SOURCE: Lindley, Arthur. “Antony, Cleopatra, the Market, and the End(s) of History.” In Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, edited by Lloyd Davis, pp. 62-73. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003.

[In the following essay, Lindley argues that Antony and Cleopatra associates Octavius with the centralization and monopolization of trade—that it shows he wants, in effect, to be the sole proprietor of the world, fixing the value of every commodity, including time. By contrast, the critic suggests, Cleopatra is linked not only with the festivity and unrestraint of carnival but also with the idea of free trade, for she believes that the value of commodities, even sexual love, is negotiable and constantly changing.]

Commerce is the dirty secret of Bakhtin's theory of carnival. Throughout his definitive (if fictive) account in the first chapter of Rabelais and His World and elsewhere, he marginalizes what in practice is as inescapably central to carnival as is its hostility to outsiders: the normal activities of the marketplace and its inhabitants. Carnival is the festivity of the market, after all, and its celebration of change, its projection of values as negotiable and identities as reversible, as well as its reduction of life to appetite and everything spiritual or abstract to the material bodily level, all reflect its origins. A ruthlessly successful character, who happens to run a gaudy restaurant described as a “carnival,” in the 1996 film Big Night puts these shared principles simply when he says, “I'm a businessman. I'm anything I need to be at any time.” Octavius—or Rabelais—could not have put it better. A process of ironic marginalization of embarrassingly monetary valves takes place in Antony and Cleopatra, as it does in Bakhtin. Business is Rome's and Egypt's dirty secret. An important part of the business of Shakespeare's play is to publish that secret.¹

The world of Antony and Cleopatra is a world of barter in which relations are customarily transactional and temporary. That fundamental but seldom acknowledged point shapes the presentation of time in a time-obsessed text. The difference between Rome and Egypt is not simply between business and pleasure, as is often assumed, but between two different kinds of business (and, for that matter, two different kinds of pleasure). One society trades in honor and hoarded treasure, the other “trade[s] in love,” as Egypt says of herself (2.5.2). Caesar, as Pompey notes, “gets money where / He loses hearts” (2.1.13-14). One culture saves, the other lavishes. Rome is associated with the newly emergent, increasingly centralized state of Shakespeare's England and with its business culture of purchased monopolies and joint-stock companies; Egypt with the traditional marketplace of independent small traders that is also, for Shakespeare as well as Bakhtin, the place of carnival. Octavius is proleptically identified with corporate ruthlessness, just as the bountiful Antony, Egypt's reluctant patron, is identified with a dying tradition of aristocratic largesse. What kills Enobarbus, of course, is Antony's sending of his treasure after him, a gift that reminds its victim of the difference between the two systems.

The train of Roman history runs on the clock-time of bureaucratic order and speeds toward an illusory millennium of monopoly and stasis, Caesar's “time of universal peace” (4.6.4). Egypt embodies and survives in the fluid time of a world of constant transaction that resists closure—the freedom of a market whose purpose is, after all, the indefinite perpetuation of trade—and for which Octavius's peace is death. One order hates flux; the other celebrates it. That means that the Roman order of Octavius is at war with the very nature of time in the fallen, mutable world and tries, like Bakhtin's official order, to defeat it by imposing the illusion of changeless stability. Octavius, an early version of Francis Fukuyama, aims at nothing less than the end of history. Egypt is immersed in mutability, in the ever-vanishing present that it can transcend only by rejecting the source of its vitality to become marble-cold and constant. Both orders attempt to escape the flux of fallen time in ways whose religious and metaphysical dimensions are often noted, but whose commercial bases have been largely ignored. Cleopatra embodies the vitality of the open market, Octavius the principle of monopoly and its agricultural extension, enclosure, which threatens that vitality in the name of order and an aristocratic superiority to trade.

As The Merchant of Venice reminds us, there is nothing anachronistic about referring to Shakespeare's interest in the market. The opposition of Rome and Egypt in this play is deeply rooted in the economic and social context of Shakespeare's time. Sixty years ago, L. C. Knights taught us the cultural and literary importance of the proliferation of monopolies in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.² One particular form those monopolies took, of course, were joint-stock companies for exploration and trade such as the East India Company and the Levant Company, those precursors of empire. In his recent, magisterial study of the economic history of the period, Merchants and Revolution, Robert Brenner traces the rise to commercial and political power of these new merchants, their displacement of the older merchant adventurers, and the pervasive restraints of trade that accompanied the process, since “a free and open trade posed real dangers” for these merchants.³ The new monopolists were consistently supported by the monarchy since, as Brenner says, “a prosperous merchant community could offer an unrivaled source of financial support.”⁴ The monopolies—the commercial version of agricultural enclosure—were widely and correctly seen as threats both to free trade and what we would call consumer rights. They were also linked to two other prominent features of the period: the centralization and expansion of the state's revenue operations under Thomas Gresham and the proliferation of spies—who provided commercial information as much as or more than military information—under Francis Walsingham.⁵ Overseas ventures and spying, both internal and external, are, as we know, defining features of Octavius's Rome. Shakespeare thus represents the opposition between Rome and Egypt as one between independent traders, in either the marketplace or the exchange, and the arch-monopolist and encloser Octavius, whom Thidias calls the “universal landlord” (3.13.72). That conflict, as one might expect, is represented as one between carnival and Lent.

One need not, of course, assume that all these references are equally explicit, let alone that Shakespeare would have expected his audience to look at Cleopatra and think, “Ah, yes, free enterprise!” The closing of markets and fields, however, was very much a live issue at the time of the play: enclosure at the hands of local versions of Octavius produced riots in Kent in 1596 and a “rising” in the Midlands in 1607, close to the date of Antony and Cleopatra.⁶ Brenner further notes that the expansion of the Levant Company's monopoly in 1589 and 1590 “provoked substantial protests from merchant outsiders,” an old order fighting a losing battle against its successor.⁷ It does seem, in this regard, that the identification of the aging Antony with a myth of old-aristocratic generosity and the boy Caesar with the cost-accounting “new men,” like those of the East India and Levant Companies as well as their friends in government, is quite explicit and is spelled out in such parallel scenes as act 4, scenes 1 and 2, in which the two leaders—one coldly calculating, the other (at least in manner) generous—deal with their troops before battle.⁸ As is usually noted, Antony contrasts his old-fashioned mode of fighting with the strategic-planning style of Octavius, who “dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had / In the brave squares of war” (3.2.39-40). That contrast has a commercial analogue, however, as well as a carnivalesque one.

Cleopatra's association with the carnivalesque is similarly explicit. In a sense, her association with the free market is the implicit product of imagining an opposite to Caesar's quite explicit drive toward global monopoly. The language of commerce in the play, however, is subversive and marginal, since it demystifies the processes of power. It emerges explicitly in the language of losers, such as Pompey, and subordinates, such as Enobarbus and Agrippa; it emerges only inadvertently in the language of the leaders. Its importance is thus registered by its very suppression, as when Octavius denies being a merchant, a charge no one has made (5.2.178-79). In the world of this play the leaders, such as Antony, talk reason of state while stealing another's house. In such a case, it is the man (such as Pompey) whose house has been stolen who is most likely to say what is really going on.

Cleopatra's carnival nature is directly related to the marketplace, the traditional site of carnival, where Antony sits “enthroned” (2.2.221), waiting for his first meeting with her, and where—arrayed in the colors of money—they proclaim their (nominally her) empire:

I' th' marketplace on a tribunal silvered,
Cleopatra and himself in chairs of gold
Were publicly enthroned.

(3.6.3-5)

From their first pageantlike entrance, Antony and Cleopatra's affair is played out as public spectacle, available for promiscuous observation and participation, both royal and common. Enobarbus “saw her once / Hop forty paces through the public street” (2.2.234-35). When the lovers abandon Caesar's ambassadors to “wander through the streets, and note / The qualities of people” (1.1.55-56), they also make themselves available to be noted, both spectators and spectacle, as participants in carnival are supposed to be. As Julian Markels writes, “Cleopatra and the public street are ornaments to each other, and they measure each other's value.”⁹

Carnivalesque Cleopatra is linked to the earth and the time-sense appropriate to it. Identified with birth and decay, the cycles of the Nile, “she represents,” as Andrew Fichter puts it, “the unbroken circle of appetitive nature.”¹⁰ She is also what Philo sees as “a tawny front” (1.1.6), and what she herself describes, a woman “with Phoebus' amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.28-29)—in Elizabethan eyes at least, a grotesque.¹¹ A figure of such extreme and pervasive sexual voracity that Romans habitually regard her as debilitating, she figures, like the Wife of Bath, as sexual appetite abnormally prolonged as well as heightened, a summer with no winter in it or to it. She is also, at various times, a shrew, a virago, an ostentatious and self-glorifying liar, a beater of servants and browbeater of lovers, in short, a crowned version of the husband-tormenting wife at whom skimmington rituals were directed: “Shakespeare has represented her in much the same terms Bakhtin uses to identify the grotesque—or popular—body in Renaissance culture. Shakespeare clearly endows her with all the features of carnival.”¹²

While she may be “stigmatized” by this identification, as Tennenhouse argues, she is also glorified by it. “In this tradition,” Bakhtin says, “woman is essentially related to the material bodily lower stratum; she … degrades and regenerates simultaneously.”¹³ Cleopatra, of course, gives birth to a new, sexualized Antony in the process of subverting the military, Roman one. “Egypt,” moreover, rules and is metonymically associated with a country defined by carnival festivity and carnivalesque inversion, a national expression of what Marilyn French calls the “outlaw feminine principle.”¹⁴ Egypt everywhere acts out that basic trope of carnivalesque subversion, women on top. Cleopatra “angles,” Antony is the fish (2.5.10-14); she drinks him to bed and wears his “sword Philippan” (2.5.21-23). In the most fundamental dynamic of the play, carnivalesque femininity confronts masculine officialdom in the person of Octavius or his various lieutenants. That much is obvious; the entrepreneurial basis of the confrontation, to judge from the criticism, is less so.

If Cleopatra is carnival, then crabbed, parsimonious Caesar, who typically regards feasting his victorious army as “waste” (4.1.16), is a Lenten representative of the plutocratic new lords of Jacobean England.¹⁵ She is, of course, everywhere identified with feasting, a trope Clare Kinney neatly calls “Cleopatra the Comestible.”¹⁶ It is her “lascivious wassails” from which Caesar pretends to call Antony back to business (1.4.55-56). She is, at various times “a morsel for a monarch” (1.5.31), an “Egyptian dish” (2.6.123), “a morsel cold upon / Dead Caesar's trencher” (3.13.117-18), even (in her youth) a green salad, and finally, of course, “a dish for the gods” (5.2.265-66). She is not only the purveyor of feasts, but also Feast itself, the literary descendent of Rabelais's Gargamelle as much as Venus. Breakfast at her house is “eight wild boars, roasted whole” (2.2.186) for twelve people. By contrast, when Octavius wants to praise the former Antony, he seizes on the most antifestive kind of feasting: drinking “the stale of horses” and eating “strange flesh, / Which some did die to look on” (1.4.61-68). The tyrant, not surprisingly, regards the proper relation of will to body as tyrannical, an attitude also expressed in his desire to “possess” the time rather than enjoy it (2.7.95). For Caesar, privation is virtue; bodies, like kingdoms and moments, exist to be conquered. Lenten in his youth, by contrast, Antony has become carnivalesque in middle age, a testament to Cleopatra's powers of regeneration.

Cleopatra's liquidity is also that of the market as well as the Nile. When Enobarbus says that “custom” cannot “stale / Her infinite variety” (2.2.240-41), he clearly means the business sense of “patronage” as well as the familiar sense of “habit.” After “gipsy,” “strumpet” is the first and most frequent term of Roman abuse thrown at her (see 1.1.13), women who sell themselves being, of course, a threat to men such as Octavius, who wish to sell them.¹⁷ She “trade[s] in love” (2.5.2), and not merely by getting armies in return for her favors. (Sleeping with generals is, after all, Egypt's defense policy.) At their first meeting, as Enobarbus describes it, Antony “for his ordinary”—that is, his board—“pays his heart / For what his eyes eat only” (2.2.231-32). Their moment-to-moment relationship is a constant extortion of tribute, whether in the form of pearls, protestations, or empires. “If it be love, tell me how much” (1.1.14): from her first words Cleopatra makes it clear that love is a measurable commodity and subject to fluctuation. That commodity is obtained by what we might call the negotiability of her character. Her moods are determined by the market: “If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing” (1.3.3-4). The principle may be that the customer is always wrong, but the transaction nonetheless makes Cleopatra vulnerable as the purveyor of a product always subject to rejection. The “morsel for a monarch” can easily become the “morsel cold” on the dead monarch's trencher and despised by the next customer.

At the same time, however, Cleopatra is the restaurateur as well as the meal. Octavia is only a commodity, however mystified, traded by males; Cleopatra is an entrepreneur. This agency conjures up the possibility of a world, outside Rome, where women operate independently. It also makes Cleopatra and carnival the embodiments of a free market of private traders. As his rivals find, Octavius aims for monopoly. In his new world order, values will be fixed because there will be only one purchaser: the sole surviving “factor for the gods” (2.6.10).¹⁸ His empire is a vast enclosure movement, driven, like enclosure, to maximize profit and control by eliminating subdivision until there is only a single “universal landlord.” By the end of the play, he can assert that “Caesar's no merchant, to make prize with [Cleopatra] / Of things that merchants sold” (5.2.179-80): an assertion of aristocratic superiority to the market that actually declares the market closed. His snobbery is directed not at commerce but at competition. The “sole sir o' th' world,” as she calls him (5.2.116), no longer needs to bargain. In effect, the plutocrat retires to his mansion and, like Ben Jonson's usurer in “The Praises of a Countrie-Life,” curses trade. Throughout the play, Caesar plays to end “play,” in both the carnival and market senses. Cleopatra gives Charmian leave to “play till doomsday” (5.2.227), but Caesar's advancing troops guarantee that doomsday comes a few moments later. Cleopatra bids, Octavius forecloses.

Cleopatra assumes that all relationships are functions of desire; Octavius assumes that they are functions of control. Her appetitive world is comic because it asserts that all desires (hence, all relationships) are renewable. Nothing really ends, nothing dies. One of the play's most startling moves is to equate that comic renegotiability and deferral of closure with the market: “play” of body and feeling with “play” of commercial value. What else does it mean to “trade in love”? What is not sold today can be sold tomorrow. (Always selling the image of gratification and the promise of ownership, Cleopatra is an opportunity for venture capitalism, making promises not unlike those Drake made to his investors: vague but immense profits for a moment's investment. As with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, the risks involved are associated with the uncertainties of the sea.) No value is fixed, nothing truly limited. Any emotional deal can be restructured. He who is sunk today can be refloated tomorrow, as the dead Antony rises in her imagination, bestriding the ocean, kissing Iras in a meadow in Hades. By contrast, Caesar insists on finality because his drive for control can only be fulfilled in universal stasis, to which both Cleopatra and the free market represent vitality and resistance. Cleopatra maintains a comic world in which consequences are perpetually suspended. She no more expects her flight from the battle to cause Antony's retreat than she expects her feigned death to cause his real one. Death in the carnivalesque, of course, only exists to occasion renewal, as bankruptcy is an aberration of the market, not its norm. Cleopatra's vision of a perpetually festive afterlife with Antony and the suicide it facilitates are the ultimate extensions of this comedic principle of escape. Her theatrical multiplicity functions throughout the play, of course, as a means of resisting possession and control—and eternity is, after all, the ultimate form of deferral. The play's notorious generic instability is a direct function of Cleopatra's insistence—beyond death—on the commercial, comic, and carnivalesque.¹⁹

The Roman sense of time, by contrast, is defined, like the Roman sense of identity, by both purpose and closure. Romans deal with mutability by organizing it into a single big, necessarily Roman, story, whose outline is the progressive emergence of order out of chaos.²⁰ Time, as Octavius sees it (and his view prevails by the elimination of other views), hastens toward its end in “the time of universal peace.”²¹ That process he, of course, construes as a kind of manifest destiny, characteristically impersonal. “I must perforce / Have shown to thee such a declining day, / Or look on thine,” he says to the deceased Antony, “we could not stall together” (5.1.37-39). History or nature or market forces did it, not him. This (cover) story confers not only the retrospective sense of inevitability that stories customarily provide but a prospective one, since the story is known before it is completed. Time is mapped, plotted, foreknown. Since Shakespeare shows us the construction of this myth, it will appear to us rather as public relations: the version Octavius will tell to his followers in his tent after act 5, scene 1: not destiny but the calculated illusion of it. Like all of Rome's claims to solidity and dignity, this one is ludicrously false.

Even Romans who see that story as a mystification (such as the skeptical soldiers who watch Caesar's reaction to Antony's death) accede to it because it imposes a form on the chaos of experience. As Janet Adelman and others have shown, Roman rulers habitually equate flux with decay and death, and both with the shifty, unorganized populace they rule: “this common body, / Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to, and back … / To rot itself with motion” (1.4.44-47).²² That is Octavius's view but it echoes Antony's earlier references to “our slippery people” (1.2.169-79). In the mythology of both leaders there is an essential Rome that coexists with the real one: the Rome of fortune, accident, and politic schemes. Octavius will rescue this ideal from the real. Rome, like the dying Cleopatra, will become marble-cold and constant. It will become its own monument, its own tomb.

Roman identity is centrally a matter of earning “a place i' [this] story” (3.13.45), as Enobarbus puts it before losing his place. Having a place in the story does indeed give one an identity, but only one, and it is necessarily built on denial. When one admits other possibilities, as Antony has done, one begins to wander into the other potential stories that surround him, the comedies of angling and cross-dressing that are Cleopatra's chosen narratives. One will eventually, if unknowningly, find oneself in the much greater dream-narrative of Cleopatra's “Emperor Antony” and one's afterlife together. Enobarbus's barge speech both describes this temptation (Antony being drawn into Cleopatra's performance), but enacts it (in the narrator's bemused fascination), and creates it (in the salacious dreaminess of Agrippa's and Maecenas's response). The speech, of course, describes the dissolution of the Roman general into the gawking tourist on his way to becoming the lover, heroic and besotted, of what is—whether he likes it or not—his defining other. To wander from one's single, self-defined story is to re-enter the flux from which the story was supposed to rescue him. It is to re-enter time and become the “cloud that's dragonish” (4.15.2).²³ In commercial terms, it is to be renegotiated.

As we all know, when Antony advises Caesar to “be a child o' th' time,” Octavius gives the perfect Roman answer, “Possess it” (2.7.94-95). Here, Caesar is treating time not merely as a commodity to be owned, as is usually noted, but as space to be colonized. “Time” roughly equals “Egypt,” the nation or the person. If Octavius ever did decide to seize the day, he would send in the army first and then appoint a governor. To possess the time, in his sense, is to control it from a viewpoint outside it in a kind of virtual timelessness and thus to achieve a kind of imaginary immortality. He who possesses time is not subject to it. Ruling over his (also imaginary) time of universal peace, why should Octavius ever die? (What doesn't change, doesn't die.) On the other hand, children of the time, as Antony will soon demonstrate, have much celerity in dying. To possess the time, however, is inherently alienating: an attempt to live outside the medium in which one exists, dolphinlike. Caesar is to life what the chair of the Federal Reserve is to the American stock market: he stands outside the play, cautioning against irrational exuberance. Romans typically view time as history, as extension and therefore as conquerable space. Concentrating on the past and the future—which is necessarily where stories exist, since the present instant can never itself be a story—they are always inclined to miss the now. Antony, whistling in the marketplace, misses the show Cleopatra has prepared for him and which has to be expended on Enobarbus and his future audience. When at the start of the play Antony wishes to let “Rome in Tiber melt” (1.1.35), he is seeking escape from just this historical, longitudinal sense. The stones of Roman tradition will melt in some apocalyptic future, taking all Roman stories with them, and leaving Antony in the “space” of the present moment where he embraces Cleopatra (1.1.36). Egyptian time, which Antony is attempting to enter, is immersive: one swims in it like the dolphin to which Cleopatra will compare Antony (5.2.88). One possesses it by letting it possess oneself. Gaining the present, one tends to lose past and future. In the mercantile terms with which we started, the past too is constantly renegotiable—Julius Caesar's memory can be displaced by Antony's; both can, nay will, be endlessly rewritten—and the future can be deferred indefinitely. Of course, since Antony remains a Roman, the present moment of act 1, scene 1 must also be conquerable space and a rival empire. But it is an empire whose extension can be no more than the moment required to announce it; in the next instant the “nobleness of life” (1.1.38) turns to wrangling or wandering the streets.

Antony, Octavius, Cleopatra, and Enobarbus share a common purpose: to rescue an identity from the flux, especially by creating a heroic other—Antony as past hero or defeated rival or godlike lover or master—against which to define the heroic self. The Roman sense of identity requires complete control in order to impose complete fixity. Thus it can only be fulfilled in suicide, the ultimate self-defining and self-terminating act, which “shackles accident and bolts up change” (5.2.6), and which is the logical end of the Roman myth of the single defining act, like Enobarbus's betrayal, which defines one's place in the story. Antony makes his wars for Cleopatra, but makes his suicide to fix his own identity as a “Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (4.16.59-60). That Roman is himself, of course; he has written even Cleopatra's agency out of his death to create a closed circle of self-definition in which he is killer, victim, and historian. And, of course, it doesn't work. Antony's memory goes on being rewritten into Cleopatra's myth and appropriated by Caesar, who will bury Antony as a lover—thus erasing the political rival—and as a further proof of “his glory which / Brought them to be lamented” (5.2.352-53). Linda Charnes appropriately refers to Caesar in this final role as “the venture capitalist of notorious identity, the Merchant of Legend.”²⁴

In this play, all roads lead to death. The choice is to melt like an Egyptian or freeze like a Roman. The Egyptian way has, of course, the advantage of not being at war with the condition of life in time, the continuously fluctuating market of desire. It is also not inherently absurd as the Roman attempt to put a stop to mutability is. As “our terrene moon” (3.13.156), Cleopatra, the goddess and not the mere emperor of this world, possesses time more effectively than Caesar: it will slow down, speed up, even pause with her desires. But it won't stay; Egypt loses the present as surely as Rome does. The Egyptian road offers the joy of play and the wealth of protean multiplicity, but it declares its own inadequacy by Cleopatra's attempts to become marble-cold and constant. The inadequacy of Caesar's way is registered not only by the cold knowing in apartness with which he attempts to rule the sublunary world, but also by the vast joke that enfolds his enterprises. He is, after all, God's fool as well as Fortune's knave, building his empire as the necessary stage for that great birth adumbrated by the play's many foreshadowings and biblical echoes. The next “Eastern star”—or “star in the east”—will announce the only agency capable of offering a way out of the deathward flux of the play's Augustinian world: the only love capable of defeating time and closing the market of desire.

Notes

1. See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 1-58. Big Night. Directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci. 104 min. Columbia/Tristan, 1996.

2. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), 1-173.

3. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 64. For an outline of the basic process, see pp. 3-23. Without trying to force allegory on the play, I would suggest that the contention between old and new monopolists is eerily suggestive of the contention of the world sharers in Antony and Cleopatra, with Pompey and the Egyptians filling the role of the outside traders. However, if Shakespeare needed a model for the power struggle in Rome, he had a very public, important one available in the commercial life of London in his time.

4. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 54.

5. For a particularly vivid account of Walsingham, the employer of (among others) Christopher Marlowe, see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), especially 102-13; on Gresham, see Knights, Drama and Society, 42-45.

6. See Alan G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529-1660 (London and New York: Longmans, 1984), 192-93.

7. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 64.

8. On Antony's and Pompey's association with feudal nobility, see Paul Yachnin, “‘Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom’: Antony and Cleopatra in Its Time,” Renaissance and Reformation 15 (1981): 1-20.

9. Julian Markels, The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare's Development (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), 45. I discuss Egypt's carnivalization of Rome in chapter 6 of my book Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse (Newark, Del., and London: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1996).

10. Andrew Fichter, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘The Time of Universal Peace,’” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 103.

11. “A brow of Egypt” is, of course, Theseus's antithesis to “Helen's beauty” in A Midsummer Night's Dream (5.1.11).

12. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 143.

13. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 274.

14. See Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London: Cape, 1982), especially chapter 1, 21-31.

15. Shakespeare has heightened the contrast by omitting Plutarch's testimony to the historical Octavius's affability and fondness for plays and women. For a summary of the changes made to Caesar's character, see Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare's Roman World (London: Routledge, 1989), 102-3.

16. Clare Kinney, “The Queen's Two Bodies and the Divided Emperor,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 177.

17. The correct term would be “huckster,” the Middle English word, surviving in its gendered form at least into the late sixteenth century, for a female retailer of food and drink. See Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. by M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 54. The type survived, of course, in the form of Cleopatra's Henrician counterpart, Mrs. Quickly.

18. Pompey's “Factors” clearly means “purchasing agents,” its common seventeenth-century meaning, not just “agents,” as the word is often glossed.

19. For an excellent discussion of the conflict between Egyptian comedy and Roman tragedy, see Barbara Vincent, “Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and the Rise of Comedy,” English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 53-86. Vincent is not concerned, however, with market or carnival.

20. On the Roman devotion to linear narrative, see Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 103-47, especially pp. 106-8. On Rome and the play's reaction to a world of “universal mutability,” see Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 169-88.

21. Roman references to the speed of events and the pressure of the times are, of course, innumerable, like the rush of messengers bringing news. On messengers and their significance, see Charnes, Notorious Identity.

22. See Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), especially 151-57 and Susan Snyder, “Patterns of Motion in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 113-22.

23. Allyson Newton, “‘At the Very Heart of Loss’: Shakespeare's Enobarbus and the Rhetoric of Remembering,” in Renaissance Papers 1995, ed. George Walton Williams and Barbara J. Baines (Raleigh, N.C.: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1995), 81-91, remarks on how Enobarbus, like Antony, “feels the pull of his attraction to Cleopatra drawing him from ‘firm security’ toward the fearful ‘gaps’ in time and nature that she inhabits” (85).

24. Charnes, Notorious Identity, 146.