SOURCE: Baker, J. Robert. “Absence and Subversion: The ‘O'erflow’ of Gender in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 105-15.

[In the following essay, Baker examines the gender reversals of Antony and Cleopatra, contending that “Shakespeare figures movement out of one's own gender as a necessary and desirable, if painful, educational process a character must undergo in order to inhabit a world not bound by life or death, tragedy or comedy.”]

The complexity of Antony and Cleopatra is daunting. Nothing in the play—genre, character, or gender—continues stable or unchallenged. Even the play's structure remains so multifarious that critics have found it difficult to describe the play as either tragedy or comedy: Carol Thomas Neely aptly suggests that the way in which Antony and Cleopatra inhabit gender roles stretches the play “to include motifs, roles, and themes found in Shakespeare's comedies, histories, problem plays, and romances; and Paula Berggren has noted Cleopatra's affinities with the comic heroines.”¹

The characters, similarly, defy easy categorization and exclusive definition. This holds particularly true for Antony and Cleopatra, who contradict themselves in word and action, and about whom not only the other characters, but also the critics offer many different reports. Berggren, for example, finds Antony “sexually the most mature of Shakespeare's men,” primarily because he wears Cleopatra's clothing.² Neely, on the other hand, discounts Antony's cross-dressing, pointing out that it is only reported, not seen, and suggesting that Antony's distinction lies in his ability to “accept more fully Cleopatra's sexuality, duplicity, and difference from him and find them compatible with his manhood.”³ Similarly, Cleopatra comes in for radically different explications, all these, at bottom, having to do with her sexuality. Madeline Gohlke finds that Cleopatra “in many ways is the epitome of what is hated, loved, and feared in a woman by Shakespeare's tragic heroes,” but, at the same time, “she is imaginative, fertile, identified with the procreative processes of the Nile.”⁴ Janet Adelman also observes this duality in Cleopatra, noting, “If Cleopatra is a witch, she is also the fairy queen, that vision for which men have constantly sought.”⁵

Perspective is needed to appreciate the complexity of the play and to explain why coherent statements about the characters are scarce and why some find it hard to see the play simply as tragedy. Such a perspective involves the use Shakespeare makes of gender in Antony and Cleopatra because much of the confusion generated by Antony and Cleopatra and certainly their evasion of monocular definition is bound up with their sexual role playing and gender shifting. Such a perspective also requires a steady refusal of a simple dialectic that issues into either-or formulations in favor of one that is additive and inclusive, one whereby opposites preserve and fulfill each other in an expansive arrangement. Antony is not merely feminized or tragic, Roman or transvestite, but all these things; Cleopatra is not merely witch or Queen, deadly or progenerative, but all of these; and the play is not just tragedy or comedy, but contains elements of both.

Adelman and James Robinson, in particular, offer helpful comments towards such a perspective. Adelman has noted that the shifts of perspective, the multiplicity of character, and the variations of metaphor in Antony and Cleopatra both complicate and characterize the play. The play's complexity, Adelman says, lies not simply in the opacity of character and identity nor in the unreliability of knowledge and judgment, but also in the subjection of the play's tragic vision to comic technique. The play works not towards an incontrovertible position, but towards multiplicity on every level. Her interpretation notes that “both the presentation of character and the dramatic structure work to frustrate our reasonable desire for certainty.”⁶ We are unable first and last to take from the play a definitive, indisputable reading.

James Robinson, citing Thomas Digges and Giordano Bruno, argues that Antony and Cleopatra might well be read with the understanding that both the cosmos which it suggests and the stage on which it is represented are infinitely expansive. What Robinson notes of Bruno's universe—“a multiplicity of changing phenomena in an infinite process of dissolution and regeneration”—applies equally to Shakespeare's play.⁷ Both universe and drama suggest a space where “multiples are substantially one, and contraries coincide: dissolution is generation; death is life.”⁸ Robinson details these multiples, contraries, and dissolutions in both the geography of the play and the hyperbolic language of the characters.

The extensiveness seen by Robinson and the multiplicity observed by Adelman apply also and particularly to the play's treatment of gender. While Adelman does treat the exchange of clothing and sexual roles by Antony and Cleopatra, she limits the significance of this “transexuality” to an emblem of what she terms “generative sympathy”: “the elements in the play that may be seen from the Roman point of view as evidence of Antony's loss of manhood may also be seen as the emblem of his procreative union with Cleopatra.”⁹ The continual shift of gender though is no mere emblem, nor quite so straightforward; rather it is central to the play's complexity. As such, it does not “only confirm the profound polarization of gender roles in the play,” as Neely observes.¹⁰ Instead, it forces a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of gender that refuses both the primacy of one sex and the sufficiency of two. As they assume the gender of the other, Antony and Cleopatra enlarge and expand the ordinary roles of their own and each other's sexes. Their gender shifting does result, at the death of each lover, in both a “generative harmony” and an “extending cosmos,” but its treatment in the play is not simple, nor is the lovers' experience of it unambiguous. Like the overflow of the Nile, the expansion and shifting of gender roles is at once productive and lethal, fertile and dangerous, prolific and chaotic.

With this overflow, Antony and Cleopatra flatly reverses the usual function of gender which, with its culturally defined and prescribed modes of behavior, produces a space in which individuals can live with a degree of psychological comfort and security. Antony and Cleopatra move out of roles traditionally assigned to the sexes: at times he leads; at others she dominates. They change clothes in bed, switch places in war and peace, and seem to evacuate the ordinary relationship between the sexes. All of this is not without cost: Antony experiences anxiety about his actions; Cleopatra behaves in a vertiginously confusing manner; and both of them are feared and hated because their behavior removes the ordinary harmony and safety provided by gender. But the play insists that the disruption created by Antony and Cleopatra's sexual role playing is essential: ultimately, movement into the experience and guise of the other sex becomes the condition of a fuller life for both Antony and Cleopatra.

In all this Shakespeare seems to be playing on his own era's anxieties about gender. The Elizabethans were particularly conscious of gender, for theirs was an age headed by a queen and, simultaneously, determinedly patriarchal. Despite Elizabeth's sovereignty, the age insisted on the subjugation of women to men. The Elizabethans feared a disruption of the hierarchy of genders by either sex, but particularly by women. A woman, crossing out of her assigned roles and entering the space of men, threatened the natural, political, and spiritual realms. Perhaps it is for this reason that Cleopatra comes in for more invective than Antony: she is perceived as an unruly woman, leaving the woman's position to manipulate the political sphere, and so is seen as more dangerous.¹¹

Early in the play, however, it is Antony who disrupts the hierarchy, leaving the world of honor and the scenes of triumph represented by Rome and entering the smaller, political space of Egypt and the heightened, personal space of love embodied by Cleopatra. He jeopardizes his place as triumvir, forsakes his position as a husband, and risks erasure of his past accomplishments, all because he gives himself over to a woman who, although a queen, remains a threat to order and stability because she will not and cannot be contained within the usual place of a woman. Queen or not, she is a woman out of her place, submissive to no man and desirous of control. Antony moves toward Cleopatra with both pleasure and trepidation; he is attracted to her, but fears a loss as he moves out of an established security and into Cleopatra's bed.

Stronger than Antony's own misgivings are the alarms of his allies and enemies who see Cleopatra as a teeming foreigner and a dangerous threat. In their view, Cleopatra's alien vitality seems to outlast both individuals and generations—she was married to a Ptolemy and loved a Caesar; now she is Antony's lover and Octavius' enemy. In fact, she is a woman whose fecundity spreads to underwrite both character and play—she gives meaning to Antony and is the catalyst that precipitates the drama. Antony's friends and foes are outraged when he allows himself to be subject to her because he trades not only sword for tires, but also the values of the Roman world for the uncontrollable pleasures of the Egyptian queen. He seems to them to join Cleopatra in removing a buttress of the world; in actuality, Antony and Cleopatra, leaving the world stage, enter the fuller space of love, a space not confined to life.

Antony, the Romans complain, is absent, truant physically from Rome, morally from his duty, and, perhaps, psychologically from himself. Caesar quarrels with Antony over his absence from Rome because his removal into Egypt has exposed the state to war. Caesar charges, “Your wife and brother / Made wars upon me; and their contestation / Was theme for you, you were the word of war.”¹² More serious than this accusation of conspiracy, which Antony refutes by reminding Caesar that Fulvia levied war in Rome only to goad Antony out of Egypt, is Caesar's indictment of Antony for dereliction of duty. It is not only that Antony, “when rioting in Alexandria” (II. ii. 72), put Caesar's letters unread aside and taunted his emissary unheard out of the room, but also that Antony broke his oath to Caesar, a pledge “To lend me arms and when I requir'd them; / The which you both denied” (II. ii. 88-89). Antony would soften this charge and insists he neglected Caesar's only claim because he was distracted by the presence of Cleopatra, “when poisoned hours had bound me up / From mine own knowledge” (II. ii. 90-91). In fact, back at Rome, Antony makes a graceful submission to ask for Caesar's pardon. It is a gesture that Lepidus applauds and that draws Caesar to remember how he would pursue a bond with Antony “from edge to edge / O'th' world” (II. ii. 117-18).

Although Antony can make a gracious, conciliatory gesture towards Caesar and even try to placate his rival by marrying his sister, Antony has already moved outside the perimeter of the Roman world. This is of issue even before Antony appears on stage, for Philo says:

Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckle on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust.

(I. i. 1-10)

According to his friends, Antony has left off the manly role of the general and entered the train of Cleopatra's eunuchs; he has reneged on the obligations of his manhood and abandoned the duties of his estate. His condition is so changed that Philo, apparently thinking him now hardly recognizable, feels compelled to point him out when he enters with Cleopatra and her attendants:

                                                                      Look, where they come:
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd
Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.

(I. i. 10-13)

The Romans see Antony reduced from a principal support of the world to the domestic servant of a whore. He has collapsed, becoming a fool by foregoing his duty and submitting to a woman. According to Caesar, Antony clearly has abandoned duty for pleasure, the masculine for the feminine, virtue for vice:

                                                                                                                        … from Alexandria
This is the news: he fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he; hardly gave audience, or
Vouschaf'd to think he had partners: you shall find there
A man who is the abstract of all faults
That all men follow.

(I. iv. 3-10)

Of course, a man who is the epitome of every fault of which a person may be capable is no man, but a shadow. Caesar recognizes this implicitly when he shortly after refers to Antony's vacancy filled with voluptuousness (I. iv. 26).

In neglecting his word and responsibilities, Antony does create a gap, an absence in the Roman world, a world that puts a premium on masculine honor, soldiering, and hardihood. The vacancy, which Antony creates in no longer filling the space he once did, is palpable and confusing. His friend Enobarbus mistakes the entrance of Cleopatra midway through the second scene of the play for the approach of Antony. Enobarbus' mistake registers the enormity of the change that attends Antony's abandonment of the ideals of Rome, the masculine world. The evacuation not only makes Antony almost unrecognizable to his closest associates, but also obscures recognizable differences between male and female. Antony and Cleopatra begin to be interchangeable because Antony has ceased to reside in Rome, to affirm its values, and to act in accord with its manly dictates. Negligent of state and obligation, he becomes identified with a woman and enters her estate.

Antony himself feels the change. After his appearance on stage, he sweeps aside all values in favor of Cleopatra: “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space” (I. i. 33-34). This early declaration for Cleopatra is full of confidence, perhaps even bombast, but it also removes Antony from at least part of who he is, for he is, after all, a Roman. To proclaim a new space, a new person for himself distances and absents him from his old self. The new space cannot be inhabited with complete ease, for the city does not flow into the river, nor does the empire collapse; rather, it is Antony himself who is shaken by the change. He admits the tension he feels between the competing claims and, later, would withdraw from Cleopatra: “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, / Or lose myself in dotage” (I. ii. 120-21).

The announcement of Fulvia's death a few lines later reinforces his desire to break with Cleopatra and his sense of a void. Antony speaks of human existence as an attraction towards vacancy:

What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We want it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution low'ring, does become,
The opposite of itself. …

(I. ii. 127-30)

The picture of human life here is grim: a continual rotation between present pleasures that forever lose their appeal, a constant desire for the absent and an unstable alternation between presence and absence. This is the space Antony inhabits during most of the play. He desires Cleopatra, but regrets the absence his being with her creates.

Caesar, Mecaenas, Enobarbus, Candidius, Philo—indeed all the Romans—have reason to fear Antony's change. He is a radical, a charged particle, oscillating mercurially between Rome and Egypt, self and Cleopatra, always likely to set off a reaction of fission that would destroy the empire and its values. After the defeat of Antony's forces at sea, Antony, urging his friends to make peace with Caesar, tells them, “I have fled myself” (III. xi. 7). Here speech recapitulates character, for the ambiguity of the grammar reflects the unpredictability of Antony. The “myself” can function either as reflexive pronoun or as direct object, allowing Antony to admit either that he himself has fled the battle or that he has fled from his sense of self, from the person he imagined himself to be. In either case, the Roman world fears Antony precisely because he moves outside the ordinary understanding of the masculine. His absence from Rome, from office, and from self threatens order and stability.

When he leaves the sea battle to follow the fleeing Cleopatra, Antony not only exposes his forces to defeat, but endangers the whole complement of values on which Rome rests by abdicating his manly responsibilities. Scarus calls him a “doting mallard” and claims, “I never saw an action of such shame; / Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before / Did violate so itself” (III. x. 20, 22-24). Cleopatra's flight draws Antony after her, and his circuit drastically shakes the foundations of the Roman world—experience, manhood, and honor. The trepidation throughout the play is that Antony's being unmanned will emasculate all men. Candidius worries that Antony's unruly behavior will make all his men subservient to women, that “so our leader's led, / And we are women's men” (III. vii. 70-71). In the previous scene Mecaenas fears that Antony's surrender of power and troops to Cleopatra will make all men liable to her noises. Late in the play Enobarbus gives direct and nervous voice to this anxiety when he entreats Antony, “Transform us not to women” (IV. ii. 36).

Antony himself has anxieties about all this, admitting that Cleopatra had the “supremacy” and commanded him, and claiming that she was his conqueror (III. xi. 59, 66). Shortly before he dies, he says that Cleopatra has been his crown and beguiled him to utter loss (IV. xii. 27, 29). But Antony's regrets and his enemies' fears of Cleopatra seem misplaced because, even though Antony may be drawn away from his space by the allures of Cleopatra, his radicality exists before his submission to her. Cleopatra herself suggests in the first act that Antony has already left the masculine domain by being subject to both Caesar and Fulvia:

                                                                      As I am Egypt's queen,
Thou blushest, Antony; and that blood of thine
Is Caesar's homager: else so thy cheek pays shame
When shrill-tongu'd Fulvia scolds.

(I. i. 29-32)

Although Cleopatra here intends in part to goad Antony into resisting the summons from Rome and declaring his love for her, she also recognizes an essential integer in Antony's nature—despite his military triumphs and manly honors, he also occupies the position of a subject; he contains both masculine and feminine attributes, almost as though he were, psychologically, a hermaphrodite.

This duality within Antony reaches its apex when he completely submits to Cleopatra and invites her to enter his very being as a conqueror. “Chain mine arm'd neck; leap thou attire and all, / Through proof of harness to my heart, and there / Ride on the pants triumphing!” (IV. viii. 14-16). Antony's invitation is to a smaller space but one which is simultaneously greater and in which Cleopatra will be exultant. The movement Antony summons her to will not only give her sovereignty over him, but make her over into part of himself; he calls her into himself and so would reshape her as the very triumph over self.

Cleopatra, despite her apparent unruliness, is less dangerous than Antony, whose vacancy is so profound that it extends even into his self. In fact, she is not so much threat as presence, the figure who informs and fills the absence figured by Antony. Gohlke says she “is the hero's point of orientation, his source of signification in the world.”¹³ She makes him her guest, laughs him in and out of patience, purses up his heart, and gives him, finally, a place in myth and history.

Cleopatra's powerful presence affects even nature. Before she and Antony meet at Cydnus, she has drawn all the citizens after her and nearly towed nature itself in her wake. Even the air, “but for vacancy, / Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too / And made a gap in nature” (II. ii. 221-23). If Cleopatra so affects even the elements, her effect on Antony is cause for little wonder.

Admittedly, Cleopatra is subversive, refusing containment in the Roman order. Her potency and her threat are expressed in terms of gender and perceived as a reversal of the ordinary configuration of the sexes. She strikes the male messenger who brings news of Antony's marriage to Octavia, threatening to unhair his head; and she calls her women “good sirs” and Iras “sirah,” confusing the differences between genders (II. v. 64; IV. xv. 85; and V. ii. 229). She has a manly desire to be at war despite Enobarbus' apprehensions that her presence will distract Antony, and she spurns Rome and its opinions, preferring her own sense:

                                                                      A charge we bear i'th'war,
And, as the president of my kingdom, will
Appear there for a man. Speak not against it;
I will not stay behind.

(III. vii. 17-20)

Cleopatra will act as a man because she occupies the position of one in heading the political hierarchy of Egypt.

Though Enobarbus' fears are realized when Cleopatra flees the battle, trawling Antony after her, she continues to play the part of a man without ceasing to be a queen. She arms Antony more efficiently than a squire; a feat Antony himself acknowledges: “Thou fumblest, Eros; and my queen's a squire / More tight at this than thou …” (IV. iv. 14-15). She outmaneuvers Caesar and cheats him of the chance to consolidate his triumph by exhibiting her in Rome. This adroit, protean woman has been mother, spawning sons and enriching Egypt like the flooding of the Nile; she also has been lover to Ptolemies, Augustus Caesar, and triumvirs; and, at the end of the play, she becomes Antony's mourner. As she approaches her death, Cleopatra fills all these roles abundantly and potently. Not even the domain of waking consciousness is adequate for Cleopatra's presence and power. During the last scene of the play, she tells Dolabella that she has dreamed of Antony and longs for another dream so she can see him again. The Antony she dreams of is godlike:

His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear'd arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. …
                                                                                                    … in his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets, realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.

(V. ii. 82-92)

Cleopatra is not merely offering a panegyric for her dead lover, she is also engendering and nurturing a new Antony. She remakes him, and in this way gives him life beyond death.

Her desire to be with Antony is more than an attempt to escape the shame Caesar and Octavia intend for her; it is the longing for a beloved, a craving so profound that it recreates the beloved in an expanse beyond mortal life. Her suicide allows her to exit the stage and to enter the sweep into which she projects Antony. Her presence is not evacuated when she takes the asp to her bosom, but magnified, amplified into an area so vast that neither stage nor mortal vision can comprehend it. Her suicide provides Antony with meaning and Shakespeare with plot. Her deportment as an unruly woman has threatened the Roman hierarchy, but here it extends the meaning and range of what it is to be human beyond the accepted distinctions between male and female. Her complications of politics and warfare, her refusal of distinctions between life and death, and her proficient occupation of every position finally extend the meaning of the tragedy towards comedy.

With Cleopatra, as with Antony, Shakespeare figures movement out of one's own gender as a necessary and desirable, if painful, educational process a character must undergo in order to inhabit a world not bound by life or death, tragedy or comedy. Throughout the play, the withdrawal or absence of either Antony or Cleopatra from the role and position of either gender generates a precariousness that the play, its characters, and critics work to steady. But their rotation into the space of the other sex and their absence from their own sex also gesture towards the possibilities of a more complete humanity. Antony and Cleopatra, in stepping outside the normal space assigned to their genders, threaten order and stability, particularly in the Roman world of the play. But at the end of the play what they enter into, despite Antony's fears and Cleopatra's ambitions, is not so much tragedy as a place where each assumes the very person of the other and fashions it anew, where each assumes the gender of the other and makes it more than it was alone, and where tragedy assumes the very resonance and expansiveness of comedy.

Notes

1. Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), p. 137, and Paula S. Berggren, “The Woman's Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays,” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, Ill: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 25.

2. Berggren, p. 21.

3. Neely, p. 150.

4. Madeline Gohlke, “‘I Wooed Thee with my Sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, p. 160.

5. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 65.

6. Adelman, p. 15.

7. James E. Robinson, Digges, Bruno, Phenomenology: Re-Spacing Shakespeare (Univ. Press of Notre Dame, 1989), p. 3.

8. Robinson, p. 5.

9. Adelman, pp. 94 and 95.

10. Neely, p. 139.

11. See Natalie Z. Davis, “Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe,” The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 147-90 for a discussion of the unruly woman as one threatening hierarchical subordination of women by assuming masculine manners and prerogatives. Davis argues that since the female sex was thought to be physiologically disorderly, women represented mutability and chaos, and so were thought dangerous, especially when they moved out of culturally defined gender roles.

12. II. ii. 42-44. All quotations are from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig and David Bevington (Glenview Ill: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1973).

13. Gohlke, p. 160.