hired” (5.2.153-54). His “ingratitude” makes her “wild” (5.2.152, 153). Yet she describes herself as “meek” towards Caesar (161),¹⁹ and beckons him even while taunting Seleucus. “Wert thou a man,” she says to Seleucus, “Thou wouldst have mercy on me” (5.2.173-74). The implication is not, as some have thought, that Seleucus is a eunuch; Cleopatra unmans him as a way of inviting Caesar to be manly.

Caesar waits out Cleopatra's performance with a few kindly words; when it ends, he is at his most magnanimous, if appearances are to be believed:

Not what you have reserved nor what acknowledged
Put we i'th'roll of conquest. Still be't yours;
Bestow it at your pleasure, and believe
Caesar's no merchant, to make prize with you
Of things that merchants sold.

(5.2.179-83)

Below the surface Caesar delivers a calculated insult. He will not claim as his conquest what Cleopatra has “reserved,” her vagina. This courtesy of his he initially portrays as extended to a woman who “reserves” herself sexually; rather than forcing her, he will let her yield her favors when and to whom she will: “still be't yours, / Bestow it at your pleasure.” “It” in its full and contracted form refers to Cleopatra's vagina, and tacitly communicates Caesar's awareness of the offer she has made.²⁰ Caesar then delivers a devastating blow. Under the guise of saying he is too much the gentleman to take merchant-like advantage of his opportunity, he rejects Cleopatra as damaged goods, already bought and “sold” (5.2.183) too many times. In his farewell he offers her his “pity” as a “friend,” but as he has already excluded the erotic associations of these terms, his real message is rejection.

When Caesar leaves, Cleopatra puts into motion her plan for suicide with only a brief and puzzling explanation: “He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself” (5.2.190-91). Critics understand Cleopatra to be reaffirming her commitment to suicide in the light of what she sees as Caesar's hypocrisy. I believe, on the other hand, that only now does Cleopatra make her decision to die, and that she makes it not because she sees Caesar as attempting to deceive her, but because she believes he has undeceived her. It is probable that she has fallen prey to his strategy, which was to create and then destroy the expectation that she could awaken his sexual interest. A remoter possibility is that she is aware of his trap but, in the face of his power and malice, sees no tolerable alternative to suicide.

Before Cleopatra can advance her plot further, Dolabella reenters, unctuously claims that his “religion” of more “love” (5.2.198) makes him Cleopatra's “servant,” and portentously delivers her news of Caesar's intentions: “Through Syria / [He] intends his journey, and within three days / You with your children will he send before” (5.2.199-201). Dolabella departs with “I must attend on Caesar” (5.2.205), a hint to us of where his real allegiance lies. Through Dolabella, Caesar tries to make doubly sure that Cleopatra will take the path of suicide. If we think she detects his ruse, then we have her thank Dolabella in an ironic voice, aware that Proculeius, not Dolabella, has been her true servant.²¹

In both Antony and Cleopatra and Plutarch's “Life of Antonius,” Caesar's guard blocks access to Cleopatra, so that poisonous asps must be smuggled to her in a basket of figs. In Plutarch, soldiers search the basket of a rustic but fail to detect the asps; in Shakespeare a guard conducts the rustic into Cleopatra's presence, and makes no search of the basket before leaving at her command. The “simple countryman” (5.2.333) is a wise and well-meaning fool, for he warns her that she has an enemy by pointing to an asp and saying: “I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him” (5.2.244-45).

When Dolabella returns to the monument to find Cleopatra and Iras dead and Charmian dying, he comments while awaiting his master: “Caesar, thy thoughts / Touch their effects in this” (5.2.323-24). His observation is as close as the play comes to acknowledging that Caesar sought Cleopatra's suicide, and it is therefore not surprising that Dolabella promptly partially unsays what he has said, describing Cleopatra's death as “the dreaded act which thou [Caesar] / So sought'st to hinder” (5.2.325-26). The infinitive construction—“to hinder”—cancels the admission that Caesar “sought” the death. Yet Dolabella shows not the least sign of apprehension that Caesar will be angered, and in the event, Caesar isn't. He instead takes clinical interest in determining how Cleopatra died, while noting that he knew from her physicians that she had been studying manifold ways to die (5.2.347-50). Caesar's reflections on Cleopatra's life are brief and purposeful: “She looks like sleep,” he says, “as she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.340-42). She might catch another Antony, but never Caesar. He ends the play distributing “pity” to Antony and Cleopatra and “glory” to himself, ordering Dolabella to make funeral arrangements, and announcing his plan to go to Rome (not to Syria, as Dolabella led Cleopatra to believe). Caesar never says whether he will fulfill his threat to destroy her children and seize her throne.²²

Caesar moves into position for the final battle with “speed” that “carries beyond belief” (3.7.74-75). He prophesies that what lies ahead is “the last of many battles” he will fight. (4.1.12). His plan of action is successful: Antony is lured into sea battle, where he is weak. Though Caesar prosecutes this last phase of the action with special vigor, he has been characterized throughout the play as one who feels himself a man of “destiny” (3.6.83), and of course we watch the play knowing that he is more right than he can know, for the Roman Republic is in its death-throes and the world's most extensive empire is soon to be born. Caesar, who brings this empire into being, may be expected to employ machiavellian arts. Yet we have been willing to minimize his overt scheming and to ignore the possibility of his covert scheming. We must not let Caesar overmatch us as he overmatches Cleopatra and Antony.

Caesar's pursuit of political objectives shows up the limitations of politics. To politics he sacrifices friendship, love, the bonds of kinship. His repressions might be expected to cripple him, though within the space of the play, they don't. He is the diminished “mirror” that shows the amplitude of Antony and Cleopatra. Antony's greatness—a Shakespearean greatness, with virtues and flaws intermixed—is beyond our scope, but a word can be said of Cleopatra's. Her claim to have unpolicied Caesar is resonant because during her duel with him she pursues not only a political objective, her “safety,” but also (in sometimes uneasy balance) her “honor,” celebrating Antony and calling to him as her “husband” as she dies a magnificent death.

The play closes with Caesar's opportunistic eulogy. In giving him his lines, however, the dramatist plays a trick on Caesar, forcing him to pay tribute to Cleopatra and (more briefly) to Antony. The play has told their story, not Caesar's, and in their story Caesar has not “earn'd” a noble “place”—such a place as Enobarbus had hoped to attain in Antony's story (3.13.46). Caesar may imply that it is to his credit not to be caught in Cleopatra's “strong toil of grace,” but the audience may wonder whether to snare as Cleopatra has snared and to be snared as Antony has been are evidence of a greatness reclaimed by the play from the ashes of history.

Notes

1. Antony and Cleopatra is cited from David Bevington's New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play. Quotation of other Shakespeare plays is from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed.

2. Only William L. Godshalk's “Dolabella as Agent Provocateur” has proposed, rightly I will argue, that Dolabella serves Caesar by deceiving Cleopatra. I am also indebted to Godshalk's unpublished “Theobald's Emendations of Antony and Cleopatra,” and to his advice on a draft of the present essay.

3. Maecenas proposes the marriage directly after Caesar expresses the wish that he could find a “hoop” (2.2.115) which would bind him and Antony together. A hoop is not merely a “circular band or ring of metal” that binds together a casket. A “hoop” is also a ring that symbolically binds a couple together; “a hoop of gold, a paltry ring,” becomes the subject of contention between Portia and Bassanio (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.147).

4. Cleopatra's lover is “great Pompey”—presumably Pompey the Great—at 1.5.32 but “Cneius Pompey”—elder brother of the play's Sextus Pompey—at 3.13.121.

5. If two questions asked by Cleopatra are not merely rhetorical, then they give evidence of her hesitation about suicide. As Antony lies dying, Cleopatra asks: “Shall I abide / In this dull world, which in thy absence is / No better than a sty?” (4.15.62-64). After his death and speaking to Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra says: “Is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?” (4.15.85-87).

6. For Cleopatra's puns on death as she hoists Antony into the monument and as he dies, see Traci 302.

7. Henke defines “monument” as a “tomb or crypt, with innuendo of an old, cold vagina.” In All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram tries to seduce Diana by saying: “In your fine frame hath love no quality? / If the quick fire of youth light not your mind, / You are no maiden, but a monument” (4.2.4-6). Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's “Life of Marcus Antonius,” Shakespeare's principal source for Antony and Cleopatra, identifies the structure to which Cleopatra withdraws as a “monument” (Bullough 5:309); possibly to create a bawdy subtext, Shakespeare repeats “To th'monument” three times in a ten-line scene (4.13.3,6,10).

8. The Folio spells the name both Dercetus and Decretas. When Antony mortally wounds himself—but before he dies—Dercetus takes up Antony's sword, hoping to win preferment from Caesar (4.14.116-17). As the entry of Dercetus to Caesar is followed by the entry of Cleopatra's messenger, we wonder whether Cleopatra, like Dercetus, is ready to “pack cards with Caesar” (4.14.19).

9. Edgar observes in King Lear that “the lamentable change is from the best, / The worst returns to laughter” (4.1.5-6).

10. The play's editors note the allusion. That the ballad was once well-known is suggested by Shakespeare's several allusions to it, some, as this one, highly elliptical; see Richard II, 5.3.79-80, and All's Well That Ends Well, Epilogue 1.

11. A number of textual and staging problems associated with the entrance of the guard are discussed by editors but are not relevant to the present argument. Note also that the assertion below that Cleopatra draws a knife is based on inference only. Cleopatra says “Quick, quick, good hands,” and Proculeius, intervening, says: “Hold, worthy lady, hold!” (5.2.38-39).

12. For erotic punning on blow in relation to tumescence and impregnation see All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1.118-26.

13. Possibly the audience has watched Dolabella overhear parts of the prior conversation between Cleopatra and Proculeius. His spying could explain both his present remark and also his attempt, which I mention in my text below, to confuse Cleopatra about whom in Caesar's entourage she can trust. As the staging of the period has characters enter well before they begin speaking (and depart well after they stop), it is often difficult to decide whether they should be portrayed as overhearing or as possibly overhearing the conversation of others. Proculeius's fears that Cleopatra may commit suicide might well be activated, for example, if, when she mentions “beg[ging]” a kingdom (5.2.18), he has already heard her speak contemptuously of the earth as both “the beggar's nurse and Caesar's” (5.2.8). For the general problem of “early” entrances and overhearing, see Dessen 65-77.

14. For an interesting effort to sort out class distinctions among Caesar's subordinates dealing with Cleopatra, see Barroll 120-24.

15. For “frailty” as sexual weakness and as a weakness to which women are especially liable, see Isabella in Measure for Measure: “Call us ten times frail, / For we are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints” (2.2.128-30; cf. 121 & 124 and also the proverb “Women are frail” [Dent W700.1]).

16. For “please,” see the entries “please oneself upon” and “pleasure” in Partridge. See also the entries for “hang” and “place” in Rubinstein.

17. Daniel makes pretty clear that Cleopatra begins by hinting to Caesar that he can succeed Antony in her bed: “Looke what I have beene to Antony, / Think thou the same I might have beene to thee. / And here I do present thee with a note / Of all the treasure …” (1599 edition, lines 665-68, in Bullough 5:424. The fullest review of the Seleucus episode in the light of its sources is Stirling's.

18. “Jewel,” according to Partridge, is used by Shakespeare allusively “for chastity incarnate in the maidenhead”; the word may also refer to the female sexual organ, whether a maid's or not (e.g. Shakespeare sonnet 131.4). With regard to “nothing,” discussed in the text below, a notoriously bawdy Shakespearean instance follows Ophelia's refusal to let Hamlet “lie in [her] lap.” He asks, “Do you think I meant country matters?”, and she replies, “I think nothing, my lord” (Hamlet 3.2.116-17). For further discussion of “nothing,” see Green 74-78.

19. The same juxtaposition of “wild” and “tame” occurs in Wyatt's “They flee from me.” The speaker complains of lovers who have turned against him: “I have seen them gentle, tame and meek, / That now are wild.”

20. See the entry under “it” in Partridge. For a bawdy use of “it” in a contraction, see Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.188. Shakespeare's most extensive punning on “it” in its full and contracted forms is in All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1.130-64.

21. Cleopatra's sharp disillusionment with Seleucus may possibly be understood as her anticipation that Caesar himself is about to fail her.

22. Plutarch reports that Caesar murdered Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar; the other children “were verie honorablie kept” (Bullough 5:312). For another account of Caesar as politically purposeful at the close of the play, see Charmes 144-46.

Works Cited

Barroll, J. Leeds. Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition and Change in Antony and Cleopatra. Cranbury, N. J.: Associated University Presses, 1984.

Charmes, Linda. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

Daniel, Samuel. The Tragedie of Cleopatra. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Ed. Geoffrey Bullough. Vol. 3. New York: Columbia UP, 1964. 8 vols. 1957-75.

Dessen, Alan C. Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Godshalk, William L. “Dolabella as Agent Provocateur.” Renaissance Papers, 1977. 69-74.

Green, Martin. The Labyrinth of Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Skilton, 1978. 74-78.

Henke, James T. Courtesans and Cuckholds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare). New York: Garland, 1979.

Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare's Bawdy. 1948. Rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1969.

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes. Trans. Thomas North. 1579. In Bullough (see under Daniel above).

Rubinstein, Frankie. A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance. 2d ed. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. David Bevington. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

———. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2d. ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton, 1997.

Smith, Marion B. Dualities in Shakespeare. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1966.

Sterlings, Brents. “Cleopatra's Scene with Seleucus: Petrarch, Daniel, and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 299-311.

Traci, Philip. The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Study of Shakespeare's Play. Studies in English Literature 64. The Hague: Mouton, 1970.