Kraft, who is dramaturg for Antony and Cleopatra, talks about why Cleopatra often seems to be the focus of attention given to this play rather than Antony.
By word count, Antony is the 10th-largest role in all of Shakespeare’s plays. That’s pretty huge. I think Cleopatra is second only to Rosalind as far as women’s roles are concerned. Cleopatra rightly is one of the most fascinating characters, male or female, that Shakespeare ever drew. I think Antony sometimes gets the short end of the stick and it’s hard to say exactly why.
When we see Antony in Julius Caesar with his great power and his oration, “Friends, Romans, countrymen . . . ,” his ability to make the Roman plebeians weep, his manipulation of Octavius in the proscriptions, we are impressed. At the end of that play, Antony is still a young man, but he’s got the full power of a senator, a consul-to-be, a general who has just won the battle of Philippi. So when we come to Antony and Cleopatra, we expect great things from him. Only two years have elapsed from the end of Julius Caesar to the very beginning of this play. But the hope that we had for Antony does not materialize.
What sets the tone for the entire play are the opening lines of Antony and Cleopatra:
“Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: 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.
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform’d
Into a strumpet’s fool.”
We have to remember it is a Roman soldier who is speaking, and Rome in Antony and Cleopatra is characterized by cold reason, by foresight, by prudence. Antony has those attributes, but they’re counterbalanced by his huge sensual nature—a nature that has made him turn to Cleopatra as if she were the only thing in life worth living for. Now, this is not a sound Roman perspective. Egypt is a vassal state to Rome. Cleopatra rules because of Antony’s say-so. Antony could change his desires and have somebody else control Egypt. But Antony is absolutely in thrall to her.
So his stature as a general, as a great Roman, is always being counterbalanced by this sensuality, this living for the moment, and he berates himself for it. He says, “I must free myself from these strong Egyptian fetters.” Because of the way he was raised, what was expected of him was to take a great part in Rome and the world it ruled. At the end of Julius Caesar, he was without question the best general, the most promising of all. But it never pans out. It can’t. Octavius Caesar orchestrates a marriage match between Antony and his own sister Octavia, and this is supposed to bind Antony to Roman needs and values, but as Antony says, “In the east my pleasure lies.”
So that’s one of the reasons Antony doesn’t command the attention Cleopatra does. I think everybody who watches Cleopatra is moved by her changeability, her intense humanism, her rages, her coyness, her regality. She is like a kaleidoscope, but you can’t point to a center in her. With Antony, you point to two centers: the pull toward Roman virtues and the pull toward Egyptian sensuality. “The nobleness of life is to do thus,” he says as he kisses her, but most viewers would not define that as nobility.
Uncertainty at his core
There’s something else: Antony’s wavering sense of identity. You think, well, of course, part of him is in Rome, and part of him is in Egypt.
Antony says, “If I lose my honor, I lose myself.” This means that he feels at this moment his sense of self-identity is wed to Roman honor. And if he loses it, he loses his identity. But the most fascinating glimpses into the question of his identity come toward the end of the play, just before he hears that Cleopatra has killed herself, incorrect information Cleopatra has given to her servant Mardian to tell Antony. That news, combined with the military defeats he has just undergone, makes Antony realize that he wants to join Cleopatra in death. And of course, one of the moments of black humor in the play is that she is not dead. So, Mark Antony asks his soldier-servant, “Eros, thou yet behold’st me?” meaning, “Can you still see me?” And here’s where we clearly see his totally wavering sense of identity. He says,
“Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapor sometime, like a bear or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.”
Eros is confused, and the audience may be as well. Antony continues,
“That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. . . .
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape.”
I think this struggle for identity that Antony has had throughout the play is one of the reasons we cannot discover a tangible, solid hero. When the play ends, he’s 53 years old. What does he have to show for his life? His hopes of being one of the foremost men of Rome have collapsed because of his entanglement with Cleopatra. But without Cleopatra, he has no life. Antony dies in Act IV. What other hero dies in Act IV in Shakespeare? Antony cannot command the same attention and focus that other Shakespeare heroes can, because it’s extremely difficult to focus on him.
And Cleopatra’s words about the demi-Atlas of the earth that Antony is—“His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear’d arm / Crested the world . . .”—is an aggrandizement of her imagined Antony, not perhaps the man that she lived with for the first four acts. With the loss of him, everything that was large and worth measuring others by is gone. Shakespeare’s unbelievably fantastic, grandiose, poignant poetry shapes our image of what Antony must be. But the actual Antony we see in action never measures up to his own feeling about himself, and even more importantly, her recollection of what kind of man he was.
He followed his heart. And his passion. And his passion was immense. We all, I think, dream—maybe in our youth more than in our mature life—of finding that one person who we were destined to mingle with, to grow from, to complete ourselves. And even though Antony was quite a playboy—he had relations with many married women, had several wives, and even left Cleopatra for about three years when he was with his wife Octavia—none of them could satisfy the most of him. None but Cleopatra.
What does it mean at the end of your life to say I was a great cog in political machinery, I controlled huge sections of the earth and my power was immense? I suppose that’s very gratifying for some frames of mind. If political power is your highest value and you do something like Antony did with Cleopatra, you’d have to say, oh no, I misspent my life. But if you have that ability to be a political honcho and realize the greatest part of your being is really a passionate poet and a lover, which Antony is, then it’s a life well spent.
For more information about Antony and Cleopatra, click here.