Cleopatra

by Harold Bloom

  CHAPTER 16

  I Am Fire and Air

  Shakespeare, as we might expect, has unique mastery at portraying the art of dying. We do not see Sir John Falstaff die. That is as it should be. It is good to remember him counterfeiting death on the battlefield and then resurrecting in the fullness of his glory. Mistress Quickly, tenderly and falteringly, croons her prose elegy for the Fat Knight.

  Hamlet dies onstage and mysteriously frustrates us by saying that if there were time, he would tell us, and we will never know what that would have been. His last words are enigmatic: “The rest is silence.” Does “rest” mean “remainder” or does it imply perpetual peace? My mentor Gershom Scholem and his tragic friend Walter Benjamin believed that speech was marred in the Creation-Fall while silence remained unblemished.

  Though the warrior Fortinbras awards Hamlet military honors for his funeral, we tolerate this irony because he commands Hamlet to be carried up to a high place, and that elevation gratifies our sense that the Prince of Denmark has died upward onto a supernal plane.

  King Lear, the great image of paternal and royal authority, dies in the beautiful delusion that his daughter Cordelia has been resurrected, and that onrush of joy breaks his overstrained heart. His friend Gloucester similarly ends betwixt joy and grief, as narrated to us by Edgar, his legitimate son and heir. Edmund the Bastard, his natural all-too-natural son, is carried off stage to die after being cut down by Edgar. We do not see the terrible death of Cordelia, strangled by Edmund’s order, though her furious father, despite being well on in his eighties, destroys her murderer.

  The monster daughters of Lear, Goneril and Regan, die offstage, and their bodies are then carried in. Goneril has poisoned Regan and then killed herself. The Fool vanishes and we do not know where or why.

  We see the deaths both of Desdemona, strangled by Othello, and then of the Moor, who stabs himself in expiation. Emilia is slain onstage by her infuriated husband, Iago, who then vows silence, knowing he will die under torture.

  Lady Macbeth, in her madness, evidently is a suicide. Macbeth, Shakespeare’s ultimate hero-villain, is slain offstage by Macduff, who enters brandishing the tyrant’s head. Perhaps we do not see Macbeth die because Shakespeare has compelled us to travel so far into the interior with Bellona’s bridegroom that we cannot help identifying with him.

  That tragic Shakespearean procession has no particular pattern that I can discern. I cite it here to suggest the enormous contrast of all these with the high artistry Cleopatra brings to her earthly conclusion. We have seen Antony’s pathetic death, a painful decline from his Herculean splendor. Cleopatra chooses to die upward in an audacious venture into the Elysian Fields. If she has any affinity with the Shakespearean personalities who have preceded her, I can think only of Hamlet, but he chooses to die into nothingness.

  Cleopatra’s histrionic consciousness mounts to a summit with majestic language:

  [Enter Iras with a robe, crown and other jewels]

  Cleopatra: Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have

  Immortal longings in me. Now no more

  The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip.

  [The women dress her]

  Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear

  Antony call; I see him rouse himself

  To praise my noble act. I hear him mock

  The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

  To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come!

  Now to that name my courage prove my title!

  I am fire and air; my other elements

  I give to baser life. So, have you done?

  Come, then, and take the last warmth of my lips.

  Farewell, kind Charmian. Iras, long farewell.

               [Kisses them. Iras falls and dies.]

  Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?

  If thou and nature can so gently part,

  The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,

  Which hurts and is desired. Dost thou lie still?

  If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world

  It is not worth leave-taking.

  Charmian: Dissolve, thick cloud, and rain, that I may say

  The gods themselves do weep!

  act 5, scene 2, lines 277–97

  Her immortal longings are not so much for a time without boundaries but for a perpetual fulfillment of her sexual richness and power. As Charmian and Iras dress her, she urges celerity, and imagines Antony calling to praise her nobility, and to mock the fortunes of Octavius Caesar, as though the gods have made Octavius lucky so that at last they can punish him for his pride.

  It is startling and wonderful to hear her cry out “Husband, I come!” Her courage must prove her legitimacy as Antony’s bride. Fulvia and Octavia are at last exorcised. The tide of her being flows exuberantly as she proclaims:

  I am fire and air; my other elements

  I give to baser life.

  Fully attired, she turns to kiss farewell to Charmian and to Iras, who expires immediately by that kiss of death. In wonderment, Cleopatra ironically asks if the poison of the asp is already in her lips. She is altogether herself when she muses:

  If thou and nature can so gently part,

  The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,

  Which hurts and is desired.

  Dying is erotic play and gentle Iras has vanished without the ceremony of farewell. Cleopatra, more than ever, is ceremonial while Charmian weeps with the gods of Egypt. And so Cleopatra begins the sacrament of her departure:

  Cleopatra:      This proves me base.

  If she first meet the curlèd Antony,

  He’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss

  Which is my heaven to have. [To an asp] Come, thou mortal wretch,

  With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

  Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,

  Be angry and dispatch. Oh, couldst thou speak,

  That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass

  Unpolicied!

  Charmian: O eastern star!

  Cleopatra:       Peace, peace!

  Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

  That sucks the nurse asleep?

  Charmian:       Oh, break! Oh, break!

  Cleopatra: As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—

  O Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too.

                [Applies another asp to her arm]

  What should I stay—               [Dies]

  act 5, scene 2, lines 297–310

  She hastens lest Iras first meet Antony in the Elysian Fields and request the pleasure of a kiss that would be heaven for the Egyptian queen. She takes up an asp and affectionately terms it a deadly beloved. The intricate knot tying her to life she yields up to the phallic bite of the serpent. Angrily ironic, she wishes the asp to speak, that it might call Octavius Caesar an outwitted ass, with an obvious play upon asp.

  Charmian, overcome by love and sorrow, magnificently cries out “O eastern star!” invoking the morning star, Venus, and the memory of Cleopatra’s first appearance to Antony in the costume of that goddess. In an ecstasy, Cleopatra hushes Charmian. As the poison seeps in, the Egyptian queen identifies the asp with one of the babies she had nursed and falls asleep even as the infant did. In Charmian’s desperate injunction:

  Oh, break! Oh, break!

  there is an echo of Kent, faithful follower of King Lear, urging the bereaved old man (or more likely, himself) to escape further torment:

  Break, heart; I prithee, break!

  act 5, scene 3, line 309

  In her final ecstasy, Cleopatra hallucinates that she takes Antony:

  As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—

  O Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too.

               [Applies another asp to her arm]

  What s
hould I stay—              [Dies]

  We will never know how those final words would have concluded. Why should she stay? Charmian answers for her and then follows:

  Charmian: In this wild world? So, fare thee well.

  Now boast thee, Death, in thy possession lies

  A lass unparalleled. Downy windows, close;

  And golden Phoebus never be beheld

  Of eyes again so royal! Your crown’s awry;

  I’ll mend it, and then play—   [Enter the Guard, rustling in]

  First Guard: Where’s the Queen?

  Charmian:         Speak softly. Wake her not.

  First Guard: Caesar hath sent—

  Charmian:          Too slow a messenger.

                [She applies an asp to herself]

  Oh, come apace, dispatch! I partly feel thee.

  First Guard: Approach, ho! All’s not well. Caesar’s beguiled.

  Second Guard: There’s Dolabella sent from Caesar. Call him.

  First Guard: What work is here, Charmian? Is this well done?

  Charmian: It is well done, and fitting for a princess

  Descended of so many royal kings.

  Ah, soldier!          [Charmian dies]

  act 5, scene 2, lines 311–25

  Charmian appears to mean both a savage and a vile world that is better abandoned. She closes the soft eyebrows of her Queen, and straightens Cleopatra’s crown. Quite wonderfully she begins her suicide by calling it “play.” A bawdy personality throughout, she dies with the wistful “Ah, soldier!” as though she wants a final embrace.

  The death of Cleopatra has been so awesome that we do it violence unless we apprehend how majestic it is. Octavius Caesar enters for a kind of epilogue, but I will postpone that until I consider Cleopatra in the larger context of Shakespeare’s pilgrimage through eros.

  Falstaff and his companions, Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly in particular, are rammed with life. Their exuberance encircles the erotic sphere of desire and its fulfillment. Defying age and the state, Sir John Falstaff must lose, and yet his passion holds on until the end. In his personality we can surmise a vitalism that Shakespeare both augmented and endorsed.

  The Sonnets are too varied for any single pattern, but they move toward the sexual furnace of the Dark Lady. Hamlet, though he insists he loved Ophelia, savagely rejects her in what seems a recoiling from sexuality itself. His contempt for his mother, Gertrude, is painful for us, and difficult to forgive. To say that there shall be no more marriages is the cry of a mistaken soul. Since Hamlet, like his creator, has the most capacious of intelligences, we are moved to woe and wonder by this extremity.

  King Lear, furious and crazed by the ingratitude of Goneril and Regan, denounces the vagina as the infernal pit, yet is large enough to be disgusted by his own sourness. Edgar, whose personality is complex beyond comprehension, humbles himself by telling the dying Edmund:

  The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

  Make instruments to plague us:

  The dark and vicious place where thee he got

  Cost him his eyes.

  act 5, scene 3, lines 167–70

  We wince, as Edgar does also, that the vagina of Edmund’s unknown mother should so be characterized. Where Shakespeare himself stands in this, we have no clue. And yet the plays show us an increasing diffidence, in the older sense of distrustfulness, in regard to the undifferentiated male sex drive.

  Iago’s bitter language about human sexuality may indicate that the shock of being rejected by Othello has unmanned him. Despite the radiance of Desdemona and the doughty spirit of Emilia, Iago so scatters and ruins Othello that the heroic Moor is reduced to a sexual obsessive.

  There are hints that Macbeth is not altogether sexually adequate as the husband of the formidable Lady Macbeth. From 1601 to 1605 Shakespeare composed the three problematic comedies: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. After that came the tragic sequence of Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

  The dark comedies are feculent. Cressida and Helen of Troy pragmatically are whores. All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure both feature the bed-trick, in which one woman substitutes for another, on the principle that in the dark they are all alike. After the sublimity of Cleopatra, the remaining tragedies are diminishments. In Coriolanus the dread figure Volumnia is the archetypal Devouring Mother whose motto is “Anger’s my meat.” In Timon of Athens the protagonist loads with gold the whores Phrynia and Timandra, who accompany Alcibiades on his expedition. Timon commissions these brazen damozels to carry their diseases to the Athenians and thus freely to decimate the ungrateful city.

  In the beautiful late romances The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Shakespeare returns to his more customary balance. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, overcome by paranoid jealousy, chants his madness:

  It is a bawdy planet, that will strike

  Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful, think it,

  From east, west, north and south: be it concluded,

  No barricado for a belly; know’t;

  It will let in and out the enemy

  With bag and baggage: many thousand on’s

  Have the disease, and feel’t not.

  act 1, scene 2, lines 201–7

  Against this Shakespeare sets his most convincing and exquisite passage between lovers when Perdita addresses Florizel:

  Perdita: Now, my fair’st friend,

  I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might

  Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,

  That wear upon your virgin branches yet

  Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,

  For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall

  From Dis’s waggon! daffodils,

  That come before the swallow dares, and take

  The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

  But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

  Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses

  That die unmarried, ere they can behold

  Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady

  Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and

  The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,

  The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack,

  To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,

  To strew him o’er and o’er!

  Florizel:        What, like a corse?

  Perdita: No, like a bank for love to lie and play on;

  Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried,

  But quick and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers:

  Methinks I play as I have seen them do

  In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine

  Does change my disposition.

  Florizel:         What you do

  Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet.

  I’ld have you do it ever: when you sing,

  I’ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms,

  Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,

  To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you

  A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do

  Nothing but that; move still, still so,

  And own no other function: each your doing,

  So singular in each particular,

  Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,

  That all your acts are queens.

  act 4, scene 4, lines 112–46

  At eighty-six this still moves me to tears. Memories flood me of ecstatic moments more than sixty years ago when love fell upon one. It would be good if this and the love between Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest had been Shakespeare’s final vision of an erotic ideal. Instead, in his final work for the stage, The Two Noble Kinsmen, done in collaboration with John Fletcher, Shakespeare horrifies me with th
e dreadful spectacle of incessant male lust prolonged into grotesquerie:

  Palamon: I knew a man

  Of eighty winters—this I told them—who

  A lass of fourteen brided. ’Twas thy power

  To put life into dust: the aged cramp

  Had screw’d his square foot round,

  The gout had knit his fingers into knots,

  Torturing convulsions from his globy eyes

  Had almost drawn their spheres, that what was life

  In him seem’d torture. This anatomy

  Had by his young fair fere a boy, and I

  Believ’d it was his, for she swore it was,

  And who would not believe her?

  act 5, scene 1, lines 107–18

  This is from a prayer to the power of Venus. Shakespeare shocks and moves me to silence. It was a long descent from the glory of Cleopatra to this nightmare.

  Subdued, I return to the closing movement of Antony and Cleopatra. Octavius Caesar is cold and triumphant and yet Shakespeare allows him a moment almost beyond eloquence:

     Oh, noble weakness!

  If they had swallowed poison, ’twould appear

  By external swelling; but she looks like sleep,

  As she would catch another Antony

  In her strong toil of grace.

  act 5, scene 2, lines 343–47

  “Toil” takes the archaic meaning of “net.” Her toil has been strong enough to seduce us and many before and after.

  We can wave aside the final speech of Octavius Caesar, in which he compliments himself on his glory in having brought down so famous a pair as Antony and Cleopatra. He promises a mutual burial with military honors. The irony recalls Fortinbras according the same to Hamlet. It is as though Shakespeare, both with Hamlet and with Cleopatra, trusts us to apprehend ironies almost too large to be seen.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge my research assistant, Alice Kenney, and my editor, Nan Graham. As always I am indebted to my literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu. I have a particular debt to Glen Hartley, who first suggested this sequence of five brief books on Shakespeare’s personalities.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © GREG JOHNSON

  Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The American Religion, How to Read and Why, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, and The Daemon Knows. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Fellow, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Catalonia International Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize of Mexico.