In his supposedly 'improved' version of Antony and Cleopatra,
All for Love, or the World Well Lost, John Dryden
neatly bundles up Shakespeare's unruly epic within the corset-strings
of the unities of time, place and action. More likely than not,
it never even occurred to Shakespeare to abide by the conventions
of an antiquated dramatic tradition. Nevertheless, I would like
to posit that this apparent disregard for the Classical unities
is in fact the result of deliberate artistic intention, that intention
being to undermine the very notion of unity, or of what one could
call, playing on the Elizabethan meaning of the verb atone, at-one-ness.
The notion of unity and the loss of unity have obvious political
and conjugal resonances in the play. My principal concern, however,
will be with the aesthetic disunity of time, space and dramatic
action.
Of course, from the point of view of the action, it is always
possible to impose a unity a postiori: the war against Pompey,
then the war between the triumvirs, then Cleopatra's game of cat
and mouse with Caesar can all be subsumed under the rubric, 'The
Irresistible Rise of Octavius Caesar', or again, 'How Cleopatra
spelt the end of Mark Antony', but such summings-up smack more
of Augustan propaganda than of Shakespearean psychology. Besides,
if we narrow down our conception of action to mean those acts
represented on the stage, rather than those comprised by the story,
or mythos, we can only but remark its relative paucity. This is
not only due to the inherent limitations of the Elizabethan stage.
Rather than the action as such, which after all was an historical
given leaving little scope for artistic creativity, what characterises
the play is the wealth of reactions. From beginning to end, Shakespeare
chooses to represent not the historical action itself but the
reactions of those who see it or, more often than not, have it
reported to them. The whole play is literally a study in reception.
'News, my good lord, from Rome' (1.1.18, Arden, ed. Wilders).
Antony refuses to hear them (which, incidentally, is what most
shocks Demetrius: "Is Caesar with Antonius prized so slight?");
Cleopatra, while seemingly encouraging him to hear the messengers,
taunts him in such a fashion that she manages to postpone their
hearing, thereby provoking yet another lover's tiff or 'conference
harsh'. Enobarbus muses on how Cleopatra and her women will receive
the news of Antony's imminent departure; in the following scene,
we witness for ourselves how they react. Here, as in the scene
where Cleopatra receives the messenger come to announce Antony's
marriage to Octavia, the Queen tries to read the news in the face
and eyes of its bringer. If she does not allow either Antony nor
the messenger to get a word in edgeways, it is not only because
she is 'childish', as she says of herself (1.3.59), and recalcitrant
to unpleasant facts, but principally because she is loath to abdicate
her Isis-role of maker of fortunes. To do so would be to accept
"the false huswife Fortune" (4.15.46) for a mistress,
and therefore to be no better than "Fortune's knave"
(5.2.3).
Shakespeare shows us, at around about the same time as Macbeth's
"She should have died hereafter", how Antony receives
the news of his wife's death, and how Cleopatra plays upon his
apparent lack of emotion to taunt him further. The first Roman
scene has Caesar and Lepidus reacting to the news from Alexandria.
Octavius has already singled Antony out as a potential Roman scapegoat,
"A man who is the abstract of all faults", and whose
expulsion and death will consolidate the unity of the Roman Empire.
In the following scene, Cleopatra receives an 'orient pearl' from
the absent Antony and enthuses in characteristically paradoxical
fashion over his 'well-divided disposition' and the becoming violence
of his extremes of passion.
One can continue in this manner for the whole play. What interests
Shakespeare is not so much how Antony is defeated, as how he takes
his defeat, how he reacts to the (false) news of Cleopatra's death,
how she reacts to his. And one can extend the study of reception
in all directions. How does Octavius receive those who have deserted
Antony? What finally breaks Enobarbus's heart, if not the reception
of his treasure along with Antony's 'bounty overplus' (4.6.23)?
Caesar complains of his sister coming like 'A market maid to Rome'
(3.6.52) and thereby preventing him from receiving her as befits
her rank. The complacent Pompey has the ground cut from under
him when he hears of Antony's imminent arrival in Rome. Enobarbus,
Scarus and Canidius all react differently to Antony's flight from
Actium: Canidius chooses to desert, Scarus to rejoin Antony in
the Peloponnesus and Enobarbus wavers between both courses of
action.
In fact, all the figures in the play are chiefly characterised,
and differentiated, by the manner in which they react to events,
or events reported to have taken place. In this sense, it is a
play not so much of action as of passion, in all senses of the
word. We know that, in Aristotelian terms, the power or dunamis
of a being determines not only its capacity for affecting something
else but also its capacity for being affected. Julius Caesar demonstrated
sufficiently what Antony was capable of effecting; now Shakespeare
explores his capacity for being affected, and not only Antony's
but that of humanity in all its variety. The consequence of course
is once more that of displacing the boundaries between the play
and its audience. By dramatising a variety of reactions to verbal
report or to actions in which one is a mere onlooker, Enobarbus,
Scarus and Canidius, despite their being Antony's generals, have
no other role than that of simple spectators during the battle
of Actium, Shakespeare directs our attention upon our own activity
(should one say passivity?) as theatre-goers. After all, he owed
his success not only to his first-hand knowledge of acting but
also to his extreme sensitivity to audience reaction: his very
livelihood depended on his plays being well received. It is hardly
surprising, then, that he should have wished to explore the mechanics
of reception in a play which defies us to form a definitive judgement
as regards either its stagecraft or the morality and motivations
of its protagonists.
The reception theme includes that of interpretation. How, for
example, do Iras and Charmian interpret the soothsayer's enigmatic
predictions in Act 1 Scene 2, and how should these really be understood?
How are we to understand Cleopatra's role in the Seleucus episode?
The treatment of information, the difficulty of arriving at a
correct judgement, the higher truth-value of what are, to all
intents and purposes, downright lies, these are questions which
have been magnificently studied by Janet Adelman in The Common
Liar : the 'common liar' (1.1.61) who, paradoxically, at least
such is Demetriusís conviction, tells the truth. But then
Cleopatra, who is herself 'something given to lie' (5.2.251),
proves that masquerade and fictional untruths are precisely the
ways in which art outworks nature.
As for the treatment of space in Antony and Cleopatra,
I would like to warn you against certain reductions which strike
me as rather too hasty and not sufficiently respectful of the
complexity of Shakespeareís art. It is not enough to analyse
the distance between Rome and Alexandria in terms of an apparent
polarity, or opposition, or dualism or antithesis between Rome
and Egypt, male and female, business and pleasure, lex and sex
etc. Nor is it enough to point out, as one critic does, how each
world contaminates the other, how it is almost always question
of Egypt in Rome and of Rome in Egypt. Such an approach overlooks
two things. On the one hand, it tends to minimise a third pole
(and perhaps even a fourth) which has not yet been properly accounted
for: the Judeo-Christian element which infuses the entire play
and draws upon the Biblical dimension of Rome and Egypt. In this
context, Egypt is not only a land from which one flees (like Moses
before him, Antony resolves to break 'These strong Egyptian fetters')
but also a land to which one flees (like Mary and Joseph after
them, Antony and Cleopatra take refuge in Egypt after their defeat
at Actium, defeat which heralds 'the time of universal peace'
(4.6.5) enjoyed by the Roman world at Christ's birth). 'Herod
of Jewry' is mentioned four times in the play, in contexts which
refer, directly or indirectly, to the massacre of the innocents
(1.2.29), the decapitation of John the Baptist (3.3.4), his alliance
with Antony (3.6.74) and his subsequent defection (4.6.14). When
Cleopatra slakes her fury at Antony's marriage upon him who brings
the news, she 'out-Herods Herod', the ranting tyrant of the Mystery
plays, and her fear of being eaten by the 'worm' (5.2.270) may
be a distant echo of the manner in which Herod died: 'and he was
eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost' (Acts 12:23). The numerous
references to the life of Christ, the three kings, the temptation
in the desert, the last supper (itself a commemoration of the
Passover), the betrayal and remorse of Judas, the Passion, the
Apocalypse and the Second Coming, testify to the overriding imaginative
hold that the Christian story had always had on Western writers,
providing them with a repertory of extremely powerful experiential
archetypes. However, I think we can credit Shakespeare with more
than simply rewriting Roman history using Christian material.
The Jewish element in particular puts us in mind of another way
of conceiving space, other ways of constituting, occupying and
moving within or between spaces. Moses led his nomadic people
out of Egypt towards a promised land, Jesus urged his followers,
all of whom were Roman subjects, to 'find out new heaven, new
earth'. The movement of deterritorialisation implied here supposes
heterogeneous spatial dimensions impossible to organise in terms
of conflicting but complementary poles.
This is my principal objection to thinking of the difference between
Rome and Egypt in terms of opposition. Opposition almost always
implies presupposition and a reciprocity of sorts. Whereas what
we have here are two distinct ways of defining, creating and occupying
space. Two distinct plateaux. Roman space proceeds by measure;
it is uniform, geometrical and orientated towards a single centre
of power: 'All roads lead to Rome'. When Antony plays the 'firm
Roman', he admits to not having kept his square, but promises
that his subsequent acts 'Shall all be done by the rule' (2.3.7).
In the words of Cleopatra's disparaging evocation, 'Greasy aprons,
rules and hammers' (5.2.209) are the chief attributes of the Roman
people. Octavius means to extend his empire upon the world by
subjecting such eminently fluid spaces as the sea and the Nile
Delta to the line and ruler. It is vital to the success of his
enterprise that he begin by wresting his sea-power from the 'main
soldier' (1.2.198), the soldier of the main or sea, Sextus Pompey.
Despite the Egyptians' greater affinity for water "Let th'Egyptians
/ And the Phoenicians go a-ducking" (3.7.64), Caesar has
a better command of naval tactics: whereas Antony weakens his
army by distracting (3.7.43) or dividing it up between his ships,
Caesar uses the strategy of distraction (3.7.76) to beguile Antony's
spies and intercept his fleet. Nevertheless, Octavius makes the
naval war machine serve the interests of the State: in his hands,
it is a means of appropriating the sea, of annexing it to Rome,
of extending the geometrical castrum grid-pattern to the furthest
confines of the Empire. Spatial unity or continuity is not a given:
it is the result of a process of capture (Caesar = siezer), a
policy of occupation and aménagement du territoire. Once
in Egypt, Caesar succeeds in disarming and capturing Cleopatra
and although she eventually escapes him, the space of which she
was once absolute mistress is now occupied by Roman geometers.
The ethical counterpart to the activity of Roman military geometers,
architects and engineers is of course measure as meaning moderation
or temperance. Philo esteems that Antony's heart 'reneges all
temper' (1.1.8) and Cleopatra, according to Antony, can only 'guess
what temperance should be', not knowing what it is (3.13.126-7).
This might endear them to a modern audience, but one should not
forget that, at the Renaissance, mediocritas was a signal virtue.
Even the extravagant Dr Rabelais asserts, in his Quart Livre,
that: "Mediocrité a esté par les saiges anciens
dicte aurée, c'est à dire precieuse, de tous louée,
en tous endroictz agreable" ('Prologue de l'autheur'). Mediocrity
is golden, as is la règle d'or, the golden mean employed
by architects and geometers. The very word mean occurs seventeen
times in the play in one form or another. Shakespeare uses it
as a means of verbal cohesion binding together the themes of measurement,
political scheming (for Caesar the 'Machiavillain', the ends justify
the means), social status (Cleopatra reproaches herself for striking
'a meaner than myself'), thwarted intentions and the difficulties
of judgement and interpretation. Antony's conduct is especially
prone to commentary and interrogation as to its meaning. 'What
means this?', asks Cleopatra at the beginning of Act 4 Scene 2,
and then ten lines further on: 'What does he mean?'. Another ten
lines and Enobarbus asks: 'What mean you, sir?' Upon seeing his
retainers weep, Antony cries out: "Now the witch take me
if I meant it thus!" (4.2.37). When applied to Caesar, the
verb vehicules the notion of conscious willed intention: Cleopatra
asks Dolabella at an unguarded moment, "Know you what Caesar
means to do with me?" (5.2.105), and Octavius declares on
the eve of an unfortunate military reversal, "the last of
many battles / We mean to fight" (4.1.12-13).
As a noun, mean can mean either means or the middle or statistical
average of an item or set of items considered quantitively. The
Egyptians 'take the flow o'th'Nile / By certain scales i'th'pyramid.
They know / By th'height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth
/ Or foison follow" (2.7.17-20). Notice, however, that the
Egyptian science of measurement is of a completely different nature
to that of the Romans. These last use rulers, scales and poles
to measure out and organise the ground they wish to occupy; the
Egyptian scales take the measure of something which can only be
indirectly quantified, the fecundity of the soil. Thus, Iras wants
to know if she will be 'an inch of fortune' better than Charmian
(1.2.60). This metaphorical use of the word inch gives rise to
some very concrete considerations as regards her future husbandís
anatomy; but even here, the size of the organ referred to changes
according to the emotional state of its possessor. A different
kind of geometry and of physics are needed to understand the Egyptian
world: Archimedes instead of Euclid. The Roman conception of space
is extensive: a given distance is the sum of two smaller distances.
Egyptian space is essentially intensive: a given temperature is
not the sum of two smaller temperatures, nor a given speed the
sum of two smaller speeds. Intensities change in nature as they
change in magnitude. Thus Cleopatra's sighs and tears [] are greater
storms and tempests than almanacs can report" (1.2.155-6)
and it is quite possible, in terms of emotional intensity, that
just one of her tears "rates / All that is won and lost"
(3.11.70).
Egyptian rhythm contrasts with Roman measure. Émile Benveniste
has shown how, etymologically, the notion of rhythm as "la
configuration du mouvant" derives from the idea of flow and
of fluxion. The Egyptian world is a watery one: like the sea,
it is a space without limits, or whose limits vary continuously
according to the ebb and flow of the Nile. 'The varying shore'
of the sublunar world (4.15.20) matches the 'infinite variety'
(2.2.246) of its 'terrene moon' (3.13.158), the Queen of Egypt
(whom Antony also compares to the shape-changing sea-goddess Thetis).
It is not a world of stable properties or of clearly defined qualities.
On the contrary, those who are caught up in it come "too
short of that great property / Which still should go with [them]"
(1.1.59). However hard they dig in their heels and resist the
flow, they will be 'unqualitied' (3.11.44) to the point of becoming
imperceptible and as "indistinct as water is in water"
(4.14.11).
Antony traces his ligne de fuite despite himself, which begs the
question of what he eventually becomes in this watery world of
generation. Cleopatra seems to espouse an Aristotelian point of
view: the state of becoming is orientated towards an end, and
that end is the actualisation, the realisation of oneís
potential nature; in her dream, the Emperor Antony achieves immutable
being as a superlunary deity. However, this suprasensible destination
is not the only one assigned to Antony: there is scope for a materialist
or immanentist reading as well. In Mille Plateaux (Minuit,
1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to ancient
atomist philosophy when postulating the different stages of a
devenir-imperceptible: first of all a devenir-femme or devenir-enfant,
which is only possible in proximity with a woman or child who
themselves become something else. Antony, claims Caesar, "is
not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the Queen of Ptolemy /
More womanly than he" (1.4.5-6). Secondly, a devenir-animal,
in Antony's case, horse, mallard, lion, bull, boar or dolphin;
and finally a devenir-moléculaire, the disintegration,
dissolution and dispersal of one's being, but also its multiplication:
an elementary state of becoming which puts you on a par with the
forces and particles that compose the cosmos. Two ways, then,
of integrating the cosmos: informing it with oneís own
image (Cleopatra's dream Emperor); engendering it with one's own
elements (Antony's cloud simile).
To conclude, the Roman world is what Pierre Boulez calls an 'espace
strié', the Egyptian one an 'espace lisse'. The Romans
throw a linear grid-pattern over the world like a sworder's net.
The lines which compose Egyptian space are of a vectorial nature,
"lignes de fuite tracées par des êtres de fuite".
Even Caesar's eulogy of Antony's former steadfastness in the first
Act presents him in the situation of having to flee: "When
thou once / Was beaten from Modena, [] at thy heel / Did famine
follow []" (1.4.58-60). Egyptian space is as fluid as the
varying shore of the sea and river by which it is bathed. By the
end of the play it has receded into the confines of Cleopatra's
monument, a place where death is the measure of life. Like the
churches or play-houses of Elizabethan London, Egypt forms pockets
of anomalous space in an otherwise Euclidian world.
The lack of complementarity also applies to the political situation.
The fear of Pompey, the peace-making efforts of Lepidus, Antonyís
marriage to Octavia have all been means, to use Caesarís
expression (3.2.32), of maintaining political unity. However,
no mean is of any real lasting value because it would seem that
Antony and Octavius are more than contrary to one another, being
contradictory. According to Aristotle, contraries admit of a mean
or intermediary whereas contradictories do not. Thus, although
Antony allows Octavia to go between himself and Caesar (3.4.25),
she knows full well that there is "no midway / Twixt these
extremes at all" (3.4.19-20). As Caesar says upon receiving
the news of Antony's death, "We could not stall together
/ In the whole world" (5.1.40).
I mentioned the possibility of a fourth spatial pole. In fact,
it is better understood as a point in time: "Now, darting
Parthia, art thou struck, and now / Pleased Fortune does of Marcus
Crassus' death / Make me revenger" (3.1.1-3). The distribution
of the temporal adverb now at the beginning and end of the first
line of Ventidius's speech re-centres the play upon one of the
most eccentric parts of the Roman Empire, its Eastern border.
Shakespeare organises the first part of the playís action
around this apparently superfluous scene. It separates the triumvirsí
interview and reconciliation with Pompey from the aftermath of
their feast, when Enobarbus and Agrippa vie with each other in
outdoing the hyperbolic praise that Lepidus is reported to have
heaped upon Caesar and Antony, before Enobarbus knocks down the
whole fragile edifice with his splendidly bathetic line: "They
are his shards and he their beetle" (3.2.20). But these scenes
are themselves inserted within an episode which admits of no break
in time: the two scenes in which Cleopatra receives the news of
Antony's marriage to Octavia, Act 2 Scene 5 and Act 3 Scene 3.
Janet Adelman points out that Cleopatra seems to exist in a 'gap
of time' (1.5.5), which is not without evoking the timelessness
of eternity to which she aspires at the end of the play. More
prosaically, Shakespeare succeeds in creating an effect of simultaneity.
Rather than staging consecutive events in a single place, he organises
as it were in concentric circles events happening at the same
time in different corners of the 'three-nooked world' (4.6.6).
The effect is one of contrast and mutual commentary: the laborious
frivolity of the world-leaders is highlighted by the deadly seriousness
of their lieutenants; Cleopatra's jealous spite reminds us that
Ventidius is unable to exploit his victory or enjoy his triumph
for fear of Antony's jealousy; the double conceit of the death's
head and the planetary sphere by which the servants evoke Lepidusís
impotence as triumvir (2.7.14-16) not only anticipates the corpse
brought on stage in the following scene but also refers to a fundamental
characteristic of Alexandrian banquets. In the words of Montaigne,
the Egyptians, "au milieu de leurs festins, et parmy leur
meilleure chere, faisoient aporter l'Anatomie seche d'un corps
d'homme mort, pour servir d'advertissement aux conviez" (Essais,
I, xx).
The defeat to which Ventidius refers, that of Marcus Crassus at
the Battle of Carrhes in 53 B.C. is one of two extraneous moments,
the other being the birth of Christ, between which Shakespeare
organises his historical material. Despite being anterior and
posterior to the ten or so years encompassed by the dramatic action,
their pull makes itself felt on all the play, defining its principal
orientations and fixing the meaning of the events it represents.
Like Lepidus, necessary link in the nud boroméen formed
by the second trimvirate, Crassus was a mean between Julius Caesar
and Pompey the Great. His death spelt the end of the first triumvirate
and ushered in the cycle of civil wars which only came to an end
with the death of Mark Antony. Octavius's victory heralds the
pax romana so propitious to the birth of Christ. But it also represents
the end of the heroic age: the mean-minded, cynical younger generation
are no longer able, as their fathers were, to embrace both Rome
and Egypt. Antony and Cleopatra themselves appear as faintly anachronistic
semi-divine figures in a disenchanted world. When Hercules leaves
Alexandria, we are reminded of Plutarch's De defectu oraculorum
and the disappearance of the old gods. Rabelais, in the Quart
Livre ("Comment le bon Macrobe raconte à Pantagruel
le manoir et discession des Heroes"), and Milton in his Christmas
Ode explain the meaning of their abandon: the imminent birth of
the new god has rendered the presence of all lesser deities on
the earth undesirable. Amongst other things, Antony and Cleopatra
is a pagan swan-song.