SOURCE: “Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring, 1995, p. 1-37.

[In the following essay, Wortham investigates the Renaissance emblem tradition that informs Antony and Cleopatra, and attempts to discern how the emblematic imagery operating in the text would have been received by Jacobean audiences.]

Antony and Cleopatra both delights and bewilders with its extraordinary diversity. Classical mythology, biblical apocalypse and thematic insistence on the virtue of temperance meet in enlightening combinations and puzzling disjunctions. Critical analysis, precisely because it is analysis, tends to isolate one or two aspects of the play and to discuss them to the exclusion of others. Perhaps it is time to ask whether one should attempt a synthesis that makes some attempt to see the dominant motifs in the play in relation to each other: is there any way that we can begin to see this play whole? And, if we can, can we test our impressions against likely overall responses among members of Shakespeare's first audience? For if this play meant anything in particular when it was first performed, its mysteries will only be yielded up to those who are prepared to inquire what those particularities were. In short, what I am proposing here is the study of Antony and Cleopatra as a cultural artefact that can be reliably interpreted only in terms of the broad cultural context from which it emerged.

Literary attempts to consider texts contextually have flourished in the last twenty years, but the dominant modes of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have tended to employ the relationship between text and context in order to demonstrate that each subversively deconstructs the other. In drama, subversions are frequently important because, as Mikhail Bakhtin and others have demonstrated, carnivalesque inversions of norms lie at the heart of the Western cultural experience in the theater.¹ It is not always useful, however, to follow the pathways of subversive irony, anomaly, and cultural contradiction to the exclusion of what is cohesive. To be more specific, alternative readings of Shakespeare are valuable and to be welcomed as long as they admit that alternatives to the alternatives have at least equal validity.²

In the instance of Antony and Cleopatra, it is time, I think, to seek an understanding that makes sense of a culture's wholeness. England in the early Jacobean period was as deeply divided, as riven with intellectual factions, and as socially tense as in any other period. But these divisions existed within mental constructs powerful enough to contain them. At this time many of Shakespeare's plays found endorsement not only by being performed publicly under the aegis of the King's Men but also by being commanded for performance at court with a frequency that far exceeded that of Queen Elizabeth's reign.³

I shall not differentiate here between attitudes held in the community of ordinary people and those of the court culture surrounding James I. Shakespeare wrote to accommodate, or bridge, the two milieux since his plays of this time were for performance at the Globe and in the provinces as well as at court, though it is interesting, I believe, that Shakespeare was not always able to make the accommodation without textual alteration. There is reason to believe, for instance, that the discrepant Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear represent, respectively, performances at court and in the public theater.⁴ The dominance of the court at this time, especially for someone writing under its direct patronage, is reflected in Shakespeare's work, particularly between the years 1603 and 1607, when King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra were written—all plays reflecting Stuart ideology. However, in the case of Antony and Cleopatra there is no competing Quarto record of another performed text, as there is for King Lear, to indicate whether the First Folio text as we have received it is or is not substantially as it was given either at the Globe or at court; in this instance we can do no more than take the good intentions of the First Folio editors on trust.

The cast of mind, or set of mental attitudes, which I seek to identify in relation to Antony and Cleopatra is best approached through what recent French historians have termed L'Histoire des mentalités.⁵ The term mentalité is not particularly felicitous in French and it is still less so when rendered into English as “mentality,” but for the moment I do not know what other term to use. Mentality suggests an identifiable and prevalent view within a sector of society, but it does not exclude competing views. It “is not a history of ideas, but a history of mind.”⁶ Minds are not nice, tidy things, and the perception of mentality does not assume that a society is monolithic. Furthermore, the concept of mentality admits the irony of contradictions, for example, “the paradox that such mental structures are at once the essential mode of human creativity and the primary obstacle to it.”⁷ Since the foundation work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the methodology employed by Michel Foucault has developed the concept of discourses or “common codes of knowledge through which the world is perceived”⁸ in order to perceive mentality in its complexity. Discourse is not synonymous with meaning, but rather it reveals through its structure the process of finding those meanings which it seeks to validate.

Without making claims to theoretical rigor in what follows, I attempt to identify a Jacobean mentality that operates through a discourse of ideological expression. Within this ideology, such components as humanistic ideals, religious belief, and political issues make sense in a way in which they could not possibly today: often they seem improbable (until corroborated), and almost always they take us by surprise. Imposing on myself a set of limits in deference to the expedients of space and my readers' patience, I have attempted to reconstruct a code of knowledge rather than to deconstruct it.

Renaissance emblem books serve as the basis of my investigation of mentality in Antony and Cleopatra. However, since my concern is not with the emblem for its own sake but for what it reveals about something else, precise definitions and categorizations of the kind which would be made by a scholar primarily interested in emblems for their own sake are outside my frame of reference.⁹ In any case, there is not complete agreement among the major scholars of emblems as to how broadly or narrowly emblems should be defined.¹⁰ Some of the items I shall be examining are incontestably emblems—like those of Alciato, Whitney, and Peacham—but others are related to emblems in some way without being emblems in themselves. The latter include works of Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Cesare Ripa, and Alexander Ross.

For the student of mentality, emblems and emblematic works are most valuable. Emblems and their relatives tend to reflect received ideas and to express commonplaces rather than to break new intellectual ground. This does not mean that they all agree with each other—far from it—but that the range of ideas conveyed through emblem and emblematics is within an identifiable code or discourse. Within this discourse there is a need to expound and explain that is always didactic, often in the limits of personal ethics; and the tone is of one who knows speaking to those who do not, which at its most oppressive becomes reprovingly pedagogical. Consequently the emblem and the emblematic do not quietly suggest meaning or enter dialogue through subtle symbolism; rather, they proclaim what meaning shall be. Uncertainty and self-doubt are not common features of emblem writing. These attributes make the emblem and the emblematic uniquely accessible as cultural materials to a later age and uniquely valuable for literary scholarship. Conversely, works which have become canonized as high literature, and which have become the focus for intensive critical attention, are often very different: they tend to be highly original in thought, innovative in generic character, subtle, allusive, and not reducible to a single interpretation. Spenser, for instance, although didactic and programmatic in The Faerie Queene wherein many of his images are profoundly emblematic in mode of creation, has not written a work that would normally be placed alongside that of emblem writers. To put it bluntly, little of the verbal element in emblems is of literary merit in the terms by which merit is ordinarily judged; and the visual component, with a few exceptions, does not bring a flutter to the hearts of art historians. Almost by definition, writing that is primarily emblematic tends not to be of interest for its literary qualities. What brings the emblem book closest to certain poetic utterances is that both have some claim to offer “speaking pictures.”

In addition to works which are by common assent classified as emblem books, the emblematic mode adumbrates a variety of cultural manifestations. Peter Daly has pointed out that the emblematic extends to handbooks, such as Fraunce's Insignium, Armorum, Emblematum Hieroglyphicorum etc. (1588) and Henry Peacham's Gentleman's Exercise (1612); to Elizabethan painting and portraiture employing “stylized, heroic and allegorical representation of its subjects”; to the wall and ceiling paintings of grand Tudor and Jacobean houses; to carved chimney mantles and wall panels; to the tapestries which adorned wealthy houses; to the painted cloths of the less wealthy; to embroideries, such as those undertaken by Mary Queen of Scots in her captivity; to emblematic jewelry and silverware; to title-pages and frontispieces of fine books, such as James I's own collected Workes (1616); and to printers' devices.¹² In short, the influence of emblems was far more pervasive than the very small number of English emblem books in existence during the time of Shakespeare would seem to suggest. That emblems directly and indirectly influence the drama itself is now well-established and needs no further elaboration here.¹³ Often the influence is felt in mode of representation rather than in specifics, but there are some notable instances of emblems as direct sources, as for example the use made of Ripa's Iconologia by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones in their masques.¹⁴ In addition to Ripa, we should acknowledge the emblematic in a variety of other Renaissance mythographers such as Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Alexander Ross, and George Sandys.¹⁵

One may well ask what sectors within Shakespeare's audience would have been aware of emblematic manner and matter. Emblem books tended to be expensive because of the cost involved in preparing the blocks used for illustrations and would have been beyond the reach of many. Nevertheless, Daly's survey of the evidence of emblems being used in household furnishings indicates that “the taste for emblem and impresa was not confined to the monarchy and aristocracy. Landed gentry and the rising middle class liked to decorate their homes with emblems.”¹⁶ We may safely assume that the middle class was well represented in the public theaters and that the particularities of emblematic significances being drawn upon by Shakespeare in a play such as Antony and Cleopatra would have been accessible to a very substantial portion of Shakespeare's audience there. It was not only at court that such significances would have been understood.

In this study I shall begin by examining the emblem tradition in relation to Shakespeare's use of classical mythology. The focus will be on emblematic representations of Mars and Hercules, to both of whom Antony is expressly likened. I would have liked to give more space to Cleopatra, for the play is equally hers, but that would have meant a much longer undertaking and must wait for another time and another place. Thereafter I apply inferences drawn from the mythological frame of reference in the play to the biblical dimension, with its emphasis on the apocalypse. And finally I suggest a relationship between mental constructs exemplified in emblematic imagery and a persistent theme in Antony and Cleopatra. This theme, which links the mythological with the biblical, is that of temperance.

I

In the first speech of the play, the two great lovers in Antony and Cleopatra are paired in terms of those primal opposites, Mars and Venus. Philo is full of indignation on behalf of his mastered master:

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 glowed 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 of his breast, reneges all temper
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust.

(I.i.1-10)

In subduing himself to Cleopatra, Philo laments, the Mars who was Antony has exceeded the limits of “measure” or moderation, which is a primary manifestation of “temper” or temperance. There is nothing unusual in this denunciation of the sort of woman who leads men away from their martial dispositions. In her shameless and lustful behavior (as Philo interprets it) Cleopatra is, in effect, an evocation of Venus. Venus is not much approved among the emblematic mythographers such as Batman and Fraunce. She is associated by Batman with “the superfluity which wantons require, and being naked, the shamelesse care of Virginitie”; and for him she is not so much a goddess as “the foremost Lady in the worlde, in Lust and Pleasure.”¹⁷ Fraunce, following Natale Conti, allows that Venus has meaning in terms of “the tilling and fertilitie of the earth,” but, having allowed her cosmological and climatological significances, he concludes with moral reprobation through an itemized analysis of the attributes of her son Cupid.¹⁸ It is Cupid “who, (to omit the philosophicall discourses of the Platonists concerning divers loves) was pictured, a boy; lovers are childish: blinde; they see no reason: naked; they cannot conceale their pasions: winged; love soone flieth into our eyes and soules, and lovers are light, as feathers.”¹⁹ Philo has iconography on his side, but he is making a great mistake in another aspect of what he says; and of this a contemporary audience would have been well aware. Mars and Venus are a pair, and are to be “read” or interpreted together. They can be read either in bono or in malo, but they must be read together: it is a breach of hermeneutic tact to attempt to read one partner in bono and the other in malo simultaneously. Or, more simply, it is unfair. If there is that which is malign or reprehensible in Venus, so there is equivalent evil in the parallel aspects of Mars. Philo is seeking to glamorize war in a period that is destined to be “the time of universal peace,” both in the Roman world of the play's setting and in the Stuart world of the play's composition; and in doing so he ignores the malignancy of the Mars he would oppose to the lustful Cleopatra/Venus. For, as Fraunce comments, this Mars is of “hote and furious disposition, fit for wars … signifiyng fiercenes and cruelty: he is figured grim, fierce, and sterne, allarmed: his chariot is drawen by two horses. … Terror and Feare: his companions be, Feare, Fury, and Violence.”²⁰ This Mars is more of a menace than a paragon of manly virtue. Translated into human terms, the truth is that both Antony and Cleopatra have positive and negative attributes.

The relationship between Mars and Venus is susceptible to favorable interpretation. Otto van Veen in his Amorum Emblemata (1608) presents an emblem in which, under the motto of “Love pacifyeth the wrathfull,” a chubby little Cupid is seen overpowering Mars in an unlikely tussle. The explanatory epigram beneath the illustration reads:

Cupid the swoord of Mars out of his hand can wring,
And soone aswage his wrath how furious so he bee,
Love can do more than stryf, by this effect wee see,
The sturdie and the stout love doth to myldnes bring.(21)

Van Veen is close to classical forms of the myth of Mars and Venus, wherein the union of the two brings forth Harmonia. In Antony and Cleopatra there is no such progeny, no such conclusion, unless one wishes to interpret the play in predominantly Neoplatonic terms. It would seem to me that the promised Neoplatonic end of a concordia discors is remote from the reality to which the play brings its protagonists.²² Van Veen's emblem reminds us that love has the power to moderate between extremes, that the temperate balance of “myldnes” is a possibility. Whether this is intended to be what Mardian thinks about in his fierce imaginings of “what Venus did with Mars” (I.v.19) is another matter.

The subtle power of the myth of Mars and Venus as a point of reference in Antony and Cleopatra is to suggest a diversity of justifications for—as well as disapprobations of—the lovers. At the polarities, two outcomes are possible: one is the favorable conclusion of mystical union in synthesis; the other is sparagmos and bloody catastrophe. To some extent, Shakespeare admits the more optimistic view, as Antony's warlike nature is softened and Cleopatra's sensual abandonment resolves into the stately and disciplined self-mastery of one who resolves to die “after the high Roman fashion” (IV.xv.92). But their end, however ennobled and spiritually refined, remains one of mutual self-destruction.

Recensions of the story of Mars and Venus are transmitted largely through the tradition of the moralized Ovid. The commentary given by George Sandys, Shakespeare's contemporary, in his Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (1621), is particularly instructive. Sandys understands the myth in various ways. Astrological, astronomical, climatic, biological, psychological, and moral meanings all crowd in on one another in his interpretation. The myth of Mars and Venus, says Sandys,

carries this astrologicall sence: that those who are borne in the Conjunction of Mars and Venus are prone to inordinate affections. Mars sometimes descendeth beneath the Sun, and Venus for a part of the yeare ascendeth above him, as it were to meete with each other: whose conjunction may then be said to be discovered by the Sunne, when he ceaseth to obscure them by the proximity of his greater splendor. Vulcan bindes them in a net: that is, with too much fervor subdues their operations. For the star of Mars is hot; and that of Venus moderate moist; whereof generation consists: and therfore mutuall lovers: by Neptune unbound; in that water extinguisheth fire, which is Vulcan. This fable therefore was invented to expresse the sympathy that is necessary in nature. Proceede we a little with the influencies of these Plannets: Mars is malignant, but aproaching Venus subdues his malignity: Mars exciteth greatnesse of spirit and wrath in those in whose nativity he prodominates; Venus impeacheth not that virtue of magnanimity, but the vice of anger: Venus ruling infuseth the effects of love; and Mars conjoyning, makes the force of that love more ardent: wherefore those that are borne under that conjunction are most fervently amorous. Mars followes Venus: because audacity is the page unto love; not love unto audacity: for none, in that valiant are taken with love; but wounded with love become so, and undauntedly undergoe all dangers for the beloved. Mars likewise signifies strife, and Venus friendship; which, as the ancient held, were the parents of all things. But morally adulteries are taxed by this fable: which how potent soever the offenders, though with never so much art contrived, and secrecy concealed, are at length discovered by the eye of the Sun, and exposed to shame and dishonour.²³

I have quoted Sandys at some length because I think it is important to appreciate both the complex variety which Renaissance interpretation of classical myth is able to sustain and the ingenuous discontinuities one finds there. Astronomical and moral interpretation are particularly at odds in this instance: a single mythic narrative explains both what actually happens in a divinely-regulated cosmos and what ought not to happen in the moral dimension of human behavior. One gains from Sandys a wider perception of the multiple modes within which an early seventeenth-century audience would have received Shakespeare's allusions to the myth of Mars and Venus; one also gains a more informed regard for Shakespeare's capacity to transform the allusive power of myth.

Not unlike Sandys, Richard Linche in his rendering of Cartari's Imagini (1556) as The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599) is self-contradictory about Venus without any sense of embarrassment:

According therefore to the opinion of the Poets, Venus was taken to be the goddesse of wantonnes & amorous delights, as that she inspired into the minds of men, libidinous desires, and lustfull appetites, & with whose power & assistance they attained the effect of their loose concupicence: whereupon also they entermed her the mother of love, because without a certaine love & simpathie of affections, those desires are sildome accomplished. And unto hir they ascribe the care and charge of marriages and holie wedlockes. …²⁴

His “whereupon” conceals a change of direction that leads in the next sentence to a respectable and even holy Venus! And yet this is also she who inspires “libidinous desires and lustfull appetites.” The emblem writers are not more bound by consistency than their cousins, the mythographers. P.S., in his translation of Claude Paradin's influential emblem book, Devises Heroiques, in one place speaks admiringly of “Antonius and Cleopatra of famous memorie,” but in elsewhere reviles Cleopatra for having “the audacitie, and impudent boldnes of a shamelesse woman.”²⁵ Shakespeare, then, is drawing simultaneously upon well-established parallel attributes of Venus and of Cleopatra in exploiting the duality of the goddess and the woman.

The Cleopatra who is described with such honest stupefaction in the account given of her by Enobarbus is drawn from many sources but chiefly from Shakespeare's transforming imagination:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue—
O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids …

(II.ii.201-12)

What this description does reveal, however, is a question of technique. Cleopatra becomes Venus in her most sensual aspect, and her meaning is signified in the manner of the emblem writers and the Renaissance mythographers: where she is placed, how she is dressed, in what attitude her body is positioned, her attendants, and their accouterments—all contribute items towards defining what she represents. Shakespeare's Cleopatra is, of course, also closely akin to the iconographically related Venus paintings of Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Titian, and Veronese—to name but a few—but what I am concerned with here is how a code of visual and verbal representation would have been transmitted to an audience in a Renaissance theater to most of whom the works of the Italian masters would have been unknown. Specific constructions of mythological allusion in Renaissance drama should, then, be referred to the emblematic tradition both for substantive resonances and technique.

Returning now to the instance of Antony as Mars, we may note that one of the few emblematists actually to defend the role of Mars is Gabriel Rollenhagen, who, taking the neat “Ars/Mars” nexus as a point of departure, offers a view that has chilling resonances for twentieth-century readers—i.e., that without military supremacy the arts cannot flourish. His illustration for the emblem shows Mars and Minerva sharing a plinth, the cartouche surrounded by the motto “Arte et Marte.” Yet, although Rollenhagen gives equal space to Mars and Minerva, the latter is slightly forward in the engraving and is more dominant. She is, after all, the civic spirit which makes the arts possible.

Mars receives a bad press from most of the emblem writers. The writers are generally not from the aristocracy, and, even if they are writing for a primary readership among the more militaristic nobility, they remain necessarily bourgeois in their values. In James I's England in particular, the urban middle class had most to lose and least to gain from warfare. And these too would have been among the most regular attenders at the public theaters. For the first time in English history, quite probably, the middle-class value of peaceability was in keeping with the monarch's; for James' reign was conducted under the beatitude Beati Pacifici—blessed are the peacemakers. James took this motto for the frontispiece to his Workes which he devised for himself and which is in effect an emblem with motto, picture, and verses. In the previous reign, the more aristocratic ideal of military glory had prevailed at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, had found himself an early grave in pursuit of a courtly ideal which sought ars within Mars. James had no inclination follow such an example.

Mars and Venus were at some distance from the king's watchwords of pax and religio. No mythographer or emblematist is more disparaging of Mars than is Alexander Ross, who grew to adulthood in the early years of James I. In the Mystagogus Poeticus (1648), Ross records that “because the Romans would intimate how much they detested civil wars in their City they would not suffer the picture of Mars to be painted on their gates and private doors.”²⁶ Ross enlists St. Augustine in support of his view that, without the horrors of war to do him perverse honor, “Mars is no god.”²⁷ Given the new orientation of the Stuart court, there is cause to think that Shakespeare's first audience would not have interpreted the imagery of Mars in relation to Antony with unqualified admiration or approval. At this time Hercules would have been a much more appealing model for human conduct. Ross, who gives much more extended coverage to Hercules than to Mars, also sees the former as worthily prefiguring the God, for “Our blessed Saviour is the true Hercules.”²⁸

It has been incorrectly assumed, I think, that the Mars and Venus story is the dominant mythic correlative for the protagonists in Antony and Cleopatra.²⁹ While it is true that Antony and Cleopatra are explicitly compared with these gods in the early part of the play, a change of direction takes place. The more Antony and Cleopatra are separated as the play proceeds, both physically and in attitudes of mind, the less important the Mars-Venus construction becomes. Antony becomes progressively more akin to Hercules, and Cleopatra to Isis. The change in the frame of emblematic resonances becomes highly significant when one takes into account the implications of differences in the emblematic tradition between the characteristics of Mars and Hercules.

II

Hercules is more heroic than Mars. Mars is an Olympian, an immortal god, a figure different in kind from human beings, but Hercules is human. He must labor and prove himself through his work. He is a man burdened with a sense of moral awareness and is faced, at least once, with a difficult choice. He is one of us. In that he eventually achieves apotheosis, he is more than we can ever be, but he is that to which we aspire. And Antony claims descent from him.³⁰

The Herakles/Hercules of classical myth is something of a wild man—a heroic man of action, who on a visit to King Thespius hunted lions by day and slept with all of his host's fifty daughters by night; who treacherously maimed the sacrosanct heralds of the Minyan King Clymenus; and who slaughtered his wife and six of their children in a fit of madness. This man is only just discernible under the covering of virtue and moderation given to him in later centuries.³¹ The Renaissance Hercules keeps his lion-skin and club as insignia but has otherwise become thoroughly civilized. Unlike Mars, he was a great favorite among the emblem writers,³² who, following in the tradition of the Ovide Moralisé, gave to each of his twelve labors its own moral significance. Some of those significances will seem as strange and as forced to us as they would have seemed to Greeks and Romans of antiquity. Alciato declares that the labors have taught Hercules to give up luxury, spurn avarice, shun ill-gotten gains, and triumph over the ways of women. His commentator, Claude Minoes, observes that the meaning of the labors has been transmitted to the ordinary people through the medium of allegory and proceeds to give a few lines of explication.³³ Batman describes Hercules as “a mainteiner of Vertue, and a punisher of Vice.”³⁴ A particularly Renaissance twist to the character of Hercules is to represent him as the opponent of avarice, for example in Batman's allegorization of Hercules' theft of the golden apples of the Hesperides as a punishment for avarice “whereby is fignifyed, the great riches that proceaded of so fertill a soyle, and the covetus disorder of the inhabitantes, who by devouring of others, consumed themselves.”³⁵ Like Batman, Fraunce presents Hercules as the enemy of covetousness, particularly in the incident of the capture of Cerberus; allowing that various interpretations are possible, he choses to cite the Mythologiae of Natale Conti that “Cerberus is Covetousnes” which he “bridled and kept under concupiscence, and therefore returned safe from Hell.”³⁶ He also presents the view that “Hercules is a learned and absolute Philosopher: hee draweth the three-throated Cerberus out of Hell, by bringing to light the tripertite mysteries of Philosophie, naturall, morall, and dialectical.”³⁷ We are clearly a great distance from the Hercules of the Troades or the Hercules Furens.

For an indication of what Hercules represented to Shakespeare's contemporary audience the best indication may be an emblem by Henry Peacham in Minerva Britanna. Under the motto Virtus Romana et antiqua, Peacham presents a dignified Hercules in a loose cloak, over which he wears the skin of the Nemean lion killed in his first labor, and in his right hand he holds three golden apples from the Hesperides won in his eleventh labor, while in his left he holds the club that has been his only instrument of attack and defence. The pictorial aspect of the emblem affirms the general Renaissance tradition of Hercules as representing “th'Heroique virtuous mind.” The lion's skin, Peacham tells us, “Notes fortitude” and the club “the crabbed paine” of endurance. In his interpretation the three golden apples signify “the three Heroique vertues old,” and in a marginal gloss he identifies these as “1. Moderation of anger. 2. Contempt of pleasure. 3. Abstinence from covetousnes.”³⁸ These are, of course, Stoic values. Whether they are attributed to Hercules by way of Cesare Ripa, as has been suggested, or whether both Ripa and Peacham received the Stoicized Hercules from Valeriano Bolzani, as I think, the fact that all three characterize Hercules in this way suggests that the Stoic Hercules was something of a commonplace.³⁹ Indeed, this interpretation may have prompted Fraunce to see in Hercules his “learned and absolute Philosopher.”

Of particular interest for our present purpose are two episodes in the life of Hercules which recur in emblems and which bear on the actions of Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. It has often been remarked that Antony's choice between Octavia and Cleopatra has its origins in emblematic representation of the so-called “choice of Hercules” or “Hercules at the cross-roads.”⁴⁰ The choice of Hercules motif seems to have had its origin in a story told by Xenophon in his Memorabilia about the young Hercules meeting with two women, one sober, the other tarty. As John Coates summarizes the tradition:

They are, of course, Virtue and Vice, and the scene which follows achieved a great familiarity in Renaissance iconography. The well-known Rubens painting is only one of scores of instances of Hercules standing between Vice and Virtue. Vice is made to offer every kind of sensual pleasure. Rather than wars and worries, Hercules shall consider his choice of food, drink, sound, touch or perfume; ‘what tender love can give you most joy and how to come by all these pleasures with the least trouble’. Virtue reminds Hercules that if he desires success and glory he must work for them.⁴¹

The Peacham emblem indicates that the battle has been won by Virtue, given the symbolism attached to the three apples which Hercules holds.

Emblems representing Hercules at the crossroads take us back to an earlier point in the myth where the outcome seems to be still in doubt, or at least open to choice. Of these, a notable English instance is Whitney's emblem No. 40, wherein Hercules is illustrated with his club in one hand and the other as yet empty of the Hesperidean apples, between two female figures who are clearly Minerva and Venus, under the motto Bivium Virtutis et vitii. The same moment of decision is depicted by Rollenhagen (No. 14), later to be reworked in English by George Wither (No. 22). The victory is not easily won; as Whitney says of Hercules' struggle with the rival attractions of virtue and vice in his explicatory verses: “They long did strive, before he coulde be wonne.”

Dramatically, Shakespeare's Antony is in the position of the undecided Hercules until well into the play. Quite early (II.iii.38-40), Antony gives notice in a brief soliloquy of his intention to return to Cleopatra: “I will to Egypt; / And though I make this marriage for my peace, / I'th'East my pleasure lies.” But then he hesitates, trying at times to be loyal to his marriage to Octavia, until the final rift when Octavius tells his sister, who thinks Antony is still in Athens on Roman business:

No, my most wronged sister, Cleopatra
Hath nodded him to her. He hath given his empire
Up to a whore, who now are levying
The Kings o'th'earth for war.

(III.vi.67-70)

In this moment the Herculean Antony is seen to have fallen short of the ideal set by his ancestor. The great but greatly imperfect Antony has chosen the pleasures offered by Venus rather than the civic duties of Minerva. However, whether the play itself finally upholds the Stoic virtues represented by the Hercules of emblem tradition is another matter. There is a case for suggesting that Shakespeare summons up the Stoic values and expectations only to refute them. Some measure of dramatic irony arises out of his enraged cry to Cleopatra, shortly after his defection from Rome and his desertion of his wife: “Though you can guess what temperance should be, / You know not what it is” (III.xiii.124-25). This accusation were best levelled at Antony himself.

Another important moment in Antony and Cleopatra which touches upon the life of Hercules is that in which Cleopatra boasts of having drunk him into oblivion. His defeat by a woman in the supposedly manly rite of holding one's liquor had been followed by his unmanning in a more literal way:

                                                                      That time?—O times!—
I laughed him out of patience; and that night
I laughed 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)

In emblem No. 95 of Minerva Britanna Peacham recalls the episode in which Hercules, besotted with Omphale, putting off his lion's skin for a woman's mantle, and throwing away the club which signified his manhood and fortitude (see also Peacham, No. 36), took up instead the distaff of feminine subjection. Peacham's verses provide an analogue for the Antony who has been overcome by Cleopatra and is dressed up in her tires and mantles:

Alcides heere, hath throwne his Clubbe away,
And weares a Mantle, for his Lions skinne,
Thus better liking for to passe the day
With Omphale, and with her maides to spinne,
                    To card, to reele, and doe such daily taske,
                    What ere it pleased, Omphale to aske.

The second stanza thereafter laments that “Love's affection did disgrace and shame / His virtues partes.” Peacham represents that part of the tradition which finds Hercules diminished by love. His is akin to the Roman view, first expressed by Philo and Demetrius and later expanded tellingly by Octavius, that love diminishes true manhood.

It has been assumed that the story of Hercules' subjection to Omphale is fused in Antony and Cleopatra with another myth of female mastery and that the tires-and-mantles episode resonates equally with recollections of “what Venus did with Mars.”⁴² To some extent a Jacobean audience would probably have identified the episode with both Hercules-Omphale and Mars-Venus. It is unlikely, however, that an audience so steeped in mythology and its emblematic recreations would have fused (or even confused) the two in their minds. Both myths are present in the background of the tire-and-mantles episode, but they are distinct in what they bring to the play. There is little moral content in the story of Mars and Venus. They are gods, beyond human reach in their ways, and the allegorizations of the myth are principally ontological, as the extract from Sandys noted above has indicated. The affair ends in celestial laughter at the embarrassment of the two gods caught in a net by the cuckolded husband, Vulcan. To be sure, there is the Neoplatonic reading of the myth which is encoded within some Renaissance paintings, and this reading emphasizes the theme of concordia discors, or the union of the opposites which Mars and Venus represent. Similarly, there is in Antony and Cleopatra a need to find “the midway 'twixt these extremes” (III.iv.19-20) of sensual Egyptian nature that Antony has taken on and the cold Romanness of Octavius. But a Neoplatonic reading is not the only one.

If the tires-and-mantles episode alludes to what Venus and Mars got up to—and it may do so—the story of Hercules and Omphale adds another dimension. It is to this latter myth that Cleopatra's description alludes primarily since Mars and Venus are undressed, whereas Antony and Cleopatra, like Hercules and Omphale, are cross-dressed. There is a difference. Hercules is sold into slavery to provide money as compensation for the orphaned children of Iphitus, whom he had murdered before recovering entirely from the insane fit in which he had previously killed his own children.⁴³ Omphale buys him as her slave. Hercules' subsequent self-diminution in the cross-dressing episode is not so much a new sin or disgrace but rather the working out of a previous one. Seen in this way, Antony's being drunk to bed by Cleopatra, dressed in her clothes and robbed of his sword, is the sign of habitual moral failure rather than of something detached from his previous life. In Peacham's emblem of the cross-dressed Hercules, with its marginal gloss Si temperata accesserit Venus nos alia Dea est adeo gratiosa taken from a Latin version of Euripides' Medea, the point is that a disorderly life manifested in a loss of moderation or temperateness is destructive of the self. It is the emblematic Hercules rather than the emblematic Mars to whom Antony is the more closely compared. Antony's passion for Cleopatra is his downfall. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily inglorious.

There is another side to the business of giving oneself up to love, however. Van Veen, in his Emblemata Amorum, makes Hercules in love noble in a way that is quite outside the Roman comprehension. Under the motto “Love is the cause of virtue,” he comments:

Moste great and woorthie deeds had never been atchyved,
If in respect of love they had not bin begunne,
Loves victorie hath made more victories bee wonne,
From love-bred virtue then thus were they first deryved.(44)

In this emblem and elsewhere van Veen represents Hercules smitten by an arrow from Cupid, but one recognizes here the Platonic precept that love in various forms leads towards enlightenment, as exemplified in the Symposium and some of the more mystically-tinged dialogues. Indeed, van Veen cites Plato here (in a passage whose original I have been unable to locate) as his source for this view of love as the path to virtue. Another van Veen emblem suggests that love not only leads to virtue but is also the force which sustains the cosmos. Hence love is a force more potent than the kind of virtuous strength which Hercules embodies:

Atlas the heavens bore as poets have us told,
Whome Hercules did help, for which both are admyred,
But more is Cupids power, where no ayd is requyred,
Which by mayn force of love doth heaven and earth uphold.(45)

Love as the transcendent reality which “doth heaven and earth uphold” would have been familiar to Renaissance readers of Boëthius' De Consolatio Philosophiae and other works in the Realist tradition.

It is surely this transcendence, monistically conceived and not dichotomized in the body-soul antipathy between the Eros and Anteros of Neoplatonism, that would have been what most of Shakespeare's first audience understood in the love between Antony and Cleopatra. Historians of ideas, such as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind, have emphasized the Neoplatonic, and quite rightly too, in the context of aristocratic patronage and commissioning of specific Renaissance works, but neither the works nor the ideas necessarily had much currency in Shakespeare's wider play-going community.⁴⁶ Very few modern interpreters of Antony and Cleopatra would deny that there is in the last two acts an ecstatic visionary quality to the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra that commands our attention and respect, but I think it is more informed by the demotically interpreted book of Revelation than by the arcane Plotinus.

Few could fail to be moved by Antony's death scene. And who could deny Cleopatra her right to remember Antony as she does, when she reminisces to Dolabella, who is her captor's subordinate:

His face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, the earth. …
His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tunèd 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 in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above
The element they lived in. …
Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?

(V.ii.78-89, 91-92)

When Dolabella answers her with “Gentle madam, no,” we must agree with him, at the same time acknowledging our own poverty of spirit for having to accord with his truth rather than Cleopatra's.

This other view of love as a force intimating transcendence through the ways of the body chiefly demands our respect during the last two acts of Antony and Cleopatra. Although it would be a mistake to become euphoric in one's commitment to Cleopatra's vision of Antony or, for that matter, herself, the contrary vision of two intemperate lovers who deservedly came to a bad end must equally be resisted. Where members of Shakespeare's first audience would have positioned themselves is not more simple or more single than the response of modern readers, but perhaps we should consider the comparison of Antony with Hercules as one that is simultaneously valid and ironically deficient.

The apotheosis of Hercules remains a central part of the myth, howsoever his intervening exploits may be judged. His death, brought about by the poisoned shirt of Nessus bestowed upon him by his wife, the unsuspecting Deianira, is agonizing, but the agon is the necessary prelude to apotheosis. Fraunce puts together the actions of Omphale and Deianira to extract the same cautionary conclusion from the two episodes, but he sees the ending as being glorious in spite of the process by which it is attained:

Thus did Hercules his searching and heroicall heart leave nothing unattempted: but by his reaching capacitie, and inquisitive speculation, pierced through heaven and hel: yet alas he that overcame all, was at last overcome himselfe: He that mastred men, was whipped by a woman, and enforced by her to spinne and handle a distaffe in stead of an Iron clubbe: so doth wantonnes effeminate the most warlike hearts, and so much harder it is, to resist pleasure, then not to be overcome by payne. At length having passed through so many perils, and being infected with a shirt sent him from Deianira, and polluted with the venymous blood of the Centaure Nessus, he burnt himselfe on the mount Oeta: that is to say, his terrestriall body being purged and purified, himselfe was afterwards deified and crowned with immortality.⁴⁷

Thus Hercules began as a hero and became a god.

Antony is heroic too, if in a more limited and less certain way. Although he is likened to Hercules by others throughout the play, it is only after his final defeat at sea, through the treachery of Cleopatra's navy, that he allows himself a direct comparison with his legendary ancestor:

                                                                                                              All is lost!
This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me.
My fleet hath yielded to the foe, and yonder
They cast their caps up and carouse together
Like friends long lost. Triple-turned whore! 'Tis thou
Has sold me to this novice. …
.....The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'th'moon,
And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club
Subdue my worthiest self.

(IV.xii.9-14, 43-47)

One may read this passage ironically, with Antony as alazon, or butt of its irony, not its eiron, or controller. After all, Antony may be Herculean, but he is not Hercules. His successes are familiar matters of history rather than the marvelous matters of myth. Shakespeare makes more active use of the distance between Antony and Hercules than does Plutarch or the dramatists who had drawn on Plutarch before Shakespeare. And, to Shakespeare's audience whose Christian envelope of thought is reinforced by a multitude of biblical echoes, there can be no transformation into the divine for the Herculean Antony, despite all Cleopatra's nostalgic imaginings. And in spite of Antony's vision that “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours” (IV.xiv.53-54), he and Cleopatra can hardly be reunited in the Elysian fields where Dido and Aeneas were never reunited before them.⁴⁸

It is at this point that the very limitations of the comparison with Hercules become important. One thing that the emblem tradition makes very plain is that there is a Renaissance typology within which Hercules has a very special place of honor. Typology operates within a dimension of limited likeness. Antony is an antitype of Hercules; but for the Renaissance, Hercules is a type of Christ. Then to remove the middle term and make Antony himself a Christ-figure is to attenuate an already limited likeness, to Antony's disadvantage. Certainly, Antony has moments in which he is movingly Christ-like, but ultimately his separateness from Christ is more significant.⁴⁹ He is irremediably previous to Christ and outside the Christian redemption.

Herculean Antony, however Christ-like at his best, must give way to Christ, not by typology but by displacement. Antony's soldiers, who attend their master on his last gaudy night and hear the mysterious music that seems to come either from the air or under the earth, perceive that “'Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him” (IV.iii.21-22). Within only a few minutes of stage time they give place to Octavius, who proclaims that “The time of universal peace is near” (IV.vi.5).

Evidence for Hercules as a type of Christ is widely dispersed throughout Renaissance thought. Eugene Waith says of Renaissance attempts to free Hercules of his medieval accretions and to return him to his classical form:

When the Renaissance restored to Hercules his concrete particularity as hero, however, it did not take away from him the symbolic value so strongly fortified by medieval typology and allegory. His association with the Old Testament heroes and with Christ lasted throughout the period. Milton assigns to the chorus of Samson Agonistes a comparison of Samson with Hercules, and in Paradise Regained he compares Christ's struggle with Satan to that of Hercules with Antaeus.⁵⁰

Waith also correctly notes that “the typologists made his benefactions into an analogue of the sacrifice of Christ.”⁵¹ The quaint and labored Mystagogus Poeticus of Alexander Ross makes much of the typology and indicates some of the ways of interpreting Hercules which this author inherited. Although the Mystagogus Poeticus was not published until 1648, its thinking is of a generation earlier and hence is contemporary with the period in which Ross grew up and during which Shakespeare was drawing on classical mythology for his plays.

Ross was undoubtedly familiar with emblem books as well as the tradition which Renaissance mythographers shared with the emblem writers. In describing the eloquence of Hercules, a late accretion to Hercules' attributes, Ross seems in fact to be drawing directly upon an emblem by Alciati: “By Hercules the Ancients did not only mean valor & strength of body, but the force of eloquence also; which they did express by that picture of Hercules, clothed in a horse skin, armed with a club, with bow and arrows, having small chains proceeding from his tongue, & tied to the ears of people whom he drew after him.”⁵² In an edition of Alciato published by Plantin in 1591, Hercules is depicted exactly thus in Emblem CLXXX, with the motto Eloquentia Fortitudine praestantior making the surprising assertion that eloquence is more important than fortitude, the virtue normally associated with Hercules' heroism. The clue that it is this particular emblem which Ross is recalling is contained in his curious assertion that Hercules is wearing “a horse skin.” In this illustration the head of the Nemean lion is so flattened as to be indistinguishable as that of a lion, and the tail which hangs between Hercules' legs could easily be taken to be that of a horse.

Ross, however, not only affirms that Hercules is a type of Christ—“Our blessed Saviour is the true Hercules, who was the true & only son of God, & of the Virgin Mary: who was persecuted out of malice, and exposed to all dangers, which he overcame: he subdued the roaring Lion, that red Dragon, that tyrant and devourer of mankinde, the devil; he subdued the Hydra of sin, the Antaeus of earthly affections”⁵³—but also, conversely, writes that “by Hercules may be meant every good Christian.”⁵⁴ In this scheme of things Shakespeare's Antony cannot be a complete Hercules because he lives in the generation preceding the fulfillment whereby the typology is made meaningful.

Shakespeare's audiences who saw Antony and Cleopatra for the first time early in the reign of James I were acutely conscious that the tragedy they were witnessing was being played out immediately before the time of Christ. They knew that in the time of Antony's vanquisher, Octavius, soon to be proclaimed Augustus Caesar, the Redeemer had been born and that all who preceded him, unless specially privileged, remained outside the dimension of grace through which salvation was possible. In short, to the Christian in Jacobean England, Antony and Cleopatra were of the pagan world, excluded from grace. The very strength of Antony and Cleopatra's associations with the figures of pagan mythology—with Mars and Venus, Hercules and Omphale, Isis and Osiris—not only ennobled them but also put them firmly beyond the restorative immortality of which they dreamed. To those audiences, Proculeius' advice to Cleopatra (V.ii.21-28) after Octavius's victory would have been replete with ironic resonances:

                                                                                                                        Be of good cheer;
You're fallen into a princely hand. Fear nothing.
Make your full reference freely to my lord,
Who is so full of grace that it flows over
On all that need. Let me report to him
Your sweet dependency, and you shall find
A conqueror that will pray in aid for kindness
Where he for grace is kneeled to.

We know that Proculeius is lying, that he wants to keep Cleopatra alive only so that Octavius can humiliate her utterly by leading her in triumph through the streets of Rome. Octavius is not a lord who gives meaning to the word grace or to whom one may validly pray. That lord is yet to come; Octavius is, at best, his unknowing harbinger.

Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra early in the reign of James I, his new patron. There is considerable evidence that the first plays he wrote for James were all imbued with political sentiments that supported James' view of his own place in human history and in salvation history.⁵⁵ The question that remains to be asked is: Does Shakespeare's play present dramatically any of the ideas which James I was concerned to promote in the political life of the court?

III

When James I came to claim his English throne he disconcerted many of his English supporters by setting immediately about the task of making peace with Spain. They were probably not to know at that stage but would find out as the years unfolded that peace would be James' chief political ambition. James had his reasons. The personal experience of two attempts on his life in Scotland, reinforced by the outrageous Gunpowder Plot only two years after his arrival in England, confirmed his commitment to the Stuart dynasty's claim that they had put an end to internecine warfare within the Scottish nobility and had firmly established accession by primogeniture rather than by violence.⁵⁶ It was partly to demonstrate the superior way of the Stuarts that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for his new patron, shortly after the failed Gunpowder Plot. What English people seemed not to understand was that in furthering a policy of peace to all, or almost all, James was building on the ideological construct of Queen Elizabeth as the incarnation of Astraea. This construction of the Queen had received powerful support from the Virgil of her age, Edmund Spenser, and it is beyond contention that “the dominant themes in Spenser's glorification of Elizabeth correspond to the leading characteristics of Astraea.”⁵⁷

If Elizabeth had been the virgin goddess who had brought back the Golden Age, then James was the Augustus who lived to make good its promise, and that would be through peace. In the introductory verses (Stanza 9) to Book V of The Faerie Queene, Spenser says of this return, marked by the celestial rule of Saturn in the Golden Age:

For during Saturnes ancient reigne it's sayd,
That all the world with goodnesse did abound:
All loved vertue, no man was affrayd
Of force, ne fraud in wight was to be found:
No warre was known, no dreadfull trumpets sound,
Peace universall rayn'd mongst men and beasts. …(58)

James identified himself with Augustus from the start of his reign in England, as his Royal Entry to London in 1604 shows.⁵⁹ James' Augustan pretensions probably go back much further, however, and may be discerned in the Stuart dynasty's connections with France. James' own mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been linked by Du Bellay with the return of Astraea, and Ronsard had had a hand in the Royal Entry of Charles IX in 1571. In that earlier entry it had already become evident that “the imperial theme could identify with the peace theme as representing the arrival of an Augustan golden age of universal peace.”⁶⁰ When Ben Jonson wrote The Poetaster (1601) with its strong emphasis on Augustus in the last days of Elizabeth, it seems likely that he already had one eye cast in the direction of Edinburgh.⁶¹

In the Royal Entry of 1604, the first of its kind in England since Queen Elizabeth's coronation procession of 1559, the imperial theme was prominent.⁶² James was praised and celebrated in many guises in a sequence of triumphal arches which lined his way and through which his procession passed. Decked out with tableaux vivants and painted emblematic devices, the elaborate arches announced the iconography of the new reign to the public. Atop one of the arches, the figure of Astraea reminded Londoners that “it was now the golden world.” And the final arch bore the proclamation “Redeunt Saturnia Regna.”⁶³ As a coda to the ceremonial, Graham Parry records that “As the royal party … rode down the Strand, they encountered one final tailpiece thrown up by Jonson at the last moment. … A human comet, Electra, prophesies, like an ancient Sybil, that the new reign shall be free” from any envy, faction, and discord that might disturb its peace, and “at the climactic moment James is hailed as the new Augustus.”⁶⁴ The comet concluded its prophecy with the prayerful prognostication:

Long maist thou live, and see me thus appeare
As omenous a comet, from my spheare,
Unto thy raigne; as that did auspicate
So lasting glory to AUGUSTUS state.(65)

And, thus edified and affirmed, James returned to Westminster.

That James' rule was already proving to be at odds with the idealized self he himself projected and encouraged in others made the propaganda value of the Royal Entry all the more important, for “[t]he distance between the King's real and imagined self was immense. His Court was destined to be renowned for its venality, for its intemperance, for favoritism so extreme that it subverted good government, for neglect of affairs of state, and for gross flattery.”⁶⁶ However, in the early years of his reign, James was a popular figure whose short-comings gave rise to occasional disappointment rather than general disillusionment. The English people had too much invested in their expectations of him to throw them away on the first breath of scandal.

Perhaps this situation explains why Shakespeare seems to have been prepared to accept and even endorse Stuart ideology in the first few plays he wrote for the King's Men, notably King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. While Shakespeare would never have been fooled by empty or vainglorious display, there is no reason to believe that by the time he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, four or five years into the reign, he was participating cynically and hypocritically in a political charade. Why Shakespeare elected to work as fully as he did within Stuart ideology during those years is a very interesting question, but it is outside the present discussion.

Whatever the quality of James' private life or the conduct of his court, the king was concerned to the point of obsession with the idea of the Second Coming and made its imminence part of his political life. And the book of Revelation which predicted it “was an obsession of England during his reign—in large part because commentators were stressing so insistently the political dimension of the Apocalypse.”⁶⁷ James had published his own commentary in 1588 under the title of A Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle S. John, which was reissued in the year of his accession to the English throne and given first place in his collected Workes of 1616. Chiliastic belief was divided into those who predicted the coming of Christ before the thousand years spoken of in Revelation 20 and those who expected it afterwards. James was clearly one of the latter and was of the opinion that that period had already expired, for Gog and Magog (Rev. 20.8) had already come and were, respectively, “the Turke the open enemy, and the Pope the covered enemie.”⁶⁸ Clearly the end was imminent, but James, even in his youthful enthusiasm, was too canny to commit himself to a timetable for consummation of the last days: “but in how short space it shall follow, that is onely knowne unto God; Onely this farre are we certaine, that in the last estate, without any moe generall mutations, the world shall remaine till the consummation and end of the same.”⁶⁹

Such views were not the property of a maggoty-headed, brain-wormed few, but were rather part of normal life. Richard Bauckham has indicated how pervasive apocalypticism had been during the previous reign.⁷⁰ James was simply bringing aspects of it up to date. James' sense was that Britain was to play a special role in accomplishing the final term in the typology which began with the Fall, found its antitype in Christ, and looked to final resolution in the apocalypse promised by John the Divine. Medieval apocalypticism had often been imprecise in that it interpreted Revelation spiritually or allegorically rather than literally, as, for example, in the case of Joachim of Fiore's concept of three ages. In the Renaissance, and particularly after the Reformation, the apocalypse found a local habitation, whether in Calvin's Geneva or Oliver Cromwell's London.⁷¹ A number of Renaissance poets, from Spenser to Andrew Marvell, were prepared to make apocalyptic prediction part of their political stance. As Bernard Capp has noted, “Apocalyptic belief with a clear political dimension was to remain part of the mainstream of thought down to the very end of the Stuart age.”⁷²

Shakespeare, whatever he himself may have or not have believed, became part of the processes which expressed a mentality that was most influential in early Jacobean England. It could scarcely have been otherwise. Joseph Wittreich offers a compelling summary of the situation: “Nor should it be forgotten that plays and politics had become inextricably intertwined, especially plays such as were performed before the courtly audiences of Whitehall, where, as Stephen Orgel remarks, ‘the primary audience was the monarch, and the performance was often directed explicitly at him’, even if such political content was conveyed cryptically, through implied analogy and arcane symbolism.”⁷³Antony and Cleopatra is a case in point: present throughout the play is a cryptically conveyed political content, sustained through implied analogy and symbolism which, though arcane now, was not so then. Of Shakespeare it may accurately be said that “In the tragedies especially, the apocalyptic strain becomes increasingly more prominent, with King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra all harboring the apocalyptic myth.”⁷⁴ This is especially true of Antony and Cleopatra. If Naseeb Shaheen is accurate in his detection of citations from and allusions to Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra, that one play contains almost as many references as the other ten tragedies put together.⁷⁵

The arcane core of Antony and Cleopatra is an interlayering of James' Augustan pretensions and his apocalyptic fervor, bound together in typological signification. It was Augustus who established the Pax Romana, which he thought to be an end in itself, not knowing that sub specie aeternitatis he was merely providing occasion for the fulfillment of prophecy in the birth of Jesus, as recounted in Luke 2, which reports that “in those dayes, there came a commandement from Augustus Cesar, that all the worlde shuld be taxed” (Geneva). If Augustus had brought about the peace that prevailed throughout the known world as a result of his imperial control over it at the moment of the Incarnation, then James, as the new Augustus, had restored that peace. Had he not reunified the divided realms as “King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland”—thus he styled himself!—thereby rendering the time and place propitious for the Second Coming?⁷⁶ One might represent the typology thus in mathematical terms:

Augustus: Christ's Incarnation: James: Christ's Second Coming

It might be objected that the narrative and imagery surrounding the Second Coming in Revelation is shot through with violence, rendering James' policy of peace inappropriate to the typological sequence. However, there was in the Middle Ages and afterwards a firm tradition for reading the biblical apocalypse irenically, or peacefully—a tradition in which Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais had participated.⁷⁷ And Shakespeare had already shown himself favorably disposed to the idea of irenic apocalypse in his history plays, written prior to the accession of James I.⁷⁸

The theme of temperance in Antony and Cleopatra is also connected with James' Augustan pretensions and the persistent reference to Revelation. Temperance, or the lack of it, is related to the play's apocalypticism in ways that would have been readily divined by a courtly audience and probably by one in a public playhouse too. Emblematic representations of Mars-Venus and of Hercules invited ontological and moral readings in terms of temperance and at the same time reminded Renaissance audiences of the distinction between classical temperance as sophrosyne and Christian temperance as the reward of grace. In Shakespeare's play Antony does not compare favorably with the mythological figures as far as temperance is concerned, as if to demonstrate that is beyond hope in a world both fallen and unredeemed. For it is in his very intemperance that Antony loses his way in the world. Despite his other qualities of magnanimity, generosity, and largeness of spirit, which are unaffected and serve to enhance his tragic grandeur, the lack of temperance proves fatal. The persistent allusion in the text of the play to the book of Revelation serves to remind that the events being played out are within a scheme beyond the understanding of the pagan world and beyond its limited spiritual resources.

But Antony's enemy at the last, Octavius, displays a kind of temperance that wins him the field and prepares him for empire. Yet the temperance of Octavius paradoxically is much less attractive than the intemperance of Antony. It is no more or less than the sophrosyne of Aristotle, enjoining moderation in all things, transplanted to the cold climate of Stoicism in political Rome at the end of the Republic. In this foreign soil, temperance has become distorted into discipline, denial, and ruthless heartlessness; and it comes perilously close to the extreme of defect in Aristotle's terms of temperance as balance between excess and deficiency. In any event, Octavius lacks the warmth, the vision, and the expansiveness of the man he defeats and destroys. If his is classical temperance as shown from a Christian perspective, it is so partial and so limited that it will render no more than a convenient occasion in salvation history.

The Christian humanist of the English Renaissance had to be particularly discriminating in understanding temperance. Classical temperance was not enough. The distinction was especially significant to Protestants such as James I. Humanists in general approved the moral tradition received from the classics, and in particular they built upon the Stoicism which was already embedded within the cultural mentality of many early Roman converts to Christianity. The Protestants among them, however, dissociated themselves from the Pelagian and Neo-Pelagian tendency in late medieval Catholicism to see the educated person as being spiritually self-sufficient.⁷⁹ To the Protestant sensibility, humanity was fallen irretrievably unless redeemed by Christ by his personal intervention in the life of each individual. One was naturally evil, born in original sin. One could do nothing to save oneself, and good works were of no account since they could be accomplished only through grace, which it was God's prerogative to bestow or withhold as he pleased. In a pitched battle against Satan and the supernatural forces of evil, only supernatural forces of good could triumph.

In Spenser's scheme of precedence among the virtues, Temperance comes immediately after Holiness in importance. Book II of The Faerie Queene demonstrates the distinction between classical temperance and Christian temperance, to the advantage of the latter, by comparing them in action. Guyon is a naturally temperate man, who succeeds up to a point, but he proves powerless against the malign strength of Mammon. Only Prince Arthur, representing Christ, can save him. Thus, as René Graziani notes, Book II explores “the relation between classical temperance, which is self-sufficient, and Christian temperance, whch depends on grace.”⁸⁰

James I had a similar view. In his advice to his eldest son, Prince Henry, Basilikon Doron, which was published several times in the years following his accession and which proved to be very popular reading in the first days of the Stuart regime in England, James wrote:

I need not to trouble you with the particular discourse of the foure Cardinall vertues … but I will shortly say unto you; make one of them, which is Temperance, Queene of all the rest within you. I meane not by the vulgar interpretation of Temperance, which onely consists in gustu & tactu, by the moderating of these two senses: but, I meane of that wise moderation, that first commaunding your selfe, shall as a Queene, command all the affections and passions of your minde, and as a Phisician, wisely mixe all your actions according thereto. Therefore, not onely in all your affections and passions, but even in your most vertuous actions, make ever moderation to be the chiefe ruler: For although holinesse be the first and most requisite qualitie of a Christian, as proceeding from a feeling feare and trew knowledge of God: yet yee remember how in the conclusion of my first booke, I advised you to moderate al your outward actions flowing there-fra.⁸¹

Underlying this precept is James' Calvinist belief that the elect person, though not saved by holy living, will succeed in living holily as a sign of his election. For James, the difference between “a lawfull good king, and an usurping Tyran[t]” is that the true king “having received from God a burthen of government, whereof he must be countable: the other thinketh his people ordeined for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites.” In short, an illegitimate monarch will show his distance from God through intemperance.

The virtue of temperance is given an emblem to itself by Henry Peacham in Minerva Britanna.⁸² It is the only virtue to be singled out in this way, though of course virtuous qualities—and among them temperance—are dispersed through a wide range of thematic emblems in Peacham's book. In the marginal gloss to this emblem Peacham acknowledges his debt to the king's Basilikon Doron. Even without the acknowledgment the indebtedness is plain enough, for Peacham's verses begin: “Heere Temperance I stand, of virtues, Queene, / Who moderate all humane vaine desires.” The following stanza, though baldly moralistic and without any literary merit in itself, could well stand as a synopsis of Antony's personality, his failings and his catastrophe in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:

For when to lustes, I loosely let the raine,
And yeeld to each suggesting appetite,
Man to his ruine, headlong runnes amaine,
To frendes great greife, and enimies delight:
                    No conquest doubtles, may with that compare,
                    Of our affectes, when we the victors are.

The shared characteristics of the otherwise diverse representations of Peacham and Shakespeare show very clearly that at the time Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra an audience would have been in no doubt that what they were witnessing on stage was, on one level, the manifestation of an intemperate man in the throes of self-destruction.

If H. Neville Davies is right in his argument that Antony and Cleopatra alludes to some of the events of the visit to England in mid-1606 by James I's brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark, then there is a case for finding in the play exhortations and warnings to James of the same kind that James had issued to his son.⁸³ The royal Danish visit was replete with episodes of drunkenness and debauchery, scandalizing such venerable statesmen as Sir John Harington, who had been one of Queen Elizabeth's favorite courtiers. Harington's marvellously witty account of the disastrous masque of Solomon and Sheba which was played before their British and Danish majesties, or rather fell apart before them, has the sting of prejudice within it, but much of it must have been true.⁸⁴ Whether there is a minatory undercurrent in Antony and Cleopatra, suggesting, for example, that the scene on Pompey's barge bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to what has been happening just recently in England, it is hard to be certain.⁸⁵ Some degree of guarded criticism is not unlikely, since Shakespeare had employed irony against the monarchy even in the history plays written at the height of Elizabethan patriotic fervor.

It must have been clear to anyone connected with the court that, whatever the king's positive qualities might be, he did not embody the queen of virtues in his own person. Harington went on to complain that riotous excess of the court had brought “devastation of time and temperance.”⁸⁶ Perhaps it was for this very reason that Shakespeare found it appropriate to place some emphasis on time and temperance in his Antony and Cleopatra.

Nevertheless, it is both possible and probable, I think, that Antony and Cleopatra brings more praise than blame to Shakespeare's royal patron. Shakespeare seems to me to be acknowledging the hortatory style of the masque, which at court was becoming a genre that offered serious competition for royal entertainment, as a way of keeping his integrity intact: by way of subtle encouragement he attributes to the monarch those qualities James would like to find in himself—qualities which had become part of his official propaganda. Many of Ben Jonson's masques in fact do exactly that. Both King Lear and Macbeth, written only a very short time before Antony and Cleopatra, make much of the Stuart ideology of kingship, while hinting at shortcomings in its incumbent practitioner. If Antony and Cleopatra was given its first—or one of its first—performances before James I and King Christian, they would have interpreted the play's emphasis on temperance and the failure of it in the ancient world as a compliment to the new king; for James was encouraged by contemporary apocalypticism to see himself as chosen to lead the world with his example of Christian temperance and to make it more ready for the Second Coming than the pagan Augustus had been able to do for the Incarnation. London might prove to be the New Jerusalem. Antony and Cleopatra completes a sequence which King Lear and Macbeth had begun. Those two plays had celebrated the triumph of Scottish and English nobility acting in concert to restore lawful kings in the distant past. Antony and Cleopatra would look to the future.

Antony and Cleopatra points to the role of a lawful and virtuous king in bringing the glory of a promised future out of potentiality and into reality. True temperance will be the mark of the divinely-appointed ruler who is to hurry the world on to the apocalypse, bringing thereby an end to time. The compliment is King James' to wear—if he can make it fit.

Notes

1. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (1968; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984); and Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structures of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1989).

2. See, for example, Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985).

3. See Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 23-49, 116-52, and also Peter Thomson, Shakespeare's Theatre, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 73-83, for a year-by-year account of the practical meaning of royal patronage between 1603 and 1607.

4. See The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), especially the essays by Michael Warren, “The Diminution of Kent,” pp. 59-73, and Gary Taylor, “Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster, and Invasion: King Lear and Censorship,” pp. 75-119. The contention that the Q1 Lear is specifically the record of a court performance is, I believe, my own in a paper entitled “Ghostly Presences,” read at the 4 Rs Conference on Editing, under the auspices of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University of New South Wales, Canberra, in April 1994.

5. I am much indebted to Patrick H. Hutton, “The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History,” History and Theory, 20 (1981), 237-59.

6. Ibid., p. 238.

7. Ibid., p. 239.

8. Ibid., p. 252.

9. See Peter Daly, “Shakespeare and the Emblem: The Use of Evidence and Analogy in Establishing Iconographic and Emblematic Effects,” in Shakespeare and the Emblem: Studies in Renaissance Iconography and Iconology, ed. Tibor Fabiny (Szeged: Attila József Univ., 1984), pp. 117-87. However, Daly allows a more inclusive approach towards related genres and cultural phenomena in his later essay “The Cultural Context of English Emblem Books,” in The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition, ed. Peter Daly (New York: AMS Press, 1988), pp. 1-60.

10. Rosemary Freeman defined emblems strictly in terms of Alicato's illustrated emblems with mottos and epigrams in her English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948). However, see Daly, “The Cultural Context,” and also Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), esp. pp. 1-27.

11. The connection between emblematist and mythographer is particularly close. See George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970): “I have contracted the substance of every Booke into as many Figures … since there is between Poetry and Picture so great a congruitie; the one called by Simonides a speaking Picture, and the other a silent Poesie” (p. 9).

12. Daly, “The Cultural Context,” p. 6.

13. See John Doebler, Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1974), pp 8-20 and passim; and Dieter Mehl, “Emblems in English Renaissance Drama,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 2 (1969), 39-57.

14. Daly, “The Cultural Context,” p. 32.

15. Stephen Batman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (London, 1577); Abraham France, The Third Part of The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch (London, 1592); George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis; Alexander Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus (London, 1648).

16. Daly, “The Cultural Context,” p. 17.

17. Batman, The Golden Booke, fol. 6^v.

18. Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, fol. 46^r.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., fol. 32^r.

21. Otto van Veen, Amorum Emblemata (1608), pp. 208-09.

22. Cf. Raymond B. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus Did with Mars’,” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1965), 210-27. See also the iconographic study of Cleopatra in her infinite variety by Clifford Davidson, “Antony and Cleopatra: Circe, Venus, and the Whore of Babylon,” in Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 31-55. Davidson's work makes use of a number of the emblematic sources to which I have also had recourse as well as to a wider range of sources outside the scope of this paper. Davidson's points on the apocalyptic aspect of Cleopatra as Whore of Babylon lend support to some of my own ideas about Shakespeare's apocalypticism in the third section of this essay.

23. Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis, pp. 202-03. See Jean Seznec, The Survival of The Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, Bollingen Ser., 38 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), for a comprehensive study of the modes in which the myths were reinterpreted: Sandys' commentary makes best sense when read in the light of Seznec's argument.

24. Richard Linche, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (London, 1599), sig. Ccij.

25. The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin, trans. P. S. (London, 1591), pp. 82, 120.

26. Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, p. 259.

27. Ibid., p. 260.

28. Ibid., p. 171.

29. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus did with Mars’,” pp. 210-27.

30. For Plutarch's statement (in North's translation) “that the familie of the Antonii were discended from one Anton, the sonne of Hercules, whereof the familie tooke name” see Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, V (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 257.

31. See for convenience Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), II, 95-103.

32. I have noticed some twenty-four emblems centered on Hercules by Alciato (4), Peacham (2), Perriere (2), Reusner (1), Ripa (2), Rollenhagen (1) van Veen (6 in Amorum Emblemata, 4 in Horatii Emblemata), and Whitney (2). He is also given extended treatment by the mythographers, e.g. Batman, Cartari (trans. Linche), Fraunce, Ross, and Valeriano.

33. Alciato (Plantin edition of 1591 with commentary by Minoes), pp. 164, 339.

34. Batman, The Golden Booke, fol. 16^v (mispaginated).

35. Ibid.

36. Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, fol. 27^v.

37. Ibid.

38. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), p. 36.

39. Authorial and editorial accretions from edition to edition of the most popular emblem books make it almost impossible to locate a single source for an image or idea. This is one reason why I think it best for scholars of Renaissance drama to regard emblem books as indications of mentality rather than as specific points of origin.

40. The fullest treatment of this motif in Antony and Cleopatra has been by John Coates in “‘The Choice of Hercules’ in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 45-52.

41. Ibid., p. 45.

42. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus did with Mars’,” p. 215, settles for a resemblence “of role and situation” that blurs the distinction.

43. Graves, Greek Myths, II, 162-63.

44. Van Veen, Amorum Emblemata, pp. 32-33.

45. Ibid., pp. 36-37.

46. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 129-30; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), passim.

47. Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, fol. 47^r.

48. See Bevington's note (p. 222): “In the Aeneid … Aeneas … is repulsed by a scornful Dido when he encounters her in Hades.”

49. See, for example, Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, 1936), p. 303.

50. Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), p. 39.

51. Ibid., p. 43.

52. Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, p. 170.

53. Ibid., p. 171.

54. Ibid., p. 168.

55. I develop this argument elsewhere; see my “Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain,” English, forthcoming.

56. See Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), esp. pp. 162-82.

57. Frances H. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 70.

58. Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), II, 161.

59. See Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1981), pp.1-40. See also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 28-54. For the Augustan theme in relation to Antony and Cleopatra see especially H. Neville Davies, “Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Studies, 17 (1985), 123-58.

60. La ioyeuse entrée de Charkes IX roy de France en Paris, 1572, ed. Frances Yates (Amsterdam, 1973), p. 22, as quoted by Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), pp. 121-33.

61. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea, p. 121.

62. Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, p. 9.

63. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

64. Ibid., p. 19.

65. Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 109.

66. Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd, p. 19.

67. Joseph Wittreich, “‘Image of that horror’: The Apocalypse in King Lear,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), p. 182.

68. James I, Workes (London, 1616), p. 79.

69. Ibid., p. 80.

70. Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), pp. 19-78. See also B. W. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1975).

71. See Ronald F. Reid, “Apocalypticism and Typology: Rhetorical Dimensions of a Symbolic Reality,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 69 (1983), 229-48.

72. Bernard Capp, “The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought,” in The Apocalypse, ed. Patrides and Wittreich, p. 118.

73. Wittreich, “Image of that horror,” p. 180; the quotation from Stephen Orgel is from his The Illusion of Power in Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 9.

74. Wittreich, “Image of that Horror,” pp. 176-77.

75. Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Tragedies (Delaware: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987), lists seventeen references to Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra out of a total of forty-two (pp. 221-22). This proportion is indicative only because references and allusions to specific passages from Revelation are not always easy to establish and because some of the attributions are debatable.

76. See James I, Workes, title page.

77. See Dennis Costa, Irenic Apocalypse: Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1981).

78. Ibid., p. 29.

79. See my “Everyman and the Reformation,” Parergon, 29 (1981), 23-31.

80. René Graziani, “The Faerie Queene, Book II,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, gen. ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 263.

81. James I, Workes, p. 174.

82. Peacham, Minerva Britanna, p. 93.

83. Davies, “Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra,” pp. 133-49.

84. For Harington's letter see Nugae Antiquae: Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers, ed. Thomas Park (1804; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), I, 349.

85. Davies, “Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra,” p. 141.

86. Nugae Antiquae, I, 352.

All references to Antony and Cleopatra are to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, edited by David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).