SOURCE: Lloyd, Michael. “Antony and the Game of Chance.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61, no. 3 (July 1962): 548-54.

[In the following essay, Lloyd examines the destabilizing role of fortune in Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, observing Antony's affinity with the unpredictable powers of chance.]

Plutarch's Roman Fortune¹ is a planning goddess beneficent to Rome, because through Rome she will establish universal peace. Rome has been chosen to serve as “a maine pillar to sustaine the decaying state of the world, ready to reele and sinke downward; and finally, as a sure anchor-hold against turbulent tempests, and wandering waves of the surging seas.” Octavius is Fortune's favoured instrument in this voyage to fixity out of dangerous flux: “for I reckon Cleopatra among the favours that Fortune did to Augustus, against whom, as against some rock, Antonius … should run himself, be split, and sink. …” Here, as elsewhere in the essay, Plutarch maintains the concept of stability being reached, out of a state whose fluctuations are like those of the sea. Fortune shares none of these fluctuations: she is the steadfast pilot who guards her chosen across them.

Shakespeare's Octavius proclaims the peace to which Fortune has led Rome and the world. But Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra² depict the Rome of sealike instability that preceded peace. Shakespeare retains Plutarch's sea images. Men are creatures afloat on “the Tide of Times.” Brutus shares Antony's image:

There is a Tide in the affayres of men,
Which, taken at the Flood, leades on to Fortune:
Omitted, all the voyage of their life,
Is bound in Shallowes, and in Miseries.
On such a full Sea are we now a-float,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or loose our Ventures.

(IV.iii.248-54)

These are the “surging seas” against whose “wandering waves” Rome must prove the world's “anchor-hold.” But until Octavius' ultimate triumph, Rome's idea of her own fixity is an illusion. Shakespeare builds for her images of architectural or sculptural weight and solidity, only to shake, break, or fell them. Physically, “All the sway of Earth / Shakes like a thing unfirme.” Politically, Julius Caesar strides the narrow world like a colossus; but this god also can shake with fever, and must sit secure or he will be shaken. The “Fortresse” of the triumvirate that succeeds him is a cracked edifice botched up first by the “Cyment” of fear, then by a domestic bond that proves too fragile to hoop its disruptive impulse. Alongside the Rome of apparently established fixity, Shakespeare shows the Rome that shakes, melts, or is fractured from within. Nor can a “triple Pillar of the world” that has not kept its “square” lead Rome to become “a maine pillar to sustaine the decaying state of the world, ready to reele and sinke downward.” For Antony shares this tendency to sink and turn into the sea, rather than act as a pillar against such subsidence. He would “Let Rome in Tyber melt, and the wide Arch / Of the raing'd Empire fall.” Caesar's claim to be “fix't” had been an irony of self-deception after his veering in the previous scene. So is Antony's claim to be the “firm Roman” after a like veering, from the ambassadors to Cleopatra, from her to the ambassadors. This veering movement is that of Plutarch's sea into which, without the protection of the goddess, all succumb. So Shakespeare recurrently reminds us that alongside the Rome of monumental stone stand the Tiber and the “Empire of the Sea.”

Shakespeare's fortune herself resembles the fluctuating sea. Ventidius believes in a purposive fortune like Plutarch's. But Shakespeare does not choose to show her as such.

Wisedome and Fortune combating together,
If that the former dare but what it can,
No chance may shake it.

(Antony and Cleopatra, III.xiii.96-98)

Fortune here is not the planning goddess who brings stability to an unstable world, but the very “chance” that “shakes” it. The planners are those “high Powers / That governe us below.” To their instruments, “our Gods,” Pompey will submit; but not to fortune (II.i.62; vi.69-71). To Cleopatra, fortune is merely that “lucke” which they give to men to “excuse their after wrath” (V.ii.339). As such, it is not she who chose Octavius for a divine plan, but the gods who gave her to him. In so far as she has herself the power to give, she gives irresponsibly, as a creature of moods: “Fortune is merry, And in this mood will give us anything” (J.C., III.ii.280-81). When the mood changes, she “offers blowes,” and is then to be scorned (A.C., III.xi.84). This is the “false Huswife” with her “Wheele”; and though she is still associated with the sea, that is as a figure for what she is, not what she controls:

                              blow winde, swell Billow,
And swimme Barke:
The Storme is up, and all is on the hazard.

(Julius Caesar, V.i.77-79)

Shakespeare has dethroned her from the position of guardian pilot over the waves. She is simply, as Brutus describes her, the reward of the man whose own initiative in sea peril is timely.

“Chance,” “hazard,” “lucke” are the names of a fortune who is not the controller of the element of flux, but that element itself. Yet Shakespeare retains for her the prominence in Roman affairs that Plutarch gave to the goddess. For the revolutions of her wheel and the fluctuations of her tides are the underlying movements of the plays, linked as they are with the characters of Antony and the populace who give and take away his power. All three—fortune, Antony, and the populace—meet in the movement of that water against which the “maine pillar” will bring ultimate stability. Until then, man is a creature afloat on “the Tide of Times.” His “affayres” are a “Sea” that may take his “Ventures” to “Fortune,” or leave him in the “Shallowes.” This tidal state of men's affairs resembles the moods of fortune, who gives when she is “merry”; and when she is not, “offers blowes.” But what she gives is given also by the populace who resemble her. It is upon their moods, as Antony realises, that “the state of things” depends. Behind the illusion of a monumental Rome stand not only the water into which Antony would have it melt, but the populace who in their tidal switch of mood will weep their tears into the river till it floods (J.C., I.i.1-71). Behind the triple pillar that has not kept its “square,” it is they who have abandoned their “rule.” Behind the fortune who will give anything when she is merry, and the man of power who in his “idlenesse” will give “a Kingdome for a Mirth,” it is these “idle creatures” who “cull forth a holiday” from a “labouring day.” They would give Brutus a triumph as they did Pompey and Caesar; and in these shifting allegiances they share with fortune and the man of power the movements of a tidal water:

                                        the ebb'd man,
Ne're lov'd, till ne're worth love,
Comes fear'd, by being lack'd. This common bodie,
Like to a Vagabond Flagge upon the Streame,
Goes too, and backe, lacking the varrying tyde
To rot it selfe with motion.

(Antony and Cleopatra, I.iv.49-54)

Antony's own associations with water both derive from his own temperament, and link that temperament with those of fortune and the populace. His word “revolution” associates his moods with fortune's wheel; but his description of those moods evokes the “too, and backe” movement of water: “Hurle from us,” “wish it ours againe”; “plucke her backe,” “shov'd her on” (I.ii.144-48). So he will abandon the “firme Securitie” of land for the “chance and hazard” of water (III.vii.58-59). When, after the departure of his kings, Antony is “ebb'd” by the wholesale defection of those slaves and knaves that were his companions and confederates, it is in terms of a navy that that occurs. Their flung caps and carousing translate into terms of the sea the cast caps and holidays of the populace of Julius Caesar, I.i; as their mutiny translates to the sea Antony's own willingness to incite to and theirs to follow mutiny in the forum. From the Antony who would go “a-ducking,” authority “melts,” and he himself seems at last to turn to water. Until the last he had still seemed a creature of solid land: boar, pine, horse, retaining his foot on the hills (A.C., IV.x.6-7; xii.28; xiii.2). Now what had seemed beast, pine, mountain, horse, is seen to be cloud, and “dislimes … indistinct / As water is in water” (IV.xiv.4-15). Apparent solidity takes the nature of the tide it has followed, and at death “The Crowne o'th'earth doth melt.” It is a resolution into that element to which he is most akin. But when Antony is a leaky vessel sinking, Octavius is a “landlord”; for the control of policy or judgment is contrasted with the submission to hazard as dry land is contrasted with water. The entry into this element occurs characteristically in the irrational act of the dare: and as Julius Caesar and Cassius had leapt into the flood for a dare, so Antony at Actium takes to water because Octavius “dares us to't.”

Antony would not “confound the Time.” He is by temperament and policy “a Child o'th'time,” fluid in his responsiveness to its “strong necessity” (A.C., I.i.59; ii.108; iii.57; II.vii.118). “Things that are past, are done, with me.” So when Brutus is in the ascendent, Antony claims that he will “follow The Fortunes” of Brutus through future “hazards” (J.C., III.i.154-56). When the tide turns against Brutus, Antony abandons his “Fortunes.” Yet it was Antony's own initiative that, acting upon the populace, turned fortune from Brutus to himself. For Antony may appear to underrate individual action: when, for example, he sees the outcome of battle as, passively, what has “chanc'd” (J.C., V.iv.37). Nevertheless he maintains a balance of submission to the time, and of personal intervention to take advantage of the time.

Others maintain this double attitude. Menas, whom Pompey supposed his faithful servant, had on the contrary but held his cap off to Pompey's fortunes. When Pompey will not act to take advantage of the time, Menas will “follow” those “Fortunes” no longer. For Menas also has a theory of intervention as well as of submissiveness: “Who seekes and will not take, when once 'tis offer'd, / Shall never finde it more” (A.C., II.vii.94-98). That view resembles Brutus'. He also preached patient acceptance of what was sent to man, and personal initiative at the right moment. For good fortune depends not only on fluctuations external to man, but on man's willingness to take the flood when it comes.

Man thus recognizes the power of fortune's unpredictable tides, but gambles on his own right choice of the one that will lead him to good fortune. For man's participation in “the Tide of Times,” Shakespeare's dominant image is appropriately the game of chance. “Plato therefore compared our life to a game of Tables; wherein the plaier is to wish for the luckiest cast of the dice.”³ Such images are shared among these figures who regard fortune as not a planning goddess but a capricious ebb and flow. When Brutus predicts that men will fall “by Lottery” (J.C., II.i.137), he is referring to a game of chance played with a wheel like fortune's own. But lottery may also be played with cards, and it is probably of that that Mecaenas thinks (A.C., II.ii.281-82) when he links “Lottery” with “heart.” When Enobarbus would cry “Take all” (IV.ii.12) he is using a gaming term which means a refusal of composition. The soothsayer had put Antony's relationship with Octavius in the context of the game, with the odds in Antony's favour; and Antony extends the view (II.iii.31, 43). It is as such a gaming contest that Cleopatra sees their opposition at Antony's death: “The oddes is gone” (IV.xv.83). Yet what seemed a game between mortal contestants was perhaps rather played out between their angels; or again, by “Nature” herself, with Antony as her “peece,” in a vie-ing game with “fancie” (V.ii.118-20).

It is Antony, most temperamentally akin to fortune, who is at the centre of such images. It is a characteristic vision that sees his dependent kings as boys scrambling about him in the game of musse; and Octavius' messenger as his “Jacke” in the card game of “Triumph” (A.C., III.xiii.112, 127, 165). His “quicke Spirit” was introduced to us as “Gamesom,” and we first met him as a competitor in those public games that ally him with the populace for whom they were given. It is he who is master of ceremonies at that “Foolerie” in which a crown was offered, and the populace hissed or clapped the antics as they did “the Players in the Theatre” (J.C., I.ii.36-37, 222, 280-82). Antony is a lover of plays, and this one we are later taught to see as like a game of chance. For it is thus that Antony looks back on such lordly acts, when he remembers his lost greatness as a game of make and marr, in which he played with half the world and made fortunes as he pleased (A.C., III.xi.72-73). Likewise the theatrical element in the public triumph itself is put by him into the context of the game of cards, when a cluster of covert references, to “Knave,” “Queene,” “heart,” culminate in the pun of triumph as trump:

                                                                      shee Eros has
Packt Cards with Caesars, and false plaid my Glory
Unto an Enemies triumph.

(IV.xiv.23-25)

Antony's “glory” is to himself that of the winning gamester; and when we see him “pricking” men to death, we are reminded of Brutus' description of such tyranny as a game of “Lottery.” To lose is to him to be cheated: so Cleopatra is “a right Gypsie” who has beguiled him in the gypsies' game: “fast and loose” (IV.xii.33-34).

To see a political contest like Antony's with Octavius in terms of a game at cards is a commonplace of Italian renaissance poets.⁴ Familiarity with games of chance might show Shakespeare adapting the image to character and situation. Antony's musse emphasises the element of incorrigible youth reproved in Octavius' comparison with “Boyes.” It is rebuked as rashness by Antony himself, when he distinguishes the white hairs from the brown; then vindicated in a further image from games. For when he is fighting for Cleopatra, in the unison of nerves and brain, he sees himself as playing a game not of chance but of skill, in which the “yonger brown” can still “Get gole for gole of youth” (IV.viii.26-29).

Card-play is different from dicing “because the latter is open, whereas play with cards takes place from ambush, for they are hidden.” Thus with the “cunning” Cleopatra, Antony associates the card game of “triumph,” which joins “to chance the art of play.”⁵ He sees in her the cunning of the gypsy cheat at fast and loose. Perhaps Shakespeare reprieves her of such suggestion, in showing her at billiards: “Both an ingenious, and a cleanly game,” as Charles Cotton calls it.⁶ Nevertheless the “breefe” Cleopatra gives Octavius probably holds a multiple pun. Not only is it so brief as to omit “Enough to purchase what you have made known” (V.ii.167, 177); but in the gaming cheat known as the breef, the cards of highest value are shortened so that when the pack is cut, these need not be given away.

Of chess Cardanus writes that it depends on “industriously acquired skill”; and for Octavius is reserved the term “jump” from its associated game of draughts (III.viii.9). For Octavius does not discount the power of skill to aid the shaping of circumstances. He sends out spies that beguile Antony's; his eyes are on his opponent, whose affairs come to his knowledge on the wind (III.vi.70; vii.95). That is in contrast to Antony's negligence of the intelligence of messengers, his casual assumption that Cleopatra may have heard some pressing news before he has. Yet if Octavius appears to show us events dependent not on chance but on man's skill and gravity, that is itself but a partial truth. Octavius, in seeking his “vantage” before Actium, is but aiding fortune to aid himself. He may answer Antony's injunction to be a child of the time with the exhortation rather to possess it. He is nevertheless himself willing to recognise the time's necessity and make his concessions to it. Nor does skill win all for him and fortune nothing. At Actium the odds were against him, and he won; after, loaded with advantage, he lost. All his policies cannot hold Cleopatra, who, by stepping out of the realm of fortune, shows him an “Asse, unpolicied.” For “Not being Fortune, hee's but Fortunes knave”: a title that shows him as not even a player, but a card in fortune's game.

Notes

1. “Of the Romans Fortune,” Morals, trans. P. Holland, 1603 (edition of 1657), p. 515.

2. References are to the Variorum editions.

3. Plutarch, “Of the tranquillity and contentment of mind,” Morals, p. 122.

4. O. Ore, Cardano (Princeton, 1953), pp. 118-19.

5. Ore, pp. 206, 220.

6. Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester (1674), reprinted in Games and Gamesters of the Restoration, ed. C. H. Hartmann (London, 1930), p. xxi.