Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  Rather than embodying defect, Antony might even represent a new kind of perfection, a possibility most ardently articulated by the lovers themselves in the final few acts. Invoking familiar Neoplatonic tropes of transcendence, Antony and Cleopatra from the first present themselves as capturing “Eternity in our lips, and our eyes” (1.3.35). Antony affirms this initial vision repeatedly, until he lays “of many thousand kisses the poor last” on Cleopatra’s lips (4.15.20–21). According to Anne Barton, each kiss “asks to be read as an attempt to regain the kind of wholeness, that primal sexual unity” found in the creation myth of Plato’s Symposium—the same creation myth Shakespeare drew on to fragment his age-in-love figure in Twelfth Night.141 Shackled by his Roman thoughts, Antony worries about dissolving into shards at times, but Cleopatra works hard to reassemble her lover into a new whole during his death scene. Begging Antony to “die when thou hast liv’d / Quicken with kissing” (4.15.38–39), the Egyptian queen evokes both Lyly’s Cynthia, whose kisses quicken, and Middleton’s Gloriana, whose kisses kill. When she doubts that her “lips” have “that power” (4.15.39), she even recalls Ovid’s Aurora, who lacks the power to rejuvenate her lover. Cleopatra evokes all these precursors to overcome them, first elevating the fallen Antony visually, by hoisting him up, and then verbally, by immortalizing him as “the crown o’th’earth” (4.15.64). Nor does his elevation imply a rejection of carnal desires, as Endymion’s does. “Give me some wine,” Antony calls out as Cleopatra labors to lift him up, in a heavenly bit of “sport” (4.15.32) calculated to eclipse all previous instances of “sportful malice” involving lusty old men (Twelfth Night, 5.1.365).142 Drinking, dying, and rising, Antony invokes Endymion and Falstaff at the same time, canceling out the rote responses that they provoke, and challenging the patriarchal worldview they uphold. Even the critics who insist Antony’s suicide is “botched” must contend with the optics and poetics of the death scene, which, along with Cleopatra, strain conventional thinking, and which endorse Antony’s triumphant claim that he is “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish’d” (4.15.56–57).143 Among the things that Antony vanquishes in this coming together with Cleopatra are prejudices about his dotage. Shakespeare, meanwhile, vanquishes decades of rumor, gossip, slander, and satire about the queen’s men. The sexual innuendoes in Antony’s death scene glance at punitive accounts of royal favorites at their ladies’ feet, like Middleton’s Duke, or Falstaff in Merry Wives, or the “bere whelp” in News from Heaven and Hell, whose “pricke of desire” is turned “into a pillor of fier” by the “lady with the supported nose.”144 While these precursors are all destined for hell (the “bere whelp” is there already), Shakespeare secures a different afterlife for Antony, who ascends to “the golden world” of poetry, and haunts a transformed Elizium with his Cleopatra.145 This fallen star is no mere Fallstaff. Shakespeare finds it sweating work to assign new meanings to all these old patterns; by sheer dint of theatrical labor and sublime poetry, however, his queen succeeds in “draw[ing]” her “amorous surfeiter” high enough to “set” him “by Jove’s side” (4.15.30–36).

  Antony and Cleopatra’s divided catastrophe, which isolates Cleopatra among boys and women and thus reinforces her resemblance to the aging Elizabeth I, imbues this new masculine ideal with the persuasive force of felt emotion. Indeed, when it comes to the circumstances that inspired Shakespeare’s revision of old materials, we need look no further than the death of his queen, which prompted a series of public reevaluations echoed in Antony and Cleopatra. As Catherine Loomis points out, while the Privy Council prepared for a smooth transition to James’s reign, the “literary response taught the country how to mourn and remember the Queen, and how to welcome and accept the new King.” Pamphlets like Englands Caesar (1603) and Ave Caesar (1603) likened James’s accession to that of Augustus Caesar, cementing Elizabeth’s association with Cleopatra and heralding the new king’s identification with the Roman emperor—a cornerstone of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the victorious Octavius.146 Elizabeth’s public mourners imagined her showing like a queen in death, surrounded by the material signs of her sovereignty, “Tryumphant drawne in robes so richly wrought / Crowne on her head, in hand her Scepter,” which is how Shakespeare shows his Egyptian queen.147 Anticipating Charmian’s final tribute to her “eastern star” (5.2.308), one poem hailed Elizabeth as a “celestiall starre, / Earthes ornament, whom heaven smiles to see,” describing her grave as a “great monument,” containing a “farre more pretious shade” than any Egyptian “Piramis.”148 The English queen lay “like a sweet beauty in a harmlesse slumber” in her grave; Shakespeare, meanwhile, has his Egyptian queen look “like sleep” in her monument (5.2.346).149 And just as Cleopatra takes “the stroke of death” as “a lover’s pinch” (5.2.295), Elizabeth’s mourners found that

  Death now has ceaz’d her in his ycie armes,

  That sometime was the Sun of our delight:

  And pittilesse of any after-harmes,

  Hath veyld her glory in the cloude of night.150

  Because planetary tropes had featured prominently in Elizabeth’s cult, eclipse imagery now conveyed grief at her death. In what is thought Shakespeare’s sole comment on Elizabeth’s death, the sonnet speaker mourns “Our mortal moon” who “hath her eclipse endured” (107.5). Antony thinks about a different queen when he fears that “our terrene moon / Is now eclips’d” (3.13.153–54). But he chooses the same metaphor, which came burdened with communal mourning for Elizabeth. We might well ask, with Cleopatra, “what does he mean?” (4.2.23). And we can take Enobarbus’s answer for our own: “to make his followers weep” (4.2.24).151 Like Antony, Shakespeare knows of old that tearful “passion . . . is catching” (Julius Caesar, 3.1.283). If Antony and Cleopatra meant something different to the original audiences, it also did something different to them. Using “odd tricks which sorrow shoots / Out of the mind” (4.2.14–15), Shakespeare embraces his hero’s rhetorical prowess as his own, making his audience reexperience powerful feelings of grief, loss, guilt, and regret associated with Elizabeth’s death.

  A common refrain among those mourning Elizabeth concerned the lack of adequate comparison by which to measure their loss, which some blamed on those who had remained silent, even as “Cynthia,” the “fayrest Rose, the sweetest Princely Flower” was “with’red now by Death’s coold nipping power.”152 Like Greville, who labeled Elizabeth “unmatcheable,” Henry Chettle found that “no Princesse ever-living in the earth can be remembered to exceede her. Her wisedome was without question . . . unequalled. . . . So expert in Languages that she answered most Embassadors in their Native tongues.”153 While some did allow that she was “preteritis melior, better than those which went before hir,” and thus left open the possibility that she might function as “a precedent to those that shall followe hir,” the idea that Elizabeth was sui generis gained traction around the time of her death.154 The Earl of Northumberland assured James that the English wished for “noe more queens, fearing we shall never enyoy an wther lyke to this.”155 A friend of John Manningham’s similarly recalled “Wee worshipt noe saintes, but wee prayd to ladyes in the Q[ueenes] tyme,”and wished that the practice might be “abolished . . . in our kinges raigne.”156 Even those men who had found with Astrophil that there was pleasure “in the manage” by a queen seemed eager to forget the unorthodox arrangements to which they had consented.157 Cast as a form of praise, superlative representations of Elizabeth I as a “peerelesse Princesse” contained the disturbing implications of her reign.158 These comments isolated Elizabeth and rendered her unique and inimitable—not a “modell of true worth” but an aberration of history. “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous,” Caesar claims, as he attempts to consign Antony and Cleopatra to a similar fate (5.2.359–60).

  In this context, we might see Shakespeare’s “lass unparalleled” (5.2.316) as supplying the missing parallel for the “unmatcheable” Elizabeth. Among the old servants Chettle berates for omitting to honor the Eng
lish queen is Shakespeare, that “the silver-tongued Melicert,” who should “mourne her death that graced his desert.”159 The passage is a stinging one; Shakespeare stands accused of betrayal and ingratitude, behaviors he condemns in play after play, including Antony and Cleopatra. They stop their nose “Against the blown rose” that “kneel’d unto the buds” (3.13.39–40), Cleopatra observes bitterly, using language Elizabeth might have used. Enobarbus deserts soon thereafter, even though his tendency to become “onion-ey’d” around his master shows that he loves Antony. The old soldier fears, as so many Elizabethan men did, that his powerful emotions might transform him into “an ass” or a woman (4.2.35–36). He quickly comes to regret his decision, however, which registers as a self-betrayal: “I am alone the villain of the earth / And feel I am most so” (4.6.29–30). In turning his countenance from Antony, Enobarbus has turned away from his own feelings, and thus from a version of himself. Calling as witness his “sovereign mistress,” “the blessed moon”—Cleopatra’s planet and Elizabeth’s—he begs for forgiveness, proposing “the world rank” him “a master-leaver and a fugitive” (4.9.11–20). An “inveterate judge of men” and perennial skeptic, Enobarbus is sometimes seen as a spokesperson for Shakespeare.160 He utters some of the play’s most emotionally wrenching lines, becoming an unlikely conduit for overwhelming shame and regret. That Enobarbus’s epiphany is precipitated by a reminder of his patron’s generosity matters; “how would thou have paid, / My better service,” he wonders, “when my turpitude / Thou dost so crown with gold!” (4.6.31–33). Through his pathetic death, which “blows” our “heart” as much as his (4.6.33), Antony and Cleopatra disowns the view that emotion “preys on reason” and that what restores the “heart” must needs diminish “the brain” (3.13.197–98), arguing instead that we should let emotions guide our judgments of other people.

  Like all the other likenesses and comparisons discussed in this book, the one between Enobarbus and Shakespeare invites us to think not just about similarities, but also about differences. After a career-long struggle with the complex feelings that the Elizabethan court had inspired in him, Shakespeare elects in Antony and Cleopatra “to follow with allegiance a fall’n lord,” thus conquering “him that did his master conquer” (3.13.44–45). That means securing a better “place i’th’story” (3.13.46) for those who had “graced his desert.” According to Loomis, “the literary response to the death of Queen Elizabeth reveals not only a terrible sense of loss, but also a concerted effort, made mostly by male authors, to reconstruct a new and improved version of the Queen, one that refuses to grow old, make demands, or die.”161 Shakespeare chose a different approach than his contemporaries, giving us a queen who does grow old, make demands, and die. Living, Elizabeth I revived the dead Cleopatra’s “memorie” and “vertues,” including her ability to answer “Embassadors in their native tongues.” Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in turn revives aspects of the dead Elizabeth, including her ability to elicit stunning performances from her male subjects, an attribute that many survivors of the reign appeared eager to forget. By reminding his audience that Elizabeth had a precedent (the historical Cleopatra) and by giving her a successor (the theatrical Cleopatra), Shakespeare implied that Elizabeth might serve as a model (she serves as his model) and thus paid tribute to the transformative potentialities glimpsed in her reign. No one was better suited to this task of rememorialization than the poet who had spent a career thinking about Elizabeth I’s effect on men, and whose imagination was, like Antony’s, stirred by this extraordinary woman to create great art.

  In Antony and Cleopatra, the spirited debate about the protagonists culminates in series of eulogies of Antony, which underline the idea that “what our contempts doth often hurl from us / We wish it ours again” (1.2.123–24). The idea that people are “good, being gone” (1.2.126) resonated in Jacobean England, Loomis argues, because the recently deceased Elizabeth was “appreciated more after her death.”162 The same is true of the men who served the queen. Implicitly comparing himself to Antonius and Endymion, the eponymous narrator of Leicester’s Ghost complains about being forgotten:

  Who consecrats Colosses to my prayse?

  Who studies to immortalize my name?

  Who doth a stately Pyramid upraise

  T’entoombe my corps, that slept in Cynthias days?163

  But some writers did seek to “immortalize” the deceased earl, whom all the world admir’d,” depicting him “Not as a man, though he in shape exceld / But as a God, whose heavenlie wit inspir’d, / Wrought hie effects.”164 Indeed, those who honored Elizabeth after she died often praised the men associated with her. Celebrating “that more glorious time,” William Herbert reviews the contributions of these male courtiers, presenting “Much honor’d Dudley,” as “valiant,” “wise,” and

  Patient in perill, prone to every good,

  Belov’d of men, and graced by soveraigne eyes,

  Cleere was thy thought, as cleere as cristall flood,

  Loyall thy love, and royall was thy blood:

  Fain’d rumour shuns all trueth, beleeve not fame,

  She staines the white as snowe, the purest name.165

  Antony and Cleopatra shares Herbert’s anxiety about how “fame” and “fain’d rumour” might distort accounts of the “Loyall” men who had served a celebrated queen. This anxiety informs “the complex longing” that surrounds Antony, whose “heroic grandeur is always constructed retrospectively, in his—and its—absence.” Through her dream of an “Emperor Antony” (5.2.76), Cleopatra performs what Janet Adelman describes as “an impassioned act of memory,” which aims in part to prevent “quick comedians” from bringing Antony “drunken forth” and boying her “greatness / I’th’posture of a whore” (5.2.216–21).166 In a play where the retrospective and the prospective are confounded, the future revels preempted by the classical queen sound like the past revels that her offstage audiences remember. All come together in an instant.

  Eulogies, like other forms of history, can help transform retrospective judgments into future potentialities by creating the desire for a return to the past. Such nostalgia forges a “relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory,” and thus transforms the past for future use.167 Plutarch’s Elizabethan translators believed in their obligation to pass “the remembrance of things past to their successors.” They thought history served as “instruction of them to come,” and valued it because “There is nether picture, nor image of marble, nor arche of triumph, nor piller, nor sumptuous sepulcher, that can match the durableness of an eloquent history.”168 Plays may be better suited still to assuring the survival of “things past” than histories, because they stage the past as something that happens again and will happen again.169 Their superior eloquence conjures the present emotions that forge the necessary connections between “personal and collective memory.” According to Francis Bacon, “the minds of men” watching a play “are more open to affections and impressions than when alone.”170 Seizing on this aspect of playgoing, Antony and Cleopatra pushes auditors to mourn the dead again by making them weep, as Antony makes Eros, Enobarbus, and Cleopatra weep. Every time Burbage succeeded in eliciting tears for Antony, the actor altered perceptions of those “graced by soveraigne eyes,” a group of men that had been widely mocked and that, according to Herbert, included Shakespeare. By such means, Antony and Cleopatra aims to transform all spectators into women with a “private affection and respect, or partialitie” for the dead.171 It may have had some success in doing so; in 1616 the satirist Robert Anton complained of Bacchanalian women “growne . . . mad” and “impudent” by “irregular motion” at “base Playes” featuring “Cleopatres crimes.”172 To be sure, not all spectators of Shakespeare’s play are thus moved (George Bernard Shaw was not). But those who are learn to take on a queen’s perspective, which does not bracket off emotion or affection in judging merit. Insofar as Cleopatra moves “slippery people / Whose lo
ve is never link’d to the deserver / Till his deserts are past” (1.2.185–87) to love Antony, she calls the abstemious Caesar, and all those misogynistic young men that populated Elizabethan plays, “ass / Unpolicied” (5.2.307–8). The ability to inspire such emotion may well be worth “all that is won and lost” (3.11.70) after all.

  Shakespeare identifies in the unorthodox relationships of the recent and the classical past possibilities of mutuality and collaboration that seemed threatening at the time, but that now are “good being gone.” According to Adelman, he “exploits the conflicts of opinion which are built into the traditional accounts of the lovers”—and, I would add, of the Elizabethan figures they shadow—to show that tradition is “the common liar.”173 Not only does Shakespeare force a reevaluation of his two sets of historical lovers, but he also uses his lovers to force a reevaluation of the theater, intimately bound to them throughout. Antony plays Osiris to Cleopatra’s Isis, Mars to her Venus, her lover, her soldier, her servant, her general, and, finally, her husband. Their collaboration, which has erotic, aesthetic, political, and affective dimensions, defies decorum to generate unconventional definitions of masculine merit.174 To accept Antony as a “man of men” means learning to prize men for their capacity to arouse and experience passion, rather than for their ability to control or repress it. Steven Mullaney, defining theater as an “affective technology,” describes emotions as “boundary phenomena . . . hard to contain in rigid or exclusive categories because they are, by their very nature, things that happen betwixt-and-between.”175 They overflow the measure, taking us beyond the limits of rational discourse. Shakespeare, who shares his hero’s gift for summoning and cultivating adulterating emotions in others, personifies this affective aspect of the theater in his hybrid colossus, whose legs bestride oceans, and whose capacious heart bursts out of all constraints. In elevating Antony, the playwright exalts his own craft, while acknowledging its deep dependence on female rule. Among other things, Antony’s love for Cleopatra models the relationship between a loyal audience and the theater, which generates emotions that are at once degrading and elevating, depending on one’s perspective. The central pair evoke not just the relationship between play and playgoer, but also the relationship between two players, “stirr’d” by the one another into performing “Excellent falsehood” (1.1.40–44). Between the two lovers, between the lover of plays and the play, and between the two players, passion proves transformative and ennobling, leading to a “new heaven, new earth” inaccessible to judgmental young men like Vindice or Hamlet, puritan naysayers like Gosson, anticourt satirists like Jonson, or rationalist politicians like Octavius Caesar.