SOURCE: "Gender and Genre in Antony and Cleopatra" in Broken Nuptials In Shakespeare's Plays, University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 136-65.

[In the following essay originally published in 1985, Neely argues that in Antony and Cleopatra "genre boundaries are . . . enlarged" to include "motifs, themes, and characterization "from Shakespeare's comedies, tragicomedies, and tragedies. Likewise, she contends that "gender distinctions . . . are expanded, magnified, and ratified" in this work as in no other Shakespearean play.]

Here I am Antony
Yet cannot hold this visible shape.

No more but e'en a woman . . .
It is shaped, sir, like itself.

Critics have long found Antony and Cleopatra a peculiar play whose genre is problematic. It has been viewed as an anomaly among the tragedies, a Roman play, a problem play, a precursor of the romances, and, most commonly, a blend of comedy and tragedy.¹ Recently, psychoanalytic and feminist critics have likewise found in the play the dissolution of gender boundaries, a dissolution variously interpreted—as a regression to infantile modes of awareness in which self and other are undifferentiated; as a transcendence of gender oppositions allowing for interpenetration and metamorphosis; as Antony's terrified feminization at the hands of a powerful Cleopatra; or as Antony's achievement of an "alternative masculinity" through his acceptance of feminine aspects of himself.² Underlying these studies is the assumption that the dissolving of gender roles is in some way connected with the amorphousness of the play's generic structure, that genre is determined by the nature of the psychological conflicts explored and the nature of the resolution to them. But the relationship is not specifically explicated.³

This [essay] provides a detailed consideration of the interaction between gender and genre in Antony and Cleopatra. Its purpose is to show that, in this play, gender roles are not exchanged or transcended, but are played out in more variety than in the other tragedies. In consequence, the generic boundaries of Antony and Cleopatra are expanded to include motifs, roles, and themes found in Shakespeare's comedies, histories, problem plays, and romances. This examination illuminates both the gender relations characteristic of different Shakespearean genres and the unique generic mix of Antony and Cleopatra, a play which, like Egypt's crocodile, is shaped only like "itself."

Antony at first evades full commitment to Cleopatra by playing the romantic lover, and she responds by playing the mocking, realistic beloved; both roles are familiar from the comedies. Then, like the protagonists of the history plays, especially the Roman histories, Antony turns for self-definition to a public, political realm; he leaves Cleopatra behind to commit himself to Roman politics, male alliance, and a marriage with Octavia designed to cement that alliance. As the bond with Caesar engenders new conflicts, Antony ruptures marriage and alliance together. He returns to Cleopatra and achieves with her the synthesis of love and heroism, authority and sexuality, autonomy and mutuality sought in the problem plays and early tragedies by Romeo, Troilus, Hamlet, Bertram, and Othello. But this synthesis engenders its own dissolution. When Antony succumbs to the enraged misogyny of the tragic heroes, Cleopatra defends herself by accommodation and a strategic mock death. Enobarbus, caught between Antony and Cleopatra, Roman power and Egyptian desire, comedy and tragedy, dies embodying the play's oppositions. Through their own deaths, Antony and Cleopatra resolve these conflicts and achieve the selfrealization and reunion that will be more fully achieved in the romances through the diminishing of tragic conflict and tragic scope. But unlike the romances, Antony and Cleopatra does not conclude with reunion; the deaths are framed and distanced by Caesar, whose commentary reduces the lovers' story from myth to stereotype and exploits it to enhance his power. Antony's and Cleopatra's symbolic marriage, although it affirms their sexual union and mutual commitment, does not reconcile them to the social order, ensure family continuity, or rejuvenate the political order as do the marriages in the comedies, histories, and romances; their deaths, like those of other tragic protagonists, transcend rather than transform the social order.

Throughout the variety of Antony's and Cleopatra's roles, gender divisions remain constant—as they do, I think, throughout the Shakespearean canon. Gender roles are polarized sexually, emotionally, and socially within a patriarchal framework. Men's roles are more varied, undergo more development, and are often experienced as dangerously unstable. Women's roles and identity are less varied, change less, and are more secure; but, paradoxically, because women so often act in response to the fluctuations of the men, they are perceived as stereotypically mutable and untrustworthy.⁴ Cleopatra's "See where he is, who's with him, what he does: / . . . If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick" (I.iii.2-5) is merely a subtle, self-conscious, and inverted example of the responsiveness that is characteristic of Shakespeare's women.⁵ Antony, like men in other plays, experiences anxiety about his identity, his masculinity, his relations to love and war. His assertions and Cleopatra's that he is Antony only emphasize his difficulty in maintaining his "shape" (IV.xiv.13-14).⁶ He experiences perpetual conflict between selfrealization as a soldier and a lover, between male bonds and heterosexual ones, between his own autonomy and his commitment to Cleopatra. He is both threatened and enhanced by Cleopatra's sexuality, her difference from him, her responsiveness to him.

Cleopatra, like other Shakespearean women, assumes more effortlessly her own identity and sexuality. She finds no conflict between her roles as queen and lover, between friendship with her women and love of Antony, between self-realization and union. Her desire for Antony affirms rather than threatens her identity;⁷ even when his death frees her from playing in response to him, she settles easily into a self defined entirely by its female "passion": a self, "No more but e'en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chores" (IV.xv.76-78). Her project, like that of other heroines, comic and tragic alike, is to absorb Antony's conflicts and to validate his heroic manhood for him so that he may allow her to become herself by satisfying her passion: "But since my lord / Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra" (IILxiii.186-87).

Indeed, the moments of apparent gender reversal on which critics base their assumptions of the dissolution of gender boundaries seem to me only to confirm the profound polarization of gender roles in the play. Caesar's accusation that Antony is "not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the Queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he" (I.iv.5-7), like many of the judgments in the play, is biased, limited, and contradicted—both by the preceding scene, which ends with Cleopatra's acquiescing in Antony's departure and wishing him honor and victory, and by those following it, which show Cleopatra in Egypt, languishing with desire for Antony and Antony's return to Rome and his successful negotiations with Caesar. Cleopatra's exuberant memory of hers and Antony's unique drunken exchange of clothes: "I drunk him to his bed; / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword Philippan" (II.v.21-23) is given its joyous point by the secure and satisfying gender roles in which the two ordinarily exist. These are suggestively revealed in Cleopatra's very next line to the messenger from Rome: "O, from Italy! / Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, / That long time have been barren" (23-25). Both of these descriptions of gender role reversals are given their ironic point by the fact that they are not characteristic of the couple. This play seems different from the others, not because it overcomes gender dichotomies, but because it incorporates the greatest variety of gender relations, conflicts, assumptions, accommodations; because in it, Antony and Cleopatra have equal prominence, eloquence, complexity, and power, although the central conflicts and development are Antony's; and because it embodies the fullest mutual acceptance and self-realization of any of the plays. But this mutuality is neither complete nor symmetrical, and its price is death.

In the opening of the play, Cleopatra, like the heroines of comedy, mocks her lover's romantic hyperbole and his heroic poses to educate him to a more honest expression of his own passion, a more realistic view of his heroic posture, a less stereotyped view of her, and a fuller sexual commitment. She plays "the fool she is not" so that Antony can become "himself (I.1.42-43). Her first line, "If it be love indeed, tell me how much," jokingly calls into question, even as it provokes, Antony's romantic affirmation of a love that transcends all other claims on him: "let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall!" (I.i.33-34). She counters throughout his "excellent falsehood[s]" (I.i.40)—that his "Full heart / Remains in use" with her (I.iii.43-44), that he is her "soldier-servant, making peace or war / as thou affects" (I.iii.70-71), that their separation is not really one (103-05)—by harping on the fact of his marriage, the claims of Rome represented by its ambassadors, the callousness of his response to Fulvia's death. She mocks the empty posturing of the "Herculean Roman," as well as the hyperbole of the lover, refusing to let Antony swear by his aggressive "sword" without adding to it a gynocentric and defensive "target" (I.iii.82-85), and taunting him with his subservience to Caesar and Fulvia. She expresses her own desires bluntly:

O happy horse to bear the weight of Antony!

[I.v.21]

My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say, "Ah, ha! y'are caught."

[II.v.11-15]

Impatient with his rhetoric of sublimation, she imagines him expressing his desires for her: imagines him "murmuring, 'Where's my serpent of old Nile'" (I.v.25). When Cleopatra tries to articulate the magnitude of their love and its loss in unconventional terms, she fails; but she does intimate that both love and its loss involve reciprocity or fusion:

Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it:
Sir, you and I have loved, but there's not it:
That you know well. Something it is I would—
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.

[I.iii.87-91]

Forgotten by Antony, Cleopatra forgets simultaneously him, herself, and the means to express their love; but even with the past, present, and future of their love obliterated, unarticulated, Antony fills up the void.⁸

Antony's refusal to commit himself fully to the sexual aspect of the relationship is apparent in the Petrarchan idealization of his rhetoric, in his anger at Enobarbus's sexual innuendos, and in his fear of sexual entrapment and debilitation: "These strong Egyptian fetters I must break / Or lose myself in dotage" (I.ii.117-18). The contrast between Antony's attempt to conventionalize and idealize their relationship and Cleopatra's desire to enter into a concrete, sexual intimacy with him is summed up in their contrasting communications during their separation. Antony sends a formal, romantic message: "'Say the firm Roman to great Egypt sends / This treasure of an oyster; at whose feet, / To mend the petty present, I will piece / Her opulent throne with kingdoms'" (I.v.42-46). Cleopatra seeks to penetrate the stilted rhetoric of the messenger to make contact with the actual varied Antony beneath it: "What was he, sad or merry? . . . Be'st thou sad or merry, / The violence of either thee becomes, / As does it no man else" (I.V.50, 59-61). The "sweating labor" (I.iii.93) in the relationship is all Cleopatra's, and Antony misunderstands its nature and its purpose. She has wrested from him a commitment to the concrete and variable self she is, to the "wrangling queen! / Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh, / To weep, whose every passion fully strives / To make itself in thee, fair and admired" (I.i.48-51). But her mockery does not lead to a comic reconciliation. At their parting, when her "becomings" fail to please, she ceases to mock his "excellent dissembling" and confirms his heroic self-image: "Upon your sword / Sit laurel victory" (I.iii.99-100), accepting the separation it imposes. But he must abandon the relationship entirely, seeking military glory and political power and a pragmatic marriage in Rome before he is ready to return to Egypt to enter a new union with Cleopatra.

Antony finds that Rome does not enable him to achieve his identity either; it offers no scope for his courage, his honor, his generosity. Personal heroism is no longer possible or useful; it is dead with Pompey's and Caesar's fathers. Battles are now won by shrewd calculation, by exploiting the enemy's weakness as at Actium, or by having him assassinated like Pompey. Displays of heroic endurance like Antony's at Modena are no longer called for. Hal, defeating Hotspur in personal combat, incorporates some of his rival's archaic glory. Caesar, who will refuse personal combat and defeat Antony through strategy, eliminates the need for and the possibility of such glory. Roman politics render honor likewise superfluous. In Rome, Antony is reduced to emulating the hypocrisy of Caesar, Lepidus, Menas, and the others. He weasels out of Caesar's accusations by blaming his lapses on the dead, defenseless Fulvia; he marries Octavia to consolidate his power; he and Caesar buy off Pompey rather than fight him and then have him liquidated. Male friendship no longer exists; it is merely simulated in the strained, drunken feast on Pompey's barge. Caesar has subordinates or rivals, not friends. As Antony's rich-hued, generous heroism emphasizes Caesar's colorlessness, Caesar's political power insures Antony's powerlessness; his "Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable" spirit is "o'erpow'red" by Caesar, as the soothsayer says (II.iii.18-21).

There is in the play no image of Rome or of empire that transcends the corruption of its current leaders. Rome is no longer an ideal inspiring loyalty as it was in Julius Caesar; its republican values, Pompey reminds us, have been lost. Nor is Rome embodied as a presence calling up devotion as England does in the English history plays, largely through the pervasive imagery of the bleeding land, which compels identification and sympathy. In Caesar's reference to "universal peace," even peace lacks the emotional charge that it has in both tetralogies, in which the brutality of war and the exhaustion and depletion of the war-torn country are experienced. With no alliance he can contribute to and no ideal he can serve, Antony eventually flees the Roman fetters of politics and marriage to Octavia as he earlier fled "Egyptian fetters" (I.ii.117).⁹

The institution of marriage serves in the comedies to qualify romance, to incorporate sexuality, and to reconcile individual passion with the social order. In the tragedies, where it provides an alternative to heroic self-assertion, sexual and political anxieties are exacerbated by it. In Antony and Cleopatra marriage is stripped of its comic purpose as a ritual for reconciliation and rejuvenation and of its tragic status as a catalyst to self-knowledge and self-destruction. The marriage of Antony and Octavia, even more than those between Henry and Kate and Richmond and Elizabeth at the conclusions of the two tetralogies, exaggerates the sociopolitical function of marriage to secure male alliances and eliminates its sexual and emotional purposes. The marriage is proposed by Caesar's subordinate, presumably at his master's behest, to solidify the renewed alliance between Antony and Caesar. In Octavia's absence the two men enact an Elizabethan betrothal ceremony; parodying the customary form for spousals, they take hands, deny "impediment," and vow love and fidelity to each other: ". . . from this hour / The heart of brothers govern in our loves / And sway our great design" . . . "Let her live / To join our kingdoms and our hearts; and never / Fly off our loves again" (II.ii. 147-54). This betrothal embodies the purpose of the marriage, which is, as Agrippa tells the two triumvers, "To hold you in perpetual amity, / To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts / With an unslipping knot" (II.ii. 126-28). Because this marriage is entirely subsumed under the political order, it is hardly surprising that it fails to engender either personal or political harmony.¹⁰

The marriage is made possible by Caesar's "power unto Octavia" (II.ii. 149) and by her perfect obedience to him, her willessness and docility. But this docility engenders the self-division that eventually exacerbates the men's rivalry. Octavia's inability to transfer her love and loyalty from Caesar to Antony as marriage requires of her is emphasized at each of her appearances. The Folio stage direction for her first entrance in act 2, scene 3 encapsulates her dilemma: "Enter Antony, Caesar, Octavia between them." At her parting from Caesar, Octavia is paralyzed by her divided love as a "swansdown feather / That stands upon the swell at the full of tide, / And neither way inclines" (III.ii.49-51). At her third appearance Caesar and Antony have fallen out, and Octavia, finding "no midway / Twixt these extremes at all" (III.iv.19-20) in effect chooses brother over husband, returning to Rome to magnify Caesar's rage and catalyze Antony's return to Egypt.¹¹ Enobarbus's prediction proves exact: " . . . the band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity" (II. vi. 120-22).

Just as the men victimize Octavia, so the play exploits her to ignite the men's rivalry, compel admiration for Cleopatra even at her worst, and justify Antony's return to Egypt. Each of Octavia's brief, timorous appearances is juxtaposed to a vignette of Cleopatra's self-assertive vitality. Octavia's first entrance is preceded by Enobarbus's hyperbolic portrait of Cleopatra. Octavia's tearful farewell to Caesar is followed by the scene in which Cleopatra extracts from the messenger a derogatory description of her rival. Octavia's parting from Antony is followed directly by Caesar's description of Cleopatra and Antony extravagantly ruling in Egypt. Although Octavia's "beauty, wisdom, and modesty" (II.ii.243) are praised, they are given meager representation. Her stereotypical wifely virtues are repeatedly reduced to lifelessness by their contrast with Cleopatra's "infinite variety" (II.ii.238).¹² Her marriage and the play demand that she become the messenger's caricature:

She creeps:
Her motion and her station are as one.
She shows a body rather than a life,
A statue than a breather.

[III.iii.21-24]

The lack of identity that makes possible Octavia's marriage also subverts it. Its political and personal bankruptcy serves to legitimize for the play's audience Antony's return to a union with Cleopatra that exists outside of the institutions of marriage, the family, and the state.¹³

But the reestablished union seeks to appropriate these dimensions, as is first evident in Caesar's enraged tableau:

Contemning Rome, he has done all this and more . . .
I' th' marketplace on a tribunal silvered,
Cleopatra and himself on chairs of gold
Were publicly enthroned; at the feet sat
Caesarion, whom they call my father's son,
And all the unlawful issue that their lust
Since then hath made between them. Unto her
He gave the stablishment of Egypt; made her
Of lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia,
Absolute queen.

[III.vi.1-11]

No longer fixed in the comic roles of romantic soldier-servant and worshiped beloved (as Antony imagined) or of mocking heroine and exasperated hero (as Cleopatra contrived), Antony and Cleopatra now play more mutual roles. Loving and fighting together, their union is political, erotic, dynastic. Antony delegates power to Cleopatra, and she rules, gives audience, and fights (not well). She, in turn, now that Antony is fighting on her side, wholeheartedly supports his political and military goals instead of mocking them.¹⁴ The issues of their desire are legitimized as kings and heirs. As Plutarch describes: "They have made an order betwene them which they called Amimetobion (as much as to say, no life comparable and matcheable with it)" (Bullough 5:275), an order that unites power and desire.

As Caesar's unintended tribute suggests, this union defies temporarily the antithesis of love and heroism which is common to all the plays in this study. Philo opens Antony and Cleopatra by introducing the terms of the conventional dichotomy: Antony's eyes, which once "glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn / The office and devotion of their view / Upon a tawny front." "His captain's heart, / Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst / The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper / And is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy's lust" (I.i.4-10). The oppositions of hard/soft, rigid/tempered, glowing/bending express, in terms familiar from earlier plays, the mutually exclusive claims and effects of war and love. Masculine energy is imagined as single-minded and limited, so that redirection of it into sexual passion inevitably diminishes heroic activity. Claudio waits until the "rougher tasks" of war are done before making room for "soft and delicate desires" (Ado, I.i.292-96); Parolles warns Bertram against spending "manly marrow in her arms, / Which should sustain the bound and high curvet / Of Mars's fiery steed" (AWW, II.iii.284-86); Romeo claims of Juliet, "Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper soft'ned valor's steel" (Rom, III.i.116-17); Othello promises that "lightwing'd toys, / And feathered Cupid" will not "foil with wanton dullness / My speculative and active instruments" (I.iii.268-70); and Enobarbus argues that union with Cleopatra must deplete Antony: "Take from his heart, take from his brain, from's time, / What should not then be spared" (III.vii. 11-12). Coriolanus—"thing of blood" (II.ii.109)—will be the fullest embodiment of the heroic drive toward absolute autonomy and perfect invulnerability.

But at the midpoint of Antony and Cleopatra these antitheses merge. Passion becomes for Antony a source of heroism, and heroism becomes for Cleopatra a source of passion. As love is merged with and expressed through war, heroic activity becomes personal, erotic, de-Romanized (but not, I think, feminized). No longer a matter of abstinence and self-control as in Rome's past, nor of impersonal strategy as for Caesar, it is, instead, a passionate ritual of self-realization and communal rejuvenation. Because Caesar "dares us to 't," Antony determines to fight at sea, forgoing "assurance" and "knowledge" and giving himself up to "chance" and "hazard" (III.vii.29, 45-47). He challenges Caesar, with moving futility, to single combat. He goes into battle from Cleopatra's bed, armed by her, and eager to "make death love me" (III.xiii.194). Returning from battle, he celebrates his victory with his boldest declaration of passion in the play, radically transforming the heart imagery, which has earlier been used by Philo to mock Antony's decline and by Antony to keep desire at bay, into a fantasy of erotic vigor and emotional openness:

Leap thou, attire and all,
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing.

[IV.viii.14-16]¹⁵

His men, emulating him, have likewise fought heroically, embracing his cause as their own; they are urged to return, like him, to intimate reunions that validate their heroism, celebrate their courage, and acknowledge their vulnerability and dependence on family and community:

Enter the city, clip your wives, your friends,
Tell them your feats, whilst they with joyful tears
Wash the congealment from your wounds, and kiss
The honored gashes whole.

[IV.viii.8-11]

Intimacy here generates and restores heroism instead of depleting it.

But this union of heroic activity and love poses threats to both. Calling out new strengths in the protagonists, it also makes them vulnerable in new ways. The reckless courage that enables Antony to win the second battle causes his loss at Actium. His deepening dependence on Cleopatra allows him to brush off this dishonor and go on to win a victory, but it makes him fearful of his powerlessness and of her infidelity. Although Cleopatra has gained political power and Antony's sexual commitment, she is forced into an increasingly submissive posture by Antony's degradation of her. In the series of scenes from Actium through Antony's death, love and heroic activity renew and destroy each other as they begin to do in the problem plays, in which Bertram, Troilus, and Othello are sometimes energized but more often depleted by their relations to women. But unlike those other protagonists, Antony endures military defeat as well as emotional loss; his love is threatened not only from within but from without by the constraining context of Caesar's power.

After his retreat at Actium, Antony first takes responsibility for his own loss; "I have fled myself, and have instructed cowards / To run and show their shoulders" (III.xi.7-8), but at Cleopatra's entrance he transfers the blame: "O whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See / How I convey my shame out of thine eyes / By looking back what I have left behind / 'Stroyed in dishonor" (III.xi.51-54), "conveying" his shame to her. He claims that she is to blame for his flight as well as her own, excusing his actions by a declaration of romantic dependence; "Egypt, thou know'st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings, / And thou should'st tow me after" (III.xi.56-58). Cleopatra's (unjustified) acceptance of full responsibility,¹⁶ her request for pardon, and the tears that confirm her fault are necessary to erase Antony's loss and shame. By giving over to Cleopatra the maintenance of his honor and identity, Antony decreases his vulnerability to military defeat but increases his dependence on her sexual fidelity. He also initiates a pattern of male attack and female submission, a pattern familiar from the other tragedies, in which the tragic male protagonists, to assuage the sense of powerlessness they derive from their dependence on women,¹⁷ insist that these women accept blame and subordination. The pattern is repeated twice more in Antony and Cleopatra.

Antony's new vulnerability is apparent when, in the messenger scene, he is more enraged and humiliated by Caesar's imagined indirect sexual triumph than he was by his actual military one. Viewing Caesar as a sexual rival—"To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head, / And he will fill thy wishes to the brim / With principalities" (III.xiii.17-19)—Antony believes Enobarbus's dubious reading of Cleopatra's rhetoric as seductive and compliant. Belatedly longing for the legitimacy of marriage and the family, Antony assumes this legitimacy in a curious way by imagining that he (ironically, the adulterer) is a cuckold like other husbands: "O, that I were / Upon the hill of Basan to outroar / The horned herd!" (III.xiii.126-28). Whereas after Actium Cleopatra had to absorb and transform Antony's shame, now she must deflect his attack on her promiscuity, his degradation of her as a "morsel," a "fragment," a "boggier" (III.xiii.116, 117, 110). Finding that Antony does not yet "know" her, Cleopatra caricatures his delusion of her coldheartedness in order to counter it. In her images the melting, fertile sexuality with which she has been identified is perverted into a poisonous hail which "dissolve[s]" her life and that of her first son, her other children, her "brave Egyptians all" (III.xiii. 164), until they, "By the discandying of this pelleted storm, / Lie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile / Have buried them for prey!" (III.xiii. 165-67). By magnifying the effects of Antony's failure to credit her love and to attain the knowledge on which her generative erotic power depends, and by providing images of the effects of the deprivation of it, she proves her love and "satisfies" and revitalizes Antony. "I will be treble-sinewed, hearted, breathed" (III.xiii. 178), he vouches, and is triumphant in the next day's battle. Cleopatra absorbed Antony's military loss by taking responsibility for it. She now counters his imagined sexual loss by fantasizing her own destruction through her failure to love. In the third battle, Cleopatra's defection is imagined as both political and sexual; afterward she can only prove her love by pretending to acquiesce in Antony's demand for her death.

In this battle Antony assumes that the Egyptian fleet, tied to her as he was earlier, has made peace with Caesar at her behest and that she is a "triple-turned whore" (IV.xii.13) whose promiscuous sexuality is inseparable from political treachery. His double defeat is experienced as a loss of authority, honor, and manhood, and as a loss of the followers who guarantee these attributes but whose defection castrates Antony to enlarge Caesar: now they "do discandy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked, / That overtopped them all" (IV.xii.22-24). Cleopatra's apparent defection engenders in Antony an emptiness more profound than the "oblivion" his departure had created in her: she "Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end, / Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose / Beguiled me to the very heart of loss" (IV.xii.27-29). This loss of love, of heroism, of identity can be compensated only by the death of Cleopatra: "The witch shall die" (IV.xii.47). Cleopatra responds with a mock death (suggested first by Charmian) which, like her other performances and like the mock deaths of Hero, Helen, and Hermione, is carefully staged to prove her love and to test and transform Antony's. Her mock death, like her real one later, is both active and defensive, both for her own sake and for his: "Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself: / Say that the last I spoke was 'Antony' / And word it, prithee, piteously. Hence, Mardian, / And bring me how he takes my death" (IV.xiii.7-10).

He takes it magnanimously, accepting it as confirmation of her love and courage, and hence of the validity of his love. Like Claudio, Bertram, Othello, and Leontes, Antony's intimacy with Cleopatra is restored, although, unlike the other men, he has received no proof of her fidelity. His desire to kill her is transformed into a desire to kill himself. His love for and dependence on her are acknowledged when he affirms his heart stronger through vulnerability to love than when apparently protected by soldier's armor:

Off, pluck off:
The sevenfold shield of Ajax cannot keep
The battery from my heart. O, cleave, my sides!
Heart, once be stronger than thy continent,
Crack thy frail case!

[IV.xiv.37-41]

He prepares to die not as a defeated soldier but as a desirous lover, affirming not Cleopatra's idealized perfection but the regenerative sexual aspects of their union, imagined now as a marriage in death: "I will be / A bridgeroom in my death, and run into 't / As to a lover's bed" (IV.xiv.99-101)—"With a would I must be cured" (78). His subsequent suicide, however inept and incomplete, ratifies their love and prepares him to accept without anger or recrimination one more betrayal, her last gigantic mockery of his final grand gesture—the message that she is alive.

Antony is unlike the other tragic heroes, not because he takes on a more feminine role than they do, but because he can accept more fully Cleopatra's sexuality, duplicity, and difference from him and find them compatible with his manhood. Cleopatra is unlike most of the women in tragedy in that she, like the women in comedy and romance, fights to save both her love and her life. Her suicide is accomplished on her own terms and in her own good time. The full function and meaning of the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra can be explicated only by looking at both halves of the two-part death scenes of each: her mock and real deaths, his suicide attempt and death in Cleopatra's arms.

First, their deaths can be illuminated by their contrasts and similarities to that of Enobarbus, whose ambivalence in both life and death highlights their conflicts and their resolution of them. Enobarbus's death aptly concludes the life of this divided figure with mixed roots in comedy and tragedy. On the one hand, his role is that of the hero's friend in comedy, who, whether he is a misogynist like Benedick and Parolles or a lover of the hero like the two Antonios, is in rivalry with and must be subordinated to the marriage bond. On the other hand, Enobarbus's role is that of the friends who, in the tragedies, represent the narrow values of assertive manhood, which the hero partly transcends for a wider commitment to love and honor and partly remains bound to. Such characters either contribute to the rupture of the heterosexual bond (inadvertently, as in Mercutio's case, or maliciously, as in Iago's) or else outlast it (as when Horatio lives to tell Hamlet's story).

In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus is at first the witty, detached misogynist, most familiar from comedy, who degrades Cleopatra and mocks Antony's attachment to her. But even his mockery hints at Cleopatra's compelling power, and in Rome, Enobarbus idealizes her and turns his cynicism against Roman pretensions to honor and the practice of realpolitik. After his return to Egypt, Enobarbus first leaves Antony, protesting his loss of Roman virtues, then dies affirming his love for Antony, his master's nobility, and Cleopatra's power. His movement from the detached misogynist of comedy to the loyal friend of tragedy parallels Antony's deepening commitment to Cleopatra. But his ambivalent and ambiguous suicide—on behalf of the Roman Antony who exists no longer—contrasts with Antony's more single-minded death.

Enobarbus's ambivalence toward Cleopatra is dramatized in his first appearance. We hear him order a feast with "wine enough / Cleopatra's health to drink" (I.ii.13) and then mock her when alone with Antony. His mockery, however, is double-edged. His sarcasm manages to suggest the splendor of her self-dramatizing passions: "We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report" (I.ii.148-50). His bawdy innuendo about her "celerity in dying" (145) describes her courage as well as her lasciviousness. She is, his banter implies, a "wonderful piece of work" (155) in more than the sexual sense; she is never merely degraded, as is Fulvia, whom he smuttily reduces to a "cut," a "case to be lamented," an "old smock" (I.ii. 168-69).

This scene has a function similar to that of early scenes in other plays in which the hero's friend—Parolles, Iago, Polixenes—engages the woman who is or who will become his rival—Helen, Desdemona, Hermione—in misogynist sexual banter. The friend degrades female sexuality while acknowledging its power; the scenes assert the woman's healthy desires and acquit her of the friend's misogynist imputations, but these will infect the hero and hurt her. Parolles, in the dialogue on virginity, reveals his anxiety about women's capacity to "blow up" and "blow down" men (I.i. 127); when Helen has taken his advice and married Bertram, he urges his friend's flight, aids his infidelity, and woos Diana for himself. Iago's banter with Desdemona more sinisterly reduces all the virtues of good women to counters for trivial sexual use and procreation—"To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer" (II.i.160). The scene foreshadows Iago's compulsion to turn Desdemona's "virtues into pitch" (II.iii.351), and Othello will come to accept these commonplaces as truth, degrading Desdemona as adulterer and "procréant" (IV.ii.28). In his dialogue with Hermione, Polixenes is charmingly guileless but no less explicit about the threat posed by female sexuality. He claims that Hermione and his wife are responsible for his and his friend's sexual falls: "Temptations have since then been born to's" (I.ii.77). Polixenes and Hermione, like Desdemona and Cassio, will be falsely accused of the infidelity that Parolles seeks to contrive with Diana and that the fair friend of the sonnets engages in with the dark lady. Although Enobarbus's dialogue is with the friend, not the woman,¹⁸ the woman's vexed relation to male bonds is implied. Male bonds are confirmed through degradation of women, but they are infected by rivalry over the possession of women which ruptures all the relations in the triangle. These early scenes foreshadow disruptions of heterosexual bonds by male friendship, as well as the eventual accommodation of male bonds to heterosexual union that takes place in all of the plays discussed.

Just as Antony's and Cleopatra's separation is foreshadowed in Enobarbus's jokes about Cleopatra in Egypt, so their reunion is predicted in his extravagant praise of her in Rome. There, in Cleopatra's absence, Enobarbus can idealize her—for himself, for Antony, for his audience, for the play—while indirectly acknowledging her sexual power. His set piece defends Antony by impressing his Roman audience and protecting Cleopatra from their degrading alehouse innuendos and by sublimating his desire. In the crucial central image of the encomium, Cleopatra is described by indirection; she is a static, indescribable artwork: "For her own person / It beggered all description; she did lie / In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, / O'er picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature" (II.ii.199-203). Her eroticism and the desire it arouses are first displaced onto her fluid, rhythmic, mutually responsive surroundings: "Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver / . . . and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes. . . . The silken tackle / Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, / That yarely frame the office" (II.ii. 195-99, 211-13). These surroundings radiate and invite desire but are kept separate from Cleopatra and Antony. The power of her sexuality is also implied—abstractly—by the "gap in nature" (220) that her presence creates and by her capacity to "make defect perfection" (233); it is expressed more concretely when Enobarbus counters Agrippa's cheerfully reductive bawdy, "He ploughed her, and she cropped" (230), with a description that is energetically physical, but not yet specifically sexual: "I saw her once / Hop forty paces through the public street; / And having lost her breath, she spoke and panted" (230-32). Both this anecdote and that of Antony going to meet her, "barbered ten times o'er" (236), comically distance her seductiveness. When Enobarbus finally affirms Cleopatra's compelling sexual power more directly, he still renders it as unthreatening as possible:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

[II.ii.237-42]

Her mutability is translated into the "infinite variety" that guarantees perpetual pleasure; the connection of her sexuality with corruption, transience, and mortality is denied by this infiniteness and by the priests who sanction her wantonness.

But whereas, in Rome, Enobarbus mocked Roman strategy and defended Cleopatra, when back in Egypt, he supports the Roman values of reason and honor that generate opposition to Cleopatra and to Antony. In the second movement of the play, Cleopatra's opening challenge to Enobarbus, "I will be even with thee, doubt it not" (III.vii.1), signals their new relationship to each other and to Antony and prophesies her eventual victory, which Enobarbus fights to avert. He tries to sever the union by urging her to give up her part in the wars, by attempting to prove her politically unfaithful, and by exposing Antony's weaknesses to her. When his strategies fail and the union persists, Enobarbus's ambivalence is transferred from Cleopatra to Antony. Witnessing what seems to him the disintegration of the heroic Antony he loves, Enobarbus experiences a parallel division between love and reason: "my reason / Sits in the wind against me" (III.x.35-36)—"Mine honesty and I begin to square" (III.xiii.41). He rejects his master's claim of rejuvenated commitment to love and war on the eve of his triumphant battle. Instead, he views Antony's love as a self-destructive depletion of reason: "I see still / A diminuation in our captain's brain / Restores his heart. When valor preys on reason / It eats the sword it fights with" (III.xiii.197-200). He deserts to escape the self-division he finds in Antony and cannot endure in himself.

The parallels between the two men are, however, intensified when Enobarbus, like Antony before him, flees the Egyptian side for the Roman; his self-division increases and is embodied in his death. When Antony, by forgiving Enobarbus and sending his treasure after him, demonstrates his undiminished magnanimity and the union in him of heroism and love, Enobarbus, like Antony, abandons the security of reason for the fragility of the heart's affection. But whereas Antony, at his death, is reinvigorated by his love for Cleopatra, Enobarbus's heart, dry and brittle from his denial of love, shatters: "Throw my heart / Against the flint and hardness of my fault, / Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder, / And finish all foul thoughts" (IV.ix.15-18). The painfully thwarted and self-directed violence of Enobarbus's death reflects his trammeled, self-destructive passion. He can resolve his ambivalence toward Antony only by his suicide, debasing himself to ennoble his flawed master, like the poet of the sonnets, "Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss" (35). By becoming "the villain of the earth," Enobarbus affirms that Antony is a "mine of bounty" (IV.vi.30, 32); Enobarbus's epithet, "master-leaver" (IV.ix.22), demonstrates the incomparable generosity of the master who forgives his defection.

The circumstances of the death likewise express Enobarbus's continuing ambivalence toward Cleopatra and his acknowledgment of her power. His invocation to Cleopatra's planet, the moon—"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy, / The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me" (IV.ix.12-13)—recalls the "discandying" of the poisonous hail in Cleopatra's fantasy. The "ditch" in which he dies—"the foul'st best fits / My latter part of life" (IV.vi.38-39)—embodies and punishes his shame and has associations with that "ditch in Egypt" that Cleopatra will defiantly choose as a "gentle grave" (V.ii.57-58). The ditch and his wish to be inundated by the moon's "damp" hint that Enobarbus's death is experienced not just as self-abasement before Antony's nobility, but as an ironic and inadvertent capitulation to the "abode" of female sexuality which he had hitherto mocked. The suicide itself is surrounded with ambiguity. Enobarbus does not explicitly kill himself but expires so mysteriously that the only observers, the indifferent watch, do not know if he has fallen asleep, swooned, or died, and do not acknowledge his death as final: "he may recover yet" (IV.ix.33).

As the limitations of Antony's marriage to Octavia emphasize the fullness of his union with Cleopatra, so the self-abasement and self-division of Enobarbus's suicide heighten the self-affirming unity of Antony's death.¹⁹ Like the separation of friends in the comedies, Enobarbus's death represents the freeing of the heterosexual union from one kind of competing bond. Antonio becomes a "surety" to the marriage of Portia and Bassanio. Benedick challenges Claudio on Beatrice's behalf. Parolles joins Helen and Diana in exposing Bertram. In Antony and Cleopatra the actual departure of Enobarbus and the symbolic one of Hercules (IV.iii.15) represent the purging of Antony's excessively rational and excessively heroic aspects. As Cleopatra and Eros (significantly, the replacement for Enobarbus) lovingly arm Antony for battle, he takes on a fuller identity without discarding the virtues of the old. The deaths of rational Roman Enobarbus and passionate Egyptian Cleopatra are, taken together, an affirmation of the potential of this larger self. The first part of Antony's death scene echoes Enobarbus's divided, self-defeated death. As Antony prepares to die, he enacts the sense of disintegration and paralysis—"all labor / Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles / Itself with strength" (IV.xiv.47-49)—engendered by Cleopatra's apparent death. In his reunion with Cleopatra he anticipates her triumphant suicide.

Reunited with Cleopatra, Antony completes his death in another key, and "the play begins to live up to itself."²⁰ He submits himself to the full range of Cleopatra's "becomings" and achieves his own heroic identity.²¹ By dying for Cleopatra and ignoring her deceit, he makes restitution for his former fantasy of her betrayal. Unlike Romeo, Hamlet, and Othello, who idealize dead beloveds, Antony acknowledges Cleopatra's sexual power, her love and selfishness, her fidelity and infidelity, while she is still alive. By urging her to stay alive, even at the price of her fidelity to him, he confirms his magnanimity. He happily allows her to turn his tragic death into farcical comedy. She is cowardly, refusing to leave the monument; domineering, as she tries to steal the scene from him—"No, let me speak and let me rail so high" (IV.xv.42); wistfully selfish—"Noblest of men, woo't die? / Hast thou no care of me?" (59-60). As the helpless Antony is, like those "Tawney-finned fishes," slowly and laboriously (somehow) "drawn up"²² into the enclosed space of Cleopatra's monument, his longed-for sexual weight now dead weight, the scene becomes a comic and visually suggestive enactment of Antony's ennobling submission to Cleopatra's seductive power and a staged antidote to the "fall" of his botched suicide.

Relinquishing himself to this Egyptian enfettering, Antony dies the heroic death he has sought, "a Roman by a Roman, valiantly vanquished" (IV.xv.57-58), but with his Roman manhood achieved through Cleopatra and pledged to her. At his death he recalls his heroic past, not to restore his public honor or to cheer himself up, but for Cleopatra's sake: "please your thoughts / In feeding them with my former fortunes" (52-53). Her suggestive epitaph, correspondingly, joins the sexual and military aspects of this manhood. She laments the loss of his heroism and of erotic mutuality, seeing his death as the climax and end of female desire and male power: "The crown o' th' earth doth melt. My lord! / O, withered is the garland of the war, / The soldier's pole is fall'n; young boys and girls / Are level now with men" (IV.xv.63-66).

In the last act Cleopatra must, as Antony did earlier, define her relation to Rome and Caesar; she must test her fidelity to Antony, achieve her own identity apart from her response to him, recreate his identity, and then die a death complementing his and transforming its comical tragedy into tragic comedy.²³ Cleopatra's dealings with Caesar show her newly submissive in a more narrowly stereotypical gender role than heretofore. In place of her usually unabashed affirmation of her own gender, she admits, playing up to Caesar's misogyny, to "like frailties which before / Have often shamed our sex" (V.ii.123-24). She begs a kingdom from him as she never did from Antony. Her calculatedly false acquiescence to Caesar's unctuous hypocrisy reveals, in retrospect, the emotional honesty and self-realization that informed the roles she played for and with Antony. With him, Cleopatra could become herself, but with Caesar she can only play false. Acting for Caesar, in the absence of Antony, Cleopatra becomes more elusive than formerly. (Similarly, Antony's motives are most opaque when he is apart from Cleopatra.) We cannot be sure whether she genuinely seeks the "briefest end" (IV.xv.99), as she claims at the end of act 4, or whether she stalls to bargain for acceptable terms. We cannot tell whether her suicide attempt as the monument is seized is faked or authentic. We are not allowed to know whether Seleucus betrays her in the matter of the treasure, whether they conspire, whether he is an accident who furthers or ruins her game.²⁴ Although Cleopatra can "word" Caesar (V.ii.191) as well as he "words" her, in doing so she must play a role as narrow, fixed, and deceitful as his; her "sweet dependency" is as false as his "bounty" (V.ii.26, 43). Each assumes a role to deceive rather than to change the other, and each recognizes the other's deceit; he wishes to keep her alive for display in his triumph; she, to evade it.

The image of this triumph dominates the end of the play. It reveals the limits of the power of all three protagonists, but especially the limits of Caesar's. Although he has won a military victory, his urgent need to display Antony and Cleopatra in Rome reveals the hollowness and vulnerability of his domination of the world. The threats to his order represented by Antony's personal heroism and Cleopatra's passionate sexuality remain unconquered by the military defeat. The triumph will enable Caesar to humiliate Antony, to appropriate his rival's valor for himself, and to degrade Cleopatra, vulgarizing and hence controlling her.²⁵ As they imagine their parts, they imagine Caesar taking from both that which is most their own. Antony pictures his humiliation as a suppression of his physical valor and autonomy designed to transfer vital energy to his political rival; he pictures himself "with pleached arms, bending down / His corrigible neck, his face subdued / To penetrative shame, whilst the wheeled seat / Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded / His baseness that ensued" (IV.xiv.73-77). Cleopatra's role in the triumph is pictured differently from Antony's. Instead of being subdued, she will be caricatured; instead of "bending down," she will be "hoisted up" to sexual display. (Antony's threatening reference to the event and two of Cleopatra's defiant statements make use of this metaphor: IV.xii.34; V.ii.55; V.ii.211.) She will be exhibited as a degraded sex object, "brooch[ing]" (IV.xv.25) the triumph with her whoredom, "chastized" (V.ii.54) by her vindicated rival, Octavia, and mocked by the vulgar mob, "the shouting varletry / Of censuring Rome" (V.ii.56-57). She understands, too, that her degradation will be eternal, reiterated in endlessly reductive reenactments: "Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore" (V.ii.218-21). To escape Caesar's appropriation of his heroism, Antony chooses a suicide that affirms and protects it. To escape the debasement of her sexuality, Cleopatra would choose the most abhorrent bodily degeneration: "Rather on Nilus' mud / Lay me stark naked and led the waterflies / Blow me into abhorring" (V.ii.58-60). Instead, she counters Caesar's planned degradation with alternate stagings of herself and her love.

First, Cleopatra's dream of Antony rescues him from defeat. It enlarges and reconciles his sexuality and heroism, satisfies her desire for him, and makes him worthy to die for. (More practically, it moves Dolabella to reveal Caesar's plans to her.) Like Enobarbus's vision of her, which it parallels and complements, the dream defends Antony to a disbelieving Roman audience by sublimating his sexuality and mythologizing him as a heroic ideal. Instead of being "subdued," bent, and penetrated as he would have been in Caesar's triumph, Antony is massive, upright, and in control: "His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm / Crested the world: his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; / But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, / He was as rattling thunder" (V.ii.82-86). In the protected space of the dream, Antony's conflicts become rich paradoxes; his vacillation, the embracing of positive extremes; and his disintegration, comic fluidity: "His delights / Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above / The element he lived in" (V.ii.88-90). Roman heroism, purged of its associations with calculation, rigidity, and greed, becomes one with personal generosity and sexual largesse: "For his bounty, / There was no winter in't: an autumn 'twas / That grew the more by reaping. . . . In his livery / Walked crowns and crownets: realms and islands were / As plates dropped from his pocket" (86-88, 90-92). Cleopatra's desire-suffused dream of a perpetually satisfying Antony completes Enobarbus's vision of a Cleopatra who "makes hungry where most she satisfies" (II.ii.239-40). In the two visions, female and male sexuality are seen as reciprocal opposites: infinite variety and eternal bounty, magnetic power and hyperbolic fruitfulness, stasis and motion, art and nature. In Enobarbus's idealized picture of Cleopatra, "fancy outwork[s] nature" (II.ii.203); in Cleopatra's desire-suffused dream, Antony is, she claims, "Nature's piece 'gainst fancy" (V.ii.98).

As Cleopatra's dream completes Enobarbus's vision of her, her death complements and completes Antony's. Like his, it is partly a mockery, partly an expansion, partly a transformation of the roles she has played all along. Antony's flawed suicide is redeemed by his generosity to Cleopatra, and her vacillation is redeemed when she grows "marble-constant" (V.ii.240). Both look forward to reunion. Antony imagines a gentle literary idyll "where souls do couch on flowers" (IV.xiv.51) and a marital consummation: "I will be / A bridegroom in my death, and run into't / As to a lover's bed" (IV.xiv.99-101); "I come my queen" (IV.xiv.50). Cleopatra likewise views death as a "lover's pinch, / Which hurts and is desired" (V.ii.295-96). Characteristically, she also imagines its concrete human details, creating Antony's response to her—"Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself / To praise my noble act"—and acting in response to him—"Husband I come: / Now to that name my courage prove my title!" (V.ii.283-85, 287-89). Antony turned his phallic sword comically against himself. Cleopatra, "the serpent of old Nile," makes herself a morsel for asps, embodying the poisonous as well as the revewing aspects of her sexuality. At her death she assumes a variety of female roles: she is queen and goddess but also "no more but e'en a woman" (IV.xv.76), identified with the ordinary and archetypal woman of the clown's commentary—"a very honest woman, but something given to lie as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty" (V.ii.252-54). She is longing mistress, eager wife, satisfied mother: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep" (309-10). Her "Immortal longings" (281) are not only hopes for immortality but perpetual female desires. The scene, with its fluid images, its panting rhythms, and its identification of Antony with the asp, embodies the pun on die which has pervaded the language of the play.²⁶ The painful, pleasurable tension of the scene builds through imagery of melting and disintegrating—"Dissolve, thick cloud . . . O, break! O, break!" to the ecstatic release of Cleopatra's mid-sentence death: "As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle— / O Antony, Nay, I will take thee too: What, should I stay—." The asp is lover and child, phallic and gynocentric, death-bringing and immortality-conferring: "with thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie" (V.ii.299-313). Fulfilling the asps' desires, Cleopatra, in one last achievement of perfect mutuality, fulfills her own.

In Romeo and Juliet the love death is painfully poignant, and in Othello it is perversely terrible; here it is profoundly satisfying.²⁷ In Othello, Desdemona was desexualized at the last; here Cleopatra is allowed the fullest expression of her sexuality in the play. The elegant staging and ecstatic eroticism of the scene detach death from its connections with decay, corruption, pain, and lifelessness; the affirmation of future union mitigates its finality. Sexuality mystifies death, and death renders female sexuality benign. Its frank expression can be accommodated by the play and its audience because female sexuality here is tender, not violent; because it is autoerotic, expressed in the absence of men; because it is associated with conventional female roles; and because Cleopatra is dying of it, in it, for it. Even Caesar, after her death, can acknowledge not only her courage—"Bravest at the last, / She leveled at our purposes, and being royal, / Took her own way" (V.ii.334-36)—but also her seductiveness—"She looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace" (345-47).

He can do so because he is safe now—she has not caught him. But neither does he catch her. His attempt to diminish and exploit Antony's and Cleopatra's deaths is not entirely successful. While his victory elicits the resignation to order characteristic of the history plays, this dimension does not eradicate the sense of joyous fulfillment characteristic of comedy or the experience of irretrievable loss characteristic of tragedy.

The complex gender relations played out by Antony and Cleopatra lead to an ending that blends the dynamics of comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. Cleopatra, like the heroines of comedy, dominates the play to its end. Like them, she has, by her love and flexibility, transformed the hero and made possible their union. Like Portia, she loosens the bonds of friendship, tempers romanticism, and counters her lover's "betrayal"; like Viola, she would die for her lover "most jocund, apt, and willingly" (TN, V.i.131); like Helen, she transforms sexual degradation into sexual fulfillment. She must also, like earlier heroines, effect some submission of her power and control to the prevailing patriarchal order. Just as Kate vows subordination, Titania discards the changling child and her fantasies to achieve amity with Oberon on his terms, Hero and Helen undergo mock death, and Helen and Mariana the erotic humiliation of the bedtrick, so Cleopatra must endure Antony's vilification of her, endorse Antony's values, negotiate with Caesar on his terms, and die. But, like the other heroines, she engineers this submission to her own benefit, bringing Antony to participate with her in a loving union and in a love death that symbolizes joyous marital consummation.

Consummation, however, occurs only in death, and the play is not a comedy. Cleopatra is not, like the comedy heroines, a chaste maid whose sexuality is only potential; her sexuality is fully expressed, its threat fully acknowledged. Nor is Antony a boyish, pliant comic hero, but a mature warrior whose confrontations with passion and defeat are disintegrating. In Shakespearean comedy the concluding marriages are emblems of the reconciliation of the individual with the social order, of sexuality with love, family, and procreation. In contrast, Antony's and Cleopatra's symbolic marriage is a liberation of sexuality from family, society, and history, a consummation in death, not a movement into the world's future; "it is the conclusion and apotheosis of a union, not its beginning."²⁸ Because it is divorced from the family, sexuality can be more fully admitted into the play and can withstand more extravagant degradation than in the comedies.

Antony's and Cleopatra's love is anomalous; it does not regenerate Rome. Egypt and the values it represents must be conquered, exorcised, appropriated. As in the other history plays, political order is secured by the elimination of rebellious individualism. The selfindulgently weak Richard II is deposed; the flamboyantly villainous Richard HI is killed. In Henry IV the rebels are defeated, and Falstaff, whose joyous contempt for morality and politics anticipates Cleopatra's, is banished. In this play Caesar not only eliminates the lovers; he attempts to demythologize them. He drains Cleopatra's death of its symbolic splendor by his literal-minded search for its physiological explanation. He sharply constricts the huge space that Antony claimed for his love and that Cleopatra so lavishly ceded to her lover in her dream: "No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous" (V.ii.358-59). He exploits them, although not in the way he had first hoped, to confirm his success by their pathos: "their story is / No less in pity, than his glory which / Brought them to be lamented" (360-62).

In the history plays such exclusions are made tolerable by the positive values of the new dispensations they make way for. The new orders at the end of the histories establish peace, promise future prosperity, justice, good rule, the end of tyranny. They are solidified by dynastic marriage, which, it is hinted, will bring individual happiness as well as political harmony and the continuity of heirs:

O now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!

[R3, V.v.29-34]

Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up
Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms
Of France and England, whose very shores look pale
With envy of each other's happiness,
May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction
Plant neighborhood and Christian-like accord
In their sweet bosoms.

[H5, V.ii.348-354]

But in Antony and Cleopatra Roman order is never fully endorsed; there is no gaze toward toward a prosperous, blessed future for family and land. The "High order" which Dolabella is urged to "see" in the last line of the play is not that of the future empire but of Antony's and Cleopatra's funeral. This emphasis on what has been lost is characteristic of tragedy, not history.

Caesar's order is, like those which take over at the ends of the other tragedies, narrowly political, male, and barren. It achieves its control, like those others, through a purging of women, marriage, family, sexuality, and the conflicts they generate, conflicts eliminated in the tragedies through marriages that are aborted, perverted, broken. Hamlet declares his love for Ophelia only in the grave strewn with the flowers that should have decked her bride-bed, and Fortinbras takes over, free of the conflicts which paralyzed Hamlet. Othello concludes with a focus on the "tragic lodging" of the marriage bed, and power passes into the hands of "unwived" Cassio and "proper" Lodovico. Edmund, Goneril, and Regan "now marry in an instant," consummating their love triangle in violent death; Lear joins Cordelia in death, and Kent joins Lear and Cordelia, the triangle of fidelity complementing that of infidelity. The last lines in the play are spoken by a man (whether Edgar or Albany) who is without family and disgusted by sexuality, aware of the new order as a falling off from the old. Lady Macbeth uses her sexuality to incite Macbeth to frenzied manhood and then loses him to a diabolical marriage with the witches;²⁹ Malcolm, the new king, has a dead father and a dead saintly mother and presents his chastity as a qualification for the throne.³⁰

Similarly, Antony's and Cleopatra's marriage is consummated in death, and the puritanical "boy" Caesar, in a departure from Plutarch, is without wife or children. But this order seems both pettier and more powerful than those at the end of the other tragedies; Caesar seems to have learned little, to be less chastened by his contact with Antony and Cleopatra than the other survivors of the tragic cataclysms. And here the exclusions matter more. Hence Antony's and Cleopatra's deaths seem less a defeat, more a fulfillment than those of the other tragic heroes. The play's ending thus holds in solution the marital celebration of comedy, the political achievement of the history play, and the selfrealizing individual defeat of tragedy; no one element is precipitated out. Later, in the romances, these elements will be joined, not merely juxtaposed, as the endings involve transformed sexuality and regenerated relationships that rejuvenate the family and promise political order as well.

In Antony and Cleopatra genre boundaries are not dissolved but enlarged. Motifs, themes, and characterization from comedy, tragedy, and history are included. Gender distinctions, too, are not dissolved but are explored, magnified, and ratified. And male and female roles are not equal—not even here. Cleopatra, like the heroines of comedy, engenders Antony's growth and her own, controlling the ending to glorify her submission to him. Like the heroines of the problem comedies, she endures sexual degradation and uses sexuality fruitfully. Like the heroines of tragedy, she dies, though her death is more self-willed and selffulfilling than theirs. This death, however, serves Caesar's political needs, confirming his historical control; serves Antony's emotional needs, reaffirming the nobleness of his "shape"; and serves Shakespeare's aesthetic needs, allowing him to make Cleopatra's death, like her life, "eternal in [his] triumph" (V.i.66).

Notes

¹ R. H. Case, Introduction, Arden Edition, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv; A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: MacMillan, 1909), pp. 281-84; A. P. Riemer, A Reading of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Sydney: University of Australia Press, 1968), pp. 101-15; and Peter Erickson, "Antony and Cleopatra as an Experiment in Alternative Masculinity," in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare 's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), see it as distinct from the major tragedies. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 79; and M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 341, classify it as a Roman play and a tragedy. Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), calls it a problem play and a tragedy (p. 183 and passim). Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1949), p. 247; Paula S. Berggren, "The Woman's Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 25-27; Julian Markels, The Pillar of the World (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), p. 151; and Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare 's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 210—all suggest that the play is a tragedy with affinities to the romances. Numerous critics have found the play a mixture of comedy and tragedy, beginning with Richard Brathwait: "Love's interview betwixt Cleopatra and Mark Antony, promised to itself as much secure freedom as fading fancy could tender; yet the last scene closed up all those comic passages with a tragic conclusion" (The English Gentlewoman, 1631, quoted in Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra: A Casebook, ed. John Russell Brown [London: Macmillan, 1968], p. 25). Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), has the best extended discussion of the play's mixture of tragedy and comedy (pp. 40-52). Also see Adelman, p. 190, n. 2, for a useful summary of views on the play's genre.

² On regression, see Constance Brown Kuriyama, "The Mother of the World: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra", English Literary Renaissance 1 (1977): 324-51; on transcendence, see Murray M. Schwartz, "Shakespeare through Contemporary Psychoanalysis," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppèlla Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 30, and Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 144-45, 149; on feminization, see Madelon Gohlke, "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in Representing Shakespeare, pp. 177-78; on alternative manhood, see Peter Êrickson, Patriarchal Structures.

³ But see Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development, pp. 12-19, for a general discussion of the relationship between psychological conflicts and the genres of comedy, problem comedy, and tragedy.

⁴ Like other critics who talk about gender in Shakespeare, I find it difficult to avoid either imposing on Shakespeare the most conventional and stereotyped presentation of gender roles or prescribing for him my own (supposedly) unstereotyped notions of what these roles could or should be. To discuss the issue at all is to find oneself relying on some sort of assumptions, usually unexamined ones, about gender roles and gender oppositions. Sherry B. Ortner's "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 67-88, is a clear and useful discussion of the assumptions on which universal sex-role divisions and universal second-class status for women rest. Women, Ortner argues, are always found to be closer to nature than men, are thought to occupy an intermediate position between nature and culture as a result of their physiology, of the social roles which this physiology originally imposed on them, and of their psychic states resulting from both the physiology and the social roles. Some such assumptions about male/female differences are rooted in Shakespeare's culture as in our own, and there are, I am afraid, traces of them in my discussion.

⁵ Marianne Novy, "Shakespeare's Female Characters as Actors and Audience," in Lenz et al., The Woman's Part, pp. 256-70, explores in the tragedies the audience-like responsiveness of the female characters to the male hero and the heroes' distrust of their acting. Edmund Tilney, A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (London: Henrie Denham, 1568), advocates for wives the conventional responsiveness to men's moods that Charmian urges and Cleopatra reverses; the husband's face must be the wife's "daylie looking glasse, wherein she ought to be alwayes prying, to see when he is merie, when sad, when content, and when discontent, whereto she must always frame her owne countenance" (E5 V).

⁶ Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 59-60, contrasts Cleopatra's secure identity with Antony's unfixed one.

⁷ Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare 's Living Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), suggests that "Part of their tragedy lies in Antony's feeling himself dissolve when he is with her, and Cleopatra's feeling her 'nothingness' when he is not with her" (p. 189).

⁸ I am indebted to illuminating discussions of this elusive speech by Colie, Shakespeare 's Living Art, p. 189, and Barbara L. Estrin, "'Behind a dream': Cleopatra and Sonnet 129," Women's Studies 9 (1981-82): 181-82.

⁹ Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 2: 185-92, delineates shrewdly the nature and the limits of Roman politics and of Octavius's power.

¹⁰ Whether Caesar genuinely wishes the marriage to cement the alliance or hopes that it will give him an excuse to break it, and whether he thinks the marriage will satisfy Octavia or consciously sacrifices her to political ends, its political function is clear. For discussions of Caesar's motives, see Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, 2:186, and Traversi, The Roman Plays, pp. 112-14.

¹¹ More typically, Shakespeare's women transfer their loyalty decisively from their fathers (perhaps Caesar's being Octavia's brother rather than her father makes the difference) to their lovers, as do Hermia, Portia, Juliet, Desdemona, Imogen, Perdita. Lynda Boose, "The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare," PMLA 97 (1982): 325-47, examines the ritual that accompanies this transfer. In Antony and Cleopatra the circumstances of the marriage prevent the ritual from being accomplished, and in some other plays the transfer is not complete. Cordelia returns to fight for the father who has banished her, and France, her husband, drops out of the play. Lady Macbeth, when confronting the sleeping Duncan, and Hermione during the crisis of her trial, are reminded of the powerful prior bond: "Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't" (II.ii.12-13); "The Emperor of Russia was my father. / Oh that he were alive, and here beholding / His daughter's trial!" (III.ii.117-19).

¹² Although Octavia is not fully characterized in Plutarch, she is a stronger and more sympathetic figure there than in Shakespeare. She is not a timid girl, but a widow with children when she marries Antony. Her skillful negotiations effect a temporary reconciliation between Antony and Caesar (Bullough, 5: 282-83); Plutarch's Cleopatra fears that Octavia "would then be too stronge for her" and feigns that she is fading away from love to keep Antony with her (pp. 288-89); in Plutarch, when Anthony has returned to Eygpt, Octavia will not leave his house as Caesar orders her to, but continues to behave well toward him and to pacify Caesar (pp. 289-90). She has three children by Antony and cares for them as well as for his children by Fulvia and Cleopatra; the last paragraph of Plutarch's Life details her marriage negotiations on behalf of all the children in her charge. Samuel Brandon's Tragicomedie of the vertuous Octavia emphasizes and magnifies Octavia's strength and integrity, suggested by Plutarch, and diminishes the role of Cleopatra, omitting, for example, her death. Not only does Shakespeare diminish Octavia's role, her strength, and her connection with Antony, but he makes Cleopatra more sympathetic and more human than she is in Plutarch, further increasing the contrast between them. L. T. Fitz, "Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism," Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 310-13, discusses the departures from Plutarch in Shakespeare's characterization of Cleopatra.

¹³ In contrast, many of the versions of the story sympathetic to the lovers assume or specifically include the marriage of Antony to Cleopatra. In the tale of Cleopatra in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (1386?), Antony is a charming courtly lover, and he and Cleopatra are married in a ceremony that the narrator coyly refuses to describe because of lack of time (lines 616-23), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 496. In Boccaccio's novel Fiammetta (1343), the heroine is consoled and ennobled by comparing herself with Cleopatra, lamenting over the body of her dead husband (Amorous Fiammetta, trans. Bartholomew Young [1587], ed. K. H. Josling [London: Mandrake Press, 1929], book 7, pp. 151-52, quoted in Marilyn L. Williamson, "Infinite Variety": Antony and Cleopatra in Renaissance Drama and Earlier Tradition [Mystic, Conn.: Lawrence Verry, 1974], p. 55). In Giraldi Cinthio's Cleopatra (1583), both Cleopatra and Antony refer to her as his wife (cf. I.iii, trans, in Bullough, 5:348). In Robert Garnier's Marc-Antonie, translated by the Countess of Pembroke as The Tragedie of Antonie (1595), Cleopatra mourns for Antony, recalling their "holy marriage" (line 1947, Bullough, 5:405), and in Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra (1599) her wifehood and motherhood are persistently emphasized in order to manifest her dignity and pathos—as in this dialogue with Charmion:

CH. Live for your sonnes. CL. Nay for their father die.
CH. Hardharted mother! CL. Wife, kindhearted, I.

[LINES 555-56, Bullough, 5:372]

¹⁴ Schanzer, Problem Plays, p. 140, likewise sees a "temporary fusion of Love and Honour" at this point in the play (see n. 1 above).

¹⁵ The same word, pants, is used by Cassio in his prayer for Othello's safety, which, like Antony's welcome, celebrates the potential for a regenerative union of love and valor: "Great Jove, Othello guard, / And swell his sail with thine own pow'rful breath, / That he may bless this bay with his tall ship, / Make love's quick pants in Desdemona's arms, / Give renewed fire to our extincted spirits" (II.i.77-81, Signet edition, Folio text).

¹⁶ The question of who is actually to blame—and for what—is a vexed one. In Plutarch, Cleopatra is specifically blamed for both the strategy and the loss: "Cleopatra forced him to put all to the hazard of battel by sea: considering with her selfe how she might flie, and provide for her safetie, not to helpe him to winne the victory, but to flie more easily after the battle lost" (Bullough, 5:298). In Shakespeare, the two seem to share responsibility for the defeat. Antony decides to fight at sea, although Cleopatra may incite in him the recklessness to take on this challenge: "By sea? what else?" she agrees (III.vii.28). Cleopatra's flight is, as far as we can tell, unpremeditated, and its motive unknown, but the responsibility for it is hers. Neither the sea battle nor her flight need have resulted in defeat, however, had not Antony followed her. In Plutarch, Antony, before Cleopatra's flight, was holding his own; in Shakespeare, he may even have been winning: "vantage, like a pair of twins appeared / Both as the same, or rather ours the elder" (III.x.12-13). After her flight, he still might have won: "Had our general / Been what he knew himself, it had gone well" (III.x. 26-27). In neither Shakespeare nor Plutarch is there any support for Antony's accusation that Cleopatra was responsible for the defection of the Egyptian fleet in the third battle; in Plutarch she does not explicitly deny responsibility as she does in Shakespeare (IV.xiv.122).

¹⁷ Madelon Gohlke, in "'I wooed thee with my sword,'" (see n. 2 above) analyzes the tragic heroes' fictions of femininity, their fears of feminization, and their association of heterosexuality with violence. See especially her discussion of Antony and Cleopatra pp. 177-79, which anticipates and has influenced my interpretation of the play, although I emphasize more than she does the positive consequences of Antony's union with Cleopatra. Her discussion of the negative consequences is a useful corrective to mine.

¹⁸ Related mocking exchanges between the friends about the woman occur in Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. In the comedy, Benedick jokingly speaks "as being a professed tyrant to their sex," ambiguously mocking Hero to dissuade Claudio from marriage: "Why, i'faith, methinks she's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, and too little for a great praise. Only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome, and being no other but as she is, I do not like her. . . . Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?" (I.i. 165-75). When Claudio asks, "Can the world buy such a jewel?" Benedick replies, "Yea, and a case to put it into" (176-77). In a well known and far more bawdy variation on the conventional scene, Mercutio, outside Juliet's garden, mocks and degrades Romeo's love for Rosaline—"O, Romeo, that she were, O that she were 7 An open et cetera, thou a pop'rin pear!" (H.i.37-38), while Romeo inside, hearing him, rejects Mercutio's innuendos and commits himself to a passion that Mercutio cannot comprehend or alter: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound" (II.ii.1).

¹⁹ Adelman, Common Liar (see n. 1 above), likewise sees Enobarbus as "the pivotal figure in the play" (p. 131). Caught between "measure and overflow" (p. 131), he moves from being a detached commentator to becoming a "central actor" (p. 33) in the tragedy, one whose death teaches us "the cost of scepticism" (p. 131).

²⁰ Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, p. 194.

²¹ Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 144-45, has a fine discussion of the crucial importance of "becoming" in the play.

²² Cf. Cleopatra's "and as I draw them up, / I'll think them every one an Antony" (II.v.13-14) with her "Help, friends below, let's draw him hither" (IV.xv.13); "But come, come, Antony— / Help me, my women we must draw thee up" (IV.xv.29-30).

²³ Anne Barton, "Nature's Piece'gainst Fancy": The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra (An Inaugural Lecture, Bedford College, University of London, 1973), argues that the fifth act and Cleopatra's death create a "new angle of vision," an "alteration of emphasis" (p. 4) that transforms our earlier attitudes toward Antony, toward his death, toward Cleopatra, and toward the nature of the play.

²⁴ In Plutarch it is made clear from the start that Cleopatra intends to deceive Caesar but not whether she and Seleucus are in collusion. Brents Stirling, "Cleopatra's Scene with Seleucus: Plutarch, Daniel, and Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 299-311, shows how Shakespeare deliberately withholds from the audience all knowledge of Cleopatra's motives and of the implications of the scene as it is being enacted.

²⁵ Caesar's need to identify with Antony's valor and passion is suggested in his lament for "my brother, my competitor / In top of all design, my mate in empire, / Friend and companion in the front of war, / The arm of mine own body, and the heart / Where mine his thoughts did kindle" (V.i.42-46); the first three lines follow Plutarch closely, but the last two are Shakespeare's addition. (Cf. "Caesar . . . burst out with teares lamenting his hard and miserable fortune, that had bene his frend and brother in law, his equall in Empire, and companion with him in sundry great exploytes and battells" (Bullough, 5:310).

²⁶ Philip J. Traci, The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), argues, overschematically, that the structure of the play is a metaphor for the love-act (pp. 153-60); but this notion does bring out the importance of the sustained eroticism of the final scene and the sense of consummation and release engendered by Cleopatra's death.

²⁷ Barton, Divided Catastrophe, points out that this is the only tragedy in which we want a protagonist who is not a villain to die (p. 16).

²⁸ Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 280.

²⁹ Joan Larsen Klein, "Lady Macbeth: Infirm of Purpose," Lenz et al., in The Women's Part, p. 243.

³⁰ Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development, pp. 146-47 (see n. 1 above).