CHAPTER 6Antony and CleopatraShakespeare's Critique of Judgment

Crisis! Danby, Adelman, and Judgment

I look at two of the most agile, learned, and influential treatments of judgment in Antony and Cleopatra: These two essays admirably point out vital dimensions of the play. They also bring us to an impasse, as they reveal a crisis of judgment that is not local to their treatment of the plays but that shows what judgment has become under conditions of modernity.

John Danby called Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare's “critique of judgment” in an indispensable essay written in 1949.¹¹ “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment” was first published in the Leavisite journal Scrutiny, and it later appears in Danby's essay collection as well as in many subsequent anthologies.¹² Although judgment is a longstanding Shakespearean preoccupation, in Antony and Cleopatra, Danby claims, it is not only a prominent theme but also the central dialectical way of looking. The play is a “Shakespearean adjustment,” linked with King Lear and Coriolanus, anticipating the radical break in style in Shakespeare's late romances. The question of value was central in Troilus and Cressida, and legal judgment was profoundly under scrutiny in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, but even in King Lear, Goneril and Reagan are, claims Danby, “reliable judges” of their father's condition. (Lear's deeply unwise actions, the riotous behavior of his troupe of knights, for example, anchor their judgments, although they do not justify their actions as a result).

Antony and Cleopatra makes a break with its predecessors in the canon in that it offers a dizzying variety of irreconcilable perspectives, but no one particular viewpoint is granted lasting authority, hence stability, or finality. Nearly all the dramatis personae of the play endlessly judge, assess, describe, and comment on each other—more so than in any other Shakespeare play. What others say about the characters, what they say about themselves, and what they do are all notoriously hard to square with each other. The play's style, says Danby, is dialectical. It mixes contrarieties, works by means of a “rapid impressionism,” and a “careful lapidary enrichment,” intermixing past and present and time and space. Everything is framed by “perspective” and comes from a point of view constantly qualified, gainsayed, or even undone. This is, in Danby's assessment, a discreating society whose sheer glamor cannot obscure the fact that the world of Antony and Cleopatra rots itself with a motion and restlessness that puts us all at sea, with no firm ground of judgment to find our feet.¹³

I cannot reproduce all the details of Danby's elegant and compelling analysis but the key points, accounting for the essay's later influence rests chiefly here: (1) no comment can be taken at face value—it may at any minute be contradicted or subverted by the play's ironic movement; (2) there is no possibility of “final assessment”; but (3) characters make “continuous and insistent claim(s) on the spectator for judgment.” We cannot and in short, should not, choose between Rome and Egypt as a long precedent of critical tradition advises. It is in this sense that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's “critique of judgment.” Shakespeare's splendid trickery with our “normal standards and powers of judgment” creates a universe in which several standards of judgment apply but with no prospect of resolution: this is Shakespeare's dialectic and his “adjustment.” The play's universe is morally ambiguous; ambivalence is its fabric and principle of operation.¹⁴

Janet Adelman, in her marvelous book-length essay The Common Liar, is one of the most rigorous and insightful inheritors of the Danby tradition of finding “moral ambivalence” to be at the heart of the play's concerns. Judgment is a “dilemma.” The whole play can be seen as a “series of attempts on the part of the characters to understand and judge each other and themselves.”¹⁵ We “are forced to participate in the act of judgment,” that is, we are invited to judge at almost every turn, but the judgment “depends on where one stands,” and this seems to tell us as much about the judge and his perspective as it does about the accused.” We see both “the validity and the limitations of all perspectives,” and this “movement of perspectives” is the characteristic climate of Antony and Cleopatra. ¹⁶ The uncertainty that pervades the world of Antony and Cleopatra both in love relations and in affairs of state renders fidelity to any particular set of values pointless. Like the vagabond flag on the stream, the fluidity, variety, multiplicity, and transformation of judgment threatens to hollow out any sense of purpose, point, or direction.¹⁷

Danby and Adelman have articulated judgment at crisis point. They argue that Shakespeare depicts a world in which no indefeasible judgment is possible—because (within this logic) it cannot be final or determinative; judgment must be suspended or deferred in ambiguity and ambivalence. Shakespeare both identifies and inhabits that crisis and not merely in the play's chronic hesitation between Rome and Egypt, Roman measure or Egypt's “o’erflowing” of rule long noted by former critics. The play invites us to judge all the time but undermines our confidence in every judgment we might come to. “We are forced to judge,” says Barbara J. Bono, “and shown the folly of judgment at the same time.”¹⁸

Danby and Adelman claim that Antony and Cleopatra both diagnoses and lives this crisis of judgment. Their insight is valuable not merely as brilliant illuminations of the play at hand but also because they speak to the pervasive crisis of judgment we inhabit. We get out of the way of our judgments lest they are “merely” subjective; we grant exclusive authority to the ungainsayable methods of science even when our questions and concerns are quite beyond its remit. Vivasvan Soni has compellingly argued that in modernity, the very concept of judgment becomes unintelligible, the practice has been concealed, and our very faculties of judgment face a danger of atrophy.¹⁹ Absent for decades from literary studies, often confused with moralism or aestheticism, and seen as an epistemological rather than as an ethical concern, this fundamental concept has become obscure to humanistic inquiry.²⁰

How has the concept become unintelligible? How has the practice itself been concealed? Soni sees the avoidance of judgment in a scientism that assumes that judgments can be empirically determined (this is measurement not judgment) and in the assumption that subjective judgments will lead to relativism (myriad “opinions” or personal “tastes”) or a chronic deferment of judging. Our options seem to be decisionism or a celebration of indeterminacy, and both of these are forms of avoidance.

We go on judging of course, because we cannot not—this indeed is the crisis. Either external grounds for judgment are then not “ours” or no grounds are firm enough to be sure of our calls. In our daily lives, we constantly discern, assess the situations we find ourselves in, and deem each other hasty, worthy, ready, funny, despicable, lazy, and so on more or less continuously. In my daily life, I hardly restrict myself to judging a person as right or wrong, correct or incorrect. I am more likely to find you, say, variously tin-eared, insensitive, tactless, fair-minded, harsh, sanctimonious, cowardly, bold, inaccurate, in retreat, brilliant, or joyful. These opinions are among the myriad and more or less continuous ways we hold each other in view. If judgment lines our every thought and deed, if our judgments are pervasive and inevitable, if we live by means of them, then judgment is not the problem, only our avoidance of it. Fallible and vulnerable though our judgments might be, unavoidable as they in fact are, they seem to have become a “problem.”²¹ What picture of perspective is at work that this should be the case?

If judgments are assimilated to rules; if our concepts are understood as rules by which we count something as something, having it fall under a concept, then the absence of common and agreed standards will be devastating and will lead to irresolvable conflict.

Perspective and Its Fortunes, or Where Is Your Sense of Perspective?

In “The Dialectic of Perspective,” the philosopher James Conant contrasts an earlier concept of perspective—an intrinsic art of judgment—with the much more confined and limited reduction in range it later assumes. Modern critics, such as Danby and Adelman, have been gripped by a picture of perspective that makes the subjective a problem, something that needs to be overcome to understand what anything truly is. According to Conant, this philosophical view has lost touch with the ordinary use of the word perspective. ²² In the ordinary or literal use of the term, several factors are at play. We can and do, for example, freely alter our perspective. That perspective both affords us a view of an object and is specifiable within “a matrix of alternative perspectives.”²³ Those multiple perspectives share a common object or set of objects and together, mutually, they in turn allow us to correct for distortions and together help us to achieve a relation to the object of view. This picture of perspective, Conant points out, resting on an idea in the practice and theory of Renaissance painting “invites an internal relation between objective and subjective moments in a perceptual encounter between a perceiving subject and the objects of his perception.”²⁴ Objectivity and subjectivity are mutually related. This sense of perspective as changeable, granting us access to the world, in conversation with and corrigible by many other perspectives to establish a common object together is almost unrecognizable when judgment is understood to be in crisis. For now, it seems as if a point of view that had hitherto afforded us a view is seen as confined to a single perspective, moreover one we cannot freely alter. What the subject sees now seems dictated by that perspective, and the perspective is not shared or tested against competing ones. In fact, it is not clear how or where it stands in relation to other perspectives and no common object is afforded by such multiplicity. Our perspectives separate us from others and from the genuine knowledge of each other or the world: These perspectives must be suppressed, overcome, or avoided. When judgments come from us, they are “merely” subjective. Thus, in the introduction to the Arden, 3rd ser., John Wilders says that Cleopatra's final vision of Antony bestriding the ocean can be seen as magnificent or delusional, but it “is also subjective (as is everyone's opinion in this play).”²⁵ Judgment has become opinion. This version of perspective is epistemically isolated and all encompassing, and in it, we must remain apart from the world not within it.

Notice how judgment has become epistemological and no longer seen in ethical or existential terms. In the process, we are separated from and shut out from the world. We must ascribe to heteronomous standards whose objectivity can be secured only by keeping our “opinions” out of it, or we can delay and defer judgment by inhabiting a moral ambiguity and ambivalence that can be celebrated or deplored. Both “solutions” sever judgment from responsibility: The one overturns judgment to an external authority, and the other simply defers it. If, however, as Vivasvan Soni has argued, “judgment is the groundless and inherently risky process by which we shape our lives and assume responsibility for our existential choices,” judgment cannot be avoided, only responsibility for it.²⁶

When Danby called Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare's “critique of judgment,” he was playfully alluding to Kant's third critique, Critique of the Power of Judgment.²⁷ The Kantian allusion is not developed in Danby's essay, but Kant's far-reaching insights in this critique have been developed with striking originality by both Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell in the early 1960s.²⁸ Although Kant's claims were made in relation to aesthetic judgment, Arendt and Cavell saw how Kant's insight could be extended both to political judgment (Arendt's concern) and to an entire ethical and existential understanding of language.²⁹ Their work makes available a way of animating Danby's playful but unexplored allusion, as it might help us retrieve a concept of judgment.

When Kant discussed aesthetic judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he isolated and developed with great rigor the peculiar rationality of aesthetic judgments, the kinds of reason we enter into when we call something beautiful. He calls aesthetic judgments reflective, and he distinguishes them from determinative judgments in which a particular is subsumed under a universal, counted under an already established concept or rule. When we feel something is beautiful and call it so (because aesthetic judgments call for expression and require articulation), our judgment is necessarily subjective, passing through our experience.³⁰ Our judgment is importantly free; if it fell under a preexistent concept of beauty, it would be neither free nor essentially my judgment. At the same time, the claim of beauty has “subjective universality”: When I call something beautiful, I demand everyone's assent. Aesthetic judgment is utterly distinct from opinion and from what is simply agreeable or pleasing.³¹ Kant's language is strong: I demand assent when I make an aesthetic claim, I rebuke anyone who claims otherwise and deny the validity of their taste. We do not count on assent to our judgment, but it is part of the logic of aesthetic judgment, as Kant reveals it, that we do demand it. Kant says an aesthetic claim is without a concept. Were it to “fall under” a preexisting concept, it would have a different kind of necessity. An aesthetic judgment has the grammar of a claim and is as vulnerable as a claim is. A claim cannot prove its relevance. The grammar of claim is central to the Kantian idea of aesthetic judgment—to impute my judgment to my psychology or our sociology is to lose this idea of a claim, and the peculiar kind of agreement it projects and posits.

If you claim that Cleopatra is a tawdry has-been, a wayward embarrassment on stage, and you simply cannot understand what anyone sees in this play, let alone this particular production, our relationship might be at least temporarily strained. I might not be able to talk to you for a while, until we have found a way round this, even if you articulate your reasons compellingly. Our judgments raise questions, such as “do you see what I see?” “This is how I look at it.” “Can’t you see that?” They are questions of a vision we share or do not share, and we do not feel we can be indifferent, as if we can let each other alone in a retreat to opinion or different tastes.

The role of Kantian aesthetic judgment is fundamental in Stanley Cavell's writings. One commentator has suggested that “from the outset Cavell has proclaimed an intimacy, at times amounting to a virtual identity, between the logic of aesthetic claiming (the logic appropriate to our claims, evaluative and interpretative, about works of art and, by extension, the logic of those works, their claiming) and the logic peculiar to ordinary language philosophy (‘what we say when’ and ‘what we mean when we say it’).”³² The logic that is claimed for aesthetic judgments works across the whole of our use of language. This is how Cavell develops Ludwig Wittgenstein's exploration of rules in the Philosophical Investigations using Kantian insight. Wittgenstein's exploration of rules in the Philosophical Investigations is an investigation about words and concepts and how we acquire them.

The radical innovation of Cavell's insight developed in the first two essays in Must We Mean What We Say? and the first chapter of The Claim of Reason turns on his understanding that what governs our judgments was not rules (platonically preexisting our encounters) but criteria emerging from our shared forms of life. Cavell explores Wittgenstein's extensive consideration of rules and how we follow them, obey them, are guided by them, and grasp them to conclude that our speaking together and the concepts we arrive at together are not “everywhere bounded by rules” or universals.³³ Criteria replace rules for Cavell. Moreover, the criteria by which we count something as something, call it anything, are not the criteria of experts, such as those who can adjudicate the difference between swifts and swallows or golden doodles and labradoodles. We grant authority to ornithologists and twitchers or to dog breeders or those in the know at the Westminster Dog Show to those kinds of distinctions. Wittgenstein wants us to think about the criteria for being in pain, for having a toothache (whether incisor or molar), for sitting on a chair (whether Chippindale or Bauhaus), in short for the kinds of things we cannot fail to know and for which we are all in the same boat, not one of us in possession of surer knowledge than any other. Cavell leads us away from the Augustinian picture of language by which we label things in the world to a vision of language in which we are initiated into forms of life, learning word and world together.

Two relevant differences emerge in this picture of criteria and judgment. Cavell repeatedly calls attention to the fact that, for anything to count as anything, we have to deploy criteria, and we have to count something as something on any particular occasion. Borrowing from Kant on aesthetic judgment, Cavell calls this (incessant) voicing of criteria speaking with a “universal voice.” The claim is on everyone else, but I have to voice it, and in this sense, it is my counting, telling, calling, and speaking through which criteria alone count. Cavell's aim was to bring the human voice back into philosophy, something that this picture of rules rules out. So, using criteria is showing what counts for us, what we care about and value. Cavell's felicitous phrase refers us to “the importance of importance” in this way of thinking.³⁴ To tell anything—to count and recount it is to say what matters—“recounting what is important, taking up the details of where importance lies, is the task Cavell assigns to philosophy.”³⁵ The question of value is intrinsically linked to questions of voice, and hence to self-knowledge, and Cavell understands ordinary language philosophy as a quest for self-knowledge. To explore our concepts, our criteria, we ask when and how and for what reason do I count something as something?

Furthermore, Cavell's emphasis on the elicitation of criteria rather than rules puts our relations with each other back into the picture. The implication is that the attraction of rules outside of these relations is precisely to escape the contingency and fragility of these relations, in search of something more firm and reliable. As Richard Eldridge says, “in staking and testing oneself as an articulator of criteria, one is at the same time staking and testing one's relationship with others.”³⁶

The idea that our judgments are merely subjective preferences dies hard. For surely rules can only be trusted, their impartiality and principled nature secured, if they are fixed independently of our responses. The world of value must be separated from the world of fact. In the humanities, we think we have overcome these tired antinomies, even when we have barely begun to confront them.³⁷

In this picture, we cannot isolate certain specific acts as carrying the weight of judgment. This is not to deny that certain specifiable speech acts by particular people in particular situations carry that authority: The umpire rules; the judge gives a verdict. In these instances, certain precedents are followed and certain agreed standards apply. But we have already established—and this is the fruit of Danby and Adelman's insight—that no such judgments are available in this play. We are all in as good, or bad, a position as any other to judge.

If Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein, unlike the epistemologized understanding of perspective examined by Conant, gives us the notion that our judgments “word the world,” bring the word and world into alignment through our use of words, then our ways of talking can shrink or enlarge the world and can contract and constrict our relations or enlarge our perspectives.

Cavell's Kantian reading of Wittgenstein illuminates the question of judgment in Antony and Cleopatra. It helps us move beyond the “problem” or crisis of judgment to grasp the logic of the aesthetic and imaginative claims the play makes on us, especially in its last staging of Cleopatra's death and in her unprecedented dramatic claim that her death is a marriage and that Antony is her husband. I next show both how the vast geographic and global reach of the play reveals a diminished planet, and the nature of the claims Cleopatra makes for her relationship with Antony, and why the logic of those claims is aesthetic.

Wording the World: Modes of Talking

This invocation of the world is a notoriously striking feature of Antony and Cleopatra. Global dominion is at stake in this crucial period of transition of republic to empire: Who will be the “universal landlord” (3.13.76)? The world is a geographic and political entity inhabited by all the play's players who live in the forcefield of the world's “pillars,” those who supposedly uphold it (1.1.12). Rome and Egypt, the fertile Nile and Alexandria's pastimes, are richly conjured, the play's famous antinomies. Other whole countries are casually traded and divided between the big men: “You have made us offer / Of Sicily, Sardinia,” says Pompey (2.6.34–35). Antony does give crowns and crownets—“Lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia”—to the “absolute Queen,” Cleopatra (3.6.9–11). Shakespeare lifts wholesale from Plutarch the kings and regions Antony assembles to give his “empire to a whore”: Cappadoccia, Arabia, Mede, and Lycaonia (3.6.70). The world in Antony and Cleopatra is both vast and particularized. We are given specific locales for Fulvia's death (Sycion, northwest of Corinth), for example, or for Pompey's gathering force (Misena). Ventidius is deputized to take care of Parthia (2.4). The geographic settings are numerous and vaster than anything yet envisaged in previous plays. The worldly semantics also invite us to think about how the world comes into view, which is a feature of that invitation to perspective and vision we have just examined: Do you live in the same world as me? “The world of the happy is quite another than that of the world of the unhappy” said Wittgenstein in the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus.³⁸ The world of lovers might be different from the world of the unloved and unloving. How do we have a world at all, and is our world shareable? How can it be both vast and paltry, worth conquering, but worth losing altogether? How is the world “worded,” imagined, and projected in Antony and Cleopatra?

The world in Antony and Cleopatra is grandiosely vast: Its rulers are vaunted as quasi-divine. The whole world must witness their love: Antony invites “the world to weet” the “mutual pair” (1.1.40); after Antony's death, Cleopatra dreams that Antony's reared arm crested the world (5.2.81–2); Antony claims he quartered the world with his sword (4.14.58–59). But this exalted world is diminishing. The three triple pillars—Caesar, Lepidus, and Antony—do not so much share the world as compete for it. With the elimination of Lepidus who never stood a chance in the story, there are now only a “pair of chaps, no more” (3.5.13). The world is finally consolidated under the universal landlordship of Caesar, where all are his tenants. If we think of the world as afforded by the richness of the perspectives we bring to bear on it, however, this vast ranging empire is not so much growing as shrinking. To Cleopatra, after the loss of Antony, the world becomes merely “dull,” with nothing “left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon” (4.15.64, 68–69) and Caesar becomes “paltry” (5.2.2) For Antony, one single tear of Cleopatra's weighs and wins in the balance of “all that is won or lost” (3.11.69–70). Rome shrinks the world as it dominates it; it becomes uninhabitable for those of larger vision. This is established chiefly through modes of talking in the play.

Cleopatra brilliantly captures Roman talk in her mimicry of it in the first scene. The mood is imperative, a world of “mandate” and “dismission” (1.1.23, 1.1.27). “Do this, or this, / Take in that kingdom and enfranchise that. / Perform’t or else we damn thee” (1.1.22–24). Cleopatra ventriloquizes Caesar's commanding voice as she empties it of significance. Caesar's favorite address of commands and orders attempts to limit the range of response to obedience and disobedience. He likes to set out the script beforehand: “Do not exceed / The prescript of this scroll” (3.8.4–5). He counts open-ended play and festivity as unproductive “waste”: Antony “wastes / The lamps of night in revel” (1.4.4–5). Every occasion of talking is strategic with an end he has determined. The response of others is mostly irrelevant except in so far as it coheres with his predetermined end. All talk that does not have an end in mind (an end he defines) is in vain. His world is the new world that will emerge from his victory: The world of empire, and Rome's victors will be framed in his triumph. In a world divided between conqueror and conquered, the responses of the conquered are only relevant in so far as they figure forth their conquered state. Although vast in geographic scope, although huge in power and might, the world under Caesar's conditions is a diminished and degraded world, a meaner and a poorer one. This world has little room for the voices of others in their integrity and individuality. The perspectives—multiple, corrigible, affording us a common world—are profoundly reduced and degraded.

But what of the world in Antony and Cleopatra's talk? Something of the grandiosity, overreach, melodrama, magnitude, and glamour of Antony and Cleopatra's claims on us are expressed in the play's heightened style. The play is marked by astonishing metrical subtlety and variety—short sentences, pleonasms, ecphonesis, and lines that overflow their measure with feminine endings, lines with inverted word order, and lines that are notably and frequently interrupted by the speaker or by others. Madeleine Doran has elaborated on one of the play's most persistent tropes: hyperbole.³⁹ Several outstanding analyses of the play's incomparable style have explored this most poetic of plays in which the creativity of language is so sustained and so subtly explored.⁴⁰ By contrast, I wish to investigate the pair's practice of conversation and its role in the play. For conversation between the two is both the medium of their acknowledgment of each other and the means of transformation. It is the quality of talk between Antony and Cleopatra that marks such an unprecedented departure from the dramatic tradition with its neoclassical preponderance of soliloquies and declamations. As one of its editors observed, Antony and Cleopatra is “in many ways a quiet play, conversational rather than declamatory.”⁴¹

Milton put conversation before procreation in God's ordaining of marriage.⁴² Marriage was to be a comfort for the “evil of solitary life,” and God implies “the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman.”⁴³ Why should conversation be a model for marriage? What is being suggested? How does Shakespeare imagine the conversation between Antony and Cleopatra such that it finally carries the weight of their opposition to Roman rule?

This is one more extension of Danby's light allusion to Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare's “critique of judgment.” In his book Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell posits a new genre, the Hollywood remarriage comedy of the 1930s and 1940s, which he claims begins with Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. ⁴⁴ He sees the last scene of Antony and Cleopatra, too, as matching The Winter's Tale in presenting us with a new ceremony of marriage.⁴⁵ Unlike the romantic comedies in which the truth of a young girl's desire wins out against an older generation of patriarchs, such that the play reconciles love and marriage in its ending, the older couples in remarriage comedy begin married. The question of the play is what constitutes their union, and it is not the state, or the church, or the social order that in the premise of this new genre has lost its power over the authentication of marriage. What binds or sanctifies in marriage? Shakespeare inaugurates remarriage comedy, but it reappears in the medium of film, with the invention of the talkies, because the marriage to which we grant our consent is worked through in conversation and by means of it: “In thus questioning the legitimacy of marriage, the question of the legitimacy of the society is simultaneously raised, even allegorized.”⁴⁶ Remarriage is Cavell's word for the ongoing consent that legitimizes itself in the mutual acknowledgment of the couple. It is, as one critic has put it, a vision “for a society based on speaking to and for each other.”⁴⁷ In Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Cavell regards his reformulation of what legitimates marriage in the remarriage comedies, “marrying as declaring you are already married,” as a kind of comic purloining of Kant's aesthetics. It is, as he puts it, “pleasure in one another without a concept,” beginning from no prior definition or rule of church or state, or by the fact of children, but emerging to find new words, and new worlds.⁴⁸

In the opening scene, when Cleopatra asks for an accounting of Antony's love for her, Antony replies there is beggary in the love that can be reckoned, taking telling, and counting love as measuring it. We already have been told—it is the first thing we are told—that Antony's love “oe’rflows the measure” (1.1.2). To be able to tell Cleopatra his love would mean “finding out” new heaven and new earth,” claims Antony (1.1.17). Much has been made of the image from the Book of Revelation, but I want to stress the “finding out.” It will be the work of the play to show the cost of love's reckoning, and it is something that must be found out. Antony and Cleopatra must find a language for their love and find themselves out in it too. The “new heaven, new earth” must be discovered beyond Roman rule and in despite of it. Being “without a concept,” their conversation / marriage can be discovered and sustained only through conversation. A key word in thinking about the marriages in Shakespeare's play is thus conversation. The bond, not being assumed, is to be refound, reestablished multiple times. This turns out to be one of the patterns of the play.

“Husband, I Come!”

This chapter opens with Vergil's heated remonstrance: Cleopatra is “that woman, that Egyptian wife.” But coniunx can mean both “wife” and “woman,” and the distinction is particularly important in this play. North's Plutarch harps on it, and in Shakespeare's play, it is structural to the play's design and for our understanding of Cleopatra's death as a claim to marriage: “Husband, I come!? / Now to that name my courage prove my title!” (5.2.286–87). The titles of wife and husband are not conferred by the Roman state or any other external authority, such as temple or church, but they derive from the logic of the claims and courage of the mutual pair to a kind of love that demands recognition.

Although other neoclassical versions of the story fudge the legal status of Cleopatra's relationship with Antony, Shakespeare's version turns on it. In Shakespeare's play, Antony is married but not to Cleopatra. First of all, he is married to Fulvia and consequently to Octavia. Antony's second marriage to Octavia is a bond with Octavius. Octavia's consent barely figures in it. Shakespeare deliberately stages this as if it is Octavius and Antony who are to be married by mimicking the marriage service over a line break. Agrippa proposes marriage “to hold you in perpetual amity” (2.2.132), “to make you brothers,” and “to knit your hearts / With an unslipping knot” (2.2.132–3), language usually reserved for the bond of love between the two parties of the marriage. This idea is pointedly and subtly reinforced when Agrippa says, “Take Antony,” and just shy of the momentary pause of the line break, we might almost imagine that it is Caesar who Antony is marrying before the next line specifies Octavia (2.2.134–35). But if Octavia's say in the marriage is of no account, this is the marriage that is authorized in a last-ditch attempt to bind the hoops of the world together. Antony is bound to Octavius by means of his sister, and although we know that Octavia's position is untenable, her task impossible, the marriage has the full backing of the Roman state, indeed the empire, through its great progenitors.

In his essay on the play, “Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra,” Robert Ornstein declares that Cleopatra wants to be a Roman wife.⁴⁹ But this cannot be right. Cleopatra does not want to be a Roman wife, the model for which is Octavia. She does not want the sanctification of the Roman state. Rather she claims legitimacy for her brilliant mutual being with Antony—she claims he is her husband solely by virtue of their relationship, justified through their open-ended love. Its legitimacy derives from their mutual delight and continues by means of it. The glorious declaration “Husband, I come!” has the form of a claim. The play turns on the point from which the legitimacy of marriage is derived: from the law or out of the fabric of their love. I will return to the logic of Cleopatra's claim as it is developed in the play's climactic last scene.

In North's Plutarch, Cleopatra's advisers belabor the difference in the way Octavia's relationship is recognized at the point in the narrative at which Octavia has come to meet Antony in Athens in the midst of the Parthian wars. Cleopatra's advisers hope to persuade Antony not to go to Octavia. “For Octavia” they say, “that was maryed unto him as it were of necessitie, bicause her brother Caesars affayres so required it: hath the honor to be called Antonius lawefull spowse and wife.” But “Cleopatra, being borne a Queene of so many thowsands of men, is onely named Anthius Leman, and yet that she disdayned not to be so called, if it might please him that she might enjoy his company, and live with him: but if he once leave her, that then it is unpossible that she might live.”⁵⁰ The very necessity of the marriage—for legitimacy, for political alliance, for the great homosocial and world-saving bond between Caesar and Antony—is precisely what undermines its integrity. Cleopatra will suffer the shame of illegitimacy with honor because her relationship with Antony rests on love, not necessity. No external support, such as a brother's anger, a brother's army, the Roman state, the judgment of sensible political men, or the general polity underwrites the love between them. In Shakespeare's play, this is what lends the lovers their characteristic style of testing, suspicions of betrayal, jealousies, and grandiosity of expression for their relationship cannot be secured by legal means or external ratification. Their love proclaims itself as exemplary when “such a mutual pair / And such a twain can do’t” (1.1.38–39). They made, as Plutarch says, “an order between them, which they called Amimetobion as much as to say, no life comparable and matcheable with it.”⁵¹ The volatility, insecurity, and utter grandeur, the inventiveness and daring of their relationship, as well as its self-conscious showiness, instability, astonishing vulnerability and occasional degradation are all encompassed in the idea of their marriage as a claim on their readers and audiences, a claim explicitly reserved for Cleopatra's last scene.

This idea of marriage as a claim of recognition is peculiar to Shakespeare: It is his unique idea, and this is why he reserves the word husband for Cleopatra's death scene, after Antony is already dead. In the neoclassical versions Bullough collects, the name husband is quite casually thrown around. Cinthio has Cleopatra claim that Heaven “has made me Antony's wife.” Garnier calls them husband and wife; so much later does Dryden. Samuel Daniel omits the question.⁵²

In this tremendously busy play with its constant traffic of messengers concerned with the urgencies of war and empire, in the midst of a world replete with orders, commands, negotiations and strategies, in a play of some four hundred entrances and exits, a play of multiple small scenes, and manifold locations, ranging from Rome and Alexandria to Athens and the Greek sea coast, it might seem odd to claim that the conversation between Antony and Cleopatra is one of the play's chief media and subjects. Where is the time for such converse? The pair are simply not seen alone; an audience is always on stage for their talk, and the lovers are acutely aware that they appear in the world and that the world is their witness. They speak together in only ten of the play's rapidly succeeding forty-two scenes.⁵³ For long stretches of the play they are apart. They do not appear together at all in act 2. Act 5 is Cleopatra's alone: Antony appears there only in her visionary imagination. This leaves only a few scenes in which we see them talking together: the opening scene framed by Demetrius and Philo (act 1,scene 1) and very soon afterward (act 1, scene 3) in which Antony explains to Cleopatra that he must leave for Rome, a scene already marked by an imminent separation. In act 3, they share brief exchanges on the battle to come, and in act 3, scene 11, in the aftermath of the debacle at sea, a scene of devastating intensity stages the most intimate and searing conversation of them all. The exquisitely tender scene in which Cleopatra helps Antony arm himself (act 4, scene 4) is followed by Antony's rage (act 4, scene 12), which cuts off the possibility of conversation more or less entirely. Finally, after all the physical comedy and exertion that enables their final encounter in the monument, in one short scene Antony manages to give Cleopatra advice about how to manage Caesar, advice she constantly interrupts, may not trust, and does not take. Clearly, how they exist in each other's imaginations is vital to establish their love. Nevertheless, it is in the astonishing dramatic economy of their conversation that their love is honed and refined, and it is here that they—and we—recognize their love and its claims. Despite the continuous audience for their conversation, one of the achievements of their talk is an astonishingly raw intimacy unprecedented on the English stage.⁵⁴

Shakespeare might have found a clue in Plutarch's admiration and appreciation for Cleopatra's wit and learning for he says that “so sweete was her companie and conversacion, that a man could not possible be taken.”⁵⁵

One gloss on conversation and marriage is provided by Enobarbus. Octavia, Antony's new intended, is of a “holy, cold, and still conversation” (2.6.125), says Enobarbus. Menas's conventional response affirms the Octavian model: “Who would not have his wife so?” (2.6.126). Enobarbus's reply—“Not he that himself is not so” (2.6.127)—might have in mind a woman worthy of a different kind of devotion, one blessed by holy priests when she is “riggish” (2.2.249–50). Antony, says Enobarbus “will use his affection where it is” (2.6.132). Michael Neill, in his edition of the play, glosses this nicely as Antony “will use his passions where they are really engaged.”⁵⁶

From the beginning, their conversation is persistently interrupted by Rome, and Rome designs the end of it, for Caesar demands that Cleopatra gives up Antony. Their points of union are fragile, tender, and sparse, a point often underplayed in productions that belittle Cleopatra's charms in a crudely overplayed or lurid sexuality, missing the exposure of a precious and precarious intimacy, an intimacy fundamentally beset by Rome.⁵⁷ The raw simplicities of talk are so often overwhelmed with a showy excess that obscures the delicate and exposed points of connection between the lovers. It is in their conversation, however, that we come to understand the texture of their relationship: its insecurities and bombast, its intimacies and evasion of them, its dreams and its poetry, its adventure and neediness, its mutual reliance and dependency. This is where they may be “found out,” not in Philo's static tableau but in the time-bound shifts of conversing.

What ruins a conversation? We can establish the conditions for a conversation when we see how and where it goes wrong—when it stops being a conversation. Sometimes the person you are talking to does not listen and vitiates the conditions of conversation. If you condescend, you will quickly abort conversation for it relies on an assumed equality of parties. A certain quality of attention is needed for a conversation to flow and be sustained. Sometimes someone is just waiting their turn to speak, and their impatience is palpable. We all know people like this, and they are not fun to converse with. Conversation depends on a natural reciprocity; therein lies its delight. One person is not waiting for the gap in which they can speak but is spurred on to say something in direct response to what it is that someone has just said. In a good conversation, one person's words sponsors (inspires, prompts) another and another responds in kind, leaving full play for the particularity of the other. Where it leads cannot be anticipated: It can be surprising and unexpected, and so frequently good conversation offers something new. It is a medium of self-discovery. It cannot be scripted in advance, as Caesar likes to script his talk, because it is fundamentally free. It depends on a certain kind of trust and intimacy, a delicate balance. You can strike up a conversation or fall into one. Samuel Johnson shows that good conversation is substantial: “We had talk enough but no conversation; there was nothing discussed.”⁵⁸ The delicate balance of a conversation is easily interrupted and destroyed and all the more precious for that: It can transform into a quarrel, for example, as happens quite a lot in Antony and Cleopatra. It is a form of dialogue unaccounted for in rhetoric.

Even the simplest neighborly conversation over the fence of our backyards establishes that a conversation is not the actions of two individual people talking but rather a common action. Charles Taylor uses the example of two neighbors discussing the weather. My neighbor and I were perfectly aware of the weather before I said, “Fine weather we’re having,” but now this is something we attend to together. The conversation has become our action and, as Taylor says, opening a conversation inaugurates a common action, one irreducible to my action in talking or yours.⁵⁹ Such mutuality is intrinsic to Antony and Cleopatra's relationship. They are, as Antony says, a “mutual pair” (1.1.38). The title of the play belongs to both of them. This makes it distinct from the English neoclassical closet drama Shakespeare knew, focused on either Antony or Cleopatra. (Such drama is also notably declamatory; it is impossible to imagine a conversation in it.) Shakespeare seemed to conceive of the pair as incomprehensible except in relation to each other.⁶⁰ “Antony / Will be himself,” says Cleopatra, while Antony adds: “but stirred by Cleopatra.” (1.1.44–46).

I look more closely at two out of the ten scenes of Antony and Cleopatra conversing: in one scene (act 1, scene 3), they have to accommodate a separation, and in another, they share an almost unbearably intimate scene of shame and belated self-knowledge after the fatal sea battle (act 3, scene 11). In these scenes, we might begin to chart the great open-ended leap into another human being, the space that is made for the soul's growth in this play.⁶¹

In the first sequence of scenes (act 1, scenes 1 and 3), we see Antony and Cleopatra responding to Rome's pressure. When Antony eventually gives Rome's messengers a hearing, he accepts Rome's reprimand even to its judgment of Cleopatra: “Speak to me home. . . . Name Cleopatra as she is called in Rome” (1.2.112–12), and like Aeneas, he leaves his queen to report for duty. Cleopatra is never unaware of Rome's power and pull; she is alert to all those moments when a Roman thought strikes Antony (1.2.88) and wants to test out the veracity of his love, the truth of his hyperbolic and extravagant protestations against its judgment: “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall!” (1.1.34–35). She never ceases to think about Antony during their long stage absences. She never ceases to have love on her mind—love for Antony, all other lovers paling in comparison. But Antony never consciously brings her to mind; he simply and inevitably returns to her. “I will to Egypt” (2.3.37) is spoken after his interview with the soothsayer who advises Antony not to stay by Caesar's side because his “daemon” is afraid of Caesar's (2.3.19) and his luster grows dim at Caesar's side. Enobarbus knows more about him than he knows about himself, but in act 3, scene 11, Antony retrospectively understands the measure of his love for Cleopatra and voices it full-throatedly even in the utter shame of defeat.

When we first see Antony and Cleopatra they are indulging in love talk: “If it be love indeed, tell me how much,” opens Cleopatra (1.1.14). Is Antony's love love? If it is, Cleopatra will have it told and retold. Perhaps this is one of love's pleasures—to dwell on its growth and possibilities. Perhaps, however, the “if” entertains doubts as to the nature and quality of Antony's love. From the first, these lovers claim to extend the resources of language to reckon their love. Antony declares that Cleopatra cannot set a bourn on his love: “Thou must needs find out new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17). The extravagantly apocalyptic registers are there, but it is the “finding out” that strikes me. Can these lovers live in this world, or will they, do they, need to find a new one for their love to have a habitation? At this very point, Rome calls upon the pair: “Enter a messenger,” a decisive and unwelcome reminder of Rome's impinging reach. It is Antony's curt irritation and dismissal of Rome's messages that appalls Philo and Demetrius.

Cleopatra understands Roman claims chiefly through Fulvia's effect. Fulvia's moods—“perchance she is angry” (1.1.21)—or her scolding can shame or command him. She economically captures Caesar's imperatival speech: “Do this, or this; / Take in that kingdom and enfranchise that,” (1.1.22–23) commands either obeyed or disobeyed. Of course, she is taunting and testing as well as ventriloquizing Rome's habitual mode of order and command. Her suspicions are warranted. Her own understanding of marriage incorporates love from the beginning—“Why did he marry Fulvia and not love her?” (1.1.43). This question shows a willful oblivion of the political marital arrangements of Roman polity, or a disdain for them, or simply the assumption that love and marriage do go together.

In fact, Cleopatra perceives entirely accurately that the claims of the political world on Antony are mediated through his (legitimate) marriage to Fulvia. Fulvia is “the married woman”: “What says the married woman you may go?” (1.3.21). Not only must she acknowledge that Antony is Fulvia's and that she has no power over him, she must rely alone on his love: “I have no power upon you; hers you are” (1.3.24).

In scene 3, she asks why should she believe Antony's oaths or cries to the gods to witness his truth (“the gods best know”) when he has already been false to Fulvia: “Why should I think you can be mine and true— / Though you in swearing shake the throned gods—? Who have been false to Fulvia?” (1.3.27). She rightly understands that his loyalty to her does not have a good precedent in his lack of fidelity to Fulvia and she can also see that the loss of Fulvia barely registers with him.⁶² She is therefore right to wonder whether Antony's proclamations may be empty, that the word he has given is at stake. Indeed, in the intervening scene, Antony invites the messenger to give a Roman description of Cleopatra: “Name Cleopatra as she is called in Rome” (1.2.112). He decides to go to Rome before he knows Fulvia is dead, declaring he must cut his “strong Egyptian fetters” (1.2.123) and break off from the “enchanting Queen” (1.2.135), wishing he had never seen her. No wonder Cleopatra wonders whether Antony's Roman honor and word might be an “excellent falsehood” (1.1.42), his words “mouth-made vows” (1.3.30), his behavior a “scene / Of excellent dissembling” (1.3.80–81).

The first scene ends with a dismissal of the messengers, and Antony invites Cleopatra to a favorite pastime, and to be playmates again. Antony and Cleopatra's pleasures are improvisatory and playful. What they would like to do is “wander through the streets and note the qualities of people” (1.1.54–55). Such an activity is intrinsically uninteresting if you are not to be delighted by the observations of your traveling partner. With the right companion, such simple pleasures are magical. Shakespeare takes this suggestion from North's Plutarch, but in that version, they are cross-dressing for class as slave and chambermaid to “peere into poore men's windows and their shops.”⁶³ Shakespeare is more discreet and sympathetic in providing Antony and Cleopatra with an activity less obviously to be dismissed as hauteur and condescension. It is not merely that Antony is giving Cleopatra what she wants—“last night you did desire it” (1.2.56). What this scene evinces is a mutual delight in an open-eyed curiosity toward others, the possibility of discovery, and a confidant sense that they will find each other's comments remarkable. Antony will later call Cleopatra his “play-fellow.” Their pleasure in each other extends and expands their time together: “There's not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now” (1.1.47–48).

In the next scene, in which we find them talking together, Antony has given full hearing to the messengers from Rome. It is clear that such conversations, such mutual delights, are no longer to be possible. Cleopatra knows he has bad news and exasperates him by preventing its delivery. She tells him what he thinks, interrupts him, and casts aspersions on his protestations of love. Nothing, she wants to insist, has changed between them. Recalling him to the memory of love she invokes the “Bliss in our brows bent; none our parts so poor / But was a race of heaven; they are so still” (1.3.37–38). Antony's response is priggish; he makes the kinds of comments one might give at a public assembly but not to a lover: “The strong necessity of time commands / Our services a while, but my full heart / Remains in use with you” (1.3.44–45).

Antony prefers to declare the “necessity” of his departure. He talks of himself in the second-person plural, for he dare not say he wants to leave and evades his responsibility in leaving. Rome commands him as it did Aeneas to leave his Carthaginian queen.

A conversation can degrade into a quarrel, and this is what happens here. Antony no longer finds the “wrangling queen / Whom everything becomes” of the first scene so delightful (1.1.49). “Quarrel no more,” says Antony (1.3.67). Because she will hardly give him leave to go, he starkly says: “I’ll leave you, lady” (1.3.87). Then, however, the lovers somehow find a way of gracefully taking leave of each other, a real conversational achievement under the circumstances. She cannot yet bear the scourge of his disapproval; she needs to appear well in his eyes: “My becomings kill me when they do not / Eye well to you (1.3.97–99). She reconciles his departure to herself by saying not that Rome or Fulvia summons him but that his honor calls him hence (1.3.99). Antony leaves her with his valediction, forbidding mourning: “Our separation so abides and flies / That thou residing here, goes yet with me / And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee” (1.3.105–6). What lovers have not had these thoughts? It is their gentle and elderly aubade.

Act 3, scene 11, is one of the play's most daring and delicate scenes. It comes in the wake of the Battle of Actium—that decisive battle in Rome's history depicted on the famous shield of Aeneas in book 8 of the Aeneid, inaugurating the empire and one-man rule. Antony has left the battle, a “doting mallard” (3.10.20) flying after Cleopatra's fleet; it is a violation of “experience, manhood, honour,” as Scarus describes it (3.10.23). It is a battle of great historic import, but its effects on the lovers are seen to be of overriding importance. Antony and Cleopatra are most divided from each other and most present to each other. It is an unprecedented dialectic of intimacy. The separation and connection tracked so subtly and economically through act 1, scenes 1 and 3, is now revisited but in the face of a devastatingly unglamorous defeat. How does this scene convey such painful raw closeness with so many people on stage?

Antony is alone on stage when Cleopatra enters. They sit at a remove from each other: They cannot, will not, face each other. Each is in torment, but not one they can right now share. Antony is undone by shame, and she by fear of his shame, both by the belated realization of defeat and the reasons for defeat, thus the cost of their bond. Charmian, Iras, and Eros have entered with Cleopatra: The dialogue that ensues between Antony and Cleopatra is impossible without their intervention. Without the insistent help of the attendants who guide them toward each other, they cannot talk to each other at all. Where are the words to be found for such a conversation?

“Nay, gentle madam, to him, comfort him” (3.11.25). Charmian, Iras, and Eros's urgings proceed over the next twenty lines while Antony remains apart and desolate, fixed in his own desperate musings. When Cleopatra moves toward him, the attendants have to rouse him out of his desperate reverie as he ponders his erstwhile strength against the man who had no practice in “the brave squares of war” (3.11.40). Iras urges again: “Go to him, madam; speak to him. / He is unqualitied with very shame” (3.11.43–44). Eros exhorts Antony to comfort her while the queen approaches. Both then are struck dumb; both need rousing. Antony speaks first through his humiliation: “I have offended reputation, / A most unnoble swerving” (3.11.48–49). I imagine Eros's “O, the Queen” draws his attention to Cleopatra. First a question: “O whither hast thou led me, Egypt?” Cleopatra's first words in response are to ask him to “forgive her fearful sails.” She adds: “I little thought / You would have followed” (3.11.55–56). This prompts Antony into the astonishing protestation: “Thou knew’st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’strings / And shouldst tow me after” (3.11.57–59).

Antony has come to know himself in a different way and the knowledge is devastating. Perhaps it is no surprise that there comes a flood of gentle reproaches when he finally does speak with Cleopatra: “Thou knew’st too well . . . you did know / How much you were my conqueror” (3.11.65–66). Cleopatra, unguarded, because there is no precedent in her repertoire for this, can only say, “O, my pardon” and “Pardon, Pardon” (3.11.62, 3.11.69). Is Cleopatra wrong to have thought he would not follow her? Where do right and wrong come in? There are only our fatal ignorances and flighty responses in the moment. Perhaps they are both now discovering the measure of their love.

“Thou knew’st”—“I knew it” is something we often say when we do not know, when events have done their worst and brought us to a realization of what we wished we had known by any other route. It is not clear what Cleopatra knew, what Antony knew, for their love, as most loves, was not sustained by knowledge but only by trust. What is clear now is that they do acknowledge each other and perhaps for the first time in this play. When people say, retrospectively, when all at last is clear, you knew or I knew it, it is because their knowledge is not acknowledged and so that knowledge is useless.

Antony's attempt to comfort her is now heartrending. His prompt is her tears: “Fall not a tear,” and one of those tears “rate / All that is won and lost” (3.11.69–70). In the balance, one of her tears falls, and this counterweights everything lost, everything won. He has learned what he values, what is most precious to him. The kiss that comes now must contain the knowledge of the loss and the awareness of all that has just now been acknowledged. The kiss is made in the very face of all the world can throw at them: It is a sad kiss, a kiss of unbearable honesty. It cannot console but does affirm their love's measure. Productions must have the tact and intelligence to respect this intimacy, raw and exposed as it is.⁶⁴ The scene ends with a defiant call for that old solution, wine, but the wine is not convivial. It is a welcome to stupor, not festivity.

Living and Dying

Five of the thirteen suicides in the Shakespeare canon take place in Antony and Cleopatra.⁶⁵ In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus said that the one truly philosophical problem was suicide, because “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”⁶⁶ As Anne Barton shows definitively, Shakespeare offers us in this play the unusual structure of the double catastrophe.⁶⁷ The ending may be doubly catastrophic, but the two suicides could not be more differentiated: one a botched Roman attempt, the other a glorious apotheosis.⁶⁸ The juxtaposition seems poised to reveal Cleopatra's “toil of grace” (5.3.347) by contrast. The recuperative claims—to the sheer worth of their relationship and to the beauty of her ending—are also a magnificent defense of a theater for mortal bodies and for the embrace of change and transformation. Before we arrive at her defense of theater, we need to see the logic of poor Antony's death.

The action that precipitates their suicides is deliberately murky: Several unanswered questions hang over their deaths. Did Cleopatra betray him? Is she negotiating with Caesar or playing a long game of self-preservation? Antony's terrible military losses are the instigator of his death, but the immediate precipitating factor is Antony's idea that Cleopatra has betrayed him: “To the young Roman boy she hath sold me” (4.12.48). “There is left us / Ourselves to end ourselves” (4.14.21–22), he says. The rationale for Cleopatra's suicide is hotly contested as if her veniality or her attempt at negotiation with Caesar slights her high resolve. Yet Antony's response to the (false) news of her death, Cleopatra's most fatal lie, is immediately touching and generous, setting the tone for the rest of the play. There is simply the urge to talk again one more time no matter the difficulties and obstacles in the way. The two lovers leave the world behind as not worth the living, so both suicides are an indictment of the new world of the universal landlord. Although Shakespeare stages these suicides in utterly different and deliberately polarized ways, they both constitute an interrogation of a fantasy of self-sovereignty that has been in his sights all along in this play.

In Roman stoicism, especially as it became articulated under conditions of tyranny and imperial rule, the greatest empire consists of rule over your own mind: “The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself.”⁶⁹ As Rebecca Bushnell has explained: “Stoicism offers an ethics of the imperial self as well as a response to imperialism.”⁷⁰ Self-sovereignty and autonomy, the autarkic self, are fantasies of avoidance stylizing themselves as freedom.⁷¹ The path to freedom is always open: “Do you ask what path leads to freedom? Any vein in your own body.”⁷² Seneca's words are gently mocked in Tacitus’ description of his suicide in the Annals. ⁷³ His suicide is as botched as Antony's death. Seneca did not find freedom in any of his veins for, according to Tacitus, his long habits of fasting had withered his veins, even those in his legs and the back of his knees. His death was long drawn out and slow like Antony's death: He takes poison, but his bloodless legs left him immune to the poison's effect. Eventually, he is placed in a bath of warm water. Between these attempts, he dictates a lengthy missive to his scribes, in Tacitus’ mischievous portrayal, and finally, he suffocates in a steam bath after having spattered all the slaves closest to him mightily with water from the bath. Seneca's name was synonymous with suicide: se necare (se-necans).⁷⁴

Antony's description of his suicide rehearses a Senecan fantasy. It is Antony's valor not Caesar's, he claims, that has “triumphed on itself” (4.15.16). He describes himself as a “Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished” (4.15.59–60). He has not been overthrown by Caesar but has only overthrown himself. Cleopatra gently agrees, but the change to the modal auxiliary from Antony's past tense is subtly significant: “So it should be, that none but Antony / Should conquer Antony” (4.16.18–19). This is face-saving, a dying wish to save the appearances of his nobility. The scene of his suicide that we have just witnessed is hard to square with this.

For his first attempt was not in fact to die by his own hand but by the hand of Eros, and Eros kills himself rather than Antony. Because he imagines that both Cleopatra and Eros have now preceded him in death, his suicide is already threatening to be as long drawn out as poor Seneca's. Falling on his sword but with no decisive blow, he too does not yet find freedom in every vein. Even here, he depends on others, first Eros, and then almost any passing soldier who will dispatch him. It is his desperate dependence that leads him to beg any one of the three guards to finish him off, but he comes up short: “First guard: Not I! / Second Guard: Nor I! / Third Guard: Nor any one!” After the three guards run away from the dying Antony, even Decretus will merely steal his sword, the instrument of his “triumph over himself,” because it will advance him with Caesar (4.14.113–14). His end is sadly ignominious, and often provokes laughter in the audience, but it is an awkward laughter of discomfort. It cannot altogether shake itself free of the pathos and pain of Antony's abjection. Yet the audience's laughter might derive from the gap between the botched action on stage and Antony's stoical fantasies about his action, which is in line with the play's flirtations with comic idiom.⁷⁵

Even Caesar's response to the news of Antony's death registers what should happen but does not: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack” (5.1.14–15).

Antony cannot define his action unilaterally: The stoic fantasy of autonomy is revealed as corrigible, even defeated. Stoic teaching about suicide is “an extreme testimony to the Stoic belief that we are only what we have done for ourselves, that we are not what we have received from others and from the earth in which we live.”⁷⁶ Before he attempts his stoic suicide, Antony has already been melting, deliquescing in the play's extraordinary images of dissolving and discandying, of losing solidity and shape.⁷⁷

Antony's body in the immediate aftermath of his attempt at suicide is that heavy, not-yet-dead flesh, which does not acquiesce in the nobly stoic end he wills. Moreover, the laboriously unheroic and messy stage business of drawing him up to the monument where Cleopatra is immured for his dying scene utterly denies him his liebestod with Cleopatra, as he tries to claim a last dying kiss: “I here importune death awhile, until / Of many thousand kisses, the poor last / I lay upon thy lips” (4.15.21–22). She “dares not” for fear of being taken by Caesar (4.15.24–25). So Antony must be hauled and heaved up to the monument. Cleopatra's “Here's sport indeed!” (4.15.34) is sublimely playful. Antony's weightiness, although recalcitrant, is not lumpen. It erotically recalls her envy of the horse who bears his weight during their long absence: “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” (1.5.22). But the sport of lovemaking is “all gone into heaviness” (4.15.34), which is sorrow. The gravity of their love is shown side by side with its playfulness: Cleopatra's wit astonishingly even here, even now, especially here and now, accommodates both levity and gravity.

Cleopatra's Revelatory Claims

At the beginning of the play, Antony claims that Cleopatra will have to “find out” a new heaven and a new earth to reveal the extent of their love. The echo is from Revelation 21:1, a text that is resonantly drawn on in Cleopatra's stunning dream of Antony.⁷⁸ We have already been told by the disapproving Philo that Antony “oe’r flows the measure”; Antony says he has not “kept my square” to Octavia and vows that what is “to come / Shall all be done by th’ rule” (2.3.5–7). Measures are surpassed, and rules are broken: Roman regulation cannot keep up with or get the measure of this love. This includes Antony for much of the play: Enobarbus knows more about him than he knows about himself; he knows, for example, that Antony will return to Cleopatra, that he cannot not return to her, a knowledge Antony belatedly and brokenly acknowledges after Actium. Antony has to find it out.

It is Cleopatra's last act that points us toward that new heaven and earth, one that even Caesar, not being able to contain it, has to acknowledge at the last. Cleopatra's last act is a triumphant claim upon us—a claim that Antony is her husband, the word deferred and uttered for the first time now. We are asked to answer to her claim that her “courage” alone can “prove” her title. Her claims on us in this last act can be understood as aesthetic in just the ways Kant revealed.

Cleopatra's famous conversation with Dolabella prepares us for her audacious, revelatory claim that Antony is her husband. When Cleopatra meets Dolabella, she responds to his confidant address—“Most noble empress, you have heard of me?” (5.2.70)—with a fascinating rebuttal. “No matter, sir,” she says, “what I have heard or known” (5.2.71). Who he is and what she knows about him are by the by—except for this one thing she has heard. It is the only thing that matters. She has heard that he laughs at the words of boys and women when they tell their dreams. That is a “trick” of his (5.2.44). To be able to tell anyone anything, they have to credit you, to believe what you say. She wants to be sure he will believe what she says and not dismiss her as he is wont to do with the dreams of women and boys. Dolabella is confused. This is not his world. But Cleopatra wants to tell her dream, her vision of Antony. Despite his threefold attempt at interruption, she does tell her dream. It is the dream of a woman who sees her lover as lighting up her world, even the heavens themselves, and showing the brightness—and the littleness—of “the little O,” the earth (5.2.79). The O is the perfect circle of the earth, an O of wonder and perfection resonating in the round sound of her voice (for O is a figure of speech associated with her, too). O, a great, open, and mysterious sound that is also the shape of the very stage on which they stand. It is the wooden O, the O of imaginary puissance, limited only by our imaginations. Cleopatra's dream is a vision of Antony's grandeur and his resonance with the celestial patterns of the world. It is also a paean to a fecundity that depends on death, on reaping to harvest, so it is also implicit with death but with a death that is seasonal and life-giving, like the old Nile itself. It is a dream of Antony's pleasure, his delights that transcended the world yet were of it. All this is evident in the telling of her dream of a man whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose reared arm crested the world. After the recital of her wondrous dream, she invites Dolabella to this possibility: “Think you there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?” (5.2.92–93). His “gentle madam” can hardly soften the blow of an abrupt negation: “No” (5.2.93).

Her emphatic response—that he lies up to the hearing of the gods—answers to the paltriness of his world, a world that cannot accommodate the dreams of women, and thus shrinks to the size of a diminished imagination. We might say, to reintroduce the Kantian terminology, that Dolabella's “No” is based on his determinant judgment. He cannot see Antony as a man who bestrid the ocean or whose bounty would only grow and not be diminished by reaping, that is, by those who drew on it. There is no such man, nor could there be in his world—and that is this world. The historical Antony was not that man (and we are in a history play!). He cannot even admit this as a possibility offered in a dream: “Think you there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?” (5.2.91–92). That is, like Antigonus in The Winter's Tale, he thinks dreams are toys or superstitions and are not to be credited. Cleopatra, as in reflective judgment, is responding to something that is not antecedently defined by a concept. She is grasping after a vocabulary answerable to her response to Antony, to her sense of what is beauteous in him. This is why beauty must be felt for Kant, and why it feels like grace. Cleopatra's dream, and her expression of it, is keeping faith with her response and a means of seeking its realization. (For Kant, a formal condition of beauty is our response to it.)

Dolabella does eventually respond to her claim on him—with something akin to devotion. He talks of Cleopatra's command, “which my love makes religion to obey” (5.2.198), when he tells Cleopatra what she needs to understand: the nature of Caesar's plans for her. Dolabella, despite his “Gentle madam, no!,” has experienced her claim as imperatival. Cleopatra's understanding of her place in Rome's eternal theater now inform her anti-Stoic, epiphanic countertheater. Caesar and Cleopatra, as one critic has suggested, are rival triumphal claimants: Cleopatra is to be the “scutcheon” and sign of Caesar's conquest (5.2.135). Her final ceremony of leave-taking, of marriage, of apotheosis is her triumph, outwitting Caesar. It is Shakespeare's audacious counterweight to the victory at Actium celebrated by Vergil and Horace, revealing the blindness of Augustan poetics, all that these men failed to find out about Cleopatra.

Cleopatra is thus a catalyst for an expansion of the realm of morality away from an act of moralized judgment, inviting a vastly enlarged moral imagination. Her last act, with its immortal longings and sensuous haste, its fidelity to the best Antony of her capacious projection, realizes Antony's hyperbolic gestures borrowed from Revelation and makes them good. Cleopatra lays claim to a love of life in its entirety and contrariety, its infinite variety, the sensual and the soulful, the earthbound and the celestial, the dung and the air, as if fecundity, generativity, and creativity emerge from a love of the world, a “yes” to the Roman “no.”

I discovered my notes on Antony and Cleopatra from the older Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser., which I studied when I was seventeen years old for my “Advanced Level” English exams. My annotations are meticulous, extensive, touchingly neat, and careful. Despite the studious care of my notes, and my desire to be able to parse every word in the play, I remember having a strong feeling of antipathy for Cleopatra. I needed a well-defended Roman heart in those days. It was not that I admired imperial ambition, but I did seek order. I did need peace, and Cleopatra was not supplying it. I do not think any seventeen-year-old finds old love appealing, especially when it is so flamboyant, so shamelessly erotic. The desires on display embarrassed and dismayed me, and I suppose I might have thought the sublimity of Shakespeare's most poetic play was an excellent cover, undeniably sublime, but a hyperarticulate way of pulling the wool over my not-to-be-fooled eyes.

My response to the play now is more charitable, more open-hearted. I have felt the greater weight and power of empires, and the particular ways they seek to rule our imaginations and bodies. I know, too, that human love is both sublime and ridiculous. I also see that the play incorporates and utterly resituates, in fact exposes, moral purism. It so minutely and innovatively charts the intricate intimacies and transformation of a mutual relation, and I take this to be an unprecedented achievement. It revises and explodes the history of the victors even while knowing the measure of their victories. In the freedom and splendor of the imagination, it transcends their worldly empires and shows them to be paltry indeed.