SOURCE: “Erotic Irony and Polarity in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 24, 1973, pp. 265-79.

[In the following essay, Payne traces Shakespeare's use of opposition throughout Antony and Cleopatra and demonstrates the way in which these oppositions structure the play. Payne stresses that the play's structure, like its thematic polarities, is both tragic and comic.]

One of the most impressive qualities of Shakespeare's art is his facility for creating dramatic situations, characters, and entire plays encompassing ideas, attitudes, and character traits which we ordinarily think of as mutually exclusive or contradictory. In the minds of his characters we discover reason and madness, faith and despair, innocence and experience; the societies he depicts are torn by love and lust, responsibility and irresponsibility, trust and mistrust, honesty and deceit, freedom and bondage. In his depiction of nature, which provides a physical and mythical context for social conflict, we find cyclical revolutions through life and death, youth and age, spring-summer and autumn-winter, calm and tempest, Eden and the fallen world; the cosmos itself, as he depicts it, is at one time balanced in order and harmony but can at any moment tip toward chaos and discord. And finally in the total structures of his dramas simplicity and complexity, comedy and tragedy interchange with one another in a continuously shifting pattern. Such is the scope of Shakespeare's artistic vision that the apparently exclusive or contradictory principles in these pairs of concepts are shown to be necessarily interdependent, each element coexistent with its dialectical counterpart. Shakespeare's chief means of revealing this interdependence is his use of irony and polarity.

In Antony and Cleopatra both irony and polarity function in combination with each other on every level of the play's structure, and the meaning of the play arises out of an interconnected pattern of polarities which combines the principle of an encompassing myth with that of ironic and seemingly antithetical values and attitudes. Alan Watts has written probably the clearest and most concise definition of polarity in this sense:

[Polarity] is something much more than simple duality or opposition. For to say that opposites are polar is to say much more than that they are far apart: it is to say that they are related and joined—that they are the terms, ends, or extremities of a single whole. Polar opposites are therefore inseparable opposites, like the poles of the earth or of a magnet, or the ends of a stick or the faces of a coin. Though what lies between the poles is more substantial than the poles themselves—since they are the abstract “terms” rather than the concrete body—nevertheless man thinks in terms and therefore divides in thought what is undivided in nature.¹

Throughout Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare develops a series of inter-related polarities—Rome-Egypt, masculinity-femininity, space/time boundary-space/time transcendence, death-love—which at first appear to be mutually exclusive or dualistic concepts but which are finally shown to be polar concepts instead.²

The first scene of the play establishes the antithesis between dualistic and polar perception which will dominate the play. First we are introduced to the Roman point of view through Philo's estimate of Antony's fall from greatness resulting from his association with 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 planted 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.1-9)³

This is an example of dualistic perception par excellence: on the one hand we have Philo's past impression of Antony as Mars, who once dedicated his “office and devotion” entirely to “the scuffles of great fights,” but on the other hand we have Antony as Philo sees him now, a man who has sacrificed his former greatness to become in effect Cleopatra's slave who fans her to cool her lust. Like Pompey and Caesar, and to a lesser extent Enobarbus and Agrippa, Philo would have Antony carefully measure out his experience according to an absolute set of Roman standards based on the absolutes of time and space. Measure, authority, conquest, the setting boundaries, and uniformity are the absolutes of the Roman world, as well as being the means for Roman success. Establishing boundaries, whether geographical or moral, necessitates a dualistic ethic. Within the boundaries of the Roman empire is civilization, outside those boundaries is barbarism. But Egypt is a frontier, neither quite a part of the Roman empire, nor entirely immune from its influence. From the Roman point of view Egypt is a potential civilization, but it is as yet untamed.

The magnificent entrance of Antony and Cleopatra with their exotic retinue dramatizes the Roman fear of excess, but at the same time it demonstrates the inadequacy of Philo's perspective and of the Roman ethic. Like Pompey and Caesar later on, Philo has suggested that Antony has sacrificed his manhood in Egypt; he has become a eunuch, “the bellows and the fan / to cool a gipsy's lust” (I.i.9-10). No sooner has Philo spoken these words than we see Cleopatra enter “with Eunuchs fanning her.” Immediately, therefore, we see that whatever Antony has become in Egypt, he is certainly not a eunuch; for a eunuch, as Mardian is painfully aware, has no powers “to cool” anyone's lust. Furthermore, Cleopatra is far more magnificent than Philo's references to her as “a tawny front” and a gypsy would allow. It is with the consciousness of this disparity between Philo's description and what we see that we hear Philo's final estimate of Antony:

                                                            … you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool.

(I.i.11-13)

Though he bids us to “take but good note,” what we do in fact see does not match Philo's description, for the dramatic presence of the lovers forces us to see them on their own terms as well as on Roman terms.

The first words we hear the lovers speak are an ironic rejection of the Roman preoccupation with measure and boundary.

Cleo.
If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
Ant.
There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.
Cleo.
I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
Ant.
Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

(I.i.14-17)

Like Juliet, Cleopatra has been her lover's tutor, and now she playfully has him recite what he has learned⁴ by speaking the “Roman” lines herself, allowing him to provide the “Egyptian” answers. Cleopatra's feigned scepticism—(“If it be love indeed”)—recalls Philo's word “dotage”, while her insistence that Antony tell her how much he loves her and her threat to “set a bourn how far to be beloved” ape the Roman fixation on measure. To this Antony responds with an echo of The Book of Revelation,⁵ insisting—and again this is a parody of the Roman preoccupation with conquest—that before she sets boundaries on their love, Cleopatra must discover and subdue the “new heaven, new earth,” the mythical, transcendent domain of their love. Now for Antony this mythical domain epitomizes his Egyptian experience.

Having set out on a Roman mission of conquest, Antony has not only been sidetracked from his purpose by Cleopatra and the luxurious freedom of Egypt, but also his belief in the stoicism of the Roman ethic has been almost totally undermined. Thus, he momentarily shares Cleopatra's contempt for Caesar, his messenger, and his mandates to “Do this, or this; / Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that” (I.i.22-23). Prompted by Cleopatra, Antony bursts out with his own condemnation of Rome:

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

(I.i.33-39)

But in one sense Antony is even less convincing than Philo. Whereas Philo believes in the Roman ethic, Antony ironically attempts even yet to use Roman measure—“Here is my space”—to justify his rejecting Roman values. We begin to see here what Antony is only half-consciously aware of himself at this point, that Egypt can be as confining in its own way as Rome. Furthermore, Antony is Roman; he sees the world with the only eyes he has, and they are trained to see what Rome has defined as real. Antony will soon realize that he cannot deny the part of himself that is Roman, but what he can do is precisely what Shakespeare has forced us to do by means of the structure of this first scene; he can come to see beyond the Roman perspective without rejecting it. To stay in Egypt is to reject the reality of Rome; to substitute private pleasure for public responsibility is to commit Lear's error all over again; to reject the world for love is simply not possible. What Antony must do is precisely what he does. He must endeavor to bring the Roman and the Egyptian experiences together.

Antony soon realizes this necessity, but Cleopatra at first misunderstands his Roman needs. She thinks that “a Roman thought hath struck him” (I.ii.88), which to her is a sign of Antony's regression. But from Antony's point of view his own motives are concrete: Fulvia, his wife, has committed some acts of political indiscretion during his absence; the Parthians have advanced against Caesar; and, finally, Antony learns that Fulvia has died. But his most important reason for returning to Rome is to assert his freedom. He sees now the danger of becoming the “strumpet's fool” Philo thinks he has already become: “These Strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage” (I.ii.120-21). Ironically, the very freedom, fluidity, and formlessness of Egypt can become the strongest fetters of all, which Antony later realizes “had bound me up / From mine own knowledge” (II.ii.90-91).

The Nile, which is the center of the play's mythical and physical geography, is the main image of this paradoxical character of Egypt.⁶ The Nile is simultaneously the source of both fertility and death. Its fertility, as Antony explains to Caesar, is the result of its annual overflow:

                                                            The higher Nilus swells,
The more it promises: as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain.
And shortly comes to harvest.

(II.vii.23-6)

But this process, which is antithetical to restraint and measure, is precisely what makes the Romans uncomfortable about Egypt; as Lepidus points out, this same fertilizing process produces the serpent: “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun” (II.vii.30-31). But like the Nile itself, the serpent has both positive and negative associations. Its negative associations are the result of its poison and its connection with evil, as in the Eden myth.

The first serpent image in the play, however, is not applied to Egypt but instead to the threat Pompey poses to Rome:

                                                                                Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life,
And not a serpent's poison.

(I.ii.199-201)

This use of the image recalls Brutus' fear of Caesar, whom he thinks of as “a serpent's egg” (Julius Caesar, II.i.14-34).⁷ In both Antony's reference to Pompey and Brutus' to Caesar there is no ambiguity, and the image is allowed to carry its familiar connotations of overweening satanic pride leading to disastrous consequences. But when Cleopatra first uses the image, while thinking about Antony immediately after his departure for Rome, the image takes on a controlled ambiguity:

                              He's speaking now,
Or murmuring ‘Where's my serpent of old Nile?’
For so he calls me: now I feed myself
With most delicious poison.

(I.iv.24-27)

Here we are called upon to see beyond the dualistic mythology of Christianity, to employ Cleopatra's Egyptian polarity, to see good and evil—the pleasant and the unpleasant—existing as a continuum of total experience. For Cleopatra herself is a serpent, Antony's “serpent of old Nile”; that is, she is simultaneously the embodiment of the fertility principle of the Nile, which Lepidus describes, and the embodiment of self-destructive, death-dealing, boundless sexuality, whose “delicious poison”—even as here when it is just remembered—will destroy and elevate both herself and Antony. Finally, in her suicide Cleopatra will bring about the transformation into a dramatic reality of the fertility-destructive polarity of the serpent. When she is brought the basket of figs and asps, the “fruitful and death-dealing powers of the Nile”⁸ are not yet one; but when she puts the asp to her breast and says quietly to Charmian, “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (V.ii.311-13), the experience of death has become both maternal and sexual. But before we examine this relationship between sex and suicide in more detail, we must turn to the problems of sexuality, space, and time, as they appear in the central acts of the play.

II

Like their attitude toward almost everything else, the Romans' concept of sexuality is dualistic and exclusive. For Caesar and Pompey the proof of a man's virility is his ability to fight and his dedication to war. Thus, when Antony neglects these values to enjoy the pleasures Cleopatra offers him, Caesar judges Antony

                                                                                … not more manlike
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he; … you shall find there
A man who is the abstract of all faults
That all men follow.

(I.iv.4-9)

The irony of this judgment is manifold. First, on the dramatic level, there is the discrepancy between Caesar's thinking Antony is still in Alexandria and our awareness that he is returning to Rome to assume his public responsibilities.⁹ Secondly, Shakespeare has made us aware in the play's first scene of the narrowness of the Roman ethic and of its inapplicability to Antony's relationship with Cleopatra. Thirdly, in the present scene we are being introduced to a man who has dedicated himself so exclusively to war and conquest that the only woman—indeed the only person—in his life for whom he has any genuine love or compassion is his sister Octavia; yet because of his dedication to those values, he will find it necessary to sacrifice her in an attempt to keep the triumvirate from crumbling. Lastly (and this is perhaps the greatest irony for a modern audience) is our awareness of the conflict demonstrated here between two basic human instincts, which Freud has called “the sexual instincts, understood in the widest sense—Eros, if you prefer that name—and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction.”¹⁰ Whereas Caesar has dedicated himself exclusively to the latter, Antony is at least attempting to reconcile the two, as he explains to Cleopatra before his departure for Rome:

                                                            I go from hence
Thy soldier, servant; making peace or war
As thou affect'st.

(I. iii. 69-71)

Like Mars, Antony wants to be both a soldier and a lover.¹¹

In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare treated these two instincts separately in the two plots of Troilus' love for Cressida and the Greeks' strategy for overcoming the wrath of Achilles. The former Dionysian plot was set within Troy and the latter Apollonian plot outside the walls of the city. Shakespeare linked the plots in two ways: through the characterization of Troilus, we see the effect of his love in his debilitation as a soldier, and through the rhetoric of the play's theme—notably in Ulysses' speech on degree—we are shown the disastrous consequences of unbridled passion in any form. But in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare has abandoned both the double plot and the simplistic, formal arguments against passion. Now the theme of destructive aggression is not separated from the love theme but instead is an integral part of it, despite Caesar's argument and Pompey's misguided opinion that Antony has become a “libertine in a field of feasts” (II.i.23).

These two instincts, Eros and destructive aggressiveness, are most clearly united in Cleopatra's characterization as Antony's “serpent of old Nile.” Enobarbus gives the finest account of Cleopatra's manifestation of the Eros instinct in his description of her first meeting with Mark Antony. Resplendent in her pavilion—accompanied by “pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids” (II.ii.206) and worshipped by “her gentlewomen, like the Nereides” (l. 211)—Cleopatra's variety is infinite. To Enobarbus she is more beautiful than the Venus Anadyomene of Apelles (ll. 205-206); to Agrippa she is an earth goddess—“She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed: / He plough'd her, and she cropp'd” (233-34)—; at times she is a girl who will run through the public street until she is breathless (ll. 235-37); and yet at other times to her lovers she is the perfection of woman, who “makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (ll. 242-43). Yet since we are here seeing Cleopatra through the eyes of Enobarbus, a cynic and misogynist, we know that all of these superlatives are understatements—however much indebted they are to Plutarch, likewise a moralist—and that Cleopatra's magnificence “beggar'd all description” (l. 203).

Despite her glorious seductiveness, however, Cleopatra would seem to be a destroyer of men and their masculinity;¹² and she tempts us to see her in this light less than a hundred lines following Enobarbus' wonderful description of her. In II. v. Cleopatra attempts to pass the time of Antony's absence by playing two of the many games she enjoys, billiards and fishing. Since Charmian is complaining of a sore arm, Cleopatra asks Mardian, the eunuch, to play with her. To her question, Mardian replies with his customary, self-directed irony:

Cleo.
Come, you'll play with me, sir?
Mar.
As well as I can, madam.

(ll. 6-7)

To this, Cleopatra responds with a similar double entendre: “And when good will is show'd, though 't come too short, / The actor may plead pardon” (ll. 8-9). After thus joking with Mardian at the expense of his emasculated pride, Cleopatra calls for her rod and line, thinking she

                                                                                 … will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony
And say ‘Ah, ha! you're caught.’

(II.v.11-15)

This passage suggests a strange reversal of sexual roles which builds upon the dramatic presence of the eunuch and Cleopatra's references above to the shortness of his will. Here Cleopatra clearly sees herself as an aggressor: it is she who will betray the fishes by presumably luring them with her bait (her “infinite variety”?) and then by piercing their jaws with her hook. We might avoid reading this penetration of the fish's “slimy jaws” by her hook as a phallic fantasy if it were not for the following description of Cleopatra's earlier fishing contest with Antony and the events following it.

Charmian refers (ll. 16-19) to the famous anecdote, which Plutarch related at length,¹³ of Antony and Cleopatra's fishing contest during which Antony, having caught no fish, commanded one of his servants to dive into the river and fasten one which Cleopatra had caught on his hook. Accidentally observing this operation, Cleopatra had one of her own servants “hang a saltfish on his hook, which he / With fervency drew up” (ll. 18-19). Unlike Plutarch, however, who followed this story with an account of how Antony delighted “in these fond and childish pastimes,”¹⁴ Shakespeare has Cleopatra recount her evening sport with Antony during the night of the fishing tournament:

That time,—O times!—
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.18-23)

Not only is Cleopatra still the aggressor, out-laughing and out-drinking Antony, but she actually initiates a reversal of sexual roles after Antony has passed out from exhaustion and intoxication. Dressing him—like his patron Hercules when the captive of Omphale—in her women's clothes, she put on his sword, which for Caesar and Pompey, as we have seen, is quite literally the symbol of Antony's manhood. Are we then to draw the Roman conclusion that Cleopatra has seduced Antony and then psychically emasculated him because she wishes, like Portia, that she were a man?

Both of these conclusions are, I think, only partially acceptable. Certainly in one sense Cleopatra does pose a threat to Antony's masculinity, but this threat is mainly to masculinity as the Romans define it. Nevertheless, Antony is a Roman and he senses that Cleopatra tempts him from his knowledge of his Roman self and his Roman obligations. Certainly, too, in one sense Cleopatra does want to be a man. As sovereign of Egypt she feels it her responsibility to participate, against the better judgment of Enobarbus, in the final sea battle near Actium. “A charge we bear i' the war,” she insists, “And, as the president of my kingdom, will / Appear there for a man” (III.vii.17-19). But in both of these cases, masculinity and femininity are matters of social function and not of explicit sexuality.¹⁵ The scene Cleopatra describes as having taken place in her bedchamber is quite a different matter, however, and Freud was the first to provide us with an adequate theory of sexuality to account for it.

In his chapter on femininity in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud writes,

When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further. The male sexual product, the spermatozoon, and its vehicle are male; the ovum and the organism that harbours it are female. In both sexes organs have been formed which serve exclusively for the sexual functions; they were probably developed from the same innate disposition into two different forms. … Science next tells you something that runs counter to your expectations. … It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women's bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality, as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both—merely a certain amount more the one than the other.¹⁶

And as though to insist himself on our recognizing the sexual polarity in Cleopatra, Shakespeare has her greet the messenger, who enters immediately after her line “I wore his sword Philippan,” with the clearly feminine, though by no means passive outburst: “Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, / That long time have been barren” (II.v.25-26). Since his theories of sexuality were based upon his clinical experience with middle-class Viennese women, Freud is less helpful in enabling us to account specifically for Cleopatra's violence. In an often-criticized¹⁷ later paragraph in the same chapter, Freud writes,

One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity. It is perhaps the case that in a woman, on the basis of her share in the sexual function, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which her sexual life thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly force women into passive situations. … The suppression of women's aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine.¹⁸

If, however, we take Freud's advice and do not underestimate “the influence of social customs,” which in Cleopatra's case do not force her into passive situations, but which, because she is “the president of [her] kingdom” force her into active, aggressive situations, we have little trouble seeing her often forbidding strength and will as necessary parts of her character. Certainly Queen Elizabeth herself would have afforded Shakespeare an example, had he needed one, of a female ruler who combined the qualities we ordinarily associate exclusively with men and with women.¹⁹

III

Act I introduced us to the theme of polar opposition in terms of the conflict between the Roman desire to measure, to judge, and to set boundaries, and the Egyptian cultivation of freedom, fluidity, and ecstasy. Act II specifically treated this opposition in sexual terms, first suggesting that masculinity and femininity are exclusive, opposite psychophysical designations—so they seem to Caesar and Pompey—but then showing them as complementary in the personalities of Antony and Cleopatra. Acts III and IV now carry this theme of polarity even further by introducing the problem of mythical apperception,²⁰ first in terms of space (in Act III) and then in terms of time (in Act IV).

In ordinary rational thought, which in the play is seen most simply as the Roman cast of mind,

space, time, and number stand out as the logical media through which a mere aggregate of perceptions is gradually formed into a system of experience. The representations of order in coexistence, of order in succession, and of stable numerical, quantitative order of all empirical contents form the foundation for an ultimate synthesis of all these contents into a lawful or causal world order.²¹

This mode of thought is the ideal, the alternative to chaos, in Shakespeare's history plays and in his early tragedies,²² and clearly in Antony and Cleopatra it is the most efficacious mode for plotting military and political strategies, for winning wars, and for extending the boundaries of Roman civilization. Caesar has cultivated it almost to perfection. But set against this Roman rationalism is intuitive, mythical thought, which in the play is seen most simply as an Egyptian cast of mind. In this mode

space—and time as well—proves to be a … medium of spiritualization in the mythical sphere. The first clear articulations of the mythical world are linked with spatial and temporal distinctions. But the mythical consciousness is not, like the theoretical consciousness, concerned with gaining fundamental constants by which to explain variation and change. This differentiation is replaced by another, which is determined by the characteristic perspective of myth. The mythical consciousness arrives at an articulation of space and time not by stabilizing the fluctuation of sensuous phenomena but by introducing its specific opposition—the opposition of the sacred and profane—into spatial and temporal reality.²³

From the first scene of the play this opposition has been present in the contrast between two worlds, the present world of the play's dramatic action and the “new heaven, new earth” of Antony and Cleopatra's ecstatic sexuality.

But besides sexual ecstasy, several other means of achieving mythical apperception (or time/space transcendence) are either mentioned or dramatized. In I. v. Cleopatra calls for the narcotic mandragora to enable her to “sleep out this great gap of time” (l. 5) while Antony is in Rome. In II. vii., the magnificent scene on Pompey's galley, wine, dancing, and loud music steep the senses of the participants “in soft and delicate Lethe,” (l. 115) enabling the Triumvirate to forget momentarily their differences with each other and with Pompey, making it possible for Caesar to neglect his “graver business” (l. 127) for the only time in the play and to thoroughly enjoy himself, and providing all with a brief detachment from their ambitions and cares, which allows them to parody in their circular dance their pursuit of world conquest:

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy fats our cares be drown'd,
With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd:
Cup us, till the world go round,
Cup us, till the world go round!

(II.vii.120-25)

From their drunken perspective, accentuated by their dizziness from the dance, the world which they all seek appears to reel.²⁴

In each of these cases, however, the audience has merely observed or been told about the effects of apperception. But in Acts III and IV we imaginatively experience time/space transcendence for ourselves. Nevertheless, what we experience obviously does not result from an alteration in our faculties as the result of some psychophysical stimulation; but it is instead an alteration of the object of perception itself, which provides the artistic illusion of the kind of altered perception the main characters experience directly. The device Shakespeare used to create this illusion is montage, which is very common in cinematography but fairly rare in the drama.²⁵ These two acts are divided into twenty-eight short scenes which shift from one place or time to another and back again at almost mind-splitting speed. Through these abrupt scene changes we become aware of a great variety of events occurring at the same time in different places, or in the same place at different times. This technique produces in us a sense of mythical apperception: we are simultaneously conscious that what is before us is the fixed stage and what we witness taking place on it is acted in linear time but that the stage is also Syria, Rome, Alexandria, Athens, and Actium with events taking place almost at the same time in each of these places. Thus, what we have experienced through the illusion created by montage is a substitution of mythical thought for our normal logical awareness that whatever we see in the play is a fiction.²⁶

Silius in III. i. introduces the sense of the global setting of these scenes by describing the magnitude of the Roman battles with the Parthians:

Whilst yet with Parthian blood thy sword is warm,
The fugitive Parthians follow; spur through Media,
Mesopotamia, and the shelters whither
The routed fly.

(III.i.6-9)

In the next scene space becomes an issue in the private world of friends and family, as Enobarbus and Agrippa comment with some anxiety on the political consequences of Antony's leaving Rome for Athens and as Caesar in a rare moment of self-revelation expresses his concern for Octavia's security once she has left Rome. By III. iv. Octavia, now in Athens, finds herself in just such an impossible position as Caesar feared for her. She is caught between her husband's rage and her brother's policy, finding “no midway / 'Twixt these extremes at all” (ll. 18-19). Immediately following her departure for Rome to serve, like Lepidus before her, in the impossible role as mediator between the two opposing pillars of the world, news is received in Athens of Caesar's turning against Lepidus, necessitating Antony's retaliation. Before Octavia arrives in Rome, Antony has sailed to Alexandria, “publicly enthroned” (III. vi.5) Cleopatra and himself, made her absolute queen of Egypt, lower Syria, Cyprus, and Lydia, and levied the kings of Libya, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Thracia, Arabia, Pont, Judea, Comagene, Mede, and Lycaonia for war. When she reaches Rome, Octavia is completely ignorant of everything that has happened since she left Athens. The irony of her situation is the result of simultaneously occurring events which we either witness directly or learn about indirectly but of which she is unaware. Finally, even the first stage of the Battle of Actium is presented from two different spatial points of view. Before the battle, Caesar's army occupies one part of a plain near Actium (scene viii) and Antony's occupies another part of the same plain (scene ix). Then, immediately following the battle, the outcome is reported from three different points of view in three different locations: by Scarus in Antony's camp on the plain (scene x), by Antony and Cleopatra themselves in Alexandria (scenes xi and xiii) and by Caesar in his camp, presumably on the Actium plain (scene xii). From this point on, the action of the play is confined entirely to Alexandria, where we witness Caesar's closing in on Antony. It appears now that only time remains.

In Act IV multiple points of view collapse into the single, dominant point of view of Antony, which is presented in all its variation—with his “spirits first up (scene iv), then down (scenes v/vi), then up again (scenes vii/viii), and then more prolonged, in sober suspense (scenes ix/xii)”²⁷—as well as in its contrast with other points of view. But with each change in scene, the linear time of the audience's observation of the dramatic action, together with its detached perspective, is contrasted with the subjective point of view of the characters. Thus, the action is an almost inevitable progression toward Antony's defeat and suicide.

IV

The death of Antony seems at first to overthrow the theme of polarity which has been developed so far in terms of geography, sexuality, and apperception. Not only does death seem to be the absolute boundary principle, but it is also preceded by Antony's belief that he has lost both the world and love:

                                                            All is lost
This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me:
.....Triple-turn'd whore! 'tis thou
Hath sold me to this novice; and my heart
Makes only wars on thee.

(IV.xii.9-10, 13-15)

by the false report of Cleopatra's suicide, by the death of Eros—whose name symbolically suggests that love itself may be impossible in the world—and by the ludicrous suicide of Antony. Certainly these events emphasize the existential dimension in which all of the earlier conflicts have taken place; indeed they seem to point to the absurdity of the human situation and to the fact that beneath Cleopatra's luxurious robes and Antony's armor there is merely Lear's “unaccommodated man.” When Antony dies, Cleopatra can barely believe what she sees; she thought Antony's nobility immortal. When she is proven wrong, she witnesses her entire conception of reality melt before her eyes like some lovely wax image:

Noblest of men, woo 't die?
Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty? O, see, my women,
The crown O' the earth doth melt. My lord!
O, wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

(IV.xv.59-68)

Finally, in her despair, Cleopatra echoes the cries of Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth: “All's but naught” (l. 78).

Unlike Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, however, Antony and Cleopatra ends neither with the complete purging of a decadent, fallen Eden, nor with absolute annihilation in the face of nothingness. Here the existential boundaries are transcended just as the geographical, sexual, and space-time boundaries were transcended in earlier scenes. In preparation for this transcendence, Cleopatra's sense of nihilism at the death of Antony is transferred to Caesar:

Der.
I say, O Caesar, Antony is dead.
Caes.
The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens: the death of Antony
Is not a single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of the world.

(V.i.13-19)

There is no sense of triumph in these words; instead Caesar “needs must see himself” (l. 35) when such a tragic mirror as Antony is set before him. Yet even now what Caesar sees is limited by his own built-in restrictions. Though he has elegaic words for Antony, the mercy he plans to offer Cleopatra is for her the ultimate punishment: not only shame, but worse, confinement.

When we next see Cleopatra, she is no longer in despair; she has been confirmed to herself by her loss; her “desolation does begin to make / A better life” (V.ii.1-2). As she realizes, the difference between her situation and Caesar's is that she, having a choice whether to live or die, is still free; whereas Caesar is “but Fortune's knave,” committed to a way of life which by its very nature allows him no freedom at all. Thus Cleopatra's suicide is the absolute assertion of the freedom and defiance of her way of life. But more than that, her becoming “fire and air” as she gives her “other elements … to baser life” (ll. 292-93) signifies her final transcendence of the limitations and boundaries of the existential sphere. While she goes to join Antony in their “new heaven, new earth,” Caesar is left behind, as he at last realizes, in final defeat:

                                                                                Bravest at the last,
She levell'd at our purposes, and, being royal,
Took her own way.

(V.ii.338-40)

Here Caesar finds himself the victim of the play's erotic irony, its “loving affirmation of all that is not intellectuality.” Unlike Caesar, we have seen that “irony is always irony in both directions, something in the middle, a neither-nor and a both-and.”²⁸ Furthermore,

It is the posture of an artist not afraid to see what is before him in its truth, its frailty, its inadequacy to the ideal, and whose heart then goes out to it in affirmation of this frailty, as of its life. For it is according to its imperfection that each existence moves, acts, and becomes, perfection being not of this earth.²⁹

Thus, like its thematic polarities, the play's generic structure is neither tragic nor comic, but both.³⁰ The lover's apotheosis is for them a comic resolution, since they are able to go beyond tragedy to a condition of being where a new happiness waits, “a happiness resembling the old, but no longer belonging to the form of the world, for this new happiness transforms the world.”³¹ But we are left with Caesar in a world of boundaries, a tragic world where ecstasy is temporary, occasional, and suspect.

Notes

1. Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (Toronto, 1969), p. 45.

2. Two main critical approaches to Antony and Cleopatra can be distinguished on the basis of advocacy of a dualistic or a polar interpretation of the play. The dualistic interpretations begin with Hazlitt's discussion of the conflict between “Roman pride and Eastern magnificence” in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1817), p. 95. S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (Durham, N. C., 1944), pp. 116-31, has written one of the most detailed discussions of this opposition; he equates Rome with morality and intellect and Egypt with pleasure and intuition. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, 1965), III, 5, sees this opposition as the key issue in the play's construction. Thomas McFarland, Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare (New York, 1966), p. 96, sees the duality in absolute terms. Perhaps the best of the dualistic interpretations is William Rosen's, in Shakespeare and the Craft of Tragedy (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 104-60. Rosen sees in the play a clash between two worlds which “are so corrupt … that one is not morally superior to the other” (p. 106). On the other hand, the major arguments based on the principles of polarity, transcendence, paradox, and mysticism include: G. Wilson Knight's in The Imperial Theme (Oxford, 1931), pp. 199-262; John Danby's in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (London, 1952), pp. 128-52; Derek Traversi's in Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford, 1963), pp. 79-206; and Julian Markels' The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Development (Columbus, 1968), pp. 17-49.

3. Hardin Craig's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Chicago, 1961) is cited throughout.

4. I am essentially in agreement here with G. Wilson Knight's interpretation of this scene in his The Imperial Theme, pp. 290-92. McFarland (p. 94), however, and many other critics have read this scene as entirely serious. McFarland sees in the word “beggary” the introduction of “the tone of bankruptcy that permeates the entire first act: the moral bankruptcy of Egypt as opposed to the virtue of Rome, the near-bankruptcy of the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra as opposed to the call of Antony's duties in the great world.” An extreme form of the moralistic interpretation of Antony is J. Leeds Barroll's “Antony and Pleasure,” JEGP, LVII (1958), 708-20. For a summary of nineteenth-century moralistic commentary on Cleopatra and a corrective to it, see J. I. M. Stewart's Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London, 1949), pp. 59-78.

5. Rev. 21:1; cf. of E. Seaton's “Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelations,” RES, XXII (1946), 219-24. Donne uses a similar figure derived from a concern with world conquest and exploration in “The Good-morrow,” ll. 12-14; but in this poem the “new worlds” are earthly, while Antony and Cleopatra's are not.

6. My discussion of the Nile and the serpent as metaphors for one manifestation of the theme of polarity is based upon Maurice Charney's Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 96-101. Charney's excellent analysis of imagery does not concern itself with the theme of polarity, however. Cf. B. T. Spencer, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Paradoxical Metaphor,” SQ, IX (1958), 373-78. Neither Charney nor B. T. Spencer, however, cites Spenser's similar treatment of the paradox of Egypt's excessive fertility in FQ, I. i. 20.

7. Cf. Macbeth's fear of Fleance, III. iv. 29-31.

8. This phrase is Charney's (p. 100).

9. For a full analysis of dramatic irony in the play, see William Blissett, “Dramatic Irony in Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ, XVIII (1967), 151-66.

10. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1965), p. 103.

11. Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (London, 1962), pp. 113-21, discusses Antony as world-conqueror. His discussion of the parallels between Antony and the mythical warriors Mars and Hercules does not, however, distort Antony's role as lover.

12. See E. Buck's “Cleopatra, eine Charakterdeutung,” ShJ, LXXIV (1938), 101-22, for an account of her threat to masculinity.

13. Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Baltimore, 1964), pp. 206-7.

14. Ibid., p. 207.

15. Cf. Rosen's remark, p. 151, on the reversal of sexual roles.

16. Freud, Pp. 113-14.

17. By Erich Fromm, for instance, in The Art of Loving (New York, 1956), pp. 36-38.

18. Freud, Pp. 115-16.

19. See J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (New York, 1957), esp. pp. 218 (on her accomplishments and amusements), 67 and 83 (on her ambition), 255-56 (on her boldness), 308-309 (on her courage), 128-29 (on her feminism), 67, 219, 350, and 356 (on her imperiousness), 67, 245, and 356 (on her love tricks), and 293-94 and 316-17 (on her sexual interests).

20. This term is Ernst Cassirer's, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1955), II, 82.

21. Ibid., p. 80.

22. For a detailed analysis of the change in Shakespeare's treatment of the theme of order between the earlier plays and Antony and Cleopatra, see Markels, pp. 51-122.

23. Cassirer, II, 81.

24. For an entirely different interpretation of this scene, see Rosen, pp. 123-24.

25. Shakespeare's use of “cinematic movement” in Antony and Cleopatra has been discussed by John Danby, pp. 128-32; and by J. L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 121-22. Cf. Granville-Barker, III, 24-36.

26. I do not mean to imply that this effect of space/time transcendence can be dramatically created with ease. Often in performance these scenes become simply monotonous, and the audience is more conscious of the linear time it takes these scenes to be played than of the subjective time of the fiction. For an analysis of subjective time in literature, see Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955), esp. pp. 11-13 and 26-53.

27. J. L. Styan, p. 121.

28. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin, 1922), pp. 61-62. Since this work has not appeared in an English edition, I have quoted from Joseph Campbell's partial translation in Creative Mythology (New York, 1968), p. 328.

29. Joseph Campbell's comment on Mann, p. 329.

30. Cf. Arnold Stein, “The Image of Antony: Lyric and Tragic Imagination,” KR, XXI (1959), 586-606.

31. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York, 1966), p. 338.