SOURCE: Williamson, Marilyn L. “Fortune in Antony and Cleopatra.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67, no. 3 (July 1968): 423-29.

[In the following essay, Williamson views the goddess Fortune as the principal symbolic figure in Antony and Cleopatra, and finds that the tragedy of the drama is one of mighty individuals unwillingly caught among forces far beyond their understanding or control.]

The fickle goddess Fortune is the most neglected person of importance in Antony and Cleopatra. Though she looms far larger in that play than in any other of Shakespeare's or in most contemporary plays, one might apply a line from the text to commentators' treatment of her: “We scorn her most when most she offers blows.”¹ In Antony and Cleopatra forms of the word fortune appear forty-one times, or almost twice as often as in other high-frequency plays like Lear and Timon.² Furthermore, two scenes in the play are devoted to fortune-telling—one from Plutarch, in which the soothsayer warns Antony of Caesar's superior fortune whenever the two triumvirs are together (II.iii); the other, entirely Shakespeare's, in which the soothsayer tells the fortunes of Cleopatra's waiting women, an activity much to be expected in the land of the gypsies (I.ii). This latter scene breaks and stays the complicated historical narrative in a way that brings Fortune to our attention at the onset of the action.

When Shakespeare's characters are not talking directly about Fortune, their personal fortunes, or someone else's, they often express themselves in imagery that is associated with Fortune. Such imagery not only takes from the tradition a significance beyond the merely figurative, but it also constantly reminds us of Fortune's role in human affairs and thus leads us to use her to interpret the narrative. Michael Lloyd has pointed out two important groups of such images—those relating to the sea with its constant motion and tides (Antony is the “ebbed man”) and those of games of chance.³ There are additional images, however, that reveal their full significance when one remembers other traditional symbols for Fortune and her behavior. In commenting on Antony's challenge of Caesar for single combat, Enobarbus uses a cluster of such images:

Yes, like enough! High-battled Caesar will
Unstate his happiness, and be stag'd to the show
Against a sworder! I see men's judgements 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; Caesar, thou hast subdued
His judgement too.

(III.xiii.29-37)

Caesar is “high-battled” because his fully equipped armies are ready for the engagement and because he is high on Fortune's wheel; he is approaching the top of the wheel while Antony is falling down. Enobarbus moves to an observation that emphasizes the effect of Fortune on character, and then he employs another figure associated with the goddess: the measure of fruit, symbol of the worldly gifts Fortune bestows.⁴ Antony's measures are empty, and Caesar's are full. Thidias will shortly use the same image to taunt Antony with Caesar's good fortune; he calls his leader “the fullest man, and worthiest / To have command obey'd” (III.xiii.87-88).

Again it is Enobarbus who makes use of another familiar image associated with Fortune when, after Actium, he begins the process of vacillation about his loyalty to Antony. Hearing others plan desertion, he decides to remain loyal: “I'll yet follow / The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason / Sits in the wind against me” (III.x.35-37). The image here involves one of Fortune's most familiar attributes, her winds;⁵ Enobarbus' reason, like the sail so often also associated with Fortune, would carry him in the prevailing winds along with Canidius and the other deserters, but for Enobarbus' greater loyalty to his leader.

Several times in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare makes us very much aware of the moon and of the fact that the drama takes place in the sublunary world. Though Enobarbus' address to the moon in his death scene calls on other associations with the moon, it does serve to remind us that we are dealing here with the sublunary world. Such an awareness should develop in us a livelier consciousness of Fortune, who not only was closely associated with the moon,⁶ but also had her power in the world beneath the moon.⁷ Cleopatra reminds us that her story takes place below the moon when she follows a gaming image easily associated with the lady of chance with a reference to the moon:

                                                                      … the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

(IV.xv.66-68)

It is fitting also that as she prepares to kill herself, “to do that thing that ends all other deeds, / Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change” (V.ii.5-6), Cleopatra renounces the moon because she is saying farewell to a variable and unstable earthly life: “Now from head to foot / I am marble constant; now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine” (V.ii.239-41).

Earlier in the scene with Thidias, when Antony thinks that Cleopatra is about to betray him to Caesar, he exclaims, “Alack, our terrene moon / Is now eclips'd, and it portends alone / The fall of Antony” (III.xiii.153-55). Here commentators have seen Isis in the terrene moon,⁸ when a more familiar connection fits neatly into the surrounding imagery and the sense of the scene. Antony seems here to be using an image associated with “fortune-following love,” which “eclipses soon / As does the moon that falls into the shade / Of mother earth.”⁹ The connection with Fortune fits with Enobarbus' figure of Antony as a vessel¹⁰—“Sir, sir, thou art so leaky / That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for / Thy dearest quit thee” (ll. 62-65)—and with Thidias' comment to Cleopatra about “wisdom and fortune combating together,” his use of “the fullest man” (l. 87), and the language from games of chance (ll. 90-91, 93, 103). Later in another fit of rage at Cleopatra, when he thinks she has betrayed him for the last time, Antony exclaims, “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” (IV.xii.43-45). Again the Fortune tradition adds richness and significance to the lines. In the classic story Hercules simply flung Lichas high into the air and he landed in the sea, but Antony will lodge him on the symbol of his waning fortune, the pale, horned moon.

This interesting use of what one might call implicit or latent images connected with Fortune, combined with the prominence of the explicit theme of Fortune in Antony and Cleopatra, may be taken to demonstrate that Shakespeare uses the concept of Fortune to interpret his source story. In writing Antony and Cleopatra, however, Shakespeare cannot be said simply to have assimilated a theme already clear in his source, as he seems to have done in Romeo and Juliet. In that play Fortune and the stars are suggested as significant in the action, but they have a similarly important role in Brooke's narrative as well. Now, though Fortune appears in Plutarch's narrative, she is not the Fortune of Shakespeare's play. She is “a planning goddess beneficent to Rome,”¹¹ the fortuna publica of that great city, while Shakespeare's Fortune is the blind, fickle personification of chance and change, the “false huswife” who plays games even with Caesar, who is “but Fortune's knave.” So, we may conclude, Fortune is in Antony and Cleopatra because Shakespeare put her there, and she is the kind of figure he preferred over that in his source.

Fortune seems an appropriate figure to preside over Antony and Cleopatra, not only because the play involves love and war, two of her special provinces,¹² but also because both of the principals have many qualities in common with her. Lloyd has made this point about Antony,¹³ but there remain to be explored those associations and qualities which Cleopatra and Fortune have in common. Both are wanton, alluring, but wavering, changeable women of infinite variety. Both are associated with Isis, with Venus,¹⁴ with a serpent:¹⁵ “He's speaking now, / Or murmuring, ‘Where's my serpent of old Nile?’ / For so he calls me” (I.v.24-26). And Cleopatra treats Antony very much as Fortune does; he believes himself betrayed by her three times—at Actium, with Thidias, and in the final battle of the play. Though Cleopatra is the character who reminds us of the tradition (“Let me rail so high, / That the false huswife Fortune break her wheel, / Provok'd by my offence,” IV.xv.42-45), Antony's tirades against Cleopatra (IV.xii) are those that most recall the rhetoric of victims' complaints against Fortune. The language that he uses to condemn his beloved could apply equally to Fortune and Cleopatra: she is a “triple-turn'd whore” who plays “at fast and loose” with Antony, “has / Pack'd cards with Caesar, and false-play'd his glory.” The closeness of the invective to traditional speeches inveighing against Fortune not only emphasizes how closely Cleopatra resembles the goddess, but also adds a richness of association to them.

A familiar and important theme in poems and comments about ill fortune is that with adversity “we discover our true friends, and a friend in need is a friend indeed.”¹⁶ Shakespeare does more than simply follow Plutarch's narrative in showing us how Antony's descending fortunes quickly reveal that most of his friends, even his dearest, are more friends to his greatness than to him; the dramatist develops this theme beyond what he found in his source by addition to the narrative of Enobarbus' debate with himself about remaining loyal to Antony and his romantic death from agony over betraying his master. Antony's plaintive comment when he hears of Enobarbus' defection, “O, my fortunes have / Corrupted honest men,” is one of a number of statements that show a definite connection between character and fortune.

If adverse fortune corrupts the honest men around Antony, it also reveals significant qualities in Cleopatra, who, as Hardin Craig has pointed out,¹⁷ finds “a better life” in her desolation. When Boethius describes the effects of good and bad fortune, he might almost be describing the development of Cleopatra:

I think that ill fortune is of greater advantage to men than good fortune. The latter is ever deceitful when, by a specious happiness, it seems to show favor; the former is ever true when, by its changes, it shows herself inconstant. The one deceives; the other edifies. The one, with a pretense of apparent goods, enchains the minds of those who enjoy them; the other, with a conception of happiness' brittleness, frees those minds. You see, then, that the one is blown about by winds, ever moving and ignorant of self, while the other is sober, ever prepared and prudent through the sustaining of adversity itself.¹⁸

Cleopatra herself connects her change with Fortune and announces that, like Boethius' sufferer in adversity, she sees the mundane gifts of Fortune for what they are and is a free person who can willingly embrace the only remedy Fortune really fears on earth—death:

My desolation does begin to make
A better life: 'tis paltry to be Caesar:
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will: and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,
The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's.

(V.ii.1-8)

That she may remain all that she was and still be edified by adversity, as she clearly tells us she is in this passage, is a conception of character complexity not beyond our greatest dramatist. A knowledge of the traditional reactions to bad fortune helps us recognize and assess Cleopatra's development after Antony's death.

While Fortune figures large in Antony and Cleopatra, she is clearly not the all-powerful determiner of the action she might be in a truly Senecan play. Shakespeare seems, like Machiavelli,¹⁹ to interpret human affairs as partially the product of character and partially ruled by Fortune. Although we are aware that Caesar is “twenty times of better fortune” than Antony, Enobarbus also tells Cleopatra that Antony is responsible for his own defeat, “that would make his will / Lord of his reason” (III.xiii.3-4). We also should recall that if men make crucial decisions that alter the course of action, the results can change men, who may be corrupted by fortune and whose “judgements are / A parcel of their fortunes.”

The importance of Fortune affects the nature of the tragedy in Antony and Cleopatra in several ways. We seem here not to be dealing with the kind of tragedy of character that Shakespeare perfected in Macbeth and Othello. In place of the exploration of the human interior which Shakespeare presents in the tragedy of character, we have in this play an emphasis on the external world of Roman business and Egyptian pleasure, a world of forces over which the characters, powerful as they are, exercise a limited control. In Antony and Cleopatra two interests replace elaborate analysis of the world within man: a vivid portrait of the things of this world—glory, fame, greatness, sensuous experience—and an emphasis on historical event, which shapes character and is shaped by it. So the audience becomes fully aware, as the characters have always been, of the powerful allure of Fortune's gifts. Except for Cleopatra no one in the story questions the value of those mortal concerns over which Fortune rules. Even after Antony's death, Cleopatra's treasure (riches are the most obvious and crass of Fortune's gifts) becomes an issue between her and Caesar. Indeed Caesar proves to fit perfectly Cleopatra's description of him as Fortune's knave when he emphasizes in his final speech values closely associated with the goddess—fame and glory.

So long as we interpret Antony and Cleopatra as a tragedy of character, we shall find it wanting when compared with Shakespeare's achievements in that mode. As such it becomes shallowly retributive, a sermon against lust,²⁰ upholding “the view, common to vulgar Pagans and vulgar Christians alike, which ‘comforts cruel men’ by interpreting variations of human prosperity as divine rewards and punishments or at least wishing they were.”²¹ But enter the whimsical deity and the view of life that attends her, and we are treated instead to a spectacle of the most fortunate among us caught in the toils of being human: we are made constantly aware that those who hold most the gifts of Fortune are most liable to lose them, because for all its grandeur that is the way our world is. Shakespeare does not moralize on the instability of earthly estate any more than he is didactic about the love of Antony and Cleopatra. He simply tells the story and lets us learn from Cleopatra's desolation that it is paltry to be Caesar, because though he has conquered the whole world, it is still beneath the visiting moon.

Notes

1. III.ii.73; all references to the play are to the Arden edition, ed. Case and Ridley (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). Only Theodore Spencer has noticed her importance, and he simply remarks on it in passing: “Fortune (the word occurs more frequently here than in any other play) will bring about [Antony's] downfall” (Shakespeare and the Nature of Man [New York, 1942], p. 169).

2. This count does not include all the traditional words and images for the concept of Fortune, such as the “wounded chance of Antony,” which are also numerous.

3. Michael Lloyd, “Antony and the Game of Chance,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], LXI (1962), 548-54.

4. H. R. Patch, The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, III (Northhampton, 1922), 152-53.

5. H. R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 102-103.

6. See Patch, Medieval Literature, p. 50; Michael Lloyd connects this moon imagery with Cleopatra as Isis (“Cleopatra as Isis,” Shakespeare Survey, VIII [1959], 92), but since Fortune is far the more familiar figure and since Fortune and Isis are often identified (W. W. Fowler, “Fortune,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. Hastings [New York, 1955], VI, 103), it appears more plausible that the connection would be with Fortune or with both. An audience likely to know Isis would certainly know Fortune.

7. Patch, Medieval Literature, p. 58; see Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato:

   Tutte le cose sotto la luna
   L'alta ricchezza, e' regni de la terra
   Son sottoposti a voglia di Fortuna.

   (i-xvi.1).

8. See gloss in Arden edition, for example.

9. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. H. W. Robbins (New York, 1962), ll. 4799-4801.

10. “The sea-figure, comparing life to a sea and one's career to a vessel of which Fortune is in charge, is used with such great frequency in discussions of the work of Fortuna that it becomes a theme of unusual importance” (Patch, Medieval Literature, p. 101).

11. Lloyd, “Antony,” p. 548.

12. Patch, Medieval Literature, pp. 90-108.

13. Lloyd, “Antony,” pp. 551-53.

14. See Patch, Medieval Literature, pp. 96-97, and Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.200.

15. See Patch, Medieval Literature, p. 52.

16. Ibid., p. 74.

17. “The Shackling of Accidents: A Study of Elizabethan Tragedy,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], XIX (1940), 1-19.

18. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. J. J. Buchanan (New York, 1957), Book II, par. viii.

19. In Ch. 25 of The Prince Machiavelli comments, “I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us” (The Prince and the Discourses, trans. L. Ricci [New York, 1940], p. 91).

20. I suspect it is no accident that F. M. Dickey, whose interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra is highly retributive, sees Shakespeare as “minimizing the part of fortune in the tragedy” (Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies [San Marino, 1957], p. 176). That Shakespeare does not moralize about the instability of worldly estate, as do his Senecan predecessors, is only to say that he is the greater artist; he may suggest subtly what they put more obviously.

21. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964), p. 82.