SOURCE: “‘To the Very Heart of Loss’: Renaissance Iconography in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 220-76.

[In the following essay, Simonds uses the study of Renaissance iconography as a tool to explore Antony and Cleopatra's characterization. Simonds emphasizes the ambivalence with which Antony and Cleopatra are drawn, in that they are portrayed as both extremely human and semi-divine.]

Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes a mortally dangerous “relationship” between two very glamorous international celebrities at a crucial period in the history of western civilization. As personalities, the two lovers both attract and repel not only each other but scholars as well. Thus literary critics have called Antony everything from a romantic “Herculean hero”¹ and a noble lover² to a gluttonous epicurean living only for the pleasures of the flesh.³ In her turn, Cleopatra, admired by most feminist critics,⁴ has been compared by male scholars to the cunning enchantress Circe, who transforms men into animals; to the Whore of Babylon (from the Book of Revelation) who offers a cup of pleasure to all the kings of the world⁵; and to the transcendent pagan goddesses Venus and Isis.⁶ Martin Spevack, in The New Variorum edition of the play,⁷ surveys all these varying attitudes toward Cleopatra among scholars; while the Egyptian queen's seemingly endless fascination for writers, artists, and movie makers has also resulted in a recent popular study entitled Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.⁸

The two characters undeniably embody all of the above elements and more, since Shakespeare—unlike Plutarch—has portrayed both Antony and Cleopatra as strangely ambivalent personalities. Janet Adelman points out that “Antony and Cleopatra insists that we take the lovers simultaneously as very mortal characters and as gigantic semidivine figures.”⁹ The same critic has also taught us to look for the perspectives that the various characters in a play reveal toward one another. In fact, the very concept of dramatic character, she argues, is rather disconcertingly slippery in this particular Shakespearean tragedy (3-7), since “it is this movement of perspectives rather than the revelations of a psychodrama or the certainties of a morality, which is most characteristic of Antony and Cleopatra” (30). Thus, we may find it especially significant that within the text of this particular tragedy we almost immediately find the same ambivalent feelings toward Antony and Cleopatra among the other characters that we have seen among the scholars. Cleopatra, for example, is lavishly praised by Enobarbus but is often called unpleasant names by her lover and other Romans, which suggests that she embodies a certain strange doubleness in her very nature.

In a similar fashion, Antony, much disliked by Plutarch,¹⁰ is described in the play by his friends and enemies alike as both heroic and besotted. Octavius Caesar reports that his old friend and ally has fallen into the mold of a hopeless libertine:

This is the news: he fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolomy
More womanly than he; hardly gave audience, or
[Vouchsaf'd] to think he had partners. You shall find there
A man who is th' [abstract] of all faults
That all men follow.(11)

(1.4.4-10)

But when Caesar wishes Antony back in Rome to fight against Pompey, he warmly commends Antony's bravery and manly endurance as a soldier (see 1.4.56-71). Although Pompey regards Antony as currently no more than an “amorous surfeiter,” he also admits that “His soldiership / is twice the other twain” (2.1.33, 34-35). Pompey further observes with relief that “Mark Antony / In Egypt sits at dinner, and will make / No wars without-doors” (2.1.11-13), a suggestion that prolonged idleness has made the hero too soft to fight again. However, the Roman triumvir then delivers a prophetic curse on Antony, a curse which sums up the story of the hero throughout the remainder of the tragedy:

                                        But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy wan'd lip!
Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both,
Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts,
Keep his brain fuming; epicurean cooks
Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite,
That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honor,
Even till a Lethe'd dullness—

(2.1.20-27)

Similar conflicting observations on Antony's character are made throughout the play by others of various social ranks.

Antony thus emerges as a man deemed previously great but now failing in warlike prowess and courage, though one still believed capable of reform and of a return to political preeminence,¹² if he could just make up his mind what he wants. Cleopatra herself compares him to an anamorphic painting with a double image: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars” (2.5.116-17), while canny Maecenas observes after Antony's death that “His taints and honors / Wag'd equal with him” (5.1.30-31).

Through colorful visual pageantry¹³ and one spectacular banquet scene after another onstage, Shakespeare's tragedy dramatizes Antony's fall from heroic virtue to helpless sensuality in Egypt. Moreover, the hero's violent moments, during which he wildly displays uncontrolled jealousy and wrath, soon erode much of our sympathy for this man who can no longer control his passions. For the modern reader or spectator, such an insidious change in a once respected personality suggests the presence of some form of addiction, an illness that is always initially caused by the stimulation of the pleasure center in the brain. Indeed, J. Leeds Barroll has argued persuasively that the hero is seduced by all the forms of fleshly pleasures from Gluttony to Lust, and Frank Kermode has described Antony's obvious addiction to the “lavish banquet of the senses” that Cleopatra has so generously laid out for him in Egypt.¹⁴

More recently, Michael Lloyd hints that Antony is addicted rather specifically to games of chance, which are mentioned over and over again in the play, and which increasingly cause him to become a pawn of the fickle goddess Fortuna. She is here not the stable Roman Fortune of Plutarch but mere chance or hazard.¹⁵ Since worldly pleasure is actually one of the major gifts of Fortuna to her favorites, Barroll and Kermode's emphasis on the importance of Voluptas or sensory pleasure in the tragedy is surely correct, although it is equally clear through the language of the play that Antony is also fatally addicted to gambling itself, probably because of the initial pleasures associated with the arrival of good fortune. In this he is much like the unhappy nineteenth-century heroes of Dostoyevsky's short novel The Gambler and of Pushkin's story “The Queen of Spades.” Having once achieved good fortune through his own earlier efforts in politics and on the battlefield, Antony now wants to maintain his high position as a world leader through sheer luck rather than through reasonable action. In any case, according to Charles A. Hallett, there are some forty-five uses of the word “fortune” in Antony and Cleopatra.¹⁶

The purpose of the present essay is to build on the above mentioned studies, and others like them, in order to arrive at a Renaissance reading of the tragedy. Using the iconographic approach to Shakespeare's words and stage imagery, I shall demonstrate (1) that a fatally addicted Antony and other characters in the play describe Cleopatra herself in terms of the attributes widely associated with the pagan goddess Fortuna; (2) that Antony's foolish trust in Fortune's continuing love for him allows him to be caught like a fish on a hook baited with female sexuality and beauty and then to be sacrificed to her honor and glory; and (3) that although a bereft Cleopatra attempts in the end to immortalize her own brilliant performance of Fortuna in the great theater of the world as a transcendent artistic work of marble statuary, the play does end tragically—if somewhat ambiguously so—for both the lovers. Caesar removes their bodies from the monument built to honor the Egyptian queen for eternity and buries them together, we know not where. In addition, Shakespeare reminds us that once Antony falls from power the Augustan pax romana will be achieved in the Mediterranean world. At this time, the unstable rule of Fortune, a goddess who traditionally entices men and women to evil, will give way to a new temporal era after the Nativity of Christ and to the universal rule of Divine Providence over chance—or so it was believed by most commentators in Shakespeare's time.

To depict here in visual terms the goddess Fortuna and her attributes, I make use primarily of engravings disseminated throughout northern Europe during the Renaissance and of woodcuts from popular emblem books of the period. I see the emblem book as a verbal and visual art form parallel to the drama, although a genre often tending to state meanings directly rather than ambiguously.¹⁷ Emblems can, therefore, be very helpful to us in understanding many intellectual and moral traditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but, of course, emblems were seldom, if ever, used as direct sources by William Shakespeare. They are offered here only as analogues to ideas either dramatized by Shakespeare or expressed by his characters in Antony and Cleopatra. As Adelman argues, “iconography and mythography can provide a context for the play; they can serve to identify those images which the original audience might have felt to be particularly significant and to suggest the range of signification” (100).

I

To begin with, although Cleopatra as a historical personage and as a literary topos herself cannot literally be Fortuna in the play, the dramatic behavior of Shakespeare's seductive character and the fickle goddess of luck do indeed have much in common. Marilyn Williamson correctly observes that,

Both are wanton, alluring but wavering, changeable women of infinite variety. Both are associated with Isis, with Venus, with a serpent: “He's speaking now, / Or murmuring, ‘Where's my serpent of old Nile?’ / For so he calls me” (1.5.24-26). And Cleopatra treats Antony very much as Fortune does; he believes himself betrayed by her three times—at Actium, with Thidias, and in the final battle of the play.¹⁸

Even such invectives as “Triple-turn'd whore” and “false soul of Egypt” (4.12.13, 25) hurled against Cleopatra by her lover are typical of the traditional complaints against the goddess Fortuna voiced by her victims (Williamson, 427). Antony's infatuation with such a dangerous figure in vain hopes of forever retaining her love and her favor gives tragic significance to his subsequent loss of everything—reputation, power, even life itself—in her service.

Renaissance emblems warning against Fortuna as an alluring but exceedingly dangerous mistress were, of course, plentiful. To take just one example, Thomas Combe's The Theater of Fine Devices (1593 and 1614),¹⁹ an English adaptation of Guillaume de la Perrière's Théâtre de bons engins (1539), contains an emblem on the topos of Fortune's basic deceit that seems particularly relevant to Antony's personal tragedy. The inscriptio of Combe's emblem 20 states, “They that follow fortunes guiding, / Blindly fall with often sliding.” The pictura shows a winged and blindfolded nude female, who holds out her sail with her right hand to catch the winds and who leads with her left hand a blindfolded bearded man. Even though the man uses a cane, it does not keep him from stepping into a black hole in the ground—meant to represent a ditch—along with his equally blind guide. The emblem implies that Fortune, blind deity of all worldly success, pleasures, and goods, is ultimately a death goddess. Combe's subscriptio reads as follows:

You blinded folkes by Fortune set on hye,
Consider she is darke as well as ye,
And if your guide do want the light of eye,
You needs must fall, it can none other be.
When blind do leade the blind, they both do lye
In ditch, the Prouerbe saith, and we do see:
And those that trust to fortunes turning wheele,
When they feare least, their fall shall soonest feele.(20)

The sources of this emblem include not only Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (bk. 2.1) but also the New Testament, specifically Matthew 15:14: “And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” This double fall into a ditch by both the goddess and her victim sounds much like the stormy love relationship between Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's tragedy, as we shall see.

In addition to direct warnings like the above against Fortuna, the fine arts—and in particular, Renaissance emblem books—provide us with visual examples of at least nine very well-known attributes of the goddess Fortuna. These include (1) her two faces of good and bad fortune, (2) her associations with the sea, (3) a sail with a breeze to fill it, (4) a sphere, (5) a ship's rudder, (6) the dolphin, (7) the wheel, (8) wings, and (9) the inconstant moon. It is significant that Shakespeare's characters in Antony and Cleopatra endow the Egyptian queen with all nine of these attributes, suggesting thereby that as high priestess of the Hellenistic goddess Isis-Fortuna, she is in their eyes also the earthly bait of Fortune herself.

First, Cleopatra as a mistress is simultaneously fickle and two-faced, offering both good and bad luck to her followers whenever she pleases. As Lady Philosophy informs Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy,

If you were to wish for a law to control the comings and goings of one whom you have freely taken for your mistress, you would be unjust and your impatience would merely aggravate a condition which you cannot change. If you hoist your sails in the wind, you will go where the wind blows you, not where you choose to go; if you put seeds in the ground, you must be prepared for lean as well as abundant years.²¹

In Shakespeare's play, Antony is well aware of Cleopatra's deceitfulness, admitting ruefully to Enobarbus that “She is cunning past man's thought” (1.2.145), an observation which implies that she has superhuman powers. Moreover, Cleopatra—often referred to as a “gypsy” since the English word comes from “Egyptian”—tells her attendant Charmian to deceive Antony when she sees him: “If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick” (1.3.3-5). After Antony's final military defeat, she has Mardian falsely inform her lover that she is dead by her own hand, thereby inciting Antony to commit suicide as well. This dishonest or double-faced aspect of Fortuna, which may partially explain our ambivalent critical responses to Cleopatra, is colorfully depicted in an illumination of Fortuna Bifrons … from the French translation of Boccaccio's Fall of Princes, an important literary source of de casibus stories for the Renaissance in general. Anna B. Jameson was clearly pointing to this two-faced nature of the Egyptian queen when she suggested in 1832 that “What is most astonishing in the character of Cleopatra is its antithetical construction—its consistent inconsistency” (quoted in Spevack, 691).

Second, Fortuna is associated with the sea, and rightly so, since the ocean traditionally symbolizes mutability or change. In fact, the figure of Fortuna is frequently illustrated as skimming over the waves on a boat, a wheel, a sphere, or a dolphin, and we can usually see a ship or two in the background of typical woodcuts, such as that from Geffrey Whitney's emblem on Occasion in A Choice of Emblemes … As we know, Fortuna and Occasion were often conflated in art and poetry during the Renaissance.²² In Shakespeare's tragedy, Cleopatra first appears to Antony from the waters of the River Cydnus, reclining in state on her barge in a deliberate and alluring imitation of Apelles's famous painting of the Birth of Venus from the sea.²³ Moreover, as Adelman states, “Enobarbus associates the sea with chance and hazard: it suggests fortune itself, that realm in which Caesar is necessarily supreme (147).

Shakespeare's dialogue tells us that Cleopatra also indulges in fishing competitions with her lover, once having had a diver place a salt fish (i.e., a dead one) on her lover's hook under water to make him believe he has caught something or has had good luck. But as we shall see, Antony, himself, is the unlucky fish to be caught.²⁴ In addition, she twice tempts Antony, whose strongest forces are on land, to do battle against Octavius at sea where she can easily control the disastrous outcome. Finally, according to Frederick Kiefer, Horace, in his Odes (1.35.6) termed Fortuna “empress of the ocean” (204). We should note that Cleopatra is called “empress” three times in the tragedy, although her actual political rank is no higher than that of queen.

The third attribute of Fortuna is the combination of a sail and a breeze to fill it, as we can see in Gilles Corrozet's image of Occasion … Indeed, as Kiefer points out, “Cicero said of Fortune, ‘When we enjoy her favouring breeze, we are wafted over to the wished for haven; when she blows against us we are dashed to destruction.’ Both Ovid (Ex Ponto, 2.3.21ff) and Seneca (Hercules Oetaeus, ll. 692ff.) liken Fortune to a breeze filling the sails of a ship” (Kiefer, 196). In Antony and Cleopatra, the word “sails” is mentioned six times, four times at very crucial moments in the play. For example, Enobarbus describes Cleopatra's barge as having purple sails (2.2.193) when she goes down river to meet Antony. During the battle of Actium, Cleopatra deserts Antony's ships and, according to Scarus, “The breeze upon her, like a cow in [June]—/ Hoists sails and flies” (3.10.14-15). Scarus continues his account as follows:

                                        She once being loof'd [ready to sail away],
The noble ruin of her magic Antony,
Claps on his sea-wing [sets sail], and (like a doting mallard),
Leaving the fight in height, flies after her.

(3.10.17-20)

The above report of Antony's foolishness at sea is a good example in the play of the tradition embodied in Combe's previously mentioned emblem on blind Fortune with her sail leading her blind worshipper to disaster. In Shakespeare's play, Canidius then enters to proclaim, “Our fortune on the sea is out of breath, / And sinks most lamentably” (3.10.24-25). Although Plutarch rationalizes Cleopatra's behavior at Actium as a ploy to facilitate her own escape from Octavius Caesar, Shakespeare offers no explanation for her erratic flight. In the very next scene, the queen, although fickle and irrational by nature, rather coyly asks forgiveness from an addicted Antony: “O my lord, my lord, / Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought / You would have followed” (3.11.54-56).

In Antony's second encounter with Caesar by sea, Scarus observes that “Swallows have built / In Cleopatra's sails their nests” (4.12.3-4), an omen hinting that the gods are with her and that this will be a lucky day.²⁵ But, continues Scarus, “The auguries say / They know not, they cannot tell, look grimly, / And dare not speak their knowledge” (4.12.4-6). Since swallows can also symbolize “faire-weather friends,”²⁶ the goddess Fortuna promises here more than she ever plans to deliver. For once again fickle Cleopatra sails away from battle and is then called a “Triple-turn'd whore” (4.12.13) by Antony, who may be referring here to the third or downward turn of Fortune's wheel, the fourth turn bringing defeat and death. This pattern is clearly depicted in an illustration of Fortune contrasted with the very Wisdom (Sapientia) that the hero lacks as a man of action rather than of contemplation. The woodcut … is the title page of Francis Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae (1527). At this point in the tragedy, Antony accepts his military defeat with the words, “Fortune and Antony part here, even here / Do we shake hands” (4.12.19-20), for Cleopatra “Like a right gypsy, hath at fast and loose / Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss” (4.12.28-29).

According to Boethius, such betrayal is precisely in the nature of Fortuna, who cannot act otherwise. Lady Philosophy reproves the grieving prisoner in the Consolatio as follows:

“What is it, my friend, that has thrown you into grief and sorrow? Do you think that you have encountered something new and different? You are wrong if you think that Fortune has changed toward you. This is her nature, the way she always behaves. She is changeable, and so in her relations with you she has merely done what she always does. This is the way she was when she flattered you and led you on with the pleasures of false happiness. You have merely discovered the two-faced nature of this blind goddess. Although she hides herself from others, she is now wholly known to you.”

(bk. 2, prose 1).

“Not know me yet?” (3.13.157) asks Shakespeare's Cleopatra of her doting lover. In Antony and Cleopatra the shifting breeze behind Fortune's billowing sail destroys Antony partly because, having deserted his long-suffering and prudent wife Octavia, he now has no Lady Philosophy nearby to offer him intellectual comfort.

Sometimes in iconography the figure of Fortuna stands on a sphere—her fourth attribute—indicating her habit of constantly turning about, as in the pictura of an emblem by Theodore de Bry. The same picture also depicts her association with Venus through the scallop shell on which her sphere balances and with the presence of a venomous serpent that usually signifies deceit or fraud. … De Bry's motto reads “His Fortvna parens; illis inivsta noverca est” (“To these [on the left side] fortune is a parent; to those [on the right side] a wicked stepmother”), while according to the verse:

Nunc toto saeuit, nunc ridet ab aethere Phoebus,
Hic vehitur vitreis, mergitur alter aquis.
Hinc ostendat opes, hinc fortiter efurit ille:
Quid nisi Rhamnuntis regna fidemque vides?
(Now Phoebus frowns on everything, now he smiles from the heavens;
This man is carried on the waves, another is plunged into the waters.
Here he offers wealth, there extreme hunger.
What see you in this but the rule and faith of Nemesis?)(27)

Fortune's association with a globe also suggests her dominance over worldly affairs of every sort. Since the conflict between Antony and Octavius is in fact concerned very precisely with the question of world dominance, there are some forty-three references to the “world” in Antony and Cleopatra.

As I have previously suggested, Antony loses the worldly card game against Caesar because he is a compulsive gambler in love with fickle Fortuna, who will not always let him win. In contrast, the cooler Octavius almost always intelligently seizes occasion by the forelock, as many scholars have noted, and thus controls his fortunes through the practice of Machiavellian virtú or manliness against the female wiles of the goddess.²⁸ For example, we observe him showing some temperance during the wild bacchic orgy aboard Pompey's ship and later practicing rational generalship in his conduct of the war against Egypt. As John F. Danby observes, however, Octavius also “falls recognizably into Shakespeare's studies of the ‘politician’—the series that begins with Richard III and continues down through Edmund.”²⁹ In any event, for an alert Caesar, Fortuna acts as a sturdy mast, allowing him to trim or hoist the sail at will. Exactly this image of Augustus Caesar together with Fortuna appears in an etching by Rembrandt that was used as an illustration in E. Herckmans' Praise of Sea-faring. …³⁰ I suspect that Shakespeare gave us a fairly positive—if Machiavellian—portrait of Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra because the propaganda machine of his king and patron, James I of England, was at that time identifying James with Augustus Caesar, Prince of Peace.³¹

Symbol 23 by Achille Bocchi represents bad Fortune with one hand holding her sail and with the other controlling her fifth attribute, the rudder …, while good Fortune holds up a cornucopia of flowers and vegetables. Although the motto is “Avrea sors regvm est, et velle, et posse beare” (“The king's fortune is golden, and it wishes to and is able to benefit us”), both the picture and verse of emblem 23—dedicated to Henry, King of France—actually emphasize the double nature of fortune. According to the verse,

Augustis olim in thalamis fortuna solebat
          Peni ab Romuleis aurea Principibus,
Nempe id magnanimos Reges insigne monebat,
          Omni vt deberent, at cuperent studio
Fortunare homines, nam ceca, volubilis ille est
          Vulgaris, passim que fauet immeritis.
Verum oculata ipsa, et stabilis, que sceptra gubernat
          Regia cui clauum copia diua tenet.
Ergo si regum fortuna est aurea multos
          Pro meritis posse, et velle beare homines,
Haec Henrice eadem digno tibi Lilia sert
          Aurea qui nostra haec florida secla beas.

(Once, golden fortune used to dwell in the majestic chambers of the Roman emperors. Surely this figure reminded the magnanimous kings that they were obliged and desired assiduously to benefit men. For she is blind and fickle, everywhere favoring the underserving. But the other is sighted and stable, she who governs royal powers, the goddess of plenty who holds the helm. Hence if the king's fortune is golden, it can and wishes to bless many men for their merits. These golden lilies [fleurs de lys] are rightfully yours, Henry, who bless these our prosperous times.)³²

Of course the people of a nation do tend to share at least the bad fortunes of their kings, if not always the good, and we can see in Shakespeare's play how Antony's descending fortunes adversely affect his followers. After the desertion of Enobarbus, a much chastened Antony cries out in guilty despair, “O, my fortunes have / Corrupted honest men!” (4.5.16-17).

Shakespeare uses the word “rudder” twice in Antony and Cleopatra. During the battle at sea, Enobarbus reports that “Th' Antoniad [Cleopatra's flagship], the Egyptian admiral, / With their sixty, fly and turn the rudder. To see't mine eyes are blasted” (3.10.2-4; my emphasis). After losing the sea battle through this shift in his fortunes, Antony berates Cleopatra as follows: “Egypt, thou knew'st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings, / And thou shouldst [tow] me after” (3.11.56-58; my emphasis).

A sixth attribute of Fortuna is the dolphin, a sea mammal usually associated with the goddess Venus.³³ Since Nonnus had claimed in his Dionysiaca that a dolphin carried Venus on its back to her new home in Cyprus (13.438-44), an unlaced Venus in a red gown sits on a marvelous dolphin throne in a Renaissance painting by Cosimo Tura now in the National Gallery, London. … She provocatively holds a branch of cherries in her right hand. Nevertheless, the casual iconographic conflation of Venus and Fortuna during the Renaissance is a well-known phenomenon and clearly occurs in Antony and Cleopatra (Kiefer, 158-92).

Although in Shakespeare's play the heroine is at first a representative of Venus, whom she “o'er-pictures” with visual hyperbole as extravagant as her language, she later behaves more and more obviously like the goddess Fortuna during the final acts of the tragedy. Yet Fortune must be as attractive as Venus is to men, or who would follow her? Since the fickle goddess is often depicted by artists in the company of Eros, the little love god himself, we should not be surprised by the presence of the squire named Eros in Antony and Cleopatra (4.4), especially during the charming scene concerned with arming Antony for battle. At this time Cleopatra and Eros work together as armorers, while Antony boasts fatuously, “If Fortune be not ours to-day, it is / Because we brave her” (4.4.4-5). The truth, of course, is just the opposite, since Antony entirely trusts Fortune and never braves her until after she has deserted him. We should also be aware that the image onstage of Cleopatra and Eros arming Antony is a direct inversion of the popular Renaissance topos of Venus and Cupid disarming Mars, thus providing us with a good reason not to accept the critical interpretation that argues for a transcendent love affair like that of Venus and Mars between Antony and Cleopatra.³⁴ On the contrary, Shakespeare demonstrates in this play that universal peace cannot occur until both Antony and Cleopatra have met their tragic ends and Octavius Caesar is in full control of the Roman empire.

Emblem 41 in Gilles Corrozet's Hecatomgraphie (1543) illustrates Fortuna riding the waves with one foot on a sphere and the other on a dolphin. …. Henry Green translates Corrozet's epigrammatic dialogue, which discusses the nature of the goddess in general and sums up her many attributes, as follows:

Tell me, O fortune, for what end thou art holding the broken mast wherewith thou supportest thyself? And why also is it that thou art painted upon the sea, encircled with so long a veil? Tell me too why under thy feet are the ball and the dolphin?

It is to show my instability, and that in me there is no security. Thou seest the mast broken all across,—this veil also puffed out by various winds,—beneath one foot, the dolphin amid the waves; below the other foot, the round unstable ball—I am thus on the sea at a venture. He who has made my portraiture wishes no other thing to be understood than this, that distrust is enclosed beneath me and that I am uncertain of reaching a safe haven—near am I to danger, from safety ever distant; in perplexity whether to weep or to laugh,—doubtful of good or of evil, as the ship which is upon the seas tossed by the waves, is doubtful in itself where it will be borne. This then is what you see in my true image, hither and thither turned without security.³⁴

In Shakespeare's tragedy, Cleopatra admiringly remarks of Antony that “his delights were dolphin-like” (5.2.88-89), thereby alluding to his uncontrollable lust³⁶ and his own trait of inconstancy, which rivals that of Cleopatra herself. In any case, through the lovers' symbiotic relationship, the dolphin becomes an attribute in the play of both leading characters.

As I have pointed out earlier, Fortune and Amor (Eros) were often close companions in Renaissance literature and art. For example, an engraving by Johann Ladenspelder depicts Venus-Fortuna riding with her sphere on a triumphal car and directing a winged Cupid at whom to shoot his arrow … Indeed, according to Kiefer, Italian and French novellas of the period often linked Fortune with a personification of Love, and sometimes with Death as well. “As a result, the [English] dramatists usually treat Fortune not in isolation but in relation to Love and Death” (Kiefer, 158). The same is certainly true in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, where the two leading characters are almost drowning in their physical love for each other but embrace only death in the end.

A seventh major attribute of Fortuna is the familiar wheel, as depicted in Hans Sebald Beham's 1541 engraving of Fortuna, who holds the palm of victory in her right hand the wheel in her left hand. … Cleopatra herself mentions the wheel in Shakespeare's tragedy. When Antony is dying in her monument, she hyperbolically exclaims, instead of comforting him, “let me rail so high / That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel, / Provok'd by my offense” (4.15.43-45). It would seem that we are now hearing a hypocritical priestess of Fortuna rail against her own chosen deity at this moment, since she herself is directly responsible for Antony's pitiful condition.

Wings are an eighth attribute of the fickle goddess. We see her winged in Beham's engraving and also in Albrecht Dürer's more famous engraving of a winged Fortuna, who stands on a sphere hovering over the world she rules. … With her right hand she offers a goblet of wine like Circe's cup (a major temptation for Dionysian Antony), but in her left hand she holds the bridle of Nemesis to indicate that her worshippers must ultimately pay for whatever they receive from her in the world. This aspect of retribution on the part of Fortuna/Nemesis (see Kiefer, 31-41) is surely a major theme in Shakespeare's tragedy. In Antony and Cleopatra, the heroine thinks of herself as having wings when she tells Proculeius that she will not become a captive of Octavius: “Know, sir, that I / Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court” (5.2.52-53; my emphasis), obviously meaning that she will not submit to having her wings clipped by Octavius.

Gabriel Rollenhagen's Fortuna, reproduced by George Wither …, is also a moon goddess and as changeable as her ninth attribute, the moon, with which Cleopatra is so often compared in the play. The circular motto is “Fortuna ut Luna” (“Fortune is like the moon”). The goddess holds a waning moon in her left hand as a symbol of where her gifts will finally lead and to remind us that, since the moon goddess controls the ocean tides, she controls as well all the significant occasions in the life of man. Of course, Antony finally recognizes that the moon of Fortuna is in fact his most deadly enemy when he laments, “Alack, our terrene moon / Is now eclips'd, and it portends alone / The fall of Antony!” (3.13.153-54). It is also significant that Antony refers here to a “fall,” a word that often alludes to the fall from Fortune's downward turning wheel as well as to the fate of the hero in a tragedy after he has been guilty of hamartia (faulty judgment) through hubris (pride) in the eyes of the gods. Antony has clearly been both foolish and arrogant during most of the play.

Because Shakespeare's characters endow Cleopatra with these nine attributes of Fortuna in the play, the playwright seems to be manipulating our responses toward his heroine and making her not so ambiguous after all. We are to see her in this play as attractive but very untrustworthy. Furthermore, the association of Cleopatra with Fortuna by other characters encourages us to reject a romantic view of the lovers and to believe instead that Antony is really in love with the element of chance in the universe. In fact he does behave more in the manner of an irrational gambler—despite his often “wounded chance” (3.10.35)—than like a wise general and statesman or “the triple pillar of the world,” especially when he insists on engaging Octavius' forces at sea, against the advice of his officers.

In contrast, Octavius is proud of his Machiavellian ability to remain calm under stress and to seize Occasion's forelock at exactly the right moment. On the battlefield he orders his army to

Strike not by land, keep whole, provoke not battle
Till we have done at sea. Do not exceed
The prescript of this scroll. Our fortune lies
Upon this jump.

(3.8.3-6)

Enobarbus comments on the difference between the two men, when Antony rashly challenges his younger rival to settle their differences by a duel or a trial by combat:

                                                                      I see men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
Answer his emptiness. Caesar, thou has subdu'd
His judgment too.

(3.13.31-37)

And, shortly before his death, a characteristically jealous and wrathful Antony informs Eros that Cleopatra “has pack'd cards with Caesar's, and false-play'd my glory / Unto an enemy's triumph” (4.14.18-20).

II

Yet Antony has willfully chosen his own bad fortune by allying himself with Cleopatra, who hooks him with love as though he were a game fish and even changes his personality from that of an honest soldier to that of someone much like herself. Once addicted to her, Antony becomes as false to others as Cleopatra is to him and a compulsive liar. When Caesar offers him the hand of his sister Octavia in marriage in order to forge a family bond between them, Antony quickly disclaims Cleopatra as an impediment: “May I never / (To this good purpose, that so fairly shows) / Dream of impediment!” (2.2.143-45). Next he promises Octavia to reform himself: “My Octavia, / Read not my blemishes in the world's report. / I have not kept my square, but that to come / Shall be done by the rule”(2.3.4-7).³⁷ Then in 3.2 he once again swears to Caesar that he will cherish Octavia, but Enobarbus knows better:

He will to his Egyptian dish again: then shall the sighs of Octavia blow the fire up in Caesar, and (as I said before) that which is the strength of their amity shall prove the immediate author of their variance. Antony will use his affection where it is; he married but his occasion here.

(2.6.125-31)

A true addiction is, of course, a passionate affair of the heart that is almost impossible to resist, although Pompey wisely observes, just before he himself falls off Fortune's wheel, that “I know not / What counts harsh Fortune casts upon my face, / But in my bosom shall she never come, / To make my heart her vassal” (2.6.53-56).

Antony, in contrast, allows Cleopatra to take any liberties with him that she desires. She boasts that “Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed, / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword Philippan” (2.5.21-23). This allusion to the affair between Hercules and Omphale draws upon a popular Renaissance satirical topos to signify the emasculation of a military hero by love. When Lukas Cranach the Elder painted a version of the story in 1537, for example, he mischievously included two dead birds in the upper left corner of the panel to represent the sexual orgasms of the lovers. This oil painting … is actually an emblem, since Cranach included a Latin epigram over the head of the bearded Hercules, who is now dressed comically as a woman by Omphale and her ladies:

HERCULEIS manibus dant Lydae pensa puellae
Imperium dominae fert deus ille suae.
Sic capit ingentis animos damnosa voluptas
Fortiaque enervat pectora mollis amor.
(The Lydian girls give tasks to the hands of Hercules;
He submits to the rule of his mistresses.
Thus ruinous sensuality enslaves the will of the great one,
And passion weakens the strong heart by its effeminacy.)(38)

The same topos appears in Henry Peacham's English emblem book Minerva Britanna (1612) with a woodcut depicting Hercules dressed as a woman and spinning thread …. According to the epigram,

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.
That all his conquests wonne him not such Fame,
For which as god, the world did him adore,
As Loues affection, did disgrace and shame
His virtues partes. How many are there more,
          Who hauing Honor, and a worthy name,
          By actions base, and lewdnes loose the same.(39)

Yet at another time in his life, Hercules heroically chose virtue over pleasure and became a demigod.

In contrast to his ancestor and patron deity Hercules, Mark Antony, as a number of critics have remarked,⁴⁰ chooses Voluptas over Virtue, and he is quite aware of the dangers implicit in his choice. As early as act 1, scene 2, he admits that “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage” (lines 116-17). When Antony is unable to free himself from the excitement of “chance and hazard” (3.7.47), however, the demigod Hercules ascends mysteriously to the sound of music and leaves him to his self-chosen catastrophe. Although in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, another more powerful god—Jupiter—descends to save a hero who has reformed, in Antony and Cleopatra Fortuna so completely overcomes the hero's reason that he willingly sacrifices himself upon her altar, running to his death like a bridegroom to his marriage bed, as he himself proclaims, and his patron god abandons him.

In any case, the wise and always diplomatic Octavia, an excellent lady (who is maligned in the play only by a messenger in mortal terror of Cleopatra), might well have saved Antony if he had remained with her. As Danby observes, “Octavia is the opposite of Cleopatra as Antony is the opposite of Caesar.”⁴¹ She seems to play the role of Wisdom or Sapientia in antithesis to Cleopatra's apparent miming of Fortuna, and Thidias comments in act 3 that, “Wisdom and fortune combating together, / If that the former dare but what it can, / No chance may shake it” (13.79-81). Moreover, as Boethius discovered in prison, Lady Philosophy alone prepares men and women to overcome Fortune by teaching them through wisdom to control their passions. But Antony tries only half-heartedly to love his wife. Octavia, in turn, is given no specific attributes of Sapientia by the playwright, except the evidence of her calm, thoughtful behavior and the ironic praise of Maecenas: “If beauty, wisdom, modesty, can settle / the heart of Antony, Octavia is / A blessed lottery to him”(2.2.240-43).

Nonetheless, when the Egyptian Soothsayer, a representative of Fortuna, informs Antony that in politics Caesar has more “natural luck” than he does and will beat him at every game in Rome, Antony agrees. He then decides to return immediately to his exotic banquet of the senses in Egypt:

                                                                                The very dice obey him,
And in our sports my better cunning faints
Under his chance. If we draw lots, he speeds;
His cocks do win the battle still of mine,
When it is all to nought; and his quails ever
Beat mine, inhoop'd at odds. I will to Egypt;
And though I make this marriage for my peace,
I' th' East my pleasure lies.

(2.3.34-41)

And back he goes posthaste to Cleopatra-Fortuna, the source of all his physical and psychological pleasures.

The thematic significance for a Renaissance audience of Antony's decision to leave Octavia behind in Rome can perhaps best be understood by examining emblem 51 in the 1593 Emblematum Liber by Jacob Boissard. … Under the motto “Expers Fortvna est Sapientia” (Wisdom has no part in Fortune”), we see Sapientia reading a book on dry land, accompanied by all her traditional attributes (from the owl to an armillary sphere), while a nude Fortuna sails heedlessly on down the river with her wine jars and her treasure chest aboard. According to the epigram,

Fortuna dubia haud vehitur sapientia cymba;
          Nec vanis fulta est indiga divitiis.
Sed cura vigili et studio solerte parata,
          In varia rerum cognitione seder.
(Wisdom by no means sails in doubtful fortune's boat;
          Nor does it need the support of vain riches.
But prepared by watchful care and skillful devotion,
          It stands firm in the knowledge of the mutability of things.)(42)

Perhaps better known to students of English drama is the emblematic title page of Robert Record's The Castle of Knowledge also depicting the fundamental opposition between Sapientia and Fortuna. … On the left of a central castle, the figure of Urania (Heavenly Wisdom), holding “The Sphere of Destiny” (an armillary sphere symbolizing Divine Providence) and a pair of compasses (human rationality), stands under the sun of reason on a cube representing stability. On the right hand side of the picture, blind Fortune teeters on her unstable sphere, while holding the bridle of Nemesis in her left hand and the Wheel of Fortune—“whose ruler is ignorance”—in her right hand. The irrational moon shines down upon her. According to the verse,

Though spitefull Fortune turned her wheele
          To staye the Sphere of Vranye,
Yet doth this Sphere resist that wheele,
          And fleeyth all fortunes villanye.
Though earthe do honor Fortunes balle,
          And bytells blynde hyr wheele aduaunce,
The heauens to fortuen are not thralle,
          These Spheres surmount al fortunes chance.(43)

Part of Antony's bad fortune is that Gluttony and riotous sexuality have already so marred his reason that he is now fortune's fool, despite such native virtues as courage and magnaminity. We should remember, after all, that in early modern England, passionate love itself was considered to be a type of insanity by writers such as Robert Burton. Unwilling to bridle his passions, Antony is ready to be transformed into a beast by act 4 and to be sacrificed to the goddess he has chosen to serve.

In 2.5, Cleopatra compares Antony to a fish (an ancient symbol of the male sex organ), then admits that she is a whore by profession, or one of those women “that trade in love” (2.5.2) and are the bait of pleasure for unwary men (Adelman, 60). She thus requires mood music as food to accompany her sport while fishing for her lover.

Give me mine angle, we'll to th' river; there,
My music playing far off, I 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! y' are caught.

(2.5.10-15)

According to Paul F. Watson, fishing and hunting imagery of this sort derives from Ovid's The Art of Love 1:43-50, and when

Boccaccio concludes his influential epic the Teseida, he slyly sings of the amorous font where only rarely does one become a good fisherman with profit. Explaining that the vagina is the font, the gloss continues: “Because of too much fishing in the amorous font there are those who get skinned by it.”⁴⁴

The sexual implications of fish continued to be playfully used by artists throughout the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century in Dutch genre painting, as we can see by the London National Gallery's “A Woman with a Fish Pedlar in a Kitchen” … painted in 1713 by Willem van Mieris. Here the rabbits are traditional fertility symbols; the fish are allusions to the phallus; the dead birds⁴⁵ are as salacious in meaning as the hunting cat at the bottom of the painting; and the unlikely bas relief beneath the shop window depicting the sea nymph Galatea about to mount a lusty dolphin, which has been bridled by amorini for her Triumph, has nothing whatsoever to do with chastity. Even the wind instruments played by the tritons and a putto on the bas relief are symbolic of sensory pleasures.⁴⁶

Clifford Davidson notes that a fish is also associated with idleness or the figure of Sloth in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia. He quotes from Ripa that “Fish, it was believed, when touched by a net or by hands become so stupified that they cannot escape. Idleness affects the idle in the same way; they cannot do anything.”⁴⁷

When Cleopatra asks Enobarbus if she is to blame for losing the battle at sea, Enobarbus sensibly replies, “Antony only, that would make his will / Lord of his Reason” (3.13.2-4), for as Aristotle teaches, only our rationality makes us different from the animals. Even Antony himself finally becomes aware of his descent into bestiality by the third act when he rails at Cleopatra, condemns Thidias to be beaten, and wishes “that I were / Upon the hill of Basan, to outroar / The horned herd!” (3.13.126-28). The Riverside Shakespeare annotates this line (deriving from Psalm 22) as a reference to Antony's cuckolding by Cleopatra, but no mistress can cuckold her lover. Only a lawful wife like Octavia can give her husband horns in the eyes of society. On the other hand, Antony is decidedly bullish or beastly at this moment in the play, roaring with impotent fury and jealousy, which indicates that he is under the control of bestial passions. Later in Shakespeare's tragedy, Cleopatra sees Antony as a wild bird or game animal to be snared. As his true captor, she rather sarcastically greets him after battle: “Lord of lords! / O infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from / The world's great snare uncaught?” (4.8.16-18). Antony is by now sufficiently dehumanized to become a sacrificial offering to the goddess Fortuna whom he worships so passionately.

As John Holloway has argued, all of Shakespeare's major tragedies include an artistically embedded human sacrifice to some deity or other:

the tragic protagonist in these plays is one who has moved from a position at the centre of well-ordered human life, to a position in which he is alien to that, in essence opposed to it, allied to what is enemy to it. Parallel with this, the protagonist passes through an ordeal of suffering which brings him from prosperity to death, but it is not death seen merely as one of the fortuitous hazards of life; it is seen from the start as the proper, and over the course of time as becoming almost the chosen, end of life lived as the protagonist has lived it.⁴⁸

In comparison to Shakespeare's Antony, Sophocles' tragic hero Oedipus is described by the Chorus as a hunted animal hiding away in forests and caves from his pursuers but ultimately destined to become a human sacrifice to Dionysus or Bacchus, the Greek god of irrationality, whose ritual dance Antony leads aboard Pompey's ship in 2.7, and whose name he often assumed while drinking.

Renaissance art also takes note of man's descent to the bestial through the machinations of Fortuna. For example, Achille Bocchi has an interesting emblem on Fortuna's deliberate transformation into a beast or monster of another famous warrior, Alexander the Great. The motto of symbol 66 reads “Bellva fit caesae statvit qvi credere sorti” (“He becomes a beast who has decided to trust to blind fate”). The engraving depicts a winged Fortuna with her sail filled with wind. … As she steps out of her motorized scallop shell (associating her with Venus), Fortuna replaces the kneeling Alexander's helmeted but severed head with the tripartite head of a monster. Under a second motto stating “Qvam stvlta sit svperbia” (“How Foolish is Pride”), the epigram reads

Caeca vni Fortuna sibi quos credere adegit,
Magna ex parte auidos decorus magis atque capaces
Efficit, hinc olim iussit se, non modo passus
Dicier Aemathius ivvenis magno Ioue natum.
Dumque cupit tali gestorum extendere famam
Nomine: corrumpit potius, six protinus ipsi
Fortunae totum quise permiserit vltro,
Vero hominis regno spoliat se prorsus, et ingens
Bellua fit capitum multorum, luminis expers.

(Those whom she has impelled to trust to her alone, blind Fortune for the most part makes more greedy for honor than they have a right to: hence in olden times she ordered herself; not only the Macedonian youth born from great Jove suffered. When he desired to extend the fame of his deeds under her name she destroyed him instead: That is what happens to one who continually entrusts himself to Fortune of his own accord. Truthfully in the realm of man she ruins him utterly, and he becomes a many-headed monster, deprived of light.)⁴⁹

The point here is the same as that in Francisco Goya's famous etching of a nightmare: “Los Caprichos” or “The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.” Having failed to control his animal passions through his reason, Antony, like Alexander, finally descends to the level of a beast.

When Antony believes in act 4, scene 14, that he has lost the war and that Cleopatra has committed suicide in order to avoid capture by the Romans, he tries to kill himself by running on his sword, as Brutus had done successfully before him in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We should note here that emblem 44 … in the 1534 edition of Andrea Alciati's Emblemata suggests that suicide is always in the cards for the worshippers of Fortune. Alciati's inscriptio introduces the topos as “Fortuna virtutem superans” (“Fortune overcoming virtue”). The pictura shows Brutus running on his sword, while the subscriptio reads as follows:

After he was overcome by Octavian's army, he saw
          Pharsalia flowing with the blood of citizens.
Just as he was about to unsheathe his sword
          against his dying heart,
Brutus with audacious mouth
          uttered these words:
Miserable Virtue, caring only for words,
why do you follow Fortune as the
          mistress in events?(50)

Geffrey Whitney's emblem 70 is an adaptation of the same notion. However, Brutus at least achieves his goal of being a Roman who vanquishes himself, while Antony—also overcome by Fortuna—botches even his own suicide. He is then carried mortally wounded to Cleopatra's mausoleum, a symbolic stronghold that she fears to leave since she is determined not to be taken prisoner by Octavius. “Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes / And still conclusion, shall acquire no honor / Demuring upon me” (4.15.27-29), she assures the dying Antony.

During the incredible stage emblem that follows, the Egyptian queen and her women draw Antony—like a huge fish—up to the second level of the monument. In fact, a fish net might be the most appropriate means for achieving this feat onstage,⁵¹ since Cleopatra speaks irreverently of her final taking of Antony as a sporting event: “Here's sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!” (4.15.32). Another Alciati emblem (number 75 in the 1621 edition) describes something rather like this grotesque situation. Under the motto “In amatores meretricum” (“On lovers of harlots”), the woodcut depicts a fisherman wearing a female goatskin disguise and pulling ashore a large bream he has just netted. … We should remember, of course, that goatskins were associated both with sexuality and with Greek tragedy itself. According to Alciati's subscriptio in translation,

The fisherman, having donned the skin of a shaggy she-goat, has added a pair of horns to his own head;
and standing on the edge of the shore he deceives the amorous bream, whose passion for the snub-nosed flock [of goats] drives it into the nets.
The she-goat brings to mind the harlot; the bream resembles the lover, who, poor wretch, caught by an indecent love, perishes.(52)

Antony, caught helplessly in two-faced Fortune's net, also perishes like the amorous bream. But Cleopatra then reminds the audience that the winning general, Octavius Caesar, is no better than the man he has defeated in battle with the help of Fortuna: “'Tis paltry to be Caesar; / Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave, / A minister of her will” (5.2.2-4). However, a few minutes later, she ironically orders Proculeius to “tell him / I am his fortune's vassal, and I send him / The greatness he has got” (5.2.27-29).

In terms of sacred history, the Roman goddess Fortuna is about to give way to the rule of Divine Providence at this point in political history. Octavius Caesar announces that “The time of universal peace is near” (4.6.4.), an allusion to the Augustan peace or the pax romana necessary for Christ's Nativity to occur in Bethlehem. From then on the notion of Fortune tends to be transformed philosophically into the notion of Providence as the ruler of human lives. Referring to this important theological change, a few copies of Whitney's 1586 Choice of Emblemes contain the emblem “Fato, non fortuna” (“Fate, not fortune”), which has the following verse:

The varying dame, that turnes the tottering wheele,
To whome the worlde hathe longe ascribed power,
To lifte men vp, where they all pleasures feele,
To throwe them doune, where all their sweete is sower:
Whose worshippes longe in euerie coaste weare rife,
Euen as the guide, and goddesse of this life.
Yet here, behoulde her diêtie is dash'de,
And shee subdu'de, and captiue vnto man:
And nowe, all those that seru'd her bee abash'de;
And doe confesse that FORTVNE nothinge can:
But onelie GOD defendes the mighties seates:
And houldes them vp, in spite of Enuies threates.(53)

Whitney's woodcut … shows a courtier or lover with his left hand displaying the laurel branch of victory and his right hand grasping the hand of God, who stabilizes him at the top of the wheel. The courtier's feet rest on the back of a fallen blind Fortune, who is defeated at last by human faith in the superior power of the Judeo-Christian deity. Fortune's wheel can turn no more, or so certain Protestant theologians believed. As Kiefer explains, “Although most Christians tolerated Fortune as a somewhat ambiguous presence within the culture of the late Middle Ages, thinkers of the Protestant Reformation generally did not. In their attitude they resemble the Church Father who so often inspires their writings—Augustine. And, like him, they adopt an antagonistic attitude toward Fortune” (16-17). By having Octavius mention the approaching pax romana, Shakespeare seems to agree in this play that Divine Providence will soon become the new ruler of the world after the military defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by the Romans.

III

The entire last act of the tragedy is now given over to Cleopatra's attempts to deify her dead lover and herself, with rather ambiguous results. Her poetic eulogy of the dead Antony in the famous dream speech beginning “His face was as the heav'ns” (5.2.79) is, of course, typical of the hyperbole of tragic endings in the theater. There is also very probably a blasphemous allusion by the Egyptian queen here to the angel of the Book of Revelation as having been her lover.⁵⁴ Yet the audience knows, after all, that Antony was no heavenly angel, and Dolabella quickly assures Cleopatra that no such wondrous human ever existed. Nevertheless, Helen Morris has shown real likenesses between the eulogy and Albrecht Dürer's illustration for Revelation 10:1-6,⁵⁵ with interesting implications for the underlying Christian meaning of the tragedy. Most commentators believe, however, that Cleopatra is comparing her victim here (“His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear'd arm / Crested the world”) to the Colossus of Rhodes, which as a lost monument of antiquity had become a symbol for the Renaissance of Time's decay of monuments (we might call it today the “Ozymandias” topos) in contrast to the art of literature, which was supposed to live on in human memory. In fact, Shakespeare himself made use of this topos in Sonnet 55, where he claims that “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powr'ful rhyme.” The poet's suggestion that, unlike poetry, marble itself is inconstant ought to be kept in mind when we later consider arguments that Cleopatra is the artistic creator of her own funeral monument through which she achieves immortality.

Peacham's emblem on the topos illustrates the Colossus bestriding the harbor but also holding what Antony clearly lacks: a book and the lamp of knowledge. … According to the verse,

The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,
COLOSSO'S statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leaue they any little memorie,
          The Passenger may warned be to say,
          They had their being here, another day.
But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweete to runne,
Preserued by the liuing Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
          Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
          Ere HOMER die, thou shalt be fired first.(56)

Ironically, Cleopatra's horror of being played hereafter onstage by a squeaking boy actor is evidently mistaken. The many poetic dramatizations of Antony and Cleopatra will actually bring the couple far more fame in the future than either her exaggerated comparison of Antony to an angelic Colossus or her own now vanished funeral monument.

For her death scene, Cleopatra assumes the role and one of the costumes [Vincenzo Cartari depicts two] of the moon goddess Isis-Fortuna … whose earthly representative she most certainly is as queen of Egypt. According to Thomas Allan Brady, in antiquity Isisi was both a civic deity and the goddess worshipped by an important hellenistic mystery cult:

Not only are the statues and monuments of her worship found in all parts of the Roman Empire and her symbols quite commonly used on rings, gems, pins, and other jewelry, but many grave reliefs and tombs show representations of her symbols, particularly the sistrum and the situla. The deceased, if a woman, was frequently portrayed on the funeral monument in the costume characteristic of the deity.⁵⁷

Thus John Bowers's argument that Cleopatra consciously attempts by her staged death to transform herself into a decorative funerary statue of marble within her own carefully designed memorial monument is historically very probable. On the Jacobean stage, the monument itself “would have been anachronistically transposed into the sort of native monument whose examples crowded the cathedrals and adorned almost every parish church in England. These were the ornate chantry-chapels which were erected around the actual tombs during the period following the first outbreak of the plague in the fourteenth century.”⁵⁸ Such chantry-chapels were fortified and could provide sanctuary. Some even had two stories, such as the famous tomb-chapel of Henry V (ca. 1440) that “ushered in a new style by adding a second story as a gallery front.”⁵⁹

It seems, moreover, that there were actually two versions of the goddess Isis during the Roman period—the terrestrial and the celestial—as was also true of Venus in Platonic philosophy. Indeed Celestial Isis was discovered by Lucius in The Golden Ass by Apuleius to be stronger than ordinary Fortune, “whose threads she unravels.”⁶⁰ The priest who initiates Lucius, after he has been transformed from an ass back into a man, tells him

to consider himself as rescued from the sway of Fortuna, that supposedly all-powerful goddess; or, in an alternative formulation of the priest, as having passed from the blind Fortuna into the protection of a Fortuna who is not only herself seeing but the source of light and vision (= knowledge?) for the other divinities.

(Solmsen, 95)

As far as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is concerned, however, the audience will have to decide for itself whether or not to believe in the validity of Cleopatra's ceremonial transformation from Terrestrial Isis (earth and water) into Celestial Isis (fire and air). Only the latter could provide a foolish and lascivious Antony with immortality.

It so happens that Bocchi published an interesting emblem flattering Alexander Farnese on just such an Isis. It is symbol 63 entitled “The Famous Fortune of Alexander Farnese the Lesser (but also the Greatest).” The picture actually illustrates two Fortunas dressed as Roman matrons and holding both the cornucopia and the rudder. … The verse reads in translation,

What goddess? Fortune the preserver she is, best born of the highest father, the world has nothing more certain. That structure [astrifer] set on top of her head is the sign of divine power. Why is her hair collected in a roll around her head? Obviously he who is discerning will capture this by his own judgment. As measure and modesty set bounds to idle luxury, so here is an image of a maiden with an ominous thread. With forceful aspect and sharp features, not submissive nor terrible, but rather reverend, propitious to the good, ferocious to the bad, upright, severe, chaste, grave, truthful, intense, great, potent. Surveying all mortal things with her eyes, she rules over land by foot and over sea by her rudder. For she directs generals in war and statesmen in peace. In her presence, no power can be lacking. She is the support of kingdoms, the knowledge of divine law; you call her august, Eunomia, Nemesis. She herself is the rich abundance of the wealthy: see how she displays the fruitful horn with her nearer hand. She gives peace and joy to the soul after the hard struggles of life, and she saves the faithful from eternal death. And finally in the magnanimous heroic Farnese springs up this thrice-great virtue, glory, and justice.⁶¹

Celestial Isis does insist, on the other hand, that “measure and modesty” should “set bounds to idle luxury,” and neither Antony nor the human Cleopatra has demonstrated either measure or modesty in Shakespeare's tragedy.

The Egyptian queen does actually claim to renounce the changing moon of Terrestrial Fortuna, when she states that “now from head to foot / I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine” (5.2.240-41). Is this merely wishful thinking on her part? In any case, Shakespeare seems to imply here for some scholars, including Adelman (155), that with her demise, Cleopatra is in fact metamorphosed into a marble statue of the goddess Isis. Marilyn Williamson states that in the final scene of the play “Cleopatra rises to the occasion: as a creature of the imagination, she sees Caesar's intention [to include her in his triumph] as a threat to the very center of her existence, and she creates in the ritual of her suicide her answering artistic triumph, one that will impress upon human memory her interpretation of the story.”⁶² Anne Barton believes that the transformation will be victorious since Cleopatra accomplishes it “by creating a tableau, still and contemplative in living art, which transfigures and quiets the events in which it was immanent.”⁶³ But Shakespeare himself never tells us in the tragedies what happens to his characters after their deaths, since this is the realm of the deity. At the very least we can say that a work of art in marble (an inconstant material itself, as we have seen), Cleopatra will apparently forever symbolize her variable and contrary nature in human memory rather than continuing to act out inconstancy on the stage of the world. She becomes in the recollected image of her suicide, a death “Which shackles accidents and bolts up change” (5.2.6), an artistic icon of that which she has always merely imitated—the goddess Isis-Fortuna in one of her two forms.

Of considerable historical interest in the ongoing Cleopatra controversy is the fact that a gifted female poet of the English Renaissance, Aemilia Lanyer, stated what seems to be the typical seventeenth-century Christian woman's understanding of Cleopatra in her poem Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (pub. 1611). Contrasting the Egyptian queen's sensual love with the love for Christ felt by her own patroness, the Countess of Cumberland, Lanyer wrote the following verses:

Great Cleopatra's loue to Anthony,
Can no way be compared vnto thine;
Shee left her Loue in his extremitie,
When greatest need should cause her to combine
Her force with his, to get the Victory:
Her Loue was earthly, and thy Loue Diuine;
          Her Loue was onely to support her pride,
          Humilitie thy Loue and Thee doth guide.
That glorious part of Death, which last shee plai'd,
T'appease the ghost of her deceased Loue,
Had neuer needed, if shee could haue stai'd
When his extreames made triall, and did proue
Her leaden loue vnconstant, and afraid:
Their wicked warres the wrath of God might moue
          To take reuenge for chast Octavia's wrongs,
          Because shee enjoyes what vnto her belongs.
No Cleopatra, though thou wert as faire
As any Creature in Antonius eyes;
Yea though thou wert as rich, as wise, as rare,
As any Pen could write, or Wit deuise:
Yet with this Lady canst thou not compare,
Whose inward virtues all thy worth denies;
          Yet thou a black Egyptian do'st appeare:
          Thou false, shee true; and to her Loue more deere.(64)

Lanyer states quite clearly that the betrayal of one's love was unacceptable behavior to women at this time in England, and I doubt that this attitude toward betrayal has changed since then.

In contrast to such a negative view toward the Egyptian queen, Chaucer describes Cleopatra as a good woman willing to sacrifice her body to the worms in order to redeem her Antony,⁶⁵ while the Renaissance emblematist Theodore de Bry admiringly portrays her death as heroic in a verse interpreting his fine engraving of “Cleopatra the Egyptian” …

Actias Ausonias fugit Cleopatra Catenas,
          Aspide somnifera brachia moras gerens.
Nec tulit Oenotrii Victoris vincla superbi,
          Sic vmbram exhorret mens generosa suam.
[Cleopatra fled the chains of the Italian of Actium,
Bearing on her arms the asp's deadly bite.
Nor did she carry the bonds of the proud Roman victor,
So greatly did her noble spirit abhor his shadow.](66)

Nevertheless, I see neither of these elements in Shakespeare's version of the story. For him, Cleopatra's “courage” consists of finding an easy and painless way to die and by taking a macabre “joy o' th' worm” (5.2.289) before our eyes. Not only does her servant Iras die more bravely before her, but after the queen's death, Charmian must straighten Cleopatra's royal crown, which has ludicrously fallen awry. In addition, the bad fortune earlier predicted by the Soothsayer in 1.2 for Charmian comes true indeed, despite all her services to Cleopatra as Terrestrial Isis and her fervent prayers to Celestial Isis.

Although Cleopatra does indeed consciously attempt by her staged death to transform herself into a decorative funerary statue of marble within her own memorial, Bowers observes that Octavius frustrates the queen's artistic design for her mausoleum by ordering soldiers “to take up her bed, and bear her women from the monument” (5.2.354-55) to another place where Cleopatra will lie next to her Antony (Bowers, 291). Ironically, no one today knows where to find the tomb of Mark Antony and the seductive mistress of both his good and bad fortunes.

In conclusion, we must return once more to the Thomas Combe emblem of Fortuna at the beginning of this essay. In it, like Antony and Cleopatra, the blind goddess and her blind worshipper both fall into a ditch … Although we cannot be sure that Shakespeare knew this particular emblem, we may be confident that he was very familiar with Matthew 15:14 on the blind leading the blind into a ditch, a biblical passage to which he apparently alludes twice in the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Apart from Antony, Cleopatra's most articulate admirer in the play is Enobarbus, who follows Antony's shifting fortunes almost to the end. When this soldier's final desertion is surprisingly rewarded by Antony's generosity, Enobarbus asks in contrition, “I fight against thee? No, I will go seek / Some ditch wherein to die” (4.6.36-37; my emphasis). Later Cleopatra threatens to starve herself to death before she will allow Octavius to exhibit her in his Roman triumph: “Rather a ditch in Egypt / Be gentle grave unto me” (5.2.57-58; my emphasis). One thing is certain: Terrestrial Fortuna, when unopposed by Wisdom, traditionally leads all her adoring worshippers to tragic defeat and death in the end … that is, “to the very heart of loss.”⁶⁷

Notes

1. See Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 113-21.

2. See Donna B. Hamilton, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Tradition of Noble Lovers,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 245-51.

3. See J. Leeds Barroll, “Antony and Pleasure,” Journal of English and German Philology 57 (1958): 709-20.

4. Feminists tend to see the Egyptian queen as a woman of power, who is courageous enough to choose her own lovers and to dominate them and destiny through her art. To cite just a few examples, see Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 209-47; Carol Thomas Neely, who sees Cleopatra as an artist in Broken Nuptials (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 136-65; Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 258-63, where the author argues that by “Allowing heroic Cleopatra to take control of her own representation, Shakespeare allies himself with her energies of difference rather than with political hegemony and the literary tradition that justified that hegemony” (263); and more recently, Evelyn Gajowski, “Antony and Cleopatra: Female Subjectivity and Orientalism” in The Art of Loving (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 86-119. Gajowski sees Cleopatra as partly “a manifestation of a prepatriarchal goddess” associated with snakes (119), although I would add that the later male association of such a goddess with the vice Luxury during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance must also be taken into consideration.

5. See J. Leeds Barroll, “Enobarbus' Description of Cleopatra,” Texas University Studies in English 37 (1958): 61-78, and Clifford Davidson, “Antony and Cleopatra: Circe, Venus, and the Whore of Babylon,” in Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches, ed. Harry R. Garvin (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 31-55.

6. Plutarch as mythographer conflated the goddesses Venus and Isis in his famous study of Isis and Osiris.

7. See “Cleopatra,” 687-99 and “Transcendent Love,” 641-47, in Antony and Cleopatra: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack et al. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990).

8. (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). See also Cleopatra, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1990); Ernle Bradford, Cleopatra (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Hans Volkmann, Cleopatra: A Study in Politics and Propaganda, trans. T. J. Cadoux (London: Elek Books, 1958); and Ivor Brown, Dark Ladies (London: Collins, 1957).

9. See Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 11; cited hereafter in parentheses in text.

10. Plutarch claims that Antony was “to the most parte of men, cruell and extreame. For he robbed noble men and gentle men of their goods, to geve it unto vile flatterers.” See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 5:272.

11. All quotations from Antony and Cleopatra are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) and are cited hereafter in parentheses in text.

12. Barroll notes that Antony is the only Shakespearean tragic hero who inspires great love in others. See Shakespearean Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 272. On the ambiguities of Antony, see also the same author's “Shakespeare and the art of character: a study of Anthony,” Shakespeare Studies 5 (1969): 159-235.

13. See Minoru Fujita, Pageantry and Spectacle in Shakespeare (Tokyo: The Renaissance Institute, Sophia University, 1982), 111-31.

14. See Barroll, “Pleasure,” 712, and Frank Kermode, “The Banquet of Sense,” in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 98-99 n.20.

15. See Lloyd, “Antony and the Game of Chance,” Journal of English and German Philology 61 (1962): 548-54.

16. See Hallett, “Change, Fortune, and Time: Aspects of the Sublunar World in Antony and Cleopatra,” Journal of English and German Philology 75 (1976): 87. Hallett also observes that “Shakespeare has deliberately drawn for us a constantly shifting world, a world that contains no fixed star by which wandering barks can take their bearings. Impermanence, he stresses, is found on all levels—the natural, the social, the personal. It permeates existence. And for Antony and Cleopatra, there is nothing beyond” (78).

17. On the other hand, I have argued elsewhere that Andrea Alciati, father of the emblem book, was particularly interested in calling our attention to the inner meaning of texts and that his emblems are, therefore, not always easy to interpret. See my “Alciati's Two Venuses as Letter and Spirit of the Law” in Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition: Essays in Honor of Virginia Woods Callahan, ed. Peter M. Daly (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 95-125.

18. See Williamson, “Fortune in Antony and Cleopatra,” Journal of English and German Philology 67 (1968): 426-27; cited hereafter in parentheses in text. For other essays on Fortune in the play, see also Raymond Chapman, “The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare's Historical Plays,” Review of English Studies n.s. 1 (1950): 2; Lily B. Campbell, “The Mirrours of Fortune,” Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1930; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), 3-10; Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 203-4; and Charles A. Hallett, “Change, Fortune, and Time: Aspects of the Sublunar World in Antony and Cleopatra,” Journal of English and German Philology 75 (1976): 75-89.

19. See Peter M. Daly, “The Case for the 1593 Edition of Thomas Combe's Theater of Fine Devices,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 255-57.

20. See Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London: Richard Field, 1593 and 1614), sig. B8.

21. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1962), bk. 2, prose 1.

22. See Frederick Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1983), 206-9. I am much indebted to this fine study.

23. See William S. Hecksher, “The Anadyomene in the Medieval Tradition (Pelagia—Cleopatra—Aphrodite): A Prelude to Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus’,” in Art and Literature: Studies in Relationship, ed. Egon Verheyen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 138-45.

24. See Davidson, “Antony and Cleopatra,” 35.

25. On the iconography of swallows, see Peter M. Daly, “Of Macbeth, Martlets and other ‘Fowles of Heuen’,” Mosaic 12 (Fall 1978): 23-46.

26. See Clifford Davidson, “Timon of Athens: The Iconography of False Friendship,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (Summer 1980): 195. Davidson quotes the Renaissance proverb “Swallows, like false friends, fly away upon the approach of winter” (Tilley S1026).

27. De Bry, Emblemata Nobilitatis (Frankfurt: Theodore deBry, 1592), 23.

28. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 156. In contrast to Machiavelli, whom he influenced, Marsilio Ficino follows Plato in arguing that Fortune may be controlled through the pilot's human skill when his ship is caught in a tempestas, a word synonymous with fortuna during the Renaissance. See Edgar Wind, “Platonic Tyranny and the Renaissance Fortuna: On Ficino's Reading of Laws IV, 709A-712A,” in Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, 2 vol., ed. Millard Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1961) 1:491. Wind adds that “Plato admits that ‘fortuna cannot be forced. Any attempt to do so would be a sign of hubris, an insult to the inscrutable wisdom of the God who in the end adjusts our chances to our skill. Hence the truly skilful pilot never relinquishes his sense of the ominous. His patience in waiting for the right kind of storm is as important as his ability to ride it” (496).

29. See John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 143.

30. For a commentary on the etching, see H. Diane Russell, Eva/Ave: Woman in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 220. I discovered many of my illustrations of Fortuna in this fine catalogue of a National Gallery exhibit.

31. See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 43 and fig. 12. Donna Hamilton departs from orthodox new historicist readings of the later plays to make a convincing case that Shakespeare was criticizing the pretensions of King James, while pretending to flatter him, in her study Virgil and “The Tempest”: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), ix-xii; as do I, using the iconographic approach, in Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's “Cymbeline”: An Iconographic Reconstruction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992). See especially “Political Iconography and Irony,” 21-25, and “The Iconography of Primitivism in Cymbeline,” 136-67.

32. Bocchi, Symbolarum … Libri Quinque (Bologna, 1555), bk. 1, p. 21. English translation by Roger T. Simonds.

33. See Michael A. Jacobsen and Vivian Jean Rogers-Price, “The Dolphin in Renaissance Art,” Studies in Iconography 9 (1983): 32-33, 37-39. See also Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (The Huntington Library, 1983), 204.

34. For an interesting discussion of the Venus and Mars theme, see Adelman, The Common Liar (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 78-101. However, Adelman does not notice Shakespeare's curious inversion of the theme.

35. Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trübner, 1870), 262.

36. See All's Well That Ends Well—“Why, your dolphin is not lustier” (2.3.26), a comment by Lafew. This is one in malo meaning of the dolphin; however, in bono the animal symbolizes salvation because of its association with Arion and haste or swiftness. In Rome, according to Ad de Vries, dolphins were connected with “the turning-points at each end of the low wall of the circus, around which the chariots had to turn in the races.” These turning points were marked by “metae” or “a group of conical pillars with dolphins on them,” where fortunes were told for ordinary women. See de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam and London: North-Holland, 1974), 142-43. The word may also refer to “dauphin” in Shakespeare's works, but that meaning is not possible in Antony and Cleopatra.

37. Barroll indicates that the same metaphor appears in George Wither's Collection of Emblemes (1635), where “we are informed that the square is law and that the bridle is discipline.” See “Antony and Pleasure,” 719.

38. Translation by Roger T. Simonds. See my essay “The Herculean Lover in the Emblems of Cranach and Vaenius,” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis, ed. Alexander Dalzell et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991), 697-710.

39. See Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London: 1612), 95.

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

41. See Danby, Poets, 142.

42. Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblematum Liber (Frankfurt: 1593), 103.

43. Robert Record, The Castle of Knowledge (London: 1556), title page.

44. See Watson, The Garden of Love in Tuscan Art of the Early Renaissance (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1979), 95. I am indebted to Elizabeth Bassett Welles for calling this book to my attention.

45. For a discussion of the sexual implications of birds in Dutch genre painting, see E. de Jongh, “Erotica in Vogelperspectief,” Simiolus 3 (1968-69): 22-74.

46. See Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 48-56.

47. See Davidson, “Antony and Cleopatra: Circe, Venus, and the Whore of Babylon,” 34-35.

48. See Holloway, The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 143-44.

49. Bocchi, bk. 3, symbol 66. Translation by Virginia W. Callahan, to whom I am also indebted for the reference to Goya.

50. See Peter M. Daly, Virginia W. Callahan, and Simon Cuttler, ed., Andreas Alciatus: Index Emblematicus, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 1, emblem 44.

51. For a discussion of the difficulties in staging this scene, see the New Cambridge edition of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43-44, and the New Variorum Edition, ed. Marvin Spevack, 785-87.

52. Daly et al., ed. 1, emblem 75.

53. Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden: Christopher Plantin, 1586), 109. The Folger Shakespeare Library copy (STC 25437.8) has this emblem.

54. See Ethel Seaton, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelation,” Review of English Studies 22 (1946): 219-24.

55. See Morris, “Shakespeare and Dürer's Apocalypse,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 258-61.

56. Peacham, Minerva Britanna, 161.

57. See “Isis,” The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2d ed (1970).

58. See Bowers, “‘I Am Marble-Constant’: Cleopatra's Monumental End,” Huntington Library Quarterly 46 (1983): 284.

59. Ibid.

60. See Friedrich Solmsen, Isis among the Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for Oberlin College, 1979), 94-95; hereafter cited in parentheses in text.

61. See Bocchi, cxxxvi-cxxxvii. English translation by Roger T. Simonds.

62. See Williamson, Infinite Variety: Antony and Cleopatra in Renaissance Drama and Earlier Tradition (Mystic, Conn.: Lawrence Verry, 1974), 210.

63. See Barton, “‘Nature's piece 'gainst fancy’: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra.” London: Bedford College, 1973), 20.

64. See Lanier 2, Women Writers' Project, Brown University (6-19-90), 170-71. I am indebted to Boyd Berry for this reference.

65. Although most critics believe Chaucer's story of Cleopatra to be ironic, see also V. A. Kolve, “From Cleopatra to Alceste: An Iconographic Study of The Legend of Good Women,” in Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry, ed. John P. Hermann and John J. Burke, Jr. (University: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 130-78.

66. De Bry, Emblemata Nobilitatis, 147. Translated by Roger T. Simonds.

67. The first section of this paper was presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference, April 1991, in New Orleans, and a version of the completed essay was read and discussed by the Colloquium on Women in the Renaissance on 30 January 1992, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. I am especially grateful to Leeds Barroll and Mihoko Suzuki for their interest in this essay and for their very useful suggestions.