SOURCE: Kinney, Clare. “The Queen's Two Bodies and the Divided Emperor: Some Problems of Identity in Antony and Cleopatra.” In The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, pp. 177-86. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Kinney contends that Cleopatra is the human embodiment of Egypt and represents an all-inclusive potentiality that embraces the feminine and the masculine.]

Cleopatra, like Falstaff, is always being called names. Almost every scene in Antony and Cleopatra generates new identities for her; over the course of the play she acquires at least forty different cognomens. She is gypsy, whore, trull, vile lady, grave charm, morsel, boggler, salt Cleopatra; she is great fairy, nightingale, serpent of old Nile, Egyptian dish; she is, furthermore, most sovereign creature, great Egypt, day o' th' world, lass unparalleled. Constantly avoiding the numerous (and largely male) attempts to fix or subsume her being within a single convenient or conventional category (such as Witch or Strumpet), she transforms and re-verses whatever labels are attached to her. Consider, for example, what happens to Cleopatra the Comestible. The “Egyptian dish” (2.6.123)¹ has been tasted by Julius Caesar, the elder Pompey, and Antony: all Rome, it seems, has had a piece of the pie, and at the nadir of his fortunes, Antony accuses her of being a rather nasty leftover:

I found you as a morsel, cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher: nay, you were a fragment
Of Gnaeus Pompey's. …

(3.13.116-18)

But even as her last over, the “pretty worm of Nilus,” feeds upon her, the queen says to Charmian:

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?

(5.2.307-8)

The tempting and dangerous “morsel for a monarch” (1.5.31) becomes at the last this gentle nurturer, figuratively giving life even as she is preyed upon.²

Yet Cleopatra's happy capacity for such transformations does not mean that the speeches of Antony and Enobarbus praising her infinitely becoming acts of “becoming,” her delicious variety (1.1.49-51; 2.2.235-40) constitute the last word on her. Inasmuch as her identity can be fixed it is located in the repeated metonymical epithet “Egypt.” Whenever the word occurs a kind of referential oscillation between the woman and the nation is triggered in the hearer's mind. The queen seems to be interchangeable with every aspect of her country and its denizens. She is its presiding goddess Isis (3.6.17), she is the “serpent of old Nile” (1.5.25), she is the Nile itself. Even as “Nilus' slime” (1.3.68-69) is quickened by the masculine sun (Phoebus, Horus), Cleopatra, “black” with “Phoebus' amorous pinches” (1.5.28), turns men's swords into ploughshares and brings forth a harvest: Caesar “ploughed her and she cropped” (2.2.228); she has borne children to Antony. Her Egyptian fecundity is indeed emphasized by Shakespeare's suppression of all mention of Antony's Roman offspring by Fulvia and Octavia. And when she calls for the general destruction of her land if she is cold and false to her lover, “Till by degrees the memory of my womb, / Together with my brave Egyptians all, … Lie graveless …” (3.13.163ff.), she instinctively couples her progeny and her people.

In fact, Cleopatra is coextensive with her subjects to such a degree that her last words can be completed quite naturally by her countrywoman Charmian.³ “What should I stay—” says the queen, and dies; her attendant immediately supplies, “In this wild world?” (5.2.312-13). This uninterrupted transference of discourse between one speaker and the other retrospectively undercuts Octavius's rather cheap shot as he faces the queen and her ladies for the first time and asks, “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” (5.2.111). Cleopatra is Egypt, but Egypt is also Cleopatra; her Egyptians can speak for their monarch. Charmian's response to the soldier's “Is this well done?”—“It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (5.2.324-26)—would have come equally fittingly from Cleopatra's own lips.

The equation of the woman so completely with her state conflates the monarch's “two bodies” and breaks down, or rather denies, the barrier between her public and private selves.⁴ Even after her suicide—and despite her claim that death “shackles accidents and bolts up change” (5.2.6)—Cleopatra's identity is still oscillating between woman and queen, between the “lass unparalleled” and the “princess / Descended of so many royal kings” of Charmian's last encomia.⁵ She asserts, after Antony's death, that she is “No more but e'en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chares” (4.15.73-75), but a scene or two later she has not lost her “Immortal longings” as she dons her crown and royal robes to revisit Cydnus (5.2.279-80). Lear's belated discovery that he is “a very foolish, fond old man” is part of his tragic education; Cleopatra's beautiful insistence at the end of act 4 on her private, limited human identity does not constitute an admission of anything she did not already know.

Perhaps the fascination and the infuriation that Cleopatra ignites in Rome's autocrats derives in part from the fact that she can be Egypt in a way that neither Caesar nor Antony can ever embody Rome: they are merely Roman. For Rome demands of its rulers an obsessive privileging of the public over the private identity, and this is why it would be unthinkable for Caesar to accede to the defeated Antony's request that he might dwell “A private man in Athens” (3.12.15): as far as Octavius is concerned Antony doesn't have a private identity; indeed, on hearing of his enemy's death he declares Antony's “is not a single doom, in the name lay / A moiety of the world” (5.1.18-19). Roman manliness, the system of value that equates virtue with virtus, demands a kind of normative public behavior allowing infinitely less free play of identity than royal Egyptian femaleness. Philo's insistence, as the play opens, that “the triple pillar of the world” has become a “strumpet's fool” (1.1.12-13) emphatically asserts the noninclusive either/or nature of Roman values. One must enact a single, absolute condition or identity; one cannot supplement it or transform it into something else equally good or better, only relinquish it or perforce represent its (vilified) opposite.

Cleopatra's Egypt embraces multiplicity and difference, and for all its apparent “femininity” does not exclude maleness (the Greek suffix of the monarch's very name makes her father as well as mother to her country). Octavius snarls that “Antony is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen … / More womanly than he (1.4.5-7). But when she appropriates Antony's “sword Philippan” (2.5.23), Cleopatra is, as Janet Adelman suggests, not merely Omphale subduing Herculean Antony, or Venus disarming Mars, but also the vigorously androgynous figure of Venus armata (Adelman 92)—or at the very least an Omphale who doesn't just trap heroes in the female space of the bedroom but insists on invading the male space of the battleground. Of course, the fiasco of Actium is on one level attributable to Cleopatra's failure to “be a man”; certainly she does not meet the requirements of Roman virtus. But as even Enobarbus points out, Antony was not obliged to fly with her. Antony has defended Cleopatra's right, as “Egypt,” to “appear for a man” (3.7.18) and lead her troops to battle, but he never properly comes to terms with her augmented identity. He cannot think of her as a fellow soldier whose shortcomings should not affect his own performance, but only as a bewitching female to be pursued at all costs.

Antony's sense that he is obliged to choose between virtus and Cleopatra at Actium, that he cannot be both soldier and lover, and that, having chosen to be the latter, he has “lost [his] way for ever” (3.11.4) and is Antony no more, is a by-product of Rome's characteristic attitude in this play toward gender relations and individual identity. It is not so much a case of “male” values predictably being privileged over “female” ones, as of a complete suppression of the female term within a potentially complementary pairing while the male one is doubled. This obliteration followed by reduplication is most clearly illustrated when Antony marries Octavia. Octavius permits his exemplary female counterpart and beloved sister to be sacrificed to and subsumed by his problematic relationship with Antony. She becomes the (inadequate) glue holding together their unhappy marriage. In the summit meeting of act 2, scene 2—at the end of which, as Carol Neely points out (143), the two men enact a parodic betrothal ceremony in Octavia's absence—Caesar yearns for a “hoop” to bind together himself and Antony (2.2.115). But Octavia is never really permitted to embrace both men; tellingly, the stage directions for her very first appearance specify “Enter Antony, Caesar, Octavia between them” (3.3), and, in Caesar's words, she is to be “the cement of our love” (3.2.29). Octavia, however, recasts this image when, sensing the renewed antagonism between husband and brother, she laments,

                                        Wars 'twixt you twain would be
As if the world should cleave, and that slain men
Should solder up the rift.

(3.4.30-32)

The sealing agent, the “solder” between the “world shares,” is not one woman's body but many corpses. The image is further revised when Enobarbus, hearing of Lepidus's fall, foresees open conflict between Caesar and Antony and declares,

Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more,
And throw between them all the food thou hast,
They'll grind the one the other.

(3.5.13-15)

Nothing can heal or seal the breach between the two, nothing can separate them, and Octavia (like everyone else) will presumably be one more victim consumed by their rivalry—and, ironically, just as much a “morsel” therefore as the “Egyptian dish.”

The mediating female is gradually obliterated: Rome's central relationship is between male rivals, each of whom wants to be Rome. It is significant that the first epithet Octavius applies to Antony in the play is “great competitor” (1.4.3). The term is being invoked in its root sense of “associate or partner in the same enterprise or quest,” but the inevitable double meaning underscores the generals' real relations. Even at the height of their apparent amity in act 3, Antony tells Octavius “I'll wrestle with you in my strength of love” (3.2.62); all loving-kindness is perforce expressed in terms of rivalry. In Egypt, the world that embraces male and female possibilities, Antony celebrates the “peerless” alliance that makes Cleopatra and himself a glorious “mutual pair” (1.1.33-40)—the semi-tautology of “mutual pair” emphasizes their bond.⁶ In Rome the significant pair-bonding is always male (wives are abandoned or absent) and perpetually competitive, because one will truly gain one's identity only by destroying a double or a parodic mirror image—not by representing one-half of a complementary pair.

Waiting to have her fortune told by the Soothsayer, Charmian comically sketches a career for herself that threatens to rival Cleopatra's: “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; find me to marry with Octavius Caesar …” (1.2.25-29). But she climaxes her wish “and companion me with my mistress.” Such a desire could not, would not be articulated in the language of Rome; even Antony's last loyal companion, Eros, turns into a competitor when, killing himself instead of his lord, he beats him to a noble death.⁷ Competition, in the shape of resented doubles, distorting mirrors, threats to individual male identity, is always present in this world. Antony is angrily aware that other “great competitors,” Cneius Pompeius and Julius Caesar, have “always already” enjoyed Cleopatra, and I think it not insignificant that the auditor or reader of this play is perpetually in danger of confusing references to the dead Pompey and Caesar with their living namesakes. Furthermore, the “sons”—Shakespeare, tellingly, blurs historical family relationships: Sextus Pompeius is actually Cneius Pompeius' younger brother; Octavius is Julius Caesar's nephew—can never quite detach themselves from the “fathers” (although, as the harshest critics in the play of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great's Egyptian mistress, Octavius and Sextus do their best.)

Doctor Johnson complained that in Antony and Cleopatra, the heroine apart, “no character is very strongly discriminated.”⁸ While one might not choose to agree with the suggestion that Antony and Octavius are not very clearly differentiated, it is true that both characters feel their discrete identities, their very selves, are put into question by the behavior of the other. Due to their unwillingness to embrace difference, the possibility of complementarity is sacrificed to the principle of mutual exclusivity (“I can't thrive while he's around”), but because they are partners as well as rivals, slightly skewed doubles as well as opposites, whenever one seeks to exclude or suppress the other he is always threatening to destroy himself.

After the battle of Actium, Canidius believes the fight would have gone well “Had our great general / Been what he knew himself …” (3.10.26-27). There is a lot of talk in this play about what it is to “be” Antony—talk that always seems to collapse into tautology, coming up with definitions that are at once circular and restrictive. At the end of act 1, scene 1, Philo complains that

                                        sometimes, when he is not Antony,
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.

(1.1.57-59)

The suggestion here is that Antony is to blame for lacking the greatness that should always accompany Antony even (paradoxically) when he “isn't himself.” His self is not his own; the “great property” that is supposed to define him is in a sense “common property”; his very existence is dependent upon his submission to Rome's code of values. An Antony who swerves from that value system is a “not-Antony” who is suppressed within three lines. Antony certainly can't reconcile the partial “versions of Antony” reflected back to him by Octavius or emanating from Rome with the competing sense of a transformed self generated by his love for Cleopatra. And yet, to the last, he is terribly dependent upon the mirror provided by Rome. “If I lose mine honour / I lose myself” he tells Octavia (3.4.22-23); “honour” is of course Roman virtus, and when Octavius defeats him and denies him his Roman identity by “harping on what I am / Not what he knew I was” (3.13.142-43)—refusing to reflect back to him that image by which Antony has constituted himself—the general's sense of self begins to dissolve. Antony can celebrate Cleopatra's multiplicity, her becoming “becomings,” but he cannot himself become anything other than the Antony approved by Rome without confronting the prospect of mere formlessness and nonexistence. As the play opens, his “Let Rome in Tiber melt” defies Rome's categories and definitions, but when he believes his Romanness is melting away he has nothing to put in its place.⁹ (Cleopatra's parallel “Melt Egypt into Nile” [2.5.78] is far less self-subverting because the Nile is also Egypt and she is both.)

Antony's presuicide meditation on the inchoate cloud forms that shift in seconds dramatizes his sense of self-loss. Like the disappearing cloud rack, “I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape …” (4.14.13-14). It is noticeable that in a few words he moves from subjectivity (“I am Antony”) to a sense of self constituted by others' regard (“this visible shape”). If he is invisible to Rome, he doesn't exist—and he can find nothing in the (as he thinks) treacherous flux of Egypt to give him new shape. Ironically, he can only regain his identity, put Antony back together again, through willed self-destruction. Dying, he tells Cleopatra:

Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony's hath triumphed on itself.

(4.15.14-15)

He displaces his rival's victory with his own, splits himself so that an Antony will survive as victor of his self-dissolution. Despite the fact that, hauled up into Cleopatra's Alexandrian monument, he is finally embraced by the womb/tomb of Egypt, this Antony will be a “Roman” Antony. At the last (and with the familiar circularity that always seems to accompany Antonine self-definition) he is, in his own words, “A Roman, by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish'd” (4.15.57-58).

When Octavius appears shaken by the news of Antony's death, Maecenas remarks upon the inescapable interdependence of the two generals' identities: “When such a spacious mirror's set before him / He needs must see himself” (5.1.34-35). If Romans are always lamenting the deaths of those they most wanted out of the way (Antony himself has wept for Brutus at Philippi), it is perhaps because the departed foe inevitably turns out to be much more a part of one's self than one had ever admitted. So it is not surprising that Octavius eulogizes Antony as

… my brother, my competitor
… my mate in empire,
Friend and companion in the front of war,
The arm of mine own body, and the heart
Where mine his thoughts did kindle; …

(5.1.42-46)

Caesar wins his empire, becomes “Rome,” through bereavement (the loss of a brother and friend), divorce (from a “mate in empire”), and self-mutilation (the cutting off of an arm, the tearing out of a heart). It has been suggested that in Antony and Cleopatra, although he does not lose himself, Octavius doesn't become anything (Adelman 92). I myself would propose that he does undergo a metamorphosis: his “becoming,” however, is predicated upon a subtraction, because his identity is so dependent upon Antony's.

Cleopatra's being encompassed Egypt, all possible versions of womankind, and the male principle too; the Roman rulers can only “become” Rome in their absence, self-suppression, or self-diminishment. Antony is named “Emperor” by his mistress for the first time in the play when she tells Dolabella “I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony” (5.2.76); he has to die first. And, as we have seen, there is not much left of Octavius to become Augustus Caesar.

But is it fair thus to privilege Egypt's multiplicity over the fragmented and limited selves of Rome when Cleopatra herself seems to submit to Rome's categories of value at the last? Even as she begins to play with the idea of thwarting Octavius's ambitions by killing herself, she says, “Let's do it after the high Roman fashion” (4.15.87). Is she reconstructing her identity according to the requirements of virtus? Awaiting the arrival of the asp, Cleopatra proclaims:

                                                                      I have nothing
Of woman in me: now from head to foot
I am marble constant.

(5.2.237-39)

Her first words deny her femaleness and suggest a complete surrender to the Roman equation of virtue with virtus, manliness; her marble constancy, on the other hand, evokes a flickering reminder of the “holy, cold and still conversation” of that exemplary Roman matron Octavia (3.6.119-20). But to my mind, Cleopatra is not so much subordinating herself to Roman value systems as adding a couple of new “becomings” to her play of identity. In dying thus she not only escapes the actual bonds that Octavius would place upon her, but (in acting in a manner that assorts with his codes) prevents him from fixing her nature by reducing her to his “Egyptian puppet.” She does not, moreover, slavishly imitate the “high Roman fashion” of death but rather appropriates it and remakes it in her own image. In a distinctly Egyptian variation on the theme of opening one's own veins, Cleopatra, the “serpent of old Nile,” succumbs to another serpent of old Nile: Egypt is by Egypt valiantly vanquished. She lives on after death as Charmian's “lass unparalleled”; Octavius also lives on, but merely to be (in the queen's own words) an “ass / Unpolicied” (5.2.306-7). And Octavius, ordering her burial beside Antony in the Alexandrian monument, admits, perforce, that “No grave on earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous” (5.2.357-58): all-embracing Egypt finally wins out as the male/female union displaces the privileged pair-bond rivalry between the “great competitors.”

Notes

1. All references to Antony and Cleopatra are taken from the edition of M. R. Ridley in the Arden Shakespeare series (London: Methuen, 1971).

2. If Cleopatra becomes the nurturing mother at the last, she does so, it might be argued, at the expense of her real children, whom Octavius has threatened to slay if she escapes him. Cleopatra, however, is in a double bind here. She has already sworn to Antony that, should she break faith with him and ally herself with Octavius, her progeny and people will perish (3.13.158ff). Whichever way she acts now, they are doomed. Her final victory over Octavius in death, her confirmation of her union with Antony, can thus only reassert her maternity in these figurative terms.

3. We do see a comparable phenomenon in Henry IV Part I when Hal concludes Hotspur's dying “Percy thou art dust / And food for—” with “For worms, brave Percy.” But Hal's finishing off this speech seems more like a final “finishing off” of his rival and double.

4. The interplay between public and private identity achieved by Cleopatra throughout the play is particularly striking if we compare Shakespeare's Egyptian queen with John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, whose assertion of her private and sexual identity challenges the public self largely constructed for her by her brothers. For an interesting discussion of the implications of “embodiment” in Webster's play see Wells 65-66.

5. For a related discussion of Shakespeare's multiple and ambiguous representation of Cleopatra at her death see Belsey 184.

6. Richard P. Wheeler remarks, “Cleopatra has offered Antony a mode of relating in which his manhood is completed in his response to the feminine in Cleopatra, and which releases the mutual interchange of masculine and feminine in both lovers” (158).

7. Of course competition is not entirely absent from the relations of the Egyptians; Cleopatra herself is anxious that Iras, having predeceased her, may steal a first postmortem embrace from Antony (5.2.300).

8. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 107.

9. On the relation of Antony's identity to “political place” see also Belsey 39-40.

Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Adelman's account of Antony and Cleopatra focuses in particular on the subversive proliferation of commentators and interpretive perspectives within its action and examines in some detail the multiple iconographies and mythic identities of its hero and heroine.

Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985. Explores the constitution of the liberal humanist subject—and more specifically, women's exclusion from the role of speaking subject—by way of readings of the tragic drama of the English Renaissance from the later Morality plays to the Restoration.

Neely, Carol. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Examines the dramatic and psychological significance of courtship, marriage, and widowhood in Shakespeare's oeuvre. Neely is particularly interested in the shifting relationship between genre and gender in the plays and makes use of the repeated motif of the broken nuptial to discuss the different ways in which the female protagonist comes to an accommodation with, transcends, or is destroyed by her socially constructed role.

Wells, Susan. The Dialectics of Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Discusses the relationship in literary texts between the “typical register” (the set of verbal strategies whereby connections are established between the specific and the universal, the text and lived experience, the logic of the work and its rhetoric) and the “indeterminate register” (everything in the text that “rubs against the historical grain or runs on a bias to the main axes of social relations, everything that resists interpretation and refuses intersubjectivity”). Includes an extensive account of the tension between the private/subjective/“feminine” and the public/“masculine” systems of value in The Duchess of Malfi.

Wheeler, Richard P. “‘Since first we were dissever'd’: Trust and Autonomy in Shakespearean Tragedy and Romance.” In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, 150-69. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Traces the tensions in Shakespeare's tragedies and last plays between the male protagonist's need to create an autonomous and individuated self and his desire to embrace the mutuality on which he can ground that self; such a relationship of trust and partial self-surrender is perceived as at once attractive and threatening and in general involves a member of the opposite sex, whether lover, wife, daughter, or mother.