SOURCE: Fawkner, H. W. “Presence and Oblivion.” In Shakespeare's Hyperontology: Antony and Cleopatra, pp. 23-45. Cranbury, N. J.: Associated University Presses, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Fawkner examines the oppositional pattern of “following and leaving” in Antony and Cleopatra, which he suggests defines the conceptual structure of the drama.]

At the most intense and fascinating level of dramatic suggestion, Shakespearean tragedy opens signification that is hyperontological. Shakespeare's language does not only dramatize certain human events, it also dramatizes the elusive play of certain logical fantasies, certain hyperlogical mystifications. These patternings, related as they are to what is philosophical in all human inquiry, are not external to the dramatic action—as “poetry” or “imagery” adorning it. Rather, these patternings are conceptual and hyperconceptual constructs that cause the organization of tragic discourse and the organization of tragic reality to become a unified sense of dramatic power.

While it is possible to argue that there is a general hyperontology for Shakespearean tragedy as a whole, it is first necessary to clarify the manner in which each individual tragedy tends to move toward its own special hyperontology: to face its own particular ontodramatic difficulty.¹ Such a challenge causes the tragic vision to become more than a spectacle, more than a showing of certain intricate happenings and outcomes. Indeed, we see in a problem tragedy like Antony and Cleopatra that the hyperontological difficulty can usurp the mastering role of tragic action to the extent that the play at times seems to begin to suffer from the dominating urge of its own hyperlogical obsessions. What we risk ending up with is not an absolutely rounded tragedy, an entirely “satisfying” theatrical product, but instead the general feeling of the contradictory hyperlogical difficulty that sets it in motion. Antony and Cleopatra in a sense becomes a performance of the intellectual obstacle that should have been its metaphysical reserve; the play performs its own hidden condition of possibility, but without always transforming that possibility into theatrical persuasion.

This inability of the drama to live up to the preexisting demands of aesthetic resolution—which is its power to surpass a neat formula of constructional felicity—at once opens the view of what this enterprise identifies as the ontodrama of Antony and Cleopatra: the spectacle of leaving. I submit that Antony and Cleopatra consistently traces a crucial (non)structure, that this (non)structure is hyperontological, and that the hyperontological trace engages the polar opposites “following” and “leaving.” But precisely because these conceptual opposites are torn by drama, and not posited by neo-classical logic, precisely because Shakespeare puts them into radical play, they no longer operate as dialectical philosophemes. Hyperontology is a play rather than a conceptual order; we are not shown how concepts work but how they resist work—how they play. The play of following and leaving with one another “is” the drama known as Antony and Cleopatra. This sporting of leaving with following, and of following with leaving (and of each side with itself), is sometimes more important than the sporting of Cleopatra with Antony, or of Antony with Cleopatra.

Antony and Cleopatra is an ontodramatically interesting play, for as Michael Goldman points out, it is likely that Shakespeare at this point in his career was becoming theatrically self-conscious in a new manner:

I find it helpful to think of Antony and Cleopatra as written at a moment when Shakespeare, for whatever reason, had become particularly self-conscious about his own career. At forty-three or forty-four, he would have had a reasonably clear sense of his own greatness. Even if he shared his culture's relatively low estimate of the importance of playwriting, he must have been conscious of the unusual power of his mind. The intellectual effort required to produce Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth in half-a-dozen years would have struck even the most modest of men as extraordinary. Like any great artist he might have wondered what his powers could have achieved in a more practical sphere.²

Goldman's essay uses this notion to deploy a vertical axis of tragic explication, one that will transcend the horizontal analysis opposing Rome and Egypt, duty and pleasure, and so forth.³ He argues that the hero and heroine above all exemplify a greatness⁴ that is ecstatic,⁵ and that can be perceived in the magnetism of great actors or in the charisma of great political leaders.⁶ Instead of a horizontal indeterminacy (between Rome and Egypt, and so forth), we get a vertical indeterminacy. Here greatness itself is at stake, always hovering near the brink of its own ruination:

The power of presence in an actor is perilously close to glamor, but it can be taken beyond the limits of glamor by art. … Antony and Cleopatra are most actor-like in that they exhibit a magnetism that is culturally suspect. Paramount among the vile things they make becoming to the audience are the particular vices of glamorous actors. Cheapness and self-indulgence, narcissism and whoredom, hover about all their gestures. … They must be, as the text demands, showy, self-regarding, manipulative, concerned with “image”—all the familiar trappings of the glamorous “star.” But while showing the seams of their talent, all the glitz of their art, they must show its irresistible power too.⁷

Like the great actor, the great playwright is structurally drawn into the risk of such greatness. The danger is not really a social one, that of fame; rather, it springs from the excessive power that the subject provisionally gains over the world. Shakespeare, absorbed for some reason in other issues during a nearby performance of one of his plays, must on numerous occasions have been startled by the recognition that the words coming from the center of the Globe (from the play in performance) were nothing but the linguistic fabrications of his own private mind. He must on such occasions have been struck by the power of language—and by the power also of the hypnotic excess that language can radiate when it pushes humans toward the limits of their creative and destructive potentials. Such a moment of sudden self-consciousness would no doubt shape itself as a moment of illumination, the dramatist suddenly acquiring a powerful intuition of the reach and force of his own spirit; yet such an intuition might also be accompanied by a sense of terror. Macbeth, already, would seem to be in the process of beginning to recognize the shape of such attraction and terror. The hero quickly grasps an expanded sense of greatness, when he has an intuition of the world's ongoing drama as a performance that he may master and appropriate.⁸ Macbeth is made to expand violently at exactly that point in time when the play's producers (the Weird Sisters) manage to suggest that he is the director of his own performance—its be-all and end-all. But with this fantastic inflation, and quite simultaneous with it, there follows an absolute loss: as soon as the hero (Macbeth, or Shakespeare happening to catch the sound of the performance of his own work) intuits the self as something enlarging itself infinitely, that self is also dispersed into the infinite otherness of the medium. By wiping out the distinction between (private) performance and (public) world, the world is privatized, while the self is abstractly publicized. Thus, in grasping himself suddenly as allness, Macbeth also claims himself as nothingness, a mere opium dream. Macbeth shows the moral unease and ontological flutter created by this ability of the imagination to infinitize its reach, and Goldman identifies a similar pattern in Antony and Cleopatra. From this viewpoint, Antony and Cleopatra pushes the problem of greatness in Macbeth one step further:

Whatever Shakespeare may have intended, however orthodox the political “philosophy” of his history plays, the power of his art made the possibility of rebellion vivid, interesting, moving. In this, it loosened the fibers of authority and moral restraint. … Macbeth deprecated regicide; Othello made it clear one wasn't supposed to kill one's wife. But each was a risky adventure in feeling and knowledge. Certainly it could not be denied that imagination at its most importunate swept dangerously beyond moral lines. The power of language could make everything it touched precious, could, while the play lasted, make its own preciousness the center of value. In the figures of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare may have recognized an appeal like that of supreme poetic fluency itself—the amoral splendor of the absolutely attractive.⁹

Goldman, then, opposes his vertical conception of the play to the horizontal one. He belongs to the large group of critics who privilege the scene where Antony is raised up from the ground and lifted into the elevated and transcendent presence of Cleopatra. The elevation, itself the symbol of “heightened perception” and “heightened sensation,”¹⁰ amounts to a typically idealist form of ascension, to a sublation through erection. Against such vertical sensations, we could then set the horizontal models that, far from stressing resolution, focus its absence. Janet Adelman's brilliant work The Common Liar may here represent that position. In the play, she argues, there is chaotic contradiction on countless levels, and our synthesizing faculties fail to bring these contradictions into a state of aesthetic or logical harmony.¹¹ If our imagination habitually yearns for such synthesizing operation, it is not surprising that Antony and Cleopatra frustrates so many spectators and critics: the play, in important ways, does not make sense. I would like to argue, however, that the vertical and the horizontal lines of explication are not mutually exclusive; indeed, an ontodramatic reading will break down the artificial opposition between them. Therefore, what I am primarily interested in in Goldman's criticism is not the transcendent qualities of the drama, but what he calls “odd knots of meaning.”¹² The emotion or general sense of a unit is clear, but then “an additional bend of suggestion is felt.”¹³ On my view, it is this “additional bend” that regularly makes Shakespearean discourse Shakespearean, and it is also my view that these “bends” nearly always create a hyperontological angle of suggestion. Moreover, these hyperontological “bends” tend, in each play, to mark the outline of a certain shared “trace.” This trace amounts to (1) a “logic” and (2) an organization of discourse. The ontodramatic trace or (non)structure, as I have pointed out, is shaped by the capacity of these two aspects to become the unified shadow of a fluttering gestalt. Most commentators, indeed even most of the great critics, miss the ontodramatic gestalt/flutter completely, the reason being that the hyperontological “bends” bend away from (rather than together with) the curves of meaning and general sense. Goldman by contrast effectuates several brilliant ontodramatic readings in the course of his essay, notably of the unit “becoming”; and he observes in this context that “the general sense” states one thing while “the words say the opposite.”¹⁴ In this situation where meanings actually get “reversed” through rhetoric,¹⁵ the clues provided by the logic of action and behavior often prove to be negative at first. This is why the critic severely conditioned by the “general sense” of a Shakespearean drama (and particularly by a moral sense) never gets anywhere near the ontodramatic flutter; he is looking for clues only in one direction, rarely suspecting that they might pop up behind his back.

This type of contradiction is operative on quite minute levels of discourse; often, as Goldman observes, “the feeling of [a] passage runs quite contrary to its argument.”¹⁶ But once this feeling is identified, it is not too difficult to see that it works, together with similarly oriented passages, to create a parallel argument, a counterargument with its own thinking and suasive direction. We see also from Goldman's discussion of the indeterminacy of the unit “becoming” that an investigation of the counterargument produced by rhetoric inevitably reaches down into ontology and hyperontology: the issue of “becoming” leads to a suggestion of “the problem of how something can become itself.”¹⁷ Furthermore, such a hyperontological “bend” does not in the final analysis remove us from the direct level of moral action; we do not soar philosophically into some platonic overworld called “ontology.” On the contrary, the really gritty moral problems can only be thoroughly deciphered through the hyperontological flutter that the odd “bends” of Shakespearean discourse make available. I have claimed that the ontodramatic pulsation of “following” and “leaving” traces the discursive and tragic shadow-gestalt in Antony and Cleopatra, and we need only look at the conclusion of Goldman's essay to see how he, perhaps inadvertently, suggests the moral implications of that ontodramatic trace: “As moral observers, we too would defect from Antony—yet to give up on Antony is to desert the life of the play.”¹⁸ This is the stuff and fabric of the tragedy: the question of desertion; when to leave and when not to leave; when to be a follower and when to be a nonfollower. But the choices made explicit in such a problematic are pulled away from the neat “either-or” of dialectical logic by the moiré effect of Shakespeare's language. Shakespeare problematizes the clear-cut options of the choices by uncertainizing the individual sides of the balance. He does not simply ask: Will you follow? Or: Will you leave? He also asks: What is a follower? What is it to leave? And since this kind of questioning, quasi-ontological as it is, goes on from the beginning right up to the last dramatic happening, no rich understanding of the play can eschew the ontodramatic difficulties that its language deploys. To skirt the “odd knots of meaning” and the hyperontological conundrums created by their intricacy is, indeed, to be a deserter; to defect from Shakespeare, “to desert the life of the play.”¹⁹

As I now move into the linguistic events of the play, I do so in a lineal and straightforward fashion, since dramatic art, being more conditioned by the flow of performance than poetry or fiction, should preferably be discussed temporally—that is, in terms of a series of linguistic bursts encoded in an organized sequence. I begin, therefore, at the beginning.

ACT 1, SCENE 1

The first scene of Antony and Cleopatra identifies the two economies of the play: the restricted economy of Rome, stressing restraint, and the general economy of Egypt, stressing excess. (I use Bataille's term “general economy” to indicate an economy of excess, a life-style based on luxury, in the hyperontological sense.) The play's ontodramatic pattern, based as it is on the (non)opposition following/leaving, immediately engages the drama of these two economies, since leaving, far from merely indicating a geographical shift from one place to another, suggests the leaving of one economy for the other. Because, in addition, each separate economy (that of Rome and that of Egypt) has its own quasiontological estimation of what leaving and following are, the Shakespearean act of opposing the two economies from the outset results in the instantaneous pressure on leaving as such. The fact that the classical story of Antony and Cleopatra was universally known to the common spectators as tragic, with the fact that Shakespeare has the transcendent death of the lovers in view from the outset, creates a dramatic atmosphere in which the most trivial parting is already full of the energies of ontodramatic thinking.

The two aspects—those of economy and of leaving—are immediately thrown into hyperontological interfunctioning. The question of leaving (“How can you go?”) is folded into the question of economy: “How far can you go?” The economic aspect is opened by the very first lines of the text: “Nay, but this dotage of our general's / O'erflows the measure.”²⁰ The general economy entrapping the general is strengthened by numerous units: “a gipsy's lust” (1.1.10), “transform'd / Into a strumpet's fool” (1.1.12-13), “pleasure” (1.1.47), and “sport” (ibid.). We also see that Antony is so impatient with the exclusionary realities of Rome that he has to restrict this restriction:

ATTENDANT.
News, my good lord, from Rome.
ANTONY.
                                                                                                                        Grates me, the sum.

(1.1.18)

Antony cannot stand the thought of Rome, its restricted horizons; he wants to bracket the slightest reference to it. Yet even the minutest thought of Rome brings in the full power of its presence. This ability of Rome—throughout the play—to assert itself when being repressed, to make its mark in terms of the discourse that seeks to evade it, is made ironically evident by the fact that Antony, in the very act of wanting to crush the appeal of Rome, is actually slipping into the formula of its restricted economy. His clipped discourse (“Grates me, the sum”) suggests the Roman paradigm: restriction, tightness, compression, concentration, cognitivity, businesslike directness. Rome is like an infection or cold, something you can catch through oral contact, through discourse itself; the news brought by a messenger must be kept at a safe distance. As soon as Antony moves on to the general economy of his heroic idiom, however, we are made to feel the contrast between the curtailed variant of his language (“Grates me, the sum”) and its irruptive potential:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay …
.....We stand up peerless.

(1.1.33-40)

We notice in Cleopatra's immediate response to this gushing enthusiasm that the play of Rome with Egypt cannot be rendered simplistically as a play between a restricted and a general economy. As soon as Antony, in a state of complete Egyptization, affirms Egypt, Egypt retreats to a more restricted and subtle appraisal of what it—or she—means:

                                                                                Excellent falsehood!
Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?
I'll seem the fool I am not; Antony
Will be himself.

(1.1.40-43)

We observe a pattern of refiguration that is paradigmatic: Rome, in affirming Egypt, affirms an Egypt that Egypt itself does not quite recognize. Antony, in adoring “Cleopatra,” is not really adoring Cleopatra (or even the general economy that she represents), but an abstract idealization of her. This idealization, moreover, is not the economically radical as such, but merely the mechanical and abstract opposite of Rome. As Roman, Antony knows Rome as restriction and restricted economy; thus he idealizes the alternative to Rome as the opposite of Rome—as an excess that is merely an absolute onwardness, or upward release. But Cleopatra, far from recognizing this Roman description of Egypt as Egypt, conceives it as folly. Indeed, there is a faintly Roman quality in her responses to some of Antony's Egyptian raptures—and it is this Roman or vaguely restricted quality in her (and therefore also in Egypt) that sometimes brings her close to the Caesars. Clearly, this Roman quality in Cleopatra—or in woman, if you will—draws attention to a crucial vulnerability in Antony by intensifying it. Conceiving Egypt as a mechanical opposite and simple negation of Rome, he is poorly equipped for any encounter with Egypt that will take upon itself the shape of the performance of the restricted, of Rome. Antony cannot prepare himself to meet Rome in Egypt, in Cleopatra, since he often views Egypt as a mere antithesis.

Antony is thus shown to be ontodramatically inferior to Cleopatra (which is not necessarily to be heroically or tragically inferior to her) through his somewhat naive conception of what an emancipation from a restricted economy amounts to. The Rome he abandons, Cleopatra knows, is a world of virtuous constancy, a place where a virtue signifies a virtue, the constancy of a virtuous disposition. But in his abstract conception of his wife Fulvia, Cleopatra senses that Antony's new life-style is simply a mechanical inversion of constancy. The Roman formula calls for constancy, the capacity to constantly be constant; but Antony threatens to only negate this attitude by implementing its empty opposite: to be constantly inconstant. “Antony will be himself” (1.1.42-43). Antony will constantly be the negation of himself, the negation of his Roman identity, of the Roman man he ought to have been. Thus he will be a fool, unlike her, by promoting a recklessness that is not constant to any single entity but merely constant to its own inconstancy, its own empty and negative ideality. She will be made to seem a fool, but he will be one. Again:

                                                                      Excellent falsehood!
Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?
I'll seem the fool I am not; Antony
Will be himself.

(1.1.40-43)

M. R. Ridley claims that we should imagine a comma after “Why.” Cleopatra, we are told, is not asking herself why Antony actually married Fulvia but saying: “The fact that he married her proves that he loved her.”²¹ But neither of these readings is adequate. What Shakespeare is emphasizing is the issue of constancy: “Why did Antony love-and-marry Fulvia and then cease loving her?” Cleopatra senses that Antony, if he is not manipulated with the utmost cunning, will repeat the Roman marriage tragedy in Egypt, that he will repeat himself, return, quite constantly, to the formula of his own spirit, absolute inconstancy: “Antony / Will be himself.”

Shakespeare, in characteristic fashion, is working with original contradiction. “Antony / Will be himself” precisely because he will not be so. This is made clear by the unit in the text that soon follows, Philo's “when he is not Antony” (1.1.57). Philo rationalizes this contradiction according to a quite reassuring scheme:

He [sometimes] comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.

(1.1.58-59)

The idea here is that Antony occasionally falls short of his true identity, which is absolute greatness. But Cleopatra, who like Shakespeare has a shrewder appraisal of Antony's nature, feels that Antony's divergence from Antony is a paradigmatic and original trait rather than an occasional misfiring.

The tension now formed by the fact that Antony is too eagerly Egyptian while Cleopatra remains tantalizingly Roman can be felt at the very moment when Shakespeare first introduces his heroine. The second line of the play discussed Antony as one who “[o]'erflows the measure”; but when Cleopatra articulates her first response to this excess, we see that she introduces an element of caution and restraint into Antony's wildly general economy:

CLEOPATRA.
If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
ANTONY.
There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd.
CLEOPATRA.
I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.
ANTONY.
Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

(1.1.14-17)

Partly, of course, such erotic dialogue is mere amorous skirmish of the most conventional type, the contestatory rhetoric of one lover negating the literal meaning of the other only to create sexual tension. In that context, too, the superiority of the male, his tendency to be erotically more audacious and impertinent, signifies no special movement of extraordinary importance. Yet the passage is nevertheless crucial, since it adumbrates a design that will be sustained throughout the drama: the war between a general economy (here Antony's) and a restricted one (here Cleopatra's). Although Cleopatra on an erotic level is really urging Antony on (“tell me how much”), and although the boundary she sets to love (“bourn”) might be conceived as Antony conceives it, as an infinitely self-extending horizon, the surface kinetics of the passage creates the feeling of feminine caution holding back masculine excess. We feel that Cleopatra, much in Roman fashion, has her feet planted firmly on the ground—and that, unlike Antony, she realizes that love, precisely in order to be general, must also be restricted.

This Roman quality of Cleopatra's is also emphasized in her openness toward the incoming Roman news. While Antony is only interested in the “pleasure” and “sport” of the night (1.1.47), she actually interrupts him in order to introduce some realism and perspective: “Hear the ambassadors” (1.1.48). It is here that we first confront the hyperontological shadow-gestalt of the play: the flutter of following/leaving. Cleopatra is quite aware of the element of irreducible absence and departure that is built into the erotic relationship, almost as its condition of possibility. She is not afraid of thinking about such absence, even if she may abhor its physical reality and materialization. She can envisage Antony leaving for Rome, and she can envisage herself not following him. Antony, by contrast, is in an exactly opposite mood; and the naïveté imbedded in this mood is brought out through the reference to his childish expectation that last night's romantic street-walking will be followed by an identical love-trip. Again, this attitude stresses the mechanical conception of inconstancy that we have already discussed; he idealizes a constant inconstancy, a negation of Rome that, every evening, will be constellated into the same ritual. And, what is worse, he expects Cleopatra to comply to the laws of this empty circus:

[ANTONY.]
                                                                                          What sport to-night?
CLEOPATRA.
Hear the ambassadors.
ANTONY.
                                                                                Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom every thing becomes, to chide, to laugh,
To weep …

.....

To-night we'll wander through the streets, and note
The qualities of people. Come, my queen,
Last night you did desire it.

(1.1.47-55)

Following is now for Antony simply a negation of leaving. To follow is not to leave, not to depart, not to sail for Rome. Following, in this scheme, stays close to following, to its own supposed essence, just as the lovers are to stick close to the figure of their ongoing proximity by not only following one another, in an evening stroll, but also by following the exact formula of such a pleasure. Love is to become an itinerary, a reassuring route that simply points the way to its own recurring possibility. The lovers are to love by “following love.” Indeed, in this Antonian conception, the following of love is the act of love itself.

ACT 1, SCENE 2

In the second scene, Shakespeare expands the notion of leaving; but we observe to begin with how the introduction of the soothsayer identifies interpretation as an issue that is interior to the play itself:

SOOTHSAYER.
You shall be yet far fairer than you are.
CHARMIAN.
He means in flesh.
IRAS.
No, you shall paint when you are old.

(1.2.16-18)

The passage serves the main purpose of creating atmosphere; the tone of Egyptian playfulness is set, so that the horizon of expectation, thrill, and desire is defined in erotic rather than military or political terms. Yet the scene also calls attention to the intellectual indeterminacy of the entire drama. Everyone in the play is interpreting rather than acting, and this applies to the hero and the heroine too. They are constantly in the process of trying to make a correct interpretation of each other, with misinterpretation going on to the end. Moreover, misinterpretations are frequently spawned by the fear of misinterpretation rather than by the difficulty of interpretation. Also, false signals are sent out (especially by Cleopatra) to neutralize the bias of interpretation by appropriating its power and mastery. “She is cunning past man's thought,” as Antony puts it (1.2.142); but this cunning is not simply sexual deviousness or erotic gamesmanship. Cleopatra, unlike Antony, tends to call forth the element of irreducible negativity in life; she anticipates the lethal workings of this negativity, and when there is given evidence of its reality, she turns the pain of its thrust into an articulate cry. This tendency in Cleopatra to take negativity by its horns is also demonstrated by her apotropaic manner of attracting in terms of distance, to create presence in terms of absence: “We will not look upon him” (1.2.84). This attitude in a sense only rehearses the age-old trick of increasing one's powers of attraction by appearing to be remote and hard to get. Yet such a unit also points to other things. Whereas Antony is intent on merely following Cleopatra (on completing another evening round in the romantic streets), Cleopatra from the outset identifies following in terms of not following. Ontodramatically, such a unit begins to promote the idea of following in terms of leaving: following-by-leaving.

Once this ontodramatic notion is picked up, and once leaving is grasped as the gestalt of the hyperontological flutter in the play, we see that Antony's inability to leave is already opening the most signifying reserve in Antony and Cleopatra. The tendency of people to perform endless deferrals of their acts of departure does not only suggest an element of empirical indecision or interpersonal hesitancy: it suggests an entire conception of reality, according to which things are eternally in the process of leaving. They leave other things, but also, in an odd way, themselves. This self-leaving in things can be viewed as an inconstancy in them; yet the inconstancy is their essential life too. Things move and are because they carry in their cores this desire for self-loss and self-abandon. The hero and the heroine move fatefully toward death, toward the final moment of absolute self-leaving; yet because the self-leaving is felt to be the irruptive driving force of life itself, that downward slide into death is in a way quite untragic. The players do not arrive there—in death—through the misfortune of committing some particularly awful crime; rather, they slide into death by virtue of a law that is built into their very manner of being alive.

In the grand finale, the heroic couple will be discussing leaving (that is, death) without actually being able to directly leave: Antony bungling his suicide, Cleopatra advertising a termination that still has to properly begin. There is a tremendous amount of talk about leaving long before the actual act materializes or even promises the view of its materialization. To emphasize the importance of this general sense of deferral, Shakespeare introduces it right here at the beginning. Antony goes through an entire sequence of references to his leaving before finally managing to make a real exit:

(a) These strong Egyptian fetters I must break

(1.2.113)

(b) I must from this enchanting queen break off

(1.2.125)

(c) I must with haste from hence

(1.2.129)

(d) I must be gone

(1.2.133)

(e)                                                                                                                                            I shall break
                    The cause of our expedience to the queen,
                    And get her leave to part.

(1.2.175-77)

(f)                                                                                          Say …
                    Our quick remove from hence.

(1.2.192-94)

Shakespeare here piles up units suggesting leaving. The frequent use of “break” helps to create the impression of a parting that amounts to a violence, a violation of presence, a hurting rupture. Antony, detesting such rupture (he will even like to “follow” men that have deserted him), seems to discourse extensively on leaving in order to soften the reality of its harshness. Language is a palliative, helping him to endure the thought of absence. The cruelty of one absence (from Egypt) can now be rationalized in terms of the healing of another one: Rome “[c]annot endure my absence” (1.2.170). Yet Antony, possibly sensing the elusive insincerity of his comportment, is prepared to define his own people as being eternally ready to leave the source of their happiness:

                                                                                          Our slippery people,
Whose love is never link'd to the deserver
Till his deserts are past …

(1.2.183-85)

Leaving, I am arguing then, is turned into an ontodramatic notion through recurrence and deferment. There are many leavings, and single acts of leaving are endlessly deferred. Death, I have also argued, is central to this “leaving” nexus. It is not only that death is the tragic end toward which the lovers fatally move (through the destiny of their famous story and through the law of their spirits); also, as seen in the lecherous rhetoric of Enobarbus, “dying” is a quite physical process that identifies the actual loving of the lovers. The physical paradigm of this “dying” identifies the figures just considered: recurrence and deferment. Because the extravagant sexual desires of the lovers demand not only sexual orgasm but its infinite extension, the luxurious prolongation of pleasure provided by such a mechanism brings “death” into the movement of its own absolute dilation along the axis of time. “I have seen her die twenty times,” cries Enobarbus (1.2.138-39). Cleopatra has “such a celerity in dying” (1.2.141-42). Here, dying's rapidity is not only a physical and sexual event; and the “celerity”—as in the heroic death of the dramatic conclusion—suggests the pitch of a frequency, the quickness of an oscillation, rather than the desire to have quickly done with something. The “celerity,” precisely, serves to interrupt celerity: we do not want the orgasm to come and be over and gone; we want its quick coming itself to recur, to return as quickly and frequently as possible. This kind of erotic deferral—anatomically more feminine than masculine—amounts, as I have said, to more than the identification of “the sexual dimension” in Antony and Cleopatra. It is, instead, the very energetics of the drama. We can see how quickly Shakespeare brings the recurrence of erotic dying into alignment with the recurrence of death itself by observing the immediate sequel to Enobarbus's discussion of recurrent female dying:

ANTONY.
Fulvia is dead.
ENOBARBUS.
Sir?
ANTONY.
Fulvia is dead.
ENOBARBUS.
Fulvia?
ANTONY.
Dead.

(1.2.154-57)

The erotic type of recurrence seems only marginally disrupted, because instead of taking up the notion of death itself, Enobarbus simply moves on to discuss a cynical scheme, according to which one mistress replaces another, like girls at a brothel: to “make new” robes (1.2.163) is only the crude act in which the lecherous male “brings forth a new petticoat” (1.2.166-67). Yet this shallow treatment of the recurrence of death/“dying” slides over toward more complex and suggestive strata of implication. What is at stake is the war between fertility and sterility itself. Charmian, anticipating the erotic definition of “dying”/recurrence promoted by Enobarbus, speaks wishfully of being allowed to “be married to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all” (1.2.25-27); yet since this wish is related to the fear of sterility (“let me have a child at fifty,” ibid.), and since the absolute fertilization of desire (“fertile every wish,” 1.2.38) would amount to the expense of spirit in a waste of shame, the playful thought of “dying's” lusty “celerity” is brought into the shadow of death as sterility: “the o'erflowing Nilus presageth famine” (1.2.47). It is this more serious level of implication that promotes the ontodramatic focus of the scene, Antony's reaction to the news of his wife's death:

There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it:
What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself: she's good, being gone,
The hand could pluck her back that shov'd her on.

(1.2.119-24)

Antony cannot extricate the desire to lose from the desire to retain. There is no way in which these opposite desires can be firmly held apart, no way in which they can be made to comply to Aristotelian logic. Antony cannot hold Fulvia's absence in one hand and her presence in the other hand, for the hand that has been holding her absence has secretly also been holding her presence.

This difficulty grows out of the fact that we tend to identify what is absent in terms of presence. We “own” and possess the absence of something; we clutch the disappearance of something, its distance from us, as a treasured object. It is this very tendency to possess in terms of repulsion and distancing that we have already observed as Cleopatra's characteristic mode of erotic conquest (1.2.84). For Antony, Fulvia's absence (from him) has itself been a presence. Fulvia has not been present to him, but her absence has. He has in a sense treasured her, because her presence has gone without the burden of presence: her reality, floating only on a half-seen horizon, has been as light as a feather. But when, through death, her absence no longer presents itself in terms of something he can retain (the thought of her, the feeling that she is still “there” somewhere), the shuttle motion between presence and absence is gone. The two sides, retention and rejection, become absolutely empty, purely abstract opposites. Therefore, at that moment, they can also become transforms of one another, become strangely synonymous, equivocate in terms of an emotional equivalence. She is “good, being gone”; yet this absolute vanishing of Fulvia's strikes home as the emotional content of her return and proximity. It is not only that we want to retain things as soon as our hostility has pushed them too far out of sight; it is that the absolute leaving caused by an act of pure loss creates for itself the sensation and impact of a presence, a nonleaving, a real “something” that almost can be touched. It is the power of such a mechanism, captured here by Shakespeare, that causes the reality of a person to be most vivacious in the illuminatory moment of its absolute vanishing. Death pilots the awareness of this illumination by being the radiant source of its possibility.

ACT 1, SCENES 3-5

Leaving, the fluttering “conceptual” focus and shadow of our hyperontological gestalt, also dominates the three remaining scenes of act 1. The fourth scene, located in Caesar's house in Rome, provides the imperial perspective through which we are to perceive Antony as one who has left Rome and deserted its ideals (1.4.4-10). Because of this act of ideological desertion, Antony cannot really return to Rome; he cannot really negate the leaving he has already effectuated. For him, a return to Rome will not be the transition from an absence to a presence, but on the contrary the very encounter with the locus of absence and leaving itself. It is Rome that defines him as leaver, as one no longer following its rules; and therefore the return to the home and the center, far from providing the hero with a restoration of presence and self-presence, only heightens the play's most powerful hyperontological sensation: the feeling of original desertion. Since Rome (for Antony) stands for departure (desertion), the return to Rome cannot—ontodramatically—amount to a return. One now returns to departure, one returns to nonreturn. (Being structurally absent is to have failed to complete a return, and since Antony's Roman return returns him to a point signifying desertion and treachery, the completion of the return fails to complete it.)

The main ontodramatic figure in this Roman scene is Caesar's reference to Antony as

A man who is the abstract of all faults
That all men follow.

(1.4.9-10)

The unit is interesting not only because it activates the hyperontological gestalt whose oscillating shadow we are learning to recognize (leaving stitched into following), but also because the actual ontodramatic fold is made so conspicuous. Is it that “all men” follow “all faults,” and that Antony is simply the essence (“abstract”) of such vice? Or is it that men follow Antony, who, in his turn, follows the paradigm of absolute vice (“all faults”)? The difference between the two readings may look negligible at this point; the ideas seem only to suggest a slight shift of emphasis. Yet, as we shall soon see, the ontodramatic tension between the two readings is considerable—and once this difference is understood as being tied to future units of similar outline, we will be able to see that the tragic gestalt itself is at stake in such minute shifts of emphasis. For what the play depicts is man as a follower: a woman following a man, a man following a woman, the soldier following his leader, the statesman following his political partner, and so forth. But the play, far from taking this following for granted, places it under the strain of the severest of pressures—so that what we ask, as I have suggested, is not naive questions like “Did he follow?” or “Who follows?” but radical questions: “What is following?” “What is it to follow?” “Can one follow?” “How can one always follow?” “How can following be constant?” “Is absolute following strictly speaking possible?” Such questions, we shall see, involve certain delicate ethical difficulties, as when a soldier is in two minds about his duty to follow his misguided leader; yet the social, heroic, military, erotic, and cultural implications in this difficulty of following are far less intricate, suggestive, and dramatically crucial than the implications operating on the hyperontological level. Shakespeare is not only asking mundane and practical questions about loyalty; nor is he only asking questions about the social theory of loyalty. He is asking questions about loyalty itself. He is asking: “Is loyalty?” “Are things (what they are) by being loyal to themselves?” “Or is there an original unloyalty at work at the center of things, making them possible as that which they are?”

The purely social issue opened by Caesar's query comes across in terms of an indefinition perceived in the loyalty of Antony's men: Antony is not only a man who shows the world a paradigm of disgusting misconduct; he is also a man capable of assembling multitudes of followers, men who will be following his greatness of heroic stature rather than the vices he typifies. What moral and imperial status have such men? This secondary notion is quite faint in the current unit (1.4.9-10), yet the slight indefinition that is there is by no means contingent, as our future explorations will demonstrate.

Although the fifth scene dramatizes a status quo rather than an actual leaving, the concept of leaving is still in the foreground, since it is Antony's departure and absence that are constantly kept in view. The stitching of division (apartness, leaving) and nondivision (togetherness, nonleaving) into one another is first delineated in Cleopatra's discussion of Antony as simultaneously balanced and unbalanced. We know, straight from the opening lines of the play, that measure and excess counterdefine one another throughout—mostly through the opposition between the lust of Egypt and the temperance of Rome. Yet Alexas, curiously, in the very act of describing Antony's superhuman grandeur, emphasizes his balance: neither sad nor merry, he is “between the extremes” (1.5.51). “O well-divided disposition!” cries Cleopatra enthusiastically (1.5.53); yet seven lines later she has transformed this concept of balance and measure into a notion of excess:

                                                                      Be'st thou sad, or merry,
The violence of either thee becomes,
So does it no man else.

(1.5.59-61)

A moment ago, what was “well-divided” (1.5.53) signified a middle and an intermediary; now, the well-divided denotes the opposite, an extreme (either sad or merry). Furthermore, this extreme, or polar opposite, is itself extreme, is a “violence” (1.5.60). The notion of the “well-divided” (1.5.53) has thus itself become well-divided: it divides itself into (1) a notion of nondivision (neither extreme is favored) as well as into (2) a notion of absolute division (violent one-sidedness of one sort or the other). On an empirical level of reference, the entire speech deconstitutes itself into the utterly nonsensical, for two mutually exlusive views of Antony are presented as simultaneously valid: on the one hand he is identified as a man of moderation, “between the extremes” (1.5.51); on the other hand he is viewed as a person achieving true identity in moments of extreme “violence” (1.5.60). Yet dramatic thought—or Shakespearean thought, if you will—is not restricted to the constituted normality of ordinary logic, and few spectators will experience the logical contradiction as a dramatic impoverishment. On the contrary, the transvaluation that brings Alexas's Roman scene into the Egyptian sphere of self-excess helps to forward general feelings of metamorphosis that Shakespeare is already manipulating for the purposes of dramatic texture. Moreover, the folding of opposed notions of the “well-divided” into one another (suggesting balance as well as its opposite) opens an indecision at the heart of the opposition together/apart that already is beginning to count as an important hyperontological device.

Cleopatra, it will be noticed, endures absence and distance by negotiating opposite conceptions of writing: the restricted conception and the radical one. On the one hand, writing is a mere system of notation, written communications passed between sender and receiver.

[CLEOPATRA.]
                                                  Met'st thou my posts?
ALEXAS.
Ay, madam, twenty several messengers:
Why do you send so thick?
CLEOPATRA.
                                                                                                    Who's born that day
When I forget to send to Antony,
Shall die a beggar. Ink and paper, Charmian.

(1.5.61-65)

On the other hand, writing is the violently differential system of active negativity itself, the markings marks mark and remark in (and as) time. She who is “black” from the amorous pinches of life and “wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.28-29) thus seems to be so much more mature than the woman who drugs herself (1.5.4) with difference-obliterating “poison” (1.5.27). Strangely, Cleopatra is both of these individuals: one who escapes from the marks of time and one who intuits the utter vanity of such escape. On the one hand, Cleopatra embodies a naive conception of love, according to which it would amount to a negation of violence/marking/difference/writing/pain/negativity. From this viewpoint, love would be narcotic in-difference, the uniformly “delicious” (1.5.27). On the other hand, and perhaps on a more alert level of living, Cleopatra senses that negativity is internal to love, as its condition of possibility. From this viewpoint, pain and violence, far from being external to the erotic experience, are its motor and driving force. We have already encountered this more complex intuition of Cleopatra's in her tendency to use erotic distancing as a means of erotic appropriation; and we see it again here in the references to “Phoebus' amorous pinches” (1.5.28). Her semi-African darkness is the impact of what is “black” (ibid.); yet the image of the amorous pinches creates the conception of the interlocking of love and pain: the pinches of love are bruises, marking actual violations performed by one person on another. Shakespeare is using this conception of minutely originary negativity in a quite conscious fashion, as we can see by turning to act 5. Notice how this later unit engages two crucial devices already emphasized: death (as source of erotic-creative negativity) and leaving (as ontodramatic gestalt):

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
Which hurts, and is desir'd. Dost thou lie still?
If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world
It is not worth leave-taking.

(5.2.294-97)

The point, of course, is that the world in an important sense is worth leave-taking: that is why the play focuses leaving. Indeed, this very scene emphasizes leave-taking, emphasizes the movement it tells us not to emphasize. Thus the contradiction in Cleopatra between narcotic escape and its opposite is sustained from beginning to end. Also, as we shall see, additional interpretations are possible.

If now, to round off act 1, we turn to scene 3, we see that Cleopatra's conflicting attitudes shape the entire scene in terms of negation. To begin with, she makes Antony believe that she has not sent Charmian to him; but the opposite is true (1.3.2-3). She is supposed to be dancing; but she is doing no such thing (1.3.4). She tells Antony to stand away from her, desiring the opposite (1.3.18). She claims that she has no power over her lover (1.3.24), knowing that she has enormous power. She claims that she is being betrayed, yet realizes that Antony is no ordinary deceiver (1.3.24-25). She accuses Antony of dissembling (1.3.79) and cold-heartedness (1.3.65), realizing that these accusations only become effective because there is no true ground for them. The emphasis on leaving and distancing is considerable in the scene: “stand farther from me” (1.3.18), “I go from hence” (1.3.69), “Then bid adieu to me” (1.3.76), “I'll leave you, lady” (1.3.86). But these units stressing leaving do not hang in the air; they are strung together by systems of mutual reference and, above all, by the appearance of conspicuous clusters of “conceptual” distraction. These huge discursive knots provide a theory of leaving. Or, put differently, their “logic” manifests intellectual patterns that function as major clues to the subsidiary units that they organize. Look, for instance, at the concluding lines of the scene:

ANTONY.
                                                                                                    Let us go. Come;
Our separation so abides and flies,
That thou, residing here, goes yet with me;
And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee.
Away!

(1.3.101-5)

It would be easy to trivialize Shakespeare, here, by concocting some commonplace reading of a reductive kind: one might say, for instance, that he is merely calling attention to the common human feeling that a sense of togetherness prevails between lovers even at moments when separation is completed or about to be completed. But Shakespeare, through the precisions of his discursive procedure, is in fact doing something more radical. It is not primarily the lovers who dominate this unit but concepts; it is not, for the moment, Antony and Cleopatra who matter, but leaving and staying. And we are given the feeling of a movement that bends these opposites (leaving and nonleaving) into one another, absolutely. The one who stays leaves; and the one who leaves stays. Leaving is staying and staying is leaving.

The proof that this organization of discourse mainly involves “concepts” rather than individuals can be found in the most interesting hyperontological part of the scene. Here, we see that Cleopatra is so baffled by the conceptual difficulty she is trying to grasp that its intellectual complexity suddenly becomes too elusive for her thought. She gives up, leaving her unresolved difficulty floating in nothingness:

ANTONY.
I'll leave you, lady.
CLEOPATRA.
                                                                                Courteous lord, one word:
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:
Sir, you and I have lov'd, but there's not it;
That you know well, something it is I would,—
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.

(1.3.86-91)

The lines are powerful because we are made to feel that the tragic protagonist is groping for the clue to her own tragedy; and this tantalizing clue, by being so far away and yet so teasingly near, prods at the inner life of the tragic victim with a particularly acute force. Cleopatra seems to have wanted to expand the intuition of hyperlogical contradiction sketched a moment earlier:

CHARMIAN.
In each thing give him way, cross him in nothing.
CLEOPATRA.
Thou teachest like a fool: the way to lose him.

(1.3.9-10)

Charmian believes in an Aristotelian type of logic: closeness is closeness, apartness is apartness. Cleopatra finds this logic foolish, for her experience of love has taught her the opposite: that in order to retain a lover she must repel him. This logical reversal seems to be built into the passage that now interests us (1.3.86-91), and Cleopatra is on the verge of expanding it into a final formula: parting will, somehow, not be parting; the pastness of love will not be pastness. Yet the intellectual faculty swoons when it tries to press beyond this point in the hyperlogical design, and all that Cleopatra is left with is the feeling of wanting to overcome the obstructing intellectual threshold:

Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:
Sir, you and I have lov'd, but there's not it;
That you know well, something it is I would,—
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.

(1.3.87-91)

The last two lines are important, opening a complex ontodramatic horizon. The first feeling is that the initiative abruptly shifts over to Antony himself: he has, personally, to shoulder most of the tension that from the outset was buried inside the logical opacity of the intellectual difficulty. She, suddenly, goes completely empty inside; and because this emptying is associated with Antony, we are made to feel that he is somehow responsible for it. Antony himself makes Cleopatra's mind swoon, creates the dip in the logical horizon where the intellectual solution drops permanently out of view. Her oblivion is not called “Cleopatra,” but “Antony.” He, perhaps because of his enormity, the feeling of his erotic largeness, extinguishes the logic that would make him available to sense. The final line's “I am all forgotten” completes this gesture: “I am forgotten by Antony.” “I am now a forgotten woman; Antony turns away from me.” “Because Antony choses to forget me, I forget also myself: I become, also for myself, forgetfulness, the forgotten.”

But if this tricky knot of discourse is approached from a different angle, the impression, at least to begin with, is quite different. Shakespeare, rehearsing a typical lapse in the grammatical behavior of his time, is forgetting to count the negatives, overlooking the ability of negations to negate each other. (Shakespeare's oblivion is itself “a very Antony” here.) What Cleopatra should have said (according to this stern critical viewpoint) is not “my oblivion is a very Antony” but “my memory is a very Antony”: my memory, like Antony, is inconstant, just takes leave of itself. Leaving is operative once more: “As Antony leaves me, forgetting me, so my memory also leaves me, forgetting me.” The phrase “my oblivion is a very Antony” expresses this notion in its own awkward fashion. Memory, then, is caught in the hyperontological flutter that I am calling attention to as the shadow of the ontodramatic gestalt of the play: the oscillation of following and leaving. Is memory a follower or a deserter?

Yet since Shakespeare's language stitches opposed concepts into one another, creating an abyss in which their conceptuality is consumed and rearticulated, we cannot really be sure that “oblivion” is a logical error, a “slip” produced by the carelessness of writing. For if we remove “oblivion” (inserting “memory”), we quickly see that an entire dimension of dramatic power collapses. We lose the feeling that the overwhelming image of Antony empties the mind of everything else, including the thoughts and logical figures about him. In fact, the beautiful unit “my oblivion is a very Antony” preserves a signification that is quite important, and that actually amounts to a negation of the surface notion of Antony as fickle deserter. Antony, far from being Cleopatra's self-loss, the negation of her memory, is what holds her together. He is the trace of her memory and self-memory: what secretly binds Cleopatra to Cleopatra. Her airy self-recollection, or shimmering identity, is an insubstantial recollection of herself through and in him; hence the threat of his departure promises also the threat of the departure of her memory (in the sense of internally subsisting myth). From this viewpoint, which I think is the best one, Cleopatra, by the phrase “my oblivion is a very Antony,” is saying that the current feeling of Antony, which is his vanishing, is the feeling of her own vanishing: her self's vanishing as its essentially fantasmic “oblivion.”

Notes

1. The term “ontodramatic” is used throughout as the rough equivalent of “hyperontological.” As with the latter term, there is no flirtation with what is properly speaking ontological: the “ontodramatic” is not the drama of (an) ontology but, on the contrary, the drama of various subversions of ontology. These subversions, while remaining ontologically suggestive, are not per se ontological.

2. Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 134.

3. Ibid., p. 129.

4. Ibid., p. 114.

5. Ibid., p. 116.

6. Ibid., p. 122.

7. Ibid., pp. 122-23.

8. See Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 190.

9. Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 135-36.

10. Ibid., p. 133.

11. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 14-52.

12. Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 124.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 125.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., p. 126.

17. Ibid., p. 125.

18. Ibid., pp. 138-39.

19. Ibid.

20. The Arden edition of Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M. R. Ridley (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). Abbreviated Arden.

21. Arden, p. 6.