SOURCE: “Antony and Cleopatra: The Narrative Construction of the Other,” in ‘Th' Interpretation of the Time’: The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Roman Plays, University of Victoria, 1993, pp. 59-90.

[In the following essay, Kujawinska-Courtney analyzes the play's use of diegesis and mimesis and argues that the opposition between the two may be viewed as analogous to the play's theme of polarity. The critic concludes that by the end of Antony and Cleopatra, Egyptian mimesis wins out over Roman diegesis.]

In Julius Caesar the theatre audience tries to make sense of two equally powerful narrative evaluations of the past: one Caesarian, the other Republican; in Antony and Cleopatra the spectators are subjected to a single dominant narrative mode, the Roman imperial ideology. Soldiers and politicians are spokesmen for the Roman world, and they galvanize at least temporarily the offstage and onstage audiences' perceptions of the enacted present. The diegetic mode of discourse animates this play as it does few others in the Shakespeare canon. The putative submission of the represented present to the narrative past constitutes the main structural pattern of the play,¹ since the diegetic evaluation of both Antony and Cleopatra weighs heavily on the lovers' mimetic present. It would impose on them the rigid Roman values of morality.

The dynamic of Antony and Cleopatra is, however, vastly more complex than this. Imposing as the diegetic dimension of the play may be, mimesis has its own impact in both Roman and Egyptian scenes. Sometimes unusually expansive and vividly concentrated mimesis subverts the Roman ideology couched in diegetic terms. This subversion occurs even though the avenues of intimacy between the protagonists and the theatre audience are less open in this play than can be expected in mature Shakespearian tragedy. Macbeth and his Lady both deliver soliloquies (largely absent from the dramaturgy of Antony and Cleopatra), and they are also shown, alone together, communing intimately about issues of great moral consequence. (We never see Antony alone with Cleopatra). As early as Julius Caesar, Shakespeare knew how to reveal character through mimesis by soliloquy and by intimate argument that, though domestic, bears life-and-death implications (II.i). It may be the absence of these elements from the mimetic strategy of Antony and Cleopatra that, in the opinion of some critics, makes the protagonists more impressive than familiar to us.

Nevertheless, other elements, especially language and symbolic character, contribute to the vivid evocation of the various worlds of the play. Of language, Terence Hawkes writes that in Egypt it is “not so much … a vehicle for rational discourse [as it is in the Roman scenes], but rather a physically luxurious thing, part of a totality of sensuous indulgence in which all events rank as potential sources of bodily pleasure” (1973, 182). In both Rome and Egypt, the essence of culture is evoked by minor characters: soldiers and armed officers in military and militant Rome and a eunuch, a soothsayer, and erotically inclined waiting women in exotic Egypt. Language, however, is deceptive, because it gives the illusion of mimesis where representation itself is lacking. There is a “gap between the enormous cravings of erotic fantasy and the banal pleasures [mimesis] of which human beings are actually capable” (Hughes-Hallett 1990, 155). Yet, the sensuality and languorous pleasures of Egypt, which Antony and Cleopatra epitomize, somehow do not permit the spectators' total condemnation. One may say that the lovers waste their time, acting irresponsibly and emotionally, but the way in which they do it is impressive, because they convey such a strong histrionic and linguistic sense of themselves.

In Rome there is a similar ambiguity. Although the Roman judgement of Antony and Cleopatra is embedded in high ethical standards—a sense of duty inseparable from austerity, honour, politics, and warfare—the enactment proves more vulnerable than the principle.² Most of the time the Romans present themselves as shrewd and grasping politicians for whom the end justifies any means. Consequently, even if the theatre audience may tend to identify itself with the Roman moral stance, the mimetic representation of sordidness in the Roman world puts into doubt the lofty moral standards the Romans express narratively.

The language and symbolism also participate in the vivid evocation of various worlds in the play; the spectators come to feel the amplitude of the Empire that is at stake for the characters who are engaged in the grandiose action. Shakespeare creates the feeling of distance and of setting that comprises the whole Mediterranean basin—of empire rather than mere kingdoms. One technical device that evokes this sense of spaciousness is the episodic structure (Aldus 1955, 397-414; Stroup 1964, 289-298; Stirling 1956, 157-192; Beckerman 1977, 99-112). This roominess can also be attributed to imagery and to the careless way kingdoms are “kiss'd away” (III.x.7) in Egypt; yet much of the roominess is due to the introduction of brief scenes. Some alternate between Rome and Alexandria and others offer cinematic glimpses of Athens, Parthia, and numerous other places in the polymorphous world of the play. In such a context of potentially disjunctive scenes, the diegetic must be brought into play in the quest for coherence in the Mediterranean vastness. The audience is indirectly informed about what has already happened or is happening elsewhere. Narratives very often delivered by anonymous messengers and soldiers (I.ii, I.iv, II.v, III.iii, III.vii, III.xii, IV.iii, IV.iv, IV.v, IV.vi, IV.ix, V.ii. See Perret 1966, 67-72; Scrimgeour 1968, 41-54; Heffner 1976, 154-162) help to create the impression of a purposeful passage through space and time. The effect is to carry geographical amplitude to the horizons of the world.

Beyond this function of support for mimesis in a quest for coherence, there is a larger purpose for diegesis in the play's dramaturgy. Diegesis stands constantly in antithetical opposition to mimesis and often subverts it. Exposed to a continual shifting from persuasive diegesis to appealing mimesis, the spectators' response wavers; it becomes split and lost between equally gratifying narrative and representation. Leading a dialogue with these two aspects of the play, they alternately question both and struggle to find a constant point of value-reference in their experience of the dramatic world. The apparent ambiguity of the play may then be seen to be not an ambiguity of the dramatic world itself, but rather the ambivalence of the audience's shifting responses. Indeed Antony and Cleopatra makes hungry where most it satisfies, since the reconciliation of diegesis and mimesis challenges the observers. One may say that the ongoing agon between the mimetic and the diegetic becomes a dramaturgical analogue to other polarities in the play.³

Shakespeare used the same dramaturgical strategy at the outset of Antony and Cleopatra that he had employed previously in Julius Caesar. The first scene offers in miniature a paradigm of the fundamental praxis of the entire play. Morally didactic narratives that dominate the Roman world compete with the lyric representation of the exotic and erotic environment of the lovers in Egypt. Philo, an archetypal soldier who will not be seen or mentioned again in the play, makes a strongly functional cameo appearance here; we know nothing of him but his once-voiced moral opinion. It is, as it were, a disembodied voice that expresses intense regret and uncomprehending anger over Antony's passion for Cleopatra:

Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war,
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy's lust

(I.i.1-10)

As Philo imposes his narrative on his as yet innocent listeners, he firmly establishes Antony as an object of his condemnation. The apparent soundness of his argument and the masterly compactness of his imagery achieve Philo's ends. Judging Antony's present behaviour, he turns Antony's past into a morally desirable standard, anchored in the Roman military concept of virtue.

In his description of the decay of Antony's potentialities, Philo establishes the lovers' relationship in the tradition of the popular mode of the war of the sexes. He foregrounds Antony's “eyes” and “heart” and juxtaposes their useful military employment in the past with their present use in indolent pastimes.⁴ Consequently, the narrative opening of the play, preceding Antony's entrance, focuses the attention of the theatre audience and turns it into biased witnesses of Antony's behaviour in Egypt. Commenting on this scene, one critic says that “from the Roman point of view of Philo, we shall see the triple pillar of the world transformed into a strumpet's fool, and not merely in this scene but in the whole action” (Stroup 1964, 297). Indoctrinated by Philo's narrative, the spectators expect, then, to see Antony as an emasculated weakling who has lost his past military prowess in a present battle of the sexes, and has become a mere servant of a racially inferior woman.

Yet when the protagonists actually appear on the stage, as they do immediately afterwards (I.i.14-55), the attention is swayed away from the pejorative topos of Philo by the amatory imaginations of the lovers as revealed in their rich and expansive imagery and their enormous presence. Indeed, “four lines, shared equally by the two lovers, are sufficient to shake our confidence in the fairness and accuracy of his [Philo's] verdict on them” (Hibbard 1980, 104). Temporarily, at least, then, the diegetic influence of Philo's position fades, since to the partners in love and to the theatre audience the atmosphere of “love of Love” and “some pleasure now” (I.i.44.47) are of a more urgent importance than the news of the political world represented by the Roman messenger. Rome and its matters and morals are far away and, at least in this part of the scene, they become a phantasmagoric intrusion, deprived of any sobering influence.

And even if the representation of the lovers' amorous pursuits carries the audience away by the power of the emotions expressed in hyperbolic poetry, unlike the protagonists the spectators are sharply brought back to reality by the dialogue of the Roman soldiers at the end of the scene. By binding the past and present to the anticipated future, the soldiers imply very strongly that this oblivion cannot last forever (I.i.56-62). The ruthless political world is losing its patience, and it will eventually shake the Elysian tranquility of Egypt and its irresponsible morality.

The establishment of Antony's military skills is crucial to the initial impression of his character, since his heroic past is “the only unquestioned idea in the play” (Rosen 1960, 112). The beginning of the play therefore bombards the audience with narrative references to Antony's past valour and contrasts it with his present passion for Cleopatra: Philo's rhetoric is later taken over by both Pompey and Octavius.⁵

Pompey—the rebel against the powers of Rome—compares Antony to Octavius and Lepidus: “his soldiership is twice the other twain” (II.i.34-35). Like Philo in Act I, scene i, he comments diegetically upon Antony's valiant past by contrasting it with his present self-indulgence which the spectators have seen in the flesh. Secure in his military position, Pompey is sure for a moment of his victory, mainly because Antony is absent from Rome.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Mark Antony
In Egypt sits at dinner, and will make
No wars without doors.

(II.i.11-13)

Pompey's voice here in the second act echoes and seconds Octavius's earlier and stronger pronouncement.

In Act I, scene iv, Octavius, who is the center of power in Rome, expresses the official Roman condemnation of Antony's hedonistic dissipation in Egypt by pointing out his indispensability in martial matters, especially when Rome is facing a time of grave political and military risk. He introduces his narrative evaluation of Antony with his condemnation of Antony's present behaviour; the list of his accusations opens with the enumeration of Antony's wasteful employment of time: “he fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel” (I.iv.4-5). He echoes Philo's denigration of Antony's manhood:

[Antony] is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he. …

(I.iv.5-7)

To prove that Antony has subverted the Roman concept of austerity and obligation anchored in manliness, Octavius enlightens both the onstage and offstage audiences about Antony's neglect of social and political codes (I.iv.16-25).

When later in the scene Octavius delivers his narrative praise of Antony's past, he presents him as having once been the best example of Roman virtus.⁶ Antony is praised not only for his bravery on the battlefield, where he personally killed Hirtius and Pansa (I.iv.56-58), but also for his endurance of hardship during the spell of famine he and his army were exposed to when they were beaten at Modena.

                                                                                          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 browsed. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.

(I.iv.61-71)

Antony becomes in this narrative passage a paragon of self-abnegation and courage. Reduced to foraging like an animal (“beasts,” “stag,” “browse”) he was yet able to preserve his manly dignity and greatness. That Octavius presents Antony's heroism in defeat strengthens the image of valiant perfection, indirectly implying that if he thus comported himself at the overthrow of his army, he must have been superb at the moment of his glory. The general impression of Octavius's narratives evokes, however, in the onstage and offstage audiences condemnation for Antony's having wasted in Egypt his worldly male potential and his honour.

As past critics' responses confirm, Octavius succeeds in his rhetorical ploy. They generally judge Antony's and Cleopatra's behaviour on the basis of Octavius's persuasive diegesis, at least at this moment of the play. George B. Shaw, for example, saw this play as merely “a faithful picture of the soldier broken down by debauchery and the typical wanton in whose arms such men perish” ([1900] 1931, xxxviii). Yet Shakespeare provides no mimetic support in the play for Shaw's negative judgement;⁷ the lovers' life in Alexandria has been portrayed, but nothing sexually extravagant involving them has taken place in early scenes other than Antony's protestations that he prefers Egypt and Cleopatra's love to Rome. The only revelry is that implied in Antony's anticipatory invitation to “wander through the streets” at night with observing eyes (I.i.53-55), but whether Cleopatra has really agreed to this proposal is never made known. In addition, the lovers are not present when languorous pleasures are wittily discussed in the scene with the soothsayer (I.ii). Therefore the opinion that “Rome is a place of words, Egypt a place of actions, Rome is where love is talked of, Egypt is where love is made” (Hawkes 1973, 179) is not provoked by the mimetic representation of Egypt but by the critic's biased synthesis of the mimetic and the diegetic. The overall sensuality of Egypt expressed in the language of Antony and Cleopatra is orchestrated to modify the effect of the Roman diegetic mode, but the representational side of the play is subject to continual conquest by the Roman narratives as Egypt itself is subject to conquest by Rome.⁸

Shakespeare has allowed the traditional Roman concept of heroism as earned on the battlefield to go unchallenged for two acts. The result is a clear-cut distinction early in the play between the Roman and the Egyptian moralities. When Shakespeare exposes the Roman duplicity in mid-play, the theatre audience experiences the shock of decentering. In Act III, scene i, he suddenly introduces cynical spokesmen for a political expediency that suffuses the world of Roman politics, indeed all of Roman culture. Returning from the Parthian campaign, the Roman officers reduce virtus to the level of Realpolitik: they undermine the acceptance of virtus as the autonomous and self-validating power of an individual. The ultimate moral ideal as represented exclusively by Rome is destabilized not only by narrative counter-discourse but also by mimetic representation.

The pragmatism of Ventidius's diegesis undercuts the staged splendour of military triumph opening the scene (“Enter Ventidius as in triumph, with Silius, and other Romans, Officers, and Soldiers; the dead body of Pacorus borne before him”; III.i.SD). Urged by Silius to pursue his advantage against the enemy, he refuses to continue his conquests, justifying the decision by his past military experience:

                                                             … For learn this, Silius,
Better to leave undone, than by our deed
Acquire too high a fame, when him we serve's away.

(III.i.13-15 ff.)

Ventidius's comment further illustrates the charismatic power-creation already discussed in Julius Caesar. In Antony and Cleopatra Antony's individual success depends not only on his military and political actions, but also on the creation of a value for these deeds by the center of power. Antony is to a certain extent aware of this fact. He seems to comprehend, however, only its basis: the rule that the glory of victory never really belongs to the common soldiers who actually suffer the wounds of battle—for instance the anonymous wounded soldier (III.vii.62-63) and Scarus (IV.vii.6-9).

What Antony realizes is that he, as the center of power, can demand a constant creation of his value even at the expense of men of real virtus. Conscious of that rule, Ventidius reveals his political shrewdness by ascribing to Antony the latest victory over the Parthians. The anticipatory narrative on the contents of his letter to Antony reverberates with Antony's imagined presence at the battlefields of this war. The magical power of Antony's name over the Parthian enemy armies is established, since the war has been won in Antony's “name,” with “his banners” and “his … ranks” (III.i.30.32). In addition, Ventidius flatters his general by stressing his generosity to the soldiers (III.i.32) and by elevating the achievements of the battle: Antony's soldiers have conquered “the ne'er-yet-beaten horse of Parthia” (III.i.33).

What Antony never properly realizes, however, is that his virtue is not only the construct of his military valour itself, but also the construct of the ideological evaluation of his virtue, which is independent of his personal power. Once he openly challenges the center of Roman power that has created his charisma, Antony sees that in the eyes of Rome his political, military and personal reputation is disintegrating. Consequently in the second part of the play, any Roman references to Antony's military skills are negative. Even before the battle of Actium the Romans diegetically denigrate his military tactics. Enobarbus tells Cleopatra that:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          'tis said in Rome
That Photinus, an eunuch, and your maids
Manage this war.

(III.vii.13-15)

Octavius, who found Antony heroic in defeat earlier in the play (I.iv), now sees nothing but an “old ruffian” (IV.i.4) in the defeated champion who challenges him to single combat. He himself prefers to achieve through his army the charisma that will result from the conquest of Antony. Octavius is then ironically, like the Antony of old who built his image through the deeds of such men as Ventidius, a believer in the Realpolitik of power-creation. As a believer in vicarious victories, Octavius pragmatically uses Antony's deserters in the front ranks against him (IV.vi.8-11).

The irony of Antony's situation in the fourth act is that he still identifies himself with the diegetically created Antony of the past, though in the mimetic present the balance of power has shifted away from him toward Octavius. The Roman narrators have now stopped reinventing the personal magic of Antony's leadership, and he nostalgically complains that Octavius is “harping on what I am not what he knew I was” (III.xiii.142-143). Frustrated with the defeat after the battle of Actium, he feels compelled to become his own narrator. He himself, then, recalls his famous military past—and at Octavius's expense:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          he at Philippi kept
His sword e'en like a dancer, while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas I
That the mad Brutus ended: he alone
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had
In the brave squares of war. …

(III.xi.35-40)

Antony's vision of himself is of an achiever at Philippi in his own person, while Octavius achieved through his lieutenants only. (Actually, as the audience of Julius Caesar remembers, “the lean and wrinkled Cassius” was killed by his slave, Pindarus, and “the mad Brutus” was “ended” by Strato, not by Antony). Mythologizing his past, Antony disregards the factual data, and, moreover, he fails to see in his narrative that his fame came through men like Ventidius, not less than Octavius's did.

A further irony is that Antony recalls his past not in front of a politically important audience, but in front of distraught Cleopatra and her court. The theatrical audience will feel the pathos and irony of Antony's sudden breaking of his narrative with “No matter” (III.xi.40). The impact of his narrative is lost for his stage audience in Shakespeare's mimetic representation of a highly emotional response by women to Antony's present defeat.

The tension between Antony's sense of his own charisma and the challenge to this charisma represented by the Roman diegetic denigration of him is only resolved by an audience which responds intellectually to the collision of narrative and mimesis. In this case modern spectators may make a cinematic analogy, which (of course) was not available to the audiences Shakespeare wrote for—but which nevertheless is helpful in defining an aesthetic phenomenon that would have been a real influence on them. The critics agree that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's most “cinematic” play, mainly because of its “wide screen” possibilities in sea fights and land battles, exotic Egypt and sober Rome (Danby 1949, 196-197). The core of the cinematic analogy, however, lies not in these technical devices and effects but in the agon between the narrative and the representational dimensions of the play. In Antony and Cleopatra, more than in any other of Shakespeare's plays, the audience constantly feels the movement of an imaginary camera-eye shifting between two often contradictory points of view: the diegetic (subjective) and the mimetic (neutral). Only a shrewd synthesis of these two dramaturgical modes reconciles the problem of the play's hermeneutics. Indeed Alexander Leggatt overstates his case when he assumes that if “there is a gap in the action [of Antony and Cleopatra], … we are not encouraged to fill it in; for the purposes of the play, anything we do not see or hear about does not happen” (1988, 173-174). Only those members of the audience who recognize that in Antony and Cleopatra cinematic “cuts” heighten the feeling of camera-eye technique will see a glaring discrepancy between the Roman interpretation of Antony's political stratagems and his very performance of these stratagems.

The political manoeuvers between Antony and Octavius are often either ignored or misunderstood by the critics—and Antony's moral stature suffers as a result. The audience sees Antony as he tries, both physically and mentally, to behave as a Roman is expected to behave. He is not at all the now floundering sometime politician and general that many critics, following Octavius's diegetic hints, have seen him to be.

As the beginning of the play establishes, Antony knows, despite his passion for Cleopatra, that he is not merely a private man but also, as Philo puts it, “the triple pillar of the world” (I.i.12). Amidst the emotionally appealing hurly-burly of the mimetic representation of the lovers in Egypt, the spectators may disregard the fact that Antony decides to break “these strong Egyptian fetters” (I.ii.113). But his decision should not be overlooked, nor should his rationale be underestimated, since he returns to Rome because of his pragmatic evaluation of the Mediterranean Realpolitik. He feels responsible for the security of the Roman Empire threatened by Pompey's rebellion, by civil war incited by his own kindred, and by unrest in Asia (I.ii.85-111,181-183). In addition, his control over the confrontation with Octavius in Rome and his consent to marry Octavius's sister (II.ii.28-116,144-149) point out Antony's shrewdness and political insight. Shakespeare's Antony is not the political criminal that Plutarch presents (Henley 1896, 6:20,56-57,62-63), and he emerges for the audience from the dramaturgical synthesis between diegesis and mimesis not as an initiator of the military upheavals of the Roman world, but as a responder to them.

It is Octavius who (as in Plutarch) offends Antony “marvelously” (Henley 1896, 6:35) by his unexpected military initiatives and self-serving political decisions. Antony complains to his new wife that her brother:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              hath wag'd
New wars 'gainst Pompey; made his will, and read it
To public ear:
Spoke scantly of me: when perforce he could not
But pay me terms of honour, cold and sickly
He vented them.

(III.iv.3-8 ff.)

Since Antony receives this news while he is still in Athens leading a virtuous life as an exemplary husband to Octavia, he has every reason to feel personally offended and politically threatened. From his point of view Octavius's proclamation of war against Pompey looks like an arbitrary decision aimed at asserting his brother-in-law's unilateral dominion over the Roman Empire. It also seems to denigrate Antony within the political structure of Rome. The spectators who recall that Antony regards himself as personally obligated to Pompey for hospitality shown to his mother when Octavius and Antony's brother “were at blows” (II.vi.44), will understand that when Octavius takes up arms against Pompey he indirectly attacks Antony.

Antony's offense at Octavius's shrewd use of his will in an oration is meaningful to those members of the audience who remember Antony's similar use of a last will and testament in Act III of Julius Caesar. They can fully comprehend the extent of the contingent political repercussions which such an oration may bring, as well as Octavius's potential threat to Antony's situation in Rome. They may even perceive Shakespeare as entering into a dialogue with a play he had written eight years before.

Even if at this moment of the play the offstage audience (together with Antony) is inclined to accept Octavia's peacemaking advice “believe not all, or … stomach not all” (III.iv.11-12), the scene following will intensify Antony's fragility as an authoritative figure in the Roman world. Flat mimetically but alive diegetically, scene v of Act III makes clear that the wars against Pompey are a fact known to everyone (III.v.5). Immediately after comes the further news of Octavius's ignoble treatment of Lepidus—the third triumvir—which adds injury to injury and gives Antony ample reason to rebel against the growing menace of his brother-in-law. Eros relates that Antony is “walking in the garden … and spurns the rush that lies before him” (III.v.16-17) on learning that:

Caesar, having made use of him [Lepidus] in the wars ‘gainst Pompey, presently denied him rivality, would not let him partake in the glory of the action, and not resting here, accuses him of letters he had formerly wrote to Pompey; upon his own appeal, seizes him; so the poor third is up, till death enlarge his confine.

(III.v.6-12)

Holding the same political position with Lepidus, Antony feels he must respond to the open gambit of Octavius's play. If Michel Foucault is correct in saying that “power is what says no” (1980, 139), Antony has no choice: he must react unless he is willing to lose his power and experience the fate of “Fool Lepidus” (III.v.17).

Two very short scenes, iv and v of Act III, thus clarify Antony's motives for seeking the imposition of his will over the Roman world. Yet, since these scenes, entirely diegetic, have “classical structure” (two convenient actors engaged in a relatively stilted narrative exchange), they may be too easily dismissed by the critics. And the role of Octavius's sinister scheming in Antony's assertion of himself in the power structure of Rome may also be too casually disregarded.

The next scene, vi of Act III, further clouds the moral validity of Antony's political actions. Octavius's representationally appealing strategies and his convincingly arranged narrative ploys temporarily overwhelm the spectators' interpretation of the diegesis of scenes iv and v. The dramaturgy of scene vi places Octavius at the center of power, influencing his political audience with a convincing account of Antony's misbehaviour. His narrative of Antony's celebration in Alexandria concentrates on “the manner of 't” (III.vi.2), juxtaposing its wasteful opulence (“a tribunal silver'd … chairs of gold” III.vi.3-4) with his own moral condemnation of the lovers' conduct:

                                                                                at their feet sat
Caesarion, whom they call my father's son,
And all the unlawful issue that their lust
Since then hath made between them.

(III.vi.5-8)

His catalogue of the kingdoms Antony has distributed among Cleopatra and her family: Lower Syria, Lydia, Great Media, Parthia, Armenia, Cilicia and Phoenicia (III.vi.10,14,16) stresses Octavius's shrewdness in reading Antony's manoeuvers as political assertion. This Antony is bent on displaying his prerogatives of power, even at the expense of endangering the stability of Rome.

The official way in which Octavius handles Antony's charges in this scene illuminates the importance of power relations between these two triumvirs. Each tries to subvert the other's rights in the political structure of the Roman Empire. Antony's accusations center around two issues: Octavius's actions against Pompey and Lepidus and his subsequent expropriation of Pompey's “part o'the isle” and all of Lepidus's “revenue” (III.vi.26,30). In other words, Antony questions the legitimacy of Octavius's unilateral authority and points out his greed. However, narrating Antony's accusations directed personally against him (III.vi.23-24), Octavius gives them a public dimension by applying illeism and the regal first person plural: he refers to himself as “Caesar” and “we” (III.vi.24,29), creating a distance from his interlocutors.⁹ His rhetoric implies that the interlocutors should identify him with the Roman Empire itself. Octavius tries to become the symbol of Rome—what Cleopatra already is for Egypt—while Antony ironically is relegated to the position of a trespasser, not so much upon Octavius's private authority as upon the very status quo of the State. Since Octavius has already sent his answer to Antony (III.vi.31), he informs Maecenas and Agrippa rather than seeks their advice, and this establishes a line between himself and his inferiors—signalling further his political domination.

Yet, at crucial moments Octavius also foregrounds his own personal authority in the narrative version of his reply to Antony. His arbitrariness appears in his use of first-person pronouns: not only does he answer Antony's charges in an arbitrary way—he completely ignores the question of Pompey—but he also keeps to himself the detailed reasons for his judgment of Lepidus:

I have told him [Antony], Lepidus was grown too cruel,
That he his high authority abus'd,
And did deserve his change:

(III.vi.32-34; emphasis added)

The tone of the second part of his answer to Antony's complaints matches the tone of the first part: it perpetuates Octavius's political and personal supremacy. He promises to share with Antony his spoils of war, under the condition that Antony do the same with his (III.vi.34-37). Since Antony has already distributed a major part of his newly conquered kingdoms among Cleopatra and her family, Maecenas knows Antony will “never yield to that” (III.vi.37). His view is shared by Octavius, who purposely has sent Antony a reply which he knows that Antony will reject. Octavius thus shows—by his very grammar and by his status as “privileged narrator”—who really wields power in Rome.

The relatively static show of Octavius's power in the early part of this scene becomes dynamic with the entrance of Octavia. Her arrival in Rome scantily attended angers Octavius, since it does not give him an opportunity for ostentation; and the mimetic energy of the scene suddenly increases. The onstage audience multiplies, setting off Octavius's imperial ire and his biased judgement on Antony's behaviour in Alexandria. Antony becomes now in Octavius's speeches a lustful man who “hath given his empire up to a whore” (III.vi.66-67).

Until his sister's appearance, Octavius has withheld the subject of Antony's offense to his family, for this offense will be the trump card in his plan to incite the anger of Rome against his political rival. Confronted with Octavia's humility and unquestioned virtue, the onstage and offstage audiences become an easier prey for Octavius's narrative manipulation. Eventually, Maecenas joins in Octavius's contempt for the lovers in Alexandria: Antony is “adulterous… most large in his abominations,” and Cleopatra, “a trull” (III.vi.93-95).

The fact that Octavius keeps back Antony's plans for war until his sister has joined the group of subservient listeners reveals also his own strongly dramatic instinct for exploiting an unexpected situation (III.vi.66-76). This information, delivered among his sister's tears, is definitely more effective here than if he had imparted it earlier to his emotionally detached audience of male Romans. This time the Roman politicians respond not only to Octavius's diegesis but also to his cleverly orchestrated mimesis. Octavius emerges, then, from this scene as the controller of not only the political but also the mimetic and diegetic dimensions of the dramatic world. He is the ultimate possessor of the narrative “truth” which he imposes authoritatively on his unchallenging listeners, while the mimetic present underscores his successful attempts at power centralisation in state and family matters.

Yet the theatre audience may not be entirely subject to Octavius's explication. If the spectators make a synthesis of diegetic and mimetic information, Antony's desertion to Cleopatra does not look so much like a crime. He goes to Egypt where he is sure to be accepted and loved, and where he can freely exercise his prerogatives of power. The readers of Plutarch are given a single option to think that “[i]t was too arrogant and insolent a part” (Henley 1896, 6:57) for Antony to give away lands only because of his love for Cleopatra. The spectators, on the other hand, are left with doubts.

If they extrapolate from the dramaturgical intention, they will see Antony not just from Octavius's point of view, as a man whose actions are only amatory and decadent—but also from their own perspective. And from this more balanced point of view, Antony emerges as a politician who is fighting for the confirmation of himself as the heroic soldier (Proser 1965, 187-188) and the co-owner of the Empire.¹⁰ Unfortunately at this moment of the play Antony proves himself to be vulnerable, and his defeat has not only political, but also diegetic and mimetic dimensions. He is not a match for Octavius who is “fastidious, abstemious, observant, … devoid of personal warmth”—a Machiavellian politician (Thomas 1989, 105).

Those theatrical directors who insert an intermission between scenes vi and vii of Act III may seem to recognize the dramatic achievement of scene vi (Jones 1971, 228-230). The audience, overwhelmed by Octavius's powers, is invited to reflect during the interval on the complexity of motives for Antony's desertion to Cleopatra—a complexity that is created by cleverly intermingled diegesis and mimesis.

Despite the fact that military valour lies at the core of its value system, Antony and Cleopatra is the only one of Shakespeare's three principal Roman plays where the battles are narrated, not represented. Shakespeare confines battles to reports of action, and this intensifies the feeling that the Roman concept of Antony's virtus belongs to the past, while in the present he subverts the Roman concept of virtus by his behaviour.

The tactics of the battles incorporated within the dramatic present are viewed alternately from Roman and Egyptian perspectives which filter offstage military manoeuvers through their biases, grounded in the physical places from which they observe them, in their ideological slant, and in the pragmatism of their particular addresses. While in their representations of the political landscape after the battle, the Roman speakers anchor their evaluation in expediency, the Egyptian vista is redolent of hyperbolic emotions and language. At these points in the play, the intensified reactions of the lovers stir and reinforce the audience's response more than the biased narrative accounts of the Roman soldiers can do; mimesis triumphs for the moment over diegesis, leaving the spectators with an uneasy feeling as they side with the irrational but more humane party.

The orchestration of the battle of Actium is a good example of this technique. The development of the martial events is conveyed through the interaction among visual, audial and narrative effects. After the initial presentation of the marching armies—Octavius's and Antony's—the audience is exposed to an empty stage, straining its audial perception to make sense out of “the noise of a sea-fight” (III.x.SD). The spectators are re-living the uncertainties of the battle on their own. The appearance of Enobarbus does not relieve the suspense since his narrative full of anxiety does not explain the battle as a whole nor its outcome (III.x.1-4). His account implies disaster but at this moment of the play the audience has too little information to evoke a full picture of the offstage events.

The same can be said about Scarus's agitated exclamations. They add a sense of urgency to the offstage action, but they do not present the final outcome of the battle (III.x.4-5,6-8). His subsequent extrapolation of the events still keeps the onstage audience in the dark, since his narrative is a poetic rendering of this part of the battle which Enobarbus has already related in more prosaic terms. (Normally, of course, those members of the offstage audience who are historically unprepared will share the onstage audience's ignorance.) The novelty of Scarus's narrative lies in the fact that he is so morally biased—so “Roman”:

                                                            Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,—
Whom leprosy o'ertake!—i'the midst o'the fight,
When vantage like a pair of twins appear'd
Both as the same, or rather ours the elder,—
The breeze upon her, like a cow in June,
Hoists sails, and flies.
… She once being loof'd,
The noble ruin of her magic, Antony,
Claps on his sea-wing, and (like a doting mallard)
Leaving the fight in height, flies after her:
I never saw an action of such shame;
Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before
Did violate so itself.

(III.x.10-15,18-24)

Scarus reduces Antony and Cleopatra to an animalistic level. Antony, the Roman paragon of virtus, becomes a beast (stallion, bull, drake), which, overpowered by an impulsive sexual drive, abandons everything and follows his mate in heat—Cleopatra (mare, cow, duck). In Scarus's interpretation of Antony's behaviour, “the possession of the sexual object is the objective of an all controlling will” (Lyons 1968, 21).

The process of Antony's later self-denigration is partly explicated by Canidius, who accuses Antony of not being himself: “had our general been what he knew himself, it had gone well” (III.x.26-27). Filling the gaps in the narrative mosaic of the offstage battle, Canidius finally informs his listeners about the total defeat of Antony's army and about the gradual desertion of Antony's soldiers and political supporters to the opponents' camp (III.x.25-26,31,33-35).

Left with a feeling of loss and with condemnation for the lovers' irrational behaviour, the theatre audience witnesses immediately afterward a scene between the two members of the “guilty” party which ameliorates the harshness of the cumulative diegesis of their defeat. After the mimetically strong moment of distress, the narrative speeches of Antony and Cleopatra, in contrast to the Roman composite narrative, employ the language of love to elevate their disastrous flight from their honourable duty:

Cleopatra:
O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought
You would have follow'd.
Antony:
Egypt, thou knew'st too well,
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O'er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of gods
Command me.

(III.xi.54-61)

The meiosis and the hyperbole of the narrative explanations of the lovers' behaviour during the battle catch the offstage audience in a paradox of mixed emotions. The spectators may question the rationale of the lovers' behaviour, but they are nevertheless sympathetic to their predicament. In other words, they may believe with Rosalie L. Colie that “the mere sexuality, strong sexual love, idealized love: however it is described, the emotions shared by Antony and Cleopatra challenge the heroic world of Roman military organization” (1974, 187). Yet, even Colie's point of view is open to challenge, since it may have been unduly influenced by the Roman soldiers' stance, which sees Antony only as a male pursuing a female in heat; he himself sees his attachment to Cleopatra otherwise, as a relation of the “spirit.”

The Roman/Egyptian relationship, then, follows in the play a pattern of alternating ascendancy of diegesis and mimesis in the response of the audience. In most cases the past-oriented, tradition-dominated Romans assert themselves narratively, while the present-fascinated, care-free Egyptians as it were try to resist this assertion by their powerful mimetic representation of their own culture. (To use modern parlance, the Roman narratives reveal a paradigm of colonial expansion at the expense of a people who must assert their cultural identity physically.) At this point in the play, the continuous decentering of the audience's response prevents any triumphant quod erat demonstrandum, either Roman or Egyptian.

The typology of Roman relations to Egypt/The Other is similar to the one which Tzvetan Todorov describes in the context of the conquest of America. At both axiological (value judgement) and praxeological (practical) levels, one asserts distance and a possible superiority to The Other; and at the epistemic (comprehending) level, one either understands or fails to understand the alien culture (1982, 185). At the axiological and praxeological levels the Roman narratives disregard the relativity of the positions from which human affairs can be judged, assuming the stand of superiority, and their superiority is anchored in the following premises:

foreigners are inferior … women resemble foreigners in many respects, not least in their common inferiority to the Roman male … a man who allows himself to be dominated by a woman is no longer a real man, and is most certainly not a real Roman … such a man cannot be considered accountable for his own actions—the guilt for his misdeeds is solely his female partner's.

(Hughes-Hallett 1990, 44)

For the representatives of the male-dominated Roman world, Octavia—a typical Roman matron—although of “a holy, cold and still conversation” (II.vi.119-120) is the only accepted female norm. She is chaste, passive, and obedient to a fault. On the other hand, Cleopatra, as a woman, perceived mimetically as articulate, intelligent, and eager to achieve in spheres outside the domestic, is consequently regarded as aberrant and suspect, all the more because of her racial and cultural otherness. Even before she appears for the first time in the play, Philo's narrative manipulates the audience's expectations by referring to her social inferiority (“a tawny front,” “gipsy”) and sexual activity (“lust,” I.i.6,10). Indeed, throughout the play the narratives on Cleopatra and Egypt reveal that the Roman males find a certain pleasure in their arrogant and oppressive behaviour stemming from racism and sexism.¹¹

Sexuality for them is ratified only by marriage (and lineal procreation); Cleopatra as a sexually independent woman becomes a constant object of their prurient excitement and a threat to their masculinity. Unaware of the sensitivity of the subject of Cleopatra in the presence of Octavius and Antony, Sextus Pompey attempts to incite a discussion of her. Because his brother was Cleopatra's lover, Pompey possesses a detailed knowledge of her affair with Julius Caesar (II.vi.64-65,67-68). His insistence on talking about her past turns him into an audial analogue to a voyeur: he seems to derive sexual gratification from talking about the sexual lives of others. In this scene, however, Pompey is in the inferior position of a rebellious partisan against the Roman Empire; thus he is relatively easily silenced by Antony and Enobarbus, who wish to avoid a conversation difficult to cope with because of their own involvement in Egyptian lifestyle (II.vi.65-66,70-73).¹²

In their mimetic present the Romans constantly abuse Cleopatra by calling her “strumpet,” “whore,” “trull,” “Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt” (I.i.13; III.vi.67,95; III.x.10). Agrippa, as if aiming at impressing his interlocutors with his knowledge of Cleopatra's past, describes it in typical soldier-like and anti-feminist phrasing. Admitting Cleopatra's initial power over “great Caesar” (“she made … [him] lay his sword to bed”), the Roman ascribes to Caesar the aggressive ploughing of her, while her sexual activity is reduced to passive yielding of the resulting harvest (II.ii.227-228). The vulgarity of his comment is intensified by the fact that Agrippa pronounces it in response to Enobarbus's elevated description of Cleopatra on the river Cydnus (II.ii.190-226). Undercutting the romanticized vision of her past, Agrippa reveals—at least for sophisticated modern theatre audiences—his own male insecurity (for the principle, see Fry 1972, 133).

Later in the play, angry with Cleopatra's supposed political desertion to Octavius's camp, Antony himself also refers to her past:

I found you as a morsel, cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher: nay, you were a fragment
Of Gnaeus Pompey's, besides what hotter hours,
Unregister'd 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.

(III.xiii.116-122)

The harsh rhetoric of Antony's invective is, however, toned down by the fact that his narrative is actually a dialogized image (in the Bakhtinian sense) of Cleopatra's own interpretation of her love affairs in scene v of Act I. She brings back amorous times:

                                                                                Broad-fronted Caesar,
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch: and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow,
There would he anchor in his aspect, and die
With looking on his life.

(I.v.29-34)

Dislocated by the collapse of his belief in Cleopatra's political and emotional fidelity, Antony uses a stylistic parody of her own ideological discourse. The self-interested meaning of the word “morsel” is determined in these narratives by the speakers' positions and their concrete mimetic situations. It juxtaposes the crudeness of Antony's fury at her betrayal and the romanticism of Cleopatra's boastfulness when she addresses her courtiers about her past.

In both of these versions Cleopatra is presented as a sexual object for satisfying male appetites. Following the Roman ideology, Antony reduces her to a fragmented and rejected ort after the males have satisfied their hunger. In Cleopatra's own version she compares herself to a special treat capable of constantly exciting the most discriminating palates.

Cleopatra's choice of the phrase “great Pompey” is a tactic to mislead both her onstage and her offstage audiences. Modern readers of the printed text will see through her ploy: she wants to give the impression that she was the mistress of Pompey the Great, not merely of his eldest son—Gnaeus. Eventually Antony puts straight the matter of her connections with the Pompey family, and in doing so he betrays his enormous anger evoked by her courteous treatment of Thidias—Octavius's messenger (III.xiii.46-85). Using irony he puts her past into historical perspective and deflates her attempt at presenting herself, as Laurens J. Mills puts it, the mistress of the most powerful and influential men of her times (1964, 154).

Boorish as Antony's invectives sound, they are, all the same, modified by his own objective treatment of Cleopatra's sexuality. Unlike his Roman friends, he admits her own active sexual participation in her past amatory adventures. Although the first part of his narrative reduces her to a passive object (II.xiii.116-120), the second part (III.xiii.121-122) contradicts his initially imposed point of view by recognizing Cleopatra as a subject with her own rights and with preferences in sexual matters. The irony is that as he denigrates Cleopatra, Antony portrays himself as an eater of other men's scraps. This “morsel” has, after all, excited his appetite.

In reducing Cleopatra and her sexuality to a mere serving of food, Antony falls into the anti-Egyptian, anti-Cleopatra stance of the Roman soldiers and politicians (e.g. “he will to his Egyptian dish again”; II.vi.123). This anti-Egyptian, anti-Cleopatra stance pervades the Roman axiological and praxeological attitude toward Egypt, especially its sexuality. But there is more—to apply once again Todorov's terminology—the epistemic level of the Roman position, which again and again reveals an authoritarianism and condescension toward the Other. The Egyptian way of living attracts their attention, but the Romans treat Egypt with the attitude of curiosa-collectors, never attempting full comprehension.

Overwhelmed by the mimetic richness of Act II, scene vii, when drunken Romans discuss the tourist attractions of Egypt, the theatre audience may not notice that the Romans, even the sober and practical Octavius, do not find Egyptian material culture politically significant, as shrewd imperialists ought to. Relegated to the atmosphere of inebriated revelry on Pompey's galley (not to the abstemious halls of Roman palaces), Antony's engineering explanation of the pyramids and his economic account of the use of the River Nile are trivialized. His technical information does not excite anyone's interest (II.viii.17-23), because the Roman ethnological investigation pursues less essential truths than mere verisimilitude. The audience may perceive in bibulous Lepidus a satiric portrait of the chauvinistic Romans and their shallow a priori knowledge of Egypt: “I have heard the Ptolemies' pyramises are very goodly things; without contradiction I have heard that” (II.vii.33-35).

The Romans' epistemic ignorance extends to the subject of Egyptian sexuality, which they seemingly cannot escape. It is the only subject which actually stirs their speculative imagination. Fascinated by the “strange serpents,” Lepidus retails the unnatural natural history of their reproductive customs (II.vii.24,26-27). He explores the subject of crocodiles by asking Antony a question about their “manner” (II.viii.40). Realizing the shallowness of this Roman's interest in Egypt, Antony answers Lepidus's interrogation by tautology (II.viii.41-44). In his cruel mockery Antony correctly assumes that neither his descriptive nor his narrative explication of Egypt as he perceives it can change the calcified Roman sense of reality as personified in Lepidus. Octavius, it is true, registers amusement at Lepidus's “naivete” (“Will this description satisfy him?” II.vii.49), but on the whole, since the Romans are too narrow-minded in projecting their own system of values on the Other, it is beyond their comprehension to appreciate the irony of Antony's reply. They are unable to understand the complexities of the Egyptian world, and therefore they are unable to pronounce an objective judgement on Antony and Cleopatra, as the representatives of that Other world.

Whenever the Romans try to penetrate the Egyptian life style, their insubstantial episteme allows them to grasp only the form of customs, never the meaning. They narrate according to Roman paradigms. Constant references to Egyptian feasts show that the Romans are fascinated with the Egyptian way of excess and joy. Pompey, for example, brings up the Egyptian “Epicurean cooks” who “sharpen with cloyless sauce” Antony's appetite (II.i.24-25); Menas asks Enobarbus for confirmation of the anecdote of “eight wild-boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there” (II.ii.179-180). At first glance these narrative allusions seem only to intensify the condemnation of Egyptian opulence and waste, unusual to austere Roman standards. They point out the gravity of Antony's felony, since his participation in the banquets has subverted his ascetic, soldier-like reputation among the Romans.

The mimetically represented feast on Pompey's barge, however, undermines the Roman narrative point of view. Contrary to expectations, the Roman soldiers themselves try very hard to experience Egyptian pleasures, even to dancing “the Egyptian Bacchanals” (II.vii.102) during their banquet. Yet the audience has the feeling that the Romans are missing the point, despite the fact that when amidst singing and dancing, Pompey seeks Antony's opinion about whether it is “yet an Alexandrian feast,” Antony confirms that “it ripens towards it” (II.vii.94-95). Scarcely able to keep their minds off political and military matters, the feasters are too prosaically masculine, too blunt and too callous. Pompey, although intoxicated, still remembers that Antony has deprived him of his father's property, and Octavius, almost indecently sober, reminds his friends that their “graver business frowns at this levity” (II.vii.118-119,125-126). At the end of the party their heads have been excessively steeped in the “conquering wine” (II.vii.105): Lepidus has to be carried off the galley and the following morning he suffers from “the green sickness” (III.ii.6).

The audience emerges from this mimetic experience filled with amused contempt for the Roman male world. It is difficult to reconcile their imperialistic superiority as world-sharers with the bathos of Menas's comment on Lepidus:

A third part, then, is drunk: would it were all,
That it might go on wheels!

(II.vii.90-91)

The scene of the banquet shows that the Roman concept of Egyptian sensual and erotic pleasures is far from the true spirit of Egypt.

Although no Egyptian banquet is staged,¹³ “at least at the level of the subconscious there is an awareness that Egyptian feasts abound in women and that the texture of such affairs is entirely different from that which takes place on Pompey's barge” (Thomas 1989, 133). The Roman version of an Egyptian feast wrongly turns it into a crude extravaganza, an unrestrained stag drinking bout, bringing into the open Roman soldiers' suppressed longings for affluence and carefree life, which they themselves vehemently have criticized in the Other's style of living.

Applied in a different context, Tzvetan Todorov's comment explains the inadequacy of the Roman comprehension of Egypt: “it is only by speaking to the other (not giving orders but engaging in dialogue) that I can acknowledge him as a subject, comparable to what I am myself” (1982, 132). In the play, Cleopatra and Antony are treated by the Romans as objects of the Roman narrative system of values. Unlike the theatre audience, the powerful and articulate Romans never enter into a dialogue with the multicoloured and fascinating mimesis of the lovers' life in distant Egypt.

Paraphrazing Todorov's statement on the relationship between Western civilization and the Third World, one can say that a true partnership requires equality without compelled identity. It also requires difference without degeneration into a superiority/inferiority struggle (1982, 249). The prudence, discipline and militarism of the Roman narratives about an exotic culture deny in it the existence of a human dimension; the Romans are oblivious to the Egyptian mimetic engagement with fertility, pleasure, and love. They blindly think of the Egyptian ethical world as a poor imitation of Roman ethics. The theatre audience is, however, encouraged by the decentered multiple vision derived from diegesis and mimesis to take a less censorious view of the Eastern world.

Rome and Egypt being what they are, any bridge between them is difficult to make. Enobarbus seems like the best hope beyond Antony for a Roman foothold in Egyptian culture, but even he fails to understand the culture in its own terms, assuming instead the part of a critic or an outsider. Following his inherent Roman way of reasoning, Enobarbus is not carried away by the emotions or the pleasures of the mimetic moment. For example, in Act I, scene ii, when Cleopatra's court engages itself in sensual indulgence, wine is the only thing on Enobarbus's mind (I.ii.11-12,44-45). It is, then, not surprising that when on Pompey's galley his Roman friends want to re-create the Egyptian ambiance, he, as an “expert” on Egyptian matters, encourages them to drink.

Like the rest of his Roman friends, Enobarbus treats women as sexual and economic property. Even if his misogynous consolation of Antony after Fulvia's death is lost for a modern audience in the highly emotional mimesis, the fact is that in his callous speech he sees women as easily replaced possessions (I.ii.163-168). Consequently, although Enobarbus recognizes Cleopatra's charms, he is always suspicious of her intentions, treating her femininity from the stance of a cool and detached Roman soldier. She is for him, first of all, “a wonderful piece of work” (I.ii.151-152); this phrase together with his facetious and bawdy comments on Cleopatra's “celerity in dying” (I.ii.141-142) endorses his belief in the control by the subject/male of the object/female.

Led by Roman political and military pragmatism, Enobarbus seriously dampens the audience's response to the inflamed passions of Antony and Cleopatra. His cynicism constantly withdraws attention from the heated sensuality of Egypt to the chilled and suspicious atmosphere of Rome. Enobarbus, like many male critics of Antony and Cleopatra in the present time,¹⁴ interprets the behaviour of the lovers dwelling in the feminine world of Egypt as irrational and incomprehensible by patriarchal standards.¹⁵ Therefore, as the action develops he gradually abandons his direct reasoning about Antony's and Cleopatra's decisions (III.vii.1-6,41-48), and begins to undermine their mimetic powers in asides. His asides on Antony's decision to challenge Octavius to single combat and on Antony's losing power even over his servants (III.xiii.94-95,195-201) are Shakespeare's way of bifurcating the audience response. What results is the audience's experience of psychic fragmentation, a living through mimetic intensity and sober narrative detachment at the same time. The same bifurcation of response occurs when in an intense mimetic moment during the agitated eve of battle, Enobarbus, after pleading futilely with Cleopatra to abstain from the Battle of Actium, in an aside cynically reduces her to a mare in heat (III.vii.6-9). Later in the play, in a similar aside, Enobarbus changes the tonal dynamics of the charm which Cleopatra is exercising over Thidias (and the offstage audience), when he comments on her dishonesty (III.xiii.62-65).

Only once in the play does Enobarbus's narrative dislocate the audience's perception of the Roman present. Breaking into the matter-of-fact Roman soldiers' crude gossip in prose, his verse narrative on the Cydnus episode (II.ii.190-226) stretches the boundaries of dramatic decorum by a poetic dream of mythic proportions. Critics usually find his speech inconsistent with his cynical nature (Wilson 1948, 394-395; Rosen 1960, 130). Viewing his passage in the context of a mimetic/diegetic opposition offers, however, a different perspective on Enobarbus. The inconsistency is not with Enobarbus's character as a diegetic cynical observer but with his role as a Roman conquering Egypt narratively. All unwitting, Enobarbus subdues Rome by his “Egyptian” tale, reversing the Romans' normal role in this play. In effect he evokes for the audience an enduring emblem of the East, which leaves Rome for this moment subdued.

Despite the fact that he becomes swayed emotionally by his own rhetoric—he slips unconsciously into the present tense midway in his vivid description, collapsing then into now—he does not appear to understand the essence of the “feminine” substance of Egypt. The superficiality of Enobarbus's impressions has been noticed by Derek A. Traversi, who writes that the barge Enobarbus describes presents “beauty indeed but of a kind strangely and firmly limited by its artifice, in which spontaneous life can have no assured place” (1963, 115). Enobarbus relives with his Roman friends the overwhelming splendour of the Cydnus epiphany in the manner of someone returning from a Jacobean masque and sharing his impressions of an unforgettable tableau vivant.

Revealing the Roman fascination with excessive opulence and waste, Enobarbus—a true product of austere Roman barracks-rooms—gives a meticulous account of the Egyptian material excess and bounty displayed by Cleopatra's barge: “burnish'd throne,” “beaten gold; purple the sails, … perfumed,” “the oars … silver,” “her pavilion-cloth of gold,” “divers-colour'd fans,” “silken tackle,” “a strange invisible perfume” (II.ii.191-194,199,203,209,212). Unaware of the implications of his rhetoric, he tacitly admits in his narrative that the Roman imperial luster, manifested in male military and political power, was not a match for the Egyptian magnificence, manifested in diaphanous femininity:

                                                                                          The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthron'd i'the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

(II.ii.213-218)

His narrative reveals that none of Cleopatra's barge crew possessed “Roman” masculinity: there were “pretty dimpled boys, smiling like Cupids,” “her gentlewomen, like the Nereides” (II.ii.202,206). Even the tiller was in the hands of a “seeming mermaid” (II.ii.209). (The audience may compare the dramatic presentation of Egypt where the male element is reduced to: a soothsayer, a treasurer, a eunuch and a country bumpkin.) The barge in Enobarbus's narrative becomes in this respect a symbol of Egypt itself, not manned but womanned. Therefore, although he never fully recognizes the power of the feminine principle, this bluff soldier's subconscious unintentionally betrays his fascination and seduction by the Other/the female: Egypt. This seduction is also reflected in his style, which, as many critics have noticed, is very different from his terse and robust “Roman” speeches. Lapsing into the poetically hyperbolic language of feminine Egypt, Enobarbus presents himself for modern playgoers as willy-nilly a feminist.

His story abounds with clusters of paradoxes about Cleopatra; he unwittingly praises the feminine nature of the Egyptian realm and above all its Queen. The pretty Cupidlike boys on the barge made Cleopatra's cheeks glow, and “what they undid did” in the very act of cooling her (II.ii.205). Enobarbus relates that he

                                                                                                              saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street,
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.

(II.ii.228-232)

She ages but she defies the withering that accompanies this process; she makes Antony hungrier even as she satisfies his sexual appetite; her wantonness is so becoming that it is blessed by the holy priests (II.ii.235-240). Cleopatra's ambiguous amorphism fascinates Enobarbus, although he never attempts to get to the essence of her perplexing feminine variety (Spencer 1958, 374).

Powerful as this famous diegesis about the Cydnus epiphany is, revealing both Cleopatra and Enobarbus, it cannot substitute for what the Egyptian audience and the theatre audience experience of Cleopatra as she enacts her paradoxes. This mimesis, full of erotic intensity and passion, makes the play one of Shakespeare's greatest love tragedies, although in Antony and Cleopatra there are practically no love scenes in the conventional sense, nothing like the bedroom scene in Romeo and Juliet or the parting at dawn in Troilus and Cressida. Unable to understand the paradox in Cleopatra's character that reconciles boundless vitality and energy with languorous eroticism, Enobarbus does not reveal in his Cydnus narrative her exuberant fervour which is a match only for Antony's own.

When Egyptian scenes unfold, Cleopatra, incomplete without Antony, seeks diversions for her humdrum hiatus. But her energy is as nothing without its partner in Antony. She is too much for Charmian, who refuses to play billiards because her “arm is sore” (II.v.4). And so Cleopatra, pining in Egypt for Antony, presents herself as almost motionless, like Duke Orsino, drowned in decadent languorousness. The diegetic reminiscence of her life with Antony is her only real pleasure. Joined by her maid, she re-lives the tricks which she once played on Antony when fishing (II.v.9-18), and the times when she spiced their sexual pleasures with unexpected changes of mood and mischievous pranks:

I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night
I laugh'd him into patience, and 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.

(II.v.19-23)

Appealing to the audience's unlimited imagination, the mimetic stillness exposes and sets off the lovers' erotic compatibility conveyed by Cleopatra's archly orchestrated diegesis. Once more then the mimetic/diegetic opposition manipulates the spectators' response by teasing their minds' eyes.

In the scene with the messenger bringing news about Antony's marriage to Octavia (II,v), Cleopatra is “at her most petty and vindictive; and yet the sheer brazenness of it is irresistible” (Leggatt 1988, 166). The juxtaposition of her unrestrained outburst of feeling and unmitigated conviction that whatever Antony has done she must get him back (II.v.116-118) are appealingly human; she is an impressive heroine. She frightens and evokes both contempt and pity, preserving at the same time her royal nobility and the sincerity of her love for Antony. Her paradoxical nature is, in fact, a symbol of the Egyptian world itself. The shifting values of Eastern reality are revealed both mimetically and diegetically in references to the Nile, which is both a grave and a source of life and to the asp which both nurses and kills.

Becoming a part of this reality, Antony unwittingly assumes the paradoxical attributes of Egyptian nobility, and the Roman world admits this with reluctance. Philo concludes his narrative chastisement of Antony's behaviour in Egypt on a contradictory note. In his formulation, Antony's heart has become “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust” (I.i.9-10). Discussing Antony's faults, Lepidus says that out of the vast darkness of his virtues, his faults shine like stars (I.iv.12-15)—i.e. his very defects involve a bright beauty. One will not find this sort of paradox in Octavius or other Romans, Enobarbus excepted. To the extent that this is true, it suggests that they, unlike Antony, are outsiders, strangers to the Egyptian mimesis.

The ultimate paradox of Antony's nature is androgyny;¹⁶ he never quite abandons Roman maleness but he never abandons Egyptian femaleness either. What is female/Egyptian about Antony is the intensity and depth of his overt passions and emotions. In a series of scenes the mimesis reveals that even his martial energy is fueled by his erotic fervour (III.xiii.192-194; IV.iv.19-21). In 1910 Mungo MacCallum agreed with Agrippa and Enobarbus that Antony's weeping over Julius Caesar's body (III.ii.54-59) is to be condemned as “easy emotionalism” (1910, 355). One sees MacCallum's point when Antony assumes too quickly that Cleopatra is guilty and threatens to give her to Octavius's triumph or to kill her at once (IV.xii.10-15,25-29,32-39,47-49).¹⁷ Even a feminist critic like Barbara J. Bono condemns Antony's emotions and sees them as precluding “his being a purely tragic figure” (1984, 161). He may, however, be seen otherwise; in his androgynous nature Antony becomes a paragon of male Roman valour with female reactions. One may say that the dynamic clash of his animus and anima does not disqualify him from tragic status, quite the contrary: it intensifies his tragedy.

The core of Antony's tragedy lies in the fact that, despite his immersion in and penetration of Egyptian mimesis he cannot totally alienate himself from the Roman diegesis. He cannot achieve a synthesis of these two equally powerful and attractive styles of life. Presented throughout the play as the mythical Hercules standing at the crossroads, he feels equally attracted to the Roman male virtus/narrative and to the Egyptian female voluptas/representation. While in Egypt he is often struck by Roman thoughts and while in Rome he cannot forget the Egyptian style of life.¹⁸ The audience, exposed to his incessant choices, experiences together with Antony his diegetic and mimetic dilemma, torn between duty and sensuality, self-denial and self-indulgence.

Antony's suicide, is as it were, his parting comment on the inadequacy of the Roman performance of ideals, “resembl[ing] only in externals previous Roman suicides” in Julius Caesar (Miola 1983, 150). One might say that the “high Roman fashion” of suicide is to Antony's clumsy and lingering death as diegetic virtus is to mimetic Realpolitik in the larger political world of Rome—an ideal unattained. Efficiency becomes flabby incompetence in several bungled actions (e.g. the Battle of Actium) in the Rome of this play, and the ideals of virtue and honour descend into expediency and Realpolitik (for instance, in Octavius's use of his sister as a political bargaining chip). By the same token, Antony's suicide, his last “Roman” act, is marred. Expecting a highly honourable spectacle, the audience is exposed to another example of the discrepancy between the ruthless efficiency of Roman narrative and its mimetic mismanagement of the ideal.

The immediate cause of Antony's death is the Egyptian narrative of the supposed suicide of Cleopatra (IV.xiv.27-34). Antony's response to this news is itself a narrative, which imparts his condemnation of himself and his elevation of Cleopatra's feminine strength:

                                                                                                    Since Cleopatra died,
I have liv'd in such dishonour 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”

(IV.xiv.55-62)

Cleopatra's diegesis—vicarious and untrue—brings Antony's death; but it also brings him immortality. His having himself carried to die in Cleopatra's arms in effect advertizes to the world that he seeks a place in her mimetic powers. The emotional truthfulness of the lovers' feelings in Act IV, scene xv—Antony's concern about Cleopatra's future, Cleopatra's fainting after he is gone (IV.xv.47-48,63-69)—intensify the dramatic impact of his death. The simplicity and directness of their emotions present them not as public figures, but as people who turn a tragic moment into an unforgettable spectacle of heroism wrapped up in tenderness and erotic ecstasy. Antony's death, although bungled, becomes in the Egyptian world a touching spectacle overpowering the senses of the witnesses in the theatre.

Comparing Octavius's elegy for the dead Antony in Act V, scene i, with the one delivered by Cleopatra in Act V, scene ii, the offstage audience may come to the conclusion that she has won the diegetic game by adapting the Egyptian hyperbolic rhetoric to a Roman mode. Roman narrative political machinations are conquered by Egyptian grasping for life through a diegesis that is more spontaneous than any Roman narrative.

Both Octavius and Cleopatra realize that Antony's death is not just the death of a man, or even of a leader, but the death of a part of the universe. Octavius speaks about him with the pragmatism typical of the Romans:

                                                                                                                                  O Antony,
I have follow'd thee to this …
                                                                                                                                  I must perforce
Have shown to thee such a declining day,
Or look on thine …

(V.i.35-39; emphasis added)

and he goes on to define Antony with reference to himself: “my brother, my competitor” and so on through line 48. Paying him a tribute, he also pays a tribute to himself, since the presence of his own person and his political agenda are strongly felt in his narrative account.

Cleopatra, on the other hand, dissociates her own person from the eulogy, implying for herself metaphorically the passive role of “the little O, the earth” lit by his magnificent light (V.ii.78-81).¹⁹ She expresses in her narrative emotions that are very subjective, very deep, and the sincerity of her feelings expands the mimetic moment.

I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.
O such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man! …
His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth …
His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear'd arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends:
But when he meant to quail, and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't: an autumn ‘twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets: realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.

(V.ii.76-92)

Her dream-like vision transcends dramatic boundaries, achieving a synthesis in the agon of the diegetic and representational dimensions of his character: the cosmic grandeur of Antony's spirit, his valour, his nobility, his bounty, his child-like passion for exceeding his grasp, and his nonchalant way of dealing with ranks and stations. Jacques Derrida, although without any reference to Antony and Cleopatra, conceives in the word Colossal/Kolossalisch the generic idea of Cleopatra's dialectical combination of the narrative and mimetic aspects of Antony. Indeed, Antony becomes in her speech colossal, which

qualifies the presentation, the putting on stage or into a presence, the catching-sight, rather, of some thing, but of something which is not a thing, since it is a concept. And the presentation of this concept inasmuch as it is not presentable. Nor simply unpresentable: almost unpresentable. And by reason of its size: it is “almost too large.” The concept is announced and then eludes presentation on the stage. One would say, by reason of its almost excessive size, that it was obscene

(1987, 70).

Cleopatra's narrative encourages the audience to make a synthesis of all that has been obscene²⁰ in Antony's nature, forming a kind of culmination of the idea of his greatness, his uniqueness present throughout the play.²¹

In their condemnation of Cleopatra, critics often forget that she is a woman of principle. Her glory is achieved in the play not, as Enobarbus sees it, through her domination over age and custom, but through her strength. Unable to determine the course of events, she is unexcelled at imposing her will upon it. Fighting against Rome, she defies in her suicide the Roman ideology personified in Octavius's plan to dominate Egypt in a mimetic triumphant pageant. Her anticipatory narrative reveals the inadequacy and dishonesty of the Roman representation.

                                                            Now, Iras, what think'st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome as well as I …
                                                                                                                         … and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'the posture of a whore.

(V.ii.206-219)

This fantasy of a Roman triumph causes Cleopatra to seek escape from it in the “high Roman fashion” (IV.xv.87) of dying; but she enriches the staging of her death with her own Egyptian dimension, and this Egyptian dimension impresses the audience more than the very fact of her suicide. Her choice of a means of death subverts the Roman ideal; the worm of Egypt replaces the male thrust of a sword as the symbol of sexual pleasure. And the bite of the asp is so gentle as to be almost feminine, here compared to a nursing child (V.ii.292-294). Repelled and attracted at once by this striking mimesis, the spectators become more and more involved in the Egyptian/feminine mode of paradox that in this play has so often been evoked through diegesis and mimesis.

The ultimate paradox of her death, perhaps, is the combination in her last moments of Roman and Egyptian values. Although her death is to be a noble act transcending Roman expediency, she also treats it as a personal revenge on Octavius, the “ass, unpolicied” (V.ii.306-307). In her suicide valour is the code she sees herself as living up to, but the mode is clearly Egyptian—voluptas. The erotic hyperboles of her last speeches and the sensuous details of the staging at the end display for one last time the full magnetism of Egyptian mimetic powers.

Assuming the full accoutrements of her political office—robe and crown—she presents herself as Queen for the first time (V.ii.279). At the moment of her death she is mimetically more regal and more noble than ever before in the play. Yet, she does not abdicate her “feminine” nature. She is jealous to the end; as before she has been jealous of Fulvia and Octavia, now she is jealous of Iras (V.ii.299-302). The risk of losing her man to another woman, even in death, appalls her. And then her concern for personal appearance in the death she stages is not only a queen's concern, but a woman's. It is fitting that after Cleopatra's death Charmian observes that her crown is awry and puts it straight (V.ii.311-318). The mimesis here at her end is eminently histrionic; as Ernst A.J. Honigmann has said: “She not only gives the performance, she writes the programme-notes” ([1976] 1987, 167).

So here in Act V, Egyptian mimesis triumphs over the constant Roman effort to conquer Egypt and the audience diegetically—an effort that has animated and dominated the play from the opening lines. The mimetic tableau of the Queen and her waiting women has a powerful and enduring effect on the spectators, supplanting the denigrations of the Egyptian Other that they have so often been subjected to in this play. Even Octavius is a temporary convert to the Egyptian mode in his poetic vision of Cleopatra, who

                                                  looks like sleep
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.

(V.ii.344-346)

But prosaic Octavius, being the Roman he is, cannot remain long in admiration of a mere Other. His last speech in the play is filled with physicians, and details about serpents, and the practicalities of burial—and, of course, with a sense of his own political and military glory:

                                                                                          high events as these
Strike those that make them: and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented.

(V.ii.358-361)

As the audience expects, Octavius subordinates the lovers to his own, diegetic, version of “their story,” which is a reference point without being a real narrative. It is not in the interest of this pragmatic Roman to retell it. This Roman reticence about an erotic and exotic Egyptian story is in a sense in vain. The spectators have been captured by the Egyptian mimesis, and the moral center of the diegetic Roman view has for them been set aside.²²

Normally it is narrative that makes things memorable, shaping a meaning for them. However, in Antony and Cleopatra, though the Roman narrative has threatened to shape the audience's response throughout, in the end the Egyptian mimesis triumphs over the Roman diegesis—even if it must die as it triumphs—and this Egyptian mimesis teaches what is truly memorable in the moral world of the play.

Notes

1. John F. Danby has said it well: “in no other of his plays is Shakespeare at such pains to suggest the stream of time past and its steady course through the present” (1949, 197).

2. Another significant characteristic of the play is that those who subvert Roman standards in their behaviour are opposed vigorously; but once their subversive power is eliminated they are well spoken of (Danby 1949, 203). For good examples of this Roman narrative trait cf. Antony's comment on his wife Fulvia (I.ii.119-121), Pompey's explanation of his intent to scourge the ingratitude “that despiteful Rome cast on my noble father” (II.vi.22-23), and Octavius's elegy on the news of Antony's death (V.i.14-19).

3. To take one critic's enumeration of some of these polarities: “Rome-Egypt, masculinity-feminity, space/time boundary, space/time transcendence, love-death” (Payne 1973, 266). The most influential works exploring the principle of polarity, transcendence, paradox and mysticism include G. Wilson Knight ([1931] 1963, 199-262), Derek A. Traversi (1963, 79-203), Julian Markels (1968, 17-49). Janet Adelman's approach to the forces that undermine the Roman perspective on Egypt are different but complementary to my own. She sees the complexity of the oppositional values presented in the play as resulting from the play's generic impurity:

   Comedy, tragedy, and romance are here distinct versions of life: limited and human attempts to understand the nature of an action which remains essentially baffling. Each will inevitably find significance in different and partial aspects of experience: none in the whole. But the play will not allow us partial vision: as Antony and Cleopatra moves among several perspectives, it suggests the futility and validity of each; only in its generic impurity can it embrace the whole.

   (1973, 170)

4. In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare reverses the then popular mode of the heroic pattern of the war of the sexes. Philo's narrative negates the male domination and female submission which are inherent in the topos, and indeed Antony is not at liberty to go freely without any scruples about his business in Rome and leave his supposed-to-be victim at home. He is more like a medieval warrior-lover, for instance Chaucer's Troilus, a man who does not dominate his lady, but is dominated by her. Later in the play Antony himself is conscious of this paradoxical reversal of the roles when he refers to it in his narrative condemnation of Cleopatra over her presumed betrayal during the last battle (IV.xii.25-29).

5. George R. Hibbard's analysis of Act I, scene i, 1-24 is similar to the one presented here. Philo's “speech is intended to be memorable and to be remembered, because it puts a point of view which will be of most importance for the tragedy it introduces, which will be reiterated time after time during its course, and which will not receive its final answer, and, … its ultimate refutation, until the close” (1980, 96-97).

6. It is likely that, aware of the Latin etymology of the word virtus (from vir, “man”), Shakespeare equated “virtue” with manliness and valour (the customary attribute of males), especially because North's translation of Plutarch presents a similar conception in the opening of the Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus:

   Now in those dayes, valliantnes was honoured in Rome above all other vertues: which they call Virtus, by the name of vertue selfe, as including in the generall name, all other speciall vertues besides. So that Virtus in the Latin, was asmuch as valliantnes.

   (Henley 1895, 2:144)

7. The gender-based bias against Cleopatra in the writings of male critics of Antony and Cleopatra is pointed out with learning and acidulous wit by L. T. Fitz (1977). This article proved to be seminal: most criticism since has been less a distortion of Cleopatra and her role in the action.

8. The dualistic interpretation of the conflict between Rome and Egypt has always been anchored in the critics' various attitudes to ethics. William Hazlitt specified an opposition between “the Roman pride and Egyptian magnificence” ([1817] 1959, 74). S. L. Bethell equated Rome with morality and intellect and Egypt with pleasure and intuition ([1944] 1948, 116-131). Harley Granville-Barker regarded this moral conflict as the main moral pivot of the structure of the play ([1946] 1959, 367-458). More recently Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott understand it in terms of the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian principles (1975, 54-98).

9. Octavius's vision of himself as reflected in illeism and the royal “we” appears as early as his first appearance in the play (I.iv.1-3). Cf. Robert S. Miola (1983, 128).

10. Contrary to the source—where Octavius “proclaymed open warre against Cleopatra, and made the people to abolishe the power and Empire of Antonius, bicause he had before given it uppe unto a woman” (Henley 1896, 6:62)—the diegetic and mimetic synthesis of the play makes it clear that the war is mainly between Octavius and Antony over the control of the world. Antony says before his suicide that he “made these wars for Egypt, and the queen” (IV.xiv.15); as he distinguishes between Cleopatra and her kingdom he reveals his (partly) political motivations in the war. Throughout the play Cleopatra is often equated with Egypt (I.v.43; III.xi.56; IV.xv.18-41; V.ii.115); but here Antony chooses to separate the person from the role, and as he does he reveals something about himself.

11. Naturally, of course, an Elizabethan audience will recognize social, cultural and sexual difference without responding to “racism and sexism.” Since the time of Eldred Jones (1965) and especially in very recent years there has been an outpouring of new-historicist criticism of “racism” in Shakespeare. In the same period feminists have raised questions about the treatment of women as “the Other” in Shakespeare's plays.

12. By introducing and at the same time suppressing the narrative of Cleopatra's past, Shakespeare makes a significant change in his source material. The source, relating the banquet episode, except for the conversation between Pompeius and Menas on the possible treachery, states that the only discussion was that “they fell to be merie with Antonius love unto Cleopatra” (Henley 1896, 6:32). Shakespeare's characters, on the contrary, talk about virtually everything but Cleopatra. In fact, nobody mentions her name in Antony's presence from the time of his betrothal to Octavia until his return to Egypt. Moreover, Antony himself does not even speak her name. One possible explanation of this omission is that, after all, in Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra are tragic protagonists and having them joking with their friends at each other's expense would have undermined their tragic stature. Cf. David C. Green (1979, 52-53).

13. The Roman narrative condemnation of the Egyptian banquets does not go hand in hand with the Egyptian mimesis, since even the festivity incorporated within the offstage dramatic world of the play is organized by Antony for military reasons—mainly for his soldiers' benefit—expressing his gratitude for their valour in battle (III.xiii.183-185,190-191) or for uplifting their spirits before “the next day's fate” (IV.vii.34).

14. John F. Danby says that “Cleopatra is … Flesh, deciduous, opulent, and endlessly renewable … Eve, and Woman … also Circe” ([1952] 1977, 55); Daniel Stempel compares her to a witch (1956, 59-72); J. Leeds Barroll associates her with the allegorical figures of Gluttony, Lust and Sloth (1958a, 708-714); Robert Ornstein calls her innocence “a pose” and doubts her fidelity: “Cleopatra is an archetypal temptress and seducer” ([1966] 1977, 85, 89). Compare Fitz (1977).

15. Describing the consequences of male gendering, Mary Ellmann draws attention to male insistence that the feminine is “the not fully conscious, not fully assembled, the intemperate, incoherent, hysterical, extravagant and capricious” (1968, 44).

16. Some male critics see Antony's androgynous nature in terms of his emasculation by Cleopatra, binding this emasculation with the myth of Hercules unmanned by Omphale. Cf. Eugene M. Waith (1962, 113-121), Raymond B. Waddington (1966, 210-227), Harold Fisch (1970, 59-67), John Coates (1978, 45-52), and Richard Hillman (1987, 442-451). In contrast, female critics usually argue for a positive interpretation of Antony's androgynous nature. Cf. Janet Adelman (1973, 90-96), Lisa Jardine (1983, 69, 113-114), and Barbara J. Bono (1984, 163-167).

17. Martha T. Rozett demonstrates in her analysis of Antony's last battle that neither in Plutarch nor in Shakespeare is there any clear indication that Cleopatra actually has betrayed Antony. Indeed, the succession of apparently spontaneous defections that precedes this scene leads the audience to conclude that she personally has given no orders that led to Antony's military defeat (1985, 159).

18. His “Roman thoughts” are also revealed in the invectives which he throws at Cleopatra when he fears that she has betrayed him. He calls her: “kite,” “boggler,” “fragment,” “foul Egyptian,” “triple-turn'd whore,” “false soul of Egypt,” “right gypsy” and “spell” (III.xiii.89,110,117; IV.xii.10,13,25,28,30). On the other hand, Egypt intrudes mimetically in Rome. Antony, who has just made a very Roman marriage, is immediately confronted by the predictions of the Egyptian soothsayer. Personifying the Egyptian world, the soothsayer warns him against Octavius and therefore Rome (II.iii.16-29).

19. It is somehow emblematic for this play that Cleopatra seldom pushes her story to the center of things by calculated diegesis. She is, the audience may say, content to be (mimetically) without attempting (diegetically) to seem.

20. Jacques Derrida makes an etymological pun in his last word “obscene” from “ob scaena.” Cf. E. Partridge: “s.v. ‘per ob-, against+scaena, a stage [SCENA]’” (1958-1959). The Derridean interpretation of this passage was first advanced by the author (1992, 124-126).

21. This uniqueness is evoked by the images which conceive Antony in relation to the cosmos and in terms of his equality with gods or ancient heroes (Clemen 1951, 159-167). Alexander Leggatt sees the lovers' magnitude also in the play's abstention from prodigies. Unlike the characters of Julius Caesar, they do not need them to magnify their greatness: If there is to be a supernatural dimension in life, men and women are responsible for creating it themselves, in their own minds and imaginations. And they must do it not by imagining gods but by seeing what is godlike in each other (1988, 163). Larger than life, Antony, and Cleopatra too, attain almost cosmic magnitude by their charismatic mimesis and their grandiose language.

22. Michael Goldman notices this mimetic side of Antony and Cleopatra:

    if we may be said at all to identify with Antony and Cleopatra, it is their performances we identify with … [we identify ourselves] with their abnormal capacity to feel pleasure and desire and to transmit those feelings splendidly to the world. … There is nothing in Antony and Cleopatra that passes show. Indeed, the aim of their action is to find a show which passes everything—all obstacles and competitors—which shackles accidents and bolts up change.

    (1985, 138)

List of Works Cited

All citations from Shakespeare's three major Roman plays are taken from the New Arden Editions:

Antony and Cleopatra. 1954. Ed. M. R. Ridley, London: Methuen, 1978.

Coriolanus. 1976. Ed. Philip Brockbank. London: Methuen, 1980.

Julius Caesar. 1955. Ed. T. S. Dorsch. London: Methuen, 1986.

All citations from Shakespeare's other works are taken from:

The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 1951. Ed. David Bevington. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980.

All citations from Plutarch are taken from W. E. Henley, ed. Plutarch's “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans” Englished by Sir Thomas North, Anno 1579. Vol. 1-6. London: David Nutt in the Strand, 1895-1896. …

Adelman, J. The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra.” New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.

Barroll, J. L. “Antony and Pleasure.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958a): 708-20.

Bethell, S. L. Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition. 1944. New York: Staples Press, 1948.

Bono, B. J. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearian Tragicomedy. Berkeley: California UP, 1984.

Clemen, W. The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951.

Coates, J. “‘The Choice of Hercules’ in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 45-52.

Danby, J. F. “The Shakespearean Dialectic: An Aspect of Antony and Cleopatra.” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, 16 (1949): 196-213.

———. “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearian Adjustment.” 1952. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Antony and Cleopatra”: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1977, 39-60.

Ellmann, M. Thinking About Women. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.

Fisch, H. “Antony and Cleopatra: The Limits of Mythology.” Shakespeare Survey 23 (1970): 59-67.

Fitz, L. T. “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 297-316.

[Goldman, M.] Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Granville-Barker, H. Prefaces to Shakespeare. 1946. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959.

Green, D. C. Plutarch Revisited: A Study of Shakespeare's Last Roman Tragedies and Their Source. Salzburg: Universitat Salzburg, 1979.

Hazlitt, W. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. 1817. London: Oxford UP, 1959.

Hibbard, G. R. “Feliciter audax: Antony and Cleopatra, I.i.1-24.” Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Eds. Phillip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G. K. Hunter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, 95-109.

Hillman, R. “Antony, Hercules and Cleopatra: ‘The Bidding of the Gods’ and ‘the Subtlest Maze of All.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 442-51.

Jardine, L. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983.

Jones, Eldred. Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama. London: Oxford UP, 1965.

Knight, G. W. The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays. 1931. New York: Barnes, 1963.

Kujawinska-Courtney, K. “Jacques Derrida and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” The Explicator n.s. 2 (1992): 124-26.

Leggatt, A. Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays. London: Routledge, 1988.

Lyman, S. M. and Marvin B. Scott. The Drama of Social Reality. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Markels, J. The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare's Development. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.

Miola, R. S. Shakespeare's Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Ornstein, R. “The Ethic of the Imagination: Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra.” 1966. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Antony and Cleopatra”: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1977, 82-98.

Partridge, E. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York: Macmillan, 1958-1959.

Payne, M. “Erotic Irony and Polarity in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 265-79.

Rozett, M. T. “The Comic Structures of Tragic Endings: The Suicide Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 152-64.

Stempel, D. “Transmigration of the Crocodile.” Shakespeare Quarterly 7 (1956): 59-72.

Traversi, D. A. Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1963.

Waddington, R. B. “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus Did With Mars.’” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 210-27.

Waith, E. M. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden. New York: Columbia UP, 1962.