Cleopatra
Page 6
I hope well of tomorrow, and will lead you
Where rather I’ll expect victorious life
Than death and honor. Let’s to supper, come,
And drown consideration.
act 4, scene 2, lines 21–46
His sad captains weep; even Enobarbus joins in but then remonstrates with Antony. Something crucial is departing from the flawed hero. Partly following Plutarch, Shakespeare reveals the supernatural abandonment of Antony by his daemon or guiding genius:
First Soldier: Brother, good night. Tomorrow is the day.
Second Soldier: It will determine one way. Fare you well.
Heard you of nothing strange about the streets?
First Soldier: Nothing. What news?
Second Soldier: Belike ’tis but a rumor. Good night to you.
First Soldier: Well, sir, good night. [They meet other Soldiers]
Second Soldier: Soldiers, have careful watch.
Third Soldier: And you. Good night, good night.
Second Soldier: Here we. And if tomorrow
Our navy thrive, I have an absolute hope
Our landmen will stand up.
First Soldier: ’Tis a brave army, and full of purpose.
[Music of the hautboys as under the stage]
Second Soldier: Peace! What noise?
First Soldier: List, list!
Second Soldier: Hark!
First Soldier: Music i’th’air.
Third Soldier: Under the earth.
Fourth Soldier: It signs well, does it not?
Third Soldier: No.
First Soldier: Peace, I say! What should this mean?
Second Soldier: ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved
Now leaves him.
First Soldier: Walk; let’s see if other watchmen
Do hear what we do. [They advance toward their fellow watchmen]
Second Soldier: How now, masters?
All: How now? How now? Do you hear this?
First Soldier: Ay. Is’t not strange?
Third Soldier: Do you hear, masters? Do you hear?
First Soldier: Follow the noise so far as we have quarter;
Let’s see how it will give off.
All: Content. ’Tis strange.
act 4, scene 3, lines 1–30
In Plutarch the departing daemon is Dionysus or Bacchus. Shakespeare chooses Hercules because Antony is the very archetype of the Herculean hero. Indeed he claimed descent from Hercules and prided himself that he looked like his mythological ancestor. Always subtle, Shakespeare implies that Antony became Dionysus or Osiris in his scattering but was Herculean at his apex.
The withdrawal of the god, be he Bacchus or Hercules, initiates from the opening lines of Antony and Cleopatra and concludes with his piteous death:
Now my spirit is going;
I can no more.
act 4, scene 15, lines 60–61
There is an uncanny magic in Shakespeare’s music below the stage and in the air. I hear a faint echo of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the early scenes of that most enigmatic of all dramas. Yet this in Antony and Cleopatra is somehow stranger:
’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved
Now leaves him.
The plangency of this abandonment is enhanced if you substitute “the goddess Isis” for “the god Hercules.” We are not told that Hercules loved Antony or that Isis the mystery was in love with him. There is a panic in Antony throughout this vast play that Cleopatra might fall out of love with him. Despite his bravura, something in him knows that without her vitality he will go on ebbing.
Does she ever fall out of love with him? Wavering is her metamorphic mode. An absolute realist, she knows before he does that Antony wanes. All of Shakespeare’s strongest women are survivalists and Cleopatra is preeminent among them. We need not doubt her passion for Antony and yet she would sell him out for the right price. When Antony calls her “the armorer of my heart” and his next words are “false, false,” he thinks he means that Cleopatra is adjusting his armor wrongly. Scarcely ever can Antony overhear himself. Shakespeare’s art is in the irony that Antony’s heart will be played false.
Marching toward the last battle with Octavius, Antony receives the news that Enobarbus has deserted him, leaving his treasure as a gesture to the gods that he goes half-unwillingly. Antony’s nobility returns in his own gracious gesture:
Go, Eros, send his treasure after. Do it.
Detain no jot, I charge thee. Write to him—
I will subscribe—gentle adieus and greetings.
Say that I wish he never find more cause
To change a master. Oh, my fortunes have
Corrupted honest men! Dispatch.—Enobarbus!
act 4, scene 5, lines 12–17
There is authentic anguish and chagrin in that cry: “Enobarbus!” Shakespeare, in a brilliant juxtaposition, answers that cry with Octavius Caesar, who will be the Emperor Augustus, proclaiming “the time of universal peace is near.” This will be the Roman Peace purchased by brutality at home and abroad.
Enobarbus proceeds to his sorrowful extinction:
I have done ill,
Of which I do accuse myself so sorely
That I will joy no more.
act 4, scene 6, lines 18–20
The heavy heart of Enobarbus cannot sustain Antony’s final generosity:
Soldier: Enobarbus, Antony
Hath after thee sent all thy treasure, with
His bounty overplus. The messenger
Came on my guard, and at thy tent is now
Unloading of his mules.
Enobarbus: I give it you.
Soldier: Mock not, Enobarbus.
I tell you true. Best you safed the bringer
Out of the host. I must attend mine office,
Or would have done’t myself. Your emperor
Continues still a Jove. [Exit]
Enobarbus: I am alone the villain of the earth,
And feel I am so most. O Antony,
Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid
My better service, when my turpitude
Thou dost so crown with gold! This blows my heart.
If swift thought break it not, a swifter mean
Shall outstrike thought, but thought will do’t, I feel.
I fight against thee? No, I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die. The foul’st best fits
My latter part of life.
act 4, scene 6, lines 20–40
Throughout the play we have enjoyed Enobarbus for his wit, realism, and gusto. Shakespeare must have known how sadly we are moved by the irony that Antony’s generosity drives Enobarbus to suicide. That sorrow is enhanced by his portrayal of the last moments of Enobarbus:
Sentry: If we be not relieved within this hour,
We must return to th’ court of guard. The night
Is shiny, and they say we shall embattle
By th’ second hour i’th’ morn.
First Watch: This last day was a shrewd one to ’s.
Enobarbus: O bear me witness, night—
Second Watch: What man is this?
First Watch: Stand close, and list him. [They stand aside]
Enobarbus: Be witness to me, O thou blessèd moon,
When men revolted shall upon record
Bear hateful memory: poor Enobarbus did
Before thy face repent.
Sentry: Enobarbus?
Second Watch: Peace! Hark further.
Enobarbus: O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder
And fin
ish all foul thoughts. O Antony,
Nobler than my revolt is infamous,
Forgive me in thine own particular,
But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver and a fugitive.
O Antony! O Antony! [He dies]
First Watch: Let’s speak to him.
Sentry: Let’s hear him, for the things he speaks
May concern Caesar.
Second Watch: Let’s do so. But he sleeps.
Sentry: Swoons rather, for so bad a prayer as his
Was never yet for sleep.
First Watch: Go we to him.
Second Watch: Awake sir, awake. Speak to us.
First Watch: Hear you, sir?
Sentry: The hand of death hath raught him. [Drums afar off]
Hark, the drums demurely wake the sleepers.
Let us bear him to th’ court of guard;
He is of note. Our hour is fully out.
Second Watch: Come on, then. He may recover yet.
act 4, scene 9, lines 1–38
Enobarbus with his last breath cries out: “O Antony! O Antony!” Just before the end he achieves a curious eloquence when he addresses the moon as: “O sovereign mistress of true melancholy.” Whether or not that melancholy is the madness attributed to the moon’s influence, or his own anguish, it stands for the agony of lost honor that destroys Enobarbus.
CHAPTER 10
This Foul Egyptian Hath Betrayed Me
Antony goes into the battle of Actium with forced confidence:
I would they’d fight i’th’ fire or i’th’ air;
We’d fight there too.
act 4, scene 10, lines 3–4
Disaster is almost immediate:
Scarus: Swallows have built
In Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augurers
Say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly,
And dare not speak their knowledge. Antony
Is valiant, and dejected, and by starts,
His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear
Of what he has and has not. [Enter Antony]
Antony: All is lost!
This foul Egyptian hath betrayèd me.
My fleet hath yielded to the foe, and yonder
They cast their caps up and carouse together
Like friends long lost. Triple-turned whore! ’Tis thou
Hast sold me to this novice, and my heart
Makes only wars on thee. Bid them all fly;
For when I am revenged upon my charm,
I have done all. Bid them all fly. Be gone! [Exit Scarus]
O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more.
Fortune and Antony part here; even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked
That overtopped them all. Betrayed I am.
O this false soul of Egypt! This grave charm,
Whose eye becked forth my wars and called them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,
Like a right gipsy hath at fast and loose
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.
[Calling] What, Eros, Eros!
act 4, scene 12, 3–30
Antony’s vexed fortunes have him in wild alternation between vain hope and the foreboding of loss. When his fleet, with many Egyptian ships, goes over to Octavius he sensibly concludes that Cleopatra has sold him out. The immensely bitter: “Triple-turned whore” hits at the sequence of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Antony himself. He endures now only to avenge himself on her evil magic and invokes the sunrise he will not live to see.
The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked
That overtopped them all.
There is a gracious turn in parting from fortune on good terms and then a falling into self-pity as he chides the false-hearted former followers whom he enriched. There is some question as to the word “spannell’d.” The Folio text reads “pannelled,” which was amended to “spanieled.” In Shakespeare’s day “pannell” meant a whore, and that fits the context better, since it applies both to the followers abandoning Antony and to Cleopatra. They dissolve and melt as tributaries to the blossoming Octavius and he, solitary pine tree that stood above them all, is now destroyed by the stripping away of his bark and thus his life.
Betrayed by the fatal charm of Cleopatra the sorceress, who in their sexual union had been the culmination of his career and his destiny, and who had enlisted him in a cheating game, he utters a line so memorable that Shakespeare could not surpass it:
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.
Cleopatra enters to be waved away as a false enchantress. What are we to make of her:
Why is my lord enraged against his love?
act 4, scene 12, line 31
It is difficult to believe she has not connived at the desertion of their combined fleet. Shakespeare will not tell us if she has intrigued with Octavius to save herself. Certainly her politic nature suggests such a plot. Why should a goddess and great ruler not seek what is best for Egypt herself?
It has been marvelous that a single play, however prodigious, should have been able for so long to contain two gigantic charismatic personalities. Antony dies near the end of Act 4. From the thirty or so final lines until Act 5, Cleopatra is alone at the center of desolation and loss. In the more than four hundred lines of the final act we see, hear, and are concerned with Cleopatra alone. The great presence of Antony becomes a sepulchral absence.
Shakespeare in Macbeth allows Lady Macbeth to speak for the last time in the initial scene of Act V. Four scenes later we hear her women cry out at her death, presumably by suicide. The final act belongs to Macbeth alone. It cannot be said that Lady Macbeth haunts the sequence of heightening equivocations that take us to Macduff’s triumphant outcry: “The time is free!”
The imminent departure of Antony compels a reflection upon Shakespeare’s extraordinary originality in teaching us that personality fuses presence and the charismatic secularization of the blessing, or being favored by God. What is presence? We tend to use it as charisma, an aura, or the force of what we call personality. Ultimately this has to be traced to the presence of God, whether among all humans, or in each human being, or in nature.
Antony and Cleopatra catches the moment when Rome overcame the Eastern world and ended an era that began with the conquests of Alexander the Great. Alexandria and its eclectic culture yielded to the monolithic Roman Empire. Antony as he goes down is the last representative of a heroic age in which men and gods mingled yet contested one another. Julius Caesar, Antony’s leader and hero, is portrayed by Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar as already declining before he is assassinated. Octavius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus, is colorless and has the presence of a consummate bureaucrat. It is not possible either to dislike him or to admire his ruthlessness, since he has no personality. The shattering of Mark Antony and subsequent apotheosis by suicide of Cleopatra sorrows us, not for them, but for the disappearance of overwhelming presences.
The presence of the wounded lion Antony is painful to behold and hear as he roars his rage:
Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving
And blemish Caesar’s triumph. Let him take thee
And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians!
Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot
Of all thy sex; most monster-like be shown
For poor’st diminutives, for dolts, and let
Patient Octavia plough thy visage up
With her prepared nails! [Exit Cleopatra]
’Tis well thou�
��rt gone,
If it be well to live; but better ’twere
Thou fell’st into my fury, for one death
Might have prevented many.—Eros, ho!—
The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o’th’ moon,
And with those hands, that grasped the heaviest club,
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. She dies for’t.—Eros, ho!
act 4, scene 12, lines 32–49
The invective of terming Cleopatra the greatest disgrace of her gender yields, with her exit, to an astonishing epiphany in which Antony identifies totally with his ancestor Alcides or Hercules who died in agony, poisoned by the bloody shirt of the centaur Nessus, and tossing his hapless page Lichas into the air. Resolving to murder Cleopatra, Antony calls out for his freedman Eros.
Cleopatra in her flight to what will be her tomb compares the fury of Antony to that of Ajax Telamon, who after the fall of Troy erupted into insanity and suicide when the shield and armor of Achilles was not awarded to him. She invokes also the wild Thessalian boar whom Artemis or Diana sent out to destroy the fields of Calydon until it was slaughtered by Meleager. One admires Cleopatra’s command of language when she compares the embossed beast to Antony, who also rages in his hopeless exhaustion.
Charmian devises the deception of playing dead and Cleopatra, supreme actress, elaborates it:
Charmian: To th’ monument!
There lock yourself and send him word you are dead.
The soul and body rive not more in parting
Than greatness going off.
Cleopatra: To th’ monument!
Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself.
Say that the last I spoke was ‘Antony,’
And word it, prithee, piteously. Hence, Mardian,
And bring me how he takes my death. To th’ monument!
act 4, scene 13, lines 3–10
Whatever her culpability, Cleopatra sensibly does not wish to be butchered by her ferocious lover. When next we see him with Eros, his fury has abated. Replacing it is a speculative mood strangely reminiscent of Hamlet:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’ mass and ’tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.