SOURCE: Kaula, David. “The Time Sense of Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Summer 1964): 211-23.

[In the following essay, Kaula compares the various senses of time held by the protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra—Caesar is focused on the future and views time as an instrument that progresses linearly, Antony clings to the past and continually strains against the pressures of time, and Cleopatra regards time as a pliant, continuous present.]

Antony and Cleopatra opens with one Roman commenting to another on what is, to them, the deplorable change that has come over their general: the Mars-like warrior of the past has become the “strumpet's fool” of the present. A little later, Antony, after refusing to hear the latest news from Rome, insists to Cleopatra that nothing matters but the immediate “now”:

Now for the love of Love and her soft hours,
Let's not confound the time with conference harsh.
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now.

(I.i.44-47)

In scene ii, Charmian and Iras hear the Soothsayer obscurely prophesy approaching misfortune for them and their mistress, but instead of taking his words seriously they blithely anticipate a future of unlimited sensual gratification. When Antony next appears, he is listening with alarm to the messengers' reports of the rapidly worsening situation in Italy and other parts of the Empire. No longer finding the present moment all-sufficient—

                                                                                The present pleasure,
By revolution low'ring, does become
The opposite of itself—

(I.ii.120-122)

he rebukes himself for his idleness and resolves to return to Rome with all possible speed. When Cleopatra caustically reminds him of his earlier vows of eternal fidelity he pleads the “strong necessity of time”.

These few instances, all coming in the first three scenes, are enough to alert us to the special importance of time in the play as a whole. The sharp fluctuations of awareness between past, present, and future, the sudden turnabouts of attitude in response to the pressure of events, the emphatic contrasts between loyalty and expedience, idleness and activity—these continue through the play, complementing the equally free and versatile handling of geographical space. Much of the action is infused with that sense of temporal urgency which was felt so strongly by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to whom time very often appeared in the guise of the insidious destroyer, the ever-active opponent of the human need for continuity. But the play also reveals another, more distinctly Shakespearian awareness of time, one which was gradually deepened and subtilized as Shakespeare's powers as a dramatist increased. It shows the intimate relationship the sense of time bears to the basic contours of the dramatic action, and its significance as one of the principal media through which the characters reveal their governing attitudes and thereby locate themselves within the moral universe of the play.

Although it embraces a historical period of ten years, the action of the play does not proceed in chronicle fashion through a series of virtually independent episodes. It rather gives the impression of rapid, continuous movement. Especially in the first three acts, beginning with Antony's hasty departure from Egypt and culminating in his defeat at Actium, the complexion of affairs in the political realm is constantly shifting as one development follows another with almost confusing speed. Shakespeare fortifies this impression by resorting to a device he had used more perfunctorily in the earlier history plays, that of frequently introducing messengers bearing the “news” which time has brought forth in other places. When Antony refuses to hear the messenger from Rome in the first scene he is trying, as it were, to erect a barrier against the irresistible pressure of time, so that when in the next scene he does receive the news—now conveyed by two messengers instead of one—it is as though a dam were bursting. Things happen so quickly that in some instances the news is already stale in the telling, rendered obsolete by the events of preceding scenes. At the beginning of Act I, scene iv, for instance, Caesar speaks of Antony as still idling in Alexandria when in fact he is already on his way to Rome; and in Act II, scene v Cleopatra learns of Antony's marriage to Octavia after he has privately made up his mind to return to Egypt. Through his abrupt shifts of locale Shakespeare also creates the impression that time moves at different velocities in different places. The last-mentioned scene is followed by four scenes of complex activity which take place in various parts of the Empire: Misenum, Pompey's galley, Syria, and Rome. Act III, scene iii returns us to Cleopatra, showing her listening to the messenger's description of Octavia after she had received the original report five scenes earlier. Thus if time in the world of political affairs moves with relentless speed, in Alexandria, while Cleopatra has nothing to do but wait for Antony, it is almost static.

During those periods in the action when the pressure of events is felt with particular urgency, the sense of time is conveyed through images which suggest a ceaseless fertility ever threatening to run out of control. Smarting under the shame of his idleness, Antony declares:

                                                                                O, then we bring forth weeds
When our quick minds lie still, and our ills told us
Is as our earing.

(I.ii.105-107)

Again:

                                                                                                    Much is breeding,
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison.

(I.ii.188-190)

The quickening of events before Actium prompts Canidius to remark:

With news the time's with labor and throws forth
Each minute some.

(III.vii.81-82)

But if time for the slow-mover breeds with dangerous rapidity, for the agile opportunist it is capable of being cultivated or “eared”. When Pompey is riding the full tide of fortune, commanding both the sea and the hearts of the commoners, his confederates, Menecrates and Menas,

Make the sea serve them, which they ear and wound
With keels of every kind.

(I.iv.49-50)

Caesar later “cuts” the Ionian Sea toward Actium with such speed that time for him seems a more fluid medium than it is for others, especially the slower, heavier Antony, whose own efforts at naval maneuvering are shortly to prove so ill-advised.

The turbulent flux of events is matched, on the human side, by the instability of desire. The play repeatedly dramatizes a sharp discrepancy between judgment and loyalty, between the apparent demands of the moment and the deeper, more abiding needs of the heart. What is scorned in the present becomes appreciated once it is past and beyond recovery. Antony, on hearing of Fulvia's death, discovers “she's good, being gone” (I.ii.122); and when he is told of Cleopatra's pretended death, bitter rejection turns in a flash into fervent devotion. Enobarbus learns too late that what reason recommends has little to do with his true emotional interests, and even the phlegmatic Caesar, after hunting down Antony to his death, is moved to weep. As Agrippa remarks:

                                                                                                    And strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.

(V.i.27-29)

These sudden reversals of sentiment are observable not only in the principal characters but also in the anonymous hoi polloi. Commenting on the “slippery” Roman people's enthusiasm for Pompey, Antony says their love “is never linked to the deserver Till his deserts are past” (I.ii.181-183). Caesar amplifies the idea:

It hath been taught us from the primal state
That he which is was wished until he were;
And the ebbed man, ne'er loved till ne'er worth love,
Comes deared by being lacked. This common body,
Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion.

(I.iv.41-47)

In the play, as G. Wilson Knight observes, “there is continually this wavering, ebb and flow, of the spirit, a shifting, varying psychology.”¹ Fundamental to the play's sense of time is the perception that the human heart, in ceaselessly riding the undulations of time, is unable to find a fixed locus of commitment in the enduring present, and so is forced to vacillate continually between future and past, anticipation and memory.

Beneath the sharp oscillations of time and desire, however, there runs through the play a deeper, longer undercurrent of time, one which in its furthest extension into the past begins with the first Caesar and culminates in the triumph of the second. What might be called the memory of the play goes back to Caesar's murder and Philippi, the events which lie behind the Triumvirate and the political conflicts of the present, and to Cleopatra's old love affairs, which cast such an ambiguous light on her relationship with Antony. From the audience's viewpoint the future of the play, since it belongs to the historical past, is already set, predetermined. Caesar's pronouncements about “destiny” (III.vi.84-85) and the coming “time of universal peace” (IV.vi.5-7) are therefore to be taken literally as indications of the shape of things to come. Yet the more emphatic intimations of the future have to do not with Caesar's triumph and the reunification of the Empire but, understandably enough, with the downfalls of the two protagonists, their destinies being dramatically the more important. The Soothsayer is introduced at two points, once to foretell the doom of Cleopatra (I.ii), and once (II.iii) to warn Antony that he will lose in any competition with Caesar simply because Caesar is more fortunate, because time and the stars are working in his favor. The ominous music of Act IV, scene iii, which carries the implication that Antony's ancestor and guardian spirit, Hercules, has deserted him on the eve of the decisive battle, suggests obscurely but potently that supernatural processes are involved in Antony's downfall. The following scenes, covering Antony's preparation for battle and initial victory, are marked by an uncustomary retardation of pace, a momentary suspension of the onward rush of time which permits a slower, more ceremonious showing forth of the hero's final acts of generosity and prowess; as though here, just before the foredoomed end, he were once more returning to the Antony of old. The final outcome of the battle is anticipated in the ominous reports of the Egyptian augurers (IV.xii.3-6). One effect of these foreshadowings is to indicate that the protagonists are opposed by time not only because they are forced to cope with the continually shifting demands of the present, but also, in a deeper sense, because their downfalls are implicated in the evolving, preestablished plan of history. But it is largely through their resistance to this plan and their ultimate transcendence of it that they gain a tragic supremacy, moving into the timeless dimensions of “their story” (V.ii.359).

All these factors together produce the impression that time in this play is, except for Caesar, an unsalutary force, a medium against which rather than through which man must work to achieve his highest aims. Nevertheless, it is not invested with the same destructive potency it has in other Shakespeare plays and the Sonnets. It is envisioned neither as the implacable enemy of youth, beauty, and sensuous delight (the hero and heroine may be well on in years but they do not complain of it), nor as the “monster of ingratitude” which ruthlessly assigns all human worth and achievement to oblivion (Antony's former triumphs are vividly remembered). Nor does the play include the dilemma suffered by several of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, that of experiencing time as nothing but a painful monotony, without direction or purpose, merely sifting away into dust and nothingness. Such does it become at various moments for Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, but here no character is driven to the point of seeing all human activity as meaningless: there is always at least the possibility of a Roman death. Conversely, time in Antony also lacks the positive, beneficent connotations that it has for those Shakespearian characters, mainly heroines, who learn to respond to it with a patient fortitude or “readiness”. To Cordelia, Imogen, and, eventually, Hamlet, patience signifies a recognition that time, because it is under providential governance, ultimately heals and restores; but to Cleopatra patience is “sottish”. While Caesar's vision of the evolving Empire does imply a kind of providential design, Caesar himself is hardly presented as the faithful and benevolent agent of higher powers.

If the world of the play is generally dominated by a heightened sense of temporal change, among the major characters sharply differing responses to this condition may be distinguished. It is in this area that time takes on a more refined, elusive significance, for here it becomes closely associated with the particular modes of expression and conduct created for each character. The subject may only be properly examined if first another, related element in the play is taken into account. This is the persistent emphasis given to the public images of Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra. One of the accepted conditions of their milieu is that their essential worth is determined not by those hidden qualities which in a Christian context are visible only to the all-seeing eye of God, but rather by the way they appear outwardly to the world. The implied metaphor for this is that of the stage: the rulers of the earth, emperors and queens, are obliged to perform their roles before the world's audience in such a way as to imitate the established qualities of greatness. Honor, reverence, and loyalty are apportioned according to the success of their performance. In this the play illustrates the “high mimetic” mode attributed by Northrop Frye to Renaissance literature, insofar as the central theme of this mode is that of “cynosure or centripetal gaze, which … seems to have something about it of the court gazing upon its sovereign, the court-room gazing upon the orator, or the audience gazing upon the actor.”² Appropriately, when Cleopatra displayed herself on the Cydnus, the very air would, but for a vacuum, have gone to “gaze” on her too (II.ii.218); and Antony, resolving to join Cleopatra beyond the grave, envisions their ultimate bliss as being “gazed” upon by so many ghosts that Dido and Aeneas will want admirers (IV.xiv.52). Other expressions which often recur are those of seeing, showing, and acting. Soon after the play begins the audience is pointedly enjoined to observe the queen and her paramour: “Look where they come: Take but good note, and you shall see …” (I.i.10-11). Antony prepares for his death by asking Eros whether he would “see” him in the shameful posture of captivity (IV.xiv.72-77); Cleopatra for hers by commanding Charmian and Iras: “Show me, my women, like a queen” (V.ii.226). The play ends with Caesar's announcement: “Our army shall In solemn show attend this funeral …” (V.ii.361-362).

One result of this emphasis on the public image is that revelations of inner experience are held to a minimum, receiving decidedly less attention than they do in Shakespeare's earlier tragedies. As acutely conscious as they are of how they appear to others, the characters show relatively little awareness of the private, isolated self. Caesar is never alone to soliloquize; indeed, only twice does he display a spontaneous attitude undetermined by calculated impression or political expedience—when he praises Antony for his Spartan demeanor during the retreat from Modena, and when he laments Antony's death. With Cleopatra there is no clear distinction between private and public attitude. All her moods and utterances are—not necessarily in a pejorative sense—theatrical. When more important personages are unavailable, she uses her retainers as an everpresent audience whose main function is to witness and appreciate. Antony does soliloquize—six times; but only one of his soliloquies, the first, in which he registers the impact of Fulvia's death, shows the kind of analytic self-awareness which follows upon abrupt disillusionment or reversal of expectation. The others are as though spoken to an audience which does not happen to be present at the moment. The one character whose private experience becomes in the end of paramount significance is Enobarbus. Through his disloyalty he dissociates himself from a human audience, from anyone like the Roman staff officers with whom he can share an immediate camaraderie and mutual respect. Hence he is forced to suffer his agony of self-reproach in isolation, having only the moon to call upon as witness to his guilt and repentance.

The kinds of public image the characters strive to create or preserve in the face of universal mutability is closely related to their sense of time; and both public image and sense of time are bound up with the implicit moral valuation Shakespeare places on each of them. While within the dominant time sense of each character there are obvious fluctuations, generally it may be said that for Caesar the most meaningful aspect of time is the future; for Antony, the past; for Cleopatra, the present.

For Caesar time in its broader movement is progressive, pointing ahead to the final goal of “universal landlordship”. Not that he clearly envisions this goal from the start; rather it emerges gradually as he recognizes and seizes upon the opportunities which time engenders. His progress is facilitated by an acute time-consciousness which appears both in the frequency with which the word “time” itself occurs in his discourse—more often than in any other character's—and in his aversion to wasting time in the pleasures of the moment. In his first scene he complains of Antony's “confounding the time” in Alexandria (I.iv.28), emphasizing the latter's flagrant violation of the normal diurnal routine through his wasting “The lamps of night in revel” and reeling about “the streets at noon” (I.iv.5, 20). During the debauched symposium on Pompey's galley Caesar refuses to be “a child o' th' time”, claiming that “our graver business Frowns at this levity” (II.vii.119-120). When it comes to military and political tactics, he knows the value of an efficient spy system (“I have eyes upon him, And his affairs come to me on the wind”, III.vi.62-63) and can dispense with the advice of his subordinates because he has already anticipated what has to be done and has done it (“'Tis done already, and the messenger gone”, III.vi.31). Caesar's efficiency is supported by another attitude, an unillusioned acceptance of the slipperiness of human desire. Since he regards human nature, especially the feminine part of it (III.xii.29-31), as gullible and unsteadfast, he is never caught off balance by betrayed expectations. Hence he is unsurprised by the Roman people's flocking to the support of Pompey, experience having led him to expect as much. When the jilted Octavia returns from Athens—already the victim of her brother's practice of subordinating personal feeling to policy—he offers her the consolation that it is no use regretting things that could not have happened otherwise:

                                                                                                    Cheer your heart:
Be you untroubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way.

(III.vi.81-85)

The public image Caesar consistently tries to present is that of the just, conscientious ruler. Already in his opening words he is showing Lepidus how fair-minded he can be about Antony, and whenever he takes action against an opponent he carefully provides self-exonerating reasons, as though his action were provoked. Greeting Octavia, he is disturbed that her unexpected arrival has prevented the “ostentation” of his love, “which, left unshown, Is often left unloved” (III.vi.50-53). After defeating Antony he proposes to “show” his officers how reluctant he was to make war against him (V.i.73-77). His dealings with Cleopatra amount to an elaborate exercise in letting “the world see His nobleness well acted” (V.ii.44-45). In these deliberately theatrical gestures Caesar is observing the Machiavellian principle that the ruler should strive always to appear, not necessarily be, just and virtuous. For all his talk of bonds, oaths, and justice, in the course of the play he deceives, or tries to deceive, every other character of political consequence: Pompey, Lepidus, Antony, and Cleopatra. His public image therefore seems unrelated to any consistent personal ideal. Owing to his concentration on the future he neither commits himself to anything beyond the “strong necessities” of his program nor inspires genuine commitment in return. Only twice, as we have seen, does he avert his attention from the future and indulge in retrospection, on both occasions eulogizing Antony. Politically speaking, Shakespeare no doubt means to suggest that the consolidation of the Empire under one ruler and the resulting “universal peace” are desirable achievements, insofar as they reestablish the order which was disrupted by the murder of Julius Caesar. But in terms of the deeper moral values asserted in the play—in Enobarbus' observations on loyalty, for instance (III.xiii.43-46)—Caesar gains his success at the expense of an unedifying compromise with the ways of the world. By regarding time as instrumental, solely in its aspect of emergent opportunity, he himself becomes, in a sense, time's instrument.

Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will.

(V.ii.3-4)

Antony plainly lacks Caesar's facility for adapting himself to the changing demands of time. Much of his behavior is characterized by a persistent strain. He is rarely able to meet with ease and assurance the circumstances confronting him. His shifts in strategy and allegiance arise not like Caesar's from clear-sighted calculation, but rather from sudden, unreflective impulse—in Enobarbus' terms, not from judgment but from will. Beginning with his revulsion from the “present pleasure” and quick retreat from Egypt, the strain, the radical fluctuations of temper, continue, except for rare interludes of equilibrium, until he is told of Cleopatra's death. Then, at the line

Unarm, Eros. The long day's task is done,
And we must sleep,

(IV.xiv.35-36)

there is a sudden loosening, a grateful relinquishment of effort. Now that “All length is torture” (IV.xiv.46), death appears to Antony as a welcome liberation.

The source of the strain seems to be a self-dividedness in Antony which goes deeper than the surface conflict between Love and Honor, Egypt and Rome. At several points the name Antony (“That magical name of war”) is invoked both by himself and others in almost incantational fashion, as though it signified a fixed concept of Antony; and this concept, or “true” self, is often seen as dangerously contradicted by the visible Antony. This appears at the outset of the play in Philo's contrast between what Antony was and what he has become, and again at the end of the first scene:

Sir, sometimes when he is not Antony
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.

(I.i.57-59)

What propels Antony back to Rome is his fear of “losing himself” in dotage (I.ii.113), and once there he admits to Caesar that in Alexandria “poisoned hours had bound me up From mine own knowledge” (II.ii.90-91). To Octavia he declares: “If I lose mine honor, I lose myself” (III.iv.22-23). After Actium, a battle he would have won had he “Been what he knew himself” (III.x.27), he is bitterly conscious of self-betrayal:

I have fled myself. …
My very hairs do mutiny: for the white
Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them
For fear and doting.
                                                                                                              Let that be left
Which leaves itself.

(III.xi.7, 13-15, 19-20)

In the throes of defeat, Antony viciously reasserts his authority by having Thidias whipped (“I am Antony yet”, III.xiii.92-93) and by sending an angry message to Caesar:

                                                                                                                        For he seems
Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am,
Not what he knew I was.

(III.xiii.141-143)

Fully aware of Antony's self-conflict, Caesar exploits it by arranging the final battle in such a way “That Antony may seem to spend his fury Upon himself” (IV.vi.10-11).

Unmistakable emphasis is given, then, to a cleavage in Antony which can be expressed in temporal terms, a cleavage between what he is in the present and what he has been in the past, prior to the time of the play. Since most of his efforts are directed toward perpetuating or revivifying his self-image against the constant threat of temporal change, his vision of time is essentially retrospective. The past he tries to preserve is not the kind which is recreated through active personal reminiscence (Antony himself actually does very little recalling of former exploits, only doing so when chafing under the shame of losing a battle to the “boy” Octavius); rather it is the kind which is enshrined in the public memory as an image of incomparable greatness. And this image is based, in turn, not on the discreet political virtues cultivated by Caesar, but on those qualities of military prowess and munificence which inspire intense awe and devotion in the observer. Caesar's relationships with others are contractual, regulated by bonds and oaths; Antony's, on the other hand, are at their best chivalric, based on close personal commitment between leader and follower. Hence Antony's efforts to perpetuate his image, to “be himself”, are closely linked with his ability to command the loyalty of his devotees, Cleopatra before all others. Their loyalty is the mirror in which he sees his greatness reflected.

Many of Antony's movements in the play result, then, from his impulsive attempts to retrieve that eminence which he regards as virtually synonymous with his being. Such is the reason for his hasty return to Rome, and again for his return to Egypt. During the prolonged process of his downfall, however, there is one sequence of scenes in which he momentarily conquers his characteristic oscillations of attitude and succeeds in becoming one with his image, in making it authentically present. These are the scenes just before and during the final battle which, as noted earlier, show a marked retardation in the usual accelerated pace of the action (IV.iv-v, vii-viii). No longer obsessed with the undeserved prosperity of the younger, luckier Caesar, Antony does not resort to the desperate bravado of challenging him to single combat, but instead, feeling the morning imbued with the “spirit of youth”, regards the coming battle with buoyant anticipation. With uncommon humility he acknowledges his past errors of strategy and assumes some of the blame for Enobarbus' defection. Towards Cleopatra and his followers he displays a spirited comradeship, showing no anxiety over the fidelity of the one, and freely praising the others for their deeds with none of that finicky concern for his own honor earlier ascribed to him by Ventidius. His speech is filled with the terms and attitudes of chivalry (“our gests”, “this great fairy”, “promises royal peril”, IV.xiii. 2, 12, 35), as though for him the battle were purely a matter of old-style heroism, uncontaminated by Caesarian Realpolitik. Antony's momentary triumph in the dual role of lover and warrior makes this the one point in the play, as Knight observes,³ where the two hitherto antagonistic values of Love and War converge and support one another.

But the scenes are already ironically undercut by the premonitions of doom conveyed through the mysterious music just preceding. The battle lost, Antony is thrust once again into his quandary of self-division by what he supposes to be the betrayal of Cleopatra and the thousands she draws after her. Owing to the “discandying” of their loyalty, he feels that his image has become as illusory as the evanescent forms of clouds at sunset: “here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape …” (IV.xiv.13-14). Upon recovering himself in response to Cleopatra's supposed suicide, Antony looks upon death at first with joyful anticipation, as a means of escaping the entanglements of temporal existence into a realm of idyllic freedom, where he and Cleopatra will be the sole objects of “gazing” admiration (IV.xiv.44-54). But when he is actually dying and learns that Cleopatra is not waiting to meet him in the Elysian Fields, this attitude gives way to another: he comes to look upon death instead in its aspect of finality, as a means of fixing unalterably the “visible shape” he will hold in memory. Although Eros, his soldiers, and Cleopatra show that their devotion is as firm as ever, his main satisfaction is that in his suicide he has performed an entirely autonomous act of honor, “conquering” that self which had proved so difficult to hold intact at the latter end of his career.

Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony's hath triumphed on itself.

(IV.xv.14-15)

As Antony approaches his end, the falling rhythms of his lines betray an enervation not merely physical but spiritual, a final loosening of the strain. The kiss he begs of Cleopatra is not the prelude to future voluptuousness beyond the grave—he assumes she will live after him—but simply the “poor last”. At the end he makes a final effort to fix himself in the memory of his audience, directing their attention away from the ignominious present to the resplendent past:

The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes,
Wherein I lived the greatest prince o' th' world,
The noblest. …

(IV.xv.51-55)

After Antony's death, the task of perpetuating his image falls to Cleopatra and her volatile imagination, fired into intense activity by her devotion. Through the imagery of her lamentation (IV.xv.59-68) he becomes the world's central symbol of excellence whose absence makes the world no longer worth abiding in. Cleopatra's “dream” of Antony (V.ii.76-92) magnifies the image even further: it virtually deifies him, assimilating him to the larger controlling processes of nature—the spheres, seasons, and elements—so that like them he appears permanent and inexhaustible, above mortal limitation. Thus if the living Antony must forever struggle to preserve his image against the pressures of time, once he is bodily removed from the scene his image is liberated into a visionary realm where “fancy outworks nature” and those pressures no longer prevail.

The significance of time for Cleopatra is not quite so easy to decide as it is for Caesar and Antony, her attitudes being more rapid and mutable, more imbued with “variety”, than theirs. Much of the ambiguity about her, reflected in the widely differing views of her offered by modern criticism, arises from Shakespeare's deliberate failure to distinguish clearly between what she really feels and what she merely pretends. To those who judge her with the sobriety of a Caesar, nearly all her actions are tainted with coquetry or self-interest until she resolves, or rather carries out her resolution, to die for Antony. But perhaps the kind of “truth” implied in such a judgment, a kind exemplified by the “holy, cold, and still” Octavia, is not one that can be meaningfully applied to Cleopatra. She eludes the sharp distinction between sincerity and pretense because her nature is intrinsically histrionic. It is impossible to conceive her as having an unobserved existence, apart from an audience. At every moment she forces her onlookers to recognize and appreciate the fact of her being. If she is not indulging in such more obvious forms of play-acting as dressing up as Isis, wearing Antony's sword Philippan, or wandering the streets of Alexandria in disguise, then she is testing her power to captivate on a Thidias, Dolabella, or Caesar. She is morally naive in the sense that she is incapable of regretting what she has done in the past or of disciplining her desires in the present. She regards all her moods and impulses as equally valid, equally worthy of revelation:

Whom every thing becomes—to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.

(I.i.49-51)

This means in effect that time for Cleopatra is not a rationally demarcated sequence of past, present, and future, but consists of a flexible, continuous present. Since every moment offers an opportunity for self-disclosure, then every moment has its own particular authority. From the efficient Roman viewpoint Cleopatra is a creature of “idleness” for whom time means nothing in a moral or practical sense; but actually her kind of idleness involves a full emotional commitment quite incompatible with mere sensual indulgence. As she tells the unsympathetic Antony:

                                                            'Tis sweating labor
To bear such idleness so near the heart
As Cleopatra this.

(I.iii.93-95)

Her idleness also involves an incessant imaginative activity which carries her freely beyond the immediate here and now, enriching even the “great gap of time” when she has nothing to do but wait passively for Antony. In his absence, her thoughts reach out to him in the present moment:

Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?

(I.v.19-20)

Then comes a quick movement of empathy:

O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!

(I.v.23)

Cleopatra's “freer thoughts” proceed to dwell appreciatively on her irrepressible seductive powers, and in so doing move into the past:

                                                                                Now I feed myself
With most delicious poison. Think on me,
That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black
And wrinkled deep in time. Broad-fronted Caesar,
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch; and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow;
There would he anchor his aspect, and die
With looking on his life.

(I.v.26-34)

However dark and wrinkled she may be, “age cannot wither her”. Time has a ripening effect on Cleopatra, bringing her to a plenitude of vitality through the sun's gradual action. She prides herself not only on having fascinated the great ones of the earth but also on having outlived them: they pass on but she endures. So strong in her is the sense of vital continuity that she can hardly be imagined as ever having been essentially different from what she is—as once having been “green in judgment, cold in blood” (I.v.74). When she refers to her “salad days” she is sharing a joke with Charmian.

The paradoxical linking of life and death at the end of the last quotation suggests that extensive range of images with which Cleopatra is associated throughout the play—images, such as those of the ebb and flow of the Nile, having to do with the cyclical processes of nature, the endless round of growth and decay; also with the two kinds of “death”—mortal and erotic—represented ambiguously in Cleopatra's “celerity in dying” (I.ii.141) and the immortal worm that “kills and pains not” (V.ii.244). These oxymora recur so often that they seem inseparable from Cleopatra and her milieu. As her barge floats rhythmically on the waters of the Cydnus (not cutting through them purposefully like the ships of Pompey and Caesar), she holds her gazers rapt, simultaneously raising and allaying appetite, making “hungry Where most she satisfies” (II.ii.238-239). Again in Enobarbus' description: “she did make defect perfection And, breathless, pow'r breathe forth” (II.ii.232-233). Cleopatra is further identified with the animating forces of nature through her association with Isis, and her declaration to Antony that if she is ever “cold-hearted”, then not only she but also the “memory” of her womb and her “brave Egyptians all” will perish (III.xiii.158-167). The import of these images is that Cleopatra inhabits a sphere where time is natural rather than historical, where instead of moving in linear progression as it does for Caesar, or with perilous unpredictability as it does for Antony, it forever undulates through the mingled revolutions of depletion and renewal, life and death.

As Cleopatra prepares for her own death she does not undergo complete regeneration so much as a refinement of qualities she has shown all along, a sublimation into “fire and air” (V.ii.288). This can be expressed as a movement from a present rather haphazard in its fluctuations to one which through ceremonious deliberateness gains a definitive clarity, or “shackles accidents and bolts up change” (V.i.6). Her actions are more consciously histrionic than before, partly stemming as they do from her desire to “show” herself in the posture of invincible queenliness so as to escape the unthinkable fate of being exhibited to the shouting hoi polloi of Rome. But the image she creates, in contrast to the exhausted finality of Antony's dying gestures, fully preserves her sense of vital continuity. Death to her means “liberty” (V.ii.237), a chance to rejoin Antony in all the triumphant splendor of their first meeting on the Cyndus. She hastens towards it with the impatience of “immortal longings” (V.ii.280), and the commands she gives are crisp and energetic:

Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call: I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act.

(V.ii.282-284)

The closer to death Cleopatra draws, the more actively her histrionic imagination works as she rehearses in rapid succession the multiple roles of queen, wife, mistress, cunning victor over Caesar, and nursing mother. The quick change of mood in her final lines, from swooning rapture to alert impatience, shows her “variety” undampened to the end. Even in death she sustains the impression of a vitality not extinguished but merely dormant:

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

(V.ii.344-346)

In the end, the realm of disordered and directionless time, the realm under the sway of the “false huswife Fortune”, is met and overcome in two sharply opposed ways. Caesar has gained his grand objective: the “three-nooked world” is at peace. The confidence with which he wears his new hegemony appears in his refusal to be annoyed by the deception worked on him by his prize captive. If he is aware of having been made an “ass Unpolicied”, he does not show it. Unimpeded in his forward progress, he is looking ahead once again in his next to last words: “And then to Rome”—words which even in their parenthetical brevity evoke the coming Augustan grandeur. But Caesar also pauses to commemorate in choric fashion the “story” of his two opponents, and it is this story which dramatically represents the more impressive and enduring victory. Through his dedication to an impersonal historical destiny, his concentration on the possibilities of the future, Caesar, as we have seen, suffers an impoverishment of self, an inability to regard any impractical activity as more than a wasteful indulgence or “confounding” of time. Antony's obsession with a static image of former greatness leads to another kind of self-dislocation, an inability to exist fully and consistently in the present. His is necessarily a post-mortem success, achieved through the releasing of his image from the complexities of time into uninhibited fantasy. The “story” of the play, its final dramatic impact, therefore, depends on Cleopatra. Her last scene is tragic in an especially exalted sense because more than any other figure in Shakespeare she consciously and ceremoniously fashions the style of her death. She treats it as a kind of inspired play—play in the sense of free histrionic activity and the full enjoyment of one's faculties in the present, without a deflection of energy into either the recapturing of the past or the conquering of the future. She demonstrates the paradox familiar in modern psychoanalytic literature, that to live fully one must accept the actuality of death, be able to die with “celerity”. In her readiness to “play till doomsday” she asserts the supremacy of being over becoming, and illuminates the meaning of one of the key Shakespearian terms: “ripeness”.

Notes

1. The Imperial Theme (London, 1931), p. 275.

2. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), p. 58.

3. The Imperial Theme, pp. 280, 305-306.