by Emma Smith
Alone and barricaded in the castle of Dunsinane, Macbeth hears of his wife’s death. His response is a famous speech of resignation and futility, using a striking metaphor:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(5.5.23–7)
Struggling for an image, Macbeth, sitting on the stage in the Globe theatre, alights on the image of the actor, strutting and fretting. It’s a common enough trope in the period – the so-called ‘theatrum mundi’ or ‘all the world’s a stage’, as Jacques puts it in As You Like It (2.7.139). But it’s a useful insight into the question of agency in the period, and one of the ways in which the popular form of theatre offers itself as an epistemology, a way of knowing, for the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Who or what makes things happen in the theatre? Is it the physical body of the actors on the stage, moving and speaking to enact narrative and character? Is it the words, penned by a playwright who may be unknown to those watching? Is it the team of theatre personnel who make sure the play gets mounted? Is it, in a more phenomenological sense, the audience, by witnessing that things are happening (a version of that old philosophical chestnut that if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has it made a sound?). Even as the theatre developed compelling tragic characters, it did so within a practical and conceptual environment in which the individual can never be autonomous. And when the theatre became an image for the world, it was never entirely clear whether that suggested the amplitude of drama or the restrictions of human existence. Sir Walter Ralegh’s extended analogy in his poem ‘What is our life? A play of passion’ saw life as a ‘short comedy’ after which ‘we die in earnest, that’s no jest’.
Macbeth does not, of course, end with this speech about futility. The script has further to go. Macbeth vows to ‘die with harness on our back’ (5.5.50) and agrees to fight Macduff: ‘Yet I will try the last’ (5.10.32). Is he now in control of his own actions in the very last moments of his life, or is he merely working out a part that has been written – by witches’ prophecies, by historical chronicle, by audience expectations, by Shakespeare himself? As in Burton’s Anatomy, it is the question and the range of possible answers that are of most interest. Macbeth asks why things happen: that we still can’t answer is key to its unsettling hold on our imagination.
CHAPTER 17
Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into many different media. In the best examples, the qualities of the new medium seem particularly suited to the original: Verdi’s grandiose opera Otello, Tchaikovsky’s erotic ballet of Romeo and Juliet, Henry Fuseli’s hallucinatory oil paintings of Macbeth, Joseph Mankiewicz’s paranoid McCarthy-era film of Julius Caesar. A perfect equivalent for Antony and Cleopatra, the Roman tragedy of doomed love, would be a Hello! magazine cover article. That’s the medium that best expresses the play’s own preoccupations: money, sex, scandal, glamorous international locations and exotic interiors, and, above all, publicity itself. Antony and Cleopatra is a play that disports itself in full view, a play in which privacy and interiority are overridden by celebrity and self-promotion. If we expect tragedies to take us deep into the psychology of the individual, we will be disappointed. The rival protagonists of Antony and Cleopatra instead show us the culture of display and consumption so intrinsic to the Jacobean theatre. And crucial to these interests is the mercurial, OTT Cleopatra herself.
Although (spoiler alert) both Antony and Cleopatra die in the play, the shape of the tragedy is organized around Cleopatra’s life. Antony’s death is not the end of the play, but when Cleopatra expires, it is indeed all over. This temporal gap between the deaths of the two lovers is the play’s most daring structural innovation. Antony’s suicide attempt and his arrival, mortally wounded, to die in Cleopatra’s monument, are dramatized at the end of Act 4. Act 5 is given to Cleopatra, who prepares for her own death, in scenes cross-cut with Octavius Caesar’s increasing military control over the conquered Egypt. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, where the gap between the deaths of the lovers is so brief as to be almost a terrible mistake, Antony and Cleopatra distends this gap by the length of an act: probably some thirty or forty minutes of stage time. In controlling the play’s final movement, Cleopatra has the structural equivalence of Hamlet, or Macbeth, or King Lear, or Othello – the key position of the tragedy.
If this is true, that the play’s true tragedian is Cleopatra, this marks a distinct change in Shakespeare’s work. Women in tragedies have tended to be one-dimensional: the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan, and the saintly one Cordelia; the abused Ophelia and Desdemona. Lady Macbeth is perhaps the nearest Shakespeare has come to writing a tragic heroine, and perhaps in this context we could see her decline in the play’s second half as a failure of authorial nerve, rather than a guilty breakdown. Cleopatra’s dominance in the play marks a shift. One potential explanation for her enhanced role is in the acting company, the King’s Men (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were so renamed in 1603 when the new king came to the English throne). Shakespeare’s in-house role with a fixed and successful troupe of players enabled him to write his plays with a clear understanding of the capacities of the actors who would embody his roles. We can see how Richard Burbage’s growing status and skills are showcased and developed through substantial tragic parts such as Hamlet and Othello, and we can also see that earlier in his career Shakespeare feels that the younger male actors who play women’s roles can best manage youthful, gamine parts such as Viola or Rosalind, because that’s what he writes for them. But somewhere around 1606 or so, a new actor of female roles seems to have joined the company – an actor who, rather than playing off the gender ambiguity of his own epicene form, was convincing in embodying powerfully mature women, such as Lady Macbeth, Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia, or here, Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s writing was always collaborative because theatre is always collaborative, and it was influenced and enabled by the actors with whom he could work.
But there are generic implications of Cleopatra’s dominance, too. Some years ago now, the critic Linda Bamber wrote a book on Shakespeare with a brilliant title that encapsulates its thesis: Comic Women, Tragic Men. In Bamber’s analysis, male dominance is one of the generic traits of tragedy, and we need only look at Gertrude, or Ophelia, or Cordelia, as evidence. Women in tragedies tend to be ancillary victims of the male hero’s egotistic downfall. The psyche that Shakespearean tragedy characteristically dissects is a male one, and frequently male tragic heroes’ self-knowledge is inseparable from violent misogyny. Even Lady Macbeth, who might seem to be the exception, effectively exhausts herself trying to buck this stereotype and get out of the clichéd sideline role. Despite a valiant theatrical effort in her sleep-walking scene, she can’t succeed in kicking against the generic pricks, and is ultimately sacrificed to Macbeth’s own increasing tragic isolation. As we saw in Isabella’s role in Measure for Measure, the woman’s part becomes the play’s generic battleground. Gender is, or at least contributes towards, genre.
So, to have Cleopatra as the play’s central character may affirm her as Shakespeare’s first true female tragic agent. But there are some contradictions too. By number of lines, Antony’s is a considerably larger role: Cleopatra gets second billing. And when the play is published for the first time, its title has an unexpected piece of punctuation: ‘The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra’. The work of that comma is to split the couple, and to suggest that Antony’s is the tragedy and Cleopatra the accompaniment or afterthought. In Antony and Cleopatra the dual protagonists compromise rather than transform the idea of Shakespearean tragedy. In some readings, the death of the two lovers gives us a double tragedy, deepening or amplifying the tragic movement through reiteration. In others, the second death either undermines the first, or is rendered bathetic by it – and this links to t
he ways in which the play’s genre teeters between high tragedy and satirical collapse, challenging the single arc we normally associate with tragedy by its repeated structure of doubling and duplication.
First, then, let’s look more closely at the deaths of the two lovers. Antony is first. After the Egyptian fleet has surrendered to Caesar’s forces, Antony curses Cleopatra: ‘This foul Egyptian hath betrayèd me’ (4.13.10). Throughout the play Antony has failed to live up to Roman ideals of military strength and masculine self-sufficiency: here, just for a moment, he talks the talk. Calling Cleopatra a ‘right gipsy’ (4.13.28) sounds just like a Roman, echoing the disapproving Philo who opened the play by bemoaning the downfall of Antony to become the ‘fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust’ (1.1.9–10). Antony’s specific curse, though, is an interesting one:
Let him [Caesar] take thee
And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians;
Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot
Of all thy sex; most monster-like be shown
For poor’st diminutives
(4.13.33–7)
Antony’s curse to Cleopatra is that she be taken prisoner and turned into a spectacle of humiliation before the ‘shouting plebeians’ of Rome. Most of the interaction between Antony and Cleopatra is needy or needling in some way, designed to prompt or provoke a response, and this is no exception. Cleopatra sends her eunuch Mardian to inform Antony that she has killed herself. On hearing this news, Antony calls on his servant Eros to kill him. Eros’s name – the god of love – is highly ironic in the circumstances, and Shakespeare seems to have enjoyed the irony, repeating the name almost twenty times in the dialogue over a couple of scenes. But Eros has other ideas: he will not undertake Antony’s command. Rather, he kills himself to ‘escape the sorrow / Of Antony’s death’ (4.15.94–5).
Love, then, emphatically does not kill Antony. Instead, the washed-up general attempts to kill himself with his own sword. It may be intended as a mark of his decline from that noble martial Roman remembered in the opening scenes that he cannot commit the most Roman of acts, heroic suicide. But the question of what prompts Antony’s botched suicide is an interesting one. In part, the false news of Cleopatra’s death has an effect – but a more immediate factor seems to be Antony’s own assessment of himself. Judging that he lives in ‘dishonour’, he tells Eros of the fate that awaits him:
Eros,
Wouldst thou be windowed in great Rome and see
Thy master thus with pleached arms, bending down
His corrigible neck, his face subdued
To penetrative shame, whilst the wheeled seat
Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded
His baseness that ensued?
(4.15.71–7)
The language here is strained, and the unfamiliarity of this cluster of unusual and Latinate words somehow suggests less that Antony is struggling to understand the situation, and more that he is trying to make it sound elevated. Antony is concerned about being humiliated in public view and, referring to himself in the third person, imagines himself as the voyeuristic onlooker in a drama of physical degradation (that word ‘penetrative’ is a suggestive one that Shakespeare never uses elsewhere). This anticipated public shaming is closely allied to the curse Antony placed on Cleopatra.
And if we skip forward an act (like the Egyptian queen who ‘hop[ped] forty paces through the public street’ (2.2.236)) to Cleopatra’s own preparations for death, we can see the same sentiment expressed again:
Thou, an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome, as well as I. Mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view …
The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’ posture of a whore.
(5.2.204–17)
What Cleopatra clarifies about their shared fear of an ignominious future is its theatrical – or meta-theatrical – implications. Not only will she herself be given up to the view of a grossly plebeian audience, but she will also be travestied in plays and other entertainments. The ultimate degradation will be to be performed by a young male actor, like a whore. It’s an astonishingly daring moment for that young male actor to deliver.
When Cleopatra lifts the poisonous asp to her breast in her own suicide, it is the defeat of Caesar that is uppermost in her mind:
O, couldst thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied!
(5.2.301–3)
What these great lovers express at their deaths is not, then, the fear of leave-taking, nor the sentiment that they do not want to live apart. Rather they are motivated by the horror of public humiliation. And although Antony and Cleopatra is typically categorized as a tragedy of love, to do so may be to accept the play’s own compelling mythos about itself – its own Hello! headline – and to read it in the way it would like to be read. What Antony and Cleopatra fear is public show, or at least, public show that is not on their own terms. The prospect of a gaping, lower-class audience witnessing their degradation is insupportable – and the irony is, of course, that that is just what they, as figures on the stage, already suffer. While love, jealousy and separation are indeed part of their story, these emotions are by no means the most pressing motives. John Dryden rewrote the play in the late seventeenth century under the title All for Love: perhaps he should have called it ‘All for Shame’.
Since the Second World War, one of the most dominant paradigms in cultural anthropology has been a distinction between cultures structured around the principle of guilt, and cultures structured around shame. Popularized by Ruth Benedict in 1946 in her influential if controversial book on Japan called The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, guilt and shame cultures differ in how social expectations are shared and how individuals understand their own failure. Shame tends to imagine this experience in terms of negative evaluations by other people: it is externally oriented. Guilt, by contrast, is imagined as a negative evaluation by the self – it is internally oriented. Shame, wrote Benedict, ‘is a reaction to other people’s criticism’. ‘A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous … But it requires an audience.’ She argued that ‘the primacy of shame in Japanese life means, as it does in any tribe or nation where shame is deeply felt, that any man watches the judgment of the public upon his deeds. He need only fantasy what their verdict will be, but he orients himself toward the verdict of others.’
From this thumbnail sketch of an important anthropological framework, it’s possible to identify Antony and Cleopatra as shame-oriented individuals. Each anticipates their ultimate degradation in terms of a public show: being paraded through the streets of Rome in Caesar’s triumph, ogled by gaping crowds, burlesqued through performance or mimicry. To be in control of a glamorous public image is one thing; to be the object of someone else’s PR campaign is quite another. Cleopatra’s fear of being ridiculed as ‘some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness’ is the obverse of her earlier publicity stunt in a barge on the River Cydnus. The gruff soldier Enobarbus, there, is moved to famous poetry: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne / Burned on the water’ (2.2.198–9). He recounts how ‘The city cast / Her people out upon her’ (220–21), and even the very air would ‘gaze on Cleopatra too, / And made a gap in nature’ (224–5). This audacious management of her own imperial image is crucial to Cleopatra’s power: she well understands how her Roman adversaries will use the same spectacular strategy for their own political ends.
Shame is an interesting concept in relation to Shakespearean tragedy, not least because guilt might seem to be the genre’s true fellow traveller. Guilt’s dependence on, in Benedict’s words, ‘an internalized convict
ion of sin’ seems closer to the individualistic and interior landscape we associate with tragedy, just as it seems closer to the religion of the inner conscience associated with the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on interior reflection rather than spiritual spectacle. One common way of understanding tragic figures is via their own sense of managing their failure to meet their own standards: Macbeth, for instance, tormented by a mind ‘full of scorpions’ (Macbeth 3.2.37) or the rapist Tarquin who ‘hates himself for his offence’ and struggles under ‘the burden of a guilty mind’ (The Rape of Lucrece 738, 735). This emphasis on guilt as the property of the tragic character would make Antony’s loyal servant Enobarbus into an alternative tragic centre. He alone in this play acts from guilt: ‘I have done ill, / Of which I do accuse myself so sorely / That I will joy no more’ (4.6.17–19). To ‘accuse myself’ is the keynote of guilt in anthropological terms; Antony’s fear of being ‘windowed in Rome’ is the keynote of shame. But having shame as the major motivation in a tragedy reorients the locus of judgement from the individual to the lookers-on – within the play world, and in the theatre. Just as Antony and Cleopatra challenges the model of individual tragedy Shakespeare had been previously working in by its double protagonists, it also shifts the balance away from interior guilt to exterior shame. It turns tragedy inside out.
