Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  But here the similarities between Middleton’s opening scene and Shakespeare’s end. Vindice delivers his assessment of “grey-haired adultery” in a soliloquy, an appropriate choice for a play that solicits agreement for age-related behavioral norms, in which even the elderly lover finds “age hot” to be “monstrous.” In contrast, Philo responds to Demetrius, who must have offered a more positive reading of Antony’s behavior, since it prompts Philo’s contradiction (“Nay, but” [1.1.1]). Demetrius’s disagreement haunts the conversation, undermining the views Philo expresses, and destabilizing a set reaction to Antony’s spectacular shattering of norms. Although Antony may be under the “wonderfull thralldom” of a Circean sorceress, I doubt Philo’s monologue provokes “wonderfull laughter” in audiences. For one thing, Philo feels more conflicted than he acknowledges, since his speech borrows not just from the discourses that condemned aging sexuality, as Vindice’s soliloquy does, but also from the heroic conventions of the epic, as Vindice’s does not. The image of Antony’s “great captain’s heart” bursting out of his buckled armor (1.1.8) is especially ambiguous, since the heart connotes both passion and courage, qualities Antony has in spades, and the Roman armor comes then to stand for rigid, perhaps undesirable, and certainly ineffective constraints on these qualities. It is hard to know which of the two qualities makes Antony more godlike: his capacity for passion or his superhuman courage. The difficulty is compounded by Philo’s allusion to Mars, by Mars’s dual status as god of war and Venus’s lover, and by the licentious behavior of these classical gods. This confusion is prologue to the play that follows, in which Shakespeare takes materials with a long history of eliciting contempt and magically transforms them into a character who eludes categorization and judgment. Although Shakespeare assembles his Protean hero out of a familiar “mixture and shreds of forms,” Antony never becomes “truly deformed,” as Ben Jonson’s Amorphus does.116 His “dotage” may overflow the measure, but it makes him something other than a monster.

  An emasculating passion that disregards social, political, and cultural prohibitions at great personal cost might even require a superhuman form of courage. Antony is vulnerable to the Roman discourses that seek to regulate his sexual behavior; at times, he reproves his own “white hairs” for “doting” (3.11.13–15), and becomes “unqualitied with very shame” (3.11.44) because of his relationship to Cleopatra. He repeatedly overcomes these mechanisms of sociocultural control, however, including his sexless marriage with Octavia, to return again to his “Egyptian dish” (2.6.126). Although Antony knows he should “from this enchanting queen break off,” he elects to lose himself “in dotage” (1.2.128, 114), embracing the behavior rejected by Lyly’s Endymion, who avoids “a dotage no less miserable than monstrous” (Endymion, 1.1.30). According to Ovid, a major influence in this play as in the others I have examined, passions like Antony’s have the power to turns lovers into beasts or gods. Where Endymion, Hamlet, or The Revenger’s Tragedy consider only the former possibility, Antony and Cleopatra considers the latter, too. When Antony comes on stage promising to exceed all limits in his search for “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17), we see something more than the familiar “strumpet’s fool” (1.1.13)—we see Burbage and not Kempe, for one thing—and the expectations that we brought into the theater about “age in love” are shattered accordingly.117

  The explosive combination of traits contained in Burbage-playing-Antony troubles conventional thinking about masculine merit throughout the play, in a way that engages onstage audiences in debate. As we have seen already in the case of Falstaff, elderly rule-breakers have a stimulating effect on other people’s evaluative powers. The “desire to judge . . . correctly”—the same desire that North attributes to his readers—is among the “dominant passions” of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is one endowed with distinctly political and historiographical dimensions.118 In their efforts to come to terms with Antony, other characters habitually compare him to past or mythic figures; although Cleopatra threatens Charmian with “bloody teeth” for contrasting her “man of men” to Caesar (1.5.70–73), she finds later that “In praising Antony I have disprais’d Caesar” (2.5.107). Octavius, careful not to compare his rival with other worthies, measures Antony against a past version of himself. The young Antony was the very pattern of immutable manhood—his “cheek / So much as lank’d not” (1.4.70–71) under the most severe hardship. Through such comparisons, characters model the retrospective behaviors that North assured his readers “teacheth us to judge of things present.” While these frequent comparisons imply that Antony is exemplary, onstage observers disagree about what to make of that example, a situation exacerbated by the opacity of the protagonists’ motivations and their common status as the subject of incessant rumors.

  In the endless chatter about the titular characters, Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes the specific desire to judge those who are “in the public eye” (3.6.12). Shapiro points out that Antony is “so habituated to being observed”—and talked about—“that he expects this will hold true even in the afterlife.”119 Much of this talk testifies to the “aspiring minde” of the talkers, as one defense of Leicester put it.120 Inferiors by virtue of class, age, or military ability, the other male characters spread the “perception of [Antony’s] sexual subjection” in an effort to attain “parity” with the famous general, who, as the sole survivor of Rome’s heroic past, is “the pine . . . that overtopp’d them all” (4.12.24–25).121 All this amplifies a pattern found in Plutarch, whose Herculean Antonius also violates expectation, and is therefore also the subject of malicious report and gossip, including the “rumour in the people’s mouths that the goddess Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of all Asia” (201–2). The numerous messengers charged with bringing “good news” (1.3.19), “bad news” (2.5.86), “strange news” (3.5.2), and even “stiff news” (1.2.100) report on Antony’s Egyptian behavior to the Romans and his Roman behavior to Cleopatra.122 Even Enobarbus, Antony’s closest companion, sounds like a reporter, offering a play-by-play analysis of his master’s behavior—“He will to his Egyptian dish again” (2.6.126); “’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp / Than with an old one dying” (3.13.93–94); “Yes, like enough! high-battled Caesar will / Unstate his happiness, and be stag’d to th’ show, / Against a sworder!” (3.13.29–31).Through frequent metatheatrical devices, like Enobarbus’s asides, or Philo’s opening instructions, Shakespeare “deliberately” draws his audiences “into the act of judging,” turning us into “the characters who stand aside and comment.”123 As we formulate comparative judgments about the male protagonist, we become conscious of our own participation in retrospective processes of evaluation.

  Designed to encourage comparisons with the past, Antony’s character raises problems of assessment specifically for those who think in conventional ways about surfeiting older men. Pompey, who recognizes that Antony’s “soldiership / Is twice” that of Octavius and Lepidus, nonetheless dismisses the “ne’er lust-wearied Antony” as an “amorous surfeiter” (1.5.32–38), deeming him incapable of quick action. Antony’s efficient military campaign shows Pompey’s judgment of his great rival to be as faulty as Brutus’s was in the earlier play. Jacobean audiences must have shared in Pompey’s surprise, since they shared in his prejudices about the effects of lust on older men, having long feasted on contemptuous depictions of old lechers. Sir Tophas, Falstaff, Claudius, Middleton’s Duke—all provoke derisive laughter, on- or offstage, for abandoning themselves to “surfette.”124 But “almost nothing” in Antony and Cleopatra is “easy to judge,” the hero least of all.125 Plutarch is baffled that Antonius, having “committed the greatest faults,” manages to secure such “wonderful love” from others (178–81). Shakespeare presents these apparently contradictory traits as integral to one another, allowing his actor to arouse the tragic emotions of empathy and admiration that help audiences overcome preexisting judgments. Antony commands allegiance and affection not despite his sens
ual surfeit or his love of the theater (which the audience presumably shares), but because of them. These are consistent features of his allegedly inconsistent character, fully realized in his love for a shape-shifting queen. A man willing to give himself up to “sport,” “soft hours,” and constant “pleasures” (1.1.45–47) at the risk of his reputation must needs register differently to theatrical artists, themselves purveyors of lowly pleasures, than to a classical historian. By the same token, those playgoers who respond with pleasure to the actor’s performance of Antony can only condemn the character’s embrace of “soft hours” and “sport” by condemning it in themselves.126

  Antony is most vital when indulging the behaviors that hasten aging and death; to paraphrase Eugene Waith, he is most himself when giving himself away.127 This paradox enables Shakespeare to retain Antonius’s well-established reputation for surfeit, while changing perceptions of such behavior. Consider 2.7, a scene in which all the major characters are thoroughly inebriated. This state of general intoxication has the odd effect of bracketing off moralistic and rational judgments about drunkenness, “that beggarly damnation,” deemed the “worst of all the deadly sins” by Middleton’s vengeful brethren (4.2.182–83). Left without the crutch of conventional thinking, we have to adjudicate a contest that I, for one, think Antony handily wins. Where Lepidus slurs his words, and Octavius’s slippery “tongue / Spleets what it speaks” (2.7.123–24), Antony becomes more articulate and expansive under the influence. The reluctant Caesar finds drunkenness “monstrous labor” (2.7.99); in contrast, Antony’s embrace of “the conquering wine” that “hath steep’d our sense / In soft and delicate Lethe” has positively ecstatic dimensions. In Caesar’s telling phrase, “the wild disguise hath almost / Antick’d” all, with the ironic exception of the oldest man on stage, whose bounty is replenished rather than depleted by wine. Although we might laugh with Antony in this scene, we never laugh at him, as we do at the other drunken men onstage, or at all the other lubricious old men who haunt this play. Indeed, Antony’s ability to surpass others in “Egyptian bacchanals” compares favorably to that of the “monarch of the vine,” “Plumpy Bacchus” (2.7.104–25). According to Leonard Barkan, this “quintessentially metamorphic divinity,” associated with “extremes of emotion,” “half-prophetic and half-destructive madness,” and “the ascendancy of the female principle,” is a god of “a nonrational and ecstatic sort”—an appropriate counterpart to a man who makes his “will / Lord of his reason.”128 In contrast to his precursors, whose emasculation by Circean queens made them like the unfortunate Actaeon (see previous chapters), Antony appears here like a god, the one celebrated for his fertility, his ability to regenerate, his love of women, and his affinity with the theater (according to Gosson, “Playes were consecrated unto Bacchus for the firste findinge out of wine”).129 Cleopatra’s lover shares a propensity for “belly cheer” and a tendency to drink “like the god Backus out of his cuppes” with all the old men described in this book, including Falstaff and the Leicester of anticourt polemic.130 Strikingly, however, in Antony such behavior strives to make itself “fair and admired” (1.1.51).

  Characters in Antony and Cleopatra agree on very few things. One of them is that Antony is notable: “note him, / Note him, good Charmian, ‘tis the man, but note him” (1.5.54). A constellation of linked words—“news,” “report,” “reporter,” “fame,” “note”—make Antony a celebrity, the embodiment of “the character traits most revered” and most feared by his community.131 Like his classical forebear, or Hercules and Mars, Antony signifies supreme masculine prowess—“there appeared such a manly look in his countenance as is commonly seen in Hercules’ pictures,” Plutarch writes about Antonius (177)—and the willing subjugation of that prowess to a woman’s pleasure. Patriarchal societies legitimate themselves by reference to men’s physical superiority to women, a principle that Antony, as the “the pine . . . that overtopp’d them all” embodies and should enforce. When this self-proclaimed “man of steel” (4.4.33) bends and kneels to a queen instead, he relinquishes his place of privilege, affirming her power at the expense of normative gender structures. The oldest and the highest-ranking man in Rome now “comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony” (1.1.58–59). Like the complaints about his desertion, the fallen pillar imagery indicates how profoundly Antony’s surrender to Cleopatra shakes the structural foundation of his society. By turning his broad back on gerontocratic Rome, and electing to let “the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall” (1.1.33–34), Antony threatens to undo the ideological basis of Western patriarchy. Predictably enough, he becomes, like the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester, “the subject of all pleasant discourses at this day throughout the realm.”132

  Antony’s ability to unsettle norms and set tongues a-wagging worries Caesar, who finds his rival dangerous precisely because he is “th’abstract of all faults / That all men follow” (1.4.9–10). While Caesar could mean that Antony concentrates in himself all men’s faults, according to the OED, “abstract” here also means “a perfect embodiment of a particularly quality or type.”133 A perfect embodiment of faults makes those faults perfect, causing “all men to follow” him. The phrase captures Shakespeare’s strategy in Antony and Cleopatra, which is to endow Antony with the most derided faults only to make these faults overwhelmingly attractive. Lepidus confirms the subversive effect of Antony’s charm when he describes his rival’s faults as like “the spots of heaven,” made “more fiery by night’s blackness” (1.4.12–13). The “night’s blackness” stands for the ostensible subject of his praise, Antony’s “goodness” (1.4.11). But the image reverses representational norms by stellifying Antony for his faults. Intentionally or not, Lepidus revises Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the “Romane Capteynes wyfe, the Queen of Aegypt” and her lover are dismissed in favor of the traditional male heroes Aeneas and Caesar, who are lifted “among the starres that glister bright.”134 The early modern tendency to describe political, heroic, or erotic ideals as stars derives from this passage, and conveys the power that some individuals have to guide and inspire others, as the English “Starre” guides the English, and Stella inspires Astrophil. An amplification of Plutarch’s Antonius, Shakespeare’s fallen “star” (4.14.106) is “even more astonishing in his ability to inspire others to outdo themselves.” Not only does Shakespeare “exalt” Antony for this “talent,” so do rival characters, who cannot criticize Antony without also paying tribute to him.135 What is so worrisome about Antony from the Roman point of view, then, is not just that he commits faults but that his commitment of those faults makes them attractive and exemplary, confounding conventional wisdom and setting new “patterns” for others to emulate, to borrow Bacon’s locution. Antony is an “example” from the past that “we may knowe what to like of, & what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschew,” all at once. No wonder the Caesars of this world feel threatened.

  The idea of Antony as an “abstract . . . that all men follow” recalls Hamlet’s description of players as the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524–26), while endowing Antony’s performances with an idealizing force. Antony does not just represent certain past behaviors—like that of Antonius or of Elizabeth’s favorites—but he also models future behaviors (including that of the actors who will play him in years to come). After Antony dies, Caesar’s henchmen recognize that a “rarer spirit never / Did steer humanity” (5.1.31–32). In another echo of Hamlet’s concern with theatrical personation, Agrippa then likens the deceased Antony to a “spacious mirror” in which a diminished Caesar “must needs see himself” (5.1.34). Raised again for each performance, the fallen Antony continues even now to reduce Octavius Caesar to a mere “boy,” a trick that Shakespeare manages by deploying generational against gendered categories. Men who violate generational decorum lose their privileged gender status in earlier plays, becoming foolish asses, or impotent “old boys.” In contrast, Antony is never anything other than a fully-
grown man, an old lion who retains the ability to transform other men into whelps, even after he is dead.136 The phallic puns that attend Antony’s demise absolve him of impotence, promising a rich harvest of virtuoso performances. When Cleopatra bids Antony “O, come, come, come” and “welcome, welcome” (4.15.37–38), we are left in little doubt about his renewable talent for dying. “Age in love” comes to be associated as a result not with diminished but with enhanced masculine capacity; at play’s end, the fallen pillar becomes the “soldier’s pole,” making all other men appear like boys and girls. “Though grey / Do sometimes mingle with our younger brown,” an undaunted Antony tells Cleopatra, rejecting all conventional wisdom on the subject, “yet ha’ we / A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can / Get goal for goal of youth” (4.8.19–22). Under such conditions, achieving masculine excellence involves becoming more like Antony.

  Seizing on Marcus Antonius’s uncanny ability to render “things that seem intolerable in other men” attractive (Plutarch, 177), Shakespeare makes Antony simultaneously a subjected male and aspirational model, thus upending the values that the Circe myth normally enforces. Like all the other aging male characters who populated the Renaissance stage, Antony endures “a metamorphosis and change” under female rule like “the companyons of Ulisses.”137 But where the myth endows the female enchantress with agency, representing the men who fall victim to her sexual allure as entrapped animals, Antony emphasizes his agency in embracing Cleopatra. He claims that “our dungy earth alike / Feeds beast as men,” acknowledging the common charge that old men who give into lust are like animals only to assert “the nobleness” of his choice by kissing Cleopatra (1.1. 35–38). Over the course of the play, his choice to return to her again and again enacts “the relocation and reconstruction of heroic masculinity.”138 Odysseus subjects Circe with his sword, thereby reestablishing the normative distinctions between men and beasts, and men and women. Antony voluntarily blurs these lines, ceding his sword to Cleopatra who wears it in their sexual play, while he dons her tires and mantles (2.5.25). This moment restages the cross-dressed Falstaff’s scene of courtship in a different key, releasing the protagonists into a gender convergence facilitated by age. Although he struggles with his Roman thoughts, Antony ultimately celebrates his union with Cleopatra as defiant of Rome’s repressive values and the male heroes who embody them: “We’ll hand in hand / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. / Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops / And all the haunt be ours” (4.14.51–54).139 Insofar as we accept the play’s claims about the exemplary nature of Antony’s transformative passion—and a number of critics, including A. C. Bradley, have—we learn to look at the much-maligned figure of “age in love” in an entirely new way.140