[In the following essay, Vanhoutte argues that Shakespeare's depiction of Antony's suicide precludes judgments of it as either ignoble or praiseworthy. Drawing on the writings of Donne and Montaigne, she explicates early modern views of self-slaughter and concludes that although Antony initially contemplates death at his own hands in a despairing frame of mind, he ultimately regards his suicide as a self-assertive act that will thwart the attempts of others to define him.]

Just after Antony dies from a self-inflicted wound, Shakespeare's Cleopatra asks, “is it sin, / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?”¹ The question appears to be rhetorical; Cleopatra soon announces her intention to prove her “resolution” by pursuing “the briefest end” (4.15.91).² This decision earns her the homage of her most assiduous critic: Caesar, fond of describing the living Cleopatra as a “whore” (3.6.67), refers to the dead one as “bravest at the last” and “royal” (5.2.333-34). Readers of the play have followed suit. The queen of Egypt herself is the subject of conflicting commentary, but her “end” typically earns critical applause. Even those who denounce Cleopatra's conduct as sinful tend to find her suicide splendid.³ She is, to paraphrase Antony's comment about Fulvia, good choosing death.

As Cleopatra's question suggests, we judge suicide by precise ethical standards; as her answer about “the high Roman fashion” reveals, these standards are also culturally contingent. In Tudor England, those who had access to education, and therefore to classical literature, might indeed judge a suicide “brave” and “noble” if done “after the high Roman fashion” (4.15.86-87).⁴ The classical tradition concerning suicide provided the only widespread and coherent interpretative challenge to absolute condemnation of the act in early modern society.⁵ But for most people living in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, suicide was unquestionably a sin. Under the designation of “self-murder,” it was regarded as a transgression against the laws of God, of nature, and of the state.⁶

Far from being rhetorical, then, Cleopatra's question calls attention to the difficulty of judging a suicide that does not conform to “Roman fashion.” Prompted by the “poor passion” (4.15.74) that she suffers as a result of Antony's death, her question refers as much to his death as to her own. And Antony's final moments have earned less acclaim than hers, in part because Antony improvises a death that comprises elements of the “high Roman” and early modern models of suicide, but that cannot satisfactorily be explained by reference to either. In his treatment of Antony's suicide, Shakespeare inhibits both praise and condemnation, the two responses associated respectively with classical and early modern ideas about suicide. The ensuing ambiguity suits the story well: the pagan setting precludes strictly Christian readings of suicide, while Antony's status as history's most famous deserting soldier undermines Roman readings. Capitalizing on the potential of his source, Shakespeare overturns the categories by which suicide was understood in the early modern period; he evokes these categories only to demonstrate their inadequacy when it comes to describing Antony's tragic death.

Antony's refusal to follow a recognizable pattern in his suicide might account for the discomfort occasioned by his death among the play's critics. While from Cleopatra's perspective Antony has rushed into “the secret house,” his critics have more frequently chastised his slowness in dying. Even Phyllis Rackin, whose reading of the play is sympathetic to its protagonists, considers Antony's suicide “a messy affair”; other scholars more categorically describe it as “bungled” or “botched.”⁷ Antony's motivations appear conflicted and his means suspect: he “cannot properly manage” his own death, he is “diminishe[d] … in the eyes of the audience,” he behaves “like a gulled, ineffectual comic figure.”⁸ Again and again, Antony's dying body elicits such condescension and confusion. Like Antony's guards, who upon discovering their bleeding master flee the room, critics eager to salvage Antony's reputation rush over the embarrassing particulars of his suicide and focus instead on its aftermath. Cleopatra's eulogies enable readings that emphasize Antony's achievement of some kind of transcendent “new heaven” (1.1.17).⁹ Such readings, however, privilege another character's view of Antony's death over his own experience of it. Yet Shakespeare demonstrably calls our attention to the actual details of Antony's dying; for the better part of two scenes, Antony “importune[s] death” (4.15.19).

Significantly, none of the surviving characters comments negatively on Antony's failure to achieve a brief “end.” When modern critics denounce the “botched” nature of Antony's suicide, then, they seem to be applying to it an aesthetic standard more attuned to late Romantic sensibilities than to those of the early modern period. Like Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, they want their hero's suicide to “shimmer with spontaneous beauty.”¹⁰ Antony fails to meet that standard and indeed fails to meet any other recognizable standard. His suicide is “shap'd” only “like itself” (2.7.41). This morphology manifests itself in the extraordinary stage business that attends Antony's dying. It is is also apparent in the fact that he finds a “secret house” in a world where there is “no time for private stomaching” (2.2.9) and in the way that he bears his dying body into the public sphere where he presents it as an emblem of his sovereignty: “not Caesar's valour hath o'erthrown Antony, / But Antony's hath triumph'd on itself” (4.15.14-15). To borrow a phrase from Elaine Scarry's work on torture, Antony's death is a “piece of compensatory drama,” a ritual purgation of the public world generally and, more specifically, of the excess signification that his body has been made to bear in it.¹¹ It is comic only in that it celebrates the brief reunion of what Antony calls his “spirit” (4.15.58) and the body from which, over the course of the play, he becomes increasingly alienated. It is transcendent only in that Antony momentarily overcomes the dynamics by which his body has become a form of cultural property.

Cleopatra's domestic metaphor (the “house of death”) implies that suicide, like Antony's body, is private, even though it calls to itself public meaning. Instead of signaling a failure, then, the “great gap of time” (1.5.5) required for Antony's death provides Shakespeare with the opportunity to investigate this discrepancy more closely. As John Donne notes, any conclusions reached about a suicide's state of mind are “doubtfull” at best, since they reflect the “scandaliz'd” sensibilities of those who presume to judge rather than the actual experience of the suicide, who can no longer be interrogated.¹² Donne calls attention to the distance between the suicide's private experience and the public judgment passed on that experience. Shakespeare exploits this gap in his representation of Antony's death. Antony's prolonged death emphasizes the disjunctions between his experience and the culturally validated models for understanding that experience. His case, in other words, points to the limitations in the deterministic paradigms governing early modern responses to suicide.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, suicide had become a source of intense cultural concern. For various reasons, the Tudor institutions of church and state produced increasingly stringent definitions of and sanctions against self-murder. In their study of suicide in early modern England, Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy record a steady increase in convictions for felo de se: whereas from 1485 to 1499 only six persons were convicted, from 1540 to 1549, 499 were convicted, and from 1600 to 1609, 873. According to MacDonald and Murphy, this increase does not reflect an actual rise in the number of suicides; instead, it signals an increasing socio-cultural censoriousness about suicide. Because of “the early coincidence of governmental and religious reform,” early modern English society developed “a common stereotype of self-murder, shared by men and women of every rank, [which] determined the response to the deed.”¹³

The stereotype represented the suicide as alienated, deprived of divine grace, and dangerous to human communities; consequently, the response to suicide tended to be condemnatory. Both stereotype and response evolved from a combination of popular superstition, church doctrine, and legal persecution. Legal and popular attitudes towards suicides focused on the deed as it affected the larger community—self-murder was a political sin as well as a religious one. A commonplace analogy, here in Montaigne's version, expresses the period's dominant paradigm for understanding suicide:

without the expresse commandment of him, that hath placed us in this world, we may by no meanes forsake the garrison of it, and that it is the hands of God only, who therein hath placed us, not for our selves alone, but for his glory, and others service, when ever it shall please him to discharge us hence, and not for us to take leave: That we are not borne for our selves, but for our Countrie. … it is against nature, we should despise, and carelessly set our selves at naught.¹⁴

The analogy of the suicide to a deserting soldier emphasizes the religious and political dimension of the crime, because the soldier's post is assigned by God but involves responsibility to “others service” and to the state. Like witchcraft, suicide violated the order of “nature” and was frequently attributed to diabolic intervention.¹⁵

Classical culture—in particular Roman culture—did make more positive valuations of suicide available. Ever contradictory, Montaigne praises Cato's death, cites the Roman stoics in defense of suicide, and opines that “the voluntariest death is the fairest.”¹⁶ The classical paradigm tended to select for praise those, like Cato, who killed themselves to preserve honor or communally held values. Thus, whereas the common suicide retreated dangerously from public responsibility, the heroic suicide in effect affirmed his or her commitment to communal life. But such heroic figures had little enough to do with most suicidal individuals. The idealizing tendencies of the classical view of suicide could therefore coexist peacefully with the demonizing tendencies of the early modern view despite the apparent contradictions between the models.

Shakespeare's plays attest to his familiarity with the two dominant interpretations of suicide. In fact, his representations of suicidal characters typically rely on cultural commonplace. Macbeth's suicidal despair, for example, is the consequence of his disregard for the laws of nature, God, and state. To accentuate the extent to which his hero's transgressions are supernatural, Shakespeare has Macbeth call on the aptly named Seyton while he despairs of Divine grace.¹⁷ The same suspicion that suicide is not only sinful but diabolical informs Edgar's treatment of his father in King Lear; Edgar “cures” his father of suicidal despair by staging a mock-suicide complete with imaginary devil.¹⁸ Shakespeare treats Brutus, on the other hand, to the “high Roman fashion”: he dies nobly and efficiently, affirming to the last the values of honor and country, and earning the public praise of his enemies Antony and Octavius.¹⁹

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses these familiar strategies to present the deaths of Enobarbus and Cleopatra. He applies the early modern model of suicide to Enobarbus's miserable and lonely death: having lost faith in Antony, the deserting soldier succumbs first to Caesar's empty promises and then to suicidal despair.²⁰ In Shakespeare's adaptation of Christian ideas about suicide, the triad of good general, soldier, and enemy general replaces the more traditional triad of God, soul, and devil. Although the religious implications of suicide disappear, the political ones are stressed. Enobarbus deserts Antony's “garrison,” enters instead in Caesar's service, and finds himself “the villain of the earth” (4.6.30). Evidence of Antony's continuing magnanimity serves only to deepen the old soldier's despair, for it underlines the extent to which he is unworthy of the one system—service to Antony—guaranteed to bring him “joy” (4.6.20). Ranking himself “a master-leaver, and a fugitive” (4.9.22), he finds a “ditch, wherein to die” (4.6.38). In his final moments, Enobarbus experiences the self-hatred, melancholia, alienation, and despair commonly attributed to suicides in the early modern period. His choice of a grave further condemns him, for suicides were buried in England face-down in a pit by the highway.²¹ Shakespeare leaves little doubt that, in Enobarbus's case, rushing into the “secret house” is “sin.”

Shakespeare's treatment of Enobarbus's death makes use of one aspect of his culture's dualistic thinking about suicide, and his treatment of Cleopatra's death reflects the other. Her death is untinged by desertion, despair, or self-hatred; like Brutus, she maintains her dignity. Although she manages to keep her intention a secret from Caesar, the suicide itself is not a private act. Instead, like Brutus's suicide, it derives its nobility from its public nature. Death, for Cleopatra, is an opportunity for one more controlled display of theatrical power, one more extravagant political self-assertion. It works: Caesar finally acknowledges “her strong toil of grace” (5.2.346). More importantly, Cleopatra forces Caesar to abandon his own habitual misogyny and come to terms with her as a political agent. The man who believes that “women are not / In their best fortunes strong; but want will perjure / The ne'er touched vestal” (3.12.29-31) recognizes in Cleopatra's death the defeat of his own stratagems. “She levell'd at our purposes,” he observes, “and being royal / Took her own way” (5.2.334-35). This is high praise, for the Romans generally refuse Cleopatra her position as “president of [her] kingdom” (3.7.17); and Caesar himself calls into question her royalty earlier in the scene when, ignoring the visible signs that distinguish Cleopatra from her serving maids, he asks, “which is the Queen of Egypt?” (5.2.111).²² Cleopatra's suicide answers him. Her resolution in death expresses her continued engagement in the politics of the play and her absolute commitment to the values she has espoused throughout. When the First Guard echoes Cleopatra's question about the ethical validity of suicide—“Is this well done?” (5.2.324)—Charmian responds without hesitation: “It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (5.2.325-26). Here, Charmian implies, lies the noblest Egyptian of them all.

Antony's death is flanked by the deaths of Enobarbus and Cleopatra. It occurs, literally, “midway /’Twixt these extremes” (3.4.19-20).²³ Such placement invites comparison, and indeed, Antony's suicide comprises aspects of the other deaths. It originates, for example, in private despair but it ends in public display: Antony kills himself in a room and dies at a monument. In his desire to “unarm” and to be “no more a soldier” (4.14.35-42), Antony, like Enobarbus, calls to mind the analogy of the soldier. But, like Cleopatra, Antony takes his own death to be a triumph; as Robert Miola points out, some aspects of Antony's suicide are “recognizably Roman.”²⁴ This interweaving of apparently incompatible positions on suicide is further complicated by the fact that although Shakespeare goes out of his way to invoke both familiar patterns, he also inhibits the standard response to either. Neither praise nor condemnation seems an appropriate reaction to Antony's experience.

By attributing Antony's initial suicidal impulse to despair, Shakespeare strays from his source and strips the suicide of some of its classical connotations. Plutarch's Antonius behaves as a Roman should. He hears that Cleopatra has died; and, refusing to be outdone by a woman, he dies by manfully “thrust[ing] his sword into his bellie.”²⁵ In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony displays no such laudable resolution, no single-minded commitment to a motivation—and certainly not to the one cited by Plutarch, since Antony's first suicidal thoughts precede by two scenes the false report of Cleopatra's death. Instead, Antony contemplates suicide when he suspects that Cleopatra has betrayed him with Caesar. His loss of faith in Cleopatra is tainted by the Roman view of her; he calls her, famously, a “triple-turn'd whore” (4.12.13). But the self-destructive thoughts that this despair inspires owe nothing to the “Roman fashion” concerning suicide. Enraged, Antony invokes the memory of Hercules' death:

The shirt of Nessus is upon me, teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o' the moon,
And with these hands that grasp'd the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self. …

(4.12.43-47)

The analogy that Antony makes between his putative ancestor's demise and his own desire for self-destruction is instructive in a number of ways. By using Hercules' Greek name (for the first time in the play), Antony underlines the extent to which his suicidal rage is not a manifestation of his Roman identity. Suicide, at this time, appears shameful to him. Far from safeguarding integrity and honor, it entails the destruction of his “worthiest self.” Moreover, implicit in Antony's analogy is the recognition that his rage is misdirected: whereas Alcides vents his anger against the innocent Lichas, Antony prepares to vent his against Cleopatra.

In its earliest appearance, Antony's suicidal impulse resembles the despair experienced by characters like Macbeth and Enobarbus. Antony's analogy implies, in any case, that his inherited suicidal rage is inescapable, like the fate that Macbeth routinely blames. Like Macbeth, Antony believes that he has been driven so far because a “witch” has “beguil'd” (4.12.28) him. Enobarbus succumbs to despair because he lacks faith in Antony; Antony follows suit when he loses faith in Cleopatra. Both servant and master have what they take to be sufficient evidence to justify their skepticism, and neither can tolerate living with that skepticism. But whereas new evidence of Antony's generosity plunges Enobarbus farther into despondency and self-hatred, Antony's despair is short-lived. He raises the idea that Cleopatra is a “witch” with supernatural power only to dismiss it, conclusively. When he does finally throw himself on his sword, he has overcome his despair. Further evidence of Cleopatra's trickery does not disturb the equanimity with which he faces his death, nor does he mention again the ways in which she has failed him. Antony's despair over Cleopatra brings the idea of suicide to his mind, but it is not what makes him kill himself.

Antony's bewildering improvisation of motives undermines Shakespeare's initial presentation of him as a soul in despair, and it equally undermines Decretas's later presentation of his master as a noble Roman. In considering suicide, Antony cites, in chaotic succession, his rage at Cleopatra, his fear that Cleopatra and Caesar are colluding, his love for Cleopatra, his desire to emulate her, his desire to emulate Eros, and his refusal to become a trophy in Caesar's triumph. Only the latter qualifies as a “Roman” justification for suicide, but its presence among so many others gives it the ring of rationalization rather than motive. Indeed, as circumstances force Antony to recognize that a motivation is not valid, he simply exchanges it for a new one. His commitment to suicide is constant; the reasons that he adduces for it are not.

Near death, Antony asserts that he was once “the greatest prince o' the world, / The noblest” (4.15.53-54). He cannot, however, affirm anything categorically about his own suicide. At first he does find that he has done his “work ill” (4.14.105) because he survives the actual deed. But the private work ill begun ends in a sense of public triumph at Cleopatra's monument. There, he expresses his achievement in a series of negatives, assuring Cleopatra that “not Caesar's valour hath o'erthrown Antony, / But Antony's hath triumph'd on itself,” and that

… [I] do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman: a Roman, by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd …

(4.15.55-58)

The Latinate words that he chooses—valour, vanquish, valiant—underscore his claim. They suggest not the private despair of the alienated individual, but the glorious victory of the classical hero. The way in which Antony puts these words together, however, cancels out Roman meaning even as it is invoked: “valour” destroys “valour” and “Roman” annihilates “Roman.” The suicide may or may not have subdued Antony's “worthiest self,” but it has certainly destroyed his Roman identity. The two, as we shall see, are not the same.

The instability of Antony's motivations restrains both “scandaliz'd” and laudatory responses, because both rely on a stable sense of motive. The amalgam of Christian and classical motifs that characterizes Antony's suicide further impedes pat ethical judgment. No easy label can adequately convey the complexities of Antony's experience as Shakespeare represents it. As a result, it becomes difficult to answer Cleopatra's question—“Is it sin?”—with any certainty.

By inhibiting both praise and condemnation, Shakespeare may be encouraging what Donne, in Biathanatos, calls a “charitable interpretacion” of Antony's suicide.²⁶ The subtitle of Donne's treatise give a good indication of its content: A Declaration of that Paradoxe or Thesis, that Selfe-homicide is not so naturally Sinne, that it may neuer be otherwise. Wherein The Nature, and the extent of all those Lawes, which seeme to be violated by this Act, are diligently Surueyd. “Is it sin?” Not always, says Donne; and his treatise, by contesting the arguments that describe suicide as sin, cautions against totalizing judgments on the subject. Shakespeare's treatment of Antony's death stresses ambiguity and uncertainty and thus delivers a similar caution. Certainly, we are asked to withhold judgment for the considerable time that it takes Antony to make his decision, to implement it, and, finally, to die. Shakespeare does not idealize or ridicule Antony's suicide; instead, he depicts it in agonizing detail. The stunned reactions of the on-stage witnesses give some indication of the potentially intense effect of the dying scenes. Eros kills himself to “escape the sorrow / Of Antony's death” (4.14.94-95), and Antony's guards initially run from the room. But the rest of us must look on while Antony “cure[s]” himself “with a wound” (4.14.78).

Shakespeare leaves us no choice but to come to terms with the sorrow of Antony's death, and the business with Eros and the guards provides us with a means for doing so. Antony requests assistance from Eros and from the guards: he tells the guards “let him that loves me strike me dead” (4.14.108). Both refuse and thus prolong his agony—Eros because, as his name indicates, he loves Antony too much, and the guards because, as their response indicates, they do not love Antony enough. Antony's plea calls attention to the guards' cowardly failure in charity; despite their recognition of the momentousness of the occasion, they withdraw. In making the plea for cooperation, Antony assumes that his suffering will elicit a loving response. The success of the suicide, in other words, momentarily hinges on Antony's ability to provoke a “charitable interpretacion.”

Although the guards disappoint Antony, his assumption concerning the possibility of such an interpretation is not necessarily faulty. It involves steering a course “midway / 'Twixt these extremes” of idealization and denigration, loving too much and loving not enough. Antony himself paves the way for a “charitable” response when he refers to the suicide as a cure (4.14.78). The suggestion that suicide heals suffering tends to provoke sympathetic responses in early modern commentators. For example, Montaigne notes that “the common course of any infirmitie, is ever directed at the charge of life: we have incisions made into us, we are cauterized, we have limbes cut and mangled, we are let bloud, we are dieted. Goe we but one step further, we need no more physicke, we are perfectly whole.”²⁷ Momentarily, Montaigne withholds judgment as he considers the possibility that suicide might be a radical act of self-healing, a making “whole” of that which has been rent. Suicide returns agency to the traumatized subject: after being prodded, mangled, cut, bled, and cauterized by some unknown agent, the “we” of the sentence triumphantly takes charge at the moment of suicide. By grounding suicide in the common somatic experience of pain, Montaigne briefly asks us to identify with, rather than disassociate ourselves from, the suicide.

The idea that suicide returns agency to the subject also sustains Donne's “charitable interpretacion,” which is based in part on an acknowledgement of his own suicidal tendencies.²⁸ In Donne's self-analysis, the categories by which early modern society understood suicide are evident, despite his desire to resist them; he blames his suicidal tendencies on his exposure to the discredited Catholic religion and on “the common Enemy.” But as he progresses in his search for cause, other possibilities present themselves. The mention of “braue scorn” evokes a classical approach to suicide, and while Donne describes suicide first as an “affliction,” it quickly becomes a “remedy.” As in Antony's case, the idea of suicide sustains a number of contradictory and culturally specific meanings. But these meanings cancel each other out in order to leave only Donne's desire for sovereignty—“methinks I haue the keyes of my prison in myne owne hand.”²⁹

The triumphant sense of recovered agency in Donne and Montaigne calls to mind Antony's sense of triumph in death, his insistence that his suicide be understood as a self-referential act (“Not Caesar's valour … but Antony's”). In fact, the desire for agency over his own body informs not only Antony's determination to cure himself with a wound but also his behavior throughout the play. Shakespeare, in other words, does not limit his representation of Antony as a suicidal figure to the scenes immediately preceding his death. From the beginning, Shakespeare presents Antony as a soldier eager to desert the competing cultures—Rome and Egypt—that claim agency over his body. Antony's assertions of sovereignty at Cleopatra's monument make sense within the context of his broader struggle to regain possession of his own body.

Antony and Cleopatra opens with an inventory of Antony's body parts: while condemning Antony's “dotage,” Philo describes his “goodly eyes,” “his captain's heart,” and “his breast” (1.1.2-8). Philo's attention to Antony's physical traits recalls the conventional blazons of Renaissance sonnets. As such, Philo's speech forms an appropriate introduction to a male hero whom the playwright consistently represents in terms of his superabundant carnality. Carnality is more habitually associated with women in the period; indeed, many readers of Antony and Cleopatra have associated it with Cleopatra.³⁰ But Shakespeare never insists on Cleopatra's body in the way that he insists on Antony's. Antony's physicality overwhelms all the other characters' conversations about him. Cleopatra spends his absence wondering “Stands he, or sits he? / Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?” Her attempts to imagine Antony's body culminate, notoriously, with her envy of his horse: “O happy horse to bear the weight of Antony” (1.5.19-21). Cleopatra's erotic yearning underlines Antony's status as an object of desire in this play. The form that desire takes is culturally contingent; Antony's “weight” signifies differently in Egypt than in Rome. But the validity of his body as cultural capital is never in question.

Both Rome and Egypt have a political stake in Antony; both Romans and Egyptians consequently show themselves determined to take advantage of Antony's expansive carnality. He is, as Cleopatra notes, “the greatest soldier in the world” (1.3.38), and he can be made to bear a number of ideologically inflected meanings. To Cleopatra, he is not just a lover, but a “soldier, servant” (1.3.70), the means by which she converts sexual into political power. Accordingly, Antony's departure from Egypt strikes Cleopatra as a political offense; she finds that he has committed “treasons” against her as a queen (1.3.26). Even so, he continues to be significant enough to her politics that she finds criticism of him to be equally treasonous (1.5.7). Cleopatra needs Antony's “inches” in order to show “there were a heart in Egypt” (1.3.40-41). Long after he leaves his post, she continues to use those “inches” as evidence of her own power.

The Romans have their own ideas about what Antony's “inches” mean; and in his predilection for Egyptian queens and Egyptian dishes, Antony challenges those ideas. He deviates from Roman standards of masculinity that emphasize masculine control over somatic impulses—standards that, paradoxically, he also embodies. By a perverse logic, Antony best represents ideal Roman masculinity because he has the most body to control. In fact, his name has become the Roman culture's byword for honor and valor, and the Romans find only his own past example to indict his current behavior. Even in the act of condemnation, for example, Philo attests to the way in which Antony's body sustained Roman readings: his “goodly eyes” once “glow'd like plated Mars,” his “captain's heart … in the scuffles of great fights hath burst / The buckles on his breast” (1.1.2-8). Caesar similarly relies on Antony's past to castigate Antony for his “lascivious wassails” in Egypt (1.4.56). He demonstrates the transgressive nature of Antony's current “voluptuousness” (1.4.26) by contrasting it to his previous willingness to drink the “stale of horses” and to “eat strange flesh, / Which some did die to look on” (1.4.62-68) in the line of duty. Even under such a regimen, Caesar notes approvingly, Antony's “cheek / so much as lank'd not” (1.4.70-71). Antony's unnatural feedings stand in Rome for masculine honor, for the extent, that is, to which the body can be subjected to spirit and material need can cede to the needs of the state. Despite its reductiveness—masculinity here becomes little more than a form of gastronomic self-flagellation—Caesar's description supplies the surest definition of Roman honor in Antony and Cleopatra.

The Romans resent Antony's desertion precisely because Antony occupies such a privileged position. While Philo means to pay homage to the way in which Antony's body signified Roman honor, the image that he invokes—of this body exploding the constraints of Roman armor—is ambiguous. Antony's body “overflows” (1.1.2); Roman armor or Roman interpretation cannot ultimately contain it. And Antony's resistance to Roman interpretation confuses Philo because it threatens his basic cognitive categories. To Philo, honor and Antony are so closely identified that a separation between them would dissolve both quantities: “when he is not Antony, / He comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony” (1.1.57-59). The “great property” is by definition Antony's; if “he is not Antony,” then the property has nowhere to go. In abandoning his post as Roman soldier par excellence, Antony leaves a troubling vacuum in Roman discourse. Although all the feats of Roman honor discussed in the play occur in the past—occur in fact in Antony's past—the value remains central to Roman cultural identity.³¹ By staying alive without retaining the “great property” which he embodies, Antony threatens that identity. From the Roman perspective, he has deserted a long time before he orders Eros to “pluck off” (4.15.37) the armor that binds what Philo calls his “captain's heart.”

As his first great speech demonstrates, Antony himself views his stay in Egypt as an escape from the determining forces of Rome. In response to Cleopatra's teasing accusations that his blush “is Caesar's homager” and that his “cheek pays shame” to Fulvia (1.1.30-31), Antony asserts his sovereignty:

Let Rome into the Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus. …

(1.1.33-36)

As Cleopatra observes, the speech is “an excellent falsehood” (1.1.40), for Egypt is not in fact a depoliticized “space” Antony may define as his own but a “kingdom” in which he must act the part of a subject. Antony has exchanged Roman overdetermination for its Egyptian counterpart; and, afraid to “lose [him]self,” he eventually reverses the process to break his “Egyptian fetters” (1.2.113-14).³² Nevertheless, he briefly finds in Egypt a position from which to criticize the Roman association between nobility and somatic repression; as he kisses Cleopatra, he privileges his own pleasure momentarily over the competing claims that the Roman and Egyptian states have on his “inches.” “To do thus” for Antony is to create a gap in language and to reclaim his body as independent from the public representations of it that proliferate in the play. He deserts so as to assert his own power (however imperfectly, however fantastically) over his body and its significations. Antony's “excellent falsehood” allows him briefly to “be himself” (1.1.43).

It is within this context, provided by Antony's first speech, that I suggest we understand his decision “to do thus” (4.14.102) later in the play, when he kills himself. Antony's belief that doing “thus” once again guarantees “nobleness” (4.14.99) confirms the connectedness of these two moments in the play; the kiss and the sword stroke are parallels of a sort.³³ Moments before he stabs himself, Antony fears that his body is disintegrating, like a cloud given brief shape by the imagination:

ANT.
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.
ANT.
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.

(4.14.9-14)

As his analogy indicates, Antony perceives his body as shaped by others' thoughts: he is still Antony, but it no longer belongs to him. He proposes the suicide as a remedy to his sense that he “cannot hold” his own body together. His suicide is thus an attempt to reassert control over his “visible shape” by removing himself from the determining cultural pressures that he thinks are destroying him. With a “wound,” Antony creates a gap in culture where he can make his body his own again.

Like Donne and Montaigne, Antony discovers sovereignty in a suicidal thought. The representational practices of Rome and Egypt have alienated him from his body by making it bear an excess of signification. Antony experiences this alienation as a somatic disintegration. But he can make himself “whole,” to use Montaigne's term, by effecting his own death; in doing “thus,” he proves that his “inches” are indeed his and that his “cheek” pays homage to none. For Antony, suicide replicates, with a difference, the dynamic that Elaine Scarry has identified in torture. Scarry argues that torture

is a condensation of the act of “overcoming” the body present in benign forms of power. Although the torturer dominates the prisoner in both physical and verbal acts, ultimate domination requires that the prisoner's ground become increasingly physical and the torturer's increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal body and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body, that eventually the prisoner experience himself exclusively in terms of sentience and the torturer exclusively in terms of self-extension.³⁴

Suicide collapses torturer and prisoner into one; by subjecting his body to “sentience,” the suicide may paradoxically experience a “self-extension.” Given the right conditions, the suicide may in fact experience himself or herself as both “colossal body” and “colossal voice,” so that he or she may overcome the other voices that seek domination over the body and thus establish “ultimate domination.”

Antony's suicide culminates in such a scene of domination. His final moments are marked both by sentience and by self-extension. “How heavy weighs my lord!” (4.15.31), exclaims Cleopatra as she hoists up the dying Antony to her monument. W. B. Worthen argues that the comment “draws our attention to [Antony's] body,”³⁵ and so do the other carnal puns in which the scene abounds. The focus on Antony's body in his death-scene momentarily inactivates ideological readings—those within the play of that body and those within the audience of his suicide. Poised between heaven and earth, Antony's body offers itself as an object of contemplation throughout the scene, insistently drawing attention to its own heaviness, its carnality, and its pain. His range of physical activity, meanwhile, establishes that body's continued capacity for the more pleasurable forms of sentience. He kisses, he drinks, and, punningly, he comes. While his body hangs, his expansive carnality becomes his own. Antony's extraordinary death makes his body present as a “colossal body,” the huge “case of that huge spirit” (4.15.89) bestriding, if not the ocean, at least the extremes of carnal experience.

The audience's extended confrontation with this dying body serves several functions. First, the recognition of Antony's pain should encourage a sympathetic response: Shakespeare suspends his hero in order to encourage us to suspend our judgment. Plutarch's description of “poore Antonius” at the monument emphasizes the fact that those who “were present to behold it, said they never saw so pitiefull a sight.”³⁶ Shakespeare follows his source by evoking pity; however, he carefully avoids the negative connotations of “pitiefull” by distancing his triumphant Antony from Plutarch's “crying” Antonius. As Leslie Thomson notes, Antony's death scene prompts us “to agree that he ‘do[es] … not basely die.’”³⁷ Moreover, the extent to which Shakespeare represents Antony's pain in terms of his capacity for pleasure forces an acknowledgment of Antony's singular individuality, stripped now of political meanings. Whereas the rest of the play has trained us to think of Antony's body in terms of its ideological use, in the death scene, it becomes, as it were, pure body. The heavy eroticism of this scene at the same time transforms us into voyeurs. Our gaze in the death scene is invasive and therefore transgressive. Our voyeuristic shame (the embarrassment so common to critical discussions of the scene) paradoxically confirms Antony's ownership of his body because it transforms his politicized body into a private body. And if Antony owns his body—if that body does not, in fact, belong to Egypt or to Rome, to the “countrie” or to God—then his suicide cannot be a sin.

Wearied by the aftermath of Actium, Antony earlier expressed his desire to “breathe between the heavens and the earth, / A private man” (3.12.14-15). By entering the “secret house of death,” Antony briefly enacts that desire: he finds the “midway /’Twixt extremes.” In transition between heaven and earth, life and death, Roman guards and Egyptian queen, Antony's body emblematizes his search for a private “space” where “kingdoms are clay.” The suicide rejects politically constructed meanings and substitutes a jubilant sense of sovereignty.³⁸ Twice, Antony claims that his voluntary death constitutes an act of overcoming. The inarticulateness of his claims reveals the extent to which he has removed himself from the play's public discourses. His assurances to Cleopatra—that his “valour,” not Caesar's, has overcome his “valour” and that though undefeated by a “countryman,” he is a “Roman, by a Roman” vanquished—also emphasize his erasure of his own submission to culture. Antony forces the cancellation of Rome within himself. His pain is “world-ridding”;³⁹ it obliterates all evidence of Romanness and of Caesar.

Paradoxically, Antony's death also frees the Romans to rehabilitate his reputation and reappropriate his past.⁴⁰ The suicide allows the Romans to restore the link between Antony's “great property” and Antony, and thus to restore Antony to his previous position as the paragonal Roman soldier. When Decretas notifies the Roman generals of Antony's death, he connects the suicide directly to Antony's glorious past, thereby imputing to Antony a consistency that he has lacked and erasing altogether the Antony whom we have seen in the play:

… that self hand
Which writ his honour in the acts it did,
Hath, with the courage which the heart did lend it,
Splitted the heart. This is his sword,
I robb'd his wound of it: behold it stain'd
With his most noble blood.

(5.1.21-26)

Decretas imagines Antony's suicide as Antony's final inscription of Roman honor on his body—he writes his honor on his splitted heart—and this pleases the assembled Roman potentates enormously. Where shortly before they had regarded Antony as an “old ruffian” (4.1.4), they now characterize him as the rarest “spirit” that “did steer humanity” (5.1.31-32); Caesar himself finds in the dead Antony a “friend,” a “mate,” a “companion” (5.1.43-44).

But Decretas's interpretation of Antony's suicide is perforce limited and limiting. Unlike us, he does not witness Antony's ultimate moments or attend to his final speeches; he barges into the room and remains only long enough to take the sword embedded in the still-living Antony. When he mentions having “robb'd his wound of it,” Decretas does not speak metaphorically, and his interpretation of the suicide is tainted by the cold-blooded opportunism of the gesture that enables it. Decretas has no idea why Antony committed suicide. His only concern is that “this sword but shown to Caesar with this tidings / Shall enter me with him” (4.14.112-13). As the unfortunate pun reveals, the sword, in facilitating Decretas's entry with Caesar, has taken on a quite different signification than it had had in Antony's body. It becomes the occasion for Caesar's cunning reappropriation of Antony and of his body: the rebellious voluptuary thus becomes “the arm of [Caesar's] own body” (5.1.45) and his story may usefully be rehabilitated to inflate “his glory which / Brought [Antony] to be lamented” (5.2.359-60). To drive an “old ruffian” to suicide is hardly creditable labor; however, to encourage a wayward hero to kill himself in an ultimate tribute to the value of “honour” is work fit for an emperor. To use Donne's term, the Romans' judgment concerning Antony's suicide is “doubtfull” at best. The “tidings” Decretas so carefully prepares for Roman consumption are nothing but the serviceable fictions of a grave-robber and the culture he wishes to re-“enter.”

The habit of imposing ideologically useful readings on still-warm corpses is not peculiar to Romans; indeed, Cleopatra manages successfully to use her dead lover to further her own ends. Once she overcomes the “poor passion” that turns her into “no more but e'en a woman” (4.15.73-75), she transforms the suicide into proof of her own transfigurative powers. Initially, she views Antony's suicide not just as an act that guarantees his status as the “noblest of men” (4.15.59) but also as an act of selfishness and desertion: she asks her dying lover, “Hast thou no care of me?” (4.15.60). Cleopatra experiences his death first as an abandonment, a fissure in their carefully sustained public identity as a “mutual pair” (1.1.36). In dying too soon, Antony has moved beyond her decidedly unsecret public representations of their relationship. Only by keeping him alive artificially in her visionary speeches does she manage to give credence to the assertion that she will join him. Her eulogies of Antony, delivered to Dolabella, are prologue to her own “immortal longings” (5.2.280). She “imagine[s] / An Antony” (5.2.98-99) so as to seduce a Dolabella, and through him, posterity. Cleopatra's handling of Antony's death is far more attractive than Decretas's but no less opportunistic.⁴¹

Shakespeare suggests that judgments such as Decretas's and Cleopatra's are more likely to reflect on the ethical nature of the judge than on that of the dead person. The misreadings of Antony's suicide that proliferate after his death underscore the difficulty of judging an act of such complexity. These misreadings point also to the ultimate failure of Antony's enterprise. Although his suicide allows him a moment of unfettered sovereignty, it finally feeds the ideological forces that he had attempted to defeat. And in that irony lies the “sorrow of Antony's death.”

Notes

1. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley, the Arden Shakespeare (1954; reprint, London: Routledge, 1988), 4.15.80-82; all subsequent citations are to this edition.

2. Roland Wymer, in Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), considers the question “wholly rhetorical” (128).

3. See, for example, H. C. Goddard, who is critical of Cleopatra but argues that, in her death, she shows “obedience to her own new self and to her emperor Antony,” The Meaning of Shakespeare (U. of Chicago Press, 1960), 200.

4. For an overview of the impact made by the Roman tradition concerning suicide on the early modern intelligentsia, see Roland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 1-37, and Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 86-106.

5. Even so, classical attitudes towards suicide made a limited impact. Wymer's assertion that “the Jacobean drama was written … at a time when suicide was reacquiring the dignity and honor of its Roman past” (4) seems optimistic; MacDonald and Murphy found no record of an actual suicide for honor earning approval. They argue that while “humanism was fostering awareness of more tolerant attitudes towards suicide, government reform and clerical evangelism were deepening popular hostility to it” (104).

6. For suicide as a transgression against these laws, see Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (U. of Minnesota Press, 1981), 531-37; MacDonald and Murphy, 15-41; Wymer, 10-25. Michael Dalton describes suicide as “an offence against God, against the king, against nature,” in The Countrey Iustice (1618; reprint Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975), 234.

7. Phyllis Rackin, “Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” PMLA 87 (1972): 201-11, p. 207. The use of the word “botch” to describe Antony's suicide has become a critical commonplace, see for example Walter R. Coppedge, “The Joy of the Worm: Dying in Antony and Cleopatra,” Renaissance Papers (1988): 41-50, p. 41; Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (Yale U. Press, 1985), 157; and Peter Berek, “Doing and Undoing: The Value of Action in Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 32 (1981): 295-304, p. 303. Leslie Thomson describes the suicide as “bungled,” “Antony and Cleopatra, Act 4 Scene 16: ‘A Heavy Sight,’” Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 77-90, p. 81; as does Anne Barton, “‘Nature's Piece’Gainst Fancy’: the Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra,” (London: Bedford College, 1973), 7.

8. Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Harvard U. Press, 1993), 142; Rackin, 207; Martha Tuck Rozett, “The Comic Structures of Tragic Endings: The Suicide Scenes in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ 36 (1985): 152-64, p. 160.

9. See for example Eugene Waith, “Manhood and Valor in Two Shakespearean Tragedies,” ELH 17 (1950): 262-73; Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (U. of California Press, 1985), 123-47; and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), 188-90. Readings that emphasize Antony's transcendence tend to credit Cleopatra's claims about the lovers' post-mortem reunion; however, as Rackin notes, “if the issue of the action is to unite the lovers in death, surely the wide separation between Antony's suicide and Cleopatra's is troublesome” (201).

10. Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, trans. Rolf Fjelde, in The Bedford Introduction to World Drama, 3rd ed., ed. Lee A. Jacobus (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 707.

11. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford U. Press, 1985), 28.

12. John Donne, Biathanatos (1647), ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II (London and Toronto: Associated U. Presses, 1984), 33, 36. Donne argues against the idea that suicide is always a violation of the laws of God, of nature, and of the state by considering each seriatim.

13. MacDonald and Murphy, 29, 76.

14. Montaigne, “A Custome of the Isle of Cea,” in Montaigne's Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Everyman's Library, 1965), 2:27-41, p. 28-30. According to Wymer, this analogy derives from Plato but was widely adapted by early modern writers (11), see also MacDonald and Murphy, 17.

15. The church considered suicide the product of sinful despair and attributed it to diabolical intervention. So the Protestant divine Richard Sibbes, in his discussion of suicidal despair, notes that “grief is like lead to the soul, heavy and cold; it sinks downwards, and carries the soul with it. … And it is Satan's practice to go over the hedge where it is lowest,” “The Soul's Conflict with Itself, And Victory Over Itself by Faith,” in The Collected Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander B. Grossart (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1862), 1:147. For the connection between suicide and witchcraft, see MacDonald and Murphy, 53.

16. Montaigne, 27.

17. Macbeth, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2 ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.3.19-29. For Macbeth's despair, see also Wymer, 54-57. Wymer does not note Shakespeare's pun on Satan in Seyton's name.

18. King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 4.4.34-80. For this incident in Lear and its connection to popular beliefs about diabolic intervention, see also MacDonald and Murphy, 38.

19. Julius Caesar, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 5.5.31-81.

20. The manner of Enobarbus's death is ambiguous; I treat it as a suicide because Enobarbus claims that “if swift thought” does not break his heart, he will seek a “swifter means” (4.6.35-36). Whether or not he resorts to such “swifter means” is unclear; even if “thought” becomes his instrument of choice, his death is self-willed and self-inflicted.

21. According to MacDonald and Murphy, this form of burial symbolizes the survivors' fear of the suicide as a transitional, liminal, and ambiguous being (47).

22. This is the first meeting between Caesar and Cleopatra. Although Caesar does not know what Cleopatra looks like, I assume that in performance Cleopatra would be regally attired and easily distinguished from her maids. (Proculeius identifies the queen immediately and correctly.) Caesar's question is thus not only disingenuous but insulting. Cleopatra responds accordingly: although Caesar is officially announced, she waits for Dolabella's cue—“It is the emperor, madam” (5.2.112)—to acknowledge Caesar, and thus repays insult with insult.

23. My argument about the layering of suicides suggests that these deaths constitute one more instance of the “multiplicity” that Janet Adelman has identified as “essential” to the play's structure and to its concern with judgment, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (Yale U. Press, 1973), 14-50, p. 45.

24. Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge U. Press, 1983), 149. Miola argues that although Antony's suicide resembles in all particulars the deaths of other noble Romans, it constitutes a rejection of Roman values because Antony ultimately privileges love over duty.

25. Plutarch, “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” Plutarch's Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North (1579), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Columbia U. Press, 1964), 5:254-320, p. 309.

26. Donne, 29.

27. Montaigne, 27.

28. Donne, 29.

29. Donne, 29.

30. See for example John Danby, who claims that Cleopatra “incarnates the Flesh,” Poets on Fortune's Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 145; and Derek Traversi, who finds that she embodies “sensual frivolity,” Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford U. Press, 1963), 101.

31. Cf. Adelman, who argues that “Roman valor” is associated with Antony's past but that “Octavius's moderate world necessarily excludes heroic virtue,” The Common Liar, 132.

32. For Antony's preoccupation with the loss of self, see also Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama (New York: Routledge, 1988), 179-80.

33. Cf. Berek, who argues that this echo makes of the suicide “an ultimate gesture in which sexual climax and the end of life are joined” and that “euphemistic language and glamorous gesture join to create an imponderable moral dilemma” (303).

34. Scarry, 57.

35. W. B. Worthen, “The Weight of Antony: Staging ‘Character’ in Antony and Cleopatra,” SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 26 (1986): 295-308, p. 302.

36. Plutarch, 309.

37. Thomson, 83. Thomson's close examination of the mechanisms of elevation deployed by Shakespeare in this scene is in service to the argument that “the fall of Antony the soldier is also the triumph, in its Medieval, visual sense as well as metaphorical, of Antony the lover” (89).

38. See also Nicholas Jose, who finds that “Antony at the moment of dying is great in the ultimate, minimal sense. … [He] has affirmed simply the thing he is,” “Antony and Cleopatra: Face and Heart,” PQ [Philological Quarterly] 62 (1983): 487-506, p. 499.

39. Scarry, 35.

40. See also Worthen, who notes that after the suicide the other characters “all vie to characterize Antony descriptively,” but who views this development as a dramatization of “the affective polarity between acting and narrative” (303).

41. Cf. Adelman, who claims that “Cleopatra's imagination of her Antony virtually redeems them both” (The Common Liar, 109), and Barton, who emphasizes that Cleopatra's death is a “remake” of Antony's because she “redeems the bungled and clumsy nature of Antony's death … by catching it up and transforming it within her own, flawless farewell” (18). I disagree with this reading of Antony's suicide but I have found Barton's insistence on separating the deaths very useful.