The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [121]
`thinking she saw the hideous features of the wretched being, rising up to strike terror to her soul, on the very threshold of eternal night'
and dies in agony. Sometime later the bankrupt Charles, ruined and turned into a wraith by her death, also dies.
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra
On this sombre note we may conclude this introductory survey of stories which present the five-stage cycle of Tragedy in its entirety and move on to those - including some of the best-known tragic stories in the world - which concentrate only on the concluding phases of the cycle, picking it up, as it were, halfway through. The initial stages are already over before the story, as we see it, opens, and can only be reconstructed by means of flashback and sympathetic imagination.
We can see the difference between these two types of Tragedy clearly illustrated when we compare two of the tragedies of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The first of these is of the type with which we are already familiar, portraying the complete five-stage pattern. In this sense Julius Caesar is essentially the tragedy of Brutus. It is he, `the noblest Roman of them all', who has to be persuaded, as the conspirators gather together in the Anticipation Stage, to join the plot to kill Caesar. It is in Brutus's soul that we see the battle of temptation acted out, in Act II Scene i, when the other conspirators, led by the chief Tempter Cassius, call on him at night. When he finally succumbs, the Focus has been found and the Dream Stage follows, including the `dark act' of the assassination itself, with Brutus as the conspirator who strikes the last fatal blow, and the heady aftermath, when it seems that the people of Rome are prepared to welcome Caesar's murder as the overthrow of an over-ambitious tyrant. But then the Frustration Stage begins, when the eloquence of Mark Antony presents a very different view of Caesar, as the people's friend. The crowd begins to turn against the conspirators. They are forced to flee from Rome and we see the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius and Lepidus assuming full authority, gathering their forces to avenge Caesar's death. The Nightmare Stage shows the conspirators on the run and beginning to fall out among themselves, with Brutus pursued by Caesar's ghost; and this culminates at Philippi in their total overthrow, first with the death of Cassius and finally Brutus's suicide.
In Antony and Cleopatra, we see the emphasis of the story falling quite differently. The essence of the situation is that the great soldier Antony has been caught between two poles: on the one hand his duty, his manly responsibilities as one of the triumvirs of Rome; on the other, his pleasure, his all-consuming infatuation with the Queen of Egypt. The basic question of the play, posed from its opening lines (`Nay, but this dotage of our general's overflows the measure ... the triple pillar of the world transform'd into a strumpet's fool') is: which pole will win?
The point is that we pick up the story of Antony's fatal love for Cleopatra halfway through. He has already embarked on the cycle of self-destruction which is to bring him down long before our story opens. Indeed we can reconstruct the moment when he was caught, the moment of Focus, when, in one of the play's most memorable speeches, Enobarbus recalls the occasion when the stern hero first set eyes on the voluptuous Temptress, on his arrival in Egypt:
`the barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne burned on the water....'
From there the Dream Stage follows, as Antony plunges into his affair with Cleopatra and begins to forget his soldierly responsibilities in endless nights of carousing. But eventually a series of threats to the security of Rome, such as that posed by the rebellious young Pompey, serve to remind Antony of his duty. An element of frustration has appeared, and it is only at this point, when Antony is being called back to his `proper Roman self', that the play begins.
In terms of the complete