Battlefield Egypt: Final Conflict

Battlefield Egypt: Final Conflict

William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was based upon historical events yet Shakespeare deviates from the dreary history lesson and leads his audience down a road that is made of every type of brick, concrete, gold, and mortar imaginable, leading us to embrace his protagonists with open arms.  Antony, the unstoppable Roman soldier, finds love in the arms of his mistress, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.  Shakespeare guides us through this historical journey with some accuracy, and an audience finds greater meaning in Shakespeare’s attention to Antony’s character and experiences.  Antony is likely meaningful to Shakespeare in many ways, but Antony’s ultimate importance is drawn from the conflicts he experiences.  By creating several dramatic conflicts in Antony’s life, Shakespeare allows his audience to learn lessons about the balance of life, the power of time, and the complications of desire. 

Antony’s struggle with death leads to some interesting insights about life.  In Jacqueline Vanhoutte’s article, “Antony’s ‘Secret House of Death’: Suicide and Sovereignty in Antony and Cleopatra,” Vanhoutte addresses some important factors that a modern-minded reader should consider, as these factors change the opinion we may hold with respect to Antony.  During Shakespeare’s time, a cultured individual may have considered suicide an acceptable means of death.  Vanhoutte states, “In Tudor England, those who had access to education, and therefore to classical literature, might indeed judge a suicide ‘brave’ and ‘noble’ if done after the high Roman fashion.”  Perhaps Shakespeare was attempting to etch the remnants of those very Roman trademarks into the minds of the wealthy, producing an appreciation of Antony rather than disgust.  Instead of viewing Antony as a Roman Hero, Shakespeare’s less affluent audience – solidly rooted in Christianity – had a firm grasp on Antony’s downfalls rather than his victories.  Vanhoutte mentions, “…for most people living in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, suicide was unquestionably a sin.”  However, Shakespeare creates a conflict within the minds of his Christian audience by providing a nearly redeeming scenario to Antony’s sinful suicide: Antony’s dramatic and slow death.  Antony cries, “Peace! / Not Caesar’s valour hath o’erthrown Antony, / But Antony’s hath triumphed on itself” (IV.xv.14-16).  Antony struggles to remain “Roman” here, yet admits defeat against his own sword, and this painful penance paints him as a “faulty” protagonist and hero in the eyes of his devout audience.  Antony’s death is neither Roman nor Christian, and Shakespeare includes another quandary surrounding Antony’s death.  The linguistic application of the word “death” may not be how we semantically view it today.  René Weis’ introduction to Antony and Cleopatra suggests that death may not always mean the end of life: “We know that ‘death’ in Elizabethan English still preserved the meaning of the French la petite mort, that is, sexual climax.  No other Shakespeare play exploits the multiple paradoxes of this in the way that Antony and Cleopatra does” (lviii).  Shakespeare creates a mixed message within the meaning of the word ‘death’ and this causes conflict in its final interpretation.  This confusion is also made more difficult by the unexpected way in which Antony dies.  Vanhoutte identifies the lack of predictability in Antony’s death and how it creates a challenge: “And Antony’s final moments have earned less acclaim than [Cleopatra’s], in part because Antony improvises a death that comprises elements of the ‘High Roman’ and early modern models of suicide, but that cannot satisfactorily explained by reference to either.”  By presenting an unexpected and botched death, perhaps Shakespeare was attempting to offer yet another redeeming moment in the eyes of his less affluent audience, painting Antony as a hero in the end.  Peter Berek’s article “Doing and Undoing: The Value of Action in Antony and Cleopatra” discusses Pompey and his failures that eventually lead the public to adore him.  Berek mentions that, “The ‘ebbed’ man (in this case, Pompey), unloved until he loses the power which truly makes one worthy of love, becomes dear to the populace by his very lack of power,” suggesting that the lack of something creates the desire for it.  The loss of Antony perhaps leads the audience in the very same psychological direction, lauding Antony after his death rather than viewing him as a sinner. 

Antony’s frolic with Father Time also draws attention to similar struggles within us.  Antony’s passionate life and death struggle suggests that he understands his limitations as well as the pleasures in life.  Berek states, “Embracing paradox as [Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar] embrace one another, they choose life and die, though the realm in which they will forever play their parts is knowable only in the imagination.”  This fluctuating state of existence between life and death, particularly for Antony, creates a tear in the temporal balance perceived by Shakespeare’s audience because this flux induces a sense of instability.   Shakespeare employed time strategically throughout Antony and Cleopatra.  Arthur H. Bell, author of “Time and Convention in Antony and Cleopatra,” suggests that time is used as a tool rather than simply a reference for presenting events, a “resource to be managed wisely.”  Shakespeare’s use of time and its effect on his characters allowed him to empower the Elizabethan audience, providing them with an almost god-like perspective of the events and simultaneously skewing that very perspective.  Bell believes that this paradox or confusion is particularly important to Shakespeare in that it presents “a universal dilemma: the willful man caught in a heedless and rigid mode of being.”  Antony struggles in this awkward temporal existence while Caesar thrives in his ability to adapt to the ever-changing world around him.  Bell concludes that Antony and his Roman counterparts are clearly divided: “No time-honored role seems to work well for [Antony].  Our suspicions are confirmed as we see, by contrast, the successful adjustments of Pompey and Caesar, exemplifications of the hero and the man of policy.”  Time is certainly not on Antony’s side, leading him to eventually escape to a timeless existence in death. 

Not only does an audience learn by observing Antony’s conflicts with suicide and his struggles with the concept of time; Antony’s balancing act with respect to his needs and wants creates a larger message for the audience to ponder.  His heroic Roman desire to maintain a positive reputation is in active conflict with the vitality of Egypt.  In Robert J. Baker’s article “Absence and Subversion: The ‘O’erflow of Gender in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Baker identifies Antony’s conflict: “Early in the play, however, it is Antony who disrupts the hierarchy, leaving the world of honor and the scenes of triumph represented by Rome and entering the smaller, political space of Egypt and the heightened, personal space of love embodied by Cleopatra.”  Antony risks his Roman world and status to love a woman in Egypt who Baker suggests carries an “alien vitality.”  Antony’s Egyptian desires create concern among his fellow Romans, and Antony recognizes the shift in his priorities from the masculine and stoic Rome to the more feminine and desirable Egypt.  Baker notes, “[Antony] is a radical, a charged particle, oscillating mercurially between Rome and Egypt, self and Cleopatra, always likely to set off a reaction of fission that would destroy the empire and its values.”  Antony’s unstable nucleus eventually shatters and it seems that his Egyptian passions consume his surroundings.  Baker suggests that this liminal attitude between Rome and Egypt is the main reason that “Caesar, Macaenas, Enobarbus, Candidius, Philo – indeed all the Romans – have reason to fear Antony’s change.”  Antony’s betwixt existence leaves him at a crossroads, and his “legs bestrid the ocean” (V.ii.82), as William D. Wolf suggests in his article “‘New Heaven, New Earth’: The Escape from Mutability in Antony and Cleopatra.”  The removal of Rome and the straddling of his two worlds allow Antony to explore his feminine side.  Weis indicates that the pageantry of gender play, as seen from the eyes of a Roman, is not necessarily taboo, but, rather, that it is “exotic and decadent” (xxiii).  Perhaps Shakespeare employed this specific type of confusion in order to stir thoughts of confusion in his audience, demonstrating what happens when desire and duty metaphorically intertwine. 

William Shakespeare takes his audience on a journey of history, and his audience likely reacted in a way that he predicted.  Shakespeare’s use of conflict within the storyline of Antony and Cleopatra creates a world in which an audience experiences the challenges that the characters face.  Shakespeare addresses the conflict between life and death, time and its challenges, and the battle between desire versus duty.  Shakespeare was able to linguistically manipulate his audience into supporting the conflicted hero, Antony, instead of shunning him.  Perhaps the greater lesson is seen through the extreme circumstances that, when diluted, appear as highly average inner wars that we struggle with every single day.  

Works Cited

Baker, J. Robert. "Absence and Subversion: The 'O'erflow' of Gender in Shakespeare's       _____Antony and Cleopatra." Upstart Crow 12 (1992): 105-115. Rpt. in Shakespearean _____Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 81. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource _____Center. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.

Bell, Arthur H. "Time and Convention in Antony and Cleopatra."Shakespeare _____Quarterly 24.3 (Summer 1973): 253-264. Rpt. inShakespearean Criticism. Ed. _____Michelle Lee. Vol. 137. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 _____Dec. 2011.

Berek, Peter. "Doing and Undoing: The Value of Action in Antony and _____Cleopatra." Shakespeare Quarterly 32.3 (Autumn 1981): 295-304. Rpt. _____in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 119. Detroit: Gale, _____2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. Emrys Jones and René Weis. _____London: Penguin, 2005. Print.

Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. "Antony's 'secret house of death': suicide and sovereignty in _____Antony and Cleopatra." Philological Quarterly 79.2 (2000): 153+. Literature _____Resource Center. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.

Wolf, William D. "'New Heaven, New Earth': The Escape from Mutability in Antony and _____Cleopatra." Shakespeare Quarterly 33.3 (Autumn 1982): 328-335. Rpt. _____in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 81. Detroit: Gale, _____2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.