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The
Tragedy of Imagination: Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra"
by
Joyce Carol Oates
Originally published in Bucknell Review,
Spring 1964.
Reprinted
in The Edge of Impossibility.
Nature
wants stuff
To
vie strange forms with fancy . . .
—Antony
and Cleopatra
Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra shares with Troilus and Cressida the
obsessive and self-consuming rage of the tragic figure as he confronts
and attempts to define "reality." But, more extravagantly than Troilus
and Cressida, this reality is layered with masquerade; forms that are
often as lyric as brutal shift and change and baffle expectation. The constant
refinement of brute reality into lyric illusion is the work not simply
of Antony, Shakespeare's hero, but the lifelong work of Shakespeare himself.
Thus there is a curious, rather decadent air in this play of flamboyant
desires having as much import—if not ultimately as much political strength—as
events themselves. Lionel Abel states that among the characters of Hamlet
there are four playwrights: Claudius, the Ghost, Polonius, and Hamlet.1
Among the characters of Antony and Cleopatra there are any number
of mythologizing poets and/or playwrights, but the most important is Antony.
Snared within the net of appearances and forced by politics (that most
extreme form of fantasy) to break free, Antony's agony is curiously muted
for someone who has achieved and lost so much; but this fact can be better
understood if we examine the basis of the play and its relationship to
"tragedy."
The movement
of most works of literature—whether the simple medieval morality play or
the ambiguous Troilus and Cressida—is toward a dramatic confrontation
with reality, with objective truth. The hero's downfall (or, in happier
works, his conversion or enlightenment) is determined by the success with
which reality overcomes appearances. If there is any great theme of literature
this is it: the destruction of the faux-semblant and attendant illusions
by the intervention, bitter or glorious, of reality. Tragedy works with
this theme and is inseparable from it, and the problem of Antony and
Cleopatra seems to be that the lovers either do not have illusions
or, if they do, they never learn to substitute for them other visions of
their predicament, in the classical way that Creon of Sophocles' Antigone
does, or in the way Othello and Macbeth do. Orthodox and recognizable tragedy
necessarily involves a process of learning and exorcism, which is manipulated
by the tragic figure himself, as in Oedipus Rex, or by surrounding
characters who may or may not be fragmented aspects of the hero himself,
as in The Revenger's Tragedy, or by fate or external social forces,
as in Ibsen's Ghosts. In Antony and Cleopatra all exorcism
fails: just as Antony cannot rid himself of his obsession with Cleopatra,
so Cleopatra cannot quite rid herself of the earth-bound and, in a crude
sense, comic aspects of her own mortality. Exorcism works to dispel illusion,
but the poetry of Antony and Cleopatra works to create illusion.
The play is sustained by words alone, for its plot is certainly incidental;
we are never interested in what a character does, but only in how he expresses
his consciousness of what he has done, and what this evokes in the mirroring
rhetoric of his witnesses. Here reality does not defeat appearances; appearances
are made—through a pressure that approaches magic—to defeat reality or
at least render it irrelevant.
Comedy also
traditionally penetrates illusions; it is the incongruity of what is supposed
and what is that produces laughter. But Antony and Cleopatra relates
most immediately and most helpfully to comedy, since its tragic dimensions
are attained (in acts 4 and 5) by an excess and concentration of emotion
that is not anticipated in the earlier acts. The first act is comic in
intention: the lovers insist upon their love's hyperbole and most specifically
upon Antony's rejection of his former life. In a pretense of negatives,
he states his real concerns:
Let
Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of
the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms
are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds
beast as man.
(1.
1. 33-36)
At the end of
the act he leaves for Rome to strengthen his hold on the empire and to
escape Egyptian "dotage." The banter and play acting of the first scene
show Antony and Cleopatra at their worst, and this self-caricaturing, since
it cannot be so judged until much later, gives a credulity to the opening
speech that would not ordinarily belong to it. This is Philo's judgment
of Antony, which may be equated exactly with the judgment of the Roman
world: Antony is the "triple pillar of the world transform'd/ Into a strumpet's
fool" (1. 1. 12-13). The paradoxical nature of Antony's infatuation is
vividly suggested by these lines:
His
captain's heart,
Which
in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The
buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And
is become the bellows and the fan
To
cool a gipsy's lust.
(1.
1. 6-10)
The surrender
of the militant must constitute for the Romans an unqualified surrender;
the problem for the spectator or reader is the extent to which Roman judgment
may be trusted. But the central image here works for the Antony of the
entire play: what is unforgettable in this Antony is his "heart" on any
level, the organ of courage, of magnanimity, of loyalty, of love, of hysterical
valor possible only by a "diminution in [his] brain." Antony is his heart,
as Caesar is his reason, and the heart, being blind, may understand the
complexities of the "tawny front" (Philo's description of Cleopatra) by
other means. The "front" has its obvious irony in that Antony is a military
man; it has its obvious accusation in that it is but a mask, a facade;
but not so obvious is the fact that, since it is a facade, there may be
dimensions enjoyed by it that would baffle the Roman mind. The image works,
then, in two directions, and the Roman Philo, speaking scornfully, is allowed
to say more than he means. Antony's heart, apparently having met defeat
on this battle front, has become a bellows, so retaining its pulsing, contracting
and expanding motions, but having undergone a metamorphosis that cannot
be admired. The paradox is that the bellows and the fan which "cool a gipsy's
lust" do not cool but enflame; their purpose, as instruments, is to do
so. The image of the cyclical cooling and enflaming, then, can suggest
that fluctuating course Antony will follow, and, in its apparent preoccupation
with a single object, the man himself: a man of complexity, a colossus
and a ruffian who consumes himself in the love that, by devouring him,
transforms him into a being the military Antony, noble as he might be,
could not imagine. The image suggests, further, a shameful helplessness;
it suggests entrapment, the commitment of the passionate being to his passion,
but never the commitment of the passive being to his "fate." Common judgments
of Antony are perplexed, or at best mixed. He is not a tragic figure in
any recognizable sense; he may yearn for "the love of Love, and her soft
hours" in act 1, but in act 4, at death, he will not yearn for more than
this.
The bantering
first scene is followed by an interlude of sophisticated joking among lesser
people—Cleopatra's servants and the Roman friend of Antony, Enobarbus.
The cliché of the anticipation of death in the midst of life, or
luxurious gaiety, and the prophecies of the soothsayer are as close in
Antony and Cleopatra as one comes to the conventionalities of tragedy.
Does this argue for supernatural design or is it introduced to strengthen,
structurally, the meandering energy of the play? Later Antony's god, Hercules,
will desert him (in Plutarch, it is Bacchus), but Antony registers no consciousness
of this symbolic act. It does not work—as do the garden scene of Richard
II or the scene in Troilus and Cressida in which Hector slaughters
the strange knight "for his hide"—to relate directly to the hero's interpretation
of his plight or to add to the audience's understanding of its dimensions.
It is eerie; it is mystical; it is a possibility—just as anything in the
enchanted Egypt is a possibility—but its suggestion of divine force or
fate is never taken up by anyone in the play. Antony and Cleopatra
is the most godless of Shakespeare's plays, because it is about human beings
for whom anything less than self-divinity will be failure.
It is not
only Cleopatra who suggests a mysterious variety, but Antony as well. Much
as he reveals himself in his words, his half-false sincerities and his
half-truthful lies, there is mystery in him because he is in a process
of change. His variety is suggested by the differing men who see him, and,
most famously, by Cleopatra after his death. To his officer, Ventidius,
he is a captain generous only to those who keep themselves, cautiously
and wisely, inferior to him (act 3, scene 1); to Enobarbus he is a "fool"
(3. 11. 42) and yet a "mine of bounty" for whom one might give his life
(4. 6. 32); to Caesar, the Antony of old was a great soldier who fought
"with patience more/ Than savages could suffer" (1. 4. 60-61), but who
is now "a man who is the abstract of all faults/ That all men follow" (1.
4. 9-10). Caesar might have gone on to see that Antony is not flawed by
his faults but is his faults; in him, as in Cleopatra, the vilest things
become themselves. Yet to Lepidus, there are not "evils enow to darken
all his goodness;/ His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven,/ More
fiery by night's blackness" (1. 4. 11-13). Antony is to be considered,
frequently, in terms of light and dark imagery; what is perplexing is the
ease with which the polar values of light and dark may be confused. Antony
"is," in Cleopatra's famous speech, light itself: he is the sun and the
moon and the heavens. Yet his faults in him seem as the spots (stars) of
heaven —again light, and perhaps the same light. This cosmic light blinks
good and evil; when one leaves the atmosphere of the human condition, the
two become indistinguishable.
But Caesar's
point here is earthbound:
If
he fill'd His vacancy with his voluptuousness,
Full
surfeits and the dryness of his bones
Call
on him for 't; but to confound such time
That
drums him from his sport, and speaks as loud
As
his own state and ours, 'tis to be chid.
(1.
4. 25-30)
The tension in
Antony and Cleopatra is, clearly, not between good and evil and
not between appearances and reality. It is simply between two views of
the world, the Roman and the Egyptian, the cold Machiavellianism of those
who deal in lieutenantry (3. 9. 39) and the unfixed, pulsating, undignified
voluptuousness of those to whom passion has become a world. I speak of
tension, but really this contention between opposites counts for little
more than the formal plot. There is never any doubt about the impending
victory of reason—if it is a victory; the tension is not, as in Troilus
and Cressida, exploited as mock tension and made to demonstrate the
shabbiness of both love-worshiping Trojans and reason-worshiping Greeks.
In Antony and Cleopatra both ways of viewing the world are given
generous consideration, the final point being that they are simply different
and that any one world threatens or suffers opposing worlds. The one necessarily
moves out of itself, bent upon conquering; the other moves in upon itself
and draws the world in after, so that to the great soldier Antony, the
absurdity of challenging Caesar to a duel is never recognizable. The political
must resist emotions, though they may trade upon them; the passionate recognize
only emotions, though they may recognize at the same time their serious
limitations. What is interesting is that for both species of man, faith
in appearances supercedes faith in reality, or it may be that, for both,
appearances turn into reality.
Thus the sacrifice
of the limpid Octavia: Caesar and Antony cannot understand each other,
and do not want to, but their accustomed faith in ceremony meets in the
proposal of the political marriage between Antony and Octavia. They are
role-takers; therefore, we feel no distaste for Antony as he dismisses
his love of Cleopatra as "poison'd hours," since we know he does not tell
the truth but speaks only ceremonially. We take our cues in the play from
Enobarbus, the plain dealer who is out of place in this meeting:
.
. . if you borrow one another's love for the instant, you may, when you
hear no more words of Pompey, return it again: you shall have time to wrangle
in when you have nothing else to do.
(2.2.
107-111)
Enobarbus pretends
not to understand the decorum of this world. Instead, the doomed Lepidus
interprets it: "Her love to both/ Would each to other and all loves to
both/ Draw after her" (2. 2. 141-143). History is too fraudulent to be
telescoped into anything but comedy. So Antony, newly contracted to Caesar
through the political marriage, recognizes no change in relationships but,
inspired by the catalytic words of the soothsayer, foresees his doom in
Caesar's alienness:
The
very dice obey him.
And
in our Sports my better cunning faints
Under
his chance.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And
though I make this marriage for my peace,
I'
the east my pleasure lies.
(2.
3. 33-40)
The relationship
of Antony and Cleopatra is as apparently ignoble as nobility will allow.
We see them as lovers in fragments: they wander through the streets and
"note the qualities of people"; they lie brilliantly and passionately to
each other; they swear their love in impossibly exaggerated terms; they
do not trust each other. Above all, they are not youthful lovers: Cleopatra
sees herself as "with Phoebus' amorous pinches black,/ And wrinkled deep
in time" ( 1. 5. 28-29 ); Antony speaks angrily of sending to "the boy
Caesar . . . this grizzled head" (3. 11. 17). But in them surface conventions
and the reality of spirit are blurred, as the good and evil of Antony become
one in the dazzling light he embodies. So Cleopatra, with "wann'd" lip,
is still the queen of her exotic land, and is evoked in the famous set-piece
in which Enobarbus describes her to an awe-stricken Roman as an impression
rather than a reality—and it is the impression, finally, that matters.
The scene upon the barge—the air love-sick with perfume, the rich imagery
of gold and purple and silver, the transformation of attendants into cupids
and mermaids, most of all the transformation of the perhaps desperate Cleopatra
into Venus—may just miss being absurd; delivered by a Thersites, this would
come to us differently. But Enobarbus? whose sense of reality we are to
trust, understands that she does "make defect perfection" and that, given
this alchemy, the logical Roman world and its judgments are irrelevant.
The paradox Cleopatra embodies is suggested most succinctly in Agrippa's
exclamation, "Royal wench!" Cleopatra's majesty is such that so crude a
comic scene as the one in which she assaults the messenger of ill news
does not destroy it; she is described in terms of food and eating, and
describes herself so, but this counts, ultimately, as one of the symptoms
of her complexity and not simply of her baseness. Recurring in her, even
at her death, is a propensity to view matters comically.
History as
possible comedy (when enacted, as it must be, by mortal men) is one of
the motifs of Antony and Cleopatra; it comes out most successfully
abroad Pompey's galley (act 2, scene 7), where the pillars of the world
end their banquet in a drunken communion that means, of course, nothing.
The Roman disposition is more recognizably admirable than the Egyptian,
because it is normally ambitious. But in the end it is no more meaningful,
and its ceremonies, though usually sober, come to the same thing as the
illusion of the cupids and mermaids attending their scheming Venus. Antony
and Cleopatra is as ceremonial a play as Richard II and Troilus
and Cressida, but though all ceremonies come to nothing finally, the
abandonment of these forms in Antony and Cleopatra does not constitute
the education it does in the other plays; realizing the sham of ceremonies
is quite equivalent to realizing the sham of one's self and the world.
If there is a difference between what the world (at its crudest, biological)
suggests and what ceremony demands, then it is clearly the world that must
be abandoned, since it becomes "no better than a sty." This is the curious
point: suicide here is an escape from the disappointing world, but not
an escape from the self, whose nobility is never diminished.
The people
of both worlds, Roman and Egyptian, live according to ceremony. Enobarbus
dies out of grief at the fulfillment of a ritual of friendship, when Antony
sends his treasure and more after him; indeed, his death itself is ceremonial.
Caesar, disgusted, may scorn Antony's vulgar performance when Antony at
last flees back to Egypt:
I'
the market-place, on a tribunal silver'd,
Cleopatra
and himself in chairs of gold
Were
publicly enthron'd; at the feet sat
Caesarion,
whom they call my father's son,
And
all the unlawful issue that their lust
Since
then hath made between them.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I'
the common show-place, where they exercise.
(3.
6. 3-12)
But he will,
minutes later, attack bitterly the manner of his sister's arrival because
it has not enough of show in it:
You
come not
Like
Caesar's sister; the wife of Antony
Should
have an army for an usher, and
The
neighs of horse to tell of her approach
Long
ere she did appear; the trees by the way
Should
have borne men; and expectation fainted,
Longing
for what it had not.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But
you are come
A
market-maid to Rome, and have prevented
The
ostentation of our love, which, left unshown,
Is
often left unlov'd.
(3.
6. 42-53)
There is no distinction
on this level between the Roman and the Egyptian: reality loses itself
in appearance.
Later Antony,
preparing for his suicide, will dream of his reunion with Cleopatra after
death in terms of this "show." It is not enough for the lovers to dwell
together in romantic bliss for eternity; their love exists, clearly enough,
at least in part in the awe of witnesses:
Where
souls do couch on flowers, 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.
12. 51-54)
This does not
subtract from their love, but rather qualifies it as a particular sort
of love that gives more of itself to supposed irrelevancies than romantic
love can afford to surrender. This love is not orthodox, and so it is suspect;
it has always been suspect in regard to Cleopatra. After the defeat at
Actium, however, with their world shaken and its vastness for the first
time questioned, Antony and Cleopatra become recognizably human. Ceremony
is forgotten in the urgency of the moment, and they are reconciled, though
the loyal Enobarbus, the spokesman or chorus for the action, has lost his
faith in the world of passion and its excesses: one must simply "think,
and die" (3. 11. 2). Enobarbus' reason tells him to abandon his failing
master, envisioned as a dangerous, dying old lion, but if we have assumed
Enobarbus' wisdom, we are forced at his death to assume also his guilt.
He dies of disloyalty, and the fact of disloyalty is in itself sinful,
despite the important fact that "loyalty well held to fools does make .
. . faith mere folly" (3. 11. 42).
The several
climaxes of the play baffle expectation. If the processes of exorcism are
to be completed, Antony as the deluded lover must collide with reality
and must see his folly. But the movement toward tragic enlightenment is
always thwarted, and Antony withdraws from these encounters with his faith
in his condition untouched. So after the battle at Actium when Antony seems
a defeated man—"I am so lated in the world that I/ Have lost my way for
ever" (3. 9. 3)—it is not the temptation of suicide that masters him but
the totality of his commitment to Cleopatra. He is able to say:
Fall
not a tear, I say; one of them rates
All
that is won and lost.
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Love,
I am full of lead.
Some
wine, within there, and our viands! Fortune knows,
We
scorn her most when most she offers blows.
(3.
9. 69-74)
So he makes his
early speech about his indifference to worldly fortune come true.
The next climax
comes when Antony sees Caesar's messenger kissing Cleopatra's hand; he
does not see that she is acting a part. His judgment on her turns back
upon himself in a passage that should work as a catharsis of his love and
his bondage:
.
. . when we in our viciousness grow hard,—
O
misery on't!—the wise gods seel our eyes;
In
our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
Adore
our errors; laugh at's, while we strut
To
our confusion.
(3.
11. 111-115)
He is maddened
by Caesar's "harping on what I am,/ Not what he knew I was" as if his life
were over. But he is again reconciled to Cleopatra, whose dignity grows
when his diminishes, and believes they will yet do well. Enobarbus sees
Antony as so furious that he is "frighted out of fear," and consequently
not the old Antony. His bravado has a new sound of hollowness:
I
will be treble-sinew'd, hearted, breath'd,
And
fight maliciously; for when mine hours
Were
nice and lucky, men did ransom lives
Of
me for jests; but now I'll set my teeth,
And
send to darkness all that stop me. Come,
Let's
have one other gaudy night: call to me
All
my sad captains.
(3.
11. 177-183)
The apparent
change of fortune that follows (they beat back Caesar's men) makes the
final catastrophe the more complete.
After the
last defeat, when Cleopatra's men desert to the enemy, Antony is brought
to a revelation of what reality is for him, but again this revelation is
discarded. The apparent betrayal of Cleopatra constitutes a betrayal of
all appearance:
Sometimes
we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A
vapour sometime like a bear or lion . . .
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thou
hast seen these signs;
They
are black vesper's pageants. . . .
That
which is now a horse, even with a thought
The
rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As
water is in water.
(4.
12. 2-11)
The protean condition
of man and his world, a vision presented here with deadly vividness, is
offset for Antony only by the false report that Cleopatra has killed herself.
His commitment to love is again realized, and he prepares for death. It
is the final restoration of faith in love that justifies the expenditure
of passion the play has permitted. Death is neither escape nor self-punishment;
it is, of course, a mistake, yet it is at the same time a willful surrender
to something very like love. Eros is Antony's knave and Antony's god: Antony
will "make death love me" and will "run into't/ As to a lover's bed." Brutus
dies because he has awakened from delusion; Othello dies when freed from
the delusion of what he is; Troilus, not a tragic figure, perhaps, nevertheless
goes into battle to die when confronted with the prospect of a world totally
corrupted. But Antony dies with his faith in love renewed. This long death
scene avoids a ghastly sentimentality partially by Cleopatra's unromantic
wariness (fearing capture, she will not leave the monument to come to the
dying Antony), partially by the confidence with which the lovers affirm
themselves and their love, partially by the sheer hyperbolic force of the
poetry itself.
The play is
conceived in hyperbole, the controlled hysteria of Renaissance language
to which no world was ever equal. If the confines of this Roman-Egyptian
world are not admittedly fake, then they are, by necessity, without limitation.
The known world is collapsed into Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar; nothing
is missing from it, since they combine among them all its brilliance and
its stupidity. Antony can say of himself that with his sword he "quarter'd
the world" (4. 12. 58); Cleopatra can say of him—beginning the extended
creation and re-creation of her lover that must be unmatched in literature
for its audacity and beauty—that he destroys with himself all order in
the world: "Young boys and girls/ Are level now with men; the odds is gone,/
And there is nothing left remarkable/ Beneath the visiting moon" (4. 13.
65-68). Even Caesar can say "the death of Antony/ Is not a single doom;
in the name lay/ A moiety of the world" ( 5. 1. 16-18). The play is finally
Antony's, for Cleopatra is priestess to his apotheosis in the speech toward
which all earlier poetry moves:
His
legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm
Crested
the world; his voice was propertied
As
all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But
when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He
was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There
was no winter in't, an autumn 'twas
That
grew the more by reaping; his delights
Were
dolphin-like, they show'd his back above
The
element they liv'd in; in his livery
Walk'd
crowns and crownets, realms and islands were
As
plates dropp'd from his pocket.
(5.
2. 82-92)
The wonder of
these flights of poetry is that they seem to give nothing of their certainty
to the ceremony of the earlier acts of the play. If it is not possible
that Antony was as he is dreamed, then it is not the lapsed Antony this
play is about. If their "strength is all gone into heaviness," this heaviness
testifies simply for the magnitude of that former strength that has now
destroyed itself. Antony's death teaches Cleopatra the vanity of life,
subject to fortune; the betrayal of her treasurer renders this education
immediately suspect, just as the knowledge that Caesar will lead her in
triumph obscures forever Cleopatra's motives for dying. Shakespeare balances
hyperbole with comic suggestion: the Antony as colossus and the Antony
as ruffian, the Cleopatra equal to all visions of herself and the Cleopatra
raging at the servant who has betrayed her. But the counterpoint does not
work here—as it does, for instance, in Dr. Faustus with its vaudeville
scenes of Wagner playing magician—to qualify the grandeur of these people
and to cheat them of their incredible dignity. Instead, it works to suggest
by contrast the range of behavior this dignity allows itself, and the heights
to which it succeeds. Thus Cleopatra becomes unforgettable precisely because
she is a woman, and at times a small woman; what is insisted upon is her
humanity, the ascent of angels or demonic gods being too easy. The baseness
of Cleopatra does not preclude her greatness but assures it, since without
this her presence would be no more than a flight of words. This magic,
admittedly, will not work for everyone. Though the modern temperament admires
passion and individuality more than the older virtues of prudence, modesty,
and chastity, Cleopatra may still be interpreted as Shakespeare's Romans
see her, and Antony's death may be seen as simply the necessary result
of his having surrendered his reason to immoral passion. But the magic
works for Antony and Cleopatra, and it need not do more.
The denial
of prosaic reality and its metamorphosis into something rich and strange
are possible through the language Shakespeare uses. Thus the chilling vision
Antony has of the cloud formations that baffle the eye and that extend,
in their impermanence, into the lives of men is a vision that may be utilized
profitably by the victims of this world of appearances. Antony dies with
his belief in Cleopatra and himself secure (and it is surely Shakespeare's
Antony that William Carlos Williams has in mind in his whimsical poem,
"To Mark Anthony in Heaven," the sense of the poem being that Antony's
experience and his commitment to love are "heaven," man's highest achievement).
Cleopatra asks, after her envisioning of Antony as a colossus, whether
there was such a man as that of whom she speaks; when told there was not,
she replies:
You
lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But,
if there be, or 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.
(5.
2. 94-99)
This condemnation
of "shadows" is the metaphorical basis upon which the entire play works.
These lines propose a question they do not answer, since by the choice
of words (nature "imagines") the meaning is made ambiguous. Clearly there
has been an Antony, and there is doubt about his being past the size of
dreaming, but—and this is the irony—if there has been this Antony, it is
the highest achievement of nature's own imagining, or creating; it falls
beyond man's capacity for understanding. At her own death Cleopatra is
able to transform by her imagination the snake to a "baby asleep at my
breast,/ That sucks the nurse asleep," this final alchemy no more wonderful
than that which has lighted the entire play. We must turn to a Prospero
to encounter equal omnipotence.
It is reality
that is defeated in this play, and its defeat goes unmourned. The uses
of poetry are nowhere in Shakespeare so well imagined as in this work about
godly creatures who delight in their humanity, and who leave their traces
upon all corners of their gigantic world. Illusion could not be sustained
in Hamlet's gloomy Denmark, or on the wild fields of Scotland; it requires
the light-drenched world of old Egypt, a world that exists nowhere except
in this play and then only within its words, by the strenuous magic of
its language. In Shakespeare's works after Antony and Cleopatra,
language will expand its uses to become both "action" and "theme," moving
toward the purely lyric.
Notes
1
Lionel Abel, Metatheatre (New York, 1963), p. 50.
Revised Sat,
Apr 17, 1999 |
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