M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Background

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Hitherto this discussion of Antony and Cleopatra has so far as possible passed over the most distinctive thing in the history of the hero and heroine, the fatal passion that binds them together, gives significance to their lives, and makes their memories famous. Knowing their environment and their nature we are in a better position to see in some measure what it meant.

We have noted how in that generation all ties of customary morality are loosed, how the individual is a law to himself, and how selfishness runs riot in its quest of gratification, acquisition, material ambition. Among the children of that day those make the most sympathetic impression who import into the somewhat casual and indefinite personal relations that remain--the relation of the legionary to his commander, of the freedman to his patron, of the waiting-woman to her mistress-something of universal validity and worth. But obviously no connection in a period like this at once arises so naturally from the conditions, and has the possibilities of such abiding authority, as the love of the sexes. On the one hand it is the most personal bond of all. Love is free and not to be compelled. It results from the spontaneous motion of the individual. Were we to conceive the whole social [p. 440] fabric dissolved, men and women would still be drawn together by mutual inclination in more or less permanent unions of pairs. And yet this attraction that seems to be and that is so completely dictated by choice, that is certainly quite beyond the domain of external compulsion, is in another aspect quite independent of the will of the persons concerned, and sways them like a resistless natural force. It has been said that the highest compliment the lover can pay the beloved is to say, “I cannot help loving you.” Necessity is laid upon him, and he is but its instrument. If then the inclination is so pervasive and imperious that it becomes a master passion, clearly it will supply the grand effective bond when other social bonds fail. When nothing else can, it will enable a man and woman to overleap a few at least of the barriers of their selfishness, and in some measure to merge their egoism in sympathy. This is what justifies Antony's idolatry of Cleopatra to our feelings. The passion is enthusiastic, and in a way is self-forgetful; and passion, enthusiasm, selfforgetfulness, whatever their aberrations, always command respect. They especially do so in this world of greeds and cravings and calculating self-interest. This infinite devotion that shrinks from no sacrifice, is at once the greatest thing within Antony's reach, and witness to his own greatness in recognising its worth. The greatest thing within his reach: when we remember what the ambitions of his fellows and his rival were, there is truth in the words with which he postpones all such ambitions to the bliss of the mutual caress:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life [p. 441]
Is to do thus: when such a mutual pair (embracing)
And such a twain can do't, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.

(I. i. 33.)

And only one of grand general outlook could feel like this, when he had tasted the sweets of conquest and power, and when all the kingdoms of the world were reached to his hand as the alternative for the kingdom of his love. It takes a hero, with such experiences behind him and such opportunities before, to make the disastrous choice. Heine tells us how he read Plutarch at school and how the master “impressed on us that Antony for this woman spoiled his public career, involved himself in domestic unpleasantnesses, and at last plunged himself in ruin. In truth my old master was right, and it is extremely dangerous to establish intimate relations with a person like Cleopatra. It may be the destruction of a hero; but only of a hero. Here as everywhere there is no danger for worthy mediocrity.”

But despite the sympathy with which Shakespeare regards Antony's passion both as an object of pursuit and as an indication of nobility, he is quite aware that it is pernicious and criminal. Relatively it may be extolled: absolutely it must be condemned. It is rooted in breach of troth and duty, and it bears within itself the seeds of infidelity and wrong. It has none of the inviolability and security of a lawful love. After all, Cleopatra's gibes about Antony's relations with “the married woman” and herself, despite their affectation of petulance, are only too much to the point, so far as he is concerned; and when she has yielded to Julius, Pompey, and Antony in turn, what guarantee has the last favourite that she will not do so again to some later supplanter? In point of fact each is untrue to the other, Antony by his marriage with Octavia, Cleopatra by her [p. 442] traffickings with Octavius and Thyreus.¹ She forfeits in the sequel her right to be angry at his truancy; he has forfeited in advance the right to be angry at hers. But it is their penalty that these resentments should come between them; and at the very time when they most need each other's support, their relation, being far from the perfect kind that casts out mistrust, is vitiated by jealousy on the one side and fear on the other. She flees to the Monument, shuts herself up from his blind rage in craven panic, and seeks to save her life by lies. At the sight of the liberties she has allowed Thryeus to take, he loses himself in mad outbursts which have but a partial foundation in the facts. Then he jumps to the conclusion that she has arranged for the desertion of the sailors, and dooms her to death, when in reality she seems to know nothing about it.

Betray'd I am:
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars. and call'd them home;
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,--
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.

(IV. xii. 24.)

These terrors and suspicions are inevitable in such love as theirs.

Or is their feeling for each other to be called love at all? The question has been asked even in regard to Antony. From first to last he is aware not only of her harmfulness but of her pravity. He is under no illusions about her cunning, her boggling, her falsity. And can this insight co-exist with devotion?

Much more frequently it has been asked in regard to Cleopatra. She frankly avows even in retrospect [p. 443] her policy of making him her prey. Thus does she mimic fact in her pastime:

Give me mine angle: we'll to the river; there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say, “Ah, ha! you're caught.”

(II. v. 10.)

Moreover, her first capture of him at that banquet where he paid his heart as ordinary, was a mere business speculation. He has been useful to her since, for he is the man to piece her opulent throne with kingdoms. When he seems lost to her, she realises that she can no longer gratify her caprices as once she did.

Alex.
Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you
But when you are well pleased.

Cle.
That Herod's head
I'll have: but how, when Antony is gone
Through whom I might command it?

(III. iii. 4.)

Or, if other motives supervene, they belong to wanton whim and splendid coquetry. Her deliberate allurements, her conscious wiles, her calculated tenderness, are all employed merely to retain her command of the serviceable instrument, and at the same time minister to her vanity, since Antony would accept such a rôle only from her.

If both or either of these theories were adopted, the whole interest and dignity of the theme would be gone. If Antony were not genuinely in love, his follies and delinquencies would cast him beyond the pale of our tolerance. If Cleopatra were not genuinely in love, she would at best deserve the description of Ten Brink, “a courtesan of genius.” merely the toy of the courtesan, Cleopatra merely the toy of the sensualist. [p. 444]

But in point of fact, it is mutual and sincere. Antony's feeling has to do with much more than the senses. It goes deeper and higher; and even when he doubts Cleopatra's affection, he never doubts his own:

[Her] heart I thought I had, for she had mine.

(IV. xiv. 16.)

Cleopatra's feeling may have originated in selfinterest and may make use of craft. But in catching Antony she has been caught herself; and though interest and vanity are not expelled, they are swallowed up in vehement admiration for the man she has ensnared. Her artifices are successful, because they are the means made use of by a heart that is deeply engaged; and it is no paradox to say that they are evidence of her sincerity. So often as she refers to her lover seriously, it is with something like adoration. After the first separation, he is her “man of men.” In her first bitterness at his marriage, she cannot let him go, for

Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,
The other way's a Mars.

(II. v. 116.)

Even when he is fallen and worsted, she has no doubt how things would go were it a merely personal contest between him and his rival. When he returns from his last victory, she greets him: “Lord of lords! O infinite virtue!” (IV. viii. 16). When he dies, the world seems to her “no better than a sty” (IV. xv. 62). When she recalls his splendour, his bounty, his joyousness, it seems not a reality, but a dream, which yet must be more than a dream.

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, to imagine
An Antony, were nature's piece ‘gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(v. ii. 96.)

Various interpretations have been given of these lines, but on any possible interpretation they exalt [p. 445] Antony alike above fact and fancy.² And when we run through the whole gamut of the words and deeds of the pair, from their squabbles to their death, it seems to me possible to doubt their love only by isolating some details and considering them to the exclusion of the rest.

But the truth is that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is genuine and intense; and if it leads to shame as well as to glory, this is to be explained, apart from the circumstances of the time, apart from the characters of the lovers, in the nature of the variety to which it belongs.

Plutarch, whose thoughts when he is discussing such subjects are never far from Plato's, has a passage in which he characterises Antony's passion by reference to the famous metaphor in the Phaedrus.

In the ende, the horse of the minde, as Plato termeth it, that is so hard of rayne (I meane the unreyned lust of concupiscence), did put out of Antonius' heade all honest and commendable thoughts.

Certainly it is not the milder and more docile steed that takes the lead in Antony's affection. But it is perhaps a little surprising that Plutarch did not rather go for his Platonic illustration to the Symposium, where the disquisitions of Aristophanes and Diotima explain respectively what Antony's love is and is not. Aristophanes, with his myth that men, once four-legged and four-armed, were split in two because they were too happy, and now are pining to find their counterparts, gives the exact description of what the love of Antony and Cleopatra is. [p. 446]

Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat-fish, and he is always looking for his other half. . . . When one of them finds his other half, . . . the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment

³ And, on the other hand, Diotima's opposite theory does not apply to this particular case, at least, to begin with or superficially:

You hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other half; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands and feet and cast them away, if they are evil.... For there is nothing which men love but the good.

⁴

We may put the case in a somewhat more popular and modern fashion. All love that really deserves the name must base more or less completely on sympathy, on what Goethe called Wahlverwandschaft, or elective affinity. But such affinity may be of different kinds and degrees, and according to its range will tend to approximate to one of two types. It may mean sympathy with what is deepest and highest in us, our aspiration after the ideal, our bent towards perfection; or it may mean sympathy with our whole nature and with all our feelings and tendencies, alike with those that are high and with those that are low. The former is the more exacting though the more beneficent. It implies the suppression and abnegation in us of much that is base, of much that is harmless, of much, even. that may be good, for the sake of the best. In it we must inure ourselves to effort and sacrifice for the sake of advance in that supersensible realm where the union took place.

The second is less austere, and, for the time being, more comprehensive. It is founded on a correspondence in all sorts of matters, great and small, [p. 447] noble and base, of good or of bad report. If it lacks the exclusive loftiness of the other, it affords many more points of contact and a far greater wealth of daily fellowship. / And of this latter variety, the love of Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the typical example. At first sight it is evident that they are, as we say, made for each other. They are both past the first bloom of youth. Cleopatra, whom at the outset Plutarch makes twenty-eight years of age, and of whose wrinkles and waned lip Shakespeare, though in irony and exaggeration, finds it possible to speak, has relatively reached the same period of life as Antony, whom Plutarch makes at the outset forty-three or forty-six years of age, and whom Shakespeare represents as touched with the fall of eld. And they correspond in their experiences. Neither is a novice in love and pleasure: Cleopatra, the woman with a history, Antony, the masquer and reveller of Clodius' set, have both seen life. They are alike in their emotionalism, their impressibility, their quick wits, their love of splendour, their genial power, their intellectual scope, their zest for everything. Plutarch narrates-and it is strange that à propos of this he did not quote Aristophanes' saying in the Symposium--

She, were it in sport, or in matter of earnest, still devised sundrie new delights to have Antonius at commaundement, never leaving him night nor day, nor once letting him go out of her sight. For she would play at dyce with him, drinke with him, and hunt commonly with him, and also be with him when he went to any exercise or activity of body. And sometime, also, when he would goe up and downe the citie disguised like a slave in the night, and would peere into poore men's windowes and their shops, and scold and brawle with them within the house: Cleopatra would be also in a chamber-maides array, and amble up and downe the streets with him, so that oftentimes Antonius bare away both mockes and blowes.

Here we have a picture of the completest camaraderie in things serious and frivolous, athletic and [p. 448] intellectual, decorous and venturesome, with memories of which the play is saturated. We are witnesses of Cleopatra's impatience when he is away for a moment: we hear of her drinking him to bed before the ninth hour, and of their outdoor sports. Antony proposes to roam the streets with her and note the qualities of the people. Perhaps it was some such expedition that gave Enobarbus material for his description:

I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.

(II. ii. 233.)

It is such doings that raise the gorge of the genteel Octavius, who has no sense for popular pleasures, whether we call them simple or vulgar. But the daughter of the Ptolemies is less fastidious, and is as ready as Antony to escape from the etiquette of the court and take her share in these unceremonious frolics. Yet it is not only these lighter moods and moments that draw them together. In the depth of his mistrust, Antony recalls the “grave charm” of his enchantress; and she, when he is no more, remembers that

his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres.

(v. ii. 83.)

But what of serious and elevated they have in common gains warmth and colour by their mutual delight in much that is neither one nor other. He tells her,

But that your royalty
Holds idleness your subject, I should take you
For idleness itself.

(I. iii. 91.)

And he pays homage to her in every mood:

Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom everything becomes, to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself, in thee, fair and admired!

(I. i. 48.)

[p. 449] It is as genuine and catholic admiration as Florizel's for Perdita:

What you do
Still betters what is done . . .
Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,
That all your acts are queens.

(W. T. IV. iv. 135.)

But apart from their sincerity and range, how different are the two tributes: Florizel's all innocence and simplicity, Antony's raffiné; and sophisticated. We feel from his words that he would endorse Shakespeare's ambiguous praise of his own dark lady:

Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?

(Sonnet CL. 5.)

Does not Enobarbus speak in almost exactly the same way of the Cleopatra that Antony adores?

Vilest things
Become themselves in her; that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

(II. ii. 243.)

Thus the two are alike not only in great and indifferent things, but in their want of steadfastness, their want of principle, their compliance with baseness. Hence they encourage each other in what debilitates and degrades, as well as in what fortifies and exalts. At its worst their love has something divine about it, but often it seems a divine orgy rather than a divine inspiration. Not seldom does it lead to madness and ignominy. That Antony loses the world for it is a small matter and even proves his grandeur of soul. But for it, besides “offending reputation,” he profanes his inward honour as well; and that unmasks it as the Siren [p. 450] and Fury of their lives. Indeed, such love is selfdestructive, and for it the lovers sacrifice the means of securing it against the hostile power of things. Yet, just because it is so plenary and permeating, it becomes an inspiration too. When its prodigal largesse fails, at the hour when it is stripped of its inessential charms, the lovers are thrown back on itself; and at once it elevates them both. Antony, believing Cleopatra dead, and not yet undeceived as to the part that he fancies she played at the last, thinks only of following her to entreat and obtain a reconciliation.

I will o‘ertake thee, Cleopatra, and
Weep for my pardon.

(IV. xiv. 44.)

When he learns that she still lives, no reproach crosses his lips for the deceit; his only wish as the blood flows from his breast is to be borne “where Cleopatra bides” to take a last farewell. He-wrestles with death till he receives the final embrace:

I am dying, Egypt, dying: only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.

(IV. xv. 18.)

Thereafter he has no thought of himself but only of her, counselling her in complete self-abnegation to seek of Caesar her honour with her safety, and recommending her to trust only Proculeius-one who, as we soon learn, would be eager to preserve her life.

And her love, too, though perhaps more fitfully, yet all the more strikingly, is deepened and solemnised by trial. After Actium it quite loses its element of mockery and petulance. Her flout at Antony's negligence before the battle is the last we hear her utter. Henceforth, whether she protests her faith, or speeds him to the fight, or welcomes him on his return, her words have a new seriousness [p. 451] and weight.⁵ Her feeling seems to become simpler and sincerer as her fortunes cloud, and at her lover's death it is nature alone that triumphs. In the first shock of bereavement Iras, attempting consolation, addresses her as “Royal Egypt, Empress”; and she replies:

No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares.

(IV. xv. 72.)

Her grief for her great loss, a grief, perhaps, hardly anticipated by herself, is in her own eyes her teacher, and “begins to make a better life.” Even now she may falter, if the usual interpretation of her fraud with the treasure is correct. Even now, at all events, she has to be urged by the natural and royal but not quite unimpeachable motive, the dread of external disgrace. Cleopatra is very human to the last. Her weaknesses do not disappear, but they are but as fuel to the flames of her love by which they are bred and which they help to feed. It is still as the “curled Antony” she pictures her dead lover, and it is in “crown and robe” that she will receive that kiss which it is her heaven to have. But even in this there is a striking similarity to Antony's expectation of the land where “souls do couch on flowers,” and where they will be the cynosure of the gazing ghosts. Their oneness of heart and feeling is indeed now complete, and their love is transfigured. It is at his call she comes, and his name is the last word she utters, before she lays the second asp on her arm. The most wonderful touch of all is that now she feels her right to be considered his wife. This, of course, is due to Shakespeare, but it is not altogether new. It occurs in Daniel's [p. 452] tragedy, when she calls on Antony's spirit to pray the gods on her behalf:

O if in life we could not severd be,
Shall death divide our bodies now asunder?
Must thine in Egypt, mine in Italy,
Be kept the Monuments of Fortune's wonder?
If any powres be there whereas thou art
(Sith our country gods betray our case),
O worke they may their gracious helpe impart
To save thy wofull wife from such disgrace.

It also occurs twice in Plutarch, from whom Daniel probably obtained it. In the Comparison of Demetrius and Marcus Antonius, he writes :⁶

“Antonius first of all married two wives together, the which never Romane durst doe before, but him self.” In the biography, when Cleopatra has lifted him to the Monument, we are told:

“Then she dryed up his blood that had berayed his face, and called him her Lord, her husband, and Emperour, forgetting her owne miserie and calamity for the pitie and compassion she tooke of him.” It is not, therefore, the invention of the idea, but the new position in which he introduces it, that shows Shakespeare's genius. It has no great significance, either in Plutarch or Daniel. In the one, Cleopatra is speaking in compassion of Antony; in the other, she is bespeaking Antony's compassion for herself. But in Shakespeare, when she scorns life for her love, and prefers honour with the aspic's bite to safety with shame, she feels that now at last their union has the highest sanction, and that all the dross of her nature is purged away from the pure spirit:

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.

(V. ii. 290.)

[p. 453] Truly their love, which at first seemed to justify Aristophanes against Diotima, just because it is true love, turns out to answer Diotima's description after all. Or perhaps it rather suggests the conclusion in the Phaedrus: “ I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and the highest, and the offspring of the highest; and that he who loves the beautiful, is called a lover, because he partakes of it.” Antony and Cleopatra, with all their errors, are lovers and partake of beauty, which we cannot say of the arid respectability of Octavius. It is well and right that they should perish as they do: but so perishing they have made their full atonement; and we can rejoice that they have at once triumphed over their victor, and left our admiration for them free. [p. 454]