Anthony and Cleopatra
Act V

ACT V

SCENE i

Caesar bids Dolabella — another interesting name, meaning “sad beauty” or “beautiful sorrow” (?) — to summon Anthony into his presence. But from one of Anthony’s men carrying Anthony’s bloody sword, Caesar learns that his nemesis is dead by his own hand. Caesar seems surprised: “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack” (V.i.14-15). Caesar does seem sincerely sorrowful: “it is tidings / To wash the eyes of kings” (V.i.27-28). North’s Plutarch reports Octavius Caesar’s tears having been genuine, as they may be here too, but certainly with emphasis on the audience witnessing his outward display of sorrow.

But perhaps his eulogy is ambivalent, and he does blame the stars for human fate. A messenger reports that Cleopatra awaits Caesar’s instructions, and Caesar seems to snap back to being a wretch. He wants to make sure she does not kill herself, “for her life in Rome / Would be eternal in our triumph” (V.i.65-66). And he exits saying,

Go with me to my tent, where you shall see
How hardly I was drawn into this war,
How calm and gentle I proceeded still
In all my writings. Go with me, and see
What I can show in this. (V.i.73-77)

So the contrived spin-doctoring is immediate.

North’s Plutarch indeed explains that Caesar “sent Proculeius and commanded him to do what he could possible to get Cleopatra alive [since] she would marvelously beautify and set out his triumph.” Plutarch says that prior to this, he “called for all his friends and showed them the letters Antonius had written to him and his answers also sent him again during their quarrel and strife, and how fiercely and proudly the other answered him to all just and reasonable matters he wrote unto him.” Shakespeare reorders these bits to emphasize the Cecils’ — I mean Caesar’s manipulativeness.

SCENE ii

Some say that Cleopatra finally comes to true love in Act V. But perhaps it’s more that instead of the perpetual actress, she becomes the playwright now.

Cleopatra obviously plans to end her own life and calls Caesar a paltry “Fortune’s knave” (V.ii.3). Proculeius brings Caesar’s greetings and Cleopatra demands Egypt for her son, but also says, “I hourly learn / A doctrine of obedience” (V.ii.30-31) and wants to see Caesar in person. He’ll report this, but signals soldiers to hold Cleopatra captive, at which her maids are aghast. Cleopatra pulls a knive but is disarmed by Proculeius so that she may not kill herself and rob Caesar of his intention: “Let the world see / His nobleness well acted, which your death / Will never let come forth” (V.ii.43-45). The phrase “well acted” also indicates that Caesar’s nobility is artificial, and the emphasis is on the staging of it for public consumption. Obviously, Cleopatra is to become the perpetual circus act for Caesar’s greatness when he carts her back to Rome, and Cleopatra insists it’ll never happen.

She goes into a rapture about Emperor Anthony so that Dolabella cannot get a word in. She gets him to believe that she believes that Caesar will lead her in triumph instead of captivity. A reference to dolphins’ backs indicates that the real Shakespeare has been to sea (V.ii.88f).

Caesar enters, asking, “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” (V.ii.111). [That’d be the woman on the throne with the golden cape and golden serpent bracelets and the golden tiara.] Though he is a dumbass, here he’s probably adopting a haughty attitude as an insult to her. Cleopatra kneels to him, and he warns her that if she tries suicide he’ll kill her children (V.ii.129ff). (This is an empty threat, as neither Cleopatra nor Anthony ever cared much about them — the play ignores Anthony’s children by Octavia, and only obliquely alludes to the three — twins in about 41 bce and another son later — of Anthony and Cleopatra during their eight-year affair. Octavia looked after these three of Anthony’s children following Cleopatra’s death. In any case, familial ties are usually negative in Shakespeare. And in life.)

Here’s an interesting scene that the BBC and other productions leave out. Cleopatra forks over a scroll listing her possessions: money, plate, and jewels. She calls for her treasurer Seleucus, who, apparently surprisingly betrays her by revealing that she has cooked the books and is withholding more than half her treasures. Caesar approves her “wisdom” (V.ii.149). She insults Seleucus but note that she does not go into a rage at him, and downplays her withholdings as “some lady trifles” (V.ii.164). Caesar will not take her possessions, saying, “Caesar’s no merchant” (V.ii.182). He politely leaves.

The holding back of possessions probably reads, to Caesar, as a strategy of self-preservation, as if she is still clinging to life and plotting her next chapter despite defeat. But isn’t this actually a prearranged ruse? and a better one than Caesar could muster in Act II? Is Seleucus acting out of treachery or on orders? Is this little drama contrived or spontaneous? Plutarch says that Cleopatra deceived Caesar into believing that she wanted to live, but doesn’t say how she managed it. Shakespeare implies it here: she staged this scene to fool Caesar, and it seems to have worked perfectly: she has gained the opportunity for her final plot.

Goddard explains:

What has happened is that a new Cleopatra is now using the old Cleopatra as her instrument…. The fact is that the new Cleopatra, with all the histrionic devices of the old Cleopatra at her command, acts so consummately in these last hours of her life that she deceives not only Octavius Caesar but full half the readers of the play. (198-199)

Bloom adds:

You could argue that the Cleopatra of Act V is not only a greater actress than she was before, but also that she becomes a playwright, exercising a talent released in her by Antony’s death. (550)

When Caesar leaves, Cleopatra remarks, “He words me, girls, he words me” (V.ii.190) — an impressive creation of a verb to convey the sense of smarminess. She tells Iras what being taken to Rome will entail: being put on show. “Mechanic slaves / With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall / Uplift us to the view…. Saucy lictors / Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers / Ballad ‘s out a’ tune” (V.ii.208-215). But these are Shakspere’s people! She then anticipates more:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Anthony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ th’ posture of a whore.
(V.ii.215-220)

Cleopatra
(Until 1662/63 female roles were played by boys on the public stage, though not in aristocratic households or at the royal court.) Here Shakespeare sounds pretty rueful about the Elizabethan stage. Queen Elizabeth said to Parliament in November 1586, regarding the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was being urged: “For we Princes are set as it were upon stages, in the sight and view of all the world.”

Iras indicates she’d sooner scratch her own eyes out than see such a spectacle (V.ii.222-223). Cleopatra sends for her finest clothes in which she’ll meet Anthony again.

My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine. (237-240)

Cleopatra renounces the moon associations and metaphorically will become a statue or tomb effigy, that is, a work of art. A statue of Queen Elizabeth from 1586 still exists, despite its now faded colors (Dorothy Ogburn 490). But perhaps this play, Anthony and Cleopatra, and many others, have also immortalized Elizabeth in art.

A man is allowed in, and Cleopatra asks him if he has in his basket “the pretty worm [serpent] of Nilus there / That kills and pains not” (V.ii.242-243). It is, and “his biting is immortal” (V.ii.245-246). This man is cast as a “clown,” and leaves only after some sexual (?) quibbling, wishing Cleopatra “all the joy of the worm” (V.ii.256, 271).

“Worm” is an archaic term for serpent, and the intrusion of this “clown” material seems odd. It is suggested that one read this portion of the scene (of a figure with impunity speaking frankly with a female monarch) with this in mind: the phrase “o’ th’ worm” in French would be “de Ver.” And the work of the worm would be the plays themselves, which no doubt did mortify occasional courtiers. The clown wishes the monarch the joy, not the pain, of the worm. The malapropism about its biting being “immortal” instead of “mortal” actually promises Cleopatra/Elizabeth immortality through the works of de Vere.

The dialogue, with its ironies and wordplay on death and sex, is Shakespeare’s invention. The Clown is often played by the same actor who plays the Soothsayer, or the Schoolmaster, one of the messengers, Pompey, or Enobarbus. But consider the effect if he is an incarnation of Anthony, especially since Oxford inhabits Anthony and his Clown figures — if Anthony “has somehow returned … to strengthen Cleopatra in her final ‘resolution’ for death and to guide her to ultimate reunion” (Rosenberg 440). The Christological hints at Anthony’s death may point towards this delightful resurrection.

“Cleopatra sees death not (like Hamlet) as a sinking into silence or (like Macbeth) the end of a meaningless tale, but as the ultimate consummation of her relationship with Antony” (Wells 311) — a liebestod. “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desir’d” (V.ii.287-288). Iras inexplicably falls dead, and in an apotheosis of insane jealousy, Cleopatra wants to hurry her own death so that Anthony doesn’t have a chance to kiss Iras first on the other side. Cleopatra holds an asp to her breast and another to her arm, and dies. [Note the recently re-emerged portrait of Elizabeth in which a serpent she is holding at her breast has been painted over poorly with a bouquet. Who would originally have commissioned such a work? Was it a companion piece for this play?]

As the guards enter, Charmian also applies an asp. Before she dies, Shakespeare closely paraphrases North’s Plutarch (V.ii.317-319) in which “”One of the soldiers, seeing her, angrily said to unto her, ‘Is that well done, Charmian?'” to which the woman replied, “‘Very well … and meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble kings.’ She said no more, but fell down dead hard by the bed.” So too Charmian here dies.

Dolabella tells Caesar, “Oh sir, you are too sure an augurer; / That you did fear is done” (V.ii.326-327) — simultaneously a bit of flattery and a jab. Caesar asks a bit about the deaths and concludes that they poisoned themselves with the figs. A guard draws his attention to other evidence and Caesar changes his informal coroner’s report to death by asp. For the first time he seems impressed with Cleopatra’s integrity. He instructs that she be “buried by her Anthony” (V.ii.350).

FINAL PERSPECTIVE

There’s more wondering at than identifying with the tragic figures, Anthony and Cleopatra, after “the big four” (Wells 300) — the four major Shakespeare tragedies. That there are no real soliloquies in the play also creates this distancing. And according to a Cleopatra historian, perhaps we’re not supposed to identify with these two:

Shakespeare allows passion to speak eloquently for itself. He pictures it gorgeous and seductive, generous and brilliant — but he does not, finally, give it his endorsement…. So intoxicating is the verse in which he allows them to hymn their own passion that the modern reader — accustomed to the Romantic notion that love ennobles the lover — tends to accept their own valuation of themselves and their relationship and is therefore frequently disappointed or startled to notice how ignoble, in fact, they are. Few people in Shakespeare’s first audience would have been thus surprised. (Hughes-Hallett 133)

Caesar may have come across as nobler to the Elizabethan audience than he does to us, but Shakespeare does seem to recognize some other principles too, so although Anthony and Cleopatra are a bit much, they’re preferable to insecure administrators, bitchy little Caesars.

For all that they [Anthony and Cleopatra] were both quite evidently ambitious and energetic workers in government and politics, Cleopatra and her lover, in their Dionysiac association, are imagined to have slipped the net of social duty. This is what makes them seem so threatening, so abominable to the Apollonian Roman, a type of which Octavius proudly proclaimed himself the prime example. It is also what made their story so attractive. For the dutiful, well-regulated Apollonian, limiting himself to ‘moderation in all things’, must always feel a fleeting envy of the Dionysiac, whose way seems so easy, so self-indulgent, even though it leads in the end to what is, for the Apollonian, the ultimate horror, the annihilation of the self. (Hughes-Hallett 98)

Hear, hear!
Goddard, as usual, has the last poignant perspective:

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. That is a hard saying for hardhearted men to accept, but it is true. Stories are told, grow old, and are remembered. Battles are fought, fade out, and are forgotten — unless they beget great stories. We put up massive monuments to military heroes because otherwise their very names will be erased. We do not need to put up monuments to great poets nor to those heroes they have made immortal…. He that ruleth himself is better than he that taketh a city. (Goddard, II 208)