SOURCE: Blissett, William. “Dramatic Irony in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 18, no. 2 (spring 1967): 151-66.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1962, Blissett explores Antony and Cleopatra's use of dramatic irony, focusing in particular on the dramatic irony generated from the nature of the theater and from the audiences' interpretations of the play's characters and events. ]

ANT.
Ho now, Enobarbus!
ENO.
What's your pleasure, sir?
ANT.
I must with haste from hence.
ENO.
Why, then we kill all our women. We see how mortal an unkindness is to them; if they suffer our departure, death's the word.(1)

Antony, one may imagine, looks a little distraught; and a slight operatic tremolo carries over from the well-turned bel canto tribute to his late wife Fulvia. Enobarbus knows his man even if he does not know the news: his remarks are dry and pointed—ironic, in a sense recognized in Shakespeare's time, that is, in the rhetorical mode described as the “dry mock”.² The relationship of the two characters might also have been called eironeia by the Greeks: the element of boastfulness and pretence in Antony at this moment, and often in the play, brings him close to the comic type of the alazon; and the tendency of Enobarbus to belittle and deflate makes him an eiron. Eiron is to alazon as pin to balloon.³

But the situation itself is an instance of dramatic irony in the modern sense: that is, one of the persons on the stage knows more than the other, and the spectator knows more than either, indeed than both. Antony knows of Fulvia's death and of the strong exigencies that recall him to Rome, and so the foolery of Enobarbus rebounds upon himself—to be deftly caught by the quick-witten eiron and thrown again with better aim when he says, “The tears live in an onion that would water this sorrow.” But Enobarbus too has superior insight and sees, as the momentarily resolved Antony cannot, how painful the parting with Cleopatra will be—funny and painful, a combination beloved of the ironic character and the ironic writer.⁴ And the audience can see and appraise both the committed and the detached man—Antony, a “plain man without subtlety” though given to a somewhat Asiatic style of speech and life,⁵ and Enobarbus, a man of sharper perception and more pointed, less rotund, rhetoric. Thus the spectators experience here the proper pleasure of the theater, that sense of comprehending the motives of the actors and the inner form and flow of the action that we call dramatic irony.⁶

It may be useful to go over the same passage again. On hearing of Fulvia's death, Antony resolves to leave “the present pleasure” for what he believes to be duty or honor in Rome; he calls Enobarbus, and Enobarbus asks, “What is your pleasure, sir?” A perfectly normal question, yet ironic in the context. Antony replies, “I must with haste from hence.” The spectator may or may not recall that Julius Caesar's virtue and boast was celeritas: he will be noticing, from this point on, that resolute and prompt action is ever the mark of the Roman—of Antony when stirred by Roman thoughts, of Octavius Caesar; and to be taken by surprise always the mark of the loser in the power-struggle, first Pompey, then Antony, for

Celerity is never more admir'd
Than by the negligent.

“Why, then we kill all our women”, Enobarbus answers: “We see how mortal an unkindness is to them; if they suffer our departure, death's the word.” What exactly is the dramatic irony here? There is first the irony from outside the play. “Death's the word”, we might have told Enobarbus from the vantage point of our superior knowledge of history, death for Cleopatra and her women, for Antony and himself. But there is also an irony within the play that makes us note this speech and say, “Be careful, witty man, lest you prove a prophet.” A prophet he does prove: immediately, when we behold Cleopatra's winds and waters; ultimately, when Cleopatra lets it be thought that Antony's unkindness has indeed been mortal and so precipitates his death and hers.⁷ From the beginning, the audience appraises Enobarbus as ironically as he appraises the other characters.

What I have tried to gain by looking so intently at this rather unemphatic passage are the senses of irony and the terms of reference for the ensuing study. Irony the trope; the eiron as a comic mask confronting and deflating the alazon; the dramatic irony that springs from the very nature of the theater; that which comes from information outside the play; that which arises from the audience's cumulative act of interpretation whereby in its state of recollection and attention it performs prodigies of memory and anticipation, responding to the play phase by phase and as a totality. Such an approach will not, of course, arrive at a full reading of Antony and Cleopatra, though it will be possible to raise the time-honored questions of the structural strength or weakness of the play and whether or not the world is well lost when the phoenix and the turtle (or, alternatively, the sensualist and the woman in whose arms such men perish) are fled in a mutual flame from hence.⁸

The universally known story of Antony and Cleopatra creates in the mind of the spectator a sort of pre-existing play. He knows that the Roman Republic has departed forever and that the Roman Empire is about to be established—and that the Empire will go the way of the Republic. He knows that maverick Antony will be defeated by imperial Caesar—a great ruler, a great dissembler, a cold comedian, “one of the most odious of the world's successful men”.⁹ He knows—as who has ever forgotten?—Cleopatra, fatal, regal, meretricious, tragic. He knows further that this action, so apparently decisive in its time, the battle of East against West, of Oriental levitas against Roman gravitas, has proved not to be the central event of all time, even of its time: its opulence shadowed and its rhetoric quite hushed by the dayspring of the Christian era, to which Shakespeare as it were over the heads of all the characters of his play makes repeated allusion, no doubt thereby pleasing the wiser sort among his auditory.

Given this initial readiness to respond and interpret, dramatic irony is present from the beginning, even in expository passages and first lines. The opening speech—Nay, the opening word—does the Roman thing and sets going the opposition of pleasure and duty, the East and the West; it also, as if in spite of Philo's grave intention, expresses Antony's very defects in heroic, hyperbolical terms—his “dotage” being compared to a river bursting its banks, his very bondage being heroic, like a Mars not knowing he is netted. Thinking (and such a thought is ironic) that this cannot be all, we look and see visible in Antony all the Roman pillar-like stature, all the limiting folly or hamartia that Philo's words led us to expect, but those words pale beside the protagonist's opening lines. For a man in Egyptian bondage, Antony speaks like an emperor with a glimpse of the apocalypse. But involved in the glory of this apocalypse is the destruction of Rome and of that part of himself that may be likened to a Roman structure:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall!

The speech thus magnificently begun discandies into turgidity, and the whole is a verbal accompaniment to an embrace of the mutual pair which this early in the play will excite embarrassed laughter, and to a dismissal of the messenger from Rome, an action of which an audience, always eager for news, cannot approve. Any spectator will take an instant liking to Antony, glowingly alive and virile among the women and the eunuchs; nevertheless, we begin to form a desire for him to hearken to the voice of duty, and sure enough, before the scene changes from Egypt, he is exclaiming, “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, Or lost myself in dotage”—dotage, Philo's word. He breaks them, but only after a scene that we expect him to dominate but which Cleopatra steals easily, heckling to tatters his studied and correct speech of leave-taking and then giving him leave to go. If the play were to pause a moment here, all would agree that return he must: if Antony like Hercules must simply choose between Pleasure and Virtue, he must simply choose Virtue.¹⁰

The play cannot pause but goes on to unfold itself in a second phase. Instead of speculating further, one must see and appraise this other set of values, this other style of life, that Antony has chosen with our concurrence. Young Caesar enters and addresses old Lepidus like a schoolmaster dictating notes. Already the future Augustus has adopted his uncle's trick of referring to himself as if he were a historical personage. Impersonal he shows himself at once to be, and cold and impassive. Alexandria, that we have seen and he has not, is recognizable but only barely recognizable in the bleak light of his account; he reinforces the Hercules parallel by his allusion to the story of the hero made effeminate by Omphale;¹¹ and he sums up his lesson for Lepidus with a comment on Antony's weakness, the pitiless truth of which prepares the audience for Caesar's final victory, Antony's final defeat.

Lepidus replies in images whose helpless inconsistency effectively cancels him out thus early in the play and renders ironic all arrangements based on his being counted as a figure of weight.¹²

                    I must not think there are
Evils enow to darken all his goodness:
His faults, in him, seem as the spots of heaven,
More fiery by night's blackness. …

Thus far the tentative thematic opposition of Pleasure and Duty holds, for Antony is not returning to enjoy the company of Caesar and Lepidus. But as this second phase of the play develops, we look in vain for some cause at stake in the struggle that Antony has joined. Antony before leaving Egypt, Caesar here, are both given speeches expressing contempt for the common people—they draw together on this unamiable ground; but neither yet is moved by anything but considerations of personal power, which Pompey threatens.¹³

Pompey duly appears. Will he perhaps embody some identifiable force for good or evil in the commonwealth? His first speech is as damaging to him as the first speech of Lepidus had been:

If the great gods be just, they shall assist
The deeds of justest men.

This piece of specious pagan pietism is spoken to his two lieutenants, pirates by trade, and Pompey's moral capital falls through a hole in his toga. And when news of Antony's return is brought, Pompey at first refuses to believe it, then comforts himself that it is he who

Can from the lap of Egypt's widow pluck
The ne'er-lust-wearied Antony.

We recognize him now for a certain loser. Before the alliance is even made, the audience knows as all the world does that only two of the triumvirate count; but we and only we know that the threat to them from outside has no strength of purpose. Thus there is not the slightest military or political suspense. The audience can therefore give its full attention to the figure Antony cuts in his new surroundings. As duty dissolves into power, and the claims of power lose their urgency, the other term, pleasure, must inevitably be reappraised, and the second phase of the play will melt into the third.

The reappraisal is accomplished in the long and complex scene that brings the triumvirs together. It opens with the feeble Lepidus begging Enobarbus to entreat his captain to soft and gentle speech, in reply to which Enobarbus momentarily steps out of his role of dry commentator to do some of Antony's boasting for him. The two great men at this point make their entrance, from opposite directions. Can a spectator without a smile watch the elaborate pretense of each to be deeply preoccupied with affairs of state and unaware of the other's approach? Can he without laughter watch their hackles rise as each tries to induce the other to sit down at his bidding? Neither has yielded yet. Antony, who is at a moral disadvantage, attacks; Caesar parries, counterattacks, scores. Antony retreats, admitting first that he could not rule his wife, then that he did not receive Caesar's messenger because

Three kings I had newly feasted, and did want
Of what I was i'th'morning.

With each such admission he shrinks nearer to Caesar's size. Only when they are evenly matched—itself a victory for Caesar—do Caesar's men recall the present danger and the need for reconciliation. Here Enobarbus protests against the imposture and falsity of the accord at the summit that seems imminent, and is silenced. He then stands, a “considerate stone”, while the shrivelled Antony struts in the speech that draws an incredulous snort of contempt and marks the nadir of our esteem for him—“I am not married, Caesar”.¹⁴ A marriage is promptly arranged to link the two greatest men in the world; they leave the stage; the scene is over? Not quite. Just at the point when the mean spirit of Caesar seems dominant, Cleopatra nods us to her and from Alexandria steals the greatest Roman scene of the play.

“She's a most triumphant lady, if report be square unto her.” No need to specify that Cleopatra and not Octavia is meant. Observe how regally she can appropriate to herself the Roman word “triumphant”—worthy of triumphing; worthy too, we shall come to realize, of being led in triumph. The great description that follows prepares for Antony's return to Egypt and for the failure of the alliance with Caesar. Ultimately, it prepares for Cleopatra's similar emergence, after the death of Antony, to dominate the last scenes of the play, which would else have been Caesar's; and here and now it decides the audience is irrevocably in favor of Egypt and makes ironic every speech and action before Antony's return. It is in the glow of this great passage that we appraise the false bonhomie on Pompey's galley and the footling point of honor that costs the wretched Pompey his world, that we see the encounter of the newly married couple and smile at the irony of Antony's first words to his bride—

The world, and my great office, will sometimes
Divide me from your bosom—

that we hear the warning, an echo of our own judgment, of the Soothsayer to Antony to separate himself from Caesar's withering genius. In this same glow we see Cleopatra herself in the scenes with the Messenger. Her outburst of anger is ironic in coming just at the time that we are sure that she is safe. We are impressed at how quickly she comes to share our insight. In contrast to the other major persons of the play (even the eiron, Enobarbus), Cleopatra is never long regarded ironically by the audience.

As Rome comes to represent something less than duty, Egypt becomes something more than pleasure, and now that Antony has finally chosen the East, his earlier promise to piece Cleopatra's opulent throne with kingdoms is vividly brought to mind by Caesar's report that he has done so, and in the process assumed an oriental divine kingship.¹⁵ Far more than any other Renaissance treatment of the story,¹⁶ Shakespeare's play gives an astonishingly accurate and concise impression of two incompatible worlds and ways of life—the cult of pleasure and fertility and the great goddess in the East, and in the West the Roman combination of stoic apathy and assent to the political juggernaut, as expressed with lapidary force in Caesar's words of cold comfort to his sister:

Let determin'd things to destiny
Hold unbewail'd their way.(17)

Shakespeare does, however, omit from Plutarch one comment made on the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra at Cydnus which might seem most apposite for these purposes: that “there went a rumour in the people's mouths, that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia.”¹⁸ It is appropriate, I think, to pause for a moment and ask why, for the answer will bear directly on the play and especially on the phase we are now entering. First, the general good of Asia matters to Shakespeare and to us not at all: such political interest as there is in the action must be concentrated in Rome. Secondly, Shakespeare can make no use of Dionysus. Dionysus in the modern world (we need to be reminded) is largely the discovery of Friedrich Nietzsche and other demonic professors; for Shakespeare he bore the name and nature of Bacchus—the “plumpy Bacchus with pink eyen” of the song on Pompey's galley, a figure quite without dignity. The historic Antony began his political career by identifying his public image with his supposed ancestor, Hercules, and only later in his Greek and Egyptian phases graduated, so to speak, to the more sophisticated and Eastern, more universal and less cultishly military and masculine figure, Dionysus.¹⁹ But it appears from the text that Shakespeare could do so much with Hercules that a second mythical identification would merely have caused confusion. A mythical identification need not be complete, consistent, or always present: it is like a constellation—a few points are sufficient for the picture. But it should be a clear and single picture. Let us see how the playwright makes use of the Hercules theme to afford to the auditor who recognizes it an additional insight into the action and the characters and hence that superior knowledge of which dramatic irony is the product.

Though a favorite patron of soldiers, Hercules was not himself a soldierly figure, and so Antony's military stature is built up first by reference to Mars. Philo's “plated Mars”, Enobarbus' “let him speak as loud as Mars”, Cleopatra's “though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, The other way's a Mars”, all establish Antony's soldiership on a superhuman scale. But almost concurrent with the first of these and continuing longer and of much greater mythical moment, since they allude to actions charged with meaning and not just to a conventional metonymic figure, are the Hercules references, some overt, some covert.

Hercules is of sanguine temperament—warm, impulsive, unreflective, great in physique, terrible in wrath, outstanding in powers of endurance and enjoyment, and Marc Antony has the physique and temperament to profit by his claim to descent from the legendary hero.²⁰ “This Herculean Roman” has performed prodigies of endurance in the Alpine campaign and enjoyed prodigious pleasure in Alexandria. In reference to his ancestor's holding the earth on his shoulder, Cleopatra speaks of Antony as the “demi-Atlas of the world”. But three parallels in the story of Hercules and Antony are played upon, at the beginning, the middle, and the end. One has already been observed: it is the hero's choice of Virtue over Pleasure, Hercules at the crossroads at the beginning of his career. The second identifies Cleopatra with the virago Omphale. Antony, Caesar complains,

                              Is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he. …

The indulgence of sensual passion (for so the Renaissance misread and moralized the legend) makes a man effeminate—a statement that everyone from Caesar's time to Shakespeare's would regard as a truism. The picture comes to focus here when Cleopatra recalls how

I laughed him out of patience; and that night
I laugh'd him into patience, and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.

It recalls the story of the infatuated Hercules, “with his great beard and furious countenance, in womans attire, spinning at Omphales commaundement”, and prompts the comment that “the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight: and the scornefulness of the action stirreth laughter”. For so Sir Philip Sidney speaks of this scene of what we should call irony.²¹

“By Hercules I think I am i'th'right”, says the common soldier who tries to plead the cause of military common-sense to Antony, and it is the historically and dramatically appropriate way to swear. In the strange quiet scene between the first battle and the second the reedy music under ground is taken as proof that “the god Hercules, whom Antony lov'd, now leaves him.”²² Placed as it is, not before the final defeat but before Antony's only victory, this effect is well timed. Somewhere Antony must win or we will doubt his soldiership, which cannot depend entirely upon report; he must win so that we will glory with him, and so the victory is placed just at the moment that we know that his doom is sealed. Because we must never consider the possibility of his final victory, this melancholy shadow (darkened by the desertion of Enobarbus) must frame his golden hour, and later, when he greets his victorious followers, he must, to point the irony further, hail them as “all Hectors”, thereby recalling the greatest, warmest, most sympathetic of doomed warriors.

Within a few minutes' playing time, Antony, betrayed as he believes by Cleopatra, makes for himself the identification with Hercules in his death agony that has long been anticipated:

The shirt of Nessus is upon me, teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'the moon,
And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.

Omphale earlier, here the witch. Parallel to the Hercules theme is the theme of a Circe-like enchantress binding the hero with erotic magic.²³ The gipsy queen, like her servant the soothsayer, can read a little in “nature's infinite book of secrecy”, and knows the properties of things as well as the qualities of people: mandragora, for example. In Gerarde's Herball (1597) Shakespeare could have learned of the mandrake that “the wine wherein the roote hath been boiled or infused, provoketh sleep, and asswageth paine.” Most of its other associations and legends he would find scornfully dismissed by Gerarde, but perhaps useful for poetic purposes—the identification of the plant with Reuben's love-apples in the book of Genesis, the magical aphrodisiac that made Rachel fruitful; its human shape; the folk belief that it grows from the secretions of a hanged man. In keeping with the image of liquification in the play, when Antony is away Cleopatra drinks a soporific love-potion distilled of a homunculus. Further, the playwright may have known that the mandrake was sometimes called Circeium.²⁴ Circe, and Venus, and Eve, with the love-apple and the serpent, the potion of sleep and love made from the man-like plant—all these associations have combined by the second half of the play and generate their full charge when Antony is called “the noble ruin of her magic”, when he hails her in victory as “this great Fairy”, in defeat as “thou spell”, and “the witch”, and exclaims

O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars, and call'd them home;
Whose bosom was by crownet, my chief end,
Like a right gipsy, hath at fast and loose
Beguil'd me, to the very heart of loss.

The moving weight of the Hercules and of the Circe patterns (both of which come into clearer view in the latter part of the play) no less than the outward action and its traditional interpretation, would seem inevitably to lead to the spectacle of the destruction of the hero by a harlot sorceress. And yet most readers and spectators will say that such is not the dominant but only a recessive impression of the play.

Part of the counter-effect that Shakespeare achieves in this penultimate phase of the action is established by the permanent destruction of our esteem for the Roman way of life, as embodied in Caesar, whom we reject as a human being, and in Octavia, whom we try to warm to and fail. Again, the identification of Cleopatra with Isis does more than add variety: it also serves to neutralize her identification with Circe, for in the moral allegory current in the Renaissance, Circe-figures are evil, Venus-figures are double, and Isis-figures are loving, maternal, and beneficent.²⁵ And further, when Cleopatra robs her Hercules of his sword, she stands to him as a sinister Omphale; but when the shirt of Nessus is upon him, though he calls her witch, her role is that of Deianeira, the loving wife of Hercules and innocent cause of his death. But the chief countervailing agent to prevent the obvious interpretation of the play is Enobarbus.

Enobarbus wanted Antony to return to Egypt, as we did, and yet as Antony falls into dotage and dishonor he speaks our comment aloud, and this part of the play is given over to a most unusual and unexpected encounter of eiron and alazon in which it is the eiron who comes to be regarded the more ironically by the audience, as being ultimately the more ignorant of his true condition.

Herculean Antony is recognizable to any Elizabethan as a sanguine man. In the first scene Cleopatra taunts him—

Thou blushest, Antony, and that blood of thine
Is Caesar's homager. …

Caesar, just as clearly, is, as the Romans would say, aridus in distinction to Antony's genialis.²⁶ The buoyancy of the sanguine man, his ruddy complection and warm moist handshake, are in Antony's case combined with frequent reminders of his time of life, a golden autumn. In returning to golden Alexandria, the granary of the ancient world, he is returning to his natural habitat.

In his earlier scenes Enobarbus is presented as a somewhat prudent, somewhat cynical follower of Antony, temperamentally similar to his master. He has shown good judgment in mocking Antony's excesses, in gauging political realities in Rome, and in rising to a description of that wonderful piece of work, Cleopatra. Now he can move more fully into his role of choric commentator and eiron—an eiron who is a subtle and perceptive person feigning not stupidity but plainness and common-sense.

He it is who warns Antony not to fight by sea, who (with Scarus) describes the shameful defeat, who, when many are deserting, yet resolves to follow the wounded chance of Antony. When next we see him, Cleopatra is asking, “What shall we do, Enobarbus?” and he answers, “Think, and die.” This is exactly what he does, in his own person, and as the representative of that part of us that looks upon Antony from the outside in cold appraisal. Antony in defeat sends a resounding, ranting challenge to the victorious Caesar, and Enobarbus left alone hardens and sharpens to a needle-like wit. Irony the rhetorical figure we observe in his speech; the ironist at work on the boaster; but also, I suggest, dramatic irony.²⁷ Does Enobarbus see everything that the spectator does in his world and his own role when he speaks thus?

Yes, like enough! High-battled Caesar will
Unstate his happiness, and be stag'd to the show
Against a sworder! I see men's judgements 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 hast subdued
His judgement too.

The full Caesar, empty Antony? Whose judgement now is a parcel of his fortunes? The audience by this time sees and understands more than the most perceptive person on the stage.

Enobarbus continues, with the irony of detachment,²⁸ looking upon his own moral conflict with the same dispassion as he has shown toward Antony, but not realizing that such abstraction ensures the victory of the baser motive. That his judgment is corrupted, that our observer cannot see what is before him, is proved immediately in the encounter of Caesar's man Thidias with Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus imputes to her on insufficient evidence the disloyalty he has allowed himself to contemplate. When Thidias suggests that the Queen has embraced Antony only out of fear, her reply is more noncommittal even than silence—a simple “O!” He goes on to speak of Caesar:

The scars upon your honour, therefore, he
Does pity, as constrained blemishes,
Not as deserv'd.

And she answers with a most politic, astute, and ironic ambiguity:

                                                                                                    He is a god, and knows
What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded,
But conquer'd merely.

The second statement depends entirely upon assent to the first, that Caesar is a god—a belief that neither she nor Thidias holds, or believes the other to hold. And yet Enobarbus so misses the point that he goes to get Antony and says, aside:

                              Sir, sir, thou art so leaky
That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for
Thy dearest quit thee.

Enobarbus is shortly to witness the rage of Antony at the sight of Thidias kissing Cleopatra's hand (a rage gloriously refreshing to us who do not wish a hero to be always patient) and the reconciliation of the lovers. Once again it is alazon and eiron when Antony calls for one more gaudy night, and Enobarbus comments that “a diminution in our captain's brain Restores his heart.”

Enobarbus' desertion is accomplished at the time the god Hercules also departs, to the sound of music under the earth.²⁹ The element of earth is to be his from now on. Antony at the end wishes to fight Caesar in the fire and in the air, and Cleopatra still later is to exclaim, “I am air and fire, my other elements I give to baser life.” Their lower elements have already departed in Enobarbus. Regretting his perfidy almost immediately, the renegade is struck down by an acute melancholia, the humour of earth as Antony's sanguine is the humour of air. “I will joy no more”, he says, and when the soldier appears, bearing gold and exclaiming, “Your Emperor continues still a Jove”, Enobarbus realizes the full magnitude of his loss. Calling himself “the villain of the earth”, he resolves to seek

Some ditch wherein to die: the foul'st best fits
My latter part of life.

It is in a ditch, mixture of the two baser elements, that he addresses to the moon his last words:

O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which being dried with grief, will break to powder,
And finish all foul thoughts. …

Bradley says, “Enobarbus simply dies”,³⁰ but this is wide of the mark. Enobarbus the eiron and the Enobarbus in the spectator perish for the defect of their eironeia and sink out of consideration. The play is purged of melancholy, self-regard, and self-pity. Shakespeare is thus able to omit Antony's retirement in defeat to a hermitage of misanthropy, his Timonaeum³¹ (perhaps saving the conception for another play). Black vesper's pageants, of which Antony sings in a beautiful aria, are pageants of air in a fading realm of light and have nothing in them of poisonous damp.

Treatments of Antony and Cleopatra usually make some attempt at an Aristotelian statement of the tragedy of Antony—his outstandingness and limitation of character issuing into a risky course of action that can have no other outcome but destruction, the final catastrophic reversal of situation however affording to hero and audience a recognition of reality not otherwise to be gained.³² And yet this is one play with one ending, not two plays with two. How does Shakespeare solve his structural problem and prevent half the interest of the play from dying with Antony?

The first thing he does is ruthlessly to disappoint normal tragic expectation. The death-speeches of a man who has been superbly eloquent in two plays, with their short phrases and sinking rhythms, do not rise to a full grandeur or memorability or finality, and Cleopatra steals the scene—as she had stolen their early scene of parting, as she had stolen the great scene of the triumvirs.

Then news of Antony's death is brought to Caesar, and the “universal landlord” is touched:

When such a spacious mirror's set before him
He needs must see himself.

The mirror for magistrates—fortune's vicissitudes as a warning to the victor: that is what Maecenas means, but why do we smile inwardly? Only the sight of Caesar can touch Caesar? That, certainly, and we may recall Caesar's words to Antony newly wedded to Octavia—“You take with you a great part of myself; use me well in't.” But we think also that if Caesar sees only himself—what might happen to his sort of man in his sort of life—in the death of Antony, how little he sees, how blind he is. Thus dramatic irony survives into act five, for the wise young Caesar of the first act is no wiser in the last.

The great passage descriptive of Cleopatra had blazed in the cold light of Rome; the comparable passage that completes the characterization of Antony is delayed until after his death. To the captured, distraught, dishevelled Queen, a young staff-officer, unknown to her and to us, one of Caesar's men with great things awaiting him on the new frontier, enters to take charge:

Most noble Empress, you have heard of me?

Cleopatra, without interest, without looking: “I cannot tell.”

Assuredly you know me.

Again, a most discouraging lack of interest:

No matter, sir, what I have heard or known.
You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams
Is't not your trick?

It is just his trick, and so he can but stammer, “I understand not, madam.”

I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony.
O such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man.

Dolabella attempts to interrupt: “If it might please ye. …”

His face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, the earth.

Securely, Antony is of fire and air, enskied in Hercules' bosom.³³ Dolabella begins to forget himself and attend to Cleopatra: “Most sovereign creature …”. But Cleopatra goes on with a colossal, more than Herculean image, combining it with the golden bounty of autumn and the image of the kingly dolphin that loves mankind and playfully leaps out of its own element into a higher one. Then she asks,

Think you there was, or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?

Dolabella's reply is the last whisper of the dead and discredited eiron, Enobarbus: “Gentle madam, no.” Cleopatra obliterates him, using the same image of nature overgoing art that had been applied to herself in the comparable great passage, and from this point Dolabella is a changed man. These few moments have for him rapidly recapitulated the movement of the play; his words confirm the spectator in his judgment of its meaning:

                                        Hear me, good madam,
Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it
As answering to the weight: would I might never
O'ertake pursued success, but I do feel,
By the rebound of yours, a grief that strikes
My very heart at root.

This briefest of encounters makes it religion for him to obey Cleopatra, and he discloses Caesar's plan to lead her in triumph. The stature of Antony, the fascination of Cleopatra, are still being freshly revealed in act five.

Dramatic expectation, even after the death of Antony, is likewise reaching new heights. The stage is now set for a scène à faire, the long-awaited confrontation of Caesar and Cleopatra. They meet on equal terms—he victorious through all the world, she in total defeat; he planning to trick her, she knowing the plan and resolved to thwart it. The victor enters, attended by his train, he looks around, and, blind fool, asks the ridiculous question, “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” The arid man cannot by taking thought become genial, and all his speeches of carefully prepared cordiality cannot conceal what he has revealed in that question.³⁴ Not even when his ascendency in the world has added to it a moral ascendancy, when Cleopatra is laughably exposed by her treasurer, does he become any more than Fortune's knave, a minister of her will; and Cleopatra's words to the eunuch hit the frosty boy:

                                                  Prithee go hence,
Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through th'ashes of my chance: wert thou a man,
Thou wouldst have mercy on me.

The lass unparalleled has quite put down the ass unpolicied.

Comment on the remainder of the play I pretermit, though in the encounter of Cleopatra with the old rustic there is irony in the words, an ironic mixture of the funny and the painful in the situation, and dramatic irony of the thematic sort in our Biblical recollections of a woman, a serpent, and death. As for the death scene itself: the whole play has been groping toward this moment, this kairos,³⁵ in which Cleopatra finds her nick of time and Caesar for all his celerity sends too slow a messenger.

I have used the word kairos as being common to natural philosophy and theology. I must say something before concluding about the contribution to the experience of dramatic irony made by the scriptural references, the meaning of which, of course, is open to the audience and closed to every actor in the play. These have frequently been noticed, but not to my knowledge collected for comment.

Some serve to remind us that, great as the world of the play and its historical action are, they are not all. We are told that Antony feasted three kings, as if to prompt us to ask what three kings. Herod of Jewry is likewise mentioned several times, usually as part of the political action as derived from Plutarch;³⁶ but when Cleopatra in comic fury vows “That Herod's head I'll have”, we laugh at the scrambled reminder of Herod and Salome and John the Baptist.³⁷ And very early in the play Charmian asks the Soothsayer for an excellent fortune: “Let me be married to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all: let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage.” Again the three kings, again Herod, now the Christ child, who will be born when Charmian would have been about fifty—or perhaps John the Baptist, whose mother was past childbearing.³⁸ These passages are ironic in that we smile at the ignorance of the Egyptians.

So do we at the Romans'. Antony in his exuberance at agreeing to marry Octavia, says to Caesar: “Let me have thy hand: further this act of grace”; but Caesar returns Antony's “thou” with the formal “you”, and the graciousness, in any sense, of this act of grace is questioned. Caesar is later proclaimed by a messenger to be “full of grace”, and he himself states:

The time of universal peace is near:
Prove this a prosp'rous day, the three-nook'd world
Shall bear the olive freely.

But it is only a messenger, not an angel, and we know that it is not Caesar who is full of grace, not he the Prince of Peace.

A last cluster of scriptural references deserves separate treatment. Antony's grand reply to Cleopatra's demand to know how far she is beloved—“Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth”—sounded the hyperbolical note, the note of hubris and alazoneia, early in the play and was remote indeed from the Apocalypse to which it alludes.³⁹ But when in the latter part of the play there are ten more recollections of the Book of Revelation, a point of view is surely established for ironical interpretation. Cleopatra seems identified with the harlot, with whom have committed fornication the kings of the earth, who has glorified herself and lived wantonly, who has said in her heart, I sit being a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no mourning. Such an identification fits in with the Circean figure of the gypsy queen. But the image of poisoned hail, the horror of being left unburied, the phrase “abysm of hell”, are drawn from the same source but are not similarly linked with an existing pattern of symbols: rather, they belong to a cluster of their own, whose moment of greatest concentration occurs when Antony's men find him still alive after falling on his sword. “The star is fallen”, says one: a star falls from heaven in Rev. viii:10; “And time is at his period”, says another, recalling the promise that time should be no more—Rev. x:6; “Alas and woe”, one cries, echoing Rev. viii:13; and Antony says, “Let him that loves me strike me dead.” “Not I”, say several, recalling that men shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them—Rev. ix:6. When Antony dies, it is to Cleopatra as if the sun were smitten and darkened; and again, her words to Dolabella recall the description of the angel—Rev. x:1-6. But in her death scene she is prepared as a bride trimmed for her husband. What infinite variety—so to transmigrate from the harlot of the Apocalypse to the New Jerusalem!

At this point an orderly retreat must be sounded or we shall be identifying, or contrasting, Antony with the suffering Servant on the basis of an allusion to a messianic psalm in “the hill of Basan”,⁴⁰ an allusion too lonely and remote to have much force in the theater, however potent it may be in a “spatial” account of the play's imagery. I have argued that perceptions and judgments of great subtlety can be expected of an audience, but only as part of the unfolding dramatic experience, which in this perhaps more than any other play is shifting and fluid. At the beginning we share the simple nature, the singly divided nature, of an Antony, but by the end have arrived at a vision of Cleopatra's variety and the varying shore of the world. “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break”, Antony declares at the beginning; but when he returns victorious from the second battle, Cleopatra reverses, increases, complicates the force of the image when she greets him thus:

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

And at the very end, Caesar himself returns for the last time to the image of the net, softened and (ironically) sanctified:

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

Notes

1. All quotations are taken from the New Arden text, edited by M. R. Ridley (London, 1954).

2. For the senses of “irony” in English, see Norman Knox, The Word Irony and its Context, 1500-1755 (Durham, N.C., 1961).

3. F. M. Cornford, The Origins of Attic Comedy (London, 1914), pp. 136-137; G. G. Sedgewick, Of Irony Especially in Drama, second edition (Toronto, 1948), chapter one, and p. 50, where Antony is called a self-deceiver and Enobarbus an ironist.

4. A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock (Berkeley, Calif., 1948), pp. 11 and 247: here a mixture of the painful and the funny is held to be of the essence of dramatic irony. G. Wilson Knight in The Imperial Theme (London, 1958), p. 254, observes of Antony and Cleopatra that a “certain sportive spirit stirs the play's surface into ripples of shimmering laughter.” Certainly it differs in this regard from all previous treatments of the story, which are grave and moralistic.

5. R. H. Carr, ed., Plutarch's Lives … in North's Translation (Oxford, 1938), p. 184, Antony's plainness; p. 164, his Asiatic style.

6. I take my conception of dramatic irony largely from Sedgewick, Of Irony, pp. 48-49 and passim; see also my article on Macbeth, “The Secret'st Man of Blood”, SQ, X (1959), 397-408.

7. In Poets on Fortune's Hill (London, 1952), p. 138, J. F. Danby observes: “Even if we read Enobarbus's words as irony, the double-irony that works by virtue of the constant ambivalence in the play still turns them back to something resembling the truth.”

8. For an account of Cleopatra's conquests among the critics after Johnson, see Daniel Stempel, “The Transmigration of the Crocodile”, SQ, VII (1956), 59-61. Cf. Bernard Shaw's preface to Three Plays for Puritans.

9. E. M. Forster, Alexandria (New York, 1961), p. 29; but see the reference by F. M. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well (San Marino, Calif., 1957), to “the Augustus whom the Elizabethans regarded as the ideal prince”, p. 183, and his note to J. E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940), pp. 198-200.

10. Erwin Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, XVIII, Leipzig & Berlin, 1930); Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 293-296.

11. An explicit likening of Cleopatra to Omphale is to be found in the “Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius”, appended to Plutarch's Life of Antony: see E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare's Plutarch”, SQ, X (1959), 27. The identification was used from the first by Octavius for propaganda purposes: see Hans Volkmann, Cleopatra, T. J. Cadoux, tr. (London, 1953), p. 139.

12. The absurdity of the passage was drawn to my attention by the poet George Johnston. B. T. Spencer makes the best case for it in “Antony and Cleopatra and the Paradoxical Metaphor”, SQ, IX (1958), 375. J. A. Bryant, quoting this speech in Hippolyta's View (Lexington, Ky., 1961), p. 177, finds Lepidus “equal to Antony only in charity”, which is charitable. J. F. Danby, in Poets on Fortune's Hill, p. 147, finds Lepidus “judicious”, which is injudicious.

13. The absence of political issues in the play has often been maintained—by M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (London, 1910), pp. 306, 345; by Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, Calif., 1950), p. 204; by William Rosen, Shakespeare and the Craft of Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 123. Against these stand J. E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays, who thinks that the problem of order is the theme of the play, and Dickey and Stempel, who follow him in this regard.

14. I disagree with the usual interpretation here—with Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy (New York, 1956), p. 166, who says that Antony “gains his stature through contrast with Octavius”; with Willard Farnham, who sees him as taking “exactly the right course” with Octavius, p. 176; with Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), who praises his “admirable diplomacy” and “political ability”, pp. 83-84; and with J. A. Bryant, p. 177, who praises each specific act of Antony in Rome and says that his behavior “measurably increases our respect for him”.

15. For the Roman fear of Eastern political and religious domination and the abandonment of Rome as center and capital, see Aeneid, VIII, 685-688, 705-706; Horace, Epode IX, 2; Ovid, Met. XV, 826; also Volkmann, Cleopatra, esp. p. 136.

16. Dickey, Not Wisely But Too Well, chapters 10 and 11.

17. Plutarch, p. 216: “It was predestined that the government of all the world should fall into Octavius Caesar's hands”.

18. Plutarch, p. 186.

19. H. Jeanmaire, Dionysos: Histoire du Culte de Bacchus (Paris, 1951), pp. 274, 428, 453, 465 ff. Plutarch, pp. 183, 220.

20. Plutarch, pp. 166, 196. MacCallum, p. 336, and others have pointed out that Shakespeare's Antony is a more grandiose and opulent—i.e., Herculean—figure than Plutarch's, though it should be noted that Antony does not share the character of Hercules the builder and civilizer. For the saga and interpretation of Hercules in antiquity see Gilbert Murray, “Hercules, ‘The Best of Men’”, Greek Studies (Oxford, 1946), pp. 106-126; and Andrew Runni Anderson, “Hercules and his Successors”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XXXIX (1928), 7-58.

21. Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie, ed. J. C. Collins (Oxford, 1945), p. 55. See also Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington, tr., Canto 7, stanzas 19 and 49; Tasso, Jerusalem Liberated, Edward Fairfax, tr., 16: 5-6; 20: 118; and Spenser, The Faerie Queene, the episode of Artegall's subjection to Radegund, Book V, canto 5.

22. Plutarch, p. 235, recounts the desertion of Bacchus, not Hercules. It is perhaps significant that Antony's Parthian campaign, which bore something of the character of a Bacchic rout, is the only important episode in Antony's later career omitted by Shakespeare.

23. The Homeric Circe reached the Renaissance interpreted and moralized, and emerges in its literature in such figures of Ariosto's Alcina, Tasso's Armida, and Spenser's Acrasia. See Merritt Y. Hughes, “Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance”, JHI, IV (1943), 381-399.

24. C. J. S. Thompson, The Mystic Mandrake (London, 1934), pp. 21, 188 ff.; J. G. Frazer, “Jacob and the Mandrakes”, PBA, VIII (1917-18), 59-79; G. Elliot Smith, The Evolution of the Dragon (Manchester, 1919), pp. 192-206; John Gerarde, The Herball (London, 1597), pp. 280-282.

25. The main literary sources are the eleventh book of Apuleius, translated by Adlington (1566), and the essay on Isis and Osiris in Plutarch's Moralia, translated by Holland (1603). Sidney praises the Plutarchan essay in the Apologie, pp. 45-46. See also Michael Lloyd, “Cleopatra as Isis”, Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959), pp. 88-94.

26. R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge, 1951), p. 225.

27. Sedgewick, p. 50, speaks of Enobarbus (and the Duke in Measure for Measure and Prospero) as ironists, “shapes that are half-character, half-spectator, moving in the stage illusion with something of the sympathy and the detachment of the spectator himself.”

28. Sedgewick, p. 13, defines this as “the attitude of mind held by a philosophic observer when he abstracts himself from the contradictions of life and views them all impartially, himself perhaps included in the ironic vision.”

29. Maurice Charney, in “Shakespeare's Antony: A Study of Image Themes”, SP, LIV (1957), 158, discusses this scene as an example of the “theme of dispersal” that pervades the play.

30. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Oxford, 1955), p. 284. Cf. Plutarch, p. 223, where Domitius does simply die.

31. Plutarch, p. 229.

32. Sylvan Barnet, “Recognition and Reversal in Antony and Cleopatra”, SQ, VIII (1957), 331-334.

33. Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, pp. 80-81, on the devaluation of the world theme.

34. See Volkmann, p. 203, where he cites Dio's narrative of the meeting, in which Octavius is unmoved by the siren. Stempel, p. 63, praises him for resisting the temptress.

35. Onians, p. 347; also Volkmann, pp. 218-219.

36. Plutarch, pp. 221, 231, 232.

37. Onians, p. 157, reminds us that the head was regarded in antiquity—and later—as the source of fertility and procreation. Caput Iohannis in disco replaced the pagan fertility god at midsummer. Shakespeare, who so often echoes archaic patterns of thought, may partake of this complex of associations when he has Antony say, “To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head.”

38. See MacCallum, p. 347, note 1, quoting Zielinski.

39. This paragraph follows closely an article by Ethel Seaton, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelation”, RES, XXII (1946), 219-224.

40. J. A. Bryant, p. 180, contrasts the Christlike submissiveness of the Psalmist with Antony's anger. This is well-argued, but I still think the allusion to be the only serious poetic fault of the play.

This paper was presented at the North-Central Regional Conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Cleveland, April, 1962.