An Apology for Antony. Morality and Pathos in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra"

An Apology for Antony

Morality and Pathos in Shakespeare’s Antony andCleopatra

Sofie Kluge, University of Copenhagen

Taking off from a consideration of Antony and Cleopatra’sintermingling of pathetic and moral tragedy, the analysis proposedin the present essay demonstrates how the play’s peculiarcombination of morality and pathos results in a dialectical critiqueof both concepts of the tragic. Shakespeare didn’t write a straight-forward pathetic tragedy, in fact Antony and Cleopatra questionsthis very phenomenon from the perspective of the tragicomicChristian theatrum mundi. At the same time, however, the playinverts not only moral tragedy, but also the moral design – the‘exemplary’ story of the great Mark Antony’s downfall throughmoral corruption – that Shakespeare inherited from Romanhistoriography through Plutarch’s Life of Antony, medievalhistoriography, and Renaissance emblematics.

In contrast to the recent critical negligence of the moral aspectof the play, as well as the overemphasis on this aspect in earlycriticism of the play, the analysis proposed emphazises the dialecticof moralism and pathos in Shakespeare’s play. The fundamentalambiguity permeating Shakespeare’s characterization of Antonyas a tragic hero is not only seen to affect the understanding of thisparticular play, but also, by implication, to question the notion ofShakespeare as a modern dramatist and the view of Renaissancedrama as an unequivocal break with the medieval dramaticheritage.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Renaissance, tragedy, theatrummundi, moralism, historiography.

I. Introduction

Critical opinion about Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1608) has

varied greatly, ranging from sheer neglect to scornful denigration and

fervent exaltation. The recurrent questioning of the play’s generic

classification as a tragedy1 suggests that this differing of critical opinion

Orbis Litterarum 63:4 304–334, 2008Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

may have something to do with the concept of tragedy underlying and

determining the critical estimation of the play’s success. Pity and fear are

certainly not the emotions most likely to be experienced by the spectators

at the falls of Antony and Cleopatra. Indeed, what should be made of a

‘tragedy’ where one protagonist complies with his inauspicious destiny

without even the faintest touch of bitterness and sorrow in an unheroic and

almost ‘comic’ suicide, while the other in a state of exaltation voluntarily

leaves this world in what appears to be a triumphant apotheosis

transcending tragic catastrophe?

Taking off from a consideration of Antony and Cleopatra’s intermingling

of pathetic tragedy with the moral tragedy only briefly mentioned as an

inferior tragic genre in Aristotle’s Poetics, but subsequently the paradigm of

the Christian drama, I shall try to demonstrate how the play’s peculiar

combination of morality and pathos results in a dialectical critique of both

moral and pathetic concepts of the tragic. Shakespeare didn’t exactly write

a straightforward pathetic tragedy, in fact Antony and Cleopatra questions

this very phenomenon from the perspective of the essentially tragicomic

Christian theatrum mundi. At the same time, however, the play inverts not

only moral tragedy, but also the entire moral design – the ‘exemplary’

story of the great Mark Antony’s downfall through moral corruption – that

the playwright inherited from Roman historiography through Plutarch’s

Life of Antony, medieval historiography, and Renaissance emblematics.

Following these observations, I shall proceed to a consideration of how

the play’s generic ambiguity determined the playwright’s characterization

of the Roman general as a tragic hero. In Antony and Cleopatra

Shakespeare created what may be termed an ‘apology’ for Antony, a

drama that explores the beauty of perdition and the personal greatness of

the man who had become the very image of corruption. However, the

play’s fundamental reliance on the Christian moral concept of tragedy

interferes with this apologetic drift of the play. As a consequence, the

character of Antony appears in an ambiguous chiaroscuro whose sombre

moral tones have their origin in Roman and medieval historiography while

the lighter, more comprehensive ones stem from the poet’s Renaissance

heritage, Petrarchan philography, Humanist anthropology, and Neopla-

tonic transcendental philosophy.

In contrast to the recent critical negligence of the moral aspect of the

play,2 as well as the overemphasis on this aspect in the early criticism of the

305An Apology for Antony

play, the analysis proposed in the present essay emphazises the dialectic of

moralism and pathos in Shakespeare’s play. The fundamental ambiguity

permeating Shakespeare’s characterization of Antony as a tragic hero is

not only seen to affect the understanding of this particular play, but also,

by implication, to question the contemporary notion of Shakespeare as a

modern dramatist and the widespread view of Renaissance drama as an

unequivocal break with the dramatical heritage of the Middle Ages.

II. Tragedia morata and theatrum mundi

The concepts of tragedia morata and tragedia pathetica derive from

Aristotle’s Poetics 1453a, which distinguishes between the perfect ‘pathetic’

tragedy (based on hamartia, the involuntary frailty or unconscious error in

the hero, evoking ‘pity and fear’) and an inferior ‘moral’ tragedy, showing

‘the downfall of the utter villain’, and hence ‘satisfying the moral sense’,

but not evoking real tragic emotion.3 The Poetics had been rediscovered by

the Italian Renaissance Humanists, interpreted by various literary theo-

rists,4 and distributed all over Europe to the Latin-speaking intelligentsia

thanks to Gutenberg’s recent invention of the printing press. Sir Philip

Sidney’s detraction of ‘irregularity’ in contemporary English dramatists in

Defence of Poesie (1595), for example, attests to the influence of the neo-

Aristotelian theory in England around Shakespeare’s time. Although

Shakespeare had probably read neither Aristotle nor his Italian commen-

tators, he was surely familiar with the contemporary discussions of the

unities and dramatic genre. At least Polonius’s enumeration of the genres

in Hamlet 2.2 suggests his acute, yet also ironical awareness of them.5 The

‘irregularity’ of Antony and Cleopatra – whose action takes place over a

long period of time (twelve years, to be exact) on two different continents

and thus challenges the neo-Aristotelian concept of the tragic far beyond

the scope of any other Shakespearian tragedy – cannot reasonably be

ascribed to Shakespeare’s ignorance of Aristotelian theory or the work of

the Italian Humanists in the field. The play quite simply has its point of

departure in the boundless and transcendental theatrum mundi of the

Christian tragedia morata, rather than in the strictly regulated, immanent

sphere of the neo-Aristotelian tragedia pathetica.

During the Middle Ages, the Graeco-Roman tragedia morata6 had been

absorbed by the Christian tradition, as a matter of principle critical of the

306 Sofie Kluge

indulgence in the downfall of great men through ‘unmerited misfortune’,

unconscious error or involuntary frailty (fundamentally irreconcilable with

the theological notion of Free Will and man’s moral responsibility for his

actions), but certainly welcoming the spiritual edification of a tragedy

showing the ‘downfall of the utter villain’. The quintessential expression of

this dramatic tradition is found in the medieval moralities and mystery

plays.7 The mysteries, compounded in cycles and performed over several

days,8 emerged in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as an

official part of the Corpus Christi feast (established in 1311 and abolished

in England in 1548). Staging the events recorded in the Bible, these mystery

cycles – which continued being represented well into early modernity9 –

presented the history of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgement

sub specie aeternitatis as a lively and colourful scene with its good and bad,

merry and sad elements. The moralities, on the other hand, were single

plays independent of official liturgy, and thus less restricted in content,

treating a variety of different subjects in allegorical form.10 Through a

number of intermediary dramatic forms (such as the martyr plays and

hagiographical plays), the seventeenth-century secular drama developed

out of these popular traditions (rather than the elect neo-Aristotelian

drama of the sixteenth century), in whose colourful tableaux vivants of

moral ‘examples’ the spectator beheld the reward of the just and the

punishment of the unjust in a universe permeated by divine justice and

order.11 Although the Aristotelian elements of Shakespearian tragedy need

to be recognized, it is also important to stress their intertwinement with

this Christian dramatic tradition, whose influence on the seventeenth-

century secular drama is particularly evident in the playwright’s recurring

references to the idea of the theatrum mundi.12

The revival of the theatrum mundi topos by Shakespeare and contem-

porary English writers13 reflected the period’s obsession with the theatre as

a cultural institution and the theatrical show on and off stage, in public,

religious and courtly life. An immediate result of the recently emerged

urban mass audience’s demand for entertainment, but also a propagan-

distic instrument at the hands of absolutist monarchs, the theatrical boom

of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries implied socioeconomic as well as

ideological ‘motives’. Theatrical imagery also permeated the artistic sphere

and the intellectual world, the culture of the court, religious rhetoric,

public feasts and celebrations. Galluci’s path-breaking map Theatrum


mundi (1588), the so-called ‘anatomical theatres’ of the period (the most

famous of which were in Padua and Leyden), and – not the least – the

famous inscription over Shakespeare’s Globe (‘Totus mundus agit

histrionem’) indicate that the theatre had become a virtual vehicle of the

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectual and artistic worldview. In

the manner of Egyptian pharaohs, kings and public celebrities’ departure

from earthly life was followed by exorbitant public shows and moving

religious rituals during which preachers recalled the vanity of earthly

existence, employing voluptuous theatrical imagery.14 The theatre had

become synonymous with the world. In the realm of aesthetics, dramatists

not only expressed the period’s theatrical creed by tirelessly letting their

characters drop comments on the play-like nature of reality, but also

through the characteristic doubling of the stage, the performance of a play

within the play. This technique, whose dizzying outcome is basically that

of suggesting a further level of reality, hitherto ignored by the spectator

and inhabited by an observer of superior vision, is not only found in

Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1 Henry IV, Love’s Labour

Lost and Hamlet),15 but also in contemporary Spanish dramatists (e.g.

Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero – treating the same material as

Massinger’s Roman Actor – and Calderon’s El gran teatro del mundo). The

idea is basically that if the characters of a play are watching a play, then

we, the audience, may ourselves be the agents of a play watched by another

audience. A virtual infinity of representational levels is evoked, as this

audience may in turn be the agent of yet another play and so on ad

infinitum. The dream-like or play-like nature of so-called ‘reality’, either

way a part of a larger and more complex totality, is suggested. The

superior spectator envisioning all three plays (the play-within-the-play, the

play itself, and the ‘play’ of the spectators) is of course the playwright, but

also, by analogy, the divine ‘dramatist’.16 Hovering high above historical

life, the all-embracing vision of the dramatic artist who beholds the world’s

great pageant sub specie aeternitatis becomes a metaphor for the

omniscient and omnipotent God. The transcendental moral outlook that

thus dominates the Christian notion of the drama as theatrum mundi,

obviously has little in common with Aristotle’s notion of tragedy and the

tragic theory of the Italian Humanists. It is, however, just as ancient.

The seventeenth century had inherited the theatre-topos from antiquity

through the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance.17 The notion of

308 Sofie Kluge

the world as a theatre was expounded by Plato (Laws I, 644 c–d, and VII,

803 b–c), with whom it came to express the idea of reality as a complex

structure consisting of several ‘levels’, not all of which are immediately

accessible to human intelligence. In Republic X, Plato considered poetic

mimesis to be ‘three removes from the truth’, because it was merely an

imitation of the world of phenomena, in turn an imitation of the eternal

world of ideas. The description of man as a puppet manipulated by the

gods in Laws is obviously a development of the same idea, since it implies a

similar notion of reality as a complex structure whose totality is unknown

to man.

The theatre-topos was subsequently passed on to posterity by Plotinus

(Enneads III. 2, 15–17), Seneca (Epist. Luc. LXXVI, 31–32, and LXXVII,

20), Epictetus (Enchiridion 17) and Lucian (Menippus or Necromancy and

The Dream or the Cock). Together with that of Marcus Aurelius

(Meditations X 27, XI 6 and XII 36), these antique interpretations of the

theatrum mundi would be particularly determinative for the seventeenth-

century revival of the topos. Through the Middle Ages and the Renais-

sance, Shakespeare’s contemporaries were familiar with these classical

authors whose works were translated into the vernacular and published

many times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.18 Although the

sixteenth-century Humanists added their distinctive (learned-critical)

touch, the moral outlook dominating – for instance, Erasmus’s interpre-

tation of the topos inMoriae encomiumXXIX (1509) – was still basically in

line with the Middle Ages, which had developed the idea of the world as a

divine comedy at great length. Dante’s Commedia is of course the

quintessential medieval artistic expression of this central Platonic-Christian

idea, but in creating his masterpiece he leaned on important theological

expositions of the theatre-topos by the early Fathers (some of them,

paradoxically, ardent detractors of the theatre) and other ecclesiastical

authorities, for example, John Chrysostom (Homilies on the First Epistle of

St Paul to Timothy, XV), Maximus the Confessor and John of Salisbury.

III. Moral historiography

John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (c. 1159) is, in fact, important to

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in several respects. Not only a

seminal source of the early modern revival of the theatre-topos19


(published frequently during the period),20 John of Salisbury’s chief work

is also an important source of medieval political theory,21 an excellent

example of medieval historiography, and a vademecum of the Christian

moral tradition. Surveying political history since antiquity from a moral

point of view, it offers an interpretation of the figures of Augustus,

Antony, and Cleopatra in the third book:

Cleopatra’s enticements lost their force when she found no Caesar or Antony.She did indeed bend to her will by her gifts Caesar, conqueror of the world; anda harlot’s charm and courtesan’s face overcame the invincible spirit of anunconquered man. It was a poet who, giving expression to the seduction of herblandishments, added: Her face it was that plead her case, her charms Incestuousthat won it, too.

But when Julius shuffled off this mortal coil, she who had gloried in herliaison with the Great Captain dared to essay the enslavement of the Chief of theRomans, and not in vain, since she found Antony ripe for all her plans; for hethought to equal Caesar’s glory, did he but occupy his couch. He succeeded toPompey’s influence and, as he imagined, to Caesar’s right, and was a man whoplaced greater faith in the hazard of fortune than in the consciousness of virtue.Next when the presumptuous and wanton creature undertook to seduceAugustus, on being rebuffed she regarded his love of honour as an insult toherself and felt impelled to make war upon him whom she had found to bestronger than Caesar. She had recourse to every art of harming, and at last takenprisoner she cast herself at Augustus’ feet and even then made her appeal to thecommander’s eyes; but all in vain her beauty bowed before the virtue of theprince. When, in despair, she saw that she was spared to grace the triumph of hisvictory, evading the guards she slipped away and betook herself to the royalmausoleum; and there, clothed as was her wont in regal raiment and sweet withprecious perfumes, the coffin all heaped round with costly objects, she stretchedherself beside her Antony, and clasping the asp to her breast she relaxed in deathas though in sleep. Psylli were summoned at Augustus’ behest, whose practice itwas to suck venom from the veins; being called too late they were of no avail; aworthy death for a poisonous courtesan created to corrupt character and assailthe virtue of noble men. She had formerly dominated kings; afterward not to bepitied despite her pitiable plight, she made her exit — a tragedy perhaps for her,but a comedy for the Roman Empire that she had been striving to overthrow.The fact that he remained invincible in his encounter with the notorious womanis especially counted among Augustus’ most distinguished titles to renown.(Chapter 10, on Romans who have ‘succumbed to vanity’, quoted at http://www.constitution.org)22

The correspondence between John’s treatment of the historical characters

and the ‘Roman perspective’ in Shakespeare’s play is fairly obvious, yet the

influence from the Policraticus – published as recently as 1595 – has not, to

my knowledge, been the object of much scholarly interest.23 Especially the

310 Sofie Kluge

comment ‘a tragedy perhaps for her, but a comedy for the Roman Empire

that she had been striving to overthrow’ is highly significant. It refers to the

theatre-topos and aptly demonstrates the moral conception of dramatic

genre inherent in the Christian tradition, seeing tragedy as a result of

human imprudence or, in this case, vice: Cleopatra is an immoral, vicious

person and in the greater scheme of things, her death therefore is not tragic

(‘not to be pitied despite her pitiable plight’), even if it may have been to

her personally. Seen from a transcendental moral perspective it is, in fact,

more likely a happy thing since it provides the basis for the great Roman

comedy (the story of Virtue’s victory over Vice).24 Among other things, we

note in passing that John interprets Cleopatra’s final encounter with

Augustus in a much more unambiguous manner (‘at last taken prisoner she

cast herself at Augustus’s feet and even then made her appeal to the

commander’s eyes; but all in vain her beauty bowed before the virtue of the

prince’) than Shakespeare, whose rendering of the same encounter in 5.2 is

highly equivocal, simultaneously suggesting the common moral detraction

of the Queen’s realpolitik25 and the more benign interpretation that she is,

indeed, contemplating joining Antony in suicide, but hides her intention

behind a feigned opportunism in order to prevent Caesar from discovering

it.26 Whereas John’s unambiguous interpretation, supported by the

Roman historians, was basically an effect of his treatment of the material

as a moral allegory, the ambiguity of this scene in Shakespeare’s play is one

of numerous instances where the playwright departs from the stereotypes

of moral historiography in his characterization of the protagonists,

presumably in order to present them as live human beings with an

individual psychology. Although a certain apologetic intention thus also

informs the play’s portrait of Cleopatra, we shall subsequently concentrate

on it in relation to the character of Antony, the protagonist of Plutarch’s

Life of Antony upon which Shakespeare based his play.

Although John’s interpretation of the historical characters is generally

much less comprehensive, more prejudiced and judgemental, the Policrat-

icus very clearly has its origin in Roman historiography, which took a

decisive moral turn with the increasing decadence of the Empire. We may

think of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, Sallust’s Historiae, Tacitus’s Annales,

Suetonius’s Life of Augustus, or Lucan’s Pharsalia, whose last chapter,

‘Caesar in Egypt’, may have been a source of both Plutarch and John of

Salisbury.27 Like the contemporary historians, the Roman poet describes


Cleopatra – her portrait wrought in flamboyant hexameters – as a ‘fatal

beauty’, who uses her famous charms to make Caesar side with her against

her brother and husband, Ptolemy:

Caesar’s ears in vainhad she implored, but aided by her charmsthe wanton’s prayers prevailed, and by a nightof shame ineffable, passed with her judge,she won his favour. (Lucan 1896, V, 123–127)28

The fatality of Cleopatra was also the background of Horace’s famous

‘Nunc est bibendum’ (Odes I, XXXVII), celebrating Augustus’s victory at

Actium, yet also admitting the spell of the Egyptian queen.29

By the time of John of Salisbury, the Roman interpretation of Cleopatra

as a shameless, pretentious and ambitious woman had been intertwined

with another fatal Eastern legend, the Babylonian whore mentioned in

Revelation 17:1–2 (‘the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with

whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the

inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her

fornication’).30 At least John’s rhetoric – from the very outset casting

Cleopatra in the role of the harlot (‘a poisonous courtesan created to

corrupt character and assail the virtue of noble men’) – suggests an

intertwinement of the Jewish-Christian figure of the powerful prostitute

and the Roman notion of the fatal woman. Roman asceticism and

Christian misogyny joined forces and Cleopatra became an allegory of lust

and ambition, Augustus an allegory of manly virtue and prudence.

From the Roman historians to John of Salisbury and beyond, the moral

historiographical tradition was thus fundamentally based on the allegorical

interpretation of history and its protagonists as elements in a complex

scheme of archetypal themes and figures. From the theatrum mundi of

exempla, the historiographer deduced moral lessons to the spiritual

edification of the public, discovering the hidden divine intention under-

lying the occurrences of the historical world by interpreting them as the

elements of a complex moral allegory. This tradition proved very strong

indeed. In fact it continued well into the Enlightenment period,31 and its

influence is even detectable in Mankiewicz’s Twentieth Century Fox

production of Cleopatra (1963) with Richard Burton in the role of the

Roman general. In the heyday of the Renaissance rejection of medievalism,

312 Sofie Kluge

Boccaccio based his portrait of Cleopatra on it (De claris mulieribus, a

misogynous collection of 104 lives of famous women, mythological as well

as historical, written 1361–1375).32 During the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, moral historiography survived in emblematics, a central artistic

genre of the period and a source of great inspiration for Shakespeare.33

In his path-breaking Emblemata, 1531, which saw more than 150

editions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the inventor of the

genre, the Milanese jurist Andrea Alciato, united Pythagorean, Egyptian,

Greek and Christian iconographic traditions in a series of enigmatic

engravings equipped with moralizing poetic epigrams composed of texts

from ancient fabulists, historians and satirists. In England, Geffrey

Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586) and George Wither’s A Collection

of Emblems (1635) represent the peak of this tradition. Although none of

the English emblematists treated Cleopatra herself, they painted a number

of similar femme fatale portraits, such as the Sirens and Circe, always

threatening the apparently ever-fragile virtue of the Christian male. Thus,

the emblem VI in Alciato’s famous Emblemata (fig. 1), a variation on the

theme of the Babylonian whore, may, for example, remind us of

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, to the minds of the Romans always luxuriously

inclined on a divan, hosting orgies, and corrupting the mind and virtue of

the heathen enemies of virtuous Rome:

A most beautiful whore seated upon a royal throne wears the robe of state distinguished by honorificpurple. She delivers wine to all from her flowing bowl. Used to their reclining, the drunken crowdsprawls all about. Thus they look to Babylon: which, with alluring form and false religion, possesses

the stupid heathens.

Figure 1. Andrea Alciato, Emblem VI, ‘False religion’34


More directly to the point, the unnumbered emblem entitled ‘Filthy love

constraineth men to commit all wickednesse’ (fig. 2) from Claude

Paradin’s Devises heroıques (1557), translated into English by William

Kearney and published as The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin in

London in 1591, treats the same material as Shakespeare’s play. Based on

an anecdote from Pliny the Elder (Naturalis historia, book 21, ch. 9) the

emblem illustrates Cleopatra’s power over Antony. The Queen appears

with an audacious tiara of poisoned leaves, some of which she pours in her

impetuous lover’s cup and persuades him to ingest, however subsequently,

upon seeing his intention to blindly follow her command, telling him not

to. The moral drift of the emblem – crystallized in the final clause ‘And

hereby we may see what may be the audacitie, and impudent boldnes of a

shamelesse woman’ – is that the General’s shameful lust for his mistress

made him subject to her most absurd commands. Cleopatra’s own curious

immunity to the poisonous leaves around her head and her proverbial

relation with snakes suggests the conception of her as a moral allegory of

Temptation rather than as a historical person35 current in the moral

historiographical tradition, yet rivalled in Shakespeare’s play by a more

sympathetic, anthropological or psychological perspective.

Figure 2. The heroicall devises of M. Claudius Paradin, ‘Quid non mortalia pectora cogis’36

314 Sofie Kluge

The moral historiographical tradition not only treated ancient history.

Recent and contemporary history was moralized in the Jesuit chronicles

(e.g. Pedro de Rivadeneira’s Historia ecclesiastica del scisma del reino de

Inglaterra, 1588; Hugo Hermann’s Obsidio Bredana armis Philippi III,

1626) upon which the Spanish Golden Age dramatists based their history

plays (Calderon’s La cisma de Inglaterra and El sitio de Breda) and in

Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland

(1577), the source of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear. As a general

rule, early modern chroniclers related historical events and persons from a

transcendental moral perspective, but the Jesuit writers arguably went to

extremes and presented contemporary historical reality as an unequivocal

moral allegory.37

Even if its use of the material is far from affirmative, Antony and

Cleopatra is perhaps the most striking example of Shakespeare’s use of the

moral historiographical tradition.38 Although eighteenth-century critics

subsequently ignored the dependence of the play on the tragedia morata

and the Christian concept of the drama as a moral and transcendental

theatrum mundi, John Dryden had in fact put his finger on it in the

‘Preface’ to his popular revision of Shakespeare’s play under the title All

for Love (1678):

That which is wanting to work up the pity to a greater height, was not affordedme by the story: for the crimes of love which they both committed, were notoccasion’d by any necessity, or fatal ignorance, but were wholly voluntary, sinceour passions are, or ought to be, within our power.39

Dryden thus pondered the protagonists’ free choice as a decisive factor.

Addressing the question of tragic emotion (‘pity’), he dismisses the

material’s aptness for the tragedia pathetica. And by stressing that

the downfall of the protagonists is the product of passion he points to the

didactic possibilities of the story. Had they chosen not to give in to their

amorous obsession things could very well have turned out otherwise, we

gather. To Dryden’s mind we are, it would seem, in the neighbourhood of

the tragedia morata and the Christian concept of tragedy as the result of

human imprudence and vice rather than in the vicinity of the neo-

Aristotelian tragedia pathetica of the Renaissance theorists. Through an

analysis of Shakespeare’s characterization of Antony we shall try to

estimate whether this is, in fact, the actual ‘lesson’ of Antony and Cleopatra.


IV. The dialectic of permissiveness

Even if the Egyptian queen is also one of Shakespeare’s most complex

female creations, the characterization of Cleopatra relies quite heavily on

the moral historiographical tradition. Thus, Enobarbus, Caesar and other

Romans reiteratedly quote almost literally from North’s translation of

Plutarch’s Life of Antony when speaking about the Egyptian queen, mostly

in order to cast her as an immoral and lascivious woman.40 Similarly,

Octavius is represented as the image of male virtue, and the whole play at

first sight appears as a complex moral allegory, a tragedia morata about the

victory of the City of Virtue over the Kingdom of Pleasure.41 The presence

of the character of Antony between these poles, a Roman lingering in

Egypt and a figure of Man, apparently strengthens this impression.

However, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare did he not add his

personal touch to the current moral interpretation of his characters, hereby

actually transforming the material basis of his play. The play’s ambiguous

fascination with the figure of Cleopatra wasn’t in itself revolutionary (as

noted, Horace had been down that road in the 1st century and Christian

writers had revealed their shameful affection for her through their

peremptory denial). What does, on the other hand, appear as strikingly

innovative in Shakespeare’s play is the characterization of Antony, which

transforms the traditional moral allegory into a live human being with

tragic potential.42

This transformation fundamentally relies on the dramatist’s exploration

of the ancient concept of psychomachy as the model of Antony’s lingering

between the worlds of Egypt and Rome.43 The concept of ‘psychomachy’

was invented by the Roman Christian poet Prudentius (Psychomachia, 4th

century), but long before then it was an essential feature of Xenophon’s

famous biographical anecdote about Hercules (Memorabilia II.1.21–34),

Mark Antony’s legendary ancestor, as Shakespeare several times reminds

us. Through this intertextual allusion to the Greek mythological hero and

his prototypical choice between virtue and vice,44 the General paradox-

ically becomes the most humane character of the play, a figure of Man, all

the while his character is still fundamentally based on the moral

historiographical tradition. More concretely, however, the play effectuates

its transformation of Antony through the exploration of what may be

termed the ‘dialectic of permissiveness’. This dialectic, which mirrors the

oscillation of Antony and Cleopatra between the moral concept of tragedy

316 Sofie Kluge

pertinent to the Christian dramatic tradition and the pathetic neo-

Aristotelian tragedy of the Renaissance, must be seen against a cultural

historical background as an emblem of the contemporary conflict between

post-Reformation moralization and the Renaissance insistence on the

dignity and greatness of man.

From the very beginning of the play, we are presented with the familiar

moral image of Antony as a figure of decadence, an allegory of drunkenness

and corruption, a rioting Bacchus to Cleopatra’s lustful Venus:

PHILONay, but this dotage of our general’sO’erflowes the measure. Those his goodly eyes,That o’re the files and musters of the war,Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turnThe office and devotion of their viewUpon a tawny front. His captain’s heart,Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burstThe buckles on his breast, reneges all temperAnd is become the bellows and the fanTo cool a gipsy’s lust. (1.1.1–9)45

Philo’s depreciative description of the general literally sets the stage of

Antony and Cleopatra, in an almost emblematic way pointing to the play’s

moral substrate. According to the view represented by Philo, Antony’s

story is the story of a fall – from the height of manly, military virtue to the

decadent sphere of the harlot’s boudoir. Mars has yet again been enticed

by the charms of Venus. Antony is in for another temptation and in

contradistinction to St Antony of Egypt, this ‘ne’er-lust-wearied’ Antony

will not abstain.46 Unlike Octavius, but like Julius Caesar, Antony has

allowed his Roman virtue to become tainted by allowing its immediate

opposite, the Alexandrian revelry that Caesar ponders as the reason for

their enmity in the beginning of the play (1.4.2–5):

It is not Caesar’s natural vice, to hateOur great competitor. From AlexandriaThis is the news: he fishes, drinks, and wastesthe lamps of night in revel…

The ‘Herculean Roman’ has become ‘a strumpet’s fool’, as the text of

Paradin’s emblem suggested. However, even if this may be so from a

moralizing perspective, it is not the only image that Shakespeare’s play


imparts. As I have said, it seems that Shakespeare quite to the contrary set

himself the task of rehabilitating Antony’s name vis-a-vis the negative

portrait painted by Roman historians and the Christian historiographical

tradition.

From a moral point of view, this permissiveness of Antony’s can be

nothing but a ‘flaw’ and a betrayal of the high Roman virtue. However,

just as the modern use of ‘permissiveness’ carries both positive and

negative meanings, the General’s permissiveness may also, contrarily, be

seen as a sign of his famous liberality, generosity and magnanimity

(disapprovingly pondered by Plutarch in Life, I),47 personal characteristics

that collide in the play with the traditional Roman ideals of hierarchy,

abstinence, sacrifice and loyalty. More things in fact suggest that the

dramatist’s characterization of Antony is informed by such dialectic, which

considers the positive as well as negative aspects of his permissive

behaviour. A fairly obvious example of its more positive evaluation in the

play is the representation of Antony’s reaction to Enobarbus’s treason in

4.5. Treason was a familiar topic of Elizabethan drama and it had a strong

contemporary appeal due to recent political events. As recently as in 1606,

Shakespeare treated the theme in Macbeth, allegedly performed before

Queen Anne and her visiting brother, King Christian of Denmark, in order

to celebrate King James’s triumph over the Gunpowder Plot traitors.48

Official sources from the Jacobean and Elizabethan periods demonstrate

the authorities’ unpardoning attitude toward treason,49 yet faced with

Enorbarbus’s betrayal Antony orders Eros to send him his belongings

together with ‘gentle adieus and greetings’, assuming the entire responsi-

bility of his former follower’s moral corruption (‘Oh, my fortunes

have ⁄Corrupted honest men!’ 4.6.16–17). Soon after, Enobarbus dies of

remorse after praising Antony’s spiritual nobility (4.9.1–26). Other

passages can be adduced, which point in the same direction, most notably

Eros’s choice of suicide over killing his general (4.14.56–96) and Antony’s

dealings with the rebel Pompey, whose former services to himself he

acknowledges (2.2.162–166). Through the positive evaluation of Antony’s

permissiveness as liberality, generosity, and magnanimity the play impor-

tantly opposes the negative moral interpretation of it as lasciviousness,

indulgence, and leniency on the level of content. However, Shakespeare’s

inquiry into the dialectic of permissiveness, which ultimately sustains the

play’s apology for Antony, is largely carried out on a formal level.

318 Sofie Kluge

V. The poetics of permissiveness

In Life of Antony, Plutarch said that Antony ‘adopted what was called the

Asiatic style of oratory, which was at the height of its popularity in those

days and bore a strong resemblance to his own life, which was

swashbuckling and boastful, full of empty exultation and distorted

ambition’.50 To the extent that Antony’s adoption of an ‘Asiatic’ rhetoric

may be seen as yet another example of his permissiveness (in the positive

sense of tolerance or openmindedness), Shakespeare’s famous recreation

of this ornamental and high-strung style in Antony and Cleopatra may be

seen as his most aesthetically ambitious transformation of the moral basis

of his play. Beheld in this light, Antony and Cleopatra appears as an

encomium of the world of passionate love, high-strung rhetoric, and vital

‘poetic’ existence – a world, in other words, whose beauty makes its fall

tragic – even if its basis in the moral tradition gives it quite an ambiguous

flavour.

An important stylistic feature of this encomium is the dramatist’s use

of conceit in order to describe complexity of feeling. Thus, Antony’s

description of himself as a bridegroom who runs into his grave as to a

lover’s bed (4.15.99–101) and Cleopatra’s simile ‘The stroke of death is as

a lover’s pinch ⁄which hurts and is desired’ (5.2.294–295) both thrive on

Petrarchan conceit, which carries with it the central elements of

Renaissance philography, extrapolating the bitter-sweet magnetism of

love, but not from a moral perspective. According to the Petrarchan

tradition, love is a torturous, yet irresistibly alluring passion, which

leaves the lover no choice of resistance. Thus, Antony’s love for

Cleopatra in many respects appears to be of the compulsive, irresistible

kind (‘I will to Egypt ⁄And though I make this marriage for my peace ⁄ Inthe East my pleasure lies’ 2.4.37–39), which contradicts the more

pragmatic Roman view of things, expressed in the triumvirs’ plotting

of Antony’s marrying Octavia, Caesar’s sister (2.2.132–146), and simul-

taneously counters the moral denigration of amorous passion as simply

‘bad’. Further evidence of Shakespeare’s recreation of Antony’s Asiatic

rhetoric is found in the dramatist’s elaborate use of stylistic features such

as hyperbole (Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra’s appearance on the

Cydnus, 2.2.200–214), paradox (Antony’s lamentation at Fulvia’s death,

1.2.128–137), synecdoche (‘My bluest veins’, 2.5.30; ‘The hearts ⁄Thatspanieled me at heels…’, 4.1.20–24), intertextual allusion (Antony’s


description of his alleged cuckoldry, 3.13.128–136), and numerous

mythological references (Narcissus, 2.5.96; Venus and Mars, 1.5.19;

Phoebus, 1.5.29; Hercules, 1.3.85; Nereids, 2.2.216; Bacchanals, 2.7.104;

Thetis, 3.7.59, among others). The two lovers in particular have a

pronounced tendency to express themselves in a highly complex and

loaded manner, which generally contrasts the Roman characters’

restrained Ciceronian rhetoric (Caesar’s monologue at receiving the news

of Antony’s death, 5.135–148, a series of neatly arranged predicates

framed by the initial invocation ‘O Antony’) and reflects the refined

beauty and beguiling sophistication of the Alexandrian way of life.

Sustaining this rhetoric is a rich Neoplatonic imagery, which culminates

in Cleopatra’s encomium for her lover, a ‘reply’ to Philo’s initial moral

denigration of the General in the beginning of the play. Antony here

appears as a cosmic figure:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared armCrested the world: his voice was propertiedAs all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;But when he meant to quaile, and shake the orbe,He was a ratling thunder… (5.2.79–85)

and as a demi-god in whose ‘livery ⁄Walked crownes and crownets;

realms and islands ⁄were ⁄As plates dropped from his pocket’ (5.2.88–91).

This is certainly the stuff that tragic heroes are made of. In Cleopatra’s

‘Asiatic’ rhetoric – an interesting mirror of Caesar’s more composed

encomiums (1.4.57–72 and 5.1.35–48) with their decorous ‘Roman’ style

and imagery of war and heroic masculinity – Antony appears as a kind

of mythological figure whose death is, indeed, a loss to the world no

matter his possible moral shortcoming. Shakespeare’s placement of this

high-strung eulogy in the last scene of the play is surely no coincidence.

Besides offering the ‘proof’ of the Queen’s love, invariably questioned by

the writers of the moral tradition, it provides the basis of the dramatist’s

transformation of the tragedia morata through the insertion of pathetic

elements. At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, Antony no longer

appears as an unequivocal figure of corruption. In the course of the

play, his downfall has proven not to be that of the ‘utter villain’, but

instead to be the result of his ‘permissiveness’: his passionate love for

Cleopatra and the fatal choices that this love impels him to make (of

320 Sofie Kluge

which his choice of sea battle and subsequent flight from Actium is the

most emblematic).

Shakespeare’s recreation of Antony’s Asiatic rhetoric is the central

formal vehicle of his apology for Antony, a nonetheless ambiguous

antidote to the current moral detraction of his character as expressed in

moral historiography and by the Roman characters of the play in terms of

content as well as form.

VI. Tragedy on the world’s great stage

The play’s oscillation between pathos and moralization – tragedia

pathetica and tragedia morata – is, however, not entirely unresolved. As

Antony’s death scene suggests, these apparently contradictory elements are

reconciled in a dialectical synthesis of positive Renaissance anthropocen-

trism and post-Reformation moralization. Antony’s death undoubtedly

leaves us with the impression of a tragic loss. However, in his swan song

the man himself urges that we do not lament his end:

ANTONYThe miserable change now at my end,Lament nor sorrow at, but please your thoughtsIn feeding them with those my former fortunesWherein I lived the greatest prince o’th’ world,The noblest; and do now not basely dye,Not cowardly put off my helmet toMy countryman. A Roman by a RomanValiently vanquished. Now my spirit is going;I can no more. (4.16.53–61)

Rather than as a mere testimony to the General’s spiritual disintegration,51

the failure of Antony’s suicide should be seen as a dramatic device to

enhance the play’s tragic effect. Had Shakespeare let him succeed, we

would not have the splendid scene where Antony dies in Cleopatra’s arms,

of great importance for the play’s depiction of the protagonists and their

love.52 Through this scene we become assured of Cleopatra’s deep, if

selfish, affection for her lover:

Noblest of men, woo’t dye?Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abideIn this dull world, which in thy absence isno better than a sty? (4.15.62–64)


This, together with the traditional moral interpretation of her character,

provides the ambiguous background for her later dealing with Caesar in

5.2. Most importantly, however, it is the only place where Shakespeare

ascribes a moral reflection to his character and thus very important for our

understanding of the nuances of his portrait of the Roman general.

First of all Antony’s final speech is permeated by the idea of the

theatrum mundi, according to which human tragedy is (as we have seen)

relativized through being inserted into a greater transcendental scheme. If

we are to believe his words, Antony has no regrets or complaints – we hear

absolutely no echo of the lamentations of the Greek tragic heroes – since

he has enjoyed his part as best he could and even secured himself a worthy

exit. Representing himself as a fortunate actor on the world’s stage, one

who got to play the part of the ‘greatest prince’, his final speech

paraphrases Epictetus’s famous words from the Enchiridion, 17, that man

must accept the part consigned to him and play it well, even if it be a brief

or a tragic one.53 According to this view, his exit should not be lamented,

and even less so since he dies a truly noble Roman death (the death that

Hamlet could only dream of), ‘A Roman by a Roman ⁄Valientlyvanquished’.54 His Stoic attitude, accepting the alternation of Fortune

and reminiscent of Prospero’s famous words in The Tempest that ‘we are

such stuff ⁄As dreams are made on; and our little life ⁄ Is rounded with a

sleep’ (4.1), thus reconciles pathos and moralism by pointing to human

tragedy as a necessary part of the world’s great pageant. However, even if

Antony himself finds no reason to complain about his tragic fortune or,

alternatively, to pass a moral judgement on his own character, and hence

succeeds in reconciling moral reflection and tragic pathos on a personal

level, Shakespeare’s play still reflects the essential contradiction between

these perspectives. Whereas Cleopatra’s speech to Dolabella fundamen-

tally affirms the apologetic intention of the playwright, her final dialogue

with Iras – the play’s most obvious reference to the theatre-topos – appears

as a virtual meta-aesthetic comment on this intention:

Thou, an Egyptian puppet shall be shownIn Rome as well as I. […] The quick comediansExtemporally will stage us and presentOur Alexandrian revels; AnthonyShall be brought drunken forth; and I shall seeSome squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatnessI’th’ posture of a whore. (5.2.208–219)

322 Sofie Kluge

Shortly after, the queen stages her melodramatic suicide and Shakespeare

gives her a magnificent final scene in order to contradict this moral

interpretation, which he hereby simultaneously acknowledges his debt to

and departs from. His own ‘quick comedians’ didn’t bring Antony forth

drunken (together with Pompey he is the only one unaffected by the heavy

drinking in 2.7) and although a ‘squeaking’ youth presumably ‘boyed’

Cleopatra, it was not in the unambiguous ‘posture of a whore’. On the

contrary, Antony and Cleopatra leaves us with a feeling of the two

protagonists’ human grandeur and the quasi-tragic beauty of their

nonetheless necessary perdition.

VII. A different Shakespeare

If Antony and Cleopatra is, as A. C. Bradley noted, in a certain sense a non-

tragic tragedy or a tragedy without a ‘real’ tragic ending,55 it may very well

be due to its mixture of neo-Aristotelian tragedy with the Christian

dramatic tradition whose transcendental moral outlook basically annuls

tragedy by inserting it into a greater divine scheme. In the essentially

tragicomic Christian theatrum mundi, tragedy is never absolute, but always

relativized from a transcendental point of view. After all, ‘the problems of

three little people don’t add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world’, as

Bogart put it in Casablanca, similarly suggesting the insignificance of

individual tragedy in the greater scheme of things. This was not exactly

how Oedipus or Antigone felt. However, on closer scrutiny the dramatist

doesn’t simply adopt the moral interpretation of the main characters and

their actions, but much rather inverts it. Passing through Shakespeare’s

magic hands, Antony undergoes a continuous process of reversible

metamorphoses, in the course of the play oscillating between morality,

human greatness, and tragic myth in nuce. As such, the ‘outcome’ is an

apology for Antony vis-a-vis the current moral interpretation of his

character, but on the other hand this apology, which leans significantly on

a neo-Aristotelian concept of the spiritual nobility of the tragic hero, is

fundamentally dialectical because framed by a Christian notion of tragedy

as the result of human imprudence or vice.

As earlier noted, the transcendental view of historical reality, occur-

rences and protagonists was not only a product of Shakespeare’s in many

respects incomparable artistic vision, but also very much a perspective


inherent in the Christian notion of the theatrum mundi. The sixteenth

century revival of the theatre-topos depended on contemporary cultural

historical circumstances. The dawn of the seventeenth century was

impregnated by the conflict between what may be termed the Renaissance

‘spirit’ on the one hand – anthropocentric, sensuous, critical, utopian – and

the contemporary reactionary tendency towards moral rearmament, re-

theologization and transcendental spirituality on the other hand. The

culmination of the latter tendency in Counter-Reformation Spain is

legendary, but in all European nations transcendental spiritual trends saw

the light of day (in an English context, the metaphysical poets and the

upsurge of the Puritan movement are obvious cases in point). These trends

were essentially a symptom of the multifarious crisis of the post-

Reformation period with its religious and political disturbances (the

Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the plots against Elizabeth’s throne),

culminating in the Thirty Years’ War. The breakdown of the una societas

christiana after the Lutheran Reformation and the segregation of the

Western Church following the Council of Trent had led to a series of

religious, epistemological, political and socioeconomic crises. As in other

such historical situations of crisis – the dissolution of the Republic and the

Roman civil war56 – a stern moral reflection on the ephemeral nature of

history and the decreptitudes of human existence entered the stage.

However, in the early seventeenth century, this moral view of history and

its protagonists was contested by the Renaissance celebration of man as

the height of divine creation (Pico della Mirandola), in a utopian spirit

pondering his infinite admirability and the resulting tragic potential of his

misfortune.

The point is that the fundamental duplicity inherent in Shakespeare’s

characterization of Antony – simultaneously a moral allegory and a grand

human being – mirrors the contemporary conflict between the Renais-

sance exaltation of the dignity of man on the one hand and post-

Reformation moralization on the other hand, rendering this admirable

human creature the ‘quintessence of dust’. Viewed in this light, it makes

excellent sense, I think, to see Antony and Cleopatra as a play that is

deeply influenced by post-Reformation moralization, yet still celebrates

the greatness of man. Even if Antony himself asked us not to lament his

death, we cannot help feeling ‘pity and fear’ although we are well aware

that his fall is to a certain extent the result of his fallible personal choice.

324 Sofie Kluge

This great achievement of Shakespeare’s – the recreation of the tragedia

pathetica within a moral framework – essentially depended on the

seventeenth-century exploration of the ancient theatre-topos, from the

very beginning of its history implying a concept of ‘reality’ as a multi-

layered structure of separate, yet somehow related theatrical ‘levels’. Thus,

on the personal or human level, the level of the puppet stage, the deaths of

Cleopatra and Antony may very well be tragic, but in the greater scheme

of things – on the level of salvational history and the great divine pageant,

the level of the puppeteer – it may, morally speaking, be a comedy. A

tragedy perhaps for them, but a comedy for the divine playwright, we may

say, paraphrasing John of Salisbury. The idea of the theatrum mundi thus

frames the peculiar mixture of pathetic and moral tragedy in Antony and

Cleopatra, obviously exercising a moral perspective, yet simultaneously

allowing for Shakespeare’s suggestion of the story’s tragic potential, his

apology for Antony.

All this leads to a necessary reconsideration of the widespread views of

Shakespeare as a ‘modern’ dramatist and as ‘our contemporary’.57 Even if

a modern reader may empathize with the play’s depiction of the

protagonists’ love for each other or understand Antony’s personal

disintegration in the light of queer theory,58 Antony and Cleopatra is

clearly a play whose literary historical ‘codes’ need to be taken into

consideration. It demonstrates that Shakespeare was in fact just as

influenced by pre-modern moralization as he was by what would later be

seen as the ‘progessive’ elements of Renaissance anthropology, Machia-

vellian political theory and introspective Petrarchan philography. Failing

to understand this and ignoring the weight of the moral tradition, we fail

to understand Shakespeare’s originality and run the risk of seeing nothing

but our own reflection in his play.

In a wider perspective the detection of the pre-modern roots of

Shakespeare’s tragedy even possibly leads to an evaluation of the

development in dramatic theory and practice in the early modern period.59

Even if Shakespearean tragedy is in some respects – the psychological

depth of characterization, the comprehensive political and social analysis

of human action – an obvious forerunner of the modern European theatre,

the process leading to the Naturalistic drama and beyond is not all that

unequivocal. In the Roman plays, this was probably due to the choice of

material, which carried the whole moral tradition along with it. Thus,


Handel’s opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto (first performed 1724), based on

N. F. Haym’s homonymous libretto, a sort of prequel to Shakespeare’s

Antony and Cleopatra, thrives on exactly the same allegorical interpreta-

tion of the ancient material. However, as noted earlier, most, if not all,

Shakespearean tragedies have the same moral flavour – the tendency to

impose an allegorical interpretation on historical and fictive characters,

which supplements political and psychological perspectives. In the history

plays, this tendency was, again, the result of the influence of emblematics

and moral historiography (Holinshed in the case of King Lear and

Macbeth, for example, the latter not only a political play, but also a play

about Ambition in the theological sense as vain human presumption), and

the influence of the medieval dramatic heritage in Othello, presenting the

Venetian Moor in an allegorical frame as a figure of Jealousy or

uncontrolled amorous passion, is irrefutable. In each of these cases,

Shakespeare created an effective and moving tragedia pathetica within the

framework of the Christian tragedia morata, hereby placing himself firmly

in the conflictual cultural climate of seventeenth-century Europe. Com-

pared with that of contemporary Spanish dramatists, his characterization

is decisively more individualized or even, to a certain extent, ‘modern’

(who will deny the topic appeal of Hamlet’s spiritual tribulations?). Yet,

the moralizing allegorical mood dominating the work of Tirso de Molina

(El burlador de Sevilla) and, especially, Calderon is highly important to

Shakespearean tragedy, whose various political, sexual and social per-

spectives it basically supplements, not contradicts. In the theatrum mundi

of ever changing human fortunes, these perspectives occupy the stage, yet

to the seventeenth-century dramatist they are still mere stories invented by

God for his own amusement, the shadows of a dream.

NOTES

1. Cf. Bradley (1909, 282), and Schanzer (1963) who included Antony and Cleopatraunder the problem plays. The editor of the recent Oxford World’s Classics edition,Michael Neill, thus calls the play ‘bafflingly resistant to satisfactory generic defi-nition’ (Neill, 1994, 5).

2. Cf. e.g. Jonathan Dollimore’s interpretation of the play with the significant title‘Virtus under Erasure’ in Radical Tragedy (1986) and Harold Bloom’s more recentreading in Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human (1998).

3. Aristotle, Poetics, 1453. In relation to Shakespearean tragedy, Golden (1976,21–33) has elaborated the Aristotelean distinction, distinguishing between what he

326 Sofie Kluge

calls ‘high tragedy’ (e.g. Oedipus Tyrannos, Othello) and ‘pathetic tragedy’ (e.g.Medea, Macbeth). However, although Golden’s sketch of a general theory oftragedy is highly interesting, his terminology is somewhat problematic. It is, indeed,rather unpractical to term plays whose hero manifests ‘a serious moral flaw’ (pp. 30f.) ‘pathetic tragedies’, especially since these plays are not, according to Golden,very likely to evoke tragic feeling or ‘pathos’ (pp. 30 f.: ‘We can have some sym-pathy for her [Medea] and can pity her to some degree […]’; my italics, S.K.). Thus,in the present context, I use the term ‘pathetic tragedy’ to describe what Goldencalls ‘high tragedy’ – the form of tragedy that evokes tragic feeling throughdepicting the ordinary man’s fall through intellectual error (even if this terminologymay have the disadvantage of reminding English-speaking readers of the domestictragedy of Restoration and post-Restoration periods) – while I term the kind oftragedy whose protagonist demonstrates moral flaws ‘moral tragedy’.

4. Cf. e.g. Scaliger, Poetices liber septem (1561), Minturno, De poeta (1559) andArte poetica (1564), and Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta(1570).

5. Aristotle merely recommended unity of action (Poetics, 1449b). The unities of timeand place were established by Castelvetro. Of Shakespeare’s plays, only the earlyComedy of Errors (1589) follows the Aristotelian precepts as interpreted by theRenaissance theorists.

6. Aristotle gives no examples of the Greek tragedia morata, but we may think ofSeneca’s tragedies as a Roman variation of this ancient genre. The Senecan dramashad a strong moralizing bias, especially compared with the Greek tragedies ofwhich they were often reworkings. Presumably on this ground, Scaliger preferredthem to Euripides’ originals and Senecan tragedy became immensely influentialduring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

7. For an introduction to the various forms of popular medieval dramatic traditions(including mystery cycles, morality plays, and interludes) in relation to Shake-speare, see Weimann (1978).

8. Thus, the York-cycle, for example, contains 48 plays and the Towneley-cycle 32plays (both cycles available online at University of Virginia Library: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu; last accessed 18 March 2008).

9. The mystery plays of the York-cycle were represented until 1569. Despite the view ofthe mystery plays as ‘Popery’ under Elizabeth I and the corresponding ban by theEnglish Church, theWakefield andChester cycles were performed as late as 1575. Cf.Happe’s chronological table (1999, 253–263) and O’Connell (1999, 150). In Catholiccountries the mystery plays survived much longer. In Spain, the autos sacramentales,an equivalent of the English mystery plays, were not banned until 1765.

10. Cf. Weimann (1978, 98). Happe (1999, 42):

Moralities are distinguished by the opportunity of their authors to make up aplot for their own objectives. In the process they make use of well-knownstructures, such as fall and rise, and also patterns of ideas and images such as theComing of Death, or the siege of a Castle of Virtue which can be widely found intheological literature.

Among the surviving or partly surviving morality plays mentioned by Happe areThe Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind and Wisdom.


11. Velz thus argues the influence of the Coventry mystery cycle (suppressed in 1579)and of the eschatology of the moralities and mystery plays in general on a range ofShakespearean plays (Velz 1992–1993, 312–329). O’Connell has recently made thesame point, emphasizing the intimate connections between medieval religiousdrama and the professional theatre of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesand rejecting the widespread view of ‘the Elizabethan public theatre as a beginningrather than as a transformation or transposition’ (O’Connell 1991, 151). Especiallyinteresting in the present context is Jones’s demonstration of the impact of themysteries on Shakespearean tragedy (Jones 1977, 31–84). Pondering the influenceof the dramatization of the passion on Shakespeare’s tragedies, Jones (p. 84)writes that:

what the Passion paradigm essentially contributed to Shakespearian tragedy wasa dramatic sense of value. It helped Shakespeare to give an immense emphasis tothe hero’s fall and death, a suggestion of spiritual greatness overwhelming in itsresonance. However much Shakespeare owed to the humanists in literary terms,it may be that the great imaginative power of the Shakespearian hero derives notso much from ‘Renaissance’ ideals as from the native late-medieval conceptionof the God-man hero. In the course of the sixteenth century the religious powerwhich centered on the figure of Christ was liberated or transferred to secularfigures in a drama fashioned ostensibly for secular ends. But at this point anantithesis formed on the terms ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ becomes misleading andindeed unnecessary. One might prefer to say that a certain residue of religiousfeeling persists into Shakespeare’s tragic writing […].

Cf. also Grantley (1986, 17–37), who recalls Shakespeare’s use of ‘morally chargedimages which are a part of the texture of the category of Tudor religious drama thatplaces in the foreground spiritual choices and conflicts’ (p. 29) and Stroup (1964),who argues the importance of the mystery plays and the notion of the theatrummundi for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, although more or less limitinghimself to the influence of the morality play The Castle of Perseverance.

12. Warnke (1969, 190 f.) has an ample selection of Shakespearian quotes relating tothe theatrum mundi-topos.

13. Among Shakespeare’s contemporaries who employed the topos are John Donne(a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross on 24 March 1616), Philip Massinger (TheRoman Actor), George Chapman (The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois), and Sir WalterRaleigh (The History of the World), cf. Warnke (1969).

14. Cf. Stone, ‘Funerals and tombs’ (1965, 572–581).15. Cf. McGuire’s enlightening essay ‘The Play-within-the-play in 1 Henry IV’ (1967).16. We may here recall the medieval analogue between the Deus artifex and the homo

creator.17. My exposition draws on the work of Vilanova (1950) and Warnke (1969).18. Cf. e.g. Epictetus’ Manuell, trans. J. Sanford (London, 1567), A Frutefull Worke of

Lucius Anneus Seneca in the Name and Fore and Rule of Honest Lyvynge both in theLatin Tongue Englyshe Lately Translated by R. Whyttynton (London, 1546),A Frutefull Worke of Lucius Anneus Senecae Called the Myrrour or Glasse ofManners and Wysedome bothe in Latin and Englyshe, Lately Translated by RobertWhyttynton, Poet Laureate (London, 1547), andCertaine Select Dialogues of Lucian,

328 Sofie Kluge

Together with His True Historie, Translated from the Greeke by Mr. F. Hickes.Whereunto is Added the Life of Lucian Gathered out of His OwneWritings, with Notesby T. H, Mr. of Arts of Christ Church in Oxford (Oxford, 1634).

19. Cf. Policraticus, VIII (‘The comedy or tragedy of this world’): ‘It is surprising hownearly coextensive with the world is the stage on which this endless, marvelous,incomparable tragedy, or if you will comedy, can be played; its area is in fact that ofthe whole world’ (quoted at http://www.constitution.org).

20. Curtius (1948, 148 f.), in his chapter on ‘Schauspielmetaphern’, conceded a specialimportance to the work of John of Salisbury, which, he notes, was published withparticular frequency during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1595, 1622,1639, 1664, 1677).

21. As the subtitle sive de nugis curialium et de vestigiis philosophorum indicates, thePolicraticus is a work dedicated to the follies of the court and offering a Christianpolitical philosophy.

22. John returns to the subject many times, e.g. book VII, chapter 7 (referring toAntony as ‘the incontinent and notorious public enemy not of the Roman People,be it said, but of the virtues’). Cf. also book IV.3 on the pre-history of Shake-speare’s love story (the young Cleopatra’s affair with Julius Caesar):

How the Decii, Roman generals, devoted themselves to death for their armies, isa celebrated tale. Julius Caesar also said, ‘A general who does not labor to bedear to his soldiers’ hearts does not know how to furnish them with weapons;does not know that a general’s humaneness to his troops takes the place of ahost against the enemy.’ He never said to his soldiers, ‘Go thither,’ but always‘Follow me’; he said this because toil which is shared by the leader always seemsto the soldier to be less hard. We have also his authority for the opinion thatbodily pleasure is to be avoided; for he said that if in war men’s bodies arewounded with swords, in peace they are no less wounded with pleasures. He hadperceived, conqueror of nations as he was, that pleasure cannot in any way be soeasily conquered as by avoiding it, since he himself who had subdued many nationshad been snared in the toils of Venus by a shameless woman. (My italics, S. K.)

23. Thus, neither John Wilders (Arden Shakespeare, 1995) nor Michael Neill (OxfordWorld Classics, 1994) mentions John of Salisbury. However, in her article ‘BenJonson, ‘‘In Travaile with Expression of Another’’: His use of John of Salisbury’sPolicraticus in Timber’, Clayton (1979, 397–408), demonstrates the influence of themedieval Humanist on Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist, emphasizing Jonson’spersonal interpretation and corresponding ‘inversion’ (p. 408) of his source. In fact,many of the points advanced in this article hold good for Shakespeare’s use of thesame source. Cf. especially pp. 406–4088 on Jonson’s use of John of Salisbury inPoetaster (1601, set in ancient Rome).

24. The continuity between the ancient Roman concept of Rome as the city of Virtueand the Christian notion of Rome as the Holy City and the capital of Christianityis, of course, seminal in this context. Cf. Kermode (excerpt from Shakespeare’sLanguage in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (2004, 149–150).

25. Cf. Dollimore (1984).26. Cf. Wilders’s note to lines 140–174 in the Arden edition. In accordance with

his superordinate interpretation of the play as about the questioning of the


heroic ideal through a modern ‘Machiavellian’ notion of ‘realpolitik’, Dollimore(1984, 214) sees this scene as an unambiguous testimony to Cleopatra’s ‘realistic’policy.

27. In his characterization of Dido in the Aeneid, Virgil also leaned on the figure ofCleopatra.

28. However, Lucan also included a panegyric celebration of Cleopatra’s beauty(V, 164–174), followed by a detailed description of the Alexandrian banquet’sdelights, which brings Shakespeare’s recurring association of Cleopatra and food tomind.

29. Or even succumbing to it. An exhortation to engage in orgiastic drinking, Horace’sode is essentially ‘Egyptian’, even if it simultaneously mocks Cleopatra for beingdrunk with the ‘Mareotic grape’ and therefore an easy prey to Augustus.

30. I quote from the King James Version. The association of Cleopatra with theBabylonian whore (the mother of all prostitutes) implied her relation to theChristian ‘pantheon’ of penitent prostitutes, first of all Mary Magdalene. Cf.the article by King, ‘Blessed when they were riggish: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra andChristianity’s penitent prostitutes’ (1992).

31. As late as 1723, Handel based his Giulio Cesare in Egitto (with a libretto by NicolaFrancesco Haym) on the moral historiographical tradition, however with theinteresting twist that the part of Caesar – according to this tradition the emblem ofmanly virtue – was sung by a castrato, today preferably a counter-tenor. Theopulence of Handel’s opera as well as Manciewicz’s film may also be seen as a debtto the moral tradition’s presentation of Egypt.

32. Boccaccio, for example, ponders Cleopatra’s tendency to luxury and cruelty (2001,ch. LXXXVIII).

33. Cf. Wortham (1995).34. Image and text from the important 1621 edition reproduced at the Memorial

University of Newfoundland homepage.35. Thus, the pictura of the emblem CCLXXVII (‘Asses vit qui meurt quand veult’) in

Maurice Sceve’s Delie (1544) shows Cleopatra with billowing skirts and a snakewrapped around her arms and body.

36. Image and text from the first edition reproduced at The English Emblem BookProject at Penn State University homepage (http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/home.htm; last accessed 18 March 2008).

37. Jones (1977, 83–84) interestingly suggests that we see the mystery plays as the firsthistory plays or ‘chronicles’:

It would […] be possible to say that – somewhat enlarging the meaning of theterm – it is the mystery plays that are our first history plays. Quite as much asShakespeare’s English and Roman histories they are dramatizations of historicaldocuments – the Biblical narratives – and they render the sense of these nar-ratives very faithfully. Again and again one finds that details which may at firstseem freely introduced for imaginative purposes are in fact accounted for by theBiblical source. But Shakespeare takes over not only their fidelity to history: as Ihave tried to show some of his tragedies, late as well as early, can be seen assecular passion plays. Conversely, the mysteries can be seen as sacred historyplays. When all due qualifications have been made, there would seem to beconsiderable continuity between the two bodies of drama.

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38. Shakespeare’s ‘Roman plays’ (Titus, Coriolanus, Caesar, Antony), based as they areon the moralizing Roman historiography and Plutarch, are most illustrative in thisrespect, but all the great tragedies have a certain ‘moral’ flavour.

39. Quoted in Bloom (1998, 547–548).40. There is, of course, the important exception (2.2) where Enobarbus quotes from

Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra’s magnificent appearance on the Cydnus.However, the context of this eulogy is the conversation between Antony’s andCaesar’s followers, in which the latter question Enobarbus about Egypt and hegives a detailed description of the ‘monstruous matter of feast’ there. Thus, theamazed description of the Queen’s first appearance before Antony is a part of thegreater characterization of the vain ostentation of the Alexandrian way of life andits hold of the General’s imagination.

41. Cf. Mack (1993), surveying these polarities, identifying some of the conflicts asRome versus Egypt; war versus love; nature versus art; austerity versus indulgence;loyalty versus self-interest; and sincerity versus affectation.

42. In his reading of the play Bloom (1998) thus sees Antony as Shakespeare’s greatestfigure.

43. Caputi (1965, 183–191) devotes due attention to the character of Antony, oftenneglected by critics for Cleopatra’s more intriguing figure. Bloom sees Antony asShakespeare’s greatest character. Cf. also Leeds Barroll’s interpretation of thecharacter of Antony in Shakespearian Tragedy: Genre, Tradition, and Change in‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (1984).

44. As Xenophon’s ample rendering of the anecdote (ascribed to the Sophist Prodicus)suggests, Hercules’ choice was not easy either.

45. Here and subsequently Shakespeare’s text (act, scene, and verse numbers inparenthesis) is quoted from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited byStanleyWells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, andWilliamMontgomery (Oxford, 1986).

46. Cf. Lewis (1997).47. ‘What might seem to some very insupportable, his vaunting, his raillery, his drinking

in public, sitting down by the men as they were taking their food, and eating, as hestood, off the common soldiers’ tables, made him the delight and pleasure of thearmy.’

48. Cf. Lemon 2000, 26.49. Lemon 2000, 26, note 2.50. Plutarch 1920, 139.51. Cf. Dollimore 1984, 211.52. This technique obviously resembles the one employed by Shakespeare in Romeo

and Juliet.53. Cf. Epictetus, Enchiridion, 17:

Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleasesto make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. If it is his pleasure youshould act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that youact it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you;to choose it is another’s. (Quoted at http://classics.mit.edu.)

54. The Romans regarded suicide as the noblest of deaths since it entailed ultimate self-control, cf., for example, Seneca’s Stoic philosophy and famous death. To Chris-


tianity, on the contrary, ‘self-slaughter’ is an unpardonable act, which condemnsthe doer to eternal punishment (since only God has the right to extinguish life).

55. Cf. Bradley 1909, 284–285.56. As we have seen, historiography then took a decisive moral turn.57. Cf. e.g. Bloom (1998).58. Dollimore (1984).59. Cf. O’Connell (1999, 151):

What appears to have kept the cycles from being brought to bear on Shake-speare and his contemporaries is not so much a problem of accessibility as asense of the need to keep ‘late medieval’ distinct from ‘early modern’ andconsequently to ignore or minimize the significance of the temporal dove tailingof the two theaters. This is, perhaps, surprising in a critical climate that hasemphasized, to very useful effect, the permeability of nearly all other barriers.Partitions between the canonical and the non-canonical, between the ‘literary’and the ‘nonliterary’, between popular or folk genres on the one hand andaristocratic genres on the other, as well as barriers of class and gender, have allbeen usefully disassembled, or at least challenged, in the new historicist dis-course of the past fifteen years. Why the barrier between ‘late medieval’ and‘early modern’ is still thought necessary, especially in view of the temporalrelation of the two theaters, is worth exploration.

Further the study by Brown (2006).

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Sofie Kluge ([email protected]), born 1975. MA, PhD in Comparative Literature.Carlsberg Research Fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies (Universityof Copenhagen). Current research: literature and myth. Author of numerous articles onseventeenth-century literature and drama, recently ‘A hermaphrodite? Lope de Vegaand the controversy of tragicomedy’ (Comparative Drama, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007).

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An Apology for Antony. Morality and Pathos in Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra"

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