[In the following essay, Hallett investigates Shakespeare's combined emphasis on mutability, fortune, and time as defining forces in the pre-Christian world of Antony and Cleopatra.]

Antony and Cleopatra is an account of things in terms of the World and the Flesh, Rome and Egypt, the two great contraries that maintain and destroy each other, considered apart from any third sphere which might stand over against them. How is it related to the plays of the ‘great period’, the period which comes to an end with King Lear? The clue is given, I think, in the missing third term. Antony and Cleopatra is the deliberate construction of a world without a Cordelia, Shakespeare's symbol for a reality that transcends the political and the personal and ‘redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to’.

—John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill

As the design of the seventeenth-century playhouse testifies, the Jacobean world had three levels: the stage represented earth, below it lay hell, and above it heaven. It was the latter realm that provided the values against which all human judgments could be measured. That Shakespeare accepted this division of the world into three zones is a commonplace. Whether he was writing comedy, history, or tragedy, it was the existence of a spiritual level in the universe that offered his characters a fixed point upon which to anchor their lives. Throughout Shakespeare, the lower world was in constant flux, but one could find rest from its turmoil by turning the mind from the temporal to the eternal. In doing so, one perceived that the chaos of the lower world was only apparent, that behind it, its source in divine love, lay order. And to perceive order was to perceive meaning.

In The Merchant of Venice we find the typical Shakespearean multileveled universe. The serene harmony of Belmont results from the awareness in its inhabitants of another level of being above their own which orders the motions of the heavens in a great cosmic symphony:

Sit, Jessica: Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

(V.i.58-65)¹

Understanding their relationship to the universe and the necessity of emulating on earth the love that creates harmony out of chaos in the heavens, these characters are never lost in the world. It is no accident that the lovers in Merchant of Venice are noted for their wise judgments—Bassanio for seeing through appearances and selecting the lead casket, though it required him to “give and hazard all he hath,” Portia for counseling Shylock on the relationship of mercy to justice. Their judgments, based on the notion that earthly power is best when it “shows likest God's,” are accurate and final.

In Antony and Cleopatra, there is no Christian heaven, no divine truth against which decisions can be weighed. Shakespeare has identified Rome itself with reason and Egypt with passion, but he has not seen fit to include a reconciling Jerusalem which would give meaning and direction to the lives of his characters. The result is that in Antony and Cleopatra the world is surprisingly hostile. Agrippa, for example, complains that the Romans seem to be compelled by Nature to “lament their most persisted deeds.” One character after another finds that the world keeps canceling out his judgments and forcing him to change his mind. Nothing is stable. Some seek satisfaction in the cold-hearted pursuit of Fortune, who was ever a fickle mistress. Antony and Cleopatra find meaning in love, but this, too, lacks permanence; when death comes to the loved one, meaning drains out of the world once again. There are few characters in Shakespeare to whom the world seems more totally absurd than it does to Cleopatra:

                                                                                          All's but naught;
Patience is sottish, and impatience does
Become a dog that's mad.

(IV.xi.79-81)

Few conclude, as she does, that nothing “shackles accidents, and bolts up change” save death.

Critics have now and then noted in passing that there is something different about the world of Antony and Cleopatra, that the multileveled universe which Shakespeare assumed in the majority of his plays has disappeared, but if they have speculated at all on the matter, it has generally been to mark this down to a falling off in Shakespeare's powers,² to insist that Shakespeare was drawing “a world beyond providence,”³ or to otherwise miss the point. Those whom we would most expect to have noticed what Shakespeare was up to—the “complementarious” critics like Smith, Spencer, and Shapiro who have studied the dualities and ambiguities which characterize the world of the play⁴—are the last to associate ambivalence with a fragmented world. And both Smith and Shapiro speak disparagingly of John F. Danby, who did.⁵ What modern-day critics see immediately is that the world of this play very closely resembles our own; what they forget is that no Jacobean would have mistaken it for the complete world. To the Jacobean, the world of Antony and Cleopatra was the sublunar world.

The failure of commentators to make the fine distinction between what we today call the “real” world and what was known in the seventeenth century as the “sublunar” world has resulted in certain critical blind spots. Among scholars who are sympathetic to the lovers, there is a widespread neglect of studies which turn up evidence that their love is a physical rather than a spiritual love (strains of imagery embodied in the play associate the love of Antony and Cleopatra and their worship of pleasure with the baser appetites, for example), and there is also a failure to distinguish between the kinds of transcendence that are possible in the world. The words “transcendence” and “immortality” are rather loosely bandied about and no care is taken to associate with the play only those kinds of transcendence conceivably available to characters who are denied access to higher levels of knowledge. Moreover, among those scholars who see ambivalence as the theme of the play there is a tendency to make Shakespeare into a relativist. Failing to see that it is the absence of the meaning-bearing level in the universe of the play that prevents the characters from finding fulfillment in their world, such critics argue that the plight of the characters is the plight of the audience, which is not necessarily the case at all. If the play is viewed from the vantage point of the multileveled universe from which it was written, these errors can be eliminated. But to gain that vantage point, we must first be willing to agree that the world of the play is incomplete.

That the play is set in pagan Rome may seem ample reason for Shakespeare's omission of a New Jerusalem. Yet, after all, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were citizens of Rome, nor were they archaeologists striving for an accurate scientific reconstruction of it. The Rome we see is a poetic Rome, vastly different in landscape and structure from the Rome we find in history. It is not so much a place as a metaphor, just as Venice and Belmont are in The Merchant of Venice, as Denmark is in Hamlet, and as the Island is in The Tempest. Therefore, had Shakespeare wished to endow his classical setting with a Christian Jove, he most certainly would have done so. But he added something else instead: he embellished Plutarch's pre-Christian setting not with a stabilizing heaven but with all those unstable attributes traditionally associated in Christian-Humanist thought with the mundane world (e.g., Fortune, Time, Change). It seems that he meant us to see in the setting of Antony and Cleopatra a metaphor for the “lower world.”⁶

Much has been made of the ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra, but little has been said of its subservience to the theme of change. Whereas in the seventeenth century the realm of the infinite was characterized by stillness, permanence, and rest, the finite world was defined by motion and was therefore subject to change. Change, reigning over all “mortall things beneath the moone,” was the very essence of the world's imperfection. In his anatomy of this unruly force in The Faerie Queene, Spenser even makes Mutability (rather than Eve) responsible for the Fall (VII.vi.5). Her world is a flawed world. Such, Shakespeare is at great pains to prove, is the world of Antony and Cleopatra. Spenser's Mutability, who failed in Nature's court to make good her claim to dominions beyond the moon, would have had little trouble in proving her authority over the “wide-rang'd empire” of Shakespeare's play, for Shakespeare has deliberately drawn for us a constantly shifting world, a world that contains no fixed star by which wandering barks can take their bearings. Impermanence, he stresses, is found on all levels—the natural, the social, the personal. It permeates existence. And for Antony and Cleopatra, there is nothing beyond.

Building a case for a Whitmanesque blending of the lovers with the whole universe at the end of the play, Knight erroneously supposed that the melting and dissolving of elements was one form of the mating theme; elements, he said, mingled like lovers.⁷ This is hardly Shakespeare's point. In Antony and Cleopatra, elements deceive. Shakespeare has made the lovers uniquely aware of the unreliability of the natural world. Whereas he allowed Lorenzo and Jessica to look into the sky and find there assurances of divine love and the soul's immortality, he permits Antony to deduce from it only instability and deception:

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air: Thou hast seen these signs;
They are black vesper's pageants. …
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.

(IV.x.2-11)

And if the air “mocks our eyes,” making us believe that we see substance where there is none, water is equally culpable here, for it has set the example for air. Shakespeare reminds us, throughout the play, of the way water changes from ice to liquid to vapor; it “melts” and “dissolves.” One of the four elements, it transmutes itself and becomes air. Earth, too, melts and dissolves. Antony and Cleopatra foresee that Rome, a kingdom of “clay,” will in time “melt” into the Tiber, and Egypt into the Nile, whereupon earth will then become water. But change in the natural world is without predictable direction; water can also become earth, as the receding Nile does in Egypt. Cleopatra rejects life on the grounds of its mutability; the very food which the earth provides to sustain life, she knows, was formerly dung, and, whether it be fed to Caesar or to a beggar, will shortly become dung once again. There is nothing in the natural world that can “bolt up change.”

The political world whirls as chaotically as the natural. Whereas in the history plays the actions of great men serve to reveal the pattern of divine retribution which gives unity to the apparent chaos of events, in Antony and Cleopatra men are up or down only according to whether they are up or down. History here, and the characters are very much concerned with time past, is merely the recounting of the vagaries of Fortune. Sextus Pompey recollects that his father, Pompey the Great, was overthrown by Julius Caesar, who was overthrown by Brutus and Cassius, who were overthrown by Antony and Octavius, whom he, Sextus Pompey, now challenges. Had Pompey succeeded, a pattern might have emerged, but he does not succeed.

Since the leaders of society hold their offices so briefly, the loyalties of those beneath them are understandably transitory. Both Caesar and Antony tell us that the populace wavers in its loyalties as naturally as the oceans reverse their tides:

It hath bin taught us from the primal state
That he which is was wish'd until he were;
And the ebb'd man, ne're lov'd till ne're worth love,
Comes dear'd by being lack'd. This common body,
Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes to and back, lacking [i.e., lackeying] the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion.

(I.iv.41-47)

As Octavius sees the “slippery people” who in the past had deserted Pompey the Great now flocking to support Pompey's son, and then, on the example of Menas, deserting him as suddenly, so Antony will witness his soldiers, one by one, transfer their hearts from himself to Caesar, and will see his fleet, once impeccably loyal, turn from enemies of Caesar to “friends long lost.” Again, motion is the rule. Everything in the political world of Antony and Cleopatra changes, but changes without measure, without purpose. As Antony notes, change seems to occur simply because “quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge / By any desperate change” (I.iii.53-54).

If change is the essence of the macrocosm and of the body politic, it is equally central to the microcosm—man's mind itself is a victim of flux. Spenser's Mutability boasts that in this lower world not only do men's bodies “flit and fly; / But eeke their minds (which they immortall call) / Still change and vary thoughts, as new occasions fall” (F.Q. VII.vii.19). Just as variable are the thoughts of the characters Shakespeare has created in Antony and Cleopatra; the instability which they detect in the universe and the state renders them unable to make final judgments.

Shakespeare makes us aware that individual judgments, in a world of change, are to a large extent necessarily meaningless. Antony locates the good in a different place almost every time we meet him; as the wheel of circumstance rises, then sinks, he is flipped from Cleopatra to Fulvia, from Fulvia to Octavia, from Octavia back to Cleopatra, and, having finally settled upon “royal Egypt” as the ultimate good, nevertheless vacillates between faith and mistrust in his attitude toward her. Shakespeare locates the source of Antony's inconstancy in mutability:

                                                            The present pleasure,
By revolution low'ring, does become
The opposite of itself: she's good, being gone;
The hand could pluck her back that shov'd her on.

(I.ii.129-32)

As it revolves, the ever-whirling wheel of change forces him to be continually revising his judgments. Cleopatra, too, is flipped about by change. She had loved Caesar—in her “salad days,” when she was “green in judgment” (I.v.73-74). Her judgment now is otherwise. And the “horrible villain” who brings her news of Antony's marriage becomes “a proper man” on a later occasion when he flatters her majesty. In a world where thoughts change and vary, as new occasions fall, and loyalties are reversed more as the rule than as the exception, Enobarbus is remarkably constant. Yet even his relatively stable judgment is shown by Shakespeare to be wavering. The moment comes when he, too, finds it meet to desert Mark Antony—only to be flung about-face once again by the occasion of Antony's generosity. Man himself, in this play, is shown to be no less changeable than his environment.

Shakespeare, then, has taken great pains to create a world which is never at rest. He has depicted a world whose basic rhythms are those of the tides and whose inhabitants are swept first toward Rome, then toward Egypt, and at the end of the play back toward Rome once again. This imagery of change is not peculiar to Rome, nor is it confined to Egypt, but embraces both halves of this secularized world; the Roman Empire itself stands as a personification of the mutable world. No wonder then that this world is paradoxical, ambiguous, perplexing.

To say that the constant dissolving and rearrangement of impressions in this kaleidoscopic world of change is based on contemporary notions of mutability is not to deny the contribution of the “complementarious” critics. As usual, a commonplace contemporary insight has become in Shakespeare's hands a lamp that throws a brilliant and penetrating light, illuminating, in this case, through an intricate structure of ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions, the very essence of the phenomenal world. But Shakespeare does not depend upon ambivalence alone to define the restless world he wished to create; he has linked with the Roman Empire other conventional iconographical attributes of the secular world—Time, which brings each individual into conflict with an endless procession of present but fleeting moments, and Fortune, that area of change which is concerned with the material happiness of the individual. Because critics who deal with ambivalence—indeed, critics of the play in general—tend to undervalue the role of the latter and, so far as I know, have neglected the former almost completely, our perceptions need sharpening in these areas if our definition of the finite world is to be complete.

As Michael Lloyd has noted, Shakespeare's concept of Fortune differs markedly from that of Plutarch. The latter depicted Fortune as an agency which works to bring Augustus to power. In Shakespeare, we find the goddess as she appeared in Medieval and Renaissance thought, subjecting man to “chance,” “hazard,” or “hap.”⁸ Symbols of her fickleness—the changing moon, the rudderless ship, the fluctuating tides—are everywhere apparent. As with the imagery of change, the fortune imagery is structural, and suggests a world that is constantly in motion; much of the action reflects the turning of Fortune's wheel.

The old adage that “the whele / Of slipper Fortune, stay it mought no stowne, / The wheele whurles vp, but strayt it whurleth downe”⁹ is well illustrated by the rise and fall of Sextus Pompey, whose invasion of Rome motivates the action during the first two acts. Early in the play, Pompey likens himself to a new moon (“My powers are crescent, and my auguring hope / Says it will come to th' full” [II.i.10-11]). His own daring, the support of the malcontents in Rome, and Antony's negligence bring Pompey to the point where he is feared by the Triumvirate and ultimately admitted to the bargaining table as their near-equal; his powers do indeed “come to the full.” At this point, he must decide whether “to try a larger fortune” (II.vi.34) or to accept the one he has. Pompey makes the wrong choice. The cynical Menas, who understands the world, prophesies that Pompey “doth this day laugh away his fortune” (II.vi.106), and offers him one last chance to stay on top of the wheel (II.vii.60-76). Again misjudging the world and choosing the honorable course over the opportune one, Pompey enters his decline. Thenceforth, his fortunes are “pall'd” (II.vii.85).

The fate of Pompey at Fortune's hands sets the pattern for the decline of Antony in the remaining acts. With the defeat of the invader, the reunification of the Empire, and his marriage to Octavia, Antony's fortunes are at their height; like Octavia, he “stands upon the swell at full of tide” (III.ii.49). Then, with an unremitting force that gives direction to the surface undulations pointed out by those critics who emphasize ambivalence, Fortune thrusts Antony downward. Antony, too, misjudges the world. Ironically, he returns to Egypt convinced by the Soothsayer that his “fortunes shall rise higher” only if he separates himself from Caesar (II.iii.17). But, alas, in Egypt, under Cleopatra's spell, he almost immediately gives himself up “merely to chance and hazard / From firm security” (III.vii.47-48) by attempting to make sailors of his infantry. The result is that “our fortune on the sea is out of breath, / And sinks most lamentably” (III.viii.36-37). Bad fortune proliferates itself; Antony's effort to recoup his honor by challenging Caesar to personal combat, stemming as it does from still another faulty judgment, only contributes to his decline:

                                                                                I see men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
Answer his emptiness!

(III.xi.32-37)

Nor is Antony unaware that he is losing ground:

My good stars, that were my former guides,
Have empty left their orbs and shot their fires
Into th' abysm of hell.

(III.xi.146-48)

It is to his credit that he does not make himself “Fortune's knave,” as Caesar does, but continually scorns Her blows (III.ix.74-75; IV.iv.4-5). But in terms of the play, it is good judgment (i.e., the worldly wisdom of Caesar) that overcomes chance, and, having lost his judgment, Antony is doomed to a life in which “his fretted fortunes give him hope and fear / Of what he has and has not” (IV.viii.22-23). Though a temporary victory lifts his spirits, his defeat is inevitable, and his loss of the battle at Alexandria convinces him that he has hit bottom (“Fortune and Antony part here, even here / Do we shake hands” [IV.viii.33-34]). Traditionally, such events could catapult a man from one level of being to another; Philosophy came to Boethius at such a moment. But Shakespeare is not writing a Consolation of Philosophy; he merely leaves Antony puzzled.

The wheel turns for Caesar as well as for Pompey and Mark Antony. Shakespeare has so associated the fortunes of Antony and Caesar that each step in Antony's decline ensconces Octavius more firmly at the top of the wheel. The relationship between Antony's fortunes and Caesar's becomes explicit when the latter states, “I must perforce / Have shown to thee such a declining day, / Or look on thine” (V.i.39-41). As Antony's death approaches, Octavius becomes the “full-fortun'd Caesar” (IV.xi.25) and Cleopatra assumes the role of “his fortune's vassal” (V.ii.29). But Shakespeare makes Caesar's victory as empty as Antony's defeat. We tend to agree with Cleopatra that “'Tis paltry to be Caesar: / Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave, / A minister of her will” (V.ii.2-4). Moreover, the mere fact that he has reached the top is cause for concern; Shakespeare, using still another commonplace drawn from the iconography of fortune, hints that Antony's fall is a “mirror” in which Caesar “needs must see himself” (V.i.36-37). Despite his seeming triumph, even Caesar will find no rest. By relating the action of the play to the turning of Fortune's wheel, then, Shakespeare has once again insisted that we recognize the instability of the world with which the characters are confronted.

The fortune imagery is not merely decorative, nor does it serve a moral function as it does in Mirror for Magistrates; those who reject interpretations which view the play as an exemplum are wise to do so. Like the imagery of time and change, the imagery focusing upon fortune serves rather to characterize the world in which not only Antony and Caesar and Pompey but their subordinates as well must live their lives. Every character in the play is quite conscious of the capricious power of this “false huswife.” Yet each has no choice but to play her game: whatever security he has in the world can be maintained only by pleasing Fortune. To win from her such rewards as she will bestow, or to retain those that have been won, is thus the primary goal of each Roman soldier Shakespeare has introduced into the action. To remain in Fortune's favor, Caesar gears his whole life to the necessities of time. To obtain her rewards, Pompey raises an army to challenge Caesar. In her name, Ventidius sets out under Antony's banner to conquer Parthia, Canidius and Alexas desert the Egyptian cause for the Roman, and Dercetas finds it politic to carry his dying general's sword to Octavius. So important is this urge among the Romans that the worst punishment Dolabella can imagine is that he “might never / O'ertake pursu'd success” (V.ii.102-103). We are not told why these characters wish advancement; it is enough for us to know that, in Rome, reason dictates such a commitment.

In order to rise on the wheel of Fortune, it is necessary, in the world Shakespeare has created, to harken to the commands of Time. What appeared in Julius Caesar merely as a wise observation, made by Brutus at a crucial moment, has become in Antony and Cleopatra a major strain of imagery. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to Fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries” (Julius Caesar IV.iii.217-20). To a degree that would have astonished Brutus, the characters in Antony and Cleopatra must live by this rule. Time, in Antony and Cleopatra, is not Time the Grim Reaper, who affects men mainly in old age. Even less is it the Bringer of Truth. More fitting to its function as an aspect of the sublunar world, it is an unpredictable and quickly changing Time, Time as Occasion. Time in this play means the present moment, and Shakespeare has so arranged things that human reason, the seat of judgment in the mind, is the slave of occasion. For every moment, there is an appropriate action, and it is up to each individual to sense, to guess, to judge what that action is, and then to take it. The more knowledge at his command, the better will be his judgment. But if he is to sup at Fortune's table, his judgments must always be made in direct response to Time.

This tyranny of Time, Time's insistence that individuals set aside their work or their play to do his bidding, is stressed by Shakespeare throughout the play. It is Time that parts Antony from Cleopatra:

ANTONY
The strong necessity of time commands
Our services awhile, but my full heart
Remains in use with you.

(I.iii.42-44)

It is Time that forces him to repay Pompey's kindness with hostility:

ANTONY
I did not think to draw my sword 'gainst Pompey,
For he hath laid strange courtesies and great
Of late upon me …
LEPIDUS
                                                                                Time calls upon's.
Of us must Pompey presently be sought,
Or else he seeks out us.

(II.ii.158-64)

And it is Time that takes Antony from Octavia and catapults Caesar into Egypt to avenge her:

CAESAR
                                                                                Cheer your heart;
Be you not troubl'd with the time, which drives
O're your content these strong necessities,
But let determin'd things to destiny
Hold unbewail'd their way.

(III.vi.84-88)

In a world where one's fortunes depend upon one's response to Time and where Time is constantly demanding new judgments, the mind can never rest. There are always new occasions developing instant by instant, new decisions to be made. To stand still is to be left behind. Moreover, a judgment is no sooner made than the times, ever-changing, render it invalid. We have seen that the occasion of Fulvia's death served to unsettle Antony's judgment of Fulvia and to make him question his commitment to Cleopatra. As situations change, former events take on new meanings, so that old judgments must constantly be revised. But the Time that Shakespeare has depicted is more insidious still. At the same moment that one is revising his own judgments, others are revising their judgments of him. Antony, for example, finds to his confusion that Caesar keeps “harping on what I am, / Not what he knew I was” (III.xi.143-44). And if the temper of the times demands it, these judgments may be biased. Actions that, when taken, had increased one's honor may in time be deemed the result of happenstance, as evidenced by Antony's impassioned command to Eros, “Do't at once, / Or thy precedent services are all / But accidents unpurpos'd” (IV.x.84-86). Similarly, judgments that were universally taken to be dishonorable may, if occasion demands, be reinterpreted favorably, as when Caesar's policied reaction to time leads him to pity the scars upon Cleopatra's honour “as constrained blemishes, / Not as deserv'd” (III.xi.59-61) and to view the willed injuries she had given him “as things but done by chance” (V.ii.119-21). A man's reputation in the world, indeed his very honor, which Shakespeare has defined in part as the respect bestowed by one's peers upon the individual who has succeeded in conducting himself with good judgment,¹⁰ is therefore at the mercy of Time. Under such circumstances, judgments become to a large extent totally meaningless. Even the best reasoned judgments cannot give stability to this world of Time. The reward of the individual dedicated to Fortune and to Time, then, is to be deprived of all hope of ever being able to rest. He must keep changing.

Not all of this has gone unremarked, yet its significance is not always clearly placed. One reads in a key article on ambivalence that “the richness of Antony's humanity increases with the instability of his attitudes.”¹¹ Surely this is a travesty of Shakespeare's meaning. What we must grasp from Shakespeare's emphasis upon change is what his audience would have assumed immediately: change is destructive. One must conquer it, rise above it. The natural—Edenic—state of man is the state of rest. As long as Mutability holds her sway, or as long as one's mind is centered in the mutable, one can never be sure of one's position in the world. At the beginning of the play, Cleopatra will ask in jest, but the question reflects reality:

Why should I think you can be mine and true,
(Though you in swearing shake the throned gods)
Who have been false to Fulvia?

(I.iii.27-29)

And toward the end of the play Antony, mistrusting Cleopatra, will find reasons in her past for his mistrust:

I found you as a morsel, cold upon
Dead Caesar's trencher; nay, you were a fragment
Of Cneius Pompey's; besides what hotter hours,
Unregist'red in vulgar fame, you have
Luxuriously pick'd out. …

(III.xi.117-21)

Perhaps the most touching expression of the uncertainty that lies at the heart of all human affairs in this world which offers its tenants no quietude is made by Antony:

I made these wars for Egypt, and the queen—
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine,
Which whilst it was mine had annex'd unto't
A million more, now lost—she, Eros, has
Pack'd cards with Caesar. …

(IV.x.15-19)

Having been whipped about by Mutability from the beginning to the end of the play, Antony is ultimately led to feel that, like the moist clouds that evaporate into air, he also cannot hold a visible shape (IV.x.14).

The unprecedented emphasis on change, fortune, and time in characterizing the world of Antony and Cleopatra, then, should warn us that Shakespeare was using the Roman Empire as a symbol for the sublunar world. The emphasis becomes even more obvious, however, when we compare the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra to that found in the other Roman plays. Forms of the word “fortune” occur forty-five times in Antony and Cleopatra but only thirteen times in Coriolanus and seven times in Julius Caesar, a fact which clearly testifies to Shakespeare's desire to associate the world of Antony and Cleopatra specifically with the realm of Fortune. And while the word “time” occurs with almost equal frequency in each play,¹² neither in Julius Caesar nor in Coriolanus does Time necessitate actions to the degree it does here. In Coriolanus we learn from references to time by the main characters that an action taken in the present may have dire consequences at a future moment (deeds “will in time break ope / The locks o' the senate” [III.i.136-37]). We also learn that, as in Antony and Cleopatra, man's actions, to be successful, must be carefully timed (II.i.272-78, III.iii.19-22). Yet where in Octavius' empire Time “commands”—indeed, “drives”—men to action, in Coriolanus' republic, Time only “prompts” (III.i.5) and sometimes merely “craves” (III.ii.33). Time in Julius Caesar is even less compelling. The images in this play, when not absolutely neutral (“many a time and oft”), serve most frequently to underscore the upset in nature that accompanies the death of Caesar (“it is a strange disposed time”) or to describe the alloted life-span of man (“so to prevent the time of life”). Just as Othello's Venice is vastly different from Antonio's, so the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra is distinguished from Shakespeare's other Romes.

In arguing that Shakespeare used symbols of impermanence usually associated in his time with the sublunar world throughout Antony and Cleopatra, I am not suggesting that change is the theme of the play; I merely wish to point out that Shakespeare has taken great pains to associate his Roman Empire with the phenomenal world. The play itself is, after all, about Antony and Cleopatra—about love. What Shakespeare had to say about this love that required him to exclude from the world of the play that higher level of reality which in his age was understood to instill meaning into the lower world must be the subject of another essay and can only be touched on briefly here.

That Shakespeare should turn his attention abruptly from the problem of evil in a multileveled world to a study of man's relationship to the mundane world at almost the very moment Donne and others were complaining that all coherence was gone should not be surprising. It is common for studies of the era to note that the old values were breaking down under the onslaught of the new learning, that the Elizabethan world was giving way to the Jacobean, harmony and order to pessimism and doubt. And speculations run high as to what Shakespeare's reaction was to the emerging new order. Some say, with Jan Kott, that he embraced the change and became an advocate for the new, others claim he escaped into romance, others that he found no escape and fell into silence. Whatever one sees as Shakespeare's ultimate stand on the question, it does seem highly probable that before he arrived at it he would have mused on what the effects of a truly secular world-view would be.

To a man used to thinking in historic as well as dramatic terms, the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra must have seemed, metaphorically, just such a world—Rome, the paradigmatic physical world, and the lovers, the embodiments of masculinity and feminity. With this as his metaphor, not as a moralist but with the coolness of a dispassionate scientist, Shakespeare has observed and recorded—without distortion—the futile lives of these demigods stripped of their wings. As always, he was able to pierce through to the fundamental issue—whether, spiritual love gone, eros can support the weight of the world. If this theme escaped the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics, one can excuse them, since it was not one they ran into every day. However, today, as we reach the totally secularized society and as the life-sustaining quality of eros has emerged as one of the fundamental dogmas of our times, this critical oversight seems a little less understandable. But if today the liturgy of eros sometimes reaches the level of farce, the question remains serious. All else having failed, has physical love sufficient dimension to grant significance to life? In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare has given us an almost clinical analysis of eros, its power and glory, but also its ultimate inability to sustain itself and those who venture all in its cause.

But Shakespeare's metaphor opened other aspects of the secular world as well. What in fact would a virtue—any virtue—be in a world cut adrift from the notion of a summum bonum? Ultimately there would be no virtues; everything would resolve itself into ambiguity and relativism. Or, in terms of the metaphors of the play, judgments—the necessary basis of any meaningful life—would be impossible.

Notes

1. All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Yale edition. Citations to Antony and Cleopatra specifically are to The Tragedy of Antony and Cleoptra, ed. Peter G. Phialas, The Yale Shakespeare (New Haven, 1955).

2. Virgil Whitaker, The Mirror Up To Nature (San Marino, Calif., 1965), pp. 281-83.

3. Julian Markels, The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare's Development (Columbus, 1968), p. 149.

4. Marion B. Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1966); Benjamin T. Spencer, “Antony and Cleopatra and the Paradoxical Metaphor,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 9 (1958), 373-78; Stephen A. Shapiro, “The Varying Shore of the World: Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly], 27 (1966), 18-32. I am following Homan's precedent in adopting Rabkin's term “complementary” to describe this particular approach to the play; see Sidney R. Homan, “Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 49 (1970), 460; and Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), pp. 185-88 and p. 191, n. 22.

5. John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill (London: 1952), p. 149.

6. I refer here to the Empire as a whole, as distinguished from Rome itself. However, I do not mean to contest the accepted practice of interpreting the Roman and Egyptian halves of that Empire as symbols of reason and passion (or honor and love). Rather, I would argue that if the parts have metaphorical functions, the whole might be expected to have a symbolic value as well.

7. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1965), p. 236.

8. Michael Lloyd, “Antony and the Game of Chance,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 61 (1962), 548. The reader will find discussions of related aspects of the imagery of fortune, which it seemed unnecessary to duplicate here, in Lloyd's study and in that of Marilyn Williamson, “Fortune in Antony and Cleopatra,” JEGP, 67 (1968), 423-29.

9. Thomas Sackville, Mirror for Magistrates, 3 vols., ed. Joseph Haslewood (London, 1815), II, 312.

10. See Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton, 1960), pp. 68-69.

11. Shapiro, p. 24, quoting David Daiches. William Blisset, “Dramatic Irony in Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ, 18 (1967), 161, tells us that Antony's rage is “a rage gloriously refreshing to us who do not wish a hero to be always patient.” Here again the point has been missed.

12. Antony and Cleopatra, 42; Coriolanus, 39; Julius Caesar, 32. Figures in this paragraph are from Martin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance of the Works of Shakespeare, III (Hildesheim, 1968).