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By Root 2117 0

ambitions. For some, Romeo and Juliet is all that needs be said, almost perfect in its poetic expression. But few of us would mistake it for history. On the other hand, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare gives us a more complicated story of passion where Cleopatra fakes her death to hurt Antony, to prove his love of her, not realizing it will cause his own suicide. (It also allows him to have each give a speech on the death of the other.) This is not history either but it comes closer to the historical reports we have in Plutarch (not history either), which Shakespeare knew. History is, in fact, a construction of our minds as redactors and editors of all the reports.

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare abandoned the earlier set speeches-poetic, purple passages that stop the action and show his poetic abilities in their best light, speeches we like so much in Romea and Juliet. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is poetry more than drama. But Antony and Cleopatra is drama more than poetry. Nor is it puppy love. Antony and Cleopatra are historical characters whose story is justly famous throughout Western history. Shakespeare portrays them as complex personalities, both decisive and indecisive, both heroic and cowardly, both industrious and lazy, with a myriad of complicated responsibilities that prevent any easy generalizations about their motivation.

At the end, when all political ambitions have been lost, when Antony is dead and Cleopatra is captured, she becomes noble in choosing death as the Egyptian Queen over life as a servant to a Roman conqueror: “Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch my best attires. I am again for Cydnus, to meet Mark Antony.” She calls her servants to bring her royal trappings: “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me. Now no more the juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip” (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 283-85).

She has determined to give up whatever pleasures life may yet hold and to die as a queen. She could have lived; she has been offered terms of surrender. But, as they turn out to be false terms, her death by her own hand is a victory and affirmation too-a martyrdom, though certainly not a simple act of following her departed beloved, whom she alternatively loves and deprecates. Her death is not a simple act of ending her defeated life. When she envisions the afterlife, we do not know whether to take her literally, either about her act of devotion or her heavenly ascent:

Methinks I hear

Antony call. I see him rouse himself

to praise my noble act. I hear him mock

The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

To excuse their after wrath. 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. (lines 285-93)

An enormous ambiguity enters our minds with Cleopatra’s “Methinks….” Unlike Hamlet in Gertrude’s bedroom, we do not know what she sees. Like us, she cannot be sure she sees the vision that promises a beatific heavenly abode reunited with her love. Yet she affirms it for his sake as well as hers: “Now to that name my courage prove my title!” Does she really see Antony or does she convince herself to act as if she does? But she does convince herself of her progressive immortality by ascent through the heavens. In a sense we too often convince ourselves of the literal truths of religion by an act of will when we know they are but metaphors.

The result is that she can speak of her own immortalization. She becomes the higher elements and rises, giving the lower elements of earth and water to baser life. She is apotheosized into a higher creature by her suicide and her martyrdom. It is an affirmation of life in a morally, existentially, and epistemologically ambiguous universe. Though Antony and Cleopatra are hardly the unblemished heroes that Shakespeare makes Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra is given the most self-conscious of all Shakespeare’s affirmations of life beyond the grave.25 But it is that ambiguity that makes her speech so powerful today when she sounds the major theme of all our doubts.