SOURCE: “Antony and Cleopatra: The Limits of Mythology,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 23, 1970, pp. 59-67.

[In the following essay, Fisch considers archetypal patterns of love/war and fertility/death associated with Roman and Egyptian mythological allusions in Antony and Cleopatra. The critic concludes by explaining the ways in which these mythological patterns are transcended at the close of the drama.]

I

When critics speak of myth and ritual in Shakespeare they have in mind chiefly the symbolic structure of the plays. Thus The Winter's Tale which begins in winter (‘a sad tale's best for winter’, I, i, 25) and ends in high summer (‘not yet on summer's death nor on the birth of trembling winter’, IV, iv, 80) perfectly corresponds to the fertility rhythm. The accent on fertility in the sheep-shearing in Act IV gives to the structural form its emotional and spiritual content, whilst the symbolic revival of Hermione at the end rounds off the pattern of death and resurrection so basic to ‘the myth of the eternal return’. Such an archetypal structure is older than Christianity (in spite of the Christian colouring) and perhaps older than the conscious memory of man.

In King Lear the symbolic structure of the play viewed as myth-ritual is defined by the image of the wheel. Lear speaks of himself as being bound on a wheel of fire (IV, vii, 47); Kent bids Fortune turn her wheel (II, ii, 173); the Fool speaking of the fate of his master bids himself ‘let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill’ (II, iv, 71); whilst Edmund acknowledges at his death that ‘the wheel is come full circle’ (V, iii, 174). The circular movement thus intimated has behind it a sense of a cyclical order, the rise and fall of kings ordained as a means of guaranteeing the fertility of the land and the orderly sequence of the seasons. Such imagery, more than it is a statement about Lear as a Nature-god (though he is that too), is a statement about his predetermined fate, and about the structure of the play in which that fate is projected.

In Antony and Cleopatra the myth-ritual pattern is undoubtedly central. But one should add that it is not so much a structural principle (as in King Lear) as the actual subject of the play. Shakespeare is dealing directly in this play with a pair of characters who lay claim to mythological status and who at every turn adopt the posture of figures in a fertility ritual. The first such myth pattern is that connected with the names of Mars and Venus.¹ From the first scene the personalities of Antony and Cleopatra are mythologically inflated and presented in terms of the conjunction of the god of war and the goddess of love. Philo in the opening speech of the first scene declares that Antony's eyes ‘have glow'd like plated Mars’, and Antony's first speeches to Cleopatra introduce an allusion to the goddess Venus:

Now for the love of Love, and her soft hours

(I, i, 44)

—the reference being of course to the ‘hours’ and ‘graces’ which wait on the queen of love. It is because they are enacting the archetypal union of the god of war and the goddess of love that they may properly claim:

Eternity was in our lips, and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor,
But was a race of heaven.

(I, iii, 35-7)

The full miming of this myth-pattern is achieved in Cleopatra's sailing on the Cydnus as described by Enobarbus: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water’ (II, ii, 199-200). The text continues with an explicit reference to Venus:

                                                  For her own person
It beggar'd 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.

(lines 205-9)

Plutarch, from whom this detail (like so much else in this speech) is derived, develops the link even further and remarks that Cleopatra's ladies were apparelled ‘like the nymphes Nereides … and like the Graces’; and he continues that on her arrival ‘there went a rumor in the peoples mouthes, that the goddesse Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the generall good of all Asia’.² Antony thus combines in himself aspects of both Mars and Bacchus, the god of war as well as the god of wine, Venus having been at various times the consort of both. The whole scene on the Cydnus naturally recalls the most famous scene associated in mythology with the goddess Venus, viz., her riding on a sea-shell wafted by Zephyrs to the foot of mount Cythera. On that occasion she was accompanied by Nereids, Cupids, and Graces. Since she is traditionally produced by the foam of the sea, it is natural that she should thus first appear before Antony. Enobarbus' conclusion confirms once again the supernal, absolute character of her charms. She is not a lovely woman, simply, but the principle of love itself, love, so to speak, carried to the infinite degree. Hence in sober truth it may be stated that

Age cannot wither her, nor custome stale
Her infinite variety.

(lines 243-4)

Her changeless, timeless character is also clearly marked in her own speech where she asserts her antiquity, her immortal, fixed and absolute quality:

                                                  Think on me,
That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black,
And wrinkled deep in time.

(I, V, 27-9)

Clearly she is not simply ‘Miss Egypt’, but the eternal feminine, Tiamat, Venus, Aphrodite. She is as old as the race of man, the source of passion, reproduction, and death.

Now whilst Shakespeare very clearly presents his two main characters in this inflated way, and has them claim all the divine honours, the transcendent status which belongs to them in their mythological capacities, he does so not without considerable irony. We may note here the same dialectical syntax as in Homer or as in Troilus and Cressida where the legendary theme of Helen and Paris becomes a subject for barrack-room jokes (‘all the argument is a cuckold and a whore’). In the conversation of Agrippa and Enobarbus following the Cydnus passage we have the same deflating tendency. ‘Royal wench’ Agrippa calls her, whilst Enobarbus with as little sense of awe before the power of the queen of love describes how the once saw her ‘hop forty paces through the public street’. Cleopatra's own servants also tend to burlesque the mythological theme:

Cleopatra. Hast thou affections?
Mardian. Yes, gracious madam.
Cleopatra. Indeed?
Mardian. Not in deed, madam, for
I can do nothing
But what indeed is honest to be done:
Yet have I fierce affections, and think
What Venus did with Mars.

(I, V, 12-18)

To think of the eunuch aping in his imagination the deeds of Mars and Venus produces the inevitable comic reaction at the expense of the whole mythological construction on which the personalities of the main characters are based.

The Mars-Venus theme is, however, not carried through to the end, and instead, the two main characters merge into another mythological grouping of much greater significance for Shakespeare's purpose, namely the Isis-Osiris-Set triangle with Cleopatra functioning as Isis, goddess of nature and fertility, and Antony as Osiris, the dying Sun-god who is resurrected in eternity.³ Octavius Caesar seems in some sense to function as Set (or Typhon) the brother of Osiris who seeks to replace him with Isis, only to be thwarted by Isis who gathers the mangled remains of Osiris together and thus guarantees that he becomes immortal and reigns as king of the underworld. The blending of the two groups together—Venus-Mars-Bacchus and Isis-Osiris-Set is no accident, since Osiris has a close connection with Dionysus (Bacchus) being also the god of wine, and Isis is the ultimate goddess from whom all the lesser deities including Aphrodite (Venus) are derived. Typhon again is a war-god like Ares (Mars). Shakespeare could have gathered his knowledge of the myth from a number of sources. It seems natural to suppose that he drew on Plutarch's Of Isis and Osiris (still to this day the chief source of our information on the subject) since he had made use of Plutarch's Lives as the chief source for the play as a whole, and Philemon Holland had translated a version of this in 1603. He could also have read an account of the appearance of Isis and Osiris in Spenser. But a particularly tempting possibility is that he had read all about the goddess Isis in Apuleius' The Golden Ass which had reached four editions in the English translation of Adlington by the end of the sixteenth century. It is perhaps worth quoting the epiphany of the goddess as experienced by Lucius in his dream at the end of the book. Since Isis is the moon- and sea-goddess—just as Osiris is the Sun⁴—it is natural that she should reveal herself to Lucius as he lies on the beach in the light of the full moon, and that her garment should be stuck with fiery stars, with—in the middle—a full moon. It should also be noted that on the boat-like vessel which she holds in her hand ‘an asp lifted up his head with a wide-swelling throat’. The association with Cleopatra is arresting. But the account of the goddess's claims are more to our present purpose:

Behold, Lucius, I am come; thy weeping and prayer hath moved me to succour thee. I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell be disposed … For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynnian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine … and the Egyptians … do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.⁵

Isis is no ordinary goddess. She is in fact the ultimate matrix of nature. She represents what Leslie Fiedler has called ‘the huge, warm, enveloping darkness of unconscious life’.⁶ But as well as her universal aspect she also has a distinct local connection with the Nile waters, the slimy, fertile ooze which through the annual rise and fall of the Nile guarantees life and sustenance to man and beast.

Shakespeare shows himself profoundly conscious of the full implications of the Isis-Osiris myth, and modern students of mythology could, if they were wise, learn of it in both depth and detail from this play. In Act III, scene vi, we are told that in the division of the middle east between their progeny, Cleopatra and Antony had been enthroned in chairs of gold, she enacting the part of the goddess Isis:

                                                                                                    she
In the habiliments of the goddess Isis
That day appeared.

(lines 16-18)

Cleopatra's monument in which the latter part of the play takes place was (according to Plutarch) ‘set up by the temple of Isis’, and Shakespeare shows himself aware of the ritual framework. Antony's ritual death has all the slow elaborate ceremonial we would expect. His connection with the Sun is made clear. As he arrives in the monument, Cleopatra declares

                                                                                                    O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in, darkling stand
The varying shore o' the world.

(IV, xiii, 9-11)

And again:

His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth.

(V, ii, 79-81)

Mythological enlargement could not be more emphatic. She herself speaks of her own connection with the moon:

Now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.

(V ii, 239-40)

And Antony had spoken earlier of her unflatteringly as ‘our terrene moon’ (III, xi, 153).

But all this is of minor interest compared with the vividness of Shakespeare's evocation of the principles of death and fertility as personified by Cleopatra, a conjunction closely tied in with the image of the Nile waters. She is the ‘serpent of old Nile’ (I, v, 25), and she swears by ‘the fire / That quickens Nilus' slime’ (I, iii, 68-9), the verb suggesting fertile life but also a swarming and insalubrious abundance, breeding produced by putrefaction. A later speech imaginatively stresses the link between death, putrefaction and fertility:

                                                                                          Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me, rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark-nak'd, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring.

(V, ii, 57-60)

The vivid sexuality of the image (‘lay me stark nak'd’) binds together its various components. Cleopatra joins in mythic union the principle of love and death: she represents the Liebestod, the downward drag of nature into unconsciousness and death. And this is entirely in keeping with her archetypal character: Enobarbus humorously remarks at the beginning of the play:

I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying

(I, ii, 152-4)

—whilst she herself testifies at the end to the same phenomenon:

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
Which hurts and is desir'd.

(V, ii, 297-8)

We recall that among the other personae of Isis (according to Apuleius) is the goddess Proserpine, and she is the bride of death ruling with him in the underworld. For Antony too death is ‘a lover's bed’ (IV, xii, 101). Modern psychologists would have no difficulty in identifying here the archetypal link between the libido and the death-wish which is so central for Shakespearian tragedy as a whole.

But death is only one side of the coin: the other and sunnier side is immortality. For it is the peculiar achievement of the ancient Egyptians that they managed to swallow death in immortality. Osiris is a dying god who dies into eternity. And here at the climax of the play Shakespeare celebrates not so much the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra as their translation into immortal life. Antony himself declares:

I come my queen … stay for me,
Where souls do couch on flowers.

(IV, xii, 50-1)

At the very heart of the Osiris legend is this notion of immortality, the mummified remains of the dead man living on eternally in ‘the field of peace’. Shakespeare had somehow penetrated into this region of ancient belief; creating for us in the last act of the play a dramatic realization of the active attainment of immortality. It is achieved especially in the speeches of Cleopatra as she mourns over the mutilated Antony-Osiris, in this re-enacting perfectly the classic pose of Isis whose long lament over the dead Osiris is recorded by Plutarch. Behind all this we hear the echo of the lament for all the dead and rising gods, Adonis, Tammuz, and the rest. But here the accent is more especially on the revival of the dead hero. Shakespeare presents in the fifth act a ritual of apotheosis in which Antony and Cleopatra in the most ceremonial fashion put off mortality and announce their union as god and goddess eternally united in the field of peace. She performs a ritual marriage between herself and the dead Antony which is going to be consummated in the afterworld:

Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have
Immortal longings in me …
                                                                                                    Husband I come:
Now to that name, my courage prove my title!
I am fire, and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.

(V, ii, 281-3; 289-92)

It is an amazing piece of virtuosity, this latter-day dramatization of the most primitive and powerful of fertility myths; the one which holds within itself the key to the entire system of nature religion, linking the inner drives of flesh with the varying seasons of the world, and seeking by ritual and by magic ceremonies to overcome the most dreadful of all terrors—death itself, and convert it into love and sweetness, uniting the most disgusting of its aspects with the most alluring dream of which man is capable, viz., the dream of eternal life.

But Shakespeare is no innocent and ingenuous worshipper of nature and fertility. He holds the entire archetypal pattern in his hand; he displays it to us; he penetrates to its inner heart, but there is no final identification either between us and the displayed forms, or between the author and his characters in their mythic personalities. There is a tonal distance. It is enough to quote Frazer's account of the manner in which the ancient Egyptians received the death of Osiris to realize how far away from such simple beliefs the play of Shakespeare takes us:

In pity for her [Isis'] sorrow the sun-god Rasent down from heaven the jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys, of Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the murdered god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the other rites which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies of the departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings: Osiris revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead.⁷

Shakespeare by contrast presents the whole apotheosis of Antony and Cleopatra within a framework of irony.

II

The entry of the Clown with his basket of figs in Act V, ii and the subsequent conversation in vulgar realistic prose between him and Cleopatra represents more than a comic deflation of the whole mythic hyperbole on which much of the play is based: it brings a Biblical realism vigorously to bear on the dream-world of Paganism. The Clown functions like Edgar the bedlam-beggar in King Lear, or like the Porter in Macbeth, or like the Gravediggers in Hamlet. And like the Gravediggers he makes death real, showing it to us in a handful of dust. His opening words parody the Egyptian myth of immortality in the fields of peace—that Shangri-la escape from the absoluteness of human responsibility—which forms the very essence of the Isis-Osiris legend:

Cleopatra. Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there, That kills and pains not?

Clown. Truly I have him: but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal: those that do die of it, do seldom or never recover.

The finality of death as in the Old Testament (‘shall the dust praise thee?’) is here given a comic form—‘those that do die of it do seldom or never recover’; and in the phrase ‘his biting is immortal’ the whole notion of immortality is beheld in the perspective of irony. It is the death-bringing worm which becomes immortal. We are reminded of Isaiah 66:

And they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die.⁸

But this is not the only Biblical locus which the Clown's immortal worm recalls to us. It is also the serpent of Eve in the garden of Eden: he tells us that he knew of an honest woman ‘but something given to lie … how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt’. And he goes on—

truly she makes a very good report o' the worm: but he that will believe all that they say, shall never be saved by half that they do: but this is most falliable, the worm's an odd worm.

The man who believed what the woman said of the serpent (worm) but could not be saved by what she had done is of course Adam; just as Cleopatra is Eve, no longer the eternal feminine principle of fertility, goddess of love and nature, but the erring female who leads man into sin and consequently forfeits the gift of immortality. Even the fig-leaves fit into place in the new pattern. There is a reversal of values, a sudden refocusing of the whole dream within an archetypal frame entirely different from that which the Isis-Osiris-Set legend had provided. Here man is tested and found wanting within the limits of his brief span of three-score years and ten. Those who die of the worm—that is to say, the whole race of man—do seldom or never recover. A cold, sharp, but morally bracing wind of realism blows through this dialogue. At the end we have Cleopatra reduced to size; she is indeed ‘no more but e'en a woman’ (IV, xiii, 73)—a woman who might have been ‘a dish for the gods’ but who has been unfortunately marred by the devil. Here the worm (the serpent of Eve) has been—as in the standard Christian exegesis—enlarged into the devil. He has become the undying worm who preys on mortal man and woman. The whole ritual of apotheosis on which the latter part of the play is based is hereby exploded, and the hero and heroine become, for the moment, actors in the Judeo-Christian drama of salvation and damnation.

III

But the dialectical syntax is not provided just by this intrusion of Christian terminology in the speech of the Clown: it is there throughout in the juxtaposition of the Roman and Egyptian worlds. Both sides of the plot are Pagan: both the Egyptians and the Romans pursue a mythical grandeur, a cosmic delusion. In the one it is the delusion of an immortal feast of love, in the other, of an immortal feast of power. But there is a sharp distinction in ethical and dramatic content. The one world is timeless, the other is governed by the inexorabilities of time—it is time-ridden. In Egypt, Antony's honour's ‘prorogued … Even till a Lethe'd dulness’ (II, i, 26-7). Cleopatra seeks escape from time; she proposes to ‘sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away’ (I, v, 5-6). Here time is biological; it is the time of Nature; birth, copulation, and death. There is no advance. Lepidus, by contrast, expresses the urgency which characterizes the Roman sense of existence in his words on the forthcoming confrontation with Pompey:

                                                                                Time calls upon's.
Of us must Pompey presently be sought,
Or else he seeks out us.

(II, ii, 164-6)

And in the race for Mount Misenum between Lepidus and Maecenas there is the careful synchronization of watches that we associate with Roman life. (We recall that Shakespeare's feeling for the Roman obsession with time had led him to his famous anachronism in Julius Caesar II, ii.) After peace is made between Pompey and the triumvirate, Menas makes his infamous proposition: he offers to kill Pompey's enemies now that they are in his power. Pompey's reply is that he is already too late:

Ah this thou shouldst have done,
And not have spoken on't.

(II, vii, 80-1)

Caesar has the same sense of opportunity; he too like Pompey has his finger on the trigger. At Actium he declares that ‘our fortune lies / Upon this jump’ (III, viii, 5-6). Against the indolence, the drunkenness, and the sleepiness of the Egyptian world (shared paradoxically by the Romans in their Bacchanalian revels on Pompey's barge) there is the pressure set up by the need to act in the heat, the sense of a world in constant motion. It was a Roman poet who wrote ‘Carpe diem’, a love ditty composed by a man with one eye on the clock.

And behind this sense of the passage of time, its inexorability and quality of challenge, there is an awareness of the vaster historical process by which human life is governed. Caesar urging his active star at Misenum, at Actium, and in Egypt, is obeying a force mightier than himself: thus he knows no rest:

                                                                                Caesar through Syria
Intends his journey, and within three days
You with your children will he send before:
Make your best use of this.

(V, ii, 199-202)

Against this plan of world-conquest, the life and death of Cleopatra becomes almost an incident, sad, diverting, and remarkable, but hardly more than an incident. The world moves on, as it must, towards the ‘time of universal peace’ of which Octavius speaks in Act IV, vi, recalling to us Vergil's vision of the ages of the world in the fourth Eclogue. The drama of universal history sets up its rhythm in the play, and the ritual enactments of Isis and Osiris in their temporary incarnations as Cleopatra and Antony are accordingly diminished in size and significance. Their own tragedy observes the mythic unity of place; it is confined to one corner of Egypt: but the play as a whole, as is notorious, bursts the last fetters of classical restraint. The structure of the play does not mirror the ‘myth of the eternal return’. In fact it is its opposite. The play lacks the rounded form, the satisfying, self-completed, cyclical rhythm of ancient tragedy which we still respond to in King Lear with its controlling image of the wheel of Fortune. Here in Antony and Cleopatra time and place extend so as to enclose the theme of universal history as it unfolds itself in power upon the vast amphitheatre of the world. The closed myth-world of tragedy is exploded, for the theme of world history has taken its place. And in this new epic context the mimic apotheosis of the two lovers shrinks to a little measure.

IV

This is the phenomenological paradox of the play, and on the whole Shakespeare is content to leave us (as he does in the other Roman plays) with the paradoxes unresolved, and with a sense of mutually contradictory value-systems.⁹ And yet there is in the final act of Antony and Cleopatra a hint of resolution. As Cleopatra takes the centre of the stage for her final exit she is not only herself rehabilitated in a characteristically Shakespearian fashion, but the world of mythology is rehabilitated too. And this is achieved paradoxically through an injection of Roman ‘virtue’. She chooses to die ‘after the high Roman fashion’; and she chooses to conceive of her relationship to Antony under the Roman figure of marriage. The marriage between Antony and Octavia in Act II had been a marriage of convenience, another example of the Romans knowing how to seize opportunities and bend them to their will. Yet it had been weighted with moral responsibility, with a sense of the need to further the ends of an historical programme. This had charged it with an almost religious character: it had become an ‘act of grace’.

                                                                                Let me have thy hand.
Further this act of grace: and from this hour,
The heart of brothers govern in our loves,
And sway our great designs.

(II, ii, 152-5)

But the words sound hollowly. The great designs are convincing, impressive, and real, but the brotherly love is not. The Romans lacked the affective content. They had discovered history, but they had failed to discover the individual spiritual force, the quality of human participation, which should give it meaning. They had no notion of dialogue. Cleopatra on the other hand knows what it is to love and be loved: in her relationship with Antony, and especially towards the close of the play, she glimpses a reality which raises man beyond the ‘dull world’:

                                                  Noblest of men, woo't die?
Hast thou no care of me, shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty?

(IV, xiii, 59-62)

These words would not have fallen from Roman lips, not even from Antony's. They point to love as a transcendent reality discovered within human relationships. Such love transcends the value-system of Romanism, but it equally transcends the Egyptian myth-world; for within the Isis-Osiris pattern proper there is no room for the marriage of true minds, but only for fertility and death. And yet it is in the notion of a marriage that this new-found transcendence finds its place in the last speech of Cleopatra:

                                                  Husband I come:
Now to that name, my courage prove my title.

(V, ii, 289-90)

Mr John Holloway points out that the two lovers in this play always seem to require an audience: when declaring their love to one another they desire to be the cynosure of all eyes.¹⁰ This I would suggest is closely bound up with the ritual character of those appearances: they function in a fertility ceremony in which all are vitally concerned. But here at the end, it is surely the private character of the relationship which is uppermost. Cleopatra is withdrawing into that private mysterious world where only the still small voice of true love will be heard. She will deny Octavius his triumph: and she wishes for no more public appearances either of love or state in this ‘vile world’.

Cleopatra's death is in one sense a ritual apotheosis: in another sense, it is a deserved punishment for a sinful life (this is the motif stressed in the conversation with the Clown): and in a third sense it is a marriage ceremony, in which Cleopatra rises above her conquerors showing them in the ceremony of love the true human dimension that they had missed. The final words of Caesar underline the religious solemnity of Cleopatra's death:

                                                  but she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.

(V, ii, 347-9)

The word ‘grace’ has now a multiplicity of meaning: it suggests the irresistible beauty of Cleopatra, as goddess of love; but it also carries a suggestion of a heavenly and transcendent virtue.¹¹

At this level we may look upon the deaths of the two chief characters not as an event which climaxes a fertility ritual, but as an event which brings the whole orgiastic world of Paganism to an end. It also brings to an end the sterile, world-conquering inhuman conception of time and history which the Romans had achieved, a history which had no room for salvation. If the Romans understood that history drives us on, if they felt its inexorable stress, its purposive direction, they had no means of discovering what that purpose was, to what end the labouring soul of man was striving. The final speeches of Cleopatra suggest not the meeting of Mars and Venus nor of Isis and Osiris, but rather of Cupid and Psyche—‘latest born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy’. And at this point where the soul is born and its grace is discovered, Paganism transcends itself and glimpses those permanent and fundamental relations of love which give meaning not only to all human marriages but to the vast and seemingly impersonal march of history itself.

Notes

1. On this aspect, see Raymond B. Waddington, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: What Venus did with Mars’, Shakespeare Studies, II (1966), 210-27, who also points out the link between Antony and his ancestor, Hercules (p. 216).

2. G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, V (London, 1964), p. 274.

3. The link with Isis as a more than casual feature of Cleopatra's personality was proposed by the eighteenth-century editors Capell and Warburton. (See M. R. Ridley (ed.), Antony and Cleopatra (London, 1954), notes to III, xiii, 153 and V, ii, 239.) It is surprising that present-day scholars have not shown more interest in this suggestion. But see M. Lloyd, ‘Cleopatra as Isis’, Shakespeare Survey 12 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 88-94.

4. Cf. Spenser's description of the priests of Isis, Faerie Queene, V, vii:

   They wore rich Mitres shaped like the Moone,
   To shew that Isis doth the Moone
   portend;
   Like as Osyris signifies the Sunne.

   Antony is also connected in the play with the sun-god Phoebus-Apollo. Cf. S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, 1944), p. 127: ‘“Deep in time” gives her an infinite age: it does not suggest an old woman, but an immortal … she is an immortal lover of the sun-god, of Phoebus-Apollo’.

5. The Golden Ass, trans. W. Adlington, with an essay by Charles Whibley (1927), p. 251.

6. Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960), p. 13.

7. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, ed. 1914), VI, 12-13.

8. And see also Mark ix. 44 f.

9. Cf. J. F. Danby, ‘The Shakespearean Dialectic: an Aspect of Antony and Cleopatra’, Scrutiny, XVI (1949), 196-213, and comments thereon by L. C. Knights, ibid., pp. 318-23.

10. The Story of the Night (London, 1961), p. 102.

11. Cf. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, p. 131. On the multiple meanings of grace (though without reference to this particular passage), see also M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1965), pp. 150-3, 161.