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Poicephalus

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Deconstructing Antony

       “The triple pillar of the world transformed/Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see” (I.1.12).
       “I have eyes upon him” (III.6.61).

       Shakespeare’s Antony invites speculation and a greedy voyerism that can only be instigated by a protagonist who, despite perpetually being at the centre of discussion, manages to elude classification.This impression of opacity of character is enhanced by the fact that his own idea of himself and of his uncontrollable infatuation with Cleopatra is constantly mutating.
       Antony oscillates between wishing “Would I had never seen [Cleopatra]” (I.2.253), and admitting “I’th’East my pleasure lies” (II.3.41). One moment he wails “I have fled myself [...] I have lost command” (III.11.7, 23), the next he reassures himself with a mantra-like repetitiveness, “There’s hope in’t yet [...] There’s sap in’t yet” (III.13.175, 191). When the protagonist himself is never static, when the other characters define him in accordance to their own agendas or morbid curiosity, there is very little for the audience to hold onto in the way of tangible evidence of one mental state as opposed to another.
       “This common body, like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,/Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide,/To rot itself with motion” (I.4.44) Caesar says this about the tendency of the masses to wish for the ruler who isn’t in power or is seen less, and then when he does come into the limelight, to lose interest and want someone else. But taken out of context, these lines are a disturbingly appropriate depiction of Antony’s state throughout the play. For he is discussed and prodded as if he were common property, and shifts continuously between duty and desire before surrendering himself to his own tormented, defeated sense of helplessness.
       With each rapid snapshot-like scene, we accumulate more and more questions. What has actually happened to Antony between the moment he meets Cleopatra and the time of his death? Has he, in effect, changed? And if he is unrecognizable from the person he was before, was the old Antony a mere facade, a mask of Roman values disguising an impulsive soul waiting to be coaxed out by Egypt’s serpentine wiles? Or has temptation unleashed a thoughtless fool, precipitating his deterioration, as Caesar, the soldiers, Enobarbus and Agrippa claim?
       Paradoxically, it is difficult to make a plausible assessment of the development and mutating states (if, indeed, they are mutating) of Antony’s character, precisely because so much attention is given to them. Everyone in the play is concerned with the state of Antony’s mind, but the credibility of their assertions is questionable. And yet we as an audience find ourselves dragged along by the popular current of thought, that which labels him as, at best, “Poor Antony” (IV.1.16), but more often “not more manlike/Than Cleopatra [...] A man who is the abstract of all faults/That all men follow” (I.4.8), an “amorous surfeiter [...] lust-wearied,” (II.1.32), and “th’adulterous Antony, most large/In his abominations” (III.6.93).
       But how can one help believing that he has fallen, been led astray, that “when he is not Antony,/He comes too short of that great property/Which still should go with Antony” (I.1.58)? After all, the audience never meets the “old Antony.” He has already become smitten with Cleopatra when the curtain rises; the very first scene consists of a biased third-person account of his dealings with her. In a note to the first lines, Emrys Jones comments “The ‘presenters’ of the tableau are the disapproving pair Demetrius and Philo, through whose eyes we are invited to view Antony’s degeneration” (192). While Jones points out the Romans’ bias, he appears not to realize that with the word “degeneration” he takes their stand. However, this unconscious judgement is easy to make: indeed, everything has been set up so that any conclusion other than that Antony has given into his “lascivious wassails” (I.4.55) is unfathomable. It is assumed we will take as truth that his “o’erflows the measure,” as one of his followers puts it (I.1.2).
       Similarly, we instinctively warm to Caesar’s staunchly Roman view of the situation as being a dangerous infatuation, with potentially disasterous consequences. The fact the the two are unacknowledged rivals, and that Caesar’s view of Antony may be distorted due to jealousy, competitiveness and the investment he has in his partner’s military performance and marriage to his sister are all factors that are easily ignored in the face of Caesar’s smooth politician’s talk. His condescending assessment of Antony “He fishes, drinks, and wastes/The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike/Than Cleopatra [...] You shall find there/A man who is the abstract of all faults/That all men follow” (I.4.8) cannot be ignored, especially in light of the many references to the old, virtuous Antony--an image we can neither depend on nor dismiss, since we never saw it firsthand.
       We find ourselves in the same vulnerable role in which we regularly see both Antony and Cleopatra: as receivers of news from what we must assume to be reliable sources. While the messengers carry the burden of delivering potentially unwelcome news, (“The nature of bad news infects the teller” I.2.96), the dependence of their superiors on that news simultaneously gives them a great deal of power. This is made evident, for example, when Cleopatra interrogates her messenger without waiting for his answers, assuming “Antonio’s dead!” and demonstrating what her reaction would be to such news, “If thou say so, villain,/Thou kill’st thy mistress” (II.5.26). Her response entirely depends on the delivery of the message--and similarly, the audience’s response depends on the delivery of the tale. That it is via a messenger that Antony later hears the false news of Cleopatra’s death may very well be a reflection of the accuracy of the story we are being told.
       Even in the analysis of the play as a whole, the material one turns to does not succeed in satiating our curiosity about who the real Antony is, and, “if it be love indeed” (I.1.14) he feels for Cleopatra, if that love is the destructive force everyone makes it out to be. The main difficulty is that while there is an abundance of material supporting this last conclusion, there is none to argue in favor of their love, to reject the universal claim that “The greater cantle of the world is lost/With very ignorance” and its implication of that love’s worthlessness in the mournful “We have kissed away/Kingdoms and provinces” (III.10.5).
       A parallel situation to Antony and Cleopatra’s is the story of the in-laws and illicit lovers Paolo and Francesca presented in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. Dante finds the two in the second circle of hell, a tempestuous place where the lustful are punished with the constant thought of their consuming passion, and are left to rot in this immersion. The sin to be punished is not the unlawful amorous act per se, but rather that of allowing that love to overshadow anything else. To let oneself be overcome by passion is a sin in itself: “Abandon yourself, Dante would say to us,--abandon yourself altogether to a love that is nothing but love, and you are in hell already” (G. Santayana). Whether Shakespeare had Paolo and Francesca in mind when he wrote the play is arguable. The hell Antony and Cleopatra enter as events spiral out of their control is certainly reminiscent of the passion-seeped hell depicted by Dante. The sweeping proclamation “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/Of the raged empire fall! [...]/Kingdoms are clay [...]/the world to weet/We stand up peerless” (I.1.33) proves insubstantial: one cannot base everything on love.
       While Dante’s influence on Shakespeare is uncertain, we do know of Plutarch’s. And perhaps it is due to his version of the events, on which Shakespeare based the play, that Antony emerges as a deluded, fallen shadow of the man he once was. In reference to Antony’s decision to return to Rome upon receiving news of discord in Rome, Plutarch states, “Then began Antonius with much ado a little to rouse himself, as if he had been wakened out of a deep sleep and, as a man may say, coming out of a great drunkenness” (207-208, Shakespeare’s Plutarch). That the military/political Antony may be the drunken man, and the love-struck Antony the awakened, enlightened being is not even considered.
       We are dealing with Roman values, and a true Roman does not abandon his duties and abandon huge military undertakings in favor of love. When Cleopatra complains that Antony “was disposed to mirth; but on the sudden/A Roman thought hath struck him” (I.2.85), while she is obviously deriding the dull, self-sacrificing, practical nature of the Roman way, the latent sense is nevertheless that though arguably boring, it is the sensible, and more importantly, sane lifestyle. Passages about Egypt are fraught with references to exotic, erotic temptation, from mere allusions such as “my serpent of old Nile/For so he calls me” (I.5.25) to loaded phrases like “your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mind/by the operation of your sun, [...] y’have strange serpents there,” and “tis a strange serpent” (II.7.24, 48) that clearly refer to more than Egyptian wildlife. Not only Cleopatra, but Egypt itself is corrupting, and in choosing to return there, Antony will fall.
       “The higher the Nile swells,/The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsman/Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,/And shortly comes to harvest” (II.7.20). The imagery here is both vaginal and phallic. Water is traditionally a feminine symbol, bringing to mind menstruation, the womb and amniotic fluid, as well as fertility in general, but the swelling denotes both pregnancy and an erection. The seedsman scattering his grain is an obvious metaphor, and the fact that a drunk Antony is describing this to an even more intoxicated Lepidus is the most promising evidence that the subject here is not farming, but sexual exploits. Which further feeds the growing impression that his and Cleopatra’s relationship is base, tainted and immoral--ie, the definition of “Egyptian.” And it is, supposedly, Egypt that is his downfall: “O whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See/How I convey my shame out of thine eyes/By looking back what I have left behind/’Stroyed in dishonour” (III.11.52). Which begs the question, could not have been Rome that was his downfall?
       But this question is forgotten as the play takes on a feverish, whirlpool-like speed with the end of the third act, as Antony’s disorientation grows more marked. The brevity of the scenes, and their settings across continents makes for a sense of displacement, of impermanence and volatility that is enhanced by Antony’s own instability. His plaintive, insistent cry “Have you no ears? I am/Antony yet” (III.13.92), followed soon after by the dejected “Alack, our terrene moon/Is now eclipsed, and it portends alone/The fall of Antony” (III.13.154) demonstrate this nausea-inducing vascillation.
       The epitome of Antony’s inscrutability manifests itself at the end of the fourth act. This near-soliloquy (Eros’ presence, like that of Ophelia in Hamlet’s soliloquy, is irrelevant: it is the protagonist’s despair that captures our attention), with its images of clouds and the indistinct, mutating shapes they form, is a grown man’s exposure of his feelings of disorientation, vulnerability and littleness, an admission of his own weaknesses. The vagueness of “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,/A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, [...] That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/As water is in water” is juxtaposed against the profoundly personal, intrspective lines “Here I am Antony,/Yet cannot hold this visible shape” (IV.14.3-22). The result is the feeling that whether he has fallen or not, whether the Roman way is better than the Egyptian, whether the “old Antony” is a myth, his own self-disgust and deflated sense of self remains. Perhaps that is the closest we can expect to get to the real Antony: the one he reveals when in the throes of self-doubt. Perhaps that is all we deserve to uncover: for as Dante’s Virgil would say, “the desire to hear [others’ dispute] is a base desire” (xxx.148).