SOURCE: “Antony and Cleopatra: A Mythological Perspective,” in Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 45, No. 3, 1990, pp. 309-29.

[In the following essay, MacKenzie suggests that Shakespeare constructed parallels between the eponymous characters of Antony and Cleopatra and figures from Roman mythology, only to abandon this classical perspective later in the play in order to pursue a new mythology based upon the ideal of human love.]

The tensions of divided loyalty in Antony and Cleopatra have challenged the imaginations and ingenuity of many critics. Hazlitt speaks of a duel between “Roman pride and Eastern magnificence,”¹ a century later M. W. MacCallum argues, of Mark Antony, “the life at Rome and the life at Alexandria both tug at his heart-strings,”² and Eugene Waith insists that the “central problem remains the validity of Cleopatra's, as opposed to Caesar's ideal.”³ Some commentators have further articulated the mechanism of tension by relating it to structural and verbal perspectives, pointing to the visual alternation of Roman and Egyptian worlds, as Granville-Barker⁴ has done in Prefaces to Shakespeare, and to differing verbal textures that serve to identify and distinguish these worlds, the latter approach best exemplified in the work of Maurice Charney.⁵

Few critics have sought to examine the play's tensions in terms of its myth fabric, and there appears to be little agreement amongst those who have as to which of the Classical motifs is the most significant.

Eugene Waith⁶ views Antony as the Virtus Heroica, a hero of Herculean proportions whose flaws are dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of his achievements. Such an all-embracing framework tends to rely more heavily on an appeal to general characteristics of the mythic hero and Antony than on a close comparison of career details. The common denominator must be loose and fairly flexible if it is to be of use, and Waith's discussion of Shakespeare's play is both strengthened and weakened by this approach: strengthened because he establishes Antony and Cleopatra within something of a coherent Herculean tradition, but weakened always by the nagging doubt that broad comparison is apt to overlook subtleties of significance. Waith may talk, for example, of a “Hercules unmanned by Omphale” (p. 113) but he fails to link this idea adequately with the question of Antony's relation to Cleopatra and the series of crucial emasculating references that appertain to it. J. Leeds Barroll⁷ sees Antony's choice between Rome and Egypt in terms of a popular sixteenth century emblem depicting Hercules' choice between Virtue and Vice. Barroll notes that “seldom in the Renaissance is Hercules a mere god of battle; he is always a figure of morality, however ambivalent” (p. 73) and he goes on to argue that Antony's final allegiance to Cleopatra is, in fact, a surrender to what he calls a “Voluptas temptation” (p. 73). Unfortunately, Barroll's interpretation tends to see the play from a purely Roman point of view, imposing upon Antony's world a simple morality structure that takes as understood the equation of Rome with Virtue and Egypt with Vice. The mythological issues of the play seem more complex than this.

In blunt terms, Hercules is mentioned four times by name in Antony and Cleopatra: I.iii.84 (Cleopatra speaking); III.vii.67 (Soldier); IV.iii.16 (Second Soldier); and IV.xii.44 (Antony). The dramatist probably derives the Herculean association with Antony from a passage in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch: “Now it had been a speech of old time that the family of the Antonii were descended from one Anton, the son of Hercules, whereof the family took name. This opinion did Antonius seek to confirm in all his doings, not only resembling him in the likeness of his body, as we have said before, but also in the wearing of his garments. For when he would openly show himself abroad before many people, he would always wear his cassock girt down low upon his hips, with a great sword hanging by his side, and, upon that, some ill-favoured cloak.”⁸ Critics have not always been in agreement as to the exact relation of Plutarch's Antony to Shakespeare's hero. T. Campbell's cautious remark that “In his portraiture of Antony there is, perhaps, a flattered likeness of the original by Plutarch”⁹ appears to be contested, in one area at least, by E. A. J. Honigmann's observation that “Long before Actium … Antony impresses us in scene after scene as a loser; Herculean, but still a loser; and his defeats in conversation, added by Shakespeare, distinguish him equally from Plutarch's Antonius and from other tragic heroes.”¹⁰ To this we might add that Shakespeare allows his hero the luxury of voicing his ancestry on only a single occasion, and that in a moment of anger when boasting is not his intention (IV.xii.44). Compared to Plutarch's ostentatious Roman, Shakespeare's Antony, a loser perhaps, is an altogether more palatable figure.

It is true that Hercules, like Mars, was one of the most “Roman” of the Classical deities. Guillaume du Choul recounts, in Discours de la Religion des Anciens Romains Illustré (1556), that one Roman Emperor wished to call Hercules “conditeur de la cité de Rome.”¹¹ And Henry Peacham posits Hercules as a type of old Roman virtue—“Virtus Romana et antiqua”¹²—who upholds the militarist and moralist qualities traditionally associated with the ancient city and its inhabitants. Antony's great military prestige in Rome has made him the subject of adulation and mythologisation, putting him in something like the same position as his illustrious forefather. But the mantle of Herculean hero is bestowed upon him more at the insistence of others than of himself, and as the identities of the bestower vary, so the connotations of the bestowal modulate with each fresh appellation. Although the allusion is loaded with sarcasm, Cleopatra's “Hercules” is quite unambiguously Roman:

Antony: Now, by my sword—
Cleopatra: And target. Still he
mends;
But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian,
How this Herculean Roman does become
The carriage of his chafe.

(I.iii.82-5)

The death of Fulvia has occasioned Antony's return to Rome, and with the demands of his mother city in the back of his mind, and the taunts of the Egyptian Queen in his ears, he might almost stand, as Hercules in Xenophon's anecdote, at the desert fork of Vice and Virtue.¹³ This, at least, is the probable Roman interpretation of the situation and the one Cleopatra hangs reproachfully before Antony's eyes. In calling him a “Herculean Roman” she assumes that his choice has been made, that he is for Roman Virtue and not Egyptian Vice, that he loves Fulvia and not her. The phrase carries the weight of accusation. In placing Antony in the High Roman Herculean tradition, the Egyptian Queen directly challenges his ability to “love” her in the sense that she understands the word. And whatever kind of “love” is tolerated in Rome, the Alexandrian version is clearly not acceptable. The hero's spasmodic reversions to the Roman archetype, as at I.ii.125-7 (quoted above), are ample evidence of that. Roman understanding of “Vice” and “Virtue” closely parallels the sixteenth century's interpretation of Hercules' Vice-Virtue encounter. Adriaan de Jonge's print in Les Emblemes reveals the two women celebrities in an urbanised version of the desert choice:

Deus femmes à l'entour d'Hercule l'indompté
Taschent de le tirer, chasqu'une à son coste:
L'une est pleine d'amour, l'autre est toute hideuse:
Ainsi Vertu nous tire en son chemin estroict,
Et le Vice nous pousse hors le sentier tout droit,
Pour nous faire noyer en l'eau delicieuse.(14)

To remove any possible doubt as to which of the two women actually represents “Vice,” de Jonge portrays her hand in hand with a child Cupid. The boys who like “smiling Cupids” (II.ii.206) fan Cleopatra on her barge may represent to Enobarbus' rather Easternised aestheticism the very quintessence of Egyptian love and, in its own context, Asiatic virtue, but they acquire a significance that has quite different moral implications in Rome. We may look, for instance, at the way in which the word “lust” creeps in as a disparaging Roman synonym for the Egyptian experience, and, particularly, for Antony's flirtation with Cleopatra: I.i.6-10 (Philo speaking); III.vi.5-8 (Octavius); III.vi.59-61 (Octavia and Octavius). Octavius never uses the term “love” in a manner that is other than socially obligatory or familial. In Rome, “love” is a trinket of rhetoric (III.ii.18), a tool to cement political alliance (III.iv.21), a fully practised and public expression of familial kinship (III.vi.89). Always premeditated and cold, never warm and spontaneous, it is a virtue rather than an emotion—just the kind of virtue Cleopatra ridicules in her reference to Hercules.

“Herculean,” in its Roman sense, quite naturally implies, as well, a military superlative, since the equation, in the Roman world, of soldierly discipline and virtue is axiomatic. Stephen Batman, in The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577), writes that “Hercules apparayled in a Lions skinne, signyfyeth the valiant courage of a woorthy Captayne, also the Prudencie wherewith his minde beinge furnished, he subdued his outrageous affections.”¹⁵ So, to the Soldier at III.vii.67, Hercules is a metaphor for the excellence of military judgement that Antony has failed to exercise: “By Hercules, I think I am i' th' right,” he says, in clear disapproval of his commander's strategy. And while the epithet “By Hercules” is not uncommon in Classical and Renaissance literature, the peculiarly Herculean currents that run through this play licence us to attach more importance to its usage here than we might otherwise have done. In a single line, the soldier weighs the myth paradigm against the fallible man. And we see at once that Antony's relation to the Roman Hercules has become distant and rhetorical. In fact, the whole question of Antony's Herculean military mantle must come under scrutiny. It is Octavius Caesar who first outlines the mythic stature of his fellow triumvir who once endured hardships “with patience more / Than savages could suffer” (I.iv.55-61). And Pompey remarks, on hearing that Antony is every hour expected in Rome, “his soldiership / Is twice the other twain” (II.i.34-5). Yet, in III.i, Shakespeare shows us that there is something synthetic in Antony's Herculean heritage, something that devalues his myth-hero status. Antony's lieutenant Ventidius, rejecting Silius' suggestion that he should push on with his military expedition, reminds him:

I have done enough. A lower place, note well,
May make too great an act; for learn this, Silius:
Better to leave undone than by our deed
Acquire too high a fame when him we serve's away.
Caesar and Antony have ever won
More in their officer, than person.

(III.i.12-17)

Ventidius understands only too well the true nature of Roman military mythologisation. “Being” Herculean consists of something besides performing Herculean acts. It is not a pure quality of military achievement—if it were, Ventidius himself might fill the part more appropriately than Antony. The rôle of the Roman Hercules is, in some measure at least, a political manufacture, a deification necessary to the processes of leadership.

Ironically, the point is made most forcefully by Antony himself at the very moment he chooses to voice his pedigree:

The shirt of Nessus is upon me; teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage;
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o' th' moon,
And with those hands that grasp'd the heaviest club
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. Se dies for't. Eros, ho!

(IV.xii.43-9)

Eugene Waith believes that Shakespeare makes the equation of Antony and Hercules explicit at this point: “Rage is the characteristic response of the Herculean hero to an attack on his honour. Both Hercules and Antony want more than anything to recover some part of their lost honour in order to make themselves worthy of a hero's death. Both of them wish that revenge upon a perfidious woman might atone for their guilt towards an innocent woman, as well as punishing an infamous betrayal.”¹⁶ Surely, though, here, as at other points in the play, Shakespeare strives to emphasise the differences between Antony and his myth-ancestor. For a start, we are inclined to wonder just what is Antony's shirt of Nessus. Presumably, he sees it as some kind of damning treachery foisted unsuspectingly upon him by his Egyptian queen, though it is likely that the blame for the naval débâcle lies more on his own shoulders than on hers. Reuben Brower is taking the passage too seriously when he writes of lines 43-7 (cited above): “The first lines sound like the mad Hercules of myth; the last line, like the other Hercules, the Stoic hero of self-conquest.”¹⁷ Antony may cry out that the shirt of Nessus is upon him, as his great forefather could once have done, but he lacks the guiltlessness and the pathos of a dying Hercules. So, too, he may inveigh in the most mournful terms against his fate but, with an army still at his disposal, such pessimism is premature. And, as a measure of his anguish, he may ask “Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o' th' moon” (Lichas was the unfortunate servant who unwittingly brought Hercules the poisoned shirt) but if blind revenge had really been his intention he could well have attacked and dismembered Cleopatra a few lines earlier. The whole tirade actually works against equation with a dying Hercules. Antony's brush with the Queen of the Nile has given him a sprinkling of the dramatic ebullience that hallmarks Cleopatra's speech and mannerism. Antony may be an unpractised actor but he has learnt from his exotic tutor the dramatic value of myth comparison. The transmigration from Roman military to Egyptian love ethic is here marked by the dramatist in a most unexpected fashion.

Plutarch is notably harsh in his condemnation of Antony's subservience to Cleopatra, likening it to that of Hercules to Omphale.¹⁸ For his murder of Iphitus, the Delphic oracle bade Hercules go into slavery for a year. He was sold to Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and set to woman's work, while she assumed his lion's skin and club.¹⁹ The association of Cupid with the Omphale-Hercules incident finds powerful expression in Renaissance iconography. The affair seems to have been taken as irrefutable proof of love's invincibility. A Carracci²⁰ drawing from Windsor shows Hercules kneeling with spindle and distaff while Omphale, grasping the usurped club, towers over him. A winged Cupid rests languidly at her feet. And Henry Peacham's print and apothegm “Vis amoris”²¹ makes the point that love conquers all. Though not specifically alluding to the Omphale incident, the emblematist Otto van Veen, in Emblemes d'Amour, claims that “pour monstere que rien ne luy pouuoit resister, d'ou print subject Alcibiades de faire grauer sur son bouclier d'Iuoire un Cupidon, qui embrassoit un foudre.”²²

Inferences of slavery and of emasculation are prominent in Antony and Cleopatra (I.iii.113; II.v.2; II.v.21-3; III.vii.16-19; III.vii.69-70; IV.xii.47-8). On this evidence, the Roman Philo may be right in calling Antony a “strumpet's fool” (I.i.13), and Octavius embarrassingly accurate in asserting that his fellow triumvir “is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (I.iv.5-7). Certainly, Antony, like Hercules, is happy to fall into the grasp of his queen. In spite of this canon of Omphalean suggestion, there are still flaws to the comparison. Foremost, Omphale is never actually mentioned by name. Assuredly, the equation of Antony's usurped “sword Philippan” with Hercules' usurped club is always attractive. But Cleopatra is not the only person to pilfer the hero's sword. Dercetas also steals it at IV.xiv.112. Further, Cleopatra never dresses in Roman armour, as Omphale dressed in Antony's lion skin. The major indication we have of a change from her imperial costume is Octavius' claim that she appeared before the Egyptian populace dressed as Isis, a deity who essenced femininity. Nor are we given the impression that Cleopatra's sway over Antony is as unqualified as Omphale's was over Hercules. The Roman's alleged bondage apparently precludes the return trip to Rome and the arranged marriage with Octavia, both of which are or will be against the wishes of Cleopatra. In fact, when Antony bandies about his accusations of slavery at IV.xii.13-14 (“Triple-turn'd whore! ’tis thou / Hast sold me to this novice”) and at IV.xii.47-8, his point seems to be that he believes Cleopatra has sold him into slavery and not that he has been sold into her slavery as Hercules was sold into Omphale's service. An equation of Cleopatra and Omphale is further impeded by several competing images of transformation associated with figures other than the Egyptian Queen. Cleopatra styles Fulvia, and even Octavius Caesar, in the Omphalean rôle when she suggests in I.iii that they have undermined Antony's manly independence and authority. And to the Roman Enobarbus, Antony himself has become the emasculating agent. “For shame! / Transform us not to women” (IV.ii.35-6) he begs his master.

The Omphalean myth may not be the dramatic mirror of Antony's subordination that some critics have suggested.²³ It is perhaps more indicative of Shakespeare's efforts to contrast and compare the activities of his two protagonists with those of mythic counterparts. Comparison does not suggest equation, though the temptation to accept the bogus synonym of Omphale and the Nilean Queen is always strong. Only when we recognise the fundamental incompatibility of myth and actuality do we begin to appreciate that actuality is setting its own precedent, devising its own mythology of matchless love. The Omphale flirtation is, again, a useful measure not of similarity but of difference.

The Second Soldier is, therefore, incisively to the point when, on hearing a strange noise, he guesses that

… the god Hercules, whom Antony lov'd,
Now leaves him.

(IV.iii.16-17)

Derek Traversi has seen this as “the sad premonition of Antony's fallen manhood … the dissolution of his heroic integrity.”²⁴ There is another interpretation. The word “lov'd,” placed centrally in the sentence, is crucial to its effect. In terms of connotation and tense, it pronounces a bondage that was once Roman and is now obsolete. It parcels up the whole gamut of Roman “love” and dispatches it with Mercurial haste. At least one critic²⁵ has alerted us to the idea that Enobarbus and Hercules both desert Antony at roughly the same time. The notion is intriguing, though the critic in question does not explain why Enobarbus and Hercules should be linked, other than to say, somewhat enigmatically, that the lieutenant “has been like a Hercules to Antony.”²⁶ Nor can we say that Enobarbus, like Hercules, symbolises a Roman martial value that now forsakes his master, for an act of cowardly desertion is hardly a fully satisfactory metaphor for the loss of Roman military idealism, though it does savour of Octavius' political pragmatism. We are better advised to consider the departure of Hercules as a signal of what we might call a mythological eclipse. A martial myth has been subtly superceded by a new mythology of the senses. The hero's Roman love for Hercules is now outmoded and the departure of that god acknowledges the ascendency of a new and a vibrant mythology—an idea expanded in the last phase of this essay. Antony himself is never quite prepared to accept that the transition has taken place. A Roman upbringing has left its indelible mark. Yet, transition there has been and the “Herculean” Roman is no longer Herculean. This is perhaps why the dramatist is at such pains to distinguish Antony's “apotheosis” in Act Four from that of his illustrious predecessor.

Renaissance representations of Hercules' deification usually show him dignified and triumphant as he is borne aloft, still clutching his club and lion skin. Tempesta's illustration of Ovid's account reveals the hero ascending in triumph to a Jove who awaits him with open arms.²⁷ Rubens' “The Apotheosis of Hercules” shows a winged boy crowning Hercules with a laurel wreath as a horse drawn chariot bears him, in familiar garb, to the lap of the gods.²⁸ Lodovico Carrucci's painting is untypical in its perspective but traditional in its values.²⁹ Having been swept up to the seat of Jove, Hercules grasps the god of gods' hand in a powerful and moving moment of fulfilment. Our visual perspective puts us, as it were, by the hero's pyre, gazing heavenwards at the mortal who has transcended his own mortality.

As spectators to Antony's final moments, we feel much less inclined to wonderment. As many commentators have noticed, the hero experiences no visionary truths or heightened insight in death. For a horse drawn chariot, Antony has to make do with four of his own guard (“Take me up” he tells them weakly at IV.xiv.138) and for apotheosis a rather unceremonious heaving aloft not to Jove but to Cleopatra must suffice (IV.xv.37). No wonder he puns with such atrociously wry humour at IV.xiv.134 and 138! Most interesting of all, though, is Cleopatra's lament for her dying lover:

… Had I great Juno's
power,
The strong-wing'd Mercury should fetch thee up,
And set thee by Jove's side. Yet come a little.
Wishers were ever fools.

(IV.xv.34-7 Emphasis added.)

Robert G. Hunter³⁰ has suggested, in his paper “Cleopatra and the ‘Œstre Junonicque,’” that there may be a reference to Juno's gadfly at III.x.10-15 but he himself concludes that the allusion is oblique and the evidence inconclusive. There is, in fact, only one other open appeal to Juno in the play and this comes during one of Antony's most abject moments of military disaster. Cleopatra is, once more, the source of utterance:

Eros: Nay, gentle madam,
to him! Comfort him.
Iras: Do, most dear Queen.
Charmian: Do? Why, what else?
Cleopatra: Let me sit down. O Juno!
Antony: No, no, no, no, no.

(III.xi.25-9. Emphasis added.)

Juno, it must be noted, pursued Hercules with an inveterate malice from the moment of his birth. The son of one of her husband's paramours, he spent much of his life avoiding or enduring her jealous machinations. A passage in All's Well That Ends Well, referring to “despiteful Juno” (III.iv.13), strongly suggests that Shakespeare was familiar with the story. There appears to be no warrant in Plutarch for Shakespeare's use of the Classical figure of Juno in Antony and Cleopatra. Why, then, does the dramatist give his heroine Cleopatra the word “Juno” at two of the play's most anguished, and Herculean, moments? Have we here some unfortunate Hercules plagued by the spite of a jealous Juno? Apparently not, for both instances catch the Egyptian Queen in a state of most un-Juno-like helplessness. Her lover distraught and unreasonable in III.xi, she is bullied into inactivity by her battling senses of fear and duty. “Let me sit down” she implores, and then exclaims “O Juno!” clearly in recognition of her dilemma and not of some evil deed accomplished on her part. And when she wishes, in IV.xv, that she had great Juno's power to set Antony by Jove's side, the point is surely that she lacks such power, that “Wishers were ever fools.” As Antony turns out to be no second Hercules, so Cleopatra emerges as no spiteful Juno maliciously assailing the fortunes of his life. In the end, the pair cannot be measured in terms of Herculean myth. It remains to be seen if the same may be said of the Mars mythology that some critics see as central to our understanding of the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra.

J. F. Danby has noted that the “play is Shakespeare's study of Mars and Venus—the presiding deities of Baroque society, painted for us again and again on the canvasses of his time.”³¹ Danby does not expand on this, but Raymond B. Waddington³² picks up the idea in his paper “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus did with Mars.’” Rejecting the Omphalean nuances of the play on the grounds that “Shakespeare fails to take advantage of iconographic touchstones” (p. 214) and doubting the significance of Herculean and Isis references because they tend to isolate the hero and heroine for purposes of character analysis rather than exploring the nature of the relationship between them, Waddington concludes that the play is an expression of “concordia discors,” of extremities compromising—an idea implicitly suggested in the union of the god of war and the goddess of love. In assessing the validity of Waddington's contentions, it will be necessary to examine closely the play's allusions to Mars.

In The Myrrour or Glasse of helth (1545), Thomas Moulton writes that Mars patronises “batayle, pryson / maryage and inimyte.”³³ Though Shakespeare's war god in Antony and Cleopatra inclines to less controversial significances, we cannot deny his remarkable diversity, and it is on this point that Waddington's approach may be deemed incomplete. The first deity to whom Antony is compared, Mars, as father of Romulus, patron of Rome and the most revered of the Roman gods, is not an unlikely choice for such comparison. Polydore Vergil remarks that, “as Diodorus thinketh, the maner of warre was found out by Mars”³⁴ and Antony's appeal to a Roman mind like Philo's rests on his unparalleled military stature. Superlative feats of endurance and courage have apparently set Antony apart from the run of ordinary men. When dalliance “blemishes” such a history, Philo concludes that the legend is lost:

… Those his goodly eyes,
That o'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front.

(I.i.2-6)

H. A. Mason observes, in Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love, that “Grammatically, it is true, his eyes are merely compared to the god in armour, but the god-like fire passes back and would turn Antony at the very least into a demi-god of war.”³⁵ Of significance, as well, is Philo's image of surveillance for it also tends to deify Antony by styling him in the mould of Vergil's architect of battle, and reminding us of Hotspur's awful Mars sitting on his altar as patron of all bloody carnage. Philo's Mars simile turns to metaphor as Antony is remembered as the model warrior of the battlefield, the archetypal Roman.

On the surface, Mars presents the dramatist with character traits that have at least a little in common with those of Hercules. In Classical mythology he, too, is a strange mixture of competing inclinations. Philo gives us a Mars Ultor who is unmitigably Roman and who betrays none of the traditions of adulterous lover or gentle knight, as in Chaucer's Complaint of Mars (43-4, 75, 187, and 275).³⁶ But, within four scenes, the Egyptian Mardian has painted the god romantic and lasciviously passionate:

Yet have I fierce affections, and think
What Venus did with Mars.

(I.v.17-18)

The eunuch disrobes the Roman Avenger-God ethic, mocking and mirroring in Mars' name precisely what the Romans now believe has happened to their corrupted hero. The martial connotations of the deity's name have been blatantly flouted. The soldier has been turned into a lover, and the sway of the victory can be deciphered in Mardian's phrasing—it is not what Mars did with Venus, but what Venus did with Mars. The lesson works within a well-established Renaissance tradition of love's insuperability. That tradition is often expressed in the context of the Venus-Mars entanglement.³⁷ This can be seen, for example, in Caraglio's engraving after Rosso (ca. 1530) depicting the Graces disrobing Mars and Venus, while Cupid-like figures play with Mars' helmet and shield.³⁸ In the figure of a small winged Cupid holding Mars' sword between his legs, we have a symbolic explanation of the eunuch Mardian's quip.

Darting, as the play does, between aspects of the Classical god's multifaceted character, Mardian's vision of a Mars pacified is soon turned, by Enobarbus, into the promise of a Roman Mars rampant. He tells Lepidus:

… If Caesar move him,
Let Antony look over Caesar's head
And speak as loud as Mars.

(II.ii.4-6)

The circumstances are almost as ironic as the eunuch's subversion of the Roman Mars theme earlier. That one so seduced by the luxurious dalliance of Egypt as Enobarbus should cast such belligerent “Romanic” demands on Antony is odd enough but that he should do so in conversation with an impotent and vulnerable Lepidus draws the scene into realms of absurdity. Needless to say, this “shouting Mars” rests rather uneasily on the lips of the Roman lieutenant and it takes only the curiosity of Agrippa to send him into a paean of Egyptian nostalgia:

… She did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue,
O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature. On each side of her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour's fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

(II.ii.202-9)

At last the association of Cleopatra with Venus is made explicit, but not so much to emphasise their similarities as their clear differences. In Plutarch, Cleopatra is “apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture.”³⁹ And in Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra, offered as a possible source of Shakespeare's play by Arthur M. Z. Norman,⁴⁰ the Egyptian Queen is represented as a Venus come down to earth:

Euen as she was when on thy cristall streames,
Cleare Cydnos, she did shew what
earth could shew;
When Asia all amaz'd in wonder,
deemes
Venus from heauen was come on earth
below.(41)

Unlike Plutarch and Daniel, Shakespeare does not equate Venus and Cleopatra. According to Enobarbus, the Nilean Queen actually “o'erpictures” Venus. It is difficult to know precisely how much significance to attach to a superlative like “o'erpicturing” in a play whose style is often one of hyperbole and whose sentiments frequently strain to excess. Cleopatra is, by her own admission, an ageing queen (“wrinkled deep in time” is her phrase at I.v.29). And yet, Enobarbus prefers this waning human to even the immortal Venus. She still retains the accoutrements of a Venus in her pretty dimpled boys who fan her “like smiling Cupids”, but she has transcended the Classical precedent. The Roman Enobarbus does not tell us precisely how she has done this, but we may infer from the tenor of his description that her victory is a victory of the senses—burnished thrones, purple sails so perfumed that the winds are love-sick with them, silver oars beating to the melody of flutes, multicoloured fans that tint the cheeks they cool. Enobarbus' easternised imagination transcends the limits of actuality, encapsulating, in marvellous images of the tangible, the sensuous essence of Cleopatra. We are, as it were, transported out of the familiar myth of Venus and relocated in a new and unrivalled mythology of the senses.

In keeping with this notion, allusions to the Venus and Mars mythology abruptly end after Enobarbus' exposition, and it is left to Cleopatra herself to conclude the Mars development in II.v when she says, of Antony, after learning the awful truth about his marriage to Octavia:

Let him for ever go—let him not, Charmian—
Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,
The other way's a Mars.

(II.v.115-7)

Mythology's most celebrated “two-faced” figure is Janus, often portrayed with one face smiling and the other frowning. Without using the precise figure, Cleopatra intends a similar opposition. Gerard Leigh, in The Accedence of Armorie (1591), notes that “Medusa with Neptune the god of the Sea, committed adultrie in the Temple of Minerua, who was in reuenge therof turned by the mightie godes, into an ouglie monstrous shape, and her golden haires into foule lothsome serpents, whose enuieng hir life with further reuenge, seeking to haue that monster slaine, gaue a Christiline shielde to hir liuetenant Perseus the Palladian knight.”⁴² Henkel and Schöne record an emblem, titled “Amoris Vmbra Invidia,”⁴³ in which a pretty Cupid, holding a bow and arrow, casts the shadow of a foul snake-saturated Gorgon. Cleopatra is jealous, but her insistence on the Gorgon image may perhaps go further than this. Both the cited sixteenth century examples connect the Gorgon with the more unseemly side of “love” and, as love is central to Cleopatra's consciousness, her choice of metaphor is appropriate. Maurice Charney⁴⁴ relates the Gorgon reference to the play's serpent motif, reminding us that the mythic anomaly had snaky locks. But the point is surely that Cleopatra sees the Gorgon as a total inversion of all that is desirable. By the same token, Mars here becomes desirability itself, though presumably not in any exclusive Roman sense. The wheel has come full circle. Starting as Philo's mythic tag for Antony, Mars ends as Cleopatra's mythic metaphor for the same. But the value attached to the Classical name by each is profoundly different. Philo's comparison aspires specifically to a military code, Cleopatra's usage to features and qualities that are simply un-Gorgon. Her vision of Mars is broader, encompassing the whole spectrum of potential human excellences. In this sense, the name Mars has been modified to signify something more than the god's Classical history could suggest. As Enobarbus spoke to Cleopatra as a woman “o'erpicturing” Venus, as something more than the goddess, so Cleopatra aggrandises Antony's potential worth, not by an open superlative that styles him as greater than Mars, but by a straight comparison with the absolute monstrosity of the Gorgon that lifts the label of “Mars” into absolute and unfamiliar regions of praise. Significant, too, is Cleopatra's terminology. Antony is “painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars,” the stress lying tellingly in the sense of imaginative artifice that, to a large extent, defines the personal mythologisation of both hero and heroine.

It might be useful to consolidate the argument at this point. The key mythologies Shakespeare uses to demonstrate the great perplexities of choice are all Classical—Hercules, Omphale, Juno, Mars, Venus. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses a two-way imagistic mechanism to express competing mythological significances. Thus, Hercules is, on the one hand, a moral and military paradigm and, on the other, an effeminate slave. Mars is both a soldier archetype and an emasculated debauchee. These, at least, are Roman moulds into which the individual is slotted approvingly or disapprovingly as the case requires. Geographically and ideologically distanced from Rome, Egypt offers, to those who experience its liberalities, the chance to adjust Roman mythologies. And so, Enobarbus speaks of a Cleopatra who exceeds the bounds of Classical myth, “O'erpicturing that Venus” (II.ii.204). And Cleopatra, using the “two-way” imagistic mechanism in variation, devises a Mars who excels his Roman namesake: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way's a Mars” (II.v.116-17). This, though, does not mark the periphery of the play's mythological exploration. Adjustment is not Shakespeare's ultimate intention in regard to Classical myth—abandonment is his objective. The experience of an English mythology that turns sour in Henry V, after a protracted development from the opening play of the Yorkist Tetralogy, appears to have left Shakespeare in some doubt that the fulfilment of a militarist myth, expressed in whatever terms, can be a valid expression of human triumph. Written many years after the first performance of Henry V, this new play based on the lives of Antony and Cleopatra afforded Shakespeare perhaps his first real opportunity to reexamine, at some length, the mythology of military heroism and to offer a meaningful and enduring alternative. Shakespeare's deliberate discreditation of Classical material in Antony and Cleopatra culminates in the final act where no overt Classical allusions evidence themselves. This is in keeping with the work's broader movement away from the illusion of close equation with a given myth towards the suggestion that, in the world of Antony and Cleopatra, we have a new myth emerging, a myth whose participants are distinguished by qualities other than military prowess or moral righteousness.

The idea that the affections existing between these two protagonists are both new and unparalleled is evoked with some force in the first act of the play:

Cleo.: I'll set a bourn
how far to be belov'd.
Ant.: Then must thou needs find
out new heaven, new earth.

(I.i.16-17)

In the same scene, Antony exclaims that he and his lover “stand up peerless” in the world: (I.i.36-40). And, two scenes later, the queen reminds him that once “Eternity was in our lips and eyes” (I.iii.35) and “none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven” (I.iii.36-7). As the drama unfolds, we become increasingly aware that such sentiments, as powerful and compelling as they may be, are, to some extent, indebted to the imagination for their survival. Cleopatra is an ageing and devious queen, Antony an uneasy and middle-aged soldier. Neither wholly trusts the other. In rhetorical flights of the imagination, their love is perfection itself, in reality it is flawed with doubts. Enobarbus' poetic description of Cleopatra in her barge on the Cydnus (II.ii) exemplifies this mechanism of fantasy. In his account, he manufactures a sensual and aesthetic utopia whose only viable domain is the mind and the painted word. And when he says of Cleopatra's tears “This cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a show'r of rain as well as Jove” (I.ii.145-6), his imagination mythologises where actuality could not.

With words, Cleopatra is able to lift the stature of waning Antony into realms of imagined excellences. When he has left for Rome, Cleopatra turns him into the very stuff of myth: he is “The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm / And burgonet of men” (I.v.18-24). In his death, the world is devalued: “this world did equal theirs [the Gods] / Till they had stol'n our jewel” (IV.x.77-8). In Cleopatra's remembrance, Antony is the quintessence not simply of a military excellence but of all those exemplary qualities that compose a perfection of humanity:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd 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. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like: they show'd his back above
The element they liv'd in. In his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.

(V.ii.82-92)

Colossal, supreme, eloquent, thunderous, bountiful, endowed with every human excellence—Cleopatra turns Antony into a god. And, though distanced by the earthliness of her imagery from the sphere of Classical deity, Antony is in no way deprived of magnificent properties or accoutrements. Cleopatra commits his memory to a world of half-realities and dream. There was such a man as Antony and he was an exceptional man. But the agency of the dream turns the remarkable into the immortal. The splendid, though fallible, hero is transformed into a very monument, bestriding the oceans, commanding the world, surpassing all in achievement and magnanimity. Cleopatra tells Dolabella: “I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony” (V.ii.76), asks him “Think you there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?” (V.ii.93-4) and, at last, censures the Roman messenger for denying the human myth (“Gentle madam, no” at V.ii.94) in a eulogy that considers the splendour of Antony's life in terms of the imagination and fancy:

You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But if there be nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t'imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(V.ii.95-100)

That Antony existed there can be no argument. It is in the perception of that existence, in the verbal and mental renewal of an earthly majesty, that the imagination and fancy vie for dominion. In Roman terms, we might guess, Cleopatra's vision of her Antony is fanciful. But in Egypt, where the bounds of “truth” extend beyond the literal (as in Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra in II.ii), the imagination finds sanction and validity in an embellished recollection of greatness. Dolabella, a stranger to the Egyptian world, can understand none of this. But in making the imagination, the Egyptian imagination, the vehicle of recollection, Cleopatra suggests that the memory of Antony might win a final victory against the slanders of Rome. As a Roman, Antony has failed to live up to the Roman militarist myth—the myth of Hercules and Mars—that the eternal city would build around its most favoured sons. For all his praise at the end of the play, Octavius Caesar pointedly avoids celebrating Antony as a soldier. If we look for a final myth, Cleopatra seems to be telling us, we must seek it in an actuality of love and human worth painted and thereby mythologised in the Egyptian imagination.

It is both strange and sad that when Mardian brings news of Cleopatra's death, Antony makes no effort to build out of her history a new and personal myth of miraculous proportions. He describes prolonged life as torture (IV.xiv.46) and admires her courage (IV.xiv.60). But there is no aggrandisement of the qualities that compounded her earthly existence, no eulogy of mythic dimensions, no extravagant expression of his love for her. Antony does not seem aware of the development from the mythologisation of his life into typical Roman modes, to a myth that is unprecedented and free of the shackles of Classical mythology. His real concerns latterly, as formerly (despite apparently hollow protestations in I.i), are with his Roman myth status. In his darkest moments, he can sink so low as to accuse Cleopatra of sullying his very ancestry: “Have I my pillow left unpress'd in Rome, / Forborne the getting of a lawful race” (III.xiii.106-7). But in his most splendid moments, he can only rise to the vain promise of a Martian-type militarist superlative:

If from the field I shall return once more
To kiss these lips, I will appear in blood.
I and my sword will earn our chronicle.

(III.xiii.173-5. Emphasis added).

If there is a union in the closing acts, it is not a union of mythic understanding, for while Cleopatra shows a willingness to mythologise Antony and her love for him, Antony does not appear to be conscious of a present movement towards the personal love-myth. It is only in the afterworld, where they will make the ghosts gaze (IV.xiv.52) and where “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours” (IV.xiv.53-4), that he considers their love will be able to achieve mythic and new dimensions.⁴⁵ We can assume he believes the present has fallen short of this. Since the love-myth relies for its dramatic existence on an imagination openly and rhetorically acknowledged, Antony's failure to offer a genuine reciprocation of Cleopatra's proffered myth-harmony in the final stages of the play leaves us short of what Raymond Waddington would term the play's “concordia discors.” The full act that separates the deaths of the lovers to some degree may be seen as a temporal and a visual metaphor for this disunity.

The manipulation of mythological figures in Antony and Cleopatra suggests a movement away from a view of a world structured purely in terms of traditional Classical mythology. Such a view reflects a Roman perspective, and, accordingly, its mythological figures assume “two-way” significances of virtue and vice, of approval and disapproval, in terms of Rome's ideal militarist values. The process of bogus or synthetic Roman mythologisation, an acceptable and even necessary function of political life in Julius Caesar, comes under increasingly pejorative scrutiny in Antony and Cleopatra. This is perhaps because the earlier play does not offer, and does not intend to offer, any viable alternative to the mythological norms of its Roman setting. Antony and Cleopatra is quite different. Here, a love myth emerges to challenge the Roman military ethos. It is perhaps a tenuous myth, and Antony's understanding of it is limited, but, in its emphasis on the worth of the human bond and interpersonal obligations, it expresses an ideal that is both fresh and vibrant.

Notes

1. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (C. H. Reynell, for R. Hunter, 1817), p. 95.

2. Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1910), p. 396.

3. “Manhood and Valour in Two Shakespearean Tragedies,” in: ELH, 17 (1950), p. 271.

4. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946-1947), I, 371.

5. Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961).

6. The Herculean Hero (Chatto & Windus, 1962), pp. 112-21.

7. “Enobarbus' Description of Cleopatra,” in: Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958), 61-78.

8. This quotation comes from “The Life of Marcus Antonius” in T. J. B. Spencer's edition of Shakespeare's Plutarch (1964; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1968), p. 177.

9. Campbell is quoted in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1907), p. 478.

10. Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies (Macmillan Press, 1976), p. 153.

11. Discours de la Religion des Anciens Romains Illustré (1556; facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), p. 182.

12. Minerva Britanna: Or A Garden of Heroycal Devices (Wa. Dight, 1612), p. 36.

13. For Xenophon's account of Hercules' choice between the damsels of Vice and Virtue, see his Memorabilia (II.i.21-32) in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Xenophon, IV (1923; rpt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), translated by E. C. Marchant.

14. Les Emblèmes, translated into French by Jacques Grévin (Anvers: De l'imprimerie de Christophe Plantin, 1567), p. 48.

15. The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577; facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), pp. 12^r-12^v.

16. Waith, The Herculean Hero, pp. 119-20.

17. Hero & Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 333.

18. Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, p. 130.

19. Richard Wagner's edition of Apollodori Bibliotheca (Leipzig: Teubner, 1894), II, 127 foll.

20. R. Wittkower refers to this print as being that of Annibale Carracci, Cat. No. 390 (Plate 50) in his work The Drawings of the Carracci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (The Phaidon Press Ltd., 1952), p. 152.

21. Peacham, Minerva Britanna: Or A Garden of Heroycal Devices, p. 95.

22. Emblèmes d'Amour. Illustrez D'une Explication en prose fort facille pour entendre le sens moral de chaque Emblème (Paris?: n.p. 16—), n. pag.

23. For example, Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero, p. 113; and Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, p. 130.

24. Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Hollis & Carter, 1963), p. 159.

25. Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, p. 138.

26. Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, p. 138.

27. Antonio Tempesta, Metamorphoseon Sive Transformationvm Ovidianarvm (1606; facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), plate 85.

28. “The Apotheosis of Hercules”, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (Cat. No. 195). The work is listed in Julius S. Held's catalogue The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

29. The painting, possibly the work of Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), is described (p. 31) and reproduced (fig. 13) in The Farnese Gallery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) by John Rupert Martin.

30. “Cleopatra and the ‘Œstre Junonicque’” in: Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), p. 237: “It would seem that there is a case to be made for the series of equations: Cleopatra=a cow in June=Io=Isis=Cleopatra.”

31. Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher (Faber and Faber, 1952), pp. 150-1.

32. “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus did with Mars,’” in: Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 210-227.

33. The Myrrour or Glasse of helth necessary and nedefull for euery person to loke in that wyll kepe theyr body from the sekenes of the Pestylence (W. Myddleton, 1545), sig. C3^r.

34. An Abridgement of the notable worke of Polidore Vergile conteygnyng the deuisers and first finders out as well of Artes, Ministeries, Feactes & ciuill ordinaunces, as of Rites, & Ceremonies, commonly vsed in the churche: and the originall beginnyng of the same, compended by Thomas Langley (R. Grafton, 1546), fol. 48^r.

35. Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love (Chatto & Windus, 1970), p. 232.

36. The text used is that in F. N. Robinson's edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 529-32.

37. See Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, revised ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 89-96.

38. Caraglio's engraving is recorded by Adam Bartsch in Le Peintre Graveur, Nouvelle Edition (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1867), XV, “Sujets De Mythologie” No. 15 on p. 74.

39. Spencer, ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch, p. 201.

40. “Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra,” in: Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 11-18.

41. Lines 1477-82. Norman, “Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra,” quotes this passage on pp. 16-17.

42. The Accedence of Armorie (1562, first publ.; R. Tottel, 1591), fol. 16^v. Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland (1475-1640), refer to the author as Gerard Legh.

43. Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch Zur Sinnbildkunst Des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), column 1572.

44. Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, p. 99.

45. Donna B. Hamilton, in “Antony and Cleopatra and the Tradition of Noble Lovers,” in: Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), 245-251, has demonstrated that Dido and Aeneas enjoyed a high reputation as noble lovers in Shakespeare's day.

In the documentation of references, London is assumed as the place of publication unless otherwise indicated. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Peter Alexander's edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London & Glasgow: Collins, 1978).