SOURCE: Freeman, Donald C. “‘The rack dislimns’: Schema and Metaphorical Pattern in Antony and Cleopatra.” Poetics Today 20, no. 3 (fall 1999): 443-60.

[In the following essay, Freeman uses the theory of cognitive metaphor to evaluate the figurative language found in Antony and Cleopatra.]

Any approach to metaphor hoping to enhance centuries of scholarship on Shakespeare's dramatic language faces an onerous burden of proof, the more so when the play under discussion is Antony and Cleopatra. The play's lushness of figurative language has attracted hosts of both New Critics and traditional philologists. Many have commented on the play's vast compass—one made possible in large part by the cosmic imagery that Shakespeare so frequently employs.

The great German Shakespearean Wolfgang Clemen (1962 [1951]: 160), for example, remarked more than sixty years ago that Antony and Cleopatra summons “to our minds again and again the image of the wide ocean and of the immeasurably vast world.” At about the same time, Caroline Spurgeon (1935: 352) pointed out how the play “fills the imagination with the conception of beings so great that physical size is annihilated and the whole habitable globe shrinks in comparison with them.”

This commentary anticipated much of what has followed. Many of Clemen's and Spurgeon's successors have remarked on the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra's imagery to its grand physical, political, and spiritual landscapes, but only in the most general terms. Seeking to refocus our attention from the play's “verbal figure” to what he called “dramatic metaphor,” Maurice Charney (1961: 7) fails to specify what aspect of the play's figuration is thus constitutive of its form. T. A. McAlindon (1973: 187) describes the play's language as a “grandiose blend of mythology and hyperbole,” without explaining the components or consequences of that blend. G. Wilson Knight (1951: 289) notices Antony and Cleopatra's “massively spatialized technique” without the kind of detailed analysis that would show how the play's nonspatial entities come to be perceived in spatial terms.

Although readings of this sort can be incomplete or imprecise, I find them in many respects intuitively satisfying. In what follows, I start from these intuitions, seeking to articulate and ground them in a theory of metaphor that depends on a theory of mind. I shall argue that the cognitive approach to metaphor¹ provides analyses of figurative language that are sufficiently detailed and coherent so that the interpretations they yield can be assessed against competing interpretations. Further, I claim, motivated cognitive analyses of one skein of a literary artwork's figurative language generalize perspicuously to analyses of other figurative patterns in the same artwork or in other works by the same poet. Finally, following the argument sketched out in D. Freeman 1995, I will seek to demonstrate that the notion of metaphorical projection as a property of mind logically prior to properties of language enables the critic of poetic language to characterize within the cognitive framework not only figurative patterns in literary language, but analogous figurative patterns in other elements of the artwork as well.

This interrelatedness of metaphorical patterning in Antony and Cleopatra emerges when we examine the processes of metaphorical projection that constitute the play's figurative language. We begin with an account of the cognitive templates, the image and conceptual schemas constituting the source domains from which we metaphorically project elements and structure into abstract target domains, the entities that are metaphorized.

For Antony and Cleopatra, the key image schemas are, I shall argue, those of container, links, and path, which fuse variously with one another (for discussion of these schemas, see Johnson 1987: 113-27). Thus Antony's courage and passion, and later his grief, as we shall see, are figured in terms of liquids swelling within the container of his body; the link schema appears as marriage bonds and ties of loyalty; the path schema emerges as Antony describes how at the Battle of Actium he turned his ship to follow the fleeing Cleopatra instead of pressing the attack. And in what I regard as the play's climactic speech, as Antony reads in the changing clouds his utter dissolution, the container schema fuses with the key metaphorical projection Knowing is Seeing (for a detailed discussion, see Sweetser 1990: 37-40) to inscribe that dissolution in a metaphorical density and richness adumbrated at the play's very start and sustained until its final lines. We understand Antony as a grand failure because the container of his Romanness “dislimns”: it can no longer outline and define him even to himself. Conversely, we understand Cleopatra at her death as the transcendent queen of “immortal longings” because the container of her mortality can no longer restrain her: unlike Antony, she never melts, but sublimates from her very earthly flesh to ethereal fire and air.

The audience first hears of Antony through an all-too-accurate report from his lieutenant Philo, in a speech dominated by metaphors projected from the container schema:²

Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure …
                                                                                          His captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust.

(1.1.1-2, 6-10)

The scant tolerance that the hard-edged Roman military code allots to a general's dalliance is metaphorized as a container, a measuring cup that cannot hold the liquid of Antony's grand passion;³ but before Cleopatra distracted him, as Philo recalls, Antony's heart had been a container with such enormous capacity for the liquid of courage that it burst the containing fetters of his armor.

Later we are to see Antony's heart-container swell again, but it does so because it “o'erflows the measure” of grief at Cleopatra's reported death. Antony would have his heart “crack” not the armor that contains his martial courage, but the very body that contains that heart:

                                        O, cleave, my sides!
Heart, once be stronger than thy continent;
Crack thy frail case!

(4.14.40-42)

At Antony's death, Cleopatra understands his body in identical terms: “This case of that huge spirit now is cold” (4.15.9).

This proliferation of metaphors projected from the container schema, and their function as containers of the liquids of passionate love, martial courage, and grief, are significant. For, as we will see, what critics have characterized as the play's shifting perspective on Antony and Cleopatra is accomplished by a similar three-stage progression in its central metaphors: from those in which the robust and solid outline of Rome, political authority, and all that they contain melt into the liquid of those passions; to those in which the liquid of those passions evaporates into ever changing cloud shapes; and finally to the death vision of Cleopatra's “marble-constant” body-container sublimating directly into her nobler elements of “fire and air.”

But even Cleopatra's ethereal final state fails to reduce the ambiguity of “their story,” as Octavius Caesar terms it in tidying up the play's last scene. Antony and Cleopatra is, from its first to its forty-second and final scene, a play that paradoxically is also dominated by the physical action of seeing and its subtextual metaphor Knowing is Seeing—and about the unreliability of both. These concerns are most closely brought together in Antony's speech to the bemused Eros near the end of act 4 about the evanescence of shapes we see in clouds, and hence of our perception and knowledge generally. Ironically, at the same time that Antony mediates upon the contingent nature of vision, he is under the impression that Cleopatra has betrayed him with Caesar, and shortly will fatally wound himself because of his “knowledge” that Cleopatra has committed suicide.

The container schema dominates the metaphors of Antony and Cleopatra from the very start. Cleopatra announces teasingly to Antony that she will “set a bourn how far to be beloved” (1.1.16); Antony, for his part, immediately seeks to transcend that boundary within which Cleopatra has contained their love, in explicitly biblical language (as Wilders [1995: 92n] observes): “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.” Given the many cases in which love is metaphorized as a liquid, it follows naturally that a play so concerned with passion should be dominated by containers. For Antony, the container of the Rome-world is confining, limiting, a “measure,” while the container of the Egypt-world is liberating, a capacious domain in which he can explore “new heaven, new earth.” The contrast between the two is epitomized in one of the play's most famous speeches:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space!
Kingdoms are clay!

(1.1.34-36)

The traditional view of this passage as dominated by an image of “melting”⁴ is only a beginning. In the play and to Antony, Rome represents the sharply defined “measure” that conspicuously fails to contain the liquid of what to Philo is Antony's “dotage,” and to Antony is his grand passion. For Rome to “melt” is for it to lose its defining shape, the boundary that contains the civic and military codes that it stands for, perhaps reified for Shakespeare's audience in the symmetrically arched aqueducts and ruler-straight roads that the Roman Empire extended even to the distant province of Britain. Once it melts into a liquid, Rome cannot be “marble-constant”; once it has become part of the Tiber, Rome and what it represents are consubstantial with the heated and fructifying liquid that produces “my serpent of old Nile,” as “indistinct [from Egypt] / As water is in water” (4.14.10-11).

Antony relies on the same projection from the container schema into his Roman and military characteristics when Cleopatra's servants are slow to respond to his summons:

Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried “Ho,”
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth
And cry “Your will?” Have you no ears? I am
Antony yet.

(3.13.95-98)

Along with the sharply outlined periphery of his Roman authority has melted, for Antony, the crystal-clear hierarchy, social order, and values of Roman “measure.” These do not play well in “my space” of Alexandria, where he has just seen (or thinks he has seen) Cleopatra being courted by Thidias, the messenger of his enemy.

After his defeat at Actium, Antony realizes in the same projection his own military, political, and moral collapse. What has “melted from” him has melted upon Octavius:

                                                                                                                        The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar, and this pine is barked
That overtopped them all.

(4.12.20-24)

The solid form of Antony's soldiers and their Roman courage and Roman loyalty are represented metonymically as “hearts,” as was Antony's courage at the beginning of the play. These hearts and the Roman qualities they represent now “discandy,” lose their outward shape and internal crystalline structure, the periphery that makes the many soldiers into one body, and the regular and articulated internal relations that give them structure as a disciplined military unit.⁵ The liquid thus created cascades upon and thickens the protecting military shell of the solid Roman Caesar. The immediately following metaphor invokes the generic schema Good is Up, as Antony describes himself as “this pine … that overtopped them all.” But instead of metaphorizing Antony's loss of that status in the traditional terms of the pine's being cut down or lopped off at the top, Shakespeare describes it as the loss of the tree's bark, its containing and protecting boundary.⁶

Antony's habit of understanding a containing shape as his status, his standing in the world, extends as well to his own life when, having been (falsely) informed by her eunuch Mardian that Cleopatra is dead, he intones to his loyal retainer:

Unarm, Eros. The long day's task is done
And we must sleep …
                                                                                          Off! pluck off!
The sevenfold shield of Ajax cannot keep
The battery from my heart …
                                                                      … since the torch is out,
Lie down, and stray no farther. Now all labour
Mars what it does—yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength.

(4.14.35-36, 38-40, 47-50)

In “unarming,” Antony removes his last containing shape, a once-defining suit of armor that becomes only a pile of “bruised pieces” (4.14.43), as have his Romanness, his identity as a military leader (“You [bruised pieces] have been nobly borne”), and now his very being as Cleopatra's lover. Immediately following this projection is, again, a crucial conceptual metaphor, Life is a Day, in which the events of his military loss at Actium and his amatory loss of Cleopatra are reified as the action of suicide, ending the day of his life;⁷ later in the speech, the reading of “unarming” as suicide is further reinforced by the generic metaphor Life is Light, as Antony's torch is out, and he is contained, “entangled,” fettered by the very martial force that is his way of life and that the “bruised pieces” of his now-discarded armor have represented.

Cleopatra uses metaphors of melting and discontainment altogether differently. Until the very end of the play, they are for her solely instruments of hyperbole (on this point see Doran 1976: 154-81)—indeed, one might argue that they ironically reduce Antony's cosmic metaphoric flights. Cleopatra flies into a rage when a messenger tells her of Antony's politically motivated marriage to Octavia: “Melt Egypt into Nile, and kindly creatures / Turn all to serpents!” (2.5.77-78). But, although she echoes Antony's use of the same metaphor, Cleopatra is not calling herself to another world. Nor, having given the messenger gold for what she thinks is good news about Antony, does Cleopatra propose to destroy the measure of value that gold represents when, after reinterpreting the message, she screeches, “The gold I give thee will I melt and pour / Down thy ill-uttering throat” (2.5.34-35). The Roman gossip about Antony's “levity” and her frivolous efforts (by Roman standards) at making war not love infuriate her (“Sink, Rome, and their tongues rot / That speak against us!” [3.7.15-16]), but she is merely expressing frustration and resentment, not calling for the dissolution of an entire culture.

Her response to Antony's death, however, is quite different:

The crown o'th' earth doth melt. My lord!
O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fallen …

(4.15.65-67)

Cleopatra understands her lover's death not just as the dissolution of a way of life, as Antony understands Rome, but as the entire world losing its containing periphery, represented in the crown that loses its defining shape. With that periphery is lost all human social organization, metonymized in the garland that becomes, in turn, a metonym for the military triumphs of Antony's “melt[ed]” career. Antony's toppled war standard, detumescent for all time,⁸ can no longer stand as a rallying point for Antony's troops.

In the play's many metaphors of melting, the foregrounded feature of the container schema is its role as a giver of shape, a definer of periphery, rather than the traditional distinction (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 380-82) between inside and outside that this schema's projections so frequently emphasize. This confining, structuring aspect also is foregrounded in the many instances of metaphors projected from the links schema in Antony and Cleopatra, where the links are, chiefly, not those of service or love, as they are, for example, in King Lear (see D. Freeman 1993). Instead, the dominant feature of the links projections in Antony and Cleopatra is that of imprisonment, constraint of movement—for example, where the linked elements are, as one might expect, Antony and Cleopatra, and the linking medium is enchantment: “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / or lose myself in dotage” (1.2.121-22; notice that Antony describes himself as did Philo in the play's opening line); “I must from this enchanting queen break off” (1.2.135).

Marriages also are understood in Antony and Cleopatra as imprisoning, limiting bonds, not the enriching links of kinship, service, or reciprocal love. Cleopatra characterizes Antony's marriage to Fulvia as

                                                                                          Riotous madness,
To be entangled with those mouth-made vows
Which break themselves in swearing!

(1.3.30-32)

The linking medium between Antony and Fulvia consists, in Cleopatra's view, of vows made only with the mouth, not the spirit, which entangle rather than fruitfully join their makers, and are fragile in the extreme—as opposed to the “fetters” that join her to Antony—and more like the self-defeating force that “entangles / Itself with strength.”

Antony's marriage to Octavia is described several times as a bond or a knot, but, except for a remark by Cleopatra's messenger (“He's bound unto Octavia,” 2.5.58), the linked entities in this marriage bond are not Antony and Octavia as husband and wife, as the conventional projection would have us understand them, but Antony and Caesar as shaky political allies. Agrippa suggests this mariage de convenance:

To hold you in perpetual amity,
To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts
With an unslipping knot, take Antony
Octavia to his wife …

(2.2.132-35)

And as Caesar sees off Octavia for her marriage to Antony, he likewise understands the marriage not as a link between the couple, but between himself and Antony, with his sister as the bonding medium that sustains their relationship for now, but that in time can become the means of destroying it. The bonding medium, Octavia, can become an instrument that invades the container of the very relationship it is supposed to strengthen:

                                                                                Most noble Antony,
Let not the piece of virtue [Octavia] which is set
Betwixt us, as the cement of our love
To keep it builded, be the ram to batter
The fortress of it.

(3.2.27-31)

For Cleopatra, the foregrounded aspect of the links schema is less that of imprisonment than that of entrapment. She sees Antony as a fish that she will bond to herself with the trap of a hook and line:

                                                  My bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws, and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say, “Ah, ha! You're caught!”

(2.5.12-15)

The linked entities are Cleopatra as angler and Antony as fish; the linking medium is the fishing line with its barbed hook; Cleopatra is thus the enactor of a strategy, with Antony as the dumb object. She employs the same metaphor (if a different mechanism) in describing the relationship among Antony, Egypt, and the world (importantly, the outside world), when she greets him upon his temporarily successful return from the land phase of the battle of Actium:

                                                                                Lord of lords!
O infinite virtue! Com'st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught?

(4.8.16-18)

Here the entrapment metaphor merges the links and container schemata. Antony and the world are the linked elements, and the putative linking element is the “world's great snare.” That link, which would have drawn Antony into the container of the world's trap, fails, however, because the link between him and Cleopatra is stronger, and its bonding medium is metaphorized in the path he must follow to return from the outside world to Egypt. Antony here is not a mindless fish, but a wily animal who escapes the world's trap; the ironic subtext is that he escapes that trap only because he is linked by the medium of his return journey to an ultimately much more confining one.

Cleopatra understands even life itself in terms of the link schema rather than the conventional Life is a Day or Life is Light metaphors that Antony employs:

                                        Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie.

(5.2.302-4)

The “knot intrinsicate” is in the linking medium—one might almost say that it creates that medium. The knot ties together two ropes or bands, creating a single bond linking the entities of Cleopatra and life. We might also see the knot as Cleopatra's body-container binding her life, or spirit, within itself (“As sweet as balm, as soft as air” [5.2.311]). That container's periphery will be penetrated from without by the asp's bite: “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5.2.307-8). The power of this image derives from the fact that Shakespeare reverses every element of the folk conception of infant nursing.⁹ In that conception the nurse or mother inserts part of her body, the nipple of her breast, into the mouth of the baby. Here the asp puts part of its body, the fangs located in its mouth, into Cleopatra's breast. Mother's milk proceeds from mother to child, giving life; the asp's venom proceeds from it to Cleopatra, giving death. The impelling force of mother's milk is the baby's suction from within the mother to within itself; the impelling force of the asp's venom is its own injection from within itself to within its victim.

The association of Cleopatra with containing traps continues until the very end of the play, where Caesar, gazing upon her corpse, sees her “As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.346-47), the containing trap of her allure that already has proven superior to the “world's great snare” and at the same time is one of the linking elements constituting the “strong Egyptian fetters” with which she binds herself to Antony.

A third aspect of confinement or compulsion in a cognitive-metaphoric analysis of Antony and Cleopatra appears in the play's many metaphors of towing. This source domain involves chiefly the links schema, but also has elements of the path and container schemas, particularly with the strong overtones of binding and controlling that dominate its appearance in this play. To be towed or led is to proceed along the path of the towing force while being linked to the exerter of that force. That path is both determined and contained by that towing force's direction and speed.

These towing metaphors are densest after Antony's defeat at Actium, but they are well prepared for. As Lepidus, Caesar, and Antony celebrate their short-lived agreement aboard Pompey's galley, Pompey curiously picks up and metaphorically extends Menas's offer (“Let me cut the cable, / And when we are put off, fall to their throats” [2.7.72-73]) to sever the galley's link to the land so that the triumvirs can be murdered in a containing environment that Pompey controls. But he demurs:

                                                                                                    Thou must know
'Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour;
Mine honour, it.

(2.7.76-78)

Pompey would have Menas believe that his honor is a towing force, not a towed object, implying that to cut the galley's mooring cable would be to call in question that status of his honor (a concern for Pompey only because Menas wants him involved in and politically liable for the proposal before it is consummated). Menas immediately situates Pompey's honor in the world of realpolitik, using a metaphor likewise projected from the links schema, but with stronger overtones of the path schema:

For this,
I'll never follow thy palled fortunes more.
Who seeks, and will not take, when once 'tis offered,
Shall never find it more.

(2.7.82-85)

Menas reverses the force dynamic¹⁰ that structures Pompey's view of his own honor. Menas “follow[s],” is attracted along the path of, Pompey's fortunes. But these fortunes are for Menas only his own profit. When Pompey asserts that what is led by his honor is his own profit, Menas disengages himself from the path and force dynamic of Pompey (= “fortunes”), itself subject to a towing force that Menas cannot understand and over which he has no control.

Caesar, for his part, portrays himself to his followers as predominantly a man of peace reluctantly dragged by the force of simple justice into a war contrary to his nature:

Go with me to my tent, where you shall see
How hardly I was drawn into this war,
How calm and gentle I proceeded still
In all my writings.

(5.1.73-76)

With Antony's death, Cleopatra's main fear is that she will be imprisoned, constrained, and towed along as a prisoner in the force dynamic of Caesar's triumphal spectacle (“Know, sir [Proculeius], that I will not wait pinioned at your master's court … Shall they hoist me up / And show me to the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome?” [5.2.51-52, 54-56]; “He'll [Caesar] lead me, then, in triumph” [5.2.108]). Antony clearly has the same metaphor in mind, if less explicitly, as he pleads with Eros to kill him:

Wouldst thou be windowed in great Rome, and see
Thy master thus with pleached arms, bending down
His corrigible neck, his face subdued
To penetrative shame, whilst the wheeled seat
Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded
His baseness that ensued?

(4.14.73-78)

Antony would, with his arms pinioned (an ironically appropriate consequence of those “strong Egyptian fetters”), be one of a long queue of prisoners attached to a linking rope, forced to march at the pace of Caesar's chariot in the procession of his triumph just as his passion for Cleopatra tied him by his heartstrings to her rudder at Actium.

In that climactic battle we see the densest occurrence of these metaphors. But Antony's troops see that he is being towed long before the battle itself, as Canidius remarks of his general's decision to give battle at sea, rather than on land where he has the advantage: “so our leader's led / And we are women's men” (3.7.69-70). Men, leaders, and Roman generals prototypically set direction along the path of events; they do not follow paths blazed by others, as Antony cries out in anguish to Cleopatra when they rejoin in Alexandria:

O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See
How I convey my shame out of thine eyes
By looking back what I have left behind
'Stroyed in dishonour …
                    Egypt, thou knewst too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after.

(3.11.51-54, 56-58)

As Canidius has predicted, Cleopatra is now the leader; Antony is the led. This metaphor of towing projected from the links schema continues as Antony in effect interprets, conveys, or convoys,¹¹ his military shame from Cleopatra's very gaze itself. What he figuratively sees reflected in her eyes is himself, and to his rear, the procession of the fleet that he led, even as he in turn permitted himself to be led by Cleopatra's abrupt departure from the sea battle. Cleopatra as the tower leads Antony's heart (that in military combat was wont in better days to “burst / The buckles on his breast”) by the linking medium of its strings; her rudder sets the course for him and for his troops. Antony and Cleopatra are linked, but the force dynamics governing that link are precisely the reverse of what they should be in time of war. “These strong Egyptian fetters” have wreaked their final and most potent damage.

The last consequence of that damage is, of course, the death of both the title characters, in which we find the paradoxically most containing and most liberating of the entire path-links-container metaphorical nexus. Both principals perceive their deaths as headlong rushes along a path into a container; in this respect, the overarching metaphorical pattern of Macbeth (see D. Freeman 1995: 706-7) is epitomized in the last major segment of Antony and Cleopatra.

For Antony, that container is the wedding bed, and the force impelling him along the path into that bed is the bridgeroom's prototypically intense sexuality; yet, ironically, Shakespeare plays out the Liebestod theme so that Antony, the great military and sexual swordsman, winds up being penetrated by his own weapon:

                    But I will be
A bridegroom in my death, and run into't
As to a lover's bed.

(4.14.100-102)

Like Antony, Cleopatra metaphorizes her death as a containing structure into which she hastens, impelled by the intense force of her passionate grief. Later, she depicts her death as a containing force that likewise maintains her ascendancy over the forces of time and circumstance by fettering them:

                    Then is it sin
To rush into the secret house of death
Ere death dare come to us?

(4.15.84-86)

                    And it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change …

(5.2.4-6)

Even, or perhaps especially, in death, Cleopatra maintains her own autonomy: she is not led in Caesar's triumph, but, as Caesar himself points out, opposes his goals (and hence the path in terms of which we understand progress toward goals) and chooses her own path for the journey of her death:

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

(5.2.334-36)

And in what is perhaps the most startling of the metaphors in which we are asked to understand her death, Cleopatra obliterates the solid, containing periphery of her body not by melting, as Antony had sought for Rome and Romanness, but by sublimation, transmuting the “marble-constant” solidity of her physicality from a solid directly into a gas: “I am fire, and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.288-89). Having towed Antony by his heartstrings from the battle of Actium to final defeat and immurement in her tower at Alexandria, Cleopatra now follows his imaginary example in conceiving of her death.

For Cleopatra has been preceded in thus perceiving her end by Antony's anguished parable to the uncomprehending Eros about the death of his standing and reputation. Fresh from his defeat before Alexandria and the “discandying” of his troops' hearts, Antony ironically defines for Eros, in a brief lesson about Gestalt perception, the final consequence of letting Rome in Tiber melt. The speech depends upon the metaphorical projection Knowing is Seeing and is in the form of an exemplum about the contingent nature of human knowledge:

Eros, thou yet behold'st me? …
Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs?
They are black vesper's pageants. …
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. …
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.

(4.14.1-14)

Near the end of a play in which, as the foregoing analysis suggests, the unambiguous, clearly outlined containing peripheries of Rome, empire, and military loyalty have, for an Antony rightly termed dissolute, melted into the liquids of passion and mercurial favor, he fully plays out his association of a containing and defining shape with his status, his standing in the world, and his very existence.

Antony implicates the hapless Eros in the act of seeing and cognizing, and invites him to imagine acts of seeing (and hence of knowing) shapes of cloud vapor to which our imagination imputes a defining periphery and structure. These acts become increasingly discrete and detailed, from a cloud that is only somewhat like a dragon, to a vapor that is somewhat like one or another animal (bears and lions are vaguely big four-legged animals), a fortress with towers, a rock hanging from a mountainside, a headland with trees blowing in the wind. These visions “mock our eyes with air”; when we see these vapors, our imagination causes us to inscribe perimeters around them and give them shape—for a moment, to indulge the illusion that these imaginary perimeters contain and delimit real objects.

But they do not, for the Gestalt perception created by the outline that our imagination momentarily imposes on these vaporous entities can be “dislimned,”¹² have its defining boundary and inner coherence destroyed, by a moment's change in the general background, or “rack”¹³ of clouds that have provided the “data” for this evanescent “perception.” Our vision, and with it, our knowledge, even our confidence in what and how we know, can be obliterated, and obliterated far more thoroughly than the Tiber can melt Antony's Rome or the Nile Cleopatra's Egypt. What we once knew with confidence can become—with a change in the background of that cloud formation that is no more tangible or discernible than a thought—mere vapor once again, as impossible to distinguish from what surrounds it as one kind of water is from another—say, water of Tiber from water of Nile.

And now, for the uncomprehending Eros, as he watches his idol come unglued before his eyes, comes the moral. Antony the man, and all he once represented (significantly, “thy captain”)—Rome, the military ethos, leadership, stability, his own existence, perhaps existence itself—become as contingent against a background of the new dispensation's shifting values and alliances as are the shapes that our imagination limns against a background of vaporous shapes that appear and disappear at a moment's notice. He is “even such a body” as those clouds; like them, he “cannot hold this visible shape”: the outline that we and Eros (and everyone) see and therefore know to contain him (for Knowing is Seeing)—citizenship, military rank, family, reputation, standing, armor—can “un-appear” at the slightest shift in the political winds.

Those winds obliterate the “visible shape” that once contained Antony's heart (the same organ that Philo had seen “burst its buckles” in the military sphere): the heart that in turn contained a million more hearts in the bodies of the troops contained by the military ethos and the force of Antony's leadership; those same hearts that now “do discandy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar.”¹⁴

If we sought for the sake of argument to interpret Antony and Cleopatra with Cleopatra as its dominating hero-figure, the major argument would rest, I suggest, on the fact that Antony's vision and knowledge of himself is defined, and in the end undefined, by his Romanness. Cleopatra, by contrast, sees him even in death as “past the size of dreaming … nature's piece 'gainst fancy, / Condemning shadows quite” (5.2.96, 98-99).

On this analysis, Cleopatra is the truly subversive force against Rome, for she threatens not merely Roman hegemony but Roman epistemology. The Rome personified in Octavius Caesar constructs itself as a sharply outlined, demarcated entity, and its might as concrete, structured, tangible, measurable, and, above all, visible; Cleopatra, for her part, exempts herself not only from conventional morality but the force of time and even the laws of physics. Small wonder, then, that when the grimly politic Octavius Caesar (maker of a marriage whose linking bonds, as we have seen, were not between his own sister and Antony but between himself and Antony) issues his first post-Cleopatran orders, they are detailed instructions in how to see, how to know, how to interpret: “Come, Dolabella, see / High order in this great solemnity” (5.2.364-65).

Dolabella is ordered to create a funeral ceremony that its viewers will see and know as the Octavian New World Order. The lovers' funeral must “keep the square”: fancy must not outwork nature; Antony's deliquescent Rome, Cleopatra's sublimated fire and air, must be—and be seen to be—buried by the book, linked forever—but also contained forever—in the basest of the four classical elements. Rome must never melt again.

Notes

1. I assume general familiarity with this body of work, in which the most recent studies, in addition to those in this volume, include Gibbs 1994; Steen 1994; Morse 1994; D. Freeman 1993, 1995; Turner 1991, 1996; and M. Freeman 1997.

2. Citations are from Wilders 1995.

3. For the standard account of Love is a Fluid in a Container, see Kövesces 1988: 43-44.

4. See, among many others, Knight 1951: 232-39.

5. Wilders 1995: 223 gives a good historical account of “discandy”; the OED citation is “To melt or dissolve out of a candied or solid condition.”

6. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare uses this same metaphor in a way that more clearly reveals its operation, as Isabella describes how Claudio will lose his honor if he does not sacrifice himself for her: “In such a [nature], as you consenting to't, / Would bark your honour from that trunk you bear, / And leave you naked” (3.1.71-73 [the text is Lever 1965]). An important interpretive point about Antony's use of this figure is enhanced by a cognitive analysis. We might be tempted to read Antony-as-tallest-tree phallically. But that reading does violence to the figure's immediate context, in which, I would argue, there is no phallic imagery but a great deal of container-as-periphery imagery. The bark as periphery that protects the tree's vital substance maps into the candied shell as periphery that protects the vital substance of Antony's military ethos. The container reading explains more of the figure's element than does the phallic reading. Although Antony and Cleopatra has great many phallic images, this is not one of them. For discussion of how cognitive analysis yields a metatheory of literary interpretation, see D. Freeman 1998.

7. Unsurprisingly, Antony's and Cleopatra's deaths are metaphorized in identical terms: “[Antony.] The long day's task is done, / And we must sleep …” (4.14.35-36). “[Iras.] … the bright day is done, / And we are for the dark” (5.2.192-93).

8. Perhaps this is what is meant by Cleopatra's “The odds is gone” (4.15.68).

9. For a cognitive account of parental nurturance that sets out these elements in more detail, see Lakoff 1996: 108-29. This passage lends itself particularly well to a blended-space analysis of the sort articulated in other essays in this volume and elsewhere in current scholarship on metaphor. But the blending analysis does not, to my mind, account for the broad range of figurative language and other metaphorized elements (stage business, plot, character) characteristic of dramatic poetry. The theory of blended mental spaces provides rich new insights into the figurative language of short, self-contained poems (see, e.g., M. Freeman 1997) and of longer, narrative works like novels (see Vimala Herman's essay in this volume), where novelist, various narrators, and reader are situated differently. But this aproach seems rather confining, in its present form, for the rich heterogeneity of dramatic art.

10. The following discussion draws much of its conceptual framework from Leonard Talmy's pioneering research in force dynamics. A good introduction to this work is to be found in Talmy 1983.

11. The etymological relationship of convey in the sense of conveying meaning, significance (OED, v., 9.b.) was closer to convoy in Shakespeare's time. Like convoy, convey carried naval overtones.

12. OED, v. “dislimn”: (1) “To obliterate the outlines of (anything limned); to efface, blot out.”

13. OED, sb. “rack”: (3b) “driving mist or fog.” But in light of the other Shakespearean illustration offered for this sense (The Tempest, 4.1.156), “The great Globe it selfe … shall dissolue, And … Leaue not a racke behinde,” it would seem that the more nearly correct sense for “rack” here is (3a), “Clouds, or a mass of cloud, driven before the wind in the upper air.” Wilders 1995: 254n apparently shares this view.

14. Rosalie Colie (1974: 199-200) has written about Antony's climactic speech in terms very similar to the foregoing—as Antony's “dissolution.” What her analysis fails to account for, in my view, is how this dissolution of Antony's selfhood works not only with other metaphors of melting in the play, but with Shakespeare's metaphorical account of what in Antony is dissolved: the sharply etched outline of his civic and military status.

References

Charney, Maurice: 1961 Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

Clemen, Wolfgang: 1962 [1951] The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (New York: Hill and Wang).

Colie, Rosalie: 1974 Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Doran, Madeleine: 1976 Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

Freeman, Donald C.: 1993 “‘According to my bond’: King Lear and Re-Cognition,” Language and Literature 2: 1-18; 1995 “‘Catch[ing] the nearest way’: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor,” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 689-708; 1998 “Making Literary Arguments,” paper delivered at the Universidad de Granada.

Freeman, Margaret H.: 1997 “Grounded Spaces: Deictic -self Anaphors in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” Language and Literature 7: 7-28.

Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr.: 1994 The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Johnson, Mark: 1987 The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Knight, G. Wilson: 1951 The Imperial Theme (London: Methuen).

Kövesces, Zoltán: 1988 The Language of Love: The Semantics of Passion in Conversational English (London: Associated University Presses).

Lakoff, George: 1996 Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson: 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books).

McAlindon, T. A.: 1973 Shakespeare and Decorum (London: Macmillan).

Morse, David Wayne: 1994 “Metaphor as a Framework for Formulaic Poetry,” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California.

Shakespeare, William: 1965 The Arden Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, edited by J. W. Lever (London: Routledge); 1995 The Arden Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, edited by John Wilders (London: Routledge).

Spurgeon, Caroline F. E.: 1935 Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Steen, Gerard: 1994 Understanding Metaphor in Literature: An Empirical Approach (London: Longman).

Sweetser, Eve: 1990 From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Talmy, Leonard: 1983 “How Language Structures Space,” in Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research, and Application, edited by Herbert Pick and Linda Acreodolo, 225-82 (New York: Plenum).

Turner, Mark: 1991 Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); 1996 The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press).