Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  The visual, verbal, behavioral, and gestural correspondences between Elizabeth I and Cleopatra matter because, among other things, they attest to Shakespeare’s investment in his female protagonist as a ruler-figure. For most adults in the original audiences, who had been born during Elizabeth’s long reign, the queen had defined what it meant to be a monarch. Cleopatra’s performance prompts these spectators to remember that they have seen some majesty, and that they, like Antony, should know it again. Nearly fifty years ago, Kenneth Muir proposed that the resemblances between Cleopatra and Elizabeth I give the lie to Roman readings of Antony and Cleopatra, which value public duty over private desire, and treat the Egyptian queen as the unworthy and apolitical object of the Roman general’s lust.87 L. T. Fitz cautioned soon thereafter that this interpretative tradition, along with its counterpart celebrating the lovers’ “transcendental love,” was the product of sexist assumptions about the nature of women that made a “reasonable assessment of the character of Cleopatra” impossible.88 Yet modern readers persist in finding that “neither Romans nor Egyptians regard [Cleopatra] as a political figure, and she doesn’t take herself seriously either,” and that “Shakespeare is assuredly less interested in the politics that envelop Antony and Cleopatra than in their love.”89 These views are hard to reconcile with the evidence described above, and with the facts of the play, in which Cleopatra insists on her role as “Egypt,” and other characters, including Antony, consistently address her as queen.90 The modern interpretative traditions on Antony and Cleopatra may reflect the fact that, unlike Shakespeare’s original audience, we have no recent memories of female rule to draw on. When actors “play something like” the Elizabethan past for us (Hamlet, 2.2.595), we do not always recognize what Shakespeare asks us to recognize. Reading Shakespeare’s plays against other works from the period, like The Revenger’s Tragedy, can help in this regard. If Middleton’s Vindice poses the dead Gloriana in the posture of a whore, Shakespeare shows his “great fairy” like a political artist of infinite variety—immortal because she is not only changeable in herself but also the cause of enduring change in others.

  Because Antony and Cleopatra so persistently evokes the Elizabethan past, I think it safe to assume, with Yachnin, that it must have meant something different to its original audiences. And I think that difference must have affected perceptions not just of the female protagonist, but also of the male protagonist, and of the relationship between the two. Trying to reconstruct those perceptions is valuable for a number of reasons, including the fact that it sheds light on our own prejudices. Notably, even those critics who view Cleopatra as a political operator tend to relegate her love for Antony to the private realm. So Jankowski finds that Cleopatra’s relationship with Antony causes her to “abandon her previous successful strategies for rule.”91 This tendency to separate the private and public aspects of the relationship imposes modern norms on a classical setting and an Elizabethan context. As they were for Elizabeth, collaborative relationships with men (including Caesar and Pompey) are among Cleopatra’s most “successful strategies for rule.” She rules through Antony. Cleopatra explicitly values her lover’s military prowess; “the demi-Atlas of the world,” he is to her “the arm / And burgonet of men” (1.5.23–24). His departure upsets her because it restricts her ability to enact her political will: “That Herod’s head / I’ll have,” she complains, “but how, when Antony is gone, / Through whom I might command it?” (3.3.4–6). And she reacts violently to criticism of Antony because it calls into question her “judgment” about his merits, an intolerable thing for a monarch (1.5.72–74). When this “wrangling queen” chooses to “to chide, to laugh, / To weep” (1.1.48–50) in an effort to control her lover’s behavior, she is not abdicating political authority. She is enacting it. That Cleopatra loves Antony, in addition to finding him useful, is arguably the source of her tragedy.

  Although Antony and Cleopatra concerns the intersections of love and politics, private desire and public duty, it does not treat these as opposites. Rather, in its “mutual pair” (1.1.37), it recreates a queenly mode of publicity that blends the two, at considerable cost to the individuals involved. Egypt is as much a political realm as Rome, and the dramatic conflict involves two distinctive approaches to politics—one that is associated with the past, and makes room for individual emotion, and therefore women; and one that is associated with the present, and insists on relegating individual emotion, and therefore women, to the private realm. Writing about Cleopatra, Irene Dash suggests that women in power have “the unusual opportunity of combining sexual and political selves.”92 I would say, though, that female rulers in premodern societies were forced take this synthetic approach because of the misogynist assumption that women naturally privileged “will before reason.”93 The political is always personal for queens, to invert the old feminist saw, and any man who serves a queen perforce risks the accusation that he “make[s] his will / Lord of his reason” (3.13.3–4). Elizabeth had sound reasons for preferring men like Leicester and Hatton, who agreed to serve her faithfully to the detriment of their families and their reputations. Essex never could resign himself to those conditions. Yet, even though his resemblance to Antony consists of being “a great general in decline,” Essex is the royal favorite most frequently identified with Shakespeare’s hero.94 History and literary history alike have been far kinder to that troubled nobleman than they have been to his predecessors, a fact that I suspect Elizabeth would find infuriating, and that reflects continuing discomfort with men like Leicester or Antonius, whose subjection to a woman makes them no longer master of themselves. At least some of Elizabeth’s contemporaries recognized that the queen had “wisely judged of [Leicester’s] vertues, and worthily rewarded his loialtie and paines.”95 When we fail to recognize what is at stake in Elizabeth’s preferences for such men, we allow ourselves to be blinded by rationalist biases inherent in the bourgeois public sphere, which requires that private emotion be bracketed off, and which has therefore problematized all forms of feminine participation in politics since the seventeenth century.96 It is no coincidence that these criteria for political participation were first developed in response to the particulars of Elizabeth I’s reign, by men “anxious to control and prime popular opinion and report” on matters like their ruler’s marriage and succession.97

  Near the end of his career, Shakespeare set about revising Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Antonius” to alter negative perceptions of female rule that he had helped to perpetuate, with increasing qualms and misgivings, in earlier plays. Strategically, he counters impressions of queenship generated by “the common liar” (1.1.60) not by rejecting the old patterns associated with the age-in-love trope, but by staging them again, shifting the generic register this time to the tragic mode. Antony and Cleopatra forces audiences to reexperience old “play-particles” by endowing them with new emotional resonance. Using his actors as “medium[s] for raising the dead,” Shakespeare engages in a layered act of “surrogation,” replacing unsatisfactory substitutes for historical figures, like Bottom and Titania, or Falstaff and Hal, with alternatives in the form of Antony and Cleopatra.98 As we have seen, although Shakespeare’s earlier age-in-love figures provoke judgments that enforce patriarchal norms of behavior, many also elicit affective responses that temper those judgments. Even Claudius gets the opportunity to court audience sympathies in his soliloquy (Middleton never grants his Duke the same privilege). As a group, these lecherous old men attest to Shakespeare’s desire for a “public life” that blends “strong feelings with rational debate and collective judgment.”99 With Falstaff or Malvolio, the need for “collective judgment,” in the form of a baiting or a banishment, eventually subordinates those strong feelings. Such is not the case with Antony, whose ability to arouse passion and affection in others unsettles all attempts at stable judgment.

  If Antony’s “great fairy” channels the historical Elizabeth I, she also recalls the many fairy queens who had stood in for Elizabeth ove
r the years, including Lyly’s moon goddess, Middleton’s Gloriana (the name “Cleopatra” means “glory of the fatherland”), and Shakespeare’s own Titania. Like these precursors, Cleopatra takes the “fleeting moon” as her planet (5.2.240), and exerts a powerful spell over the men in her vicinity. Shakespeare highlights her advanced age, moreover, thereby forging tight connections with previous works critical of the Elizabethan court. While the historical Cleopatra was thirty-eight at the time of her death, just at the cusp of green old age, Shakespeare’s wrinkled queen often appears much older. The frequent mentions of her ancient lineage endow Cleopatra with an “aura of age,” according to Adelman, and in the two protagonists—as in the subplots of Endymion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Twelfth Night—“the folly of love is explicitly associated with the folly of old age.”100 Onstage observers are often disturbed by the ways in which the “charms of love” survive Cleopatra’s “wan’d lip,” taking this as evidence that in the Queen of Egypt “witchcraft” has joined “with beauty” (2.1.21–23). As it did for the Catholic polemicists who raged against Elizabeth, that age cannot wither Cleopatra confirms her unnatural powers over men.

  In Plutarch’s Marcus Antonius, Shakespeare found rich material for his revision of the aging lover. Antonius was at the time of his death around fifty-six years of age, roughly of an age with Falstaff, and equally given over to “riot and excess.” The Roman general spent a lifetime indulging in the “banquets and drunken feasts” that physicians thought would cause some to “become old men” at “fortie.”101 Shakespeare’s Antony calls attention to his advanced age on a number occasions, as when he sarcastically proposes that Cleopatra “To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head” (3.13.17). He shares with his historical counterpart and other senescent stage surfeiters a taste for wine, a tendency to play the lover, and a desire to hear the chimes at midnight.102 Like Falstaff, Claudius and Middleton’s Duke, Antony is subject to the onstage judgments of abstemious youths because he “drinks, and wastes / The lamps of night in revels” (1.4.4–5). That last metaphor, recalling as it does Cicero’s injunctions against carnal “surfette,” in which he compares the aging body to “a Lampe, if to muche oyle bee infused into it, burnethe not brightly,” shows just how significant age is to a consideration of Antony’s character.103 In love with a queen who is “wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.29), this monumental Roman—“Here’s sport indeed! how heavy weighs my lord” (4.15.32), Cleopatra complains—is rooted so deeply in Elizabethan stage satire that he at times recalls Lyly’s preposterous Sir Tophas, the fat knight who loves old wines and old matrons. Both are characteristically Elizabethan hybrids of the miles gloriosus and the senex amans, the two types evoked at the opening of the play, when Philo describes his captain bursting out of Roman armor to be “transform’d / Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.12–13). Taking his cue from his precursors, Antony ends the play as Endymion, Tophas, Bottom, Falstaff, and Middleton’s Duke do, yet one more superannuated lover laid out prone on stage before his queen.

  The multiple patterns that link Antony to his stage predecessors may have eluded critics thus far because Antony and Cleopatra takes a fundamentally different attitude than earlier plays toward older men who break rules and have not “kept [the] square” (2.3.5–6). A generic hybrid, “shap’d” only “like itself” (2.7.42), it transforms comic and satiric tropes to show a figure normally painted as a gorgon who comes to resemble a god instead.104 Omissions can be as telling as repetitions in this regard; although Antony seems like a “doting mallard” (3.10.19) at times, he is never called an ass (Caesar is). The bearbaiting trope, a device for courting contempt in previous plays, appears only as a ghostly trace, in the lovely image of Antony surrounded by “hearts / that spannell’d [him] at heels” (4.12.20–21). Antony’s claims to being like Mars register differently than Tophas’s claims to being “all Mars and Ars” (Endymion, 1.3.96), because Shakespeare avails himself of the historical Antonius’s identification with Hercules to remind us that some braggarts make good their claims. As Janet Adelman puts it in what is still the best reading of the play, the “miles gloriosus and hero are two sides of the same coin.”105 Shakespeare also elevates the derided figure of the old man in lust by endowing Antony with select touches of Endymion. The lover of Egypt’s “eastern star” has his thoughts “stitched to the stars” and “higher” (Endymion, 1.1.5–7), like Lyly’s moon-lover. Far from requiring the Neoplatonic sublimation celebrated in Endymion, however, Antony’s transcendence has carnal and even Bacchanalian dimensions. I argued in the previous chapter that Twelfth Night gives us fragments of the age-in-love figure to counter the attacks of the satiric “substractors” who hounded the Elizabethan court. Antony and Cleopatra goes further still, reassembling these fragments “by Isis” to arrive at the “well-divided disposition” of its paragonal “man of men” (1.5.53, 71–73), a new Osiris.106

  The changes that Shakespeare makes to his source encourage audiences to help in this process of reassembly by remembering certain key figures. Shapiro, who acknowledges that Antony and Cleopatra is a political play, nonetheless holds to the position that it contains no “reductive and dangerous one-to-one correspondences between ancient and modern figures.”107 Although there is nothing reductive about him, Antony is nonetheless a composite designed to produce a series of connections between “ancient and modern,” real and virtual figures. Plutarch’s virile Antonius had “seven children by three wives” (294), but Antony claims that he has “forborne the getting of a lawful race” for Cleopatra (3.13.107), for example. When he rates his love for Cleopatra over the generative obligations of the aristocratic male, Antony evokes not just his classical forebear, but also courtiers like Greville or Hatton who chose the single life to serve Elizabeth, and characters like Endymion, who chooses the “solitary life” to devote himself to Cynthia.108 As might be expected, Antony and Cleopatra reproduces the transfiguration metaphors that characterized critical and panegyric discourses about Elizabeth’s relationship to her men. Yet another “old ruffian” (4.2.4), Antony has all the traditional traits of Circe’s victims: effeminacy, beastliness, drunkenness, and sleepiness.109 From the first, the Romans portray Cleopatra as a witchlike figure whose charms have brought this “triple pillar of the world” (1.1.12) down. The pillar was a commonplace of Elizabethan political discourses; Leicester was at once “the chef[est] pillar” on which Elizabeth “wholy relies and puts all hir truste,” for example, and “the only handsaw that shall hew the maine p[illars]and postes. . . . a sunder and ruinate all of this noble land.”110 One need not be a Freudian critic to see that this vision of fallen “pillars” and “postes” trades in anxieties about national castration, made explicit in works like Allen’s pamphlet, News from Heaven and Hell, or Leicester’s Commonwealth, and manifest also in the way Shakespeare’s Romans react to Antony. Without the hard pillar-like property that defines him, Antony becomes in Caesar’s estimation “not more manlike / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (1.4.5–7). Such sentiments echo those who condemned men like Leicester for serving Elizabeth’s “filthy lust.”111

  Although Antony inspires the contempt reserved for surfeiting older men, he also excels at undermining the contempt he inspires, and transforming it into a paradoxical form of admiration. Like The Revenger’s Tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra opens on the spectacle of an aristocratic older man who has succumbed to erotic impulses. When Philo complains about his general’s “dotage” (1.1.1), he chooses a word that conflates senility and infatuation, used in the period to condemn amorous old men.112 Cicero’s English translator explained, for example, that “libidinous volupte” is a quality “founde in younge men” but when “this folishnes . . . entangleth and captivateth the senses of old men,” and these “keep not them selves within the limittes of reason” it “is commonly called Dotage.”113 As we have seen, Elizabethan playwrights relied on such views of superannuated sexuality to provoke the “wonderfull laughter” of the “commen peo
ple.”114 Following conventional wisdom on senescent sexuality, Philo argues that Antony’s passion “O’erflows the measure” (1.1.2). His indictment borrows from the same vocabulary and the same assumptions as Vindice’s indictment of the Duke (or Maria’s indictment of Malvolio, or Hamlet’s indictment of Claudius, for that matter); as always, the recourse to generational criteria of judgment has a leveling effect, enabling an inferior’s critical attack on a superior guilty of breaching social decorum. Convinced that his view is rational and therefore accurate, Philo instructs all present to “take but good note” and “see” for themselves (1.1.11–13), inducting the audience into the processes of evaluation thus initiated.115