by Harold Bloom
There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphinlike; they showed his back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket.
act 5, scene 2, lines 70–91
There are overtones here of Revelation 10:1–2:
And I saw another mighty Angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud, and the rainbow upon his head, and his face was as the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.
And he had in his hand a little book open, and he put his right foot upon the sea, and his left on the earth.
Geneva Bible
This appears to have fused with a passage from the sixteenth-century mythographer Cartari where Jove or Jupiter is identified with the entire universe. Cleopatra’s waking dream is of an Antony who is both emperor and god. The intricate web of Cleopatra’s guile now extends to a great dream of her lost lover. Antony is transformed into the celestial alternation of sun and moon, lighting our Earth as the little O, the Globe Theatre in which Cleopatra stages her art. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, Antony’s legs straddle the ocean. His Herculean arm surmounted the universe and his voice, addressing his followers, brought back the harmony of the heavenly bodies moving in their spheres. But when roaring at his enemies, it shook the world like thunder rattling. His bounty was perpetual harvest and his delight, like dolphins playfully rising up out of the ocean, transcended and gloried in his own being. Kings and princes were his followers, and he strewed countries and islands like so many coins dropping out of his pocket.
Dolabella’s courteous dissent spurs Cleopatra to fresh eloquence. Even if such an Antony never existed, mere dreaming cannot dim her image. Shakespeare for once speaks through her: No natural material can compete with fancy or imagination yet his Antony is nature’s masterpiece, a triumph over the shadows of stage representation.
Dolabella: Cleopatra—
Cleopatra: Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
Dolabella: Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra: You lie up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be nor ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine
An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
act 5, scene 2, lines 91–99
That is Cleopatra’s vision at its highest. Her imagination of Antony surpasses nature, and yet becomes nature’s masterpiece.
Dolabella: Hear me, good madam:
Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it
As answering to the weight. Would I might never
O’ertake pursued success but I do feel,
By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites
My very heart at root.
Cleopatra: I thank you, sir.
Know you what Caesar means to do with me?
Dolabella: I am loath to tell you what I would you knew.
Cleopatra: Nay, pray you, sir.
Dolabella: Though he be honorable—
Cleopatra: He’ll lead me, then, in triumph.
Dolabella: Madam, he will. I know’t.
act 5, scene 2, lines 99–109
Moved by her sorrow, Dolabella reveals the intention of Octavius to lead her as the humiliated whore in his Roman celebration. The entrance of Octavius Caesar provokes a tableau both comic and harrowing. Cleopatra grovels and presents him a false scroll of her treasure, calling upon her treasurer Seleucus to verify her. Exposed, she rages and pretends to accept her conqueror’s false assurances. When he departs, Cleopatra’s resolution becomes firm:
Cleopatra: He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself. But hark thee, Charmian.
[She whispers to Charmian]
Iras: Finish, good lady. The bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
Cleopatra: [to Charmian] Hie thee again.
I have spoke already and it is provided;
Go put it to the haste.
Charmian: Madam, I will.
act 5, scene 2, lines 191–96
There is an ocean of luminous self-realization in Cleopatra’s “He words me, girls, he words me.” In act 2, scene 2, Hamlet sets the tone:
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
act 2, scene 2, lines 188–89
The most restless of intellectuals, Hamlet is impatient not merely with the fussy Polonius but with his own verbal mastery. To unpack his heart with words is to be a drab, or prostitute. One sees why Nietzsche followed Hamlet in the maxim that if you can find words for it, it is already dead in your heart. But Cleopatra as a great diva scorns the deceptions of others and treasures her own labors to deceive. Octavius Caesar is an amateur thespian out of his league when he seeks to entrap an authentic prima donna.
Like her faithful Iras, Cleopatra knows the bright day is done and she is for the dark. With majestic style she goes toward it.
CHAPTER 14
Some Squeaking Cleopatra Boy My Greatness
Warned by Dolabella that there are only three days at most before Octavius Caesar carries her and her children off to Rome, Cleopatra resolves to perform her final scene:
Cleopatra: Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall be enclouded
And forced to drink their vapour.
Iras: The gods forbid!
Cleopatra: Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’ posture of a whore.
Iras: O the good gods!
Cleopatra: Nay, that’s certain.
Iras: I’ll never see’t! For I am sure my nails
Are stronger than mine eyes.
Cleopatra: Why, that’s the way
To fool their preparation and to conquer
Their most absurd intents. [Enter Charmian]
Now, Charmian!
Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch
My best attires. I am again for Cydnus,
To meet Mark Antony. Sirrah Iras, go—
Now, noble Charmian, we’ll dispatch indeed—
And, when thou hast done this chare I’ll give thee leave
To play till doomsday. Bring our crown and all.
act 5, scene 2, line 207–32
As though directing her own nightmare, Cleopatra with astonishing vividness envisions the potential humiliations of Antony and herself. It would be a puppet show in which slave laborers would raise her up for the delectation of the Roman multitudes. Cleopatra and her women would be all but suffocated by the rank vapors of coarseness and grossness.
The terror augments as Cleopatra describes ribald bailiffs snatching at the Egyptian aristocratic women like so many Doll Tearsheets while scurvy poetlings tunelessly defame them in demotic ballads. Street comedians will exercise their wits in extemporaneous skits featuring an intoxicated Antony. Worst of all, Cleopatra will have to endure a boy actor reducing her greatness to a sq
ueaking harlot.
Shakespeare would have known that women performed upon the Roman stage. Ruefully he must have chafed at the legal restriction that only boys impersonated his women characters. I’ve always wondered how even a skilled Jacobean boy actor could have successfully performed the role of Cleopatra.
With forceful pride, the Egyptian queen exults in her preparations to frustrate Octavius Caesar. She wishes to be displayed like an empress. Charmian and Iras are dispatched to bring back her most seductive costume. Once again she will prepare to meet Mark Antony as first she did. As she calls for her crown she utters the uncanny promise that when their chore is performed they can play until doomsday. The arrival of the rural Clown marks the advent of her final epiphany.
Ultimately Cleopatra’s staging of her death rivals Hamlet’s. He goes into the trap set by Claudius and Laertes fully aware he will not survive. Both Cleopatra and Hamlet die by poison, but that is a limited similarity. What is akin is the appearance of choice in these common fatalities. William Butler Yeats believed that the protagonists of tragedy were beyond sorrow:
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
“Lapis Lazuli,” lines 9–24
In a related, far more splendid poem, Yeats achieved a vision of Homer’s Helen that has an aura also of Cleopatra:
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
“Long-legged Fly,” lines 11–20
One sees the young Cleopatra of Egypt, like the young Helen of Troy, practicing a seductive dance to street musicians, wandering tinkers. Certainly part of the allure of both mythic beauties is the childlike wonder that never abandons them. They know that love is play, however dark it may become.
He. Dear, I must be gone
While night shuts the eyes
Of the household spies;
That song announces dawn.
She. No, night’s bird and love’s
Bids all true lovers rest,
While his loud song reproves
The murderous stealth of day.
He. Daylight already flies
From mountain crest to crest
She. That light is from the moon.
He. That bird . . .
She. Let him sing on,
I offer to love’s play
My dark declivities.
“A Woman Young and Old,” section VII, “Parting”
This aubade, distantly reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, is Yeats in the vein of Cleopatra, high priestess of heterosexual love. If Fortune and Octavius Caesar had allowed Antony to survive and Cleopatra to be forever with him, then she would have offered her dark declivities to love’s play until doomsday.
CHAPTER 15
I Wish You All Joy of the Worm
Cleopatra’s dialogue with the rural Clown who brings her the fatal asps in a basket of figs is, in one sense, only an interlude before her magnificent self-immolation. And yet when I muse in meditation upon her vast drama, I frequently begin with this curious encounter between incommensurate personalities.
The Clown, like Falstaff’s Mistress Quickly, moves from one malapropism to another. Cleopatra, in part amused but increasingly impatient with him, dallies in a last holding off of the darkness:
Guardsman: Here is a rural fellow
That will not be denied Your Highness’ presence.
He brings you figs.
Cleopatra: Let him come in. [Exit Guardsman]
What poor an instrument
May do a noble deed! He brings me liberty.
My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.
[Enter Guardsman and Clown (with a basket)]
Guardsman: This is the man.
Cleopatra: Avoid, and leave him. [Exit Guardsman]
Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there
That kills and pains not?
Clown: Truly, I have him, but I would not be the party that should desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal. Those that do die of it do seldom or never recover.
Cleopatra: Remember’st thou any that have died on’t?
Clown: Very many, men and women too. I heard of one of them no longer than yesterday—a very honest woman, but something given to lie, as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty—how she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt. Truly, she makes a very good report o’th’ worm. But he that will believe all that they say shall never be saved by half that they do. But this is most fallible, the worm’s an odd worm.
Cleopatra: Get thee hence, farewell.
Clown: I wish you all joy of the worm. [Sets down his basket]
act 5, scene 2, lines 233–58
Ironically reflecting that the Clown is a poor instrument that will enable her to perform the noble deed of suicide, Cleopatra chills us by terming the poisonous serpents her liberty. We believe her when she affirms she is fixed in resolution yet wonder why she wants to assert that she no longer has anything of woman in her. More than ever, her power is that of female sexuality, an otherness that even Shakespeare can only intimate. Is she as constant as so much marble? How can she repudiate the changing moon? Possibly she is aware of her coming transmutation into the goddess Isis, one of whose emblems was the disc of the sun.
The dialogue between Cleopatra and the Clown is fiercely erotic. To call the asp the “pretty worm of Nilus” converts the serpent into the male sexual organ. To be killed without pain is to die in coition.
The Clown, moved by desire for her, warns her not to touch the asp, since its biting is “immortal,” by which he means “mortal,” yet Shakespeare intends both. The Clown almost matches Cleopatra as a wit when he remarks that those dying by the asp seldom or never recover.
A kind of wonder, outpacing histrionics, moves Cleopatra to the fraught question: “Remember’st thou any that have died on’t?” His reply is a little masterpiece of sexual innuendo. Just yesterday he heard from a particular customer, a woman equivocally honest and so given to lie, as only a chaste woman should, who had just died of a bite of the asp and makes a very good report of the worm, thus living on for further erotic forays. In a further turn of travesty, the Clown twists “all” and “half” in distrust of womankind. It would be difficult to refute his malapropism of using “fallible” for “infallible” in asserting that the worm, in every sense, is an odd worm.
Dismissing the Clown, Cleopatra evokes his somewhat bitter “I wish you all joy of the worm.” And yet he is not ready to depart:
Cleopatra: Farewell.
Clown: You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.
Cleopatra: Ay, ay; farewell.
&nbs
p; Clown: Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people; for, indeed, there is no goodness in the worm.
Cleopatra: Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.
Clown: Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding.
Cleopatra: Will it eat me?
Clown: You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself will not eat a woman. I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not. But truly, these same whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for in every ten that they make, the devils mar five.
Cleopatra: Well, get thee gone. Farewell.
Clown: Yes, forsooth. I wish you joy o’th’ worm.
act 5, scene 2, lines 259–76
Rather like the aristocratic Dolabella, the rustic is half in love with her. Warning her again that the worm has no goodness, he renders Cleopatra more impatient for him to be gone, and still he lingers to pray her not to die. I often tell my students that her finest moment is when, like a little girl, she asks: “Will it eat me?” In his exasperation he utters a misogynistic curse, eloquent enough, though to no purpose. Cleopatra waves him away and he exits muttering his ambiguous motto “I wish you joy o’th’ worm.”
When I stand back from this dark dialogue, invariably I recall Hamlet and the Gravedigger in the first scene of Act 5. In all of that still amazingly experimental drama, it is only the Gravedigger who holds his own confronting Hamlet. Digging Ophelia’s grave in consecrated ground, despite her suicide, the saturnine Gravedigger praises his profession as being Adamic.
Hamlet and Horatio enter just as the Gravedigger throws up the skull of Yorick, jester to the murdered King Hamlet, and a loving playmate to the child Hamlet. The emblem of The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is Hamlet holding up and confronting Yorick’s skull. Certainly one emblem of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra is the Queen of Egypt raising the asps to her breast and to her arm.
The Gravedigger is far more formidable than the Clown. His equivocations are equal to Hamlet’s deep questionings and endless dole. One could say his earthy realism sets off Hamlet’s supernal nihilism. Cleopatra’s embodiment of the moist soil and water of the Nile will be cast away by her as she ascends to what she hopes yet will be a transcendent reunion with her lost lover.