Philippa Berry
(King's College, Cambridge)
"Forgetting Egypt: oblivion and anamnesis in Antony and Cleopatra"
I
Antony and Cleopatra is unusual in being the only English Renaissance
play to be set in ancient Egypt; but although Shakespeare's choice
of historical and geographical setting must have been regarded
as quite exceptional - and even somewhat strange - by his contemporaries,
it enabled him to attempt the dramatic exploration of a set of
concerns that were fundamental to the entire culture of the Renaissance.
For in its forward-looking aspiration to birth a new idea of the
human, Renaissance humanism also looked backwards, defined a highly
complex act of cultural anamnesis - or recollection - as the crucial
starting point, the foundation, of its scholarly and philosophical
project. A text which exemplifies this divided historical focus
very well, and which was published in 1605, the year that Antony
and Cleopatra may first have been performed, was Sir Francis Bacon's
Advancement of Learning. In The Advancement, Bacon compliments
James I of England and VI of Scotland on the centrality accorded
to memory in his kingly intellect, and he identifies the Platonic
model of recollection, anamnesis, as integral to the humanist
goal of a quasi-divine expansion of human intelligence:
your Majesty were the best instance to make a man of Plato's opinion,
that all knowledge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man
by nature knoweth all things, and hath but her own native and
original notions (which by the strangeness and darkness of this
tabernacle of the body are sequestered) again revived and restored
....
The model of knowledge which is alluded to by Bacon in this passage
was derived from diverse classical sources, including several
Platonic texts, and most notably from Plato's Meno, a dialogue
already known in the middle ages. In the Meno Socrates, having
only just admitted the weakness of his short-term memory, expounds
the significance of learning as anamnesis by relating it to the
Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation:
Seeing then that the soul is immortal and has been born many times,
and has beheld all things both in this world and in the nether
realms, she has acquired knowledge of all and everything, so that
it is no wonder that she should be able to recollect all that
she knew before about virtue and other things. For as all nature
is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no reason
why we should not, by remembering but one single thing - an act
which men call learning - discover everything else, if we have
courage and faint not in the search; since, it would seem, research
and learning are wholly recollection. (my emphases)
The striking assumption shared by both these passages is that
the past - and memory in particular - is a vital key to the future.
This was an attitude that was central to the epoch of the Renaissance,
since the age saw itself as implicitly mimetic, or commemorative,
of the culture(s) of classical antiquity, which it claimed to
be renewing or rebirthing. But in its aspiration to recreate the
achievements of ancient cultures, the Renaissance did not only
look backwards in time. It was also looking forwards, towards
an emergent 'modern' era in which this multi-faceted remembering
of past cultures could significantly advance knowledge (hence
the title of Bacon's work), and so enable the world to be significantly
changed, whether by science, reason or faith. What Renaissance
thinkers thereby anticipated, in many diverse ways, was the same
'new heaven, new earth' that the heroic lovers of Shakespeare's
play are attempting to 'find out' in relation to their rule-breaking
model of love. And indeed, the complex model of temporality that
informs Shakespeare's tragedy echoes this double vision of the
Renaissance, as an era which looked both backwards and forwards.
For like the double-aspected, Janus-like image of Antony that
is evoked by Cleopatra, when she exclaims that 'Though he be painted
one way like a Gorgon,/ The other way's a Mars' (2.5.117-8), this
play looks as it were in two directions at once, in its subtle
implication that the attempt to reimagine, or re-member, the past
can assist the redefinition of the future.
There is a seeming paradox in Socrates' remarks to Meno; this
is that the memory of 'but one single thing' can lead to a full
recollection, not of individual knowledge, but instead of 'the
truth of all things that are' (86B). By the late Renaissance,
this paradox had become central to the famous art or arts of memory.
First developed for specifically rhetorical purposes in the late
classical period, to enable orators to memorize the different
parts of a complex speech by the association of these parts with
different images, the art of memory was reformulated in the sixteenth
century bring it more closely into line with the Platonic notion
of soul-memory and its esoteric implications. This redefinition
of the arts of memory was most famously undertaken by the heretical
philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was living and publishing in England
for several years in the 1580s. And it was in Bruno's thought
that the centrality of the idea of Egypt to the Renaissance project
of cultural renewal was made explicit. Thus in De magia, written
around 1590, Bruno notes as follows:
...the sacred letters used among the Egyptians were called hieroglyphs
... which were images ... taken from the things of nature, or
their parts. By using such writings and voices [voces] the Egyptians
used to capture with marvellous skill the language of the gods.
Afterwards when letters of the kind which we use now were invented
by Theuth [the Egyptian god Thoth, equated with the Roman Mercury]
or some other, this brought about a great rift both in memory
and in the divine and magical sciences.
Some years earlier, in his Spaccio della bestia trionfante or
The Expulsion of the Triumpahnt Beast (published in England in
1584 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney) Bruno had referred in
more detail to the wisdom of the Egyptians ('which is lost', he
lamented) as 'natura est deus in rebus', or the worship of God
'in all things'. Bruno observes that 'For as the divinity descends
in a certain manner inasmuch as it communicates itself to nature,
so there is an ascent made to the divinity through nature'; this
ascent to divinity through nature, instead, as Christianity implicitly
taught, of an ascent to god that was in many respects hostile
or opposed to nature, was equated by Bruno with the secrets of
the Egyptian religion, in which a pantheon of gods had been worshipped
in the forms of beasts, plants and even stones. Here divinity
was 'seen in things said to be most abject' (such as beasts) because
'everything ... has ... Divinity latent within itself'. It was
visual images associated with divinity, such as those of the Egyptians
gods in their diverse forms, which were central to Bruno's art
of memory. And in his numerous memory treatises, all written between
1582 and 1591, Bruno's quasi-magical aim was to use numerous,
carefully ordered and positioned images of 'things' as mnemonic
devices so that, ultimately, the possessor of this system could
transcend temporal limitations and 'reflect the whole universe
of nature and of man in his mind'.
The memory images described by Bruno were typically astrological
and mythological. In his introduction to a late work on the art
of memory, his Lampas triginata statuarum (Torch of the Thirty
Statues), c. 1588, Bruno claims to be reviving a practice of great
antiquity, namely
the use and form of ancient philosophies and of the earliest theologians
who used not so much to veil the arcana of nature in types and
similitudes as to declare and explain them digested in a series
and more easily accomodated to memory. We easily retain a sensible,
visible, imaginable statue [an image of a mythological figure,
usually a deity], we commend easily to the work of memory fabulous
fictions; therefore (through them) we shall be able without difficulty
to consider and retain mysteries, doctrines, and disciplinary
intentions...
In all versions of the art of memory, it was vital that these
mental images of the things one wished to remember were organised
according to a (usually intricate) spatial scheme. Cicero observed
of the putative inventor of the classical art of memory, one Simonides,
that
He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty [of memory]
must select places and form mental images of the things they wish
to remember and store those images in the places, so that the
order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and
the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and
we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing
tablet and the letters written on it.
The recommendation of many rhetoricians, such as Quintilian, was
that the places selected as memory-stores should be familiar,
such as the rooms of an empty house; however, several contributors
to the art of memory approved of the use of imaginative or exotic
'places', albeit of compact and definite scope. It is this particular
connection that was central to the art of memory, namely, that
between imagined place on the one hand and memory-storage and
retrieval on the other, that I want to emphasise here, before
turning to consider, in the next part of my paper, the specific
relevance of this complex memorial preoccupation to Shakespeare's
in the archaic cultural location of ancient Egypt. For in that
pervasive concern with cultural recollection of which the art
of memory was a distinctive emblem, the Renaissance was attempting
to recover not only the 'native and original notions' of the classical
mind but also particular geographical sites of cultural origin.
The material cultural legacy of classical sites such as Rome or
Athens had necessarily been eroded, if not wholly effaced, by
temporal decay, yet in their repeated evocation by Renaissance
writers and artists such locations effectively functioned as enlarged
versions of the memorised place-systems (loci) that were fundamental
to the art of memory. It was these geographical yet also historically
distant loci that provided the spatial structure or map within
which the Renaissance passion for cultural recollection was both
strengthened and expanded. And Ancient Egypt was just such a memory-site
for Renaissance thinkers: especially potent, yet also especially
ambivalent, because of its much greater antiquity than either
Greece or Rome. Several factors contributed to this especial status
of Egypt in the Renaissance. They included the supposedly Egyptian
origin of the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, venerated by Renaissance
Neoplatonists, and also the growing interest of emblem-collectors
in Egyptian hieroglyphics. In late Renaissance England, the first
two books of Herodotus' Histories, which were much concerned with
Egypt's customs and antiquity, were translated into English in
1584; Pliny's Natural History, with its allusions to Egypt's 'boast
and glorie antiquitie', followed in 1601; while Plutarch's retelling
of the chief Egyptian myth in his De Iside et Osiride appeared
in Philemon Holland's translation of The Morals in 1603. In his
introduction to this text, Holland observes that:
The wisedome and learning of the Aegyptians hath bene much recommended
unto us by ancient writers, and not without good cause; considering
that Aegypt hath bene the source and fountaine from whence have
flowed into the world arts and liberall sciences, as a man may
gather by the testimony of the first Poets and philosophers that
ever were. But time, which consumeth all things, hath bereft us
of the knowledge of such wisdome: or if there remaine still with
us any thing at all, it is but in fragments and peeces scattered
heere and there.
These newly available translations of key classical texts, together
with other cultural and political factors, suggest that Egypt
enjoyed an especial memorial significance in early Jacobean England.
And a process of national anamnesis or memory-retrieval certainly
had an especial topicality in England between 1605 and 1606, the
time at which Shakespeare was not only composing Antony and Cleopatra,
but was also writing his 'British' and 'Scottish' plays, Lear
and Macbeth. This was a time when the renewal or 'union' of the
British state was high on the political agenda, and when even
Egypt was being considered as a possible site of origin for a
Scottish - or British - racial identity.
II
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is deeply embedded in this
multifaceted memorial preoccupation with Egypt. And in particular,
the play implies that Cleopatra's Egypt enjoys an especially subtle
relationship to remembrance, since it is here that the personal
or individual memories that are either expressed by or associated
with Antony and Cleopatra are assimilated into a framework not
simply of historical, but also of cosmic or superhuman significance.
The chief mnemonic devices employed by
the play are of course the lovers themselves, whose 'remarkable'
and 'wonderful' difference from ordinary humanity is repeatedly
stressed, and whose very deficiencies and errors are invested
with an exemplary, more-than-human significance. For Quintilian
had observed that the extraordinary was a crucial aid to memory:
When we see in everydaylife things that are petty, ordinary, and
banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is
not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see
or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual,
great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember
for a long time.
So Enobarbus, speaking of the bizarre occasion when Cleopatra
hopped 'forty paces through the public street', declares that
even then 'she did make defect perfection,/ And breathless, power
breathe forth' (2.2.236-9). This vividly eroticised, yet also
strikingly human, approach to the mysterious subject of Egypt
seems notably irreverent - indeed almost comical at times. But
by this mingling of reverence with mockery, Shakespeare effects
a subtle expansion - and redefinition - of the very idea of memory
as a process of knowledge recovery.
In Act I, Cleopatra declares of Antony that 'his remembrance lay/
In Egypt with his joy' (1.5.57-8): half a line later, she apostrophizes
Antony as 'O heavenly mingle!' Like Antony himself, the double-aspected
Gorgon-Mars, his 'joy' seems to be ambiguous in meaning; it too,
by implication, is a mingled state. For on the one hand, the association
of this affinity between Antony's 'joy' and his 'remembrance'
with the word 'lay' defines Antony's desire, as we would expect,
as a state of sexual bliss or jouissance, in which is closely
allied to erotic pleasure. But on the other hand, the word 'joy'
was often used in 16th century translations of the Bible and other
religious writings to evoke the bliss of union with the divine,
and this association suggests that Antony's mingling of joy and
memory in Egypt has a spiritual as an erotic dimension. I am reading
Shakespeare's play, therefore, as a work whose reimagining of
Ancient Egypt suggests that, in this specific location, the affinity
between the pleasurable immediacy of 'joy' and remembrance - although
most obviously alluding to the erotic pleasure shared between
- or more specifically, remembered by the two lovers - this affinity
of joy with memory ultimately encompasses both meanings of 'joy'.
It is this uncanny , or otherworldly, aspect of the lovers' joy
that is finally evoked when the Clown wishes Cleopatra 'joy o'th'worm'.
Of course, the sensuous and sexual 'joy' of the lovers often appears
to have a closer connection with folly than with archaic wisdom,
and with forgetfulness rather than with memory (a point to which
I will return in my conclusion); yet Shakespeare could have found
support for a conception of Egyptian remembrance as encompassing
both erotic and mystical 'joy' in the texts of Herodotus and Plutarch.
Among various lewd Egyptian practices recorded by Herodotus, he
noted that to celebrate - or commemorate - the feast of Dionysus,
the Greek god whom they associated with Egyptian Osiris, the women
of Egypt carried in procession puppets made in the shape of phalluses.
And in Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride we are told that Isis, the
Egyptian mother-goddess, among her other attributes, 'is arbiter
in matters of sexual love' , and that Osiris, her divine consort,
has many other names - identities which accord him also a strong
identification with pleasure, passion and erotic love:
It is better [Plutarch tells us] to equate Osiris with Dionysus,
and Sarapis with Osiris, since the latter acquired this name when
he changed his nature ... Sarapis is the name of him who orders
the universe .... if the name Sarapis is indeed Egyptian, it denotes
joy and gladness .... Furthermore they [the Egyptians] everywhere
show an anthropomorphic statue of Osiris with erect phallus because
of his procreative and nourishing nature.
Later in the same text, referring to Hesiod's account of the creation
of the world, Plutarch suggests that 'we [can] assign the name
of Earth to Isis, that of Eros to Osiris'. These comments suggest
that the figurative link between Antony and Osiris, already noted
by some critics, creates a rich field of significance which we
may only superficially have explored as yet.
Yet although the famous lovers of Shakespeare's tragedy are depicted
as straddling the worlds of history and myth, they are gradually
forced by their tragedy to differentiate themselves from the increasingly
circumscribed historical identities that are attributed to them.
The tragedy begins, of course with Antony already identified as
the 'strumpet's fool' who is diverging from his historically memorable
role as 'plated Mars' and 'the triple pillar of the world'; its
plot will lead him inexorably to the point where he is figuratively
fighting against the memory of this Roman self, after Caesar has
instructed Agrippa to 'Plant those that have revolted [from Antony]
in the van,/ That Anthony may seem to spend his fury upon himself'
(4.6.8-10). Finally, just before his bungled suicide, it is only
through a suggestively different mode of memorial identification,
with his putative forebear, Hercules or Alcides, that Antony can
begin to understand his tragic fate - and his immediate future.
The 'ancestral' model of memory evoked here is mythic rather than
historical: 'teach me,/ Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage:/
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o'th'moon,/ And with those hands
that grasped the heaviest club,/ Subdue my worthiest self' (4.13.
43-7).
Thus as Antony's tragedy reaches its climax, for the painful loss
of personal meaning that is implied by the play to occur within
the context of historical memory is substituted, albeit just as
painfully, a more archaic and more mysterious level of meaning,
through the 'ancestral' and mythic system of anamnesis which Antony
associates with Hercules. At certain moments in the play, these
two levels of memory cohere; more often, however, they are implied
to be fundamentally incompatible. At the level of historical recollection,
Shakespeare's play uses Antony and Cleopatra to identify a crucial
episode in Western cultural memory - albeit one that was the immediate
future for their contemporaries. The tragedy reminds us repeatedly
that their fall coincides with the emergence of a decisive historical
epoch, and hence of a new temporal paradigm: 'the time of universal
peace' (4.6.4). This new time, proclaimed by Octavius just before
Antony's suicide, was to have a double aspect of both political
and religious change: 'universal peace' alludes explicitly to
the pax Romanus established by Octavius as Augustus Caesar (hence
it denotes the effective beginning of the Roman Empire), but the
phrase also anticipates the contemporary birth of Christianity.
Shakespeare's play clearly suggests that the fall of the lovers
who ruled much of the known world has a particular mnemonic function
in relation to the impending historical fusion of a new vision
of love (Christianity) with Roman political power. The play offers
proleptic anticipations of the nativity (in Cleopatra's death),
the last supper (in Antony's feasting of his men), the crucifixion
and the deposition from the cross (in Antony's ascent into the
monument and death surrounded by Cleopatra and her women), and
the repentance of Judas (in the death of Enobabus). But the more
significant consequence of this association of Antony and Cleopatra's
ends with an emergent epoch - or with historical beginnings -
is that the play also invites us to see the lovers themselves
as the last mnemonic traces of an earlier, and significantly different
age: one in which, just before the somewhat strange hybridisation
of Christianity with Roman culture, an individual yet exemplary
Roman was transformed by love. The play implies that in this soon-to-be-extinct
age, when a plurality of pagan gods and of pagan religious beliefs
was still preeminent, the gap between the human and the divine
sphere could still be bridged, by an erotic joy or bliss that
assisted more subtle forms of remembrance: mythological and initiatory
rather than historical.
In Act I, Cleopatra tells Antony that 'When you sued staying,/
Eternity was in our lips and eyes, / Bliss in our brows bent;
none our parts so poor,/ But was a race of heaven' (1.2.33-7).
And after his death she laments that 'This world did equal theirs
[the gods] / Till they had stol'n our jewel' (4.16.78-9). Using
a similar device to that commended by Giordano Bruno, the play
accords the two lovers a mnemonic function like that of Bruno's
statues of the gods or images of planetary powers, as it compares
Cleopatra and Antony to Venus and Mars (Roman planetary powers
as well as deities), to Isis, Hercules and also by implication,
to Osiris (alias Sarapis, Bacchus and Dionysus). Indeed, Herodotus
writes in his Histories that:
the Aegyptians first invented and used the surnames of the twelve
gods: which the Grecians borrowed and drew from them. The self
same were the first founders of Aulters, Images, and Temples to
the gods: by whom also chiefly were carved the pictures of beasts
and other creatures in stone. (70v).
Thus, in Enobarbus' memory of Cleopatra on Cydnus, where she is
remembered as 'Oe'rpicturing that Venus where we see/ The fancy
outwork nature', she is invested with a divine but also quasi-monumental
significance, one that, 'beggaring all description', is implied
to parallel wonders of the ancient world such as the pyramids.
A few scenes earlier, Enobarbus has countered Antony's wish that
he had never seen Cleopatra at all with an explicit comparison
of her to a quasi-touristic location - a recommended sight for
travellers; 'O sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece
of work, which not to have been blest withal, would have discredited
your travel' (1.2.152-4).
In the last scene of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare had identified
the fate of a younger pair of tragic lovers with the mnemonic
device of the two golden statues that their families propose to
erect in their memory; in Antony and Cleopatra, the ultimately
tragic restoration of the lovers' bond (when they are reunited
after Antony's marriage to Octavia) is imaged by their statuelike
enthronement 'I'th'market-place on a tribunal silvered,/...in
chairs of gold' (3.6.3-5). On this occasion, Cleopatra's statue-like
appearance is the most distinctive and strange: 'She/ In th'habiliments
of the goddess Isis/ That day appeared, and oft before gave audience,/
As 'tis reported, so' (3.6.16-9); and the statueesque effect is
confirmed at her death, when 'now from head to foot/ I am marble
constant' (5.2.239-40). Yet Cleopatra's posthumous memory-dream
of Antony is similarly statue-like, in her implied comparison
of the dead hero to the ancient wonder of the Colossus of Rhodes,
a gigantic statue of a man that straddled the harbour of the Greek
island:
I dreamt there was an Emperor Anthony -
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man!...
His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O o'th'earth...
His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres - and that to friends -
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't - an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like; they showed their back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and coronets; realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket. (5.2.76-92)
In this dramatic distortion of personal and historical memory,
Antony as an Osiris-like deity resembles an entire memory-system,
for within the frame created by his body a whole cosmos of meaning
is contained and organised by Cleopatra.
Dolabella's response to Cleopatra's dream-memory image, when she
asks him 'Think you there was, or might be such a man/ As this
I dreamt of?' (5.2.93-4), is incredulous. From a rational and
historical point of view, her 'Emperor Antony' is a poignant misremembering.
But paradoxically (although also appropriately, given the Renaissance
love of paradox), the mnemonic importance of Egyptian wisdom is
often signalled in this play by just such memorial distortions,
as its emphasis upon the forgetfulnesss of both self and state
that is attendant on the lovers' passion expands to encompass
the idea of oblivion or lethe. The implication here is that forgetfulness
functions in the play as an uncanny memorial boundary that, like
the underworld river of Lethe, has to be encountered and crossed
in order to recover or remember otherworldly knowledge. At one
level, the play's motif of lethe, or forgetting, can be read as
a subtle realignment of those powerful links between tragedy and
memory, or remembrance, that inform several Shakespeare's other
tragedies: these links are especially resonant in Hamlet and Macbeth.
In Antony and Cleopatra, however, the interrelationship of memory
with forgetting has a significance that extends well beyond the
emotional and moral sphere. For only in this play, among all of
Shakespeare's tragedies, are both memory and oblivion invested
with a quasi-mystical or esoteric function.
In a characteristically cryptic but highly suggestive formulation,
Jacques Derrida has remarked that 'At the origin there was the
ruin. At the origin the ruin happens, it is what happens first,
to the origin'. His words serve usefully to remind us, I think,
of that memorial loss or concealment which inevitably marks any
privileged site of beginning, but also of the subtle connection
between lethe as forgetfulness and primordial or archaic time.
Antony and Cleopatra are both implicitly and explicitly criticised
for the 'Leth'd dullness' which accompanies their passion. Chief
among these allusions, in a scene that vividly suggests the peculiar
interrelationship of soul-memory with forgetting, is the performance
of the Egyptian Bacchanals aboard Pompey's barge.
In Shakespeare's play, the erotic and sensual pleasures of Egypt
are represented as inspiring a 'Lethe'd dullness' whose interruption,
or 'proroguing', of the passage of historical time affects both
the 'libertine' Roman, Antony, and the Egyptian Cleopatra herself.
We are told that Antony's military responsibilities are 'prorogued'
by his excessive sleeping and 'feeding' in Alexandria, where his
brain 'fumes' with the strong effects of Egyptian liquor (2.1.20-27).
But at the same time Cleopatra experiences the mutability of their
love as inducing an exceptional or heightened effect of self-forgetfulness,
as she identifies not her realm of Egypt, but the fickle Antony
himself with 'oblivion': 'O my oblivion is a very Antony/ And
I am all forgotten. (1.3.91-2). Later in the same act, Cleopatra
will desire to drink a potion of the narcotic plant mandragora
'That I may sleep out this great gap of time/ My Antony is away.'
(1.5.5-6)
But the lovers' forgetfulness of their historical, temporal selves
- which is also, by implication, a forgetting of forward-moving
historical time - should not, I think, be read as unequivocally
negative in a play that is so suspicious of the limitations imposed
by the demands of historical memory. And in the scene on Pompey's
barge the peculiar interrelationship of this Egyptian 'Lethe'
with an archaic or 'antic' soul-memory is vividly suggested. It
is important to note not only is this scene positioned more or
less at the centre of the play, but also that only here is an
'Alexandrian feast' actually staged for us, Yet equally importantly,
we should remember that this is a mimesis of an Egyptian feast,
by a group of drunken Roman males, just as for most of the play
our changing image of Egypt is framed by the perceptions and memories
of different Roman commentators. By means of this device, the
play reminds us that the project of memory-retrieval is always
a work of interpretation, since cultural and racial differences
as well as the passage of time will always colour any attempt
at cultural recovery of the past. But in this doubly performative
context, where the drunken Romans briefly play at being Egyptians,
the 'Leth'd dullness' that is supposedly caused by such festive
indulgence assumes a ceremonial, indeed a paradoxically commemorative
function, as the forgetfulness of self which results from excess
of drink is accompanied by a ritual hymn and dance to Bacchus.
And since Bacchus was a name of Dionysus we can, I think, read
this scene as a deliberately Romanised version of a rite to Osiris.
Antony declares:
Come, let's all take hands
Till that the conquering wine hath steeped our sense
In soft and delicate Lethe. (2.7.105-7)
Caesar, of course, is sternly critical of the self-oblivion that
is produced by the dance as well as by the drink, and he eventually
exits, declaring that 'This wild disguise hath almost anticked
us all' (2.7.123-4). But his words additionally suggest that the
antic folly of this drunken obliviousness may actually involve
a momentary effect of anamnesis, in a fleeting return to the chaos
and darknesss of man's primal - or antique - origins. Indeed,
Caesar remarks that the Romans' complexions have been darkened
by their drink: 'You see we have burnt our cheeks', as the racial
difference between Romans and Egyptians appears to be momentarily
suspended.
The Greek author Lucian, who was much admired in the Renaissance,
wrote an essay on the subject of classical dance, in which he
emphasized its close links with the process of recollection. Lucian
stresses dance's primordial origins, and asserts that: 'not a
single ancient mystery cult can be found that is without dancing
... those who let out the mysteries in conversation are commonly
said to dance them out'. Moreover, Lucian observed that ancient
dance was crucially related to the power of memory:
Before all else ... it behoves her [Dance] to enjoy the favour
of Mnemosyne [Memory] and her daughter Polyhymnia [Sacred Song],
and she endeavours to remember everything; like Calchas [the Greek
seer] in Homer, the dancer must know 'what is, and what shall
be, and was of old' .... Beginning with Chaos and the primeval
origin of the world, he must know everything down to the story
of Cleopatra the Egyptian.'
At this pivotal point in the play, then, we seem to be shown how
recollection and forgetting, anamnesis and oblivion, are intimately
allied in Shakespeare's remembering of the Egyptian mysteries.
Yet the memory evoked here is not, it seems, one that can be translated
easily into intellectual and predominantly verbal form of knowledge;
instead, it is one that has a vital experiential and bodily dimension,
which can only be shown, and not explained. The implication is
that it can only be understood, either by those who participate
fully in the circling movements of the dance, or by those who
have a related expereince of bodily ecstasy, such as erotic lovers.
By reimagining the same mystery of Egyptian anamnesis which had
fascinated Bruno, the scene on Pompey's barge suggests that recollection
of an 'antic' or archaic past requires a radical forgetfulness
of self that, from a historical point of view, may be tragically
irresponsible. But the added implication is surely that, once
the pretensions of historical memory have been 'anticked' or made
a fool of, this other memorial model (whose essence, you will
remember, is joy) may be capable of revealing the primal or originary
unity - the 'god that is in all things' - which lies behind the
chimera of those seeming opposites around which the play is overtly
structured: reuniting Roman with Egyptian, history with myth,
war with love, and finally, forgetting with recollection.
Philippa Berry
King's College Cambridge
PAGE
PAGE 24
Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London: 1605),
dedication.
Plato, Meno, 81 B-D.
Giordano Bruno, De magia (Op. lat. III, pp. 411-2), cited in Frances
Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge,
1987), p. 263. The implied reference is to Plato, Phaedrus 274C
- 275B.
'Expulsion de la Bête Triomphante', in Oeuvres Complètes
(eds) Yves Hersant and Nuccio Ordine (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2000),
V/2, Troisième Dialogue, pp. 414-5.
Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast , trans Arthur D
Imberti (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), p. 242
According to the most recent editor of this text, Nuccio Ordine,
Bruno considered that ' "l'excellence du culte égyptien"
tient ... à sa capacité de converser directement
avec la divinité à travers ses 'effets vivants'
et naturels, refusant la médiation du Christ...' ('Expulsion
de la Bête Triomphante', V/2, p. 568, n. 52).
Giordano Bruno, p. 198.
Pp. 8-9, cited and trans. in Frances A Yates, The Art of Memory
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 290-1.
Cicero, De Oratore, II, lxxxvi, 351-4, cited in Yates, The Art
of Memory, p. 2.
Plutarch, The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London:1603), p.
1286
Johannes Boemus, in The Manners, Lawes, and Customes of All Nations,
Collected out of the Best Writers (trans. 1555, 2nd edn. 1611),
argues that 'they had their first originall from the Aethiopians,
who were the first authors of all these things (as Diodorus Siculus
is of opinion)' p. 18.
Quintilian, Ad Herennium, III, xxii.
Herodotus II 48.
Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride, ed. and trans. J Gwyn Griffiths
(Lampeter: University of Wales Press, 1970), 372E, pp. 202-3.
Ibid.,362B-371E, pp. 160-201.
Ibid., 374C, pp. 208-9.
Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d'aveugle. L'autoportrait et
autres ruines (Paris: Louvre, Editions de la réunion des
musées nationaux, 1990), p. 69.
Lucian, 'The Dance', in Lucian, trans. A M Harman, 8 vols (Heinemann:
1962), vol V, pp. 246-9.