Cleopatra Read online

  What shall we call the mutual love of Cleopatra and Antony? In the first and in the last place it is sexual. The two supreme narcissists behold themselves more radiantly in the eyes of the other. Yet they are not equals. Antony submits incessantly but Cleopatra will not yield to the flux of time. Shakespeare subtly hints that Antony props himself upon Cleopatra in order to find sustenance for his wavering spirit. Yet not even her endlessly burgeoning vitality can prevent his fall.

  Shakespeare was a master of ellipsis, of leaving things out so as to stimulate our curiosity as to origins. Except for a brief moment in the wings when Antony curses her treachery, we never see him and Cleopatra alone together. When not coupling, how are they with each other? Cleopatra mentions one occasion when they changed gender roles. She attired him in her garments and put on his armor to wield his favorite sword, Philippi, with which he defeated the forces of Cassius and Brutus.

  It is difficult to visualize a mutual solitude for these two fierce individualities. They depend upon the basking of their followers. In them Shakespeare invented a new kind of charismatic, in which adulation is essential for the bliss of supremacy.

  CHAPTER 3

  O’erflows the Measure

  Antony and Cleopatra begins with Philo, one of Antony’s officers, lamenting to another the foolish infatuation of their commander:

  Nay, but this dotage of our general’s

  O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,

  That o’er the files and musters of the war

  Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn

  The office and devotion of their view

  Upon a tawny front. His captain’s heart,

  Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

  The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper

  And is become the bellows and the fan

  To cool a gipsy’s lust. Look, where they come.

  Take but good note, and you shall see in him

  The triple pillar of the world transformed

  Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see.

  act 1, scene 1, lines 1–13

  Everything in this great drama “o’erflows the measure.” The Nile rises, floods its banks, brings abundance to the land of Egypt. Antony’s and Cleopatra’s titanic personalities break down all limits:

  Cleopatra: If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

  Antony: There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

  Cleopatra: I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.

  Antony: Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

  act 1, scene 1, lines 14–17

  Flirtatiously Cleopatra teases Antony by threatening to set a boundary to his passion. In the accents of Revelation he vaunts that a new heaven and a new earth will have to be discovered by the charmer he calls: “my serpent of old Nile.” Refusing to hear ambassadors sent by Rome he cries out:

  Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch

  Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.

  Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike

  Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life

  Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair

  And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,

  On pain of punishment, the world to weet

  We stand up peerless.

  act 1, scene 1, lines 35–42

  This might be called the epiphany of their passion and of their pride. Antony means it and does not mean it. He covets Rome and Egypt. He wants the entire world. The grandeur of his history culminates in the fierce embrace enjoyed with Cleopatra. Explicitly he lauds the sexual merging of himself as Hercules and Cleopatra as Isis. They are a twain unparalleled upon whom the world must render the judgment of peerlessness.

  Pride in their mutual prowess—political, military, lovemaking—is a principal constituent of their glory. This pride is akin to Falstaff’s delight in his own language, and to Hamlet’s trust in the reach of his consciousness.

  You might say that the world is the third major personality in Antony and Cleopatra. Octavius Caesar, the future first emperor as Augustus, pales in the presence of Cleopatra, her Antony, and the wide world. Octavius will destroy Cleopatra and Antony and become the universal landlord who imposes a Roman peace. And yet even he, and the world, become audience for the imperial lovers who take the stage away and make it their own:

  Cleopatra:     Excellent falsehood!

  Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?

  I’ll seem the fool I am not. Antony

  Will be himself.

  Antony:   But stirred by Cleopatra.

  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. What sport tonight?

  Cleopatra: Hear the ambassadors.

  Antony:           Fie, wrangling queen!

  Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh,

  To weep; whose every passion fully strives

  To make itself, in thee, fair and admired!

  No messenger but thine; and all alone

  Tonight we’ll wander through the streets and note

  The qualities of people. Come, my queen,

  Last night you did desire it.—Speak not to us.

  act 1, scene 1, lines 42–57

  Taunting her lover, Cleopatra reminds him of his warlike wife, Fulvia, whom he does not love. She shrugs herself off, saying she prefers to believe him, when he says only pleasure matters, though she knows otherwise. His infatuated response turns upon the rich word “stirred,” which compounds sexual arousal, folly, and stimulation to noble exploits. “Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh, / To weep.” “Becomes” sounds again as if to remind us of Cleopatra’s ebb and flow, like her Nile. Antony chooses prolongation of delights, prompted by forebodings of an end to come. Deftly Cleopatra evades him and demands that he hear the ambassadors.

  There is a rush to bright destruction as Antony admires the passion of his Isis. Unknowingly he speaks as Osiris, blind to his own scattering and enchanted by a goddess whose tears and laughter alike enhance her beauty.

  Ebb and flow, the rhythm of time’s river, soon enough brings Roman Antony to hear the resonance of the opposite:

  Enobarbus: Hush! Here comes Antony.

  Charmian: Not he. The Queen.

  Cleopatra: Saw you my lord?

  Enobarbus: No, lady.

  Cleopatra: Was he not here?

  Charmian: No, madam.

  Cleopatra: He was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden

  A Roman thought hath struck him. Enobarbus!

  act 1, scene 2, lines 73–80

  Cleopatra shrewdly intuits that “a Roman thought” will take Antony away from her. Politics and passion fuse in her realization.

  Enobarbus: Madam?

  Cleopatra: Seek him and bring him hither. Where’s Alexas?

  Alexas: Here, at your service.—My lord approaches.

  Cleopatra: We will not look upon him. Go with us.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 81–84

  Her disdain is both authentic and tactical, reminding us that while she perpetually acts the part of herself, she is aware of the limits of the histrionic. The messenger reports that Antony’s wife, Fulvia, and his brother, Lucius, were defeated by Octavian. Bad news multiplies. The Parthians have broken through Roman lines. Fulvia has died. Antony, who did not love her, praises her as a great spirit gone. A new awareness warns him he must break his Egyptian fetters and abandon the “enchanting Queen”:

  Antony:            How now, Enobarbus!

  Enobarbus: What’s your pleasure, sir?

  Antony: I must with haste from hence.

  Enobarbus: Why, then, we kill all our women. We see how mortal an unkindness is to them; if they suffer our departure, death’s the word.

  An
tony: I must be gone.

  Enobarbus: Under a compelling occasion, let women die. It were pity to cast them away for nothing, though between them and a great cause they should be esteemed nothing. Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. I do think there is mettle in death which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 129–42

  Enobarbus is meticulous in describing Cleopatra’s passionate genius at mock dying, a crucial weapon in her arsenal.

  Antony: She is cunning past man’s thought.

  Enobarbus: Alack, sir, no, her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report. This cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove.

  Antony: Would I had never seen her!

  Enobarbus: Oh, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blessed withal would have discredited your travel.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 143–52

  The language is admirable and comic, telling us again that Antony and Cleopatra cannot be subsumed by genre or categories. Poor Antony, enthralled by her, at once admires her art and ruefully is reduced to wishing their relationship undone. The diction of Enobarbus triumphs as he echoes Hamlet.

  What piece of work is a man—how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god;

  Hamlet, act 2, scene 2, lines 269–72

  Cleopatra is a piece of work wonderful in another mode, erotic and yet transcendent.

  Antony: Fulvia is dead.

  Enobarbus: Sir?

  Antony: Fulvia is dead.

  Enobarbus: Fulvia?

  Antony: Dead.

  Enobarbus: Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice. When it pleaseth their deities to take the wife of a man from him, it shows to man the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new. If there were no more women but Fulvia, then had you indeed a cut, and the case to be lamented. This grief is crowned with consolation; your old smock brings forth a new petticoat, and indeed the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 153–66

  This is captivating, as though Enobarbus has caught the contagion of Falstaff’s joyous wit, and makes me wish Shakespeare had augmented this role.

  Antony: The business she hath broachèd in the state

  Cannot endure my absence.

  Enobarbus: And the business you have broached here cannot be without you, especially that of Cleopatra’s, which wholly depends on your abode.

  Antony: No more light answers. Let our officers

  Have notice what we purpose. I shall break

  The cause of our expedience to the Queen

  And get her leave to part.

  . . .

             Say our pleasure,

  To such whose place is under us, requires

  Our quick remove from hence.

  Enobarbus: I shall do’t.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 167–92

  This sequence is essential to apprehending the renewed surge of Antony’s dynamism. Suddenly Roman, he desires facts and not illusions. His Herculean winds of potency rise and he accepts hearing his faults as an improvement, a plowing that will root out his errors and restore his sense of the ground of his glory.

  The wheel of Fortune and of time sinking warns Antony that his pleasure will lead to chagrin. The laughing cynic Enobarbus plays upon a woman dying as her achievement of orgasm. Cleopatra frequently feigns death, dramatically fainting when it suits her, so that her deaths involve an augmentation of “mettle” or sexual exuberance. We like Enobarbus for his outspoken honesty, his devotion to Antony, and his bawdy wit. But Antony is again a Roman political general and brushes aside these light answers. His martial spirit overflows the measure and he reassumes Herculean stature.

  CHAPTER 4

  Oh, My Oblivion Is a Very Antony

  Cleopatra’s histrionic suppleness is lithe and luminous as she enters the agon with Antony’s Roman thoughts. Her language dances and darts like a swallow from mood to mood. Roman thoughts are brutal. Violence, financial corruption, cupidity, and the arrogance of a masculine pride rampant are the grounds of Roman authority. All of them—Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar—augment the foundations of Rome with rivers of blood. Shakespeare avoids moral judgment, as always, but what audience would not prefer Cleopatra’s quicksilver strategies of political and erotic wit?

  Cleopatra: Where is he?

  Charmian:      I did not see him since.

  Cleopatra: [to Alexas] See where he is, who’s with him, what he does.

  I did not send you. If you find him sad,

  Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report

  That I am sudden sick. Quick, and return.   [Exit Alexas]

  Charmian: Madam, methinks if you did love him dearly,

  You do not hold the method to enforce

  The like from him.

  Cleopatra:    What should I do I do not?

  Charmian: In each thing give him way; cross him in nothing.

  Cleopatra: Thou teachest like a fool: the way to lose him.

  Charmian: Tempt him not so too far. I wish, forbear;

  In time we hate that which we often fear.

  But here comes Antony.

  Cleopatra:      I am sick and sullen.

  act 1, scene 3, lines 1–13

  She is and she is not. Can so great an actress always know when she is or is not acting? The law of Cleopatra’s personality is ebb, flow, ebb, return. Each return is a renewal and vitalizes afresh. Antony’s personality is ebb, flow, ebb, and do not return. His is the way down and out.

  Antony: I am sorry to give breathing to my purpose—

  Cleopatra: Help me away, dear Charmian! I shall fall.

  It cannot be thus long; the sides of nature

  Will not sustain it.

  Antony:     Now, my dearest queen—

  Cleopatra: Pray you, stand further from me.

  Antony:               What’s the matter?

  Cleopatra: I know by that same eye there’s some good news.

  What says the married woman you may go?

  Would she had never given you leave to come!

  Let her not say ’tis I that keep you here.

  I have no power upon you; hers you are.

  Antony: The gods best know—

  Cleopatra:         O, never was there queen

  So mightily betrayed! Yet at the first

  I saw the treasons planted.

  Antony:       Cleopatra—

  Cleopatra: Why should I think you can be mine, and true—

  Though you in swearing shake the thronèd gods—

  Who have been false to Fulvia? Riotous madness,

  To be entangled with those mouth-made vows

  Which break themselves in swearing!

  Antony:            Most sweet queen—

  Cleopatra: Nay, pray you, seek no color for your going,

  But bid farewell and go. When you sued staying,

  Then was the time for words. No going then.

  Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

  Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor,

  But was a race of heaven. They are so still,

  Or thou, the greatest soldier of the world,

  Art turned the greatest liar.

  act 1, scene 3, lines 14–39

  She is sublime and irrefutable. There is massive dignity in her: “They are so still.” Antony, indubitably the greatest soldier of the world, is neither a common liar nor the gr
eatest liar. He has no skill in prevarication. Confronted by her variety, he is dumbfounded.

  The startled Antony provokes one of her finest declarations:

  Antony:        How now, lady?

  Cleopatra: I would I had thy inches. Thou shouldst know

  There were a heart in Egypt.

  act 1, scene 3, lines 39–41

  This phallic tribute is accompanied by the earned pride of Cleopatra or Egypt in her indubitable courage. What quiets her is Antony’s pledge made remarkable by his trope assuming the role of Osiris, whose father was the sun: “By the fire / That quickens Nilus’ slime, I go from hence / Thy soldier” (act 1, scene 3, lines 68–70). The supposedly fainting Cleopatra cannot cease provoking her Osiris:

  Cleopatra:    Cut my lace, Charmian, come!

  But let it be; I am quickly ill, and well,

  So Antony loves.

  Antony:    My precious queen, forbear,

  And give true evidence to his love which stands

  An honorable trial.

  Cleopatra:    So Fulvia told me.

  I prithee, turn aside and weep for her;

  Then bid adieu to me, and say the tears

  Belong to Egypt. Good now, play one scene

  Of excellent dissembling, and let it look

  Like perfect honor.

  Antony:     You’ll heat my blood. No more.

  Cleopatra: You can do better yet; but this is meetly.

  Antony: Now, by my sword—

  Cleopatra:         And target. Still he mends.

  But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian,

  How this Herculean Roman does become

  The carriage of his chafe.

  Antony: I’ll leave you, lady.

  Cleopatra: Courteous lord, one word.