[In the following essay, Sjöberg discusses Antony and Cleopatra as a drama of transformation derived from opposition and strife.]

LEPIDUS.
But small to greater matters must give way.
ENOBARBUS.
Not if the small come first.

(2.2.11-12)

Few dramas have a more solid reputation for spectacularity than Antony and Cleopatra and few plays inspire the same expectations of extensive scenery, swarming crowds and magnificent battle scenes. And this is how the play has been staged, not least in Swedish theaters.

Yet there are, in fact, few dramas that resist this kind of treatment more radically than this. Right from the start it is understood that the drama moves in a world of ruinous oppositions. Antony is on the brink of destroying himself in Egypt, and he has hardly set foot on the stage before he wishes the whole of Rome to undergo the same fate. All external greatness and splendor is immediately broken down to a shadow of itself, and this ruinous and destructive picture running counter to something which at the same time is said to exist in splendor and honor, is upheld throughout the drama. It is as if the drama possessed two levels of articulation, one that seeks expression through rhetorical magnificence and verve and another that attempts the opposite. It is as if the action was driven by an inherent wish to cut down the dimensions of the enormous subject matter and to reduce it to its smallest possible substance, large enough or small enough to fit into the little wooden O as Shakespeare calls his minute stage. It is as if the realization of the relativity of all measurements has inspired him with an urge to destroy his enormous theme, which describes one of the largest invasions ever undertaken by the Roman Empire, in fragments and details and in violent meetings that he locates in the margin of the scenery in this theater without scenery.

He catches the whole action, broken into a thousand quick reflections as in a prism. He looks upon his vision as an astronomer looks upon the cosmos, where the huge earth has lost its place and become a grain of dust in infinity. There is a diminishing of all dimensions on all fronts, even down to the limit of the barely visible, which makes even invisibility a criterion of the uniquely real and true. (It is not by chance that the play contains the shortest line in all drama. “O” says Cleopatra on one occasion, and this “O” contains a world of irony, disappointment, sadness—a complete world view reduced to the same sign that is the sign of Shakespeare's stage. Can the meeting between image and sound that we all want be expressed more clearly? It is at such a moment that Shakespeare at once exceeds all limits and reduces all measures to the least possible, thus uniting oppositions between play and reality.)

Of course he fills the stage with visions, but these are visions in the characters' imaginations and it is this floating, uncertain fabric that makes up the only scenery in the play. Here battlefields, palaces and galleys whirl by, all of the immense empire from Rome to Alexandria, but in a stream of visions that the characters of the drama light up in the spectator's inner eye, while at the same time giving him the opportunity to observe critically with his outer eyes the simple elements that constitute this imaginary greatness.

BLACK VESPER'S PAGEANTS

The monumentality of a Shakespearean drama is founded on the paradoxical relationship between a poetical, radiant text and the poverty of the base, the nakedness of the stage and its smallness. There is not one scene that does not because of this relationship achieve a new perspective in relation to a preceding scene or a new dimension in relation to a following one. The empire grows up by means of constant displacements, just as in one of Piranesi's gigantic palaces; but as in an invisible construction, unreal and grandiose, and just as quickly lost in mist and fume, as in the scene in which Antony believes that he has been deserted and betrayed in his love.

ANTONY.
… Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants.
EROS.
                                                                                                                        Ay, my lord.
ANTONY.
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
EROS.
                                                                                It does, my lord.
ANTONY.
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony;
Yet cannot hold this visible shape …

(4.14.7-14)

The role, the identity, can shift and dissolve as quickly as the poetical vision. What is left is the nakedness of the stage as a thing in itself. The gigantic world-embracing battle can shrink to a circle around one single individual, torn between east and west in his inner life. All measurements are transformed as through a Copernican revolution. All distances in time and space are dissolved, just as the individual himself disappears with his visions and dreams.

Left on the empty stage is the actor, dressed in his gaudy rags and motley, which he now wants to divest himself of as a sign of his longing to find his way back to himself. What are roles and what are feelings in these constant unmaskings? It happens that the performers applaud each other's most fervent tirades, as if everything was a game of words and there was no difference between the genuine and the acted. It is as if the acting was directed by a secret agent, a spoilsport with a clear bent to expose the playacting and the vacuity of the gaudy words. The magnificent visions that want to rise so steeply are met with ever more violent opposition. One is reminded of Tolnay's statement in relation to Michelangelo's fresco The Last Judgment: “Before the spectator has yet understood the meaning of the work as a whole he experiences the voluptuousness of a destruction in a higher order.”

This higher order can be described briefly as the creative principle as such, not just of Michelangelo's fresco but of all great Renaissance works in all areas of art and culture. The foundation of this is Plato's doctrine of ideas involving the soul's yearning for eternity and a return to the world of ideas; a synthesis between oriental Christian mysticism and the doctrine of Eros in Antiquity. This doctrine received its first poetical form in Dante's Divine Comedy and the vision of Beatrice, the image of Divine Love manifested in the shape of the beloved, destined to lift the soul to that heaven which it could never reach of its own strength. Formulated by the Neoplatonic academy of Florence this philosophy rapidly gained ground and was transformed into a way of life embraced by the ruling classes all over civilized Europe. With Castiglione's Courtier it found its way into the palaces. But like all doctrines that have been enthusiastically embraced by a ruling class this also contained a strong element of repression. Behind the sublime concern for one's own exclusivity there lies a hidden urge to negate the existence of the exploited classes. “The slave” is repressed from consciousness and transformed into a symbol of the soul's battle against the material world, becomes a code, is deprived of his real, human content. In this way an outcast class is stripped of its political importance. This is how we see the slave in Michelangelo's grave sculptures, encased in a fixed structure that expresses the moral battle that the feudal class, and subsequently the bourgeois class, fights with itself, its dreams of transcendence, disturbed by mysterious forces and voices from the deepest layers of the mind.

This philosophy, which is built so strikingly on an elite's dreams of a superman, was to prove to have a tenacious vitality throughout the centuries. Not just Michelangelo, Leonardo and Shakespeare but also Goethe and Strindberg would in time find inspiration and material in this meeting between heaven and hell, chosenness and damnation.

It is no coincidence that in the violent oscillation between bliss and despair in the love scenes, between tenderness and hate, between tragedy and vulgar comedy, we recognize typically Strindbergian strains in Shakespeare's drama. During the most difficult crises in his life Strindberg found the way to this traditional philosophy of ideas which was to become a liberating force in all of his subsequent writing. His Inferno visions, his Road to Damascus, are derived from the same circle of ideas that form the basis of Antony and Cleopatra. And having understood this in relation to Strindberg it is possible for us to approach Shakespeare's drama with a renewed understanding, and to appreciate better not just its organization and dramatic methodology but also its ultimate structural transformation. Because just as Strindberg, with his ambivalent nature, never left an idea where he found it, so under similar circumstances a restructuring of the dramatic pattern takes place also in Shakespeare.

Castiglione's book describes the pilgrimage that the soul must undertake step by step through the inferno of this world in order to reach that height of perfection to which it is elevated through the agency of Divine Love. Also the outer architecture is informed by this vision, an architecture which by means of its different levels and elevations provides a background to the action and supports it—an architectural facade that contains the same visible elements in Michelangelo's grave sculptures and in Strindberg's house facades in the chamber dramas, as those on Shakespeare's own stage. They all emanate from the same iconography, that is they are governed by the same signifying elements on their different levels, in their relationship to high and low, to ground floor and upper floors. By placing these different versions of the same theme next to each other, despite the difference in time, we can better understand difficult passages in the dramas. We understand, for example, more clearly the meaning of the mysterious “monument” to which Cleopatra flees and the real meaning of the scene in which she draws Antony up to the elevated level of the stage balcony. By comparing the relations of the different versions to the iconographical pattern we can also see the transformations that take place, and identify with greater precision those moments of time when the original code, that is the underlying system of thought, is broken down and transformed.

An aesthetic-philosophical system is in no way different from other human creations: it lives and dies, is perhaps revived but is changed with the ideological march of history. It can from the start be charged with latent potentialities that suddenly reverse the situation. What is up can become down and be turned around, and this is exactly what happens with the Neoplatonic doctrine in Shakespeare's play, exactly as in Strindberg's dramas. For Strindberg the aristocratic doctrine ultimately became too narrow and he threw it away; the same disintegration, the same renewal, happens in Shakespeare's play. By juxtaposing these plays and seeing them as correspondences on a common theme, we can extract new values which have previously not been perceived. The dimensions of the Antony figure become clearer if we look upon him in relation to Strindberg's Inferno visions.

In the East Antony has been sucked into a world of shadows where he is at the point of losing himself. He appears to the world and to his own consciousness as a shadow of his former self. Like one of Strindberg's Strangers he experiences his alienation as an increasing feeling of degradation and divorce from reality. In a desperate attempt to break out of the petrified world that is Rome and above all the growing competition with Caesar he has lost all self-control. In Dionysian and sexual orgies he attempts to break out of his physical and mental limitations. He believes (as the Renaissance man he is) in a unity beyond all reason that with one stroke is going to burn away all sexual difference. He is under the illusion that in the sexual ecstasy he will be able to liberate himself, reconcile all the oppositions of existence and achieve that equilibrium, that coincidentia oppositorum in which humankind is transformed and loses its sexual nature. Here comes to light the dream of the androgyne, that sexless synthesis of man and woman that haunts so many romantic works of art, and that with us has found its most perfect Nordic vision in Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's Tintomara.

In Cleopatra's final scene we can see that she in turn believes that she has reached the same synthesis, the same negation of male-female. It is against all these sexual excesses and speculations that Rome, the headquarters of the manly lifestyle, turns in disgust and contempt.

CAESAR

A closed system like the Roman one can only uphold its stability and structure by means of ruthless steering and self-control and a minimum of permissible changes. Caesar stands out as the incarnation of this pitiless control, with the puritanism of a seventeen-year-old. He is one of Shakespeare's last variations on the theme of puritanical man that he, with his aristocratic-aesthetic view of life, had always seen as his natural enemy. In Malvolio in Twelfth Night he had in an earlier phase of his work with malicious delight ruthlessly exposed the type. But in Caesar the tone has deepened because the historical circumstances have changed.

He had always looked upon the Puritan as a threat, against the joy of living as well as against his art, which in the fantastic seeks to reveal the nature of existence and the sovereignty of humankind. This art he had pitted against a Puritan fanaticism that had disowned his aristocratic vision, opposing it with bigotry and baseness. But with the new century and the new monarch and far from the court and the king's control, the Puritan movement had grown in the life of the people into a political and religious movement of altogether new dimensions. Increasingly this had been colored by the growing longing for political freedom which characterized the new era and which competed on the fundamental level of reality with the aristocratic doctrine of the liberation of the spirit, which was cherished by the court and which not least had kept its grip on Shakespeare's poetry.

This gives Caesar, who is seen by Shakespeare as the self-appointed leader of this sober and realistic front, a better starting point in relation to Antony, who is now reduced to a secondary role, not because of Caesar's superior intelligence but because of his historical representation, a change in the political climate which Antony does not understand but which Caesar uses coldly and brutally. It is interesting to notice the ruthless scorn with which Caesar observes the ordinary man. Here we can see the rise of the superman, the new Machiavellian dictator, far away from the aesthetic-aristocratic schema. Shakespeare is beginning to get his eyes opened to the new variations of elitism and self-deification of the time. But Antony understands nothing of this new arrangement in the historical development. He sees only an inferior soldier who wants to take his place and relegate him to the backwater of his former fame. He begins to feel old and tired but cannot understand the cause of his depression. It is in this demotion through time that Shakespeare has found the invisible center, the black hole that will disclose the simultaneous maturation and growth of the change.

THE SONNETS

It may seem unexpected and paradoxical to find forgetfulness and aging as themes in a poet who has so definitely conquered time in the poetry of his youth. But even in the sonnets, where the Dark Lady makes her entry as his life's great disappointment in love, Shakespeare gives expression to his fear of growing old and passé. He envies his more modern colleagues who in every sense he finds more intelligent than himself, at the same time as he feels deep disgust at the state of society and everything to do with sexuality and love. Even here is fully formulated the dark and embittered view of life that with such renewed intensity will return in his last tragedy. The moral degradation is felt already in every line of these grim poems on how he had believed that he had found a new Beatrice in the Dark Lady. And he has been cruelly deceived not just by her but also by the young nobleman who had accepted him, not just as a poet and actor, but as his equal as an aristocrat and as a friend.

He is twice deceived when he realizes that a friend of the nobleman is the Lady's lover, and also an idolized poet, whose amateurish verses have superseded his own poetry. He is the servant who thought he was master, brutally put back in his place.

And with this experience Shakespeare's view of the entire Neoplatonic pattern is dislodged. Now the secondary role emerges as a theme in his poetry, at the same time as he stubbornly refuses to lose the original vision completely out of sight. All of his subsequent drama will deal with the theme of demotion. From Hamlet to Brutus and Othello he puts forth a privileged hero who—because of an attack on his identity—reacts destructively against the aristocratic model that has formed him. It is then, in the dizzy fall toward the bottom, in the luxurious urge for annihilation, that Antony suddenly discovers that the depth is populated.

He discovers the banished, the constricted, the slaves on society's lowest level. And then the nature of the death wish changes; it becomes an expression of the eternal battle between suffering and oppression. A change that will affect the structure of all of the gigantic system of ideas. A self that will break out of its limitations, not in sexual liberation, but through identification with the conditions of the banished, a self that will rediscover itself by accepting the conditions of the role of the slave.

Antony gathers his servants around him on the eve of the last, decisive battle:

Well, my good fellows, wait on me tonight:
… and make as much of me
As when mine empire was your fellow too,
And suffer'd my command, …

(4.2.20-23)

Like a gleam in a piece of broken glass flashes the picture of another night of sacrifice, when a group of servants take farewell of their master and are entrusted with the future fate of the world: the last supper in the New Testament. It is surprisingly rare that Shakespeare uses biblical motifs compared to his use of motifs from contemporary art. Shakespeare is the “poet of secularization,” he transposes the religious motifs to make them serve that creative process of mankind that is the grand theme of his poetry. Seen in this perspective the model of the Neoplatonic world order is suddenly exposed as a falsification. The banished slaves are transformed from empty forms and symbols in an aristocratic-aesthetical code into human beings of flesh and blood.

It is the same transformation as we experience today when in the confrontation with Michelangelo's grave sculptures we are captivated more by the anguish and existential conditions of the slaves than by the composition as a whole and the subtlety of its higher superstructure. This is of course primarily because the sculptor has given these contorted, fighting limbs such a strong concreteness, but above all because we, in our own historical situation, look upon them as an expression of our own fight for freedom. We see their painful wrestling with the stone as an image of the rebellion against oppression and tyranny of the awakening poor nations. And we identify this awakening with our own revived awareness of being bound to their fight.

It is in the same way as in Shakespeare's drama, where Antony is awakened to awareness of being bound to the fate of the slaves:

                                                                                                                        Every time
Serves for the matter that it is then born in't.

(2.2.9-10)

With this identification both the theme of the play and Antony's role are changed. And we read it now, because of our own historical situation, as a reflection of the liberation theme, precisely as this is reflected in the other roles of the play. They are all variations on the theme of the secondary role, the servant theme. Even Eros, the demigod of ancient abstraction, is given human form, steps down together with the whole of the Neoplatonic system from his lofty niche in the world of ideas, to the earth, to be changed there into a living being in the role of a simple servant. And in what seems an important scene he exchanges this role with his master in order to give him a lesson in dignity, in what it means to liberate oneself from degradation and disgrace.

With this descent to the earth all of the grandiose Neoplatonic construction changes form, just as all roles will change identity in relation to the vision of liberty. We get a range of all the different ways of relating to this vision: treason, contempt, ignorance, paralysis, indifference to the possibility of freedom, but also the complete transformation to loyalty, and solidarity, with its concomitant message.

It is in this way that Enobarbus goes through his transformation, his pilgrimage through the inferno of treason, in the same way as the irresponsible young girls around Cleopatra are to find in death their way to the freedom of unconditional faithfulness. But first and foremost the greatest transformation happens through Cleopatra herself; it is through her that the theme of liberation gets its most exalted purgation and grandeur.

CLEOPATRA

With Cleopatra Shakespeare revenges himself for the greatest degradation of his life. He writes himself free from the traumatic memory that he has tried to liberate himself from through his infinite poetical transformations. What luxurious pain in tearing away the mask from the Dark Lady—but at the same time what a victory for his unshakeable belief in the possibilities of transformation. What a picture he makes of the black gypsy he puts on the stage, a caricature of the Cleopatra myth, past her prime, vulgar and crude, grotesque and wild, but also with a soft humanity behind her split nature, just as with Antony whose illness she sees through because she suffers from the same disease herself, of being neglected, having to play a second-rank role in his love, when she is accustomed to being the foremost and most adored one in these hunting grounds.

Aristotle's idea of man as never being able to become more than a being of the second rank, because he can never rise to the idea of man, seems to have an uncanny manifestation in her role as well as in Antony's; they never become more than shadows and reflections of the pictures they have painted of each other. Because of this they throw themselves at each other's throats like wolves, as if they wanted to tear out with their teeth those confessions of absolute love they have never had a chance to hear from the other's lips, but which they know are there, behind all the lies and all the dissimulation. In their grotesque meetings, in their sadomasochistic attacks they can never find the words, they can only throw themselves in each other's arms in silence, as if in the contact of their bodies there was a language more eloquent than words. What a break with the idealistic credo, when this vulgar cocotte finally takes over the role of Beatrice in lifting her Antony from the lowness of the earthly level up to final purification. Her fire burns away the last remains of his degradation, and in her arms he finally rediscovers his lost identity. He can greet Caesar in the way a Roman greets a victor. He achieves liberation by accepting his fall, in his elevation, and in this way his death becomes a reconciliation of the oppositions inside him, a coincidentia oppositorum.

But the greatest change (which is at the same time the greatest deepening of the original theme) happens through Cleopatra. The despised old whore, who conducts her lover to his liberation, grows to something more than a reflection of the angelic Beatrice. When she has lost Antony, the battle of the sexes finally seems to abate, and her grief transforms her into a human being in whom the male-female opposition has melted down and lost all importance:

O, wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men: the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

(4.15.64-68)

But what human resources she has and what powers they give her to break out of the marble picture when she is forced to leave her protected retreat of cool androgyny upstairs and once again step down to the downstairs of the slaves.

At first she does this in order to find a metaphor for her grief. High and low have lost every meaning; it is only in a comparison with her lowest servant that she can find words for her loss and for her own self:

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)

She follows the same road as Antony: from the heights of cold abstraction she climbs down to the warm earth and exchanges there her role as ruler and master with an identification with the slave. She no longer glorifies the paradise of blessed Dantean visions—instead she wants to throw her royal scepter at the evil gods as a protest against their cruel games. Here there are no gestures of reconciliation toward the divine, no confessions of surrender and humility, neither to heaven nor to earth, the gypsy of the East captures without help from others the Roman citizenship that has been denied her, not just by Caesar but even by her beloved Antony. Against the divine demand for submission, she poses the picture of the beloved elevated to cosmic proportions, and conquers heaven and earth for a dream of his greatness. As Juliet makes of Romeo a being who exceeds all God-given measures for man, Cleopatra puts before us the picture of Antony, to the destruction of all gods. She is mortal humanity confronted with a cosmos devoid of all divine assistance. In her existential forsakenness she musters up strength to endow the theme of freedom with a final greatness.

She meets Caesar, and the prisoner, considered to be a slave, conquers her conqueror. With Caesar the puritan morality of cleanness has reached its final perfection and revealed its hidden fascism. The manipulator steps forward as the dictator of the new republic. He leaves after the meeting with Cleopatra in the false belief that his despotic civic rationality has conquered eastern unreason. But Cleopatra has long seen through the confusion of roles between master and slave. It is he who is Fortune's slave, a poor lackey of the morality of progress, and therefore doomed. In order to demonstrate the paradox she arrays herself a last time in her queenly rank as a sign of a majesty that has finally taken farewell of all visible, earthly power. The Black Vesper's Masquerades are drawing toward their close—also for her. (Perhaps this was the author's calculated effect taking advantage of the waning light in his theater in the afternoon. The plays were performed in daylight. The way home was beginning to darken for the audience also.)

IRAS.
Finish, good lady, the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.

(5.2.192-93)

With dusk the last mask falls from the aging cocotte, and clean and clear as dawn rises the undamaged vision of human integrity—measured not by puritan ideals—as uncontaminated by the mud as the water lily in the water.

The greatest poet of the Renaissance created his work at a time when a dying aristocracy had lost its foothold. A world in the process of restructuring, with new, rising classes on the way to breaking out of political oppression in order to make new demands of their existence, it would only take twenty years before the first European revolution had been carried through, monarchy abolished and the Puritan republic become a fact.

The poet anticipated this impending transformation—but he also defended himself against the contempt of the imagination and the spiritual impoverishment he feared would follow in its wake. Divided in his attitude to the aristocratic philosophy he himself destroyed, he has not yet found the new form that the disrupted situation requires. Instead he builds on the broken fragments of the old already superseded system, his vision. He has it conveyed by already aging characters, who can see that what is new in the new age is already losing its bearings. Their message is tragic because of the falling darkness around the vision of man's capability for integrity. But despite darkness, old age and decay this vision rises up with redoubled strength against the blight of unimaginative ideas, against spiritual capitulation, against slavery and oppression with redoubled strength. Through the thickening darkness is heard Hamlet's meditation on the creative process: “What a piece of work is man” (italics mine).

It could be translated as: “What a result of human endeavor is man.” His striving becomes a paean to man's ability of self-creation, to the ability to form a vision of an unshackled human community, despite the tyranny and evil of the material world. For us who experience our own struggle in our own time, the liberation theme in Antony and Cleopatra stands out with a new and unexpected intensity as a counteraction against the annihilation of man, against his degradation, against his loss of identification. The confrontation, between east and west, between the new world and the old, is concentrated and takes shape in human and apprehensible form.¹

Notes

1. This essay was translated by the editor from the text in Sverker R. Ek, Ulla Åsberg, Elsa Sjöberg and Katarina Sjöberg, eds., Alf Sjöberg: Teater som besvärjelse, artiklar från fem decennier (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söners förlag, 1982), 124-39.