CHAPTER TWO

THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

NTONY'S Roman duty and his Egyptian appetite are

A represented as necessary alternatives in the beginning.
Though Cleopatra is to be regarded neither as the object
of a Wagnerian passion nor as a passing itch, she is placed
clearly at the center of Antony's private life, which everywhere
in the first act is weighed against his public commitments.
Philo, Antony's friend, names the conflict in the opening speech
of the play:

His captain's heart,

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gypsy's lust. (I.i.6-10)

Octavius, Antony's arch competitor, echoes this when he com

plains that while Pompey threatens immediate danger to the
state, Antony "fishes, drinks, and wastes/ The lamps of night
in revel." And Pompey hopes that Cleopatra will continue to
"Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts." However they may
scramble among themselves to rule the world, all Romans are
of one mind concerning the lapse of Antony in his relation
with Cleopatra.
Cleopatra herself is really of their mind. Though later in the
play Antony's death will teach her otherwise, now she agrees
that he cannot hold up his head both in Rome and Egypt at
once. She also would have him choose. But, of course, she does
not share the Roman estimate of Egypt or herself; and she
uses all her wiles to intensify Antony's awareness of the con
 THE PILLAR OF T H E WORLD

flict and to make him choose her. She taunts him endlessly for
all his Roman ties of loyalty and duty. When Antony refuses
to hear the messengers from Rome, she teases him to give
them audience and thus show his subservience to "the scarce-
bearded Caesar." When he names his boundless love for her as
a reason for ignoring the messengers, she asks why then is he
married to Fulvia. When later he reassures her that Fulvia is
dead, she pretends to discover in his cool response to Fulvia's
death a forecast of his indifference to hers. She damns him if
he loves Fulvia, and also if he doesn't. In crossing him at every
turn, she is pursuing that feminine strategy which she thinks
will best sustain his love; and her strategy assumes that Rome
and Egypt are irreconcilable alternatives. Later in the play the
strategy will prove ineffectual because its underlying assump
tion is inaccurate. But here it indicates the pervasiveness of
that assumption early in the play.
Both the Roman leaders and Cleopatra, then, identify un
mistakably the conflict of values that faces Antony. But Antony
himself lives the conflict; in him it is internal. He begins by
sharing the general opinion that he must choose between Rome
and Egypt and by rejecting one for the other. At first he wants
only "some pleasure now," and will not hear the news from
Rome. Later, having heard the messengers, he decides he must
break with Cleopatra "Or lose myself in dotage." Nothing
shows better how deeply he is divided than the sharp contrast
in style between the speech in which he refuses audience to the
Roman messengers and the speech in which he later announces
to Cleopatra his departure for Rome. I place the two speeches
consecutively in order to dramatize the contrast.

Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch

Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life
Is to do thus [embracing]; when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do't, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless. (I.i.33-40)

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 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

Hear me, Queen.

The strong necessity of time commands
Our services awhile; but my full heart
Remains in use with you. Our Italy
Shines o'er with civil swords. Sextus Pompeius
Makes his approaches to the port of Rome.
Equality of two domestic powers
Breeds scrupulous faction. The hated, grown to strength,
Are newly grown to love. The condemn'd Pompey,
Rich in his father's honour, creeps apace
Into the hearts of such as have not thriv'd
Upon the present state, whose numbers threaten;
And quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge
By any desperate change. My more particular,
And that which most with you should safe my going,
Is Fulvia's death. (I.iii.41-56)

A stranger could not easily guess that both these speeches

are by Antony. The first is personal and passionate, breathless
with the lover's intensity. Its words spill over into gestures,
as Antony embraces Cleopatra when he says, "the nobleness of
life/ Is to do thus." The diction is concrete, the imagery vivid
and vast. It has already that Brobdingnagian quality1 character
istic of the whole play, in which language strains its limits in
order to encompass its subject. And the syntax is simple, swift,
and compact, with those quick transitions and elisions of thought
that attempt to embody Antony's passion even as they dilate it.
In contrast to the assurance and intensity of this opening
speech and his action following it, there is a defensive, measured
tone in the second speech and everything relating to Antony's
departure from Egypt. He has tried five times during the
conversation to explain his purpose, and each time Cleopatra
has interrupted and distracted him. Now at last he bursts out
in a highly wrought forensic style, verbose instead of breathless:
the passionless impersonal style of the public Roman. His
diction this time is abstract and his imagery is generalized.
His measured rhythm struts with dignity; and his syntax is
carefully articulated, replete with subordination, as if to support
by sentence structure that wide arch of the ranged empire that
he was ready to let fall before.

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The contrast between the speeches shows Antony caught

between two values. I think it even hints at the incompleteness
of one value without the other, for each speech in its own way-
is rhetorically overdone, as if to justify by the incantation of a
style what cannot be defended by reason: Antony's alarming
indifference to the condition of Rome on the one hand, and on
the other his frightening neglect of his full heart's desire. In
any case, believing with the others that a choice is required,
Antony chooses Rome, and thus initiates a process whereby he
is to master the Roman public world and encompass its values.
Before following that process in detail, however, we must see
in what respects the presentation of Antony in these opening
scenes is symptomatic of the whole play. The contrast between
the two speeches reveals Antony's temperament, and shows the
particular form in which he is to suffer his trial and his ecstasy.
Antony is not in the condition that post-Freudian thought calls
"conflicted." He is not aware all at once of contradictory alter
natives, then torn and weakened by the need to decide, and
finally rendered impotent or else aloof, and in either case un
ready for action. Antony's way is precisely not to weigh his
alternatives and divide himself against himself, but to live each
alternative in turn, and lift his whole self back and forth across
the line that divides Rome from Egypt. He devotes himself
wholly to each world in turn, at first dismissing the Roman
messengers with "There's not a minute of our lives should
stretch/ Without some pleasure now"; and later dismissing
himself from Egypt with "The strong necessity of time com
mands/ Our services awhile." He lives for the moment, indeed;
but he is to give himself just as fully to the Roman moment
as to the Egyptian. In each place where he stands is obliterated
every connection with another time, place, or value. This dis
continuity in thought and action is distinctive of Antony's
character, and it is pervasive in the play, where character and
conduct, motive and action, cause and effect, are everywhere
forced apart and hidden from each other. On this score our
perplexity only begins with Antony's two speeches, which
generate in turn a whole series of questions. When did he

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change his mind and decide to hear the messengers after all?
Why did he change his mind ? And having heard the messengers,
why did he decide to leave Cleopatra and return to Rome?
Here it may seem obvious from the news the messengers have
brought him that his presence in Rome is required immediately.
But to Philo and Cleopatra that was obvious before the mes
sengers had spoken. There were good reasons, they both knew,
why Antony should be in Romeunless he were indeed willing
to see Rome fall. Our question is not whether the reasons he
finally enumerates are sufficient to justify Antony's departure
for Rome. Our question is rather when, where, how, and why
did Antony decide not to "Let Rome in Tiber melt"? And on
that question Antony, and behind him Shakespeare, is dazzlingly
silent. Antony's last words before his exit at I.i.55 are these
to the messengers: "Speak not to us." At his next entrance,
at I.ii.85, he is accompanied by a messenger who is in the
midst of giving him the news from Rome.
There are other striking reversals and discontinuities. When
he hears from the messenger that Fulvia is dead, Antony says,
" . . . she's good, being gone,/ The hand could pluck her back
that shov'd her on." And now that Fulvia is gone, just when we
might think that Antony is more free than ever to remain in
Egypt, he decides to return to Rome. His apparently impulsive
conduct is essentially like that which Cleopatra pursues as a
deliberate policy:

See where he is, who's with him, what he does.

I did not send you. If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick. Quick, and return!
(I.iii.2-5)

Nothing remains stable, predictable, "in character." Everywhere

we see reversal and change, and nowhere are we permitted even
to glimpse a reason for the change. Just as Antony weighs his
alternatives only by living them, so his every living action seems
uncaused, self-generated, a new creation whose spontaneity
disarms our challenge.

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There is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare is perfectly in

control of himself in these opening scenes, and hence that the
discontinuities I have noted are precisely what he wants. We
have no warrant for improving upon his alleged carelessness
and ignoring the discontinuities by inventing for Antony a
familiar rationale: that the Antony who speaks "Let Rome in
Tiber melt" is a reeling infatuate, wined, dined, and whored
out of his senses; whereas the Antony who speaks "The strong
necessity of time commands/ Our services awhile" is back in
his right mind and a proper man again. This customary inter
pretation furnishes Antony with a conventional psychology and
his several actions with sufficient causes. But it goes straight
against the grain of Shakespeare's portrait. Shakespeare gives
us no warrant for believing that the wooden, lifeless style of
Antony's second speech is "in character" and that the vital,
passionate utterance of his first speech is not. And unlike
Plutarch, he makes no claim that the action contemplated by
one speech is preferable to that contemplated by the other. For
Shakespeare both sides of Antony are in character, and each
side is integral, discontinuous from the other. This early in the
play we can only accept the discontinuity, see where Shakespeare
will lead us with it, and let it become meaningful, if it can, in
its own terms.
At crucial moments later in the playfor example, in his
decisions to return from Rome to Egypt, to fight at Actium by
sea, and to follow Cleopatra when she deserts that battle
Antony acts again without visible premeditation, in the same
discontinuous manner as in the opening scenes. Such episodes
will invite tampering and misinterpretation unless we have let
ourselves be prepared by the opening scenes to see that all the
discontinuities, instead of needing to be "resolved" and explained
away, are intrinsic to Shakespeare's construction, are in fact
the distinctive materials in the play's tight and luminous fabric.
Then we might see too that Antony's conflict throughout is
truly an internal one, though he does not deliberate his choices
in full torment as Hamlet does, because so continuous an alter
nation in his whole style as a person necessarily involves a series

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of inner transformations. It is a characteristic and coherent

response to experience and not an accidental or frivolous pos
ture. His sudden and unexplained shifts throughout the play
show the contour of Antony's mind, the quality of its anguish,
and its continuing danger of being loosened from its moorings.
Antony, like Lear, is not an introspective character; he is not
divided up into direct discourse, soliloquy, and aside, so to
speak, in order to give each part of his psyche its own distinct
voice. He is just that man in whom there is no division between
"inner" and "outer." But it does not follow that he is only a
reprobate with no inner life at all. Although his inner life is
less vivid and fractured than Hamlet's and Macbeth's, for
example, I hope to show that it is equally intense; and I will
argue later that it is no less humanly significant than theirs.
Shakespeare's presentation of Antony in the opening scenes
trains us in that awareness.

II

From the time Antony leaves Egypt, at the end of I.iii, until
the time when his new wife Octavia leaves him at Athens, at
the end of Ill.iv, Antony devotes himself to satisfying both in
letter and in spirit his country's claim upon him. Back in Rome,
confronted with the embarrassing fact that his wife Fulvia had
made war upon his partner Caesar while he was fishing in the
Nile, Antony begins by patching up his excuses to Caesar with
whatever temporizing and self-deception are necessary. He
argues that Fulvia's wars against Caesar were subtly directed
against himself as well to get him away from Cleopatra, but
that honor and good breeding required that he stay in Egypt
and avoid meeting his own wife and brother in battle. Now he
takes occasion to joke about Fulvia,

As for my wife,
I would you had her spirit in such another!
The third o' th' world is yours, which with a snaffle
You may pace easy, but not such a wife. (II.ii.61-64)

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when a short time before, upon hearing of her death, he said

how dear she was now that she was gone. This expedient change
of attitude toward Fulvia is matched by an equally gross dis
loyalty to Cleopatra. Having pleaded first that honor made
him stay there, soon Antony finds it convenient to regard his
sojourn in Egypt as a lapse. To the charge that he has denied
military aid to Caesar in those wars "Which fronted mine own
peace," he replies:

Neglected rather;
And then when poisoned hours had bound me up
From mine own knowledge. As nearly as I may,
I'll play the penitent to you; but mine honesty
Shall not make poor my greatness, nor my power
Work without it. Truth is, that Fulvia,
To have me out of Egypt, made wars here,
For which myself, the ignorant motive, do
So far ask pardon as befits mine honour
To stoop in such a case. (II.ii.8998)

The more he attempts to justify himself, the more desperately

he fastens upon any argument that lies at hand, no matter how
incoherent or debasing to his manhood. He ends by abandoning
all pretense of argument, resorting to a compulsive assertion
of his honor independently of anything he has done to maintain
that honor. For as long as Antony is bent only upon making
peace with Octavius and renewing his credentials in the Roman
world, he has forfeited his only possible argument: that to him
Egypt and Cleopatra represent indispensable human values.
What Octavius has called his "lascivious wassails" Antony
described earlier as "the nobleness of life." But now while
Antony chooses to share Octavius' standards, his life in the
East is wholly vulnerable to Octavius' criticism, and he is
barred from making a plausible defense of his conduct.
Ironically, Antony's shabby rationalizations brilliantly serve
their immediate purpose of restoring his pre-eminence in the
Roman world, even to the point of making him an eligible
husband for Octavia. The essential Roman issue is not Antony's
past conduct but his political reliability in the future. Octavius,

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who needs Antony's strength and skill in the expected war with
Pompey, is not eager to scruple nicely about honor at such a
moment. He wants from Antony a quick sign of good intentions,
some gesture of willingness that will justify him in binding his
sister in marriage to Antony. Thus Antony's empty posturing
is exquisitely matched by the ethical shallowness of Octavius'
response, for Octavius is willing to respect a mere show of
honor if it helps to consolidate his power.
But Antony does not continue merely to put on a show
until he can return conveniently to Egypt. The unimproved
nimsiness of his patched alliance with Octavius is not enough
at best to maintain his restored status among the Romans. Nor
can his large spirit have its measure taken by any form of
abject timeserving. Once turned back toward Rome, Antony
progresses from a mere posture to a committed pursuit of the
inner spirit of Roman honor. Immediately after his marriage,
he says:

My Octavia,
Read not my blemishes in the world's report.
I have not kept my square; but that to come
Shall all be done by th' rule. Good night, dear lady.
(II.iii.4-7)

This candid statement is accurate both about his past and his
future. With Octavia he does not temporize as he did with her
brother. He makes no excuses for his past; and the sincerity
of his promise for the future is to be borne out by events.
Immediately after the speech quoted above, Octavia exits
and Antony's Egyptian soothsayer enters. Antony, palpably
satisfied by the progress of his affairs in Rome, asks the
soothsayer: "Now, sirrah; you do wish yourself in Egypt?"
The soothsayer wishes them both in Egypt, for, as he says,
though Antony is a better man than Caesar"Noble, coura
geous, high, unmatchable,"Caesar has the better luck. Once
near Caesar, Antony's good angel leaves him, so that Caesar
invariably beats him against the odds. This reminder overturns
Antony's high spirits, and after the soothsayer exits, Antony

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confesses that what he said is right. Then, less than forty lines
after he has promised Octavia to live by the rule, Antony says:
I will to Egypt;
And though I make this marriage for my peace,
F th' East my pleasure lies. (II.iii.38-40)

These lines more than any other provide grounds for the
customary interpretation of Antony's activity at Rome: that
out of weakness or cynicism, no matter which, Antony is simply
mending his political fences and watching hawk-eyed for the
earliest opportunity to return to Egypt. There is a discontinuity
indeed between Antony's promise to Octavia and his promise
to himself; and this one surely lends color to the traditional
view of Antony's dissolute character.
But here is just the moment when Antony stops vacillating
between two worlds in Drydenesque fashion and begins to make
each value, Rome and Egypt, relevant to the other. He means
everything he says in both speeches, and neither one supersedes
the other. What he calls his "pleasure" surely has its dissolute
side; but it is neither dissolute nor contradictory to want to
live by the rule and still to take pleasure in life. The soothsayer
reminded him, after all, that he is overshadowed even in those
pastimes that the austere Octavius allows himself; and it is
a fair inference that his pain here lies in fully recognizing the
circumscription of Roman values for the first time since his
return. Antony's sudden depression of spirits after the sooth
sayer's speech suggests that his marriage to Octavia was neither
desperate nor disingenuous. He took pleasure in his marriage,
and his leading question to the soothsayer implies that he for
one does not wish himself back in Egypt. When the soothsayer
reminds him of his fainting luck in Caesar's presence, to be
sure, he changes his mind with characteristic abruptness. But
this time his newly aroused desire does not lead him to jump
for Egypt at the first opportunity, or to break his promise to
Octavia and stop living by the rule. Although he is still divided
between Rome and Egypt, now for the first time he stops
rejecting one for the other. In his remaining conduct throughout

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the play, the two values gradually become coexistent in his mind
and conditional upon each other. Antony comes slowly to realize
that he cannot escape Caesar's better luck, but still must put
his virtue and his honor in the scales against it. He comes to
recognize that the Roman peace upon which his Egyptian
pleasure depends can be achieved only by the fact and not the
show of honor; that his aspirations must sustain each other
rather than compete. If there is little doubt in his mind or in
ours that he will return to Egypt, the crucial fact is that he
does not take the opportunity until he has fulfilled himself as
a Roman, until he has lived conscientiously "by th' rule" and
found himself betrayed in that conduct by lucky Caesar himself.
Only when he discovers what he could not have anticipated,
that Octavius rather than he has acted unconscionably, does
Antony turn back toward Cleopatra. By then he has become the
best of Romans, and even then he does not permit his conduct
back in Egypt to undermine his reinstated Roman honor.
The immediate task of the reunited triumvirs is to settle
their business with Pompey. Antony had wished to avoid war
with Pompey, if he could also avoid debasing his reputation
into the bargain:

I did not think to draw my sword 'gainst Pompey;

For he hath laid strange courtesies and great

Of late upon me. I must thank him only,

Lest my remembrance suffer ill report;

At heel of that, defy him. (II.ii.156-60)

He had been unwilling to defy Octavius, and thus had lost his
honor while protesting it. But now he takes the initiative in
negotiating with Pompey an acceptable peace, which manifests
simultaneously Antony's desire to avoid bloodshed, his uncer
tainty over the outcome of a possible battle, his personal regard
for Pompey, and yet his readiness to defy Pompey and all these
personal considerations for the sake of the public order at stake.
Now for the first time we see him masterfully hinge together
his public and private interests, and thereby displace Octavius
in the seat of leadership. The episode needs to be quoted at

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length, in order to show both the ease with which Antony is

here in command and the striking contrast between his assured
deployment of his honor here and his stammering rationaliza
tions in his earlier peacemaking with Octavius.

Ant. Thou canst not fear us, Pompey, with thy sails.

We'll speak with thee at sea. At land thou know'st

How much we do o'ercount thee.

Pom. At land indeed

Thou dost o'ercount me of my father's house!

But since the cuckoo builds not for himself,

Remain in't as thou mayst.

Lep. Be pleas'd to tell us

(For this is from the present) how you take

The offers we have sent you.

Caes. There's the point.

Ant. Which do not be entreated to, but weigh

What it is worth embrac'd.

Caes. And what may follow,

To try a larger fortune.

Pom. You have made me offer

Of Sicily, Sardinia; and I must

Rid all the sea of pirates; then, to send

Measures of wheat to Rome; this 'greed upon,

To part with unhack'd edges and bear back

Our targes undinted.

Omnes. That's our offer.

Pom. Know then

I came before you here a man prepar'd

To take this offer; but Mark Antony

Put me to some impatience. Though I lose

The praise of it by telling, you must know,

When Caesar and your brother were at blows,

Your mother came to Sicily and did find

Her welcome friendly.

Ant. I have heard it, Pompey,

And am well studied for a liberal thanks,

Which I do owe you.

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 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

Pom. Let me have your hand.

I did not think, sir, to have met you here.

Ant. The beds i' th' East are soft; and thanks to you,
That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;
For I have gain'd by't. (II.vi.24-53)

Here Lepidus plays his usual role of herald, while Octavius

merely seconds his colleagues with a polite form of browbeating.
To Antony falls the most delicate part of the negotiation,
especially in acquitting himself of Pompey's special grievance
against him. Antony refuses to threaten or to distort the facts
in order to gain a rhetorical advantage over Pompey, and in
the process he gains the desired advantage. He does not deny
Pompey's naval superiority; and whereas Octavius threatens
Pompey with the dangers of refusing their offer, Antony invites
him to consider the intrinsic value of that offer. Even his final
indirect reference to Cleopatra bears a new significance, through
which we see Rome and Egypt becoming simultaneous values
for him. To Octavius he had apologized for his "poisoned
hours" in Egypt and abased himself in the false confession
implied by that metaphor. To Octavia he had spoken broadly
of not having kept his square, but without embarrassing himself
by specific admissions. Now to Pompey he says only that the
beds in the East are soft, which sounds less like a confession of
guilt than an estimate of value. In suavely thanking Pompey
for taking him away from his soft bed, he begins to put his
Egyptian idyll beyond the reach of Roman criticism; and then
he turns discontinuously to the present and says he has gained
by his return to Rome.
What he has gained is Octavia; and the play goes on to
demonstrate the sincerity with which he values that gain. Caesar
has doubts, understandably; and long after Antony has said
that he makes this marriage only for his peace, Caesar presses
him on just that point at the time of their farewell:
Caes. Most noble Antony,

Let not the piece of virtue which is set

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Betwixt us as the cement of our love

To keep it builded, be the ram to batter
The fortress of it; for better might we
Have lov'd without this mean, if on both parts
This be not cherish'd.
Ant. Make me not offended
In your distrust.
Caes. I have said.
Ant. You shall not find,
Though you be therein curious, the least cause
For what you seem to fear. So the gods keep you
And make the hearts of Romans serve your ends!
We will here part. (III.ii.27-38)

When Octavius and Octavia exchange farewells, Antony says

of his wife "The April's in her eyes. It is love's spring,/ And
these the showers to bring it on. Be cheerful." The episode is
highly complex. On the one hand, Shakespeare has gone out
of his way, in an already crowded plot, to conduct this test of
Antony's probity. But he offers no immediate evidence, either
in the tone of Antony's speeches or in the surrounding context,
that Antony is guilty of duplicity. On the contrary, Antony's
beautiful description of Octavia, which continues throughout
another speech beginning "Her tongue will not obey her heart"
(III.ii.4750), shows a true and eloquent lover. Yet we all
heard Antony say before that he makes this marriage for his
peace. If we confine our attention to this episode in context,
then I do not see how we can believe that Antony's speech
hides a deliberate intention to return to Egypt. If Antony is
dissembling here, then his cynicism is even greater than his
most severe detractors have claimed, and the play itself becomes
an incoherent babble in which we cannot trust what the poetry
tells us. Everything in Antony's utterance bespeaks the honor
of his motives and the integrity of his love; and we can only
conclude that if he said before that he makes this marriage for
his peace, that is distinctly not what he is saying now. The
two statements are simply discontinuous; and yet the action
of the play does not permit either one to supersede the other.

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Only in the light of the genuine honor won by his marriage

to Octavia and his negotiation with Pompey may we discover
the significance of Antony's departure for Egypt when it finally
comes. In the scene of his farewell to Octavia, he begins by
listing the grievances that have turned him against her brother :
Nay, nay, Octavia; not only that

That were excusable, that and thousands more

Of semblable importbut he hath wag'd

New wars 'gainst Pompey; made his will, and read it

To public ear;

Spoke scantly of me: when perforce he could not

But pay me terms of honour, cold and sickly

He vented them, most narrow measure lent me;

When the best hint was given him, he not took't,

Or did it from his teeth. (III.iv.i-io)

He shows here that same jealous regard for his honor that lay
behind his earlier temporizing with Octavius, and this might
suggest that he is retreating into the old self-deception and
paving the way for his long-intended return to Cleopatra. But
this time he is not protesting too much, in view of his conduct
since returning from Egypt. Shakespeare takes considerable
pains to exclude the possibility that Antony is deceiving either
himself or Octavia. In his familiar device of the "choric scene"
(III.v), immediately following Antony's interview with Octavia,
Shakespeare gives us Eros' independent, unprejudiced confirma
tion of Antony's case against Octavius. Instead of providing
an ironic commentary on the pretentiousness or hypocrisy of
the main characters, like the scene of Ventidius' victory in
Parthia or the Fluellen episodes in Henry V, this choric scene
provides information that amplifies and confirms Antony's
argument. Eros reports that Caesar not only has made war
on Pompey but has refused to share with Lepidus "the glory
of the action"; that he has deposed Lepidus, and is about to
have him executed. When Enobarbus asks him where Antony
is at that moment, Eros replies:
Eros. He's walking in the garden thus, and spurns

The rush that lies before him; cries 'Fool Lepidus!'

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And threats the throat of that his officer

That murd'red Pompey.

Eno. Our great navy's rigg'd.

Eros. For Italy and Caesar. (III.v. 17-21)

Eros is reporting Antony's behavior after Octavia has left

to join her brother, when Antony is under no pressure to prac
tice duplicity or self-deception. He reports Antony's shame at
his colleague's violation of their pact with Pompey, which had
been negotiated in the light of "strange courtesies and great"
that Pompey laid upon him. Eros is reporting as well Antony's
unaffected sorrow over the plight of Lepidus. In Julius Caesar
Antony called Lepidus "a slight unmeritable man,/ Meet to be
sent on errands"; and in this play he has made a laughing stock
of the drunken Lepidus at Pompey's banquet. But now in the
privacy of his garden, where he does not need to maintain
appearances, a transformed Antony laments and curses the fate
of Lepidus. Finally Eros gives us the crucial information that
even after Octavia's departure, Antony's navy is rigged "For
Italy and Caesar" and not for Egypt and Cleopatra. The sole
purpose of Eros' scene is to indicate that this time Antony's
scruples are genuine because earned.
An examination of Plutarch's version of this part of the
story suggests that Shakespeare intended that significance which
I have attributed to Eros' scene. In Plutarch's account, after
concluding the treaty with Pompey, Antony leaves his new wife
and launches the Parthian campaign. During that campaign
Cleopatra makes tempting gestures, and Antony responds with
what North calls his characteristic "effeminacy" by pursuing
Cleopatra. He is disloyal to Octavia almost from the moment
he marries her. Meanwhile Octavius tears up the treaty with
Pompey and sets out to recapture Sicily, with Antony's full
knowledge and even with the help of warships supplied by
Antony. Along the way Octavius deposes Lepidus. Antony goes
to Egypt, and from a throne mounted in the market place parcels
out the earth, the sun, and the moon among Cleopatra's children
and some minor potentates. For this Octavius denounces him

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 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

in Rome, and only in self-defense does Antony make charges

against Octavius. Then he complains not that Octavius has
broken faith in ruining Pompey and Lepidus but that he has
refused to share with his accomplice Antony the spoils of
victory.2
In transmuting just this much of Plutarch's narrative, Shake
speare improves Antony's moral position beyond recognition.
He removes Antony from any contact with Cleopatra on the
one hand and absolves him of any prior knowledge of Octavius'
nefarious plans for Pompey and Lepidus on the other. He has
Antony accuse Octavius first, in moral indignation rather than
in self-defense: his charge is not that Octavius has denied him
spoils but that Octavius has broken faith. And to forestall any
suspicion that Antony is too prejudiced a spokesman in his own
behalf, Shakespeare puts these accusations into the mouth of
Eros. What Plutarch depicts as the sleazy conflict of two in
compatibly rapacious appetites, in which "it was predestinated
that the government of all the world should fall into Octavius
Caesar's hands," Shakespeare purifies into a competition of
honor won by Antony.
Shakespeare alters Plutarch even further, in order to cleanse
Antony of shame in his relation with Octavia. In Plutarch's
narrative Octavia mediates the differences that continually arise
between Antony and Octavius, from the time of their renewed
alliance against Pompey until the final outbreak of their civil
war. She remains loyal to Antony despite his renewed liaison
with Cleopatra and despite Octavius' ordering her to leave
Antony's house. She exhibits the same solicitude for Fulvia's
children as for her own, and she often intercedes with her
brother on behalf of her husband. Her conduct is so impeccable
that it does Antony unintended harm: "For her honest love
and regard to her husband made every man hate him, when
they saw he did so unkindly use so noble a lady." 3 Her loyalty
is ended only when Antony himself sends word from Egypt
that she is to leave his house.
In altering this part of Plutarch's account, Shakespeare has
Antony conduct the Parthian campaign entirely through the

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 THE PILLAR OF T H E WORLD

agency of Ventidius, which leaves the impression that from

the time of their marriage to the time of their parting at
Athens, Antony and Octavia have never been separated. Despite
Antony's earlier announcement that he made this marriage for
his peace, the initiative and responsibility for their separation
now fall upon Octavia, in typically ambiguous circumstances
that nevertheless reflect no worse upon Antony than upon her.
Informed of Antony's grievances against her brother, Octavia
asks permission to go see Octavius and try to mend the quarrel.
It is an admirable wish, but an untimely circumscription of her
faith in Antony, since his grievances, if true, are not negotiable.
At the time of their parting from Caesar, Antony had said
of her,

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can

Her heart inform her tonguethe swan's down-feather

That stands upon the swell at full of tide,

And neither way inclines. (III.ii.4750)

But now she inclines toward her brother willy-nilly, even if for
an admirable purpose, out of the same statuesque hesitation
between heart and tongue. Like Brutus' Portia, she exhibits a
legalistic Roman impersonality just when it most behooves her
as a wife to show a bit of Egyptian warmth. In effect if not in
intention, she cannot credit Antony's grievances against Octavius
until she can check up on them with Octavius himself; and it
is not the least important function of Eros' choric scene to
exhibit the shakiness of her position.
Antony's last words to Octavia, then, are those of a man
who latterly has "kept his square" while everybody around
him has been tracing hyperbolas:
Gentle Octavia,
Let your best love draw to that point which seeks
Best to preserve it. If I lose mine honour,
I lose myself. Better I were not yours
Than yours so branchless. But, as you requested,
Yourself shall go between 's. The mean time, lady,

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 P U B L I C A N D P R I V A T E W O R L D S

I'll raise the preparation of a war

Shall stain your brother. Make your soonest haste;

So your desires are yours. (III.iv.20-28)

And again:
When it appears to you where this begins,

Turn your displeasure that way, for our faults

Can never be so equal that your love

Can equally move with them. Provide your going;

Choose your own company, and command what cost

Your heart has mind to. (III.iv.33-38)

In the personal inflection of these lines there is nothing of the

forced declamation that characterized Antony's earlier parting
speech to Cleopatra or his reconciliation speech to Caesar. Here
as in those earlier speeches, he is attending to his Roman honor.
But this time his voice rings with conviction because this time
his honor has been earned; and with the peerless tact, modesty,
and confidence of a man who has had to undergo a reformation,
who can no longer afford to be righteous unless he is right, he
offers Octavia all possible help in making a journey that cannot
help being an effrontery to him.
That effrontery, for all its noble motive, frees Antony for
Egyptnot because it gives him a convenient excuse but because
it measures his inner fulfilment of Roman honor against the
external forms enacted by his wife and brother-in-law, and thus
challenges him to make viable his Roman honor in an Egyptian
life. Octavia here completes unwittingly what her brother began,
the shrinking and localizing of those public values that Antony
had come back to Rome in order to reconstruct and preserve.
That her brother hardly expected in Antony a genuine renewal
of honor is a less striking irony than that Octavia, the symbol
of that renewal, should find herself unable to incline consistently
toward Antony in his accomplishment. And the deepest irony is
that only at the moment of her failure is Antony first able to
voice the perception to which his conduct has led him, that it

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 THE PILLAR OF T H E WORLD

was only worth purging his Egyptian "effeminacy" in order to

achieve the fullness of his Roman manhood:
If I lose mine honour,
I lose myself. Better I were not yours
Than yours so branchless.

The "myself" to whom he refers is now the whole man acting

out of conviction, not a self-deceived dotard rationalizing his
honor. Antony's lines reflect his outgrowing of a world that
thrives upon such shows; for his honesty and rectitude in the
affairs of that world have given him a larger scope than either
of its two chief inhabitants, his wife and brother-in-law. Their
blindness to his honesty has left him to "stand up peerless"
among the Romans, but it has absolved him of nothing. The
play now frees him for Egypt, not to relapse into a familiar
luxury, but to achieve on condition of his earned Roman honor
that further ripeness which only the Nile generates. He is not
left free to exchange one world for another; but by winning one
world, he is enabled to reach for the other, to redeem each
world through the other and make each one relevant to the
other's glory.

Ill

Up through the end of Act III, scene v (Eros' choric scene),

Shakespeare has located in Rome and its various adjuncts a
total of eleven scenes comprising 863 lines, and in Egypt a
total of six scenes comprising 606 lines. After Antony's depar
ture from Egypt in I.iii, Shakespeare locates his remaining
Egyptian scenes (I.v, Il.vi, and Ill.iii) in places along the
sequence that dramatize the contrast in tone, texture, and values
between a Roman world whose ideal of rational, disinterested
politics is uniquely capable of degenerating into the cynical
bargaining of ward bosses, and an Egypt whose highest values
of emotional fulfilment are equally capable of collapsing into
mere willfulness and sybaritic vanity. This first half of the play,

36
 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

while presenting Antony's character and conflict, provides us

also with a comparative anthropology of these two worlds, a
running critique of the criteria of civilization as they are
hammered out in the confrontation of the two cultures. Although
this geographic polarization of values is rare in Shakespeare,
there is nothing unfamiliar in the particular values represented
by Rome and Egypt, nor in the fact of their opposition. They
are, broadly speaking, the values of public and private life, of
the state and the person, of honor and love; and the opposition
of these values, along with the possibility of reconciling them,
was one of Shakespeare's deepest concerns throughout his
career, from the parallel battle scenes in Henry VI of a father
killing his son and a son killing his father, to that moment in
The Tempest when division is at last resolved and Gonzago
announces that, despite all obstacles, Claribel has found a
husband, Ferdinand a wife, Prospero a dukedom, ". . . and
all of us ourselves/When no man was his own."
The public values of Rome arise from the same source as
always in Shakespeare: the ideal of order, harmony, and
mutuality in the state. At the beginning of the play Antony's
lapsed honor is inseparable from the failure of the Roman peace,
like two sides of a coin. To Antony's question on his return to
Rome, "My being in Egypt,/Caesar, what was't to you?", in
effect Caesar had already given an answer:
If he fill'd
His vacancy with his voluptuousness,
Full surfeits and the dryness of his bones
Call on him for't! But to confound such time
That drums him from his sport and speaks as loud
As his own state and ours'tis to be chid
As we rate boys who, being mature in knowledge,
Pawn their experience to their present pleasure
And so rebel to judgement. (I.iv.25-33)

These remarks could have been made about Richard II or about

Prince Hal by his father. They remind us that this Roman
tragedy, like Julius Caesar before it, is wrought from the same
thematic materials as the cycle of chronicle plays from Richard II
#
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 T H E P I L L A R OF T H E W O R L D

to Henry V. For they imply that same intimate connection

between disorders of character and of the state, between per
sonal honor and the public peace, that is the grand subject of
the history plays.
But the public world of Rome and the values that serve it
are placed in a different perspective from that of the history
plays; and this difference is an important measure of Shake
speare's development during the period of his greatest works.
I propose to examine that development in some detail, beginning
with the history plays, in Chapters III and IV. It is enough
to say here that England herself, the health and destiny of the
nation, is the subject of those plays; and that the personalities
and activities of individualsRichard, Bolingbroke, Hotspur,
and Prince Halare judged according to their actual or
potential relation to the condition of England. The careers of
men are conceived as subordinate to the general welfare. From
the dying Gaunt's great paean to "This blessed land, this earth,
this realm, this England," in Richard II, to King Henry V's
battle cry before Harfleur, "God for Harry! England and
St. George!", the integrity and glory of the nation is every
where the criterion of individual conduct.
But Octavius in his speech doesn't mention Rome, doesn't
refer even to a single community of which he and Antony both
are members. The threat of Pompey is not, like that of Boling
broke, Hotspur, and Macbeth, to an organic political society
whose wholeness must be sustained by love, justice, and truth.
It is a threat merely to "his own state and ours," to an acci
dental sum of wealth and power that has passed from the hands
of Julius Caesar through those of his assassins, and now has
accrued, "Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream," to the
present triumvirs. In the design of the play the condition of
Rome is subordinated to, and frequently obscured by, the inter
ests and intrigues of persons. Before we pursue the sordid
political implications of this fact, we must recognize also that
in the design of the play Rome's security is guaranteed, regard
less of the conduct and character of her citizens. In Antony and
Cleopatra as in Julius Caesar, no matter how much our atten

38
 P U B L I C A N D P R I V A T E W O R L D S

tion is focused abstractly upon politics, we are not permitted to

fear concretely for the survival of the state. The urgencies we
feel are on behalf of particular characters, irrespective of what
happens to Rome. For Shakespeare and his audience the story
of Rome was comfortably finished history, not a piece of un
certain ongoing business; and its symbolic meaning as history
had already begun to reside in the stability of Roman political
institutions.
In a variety of ways the two plays present Rome herself as
the donnee rather than the protagonist of the dramafor
example, the comic reassurance of Casca's jokes about Caesar
refusing the crown three times in Julius Caesar, as contrasted
with Owen Glendower's ostensibly comic but ominously un
settling insistence upon his astrological potency in / Henry IV.
But the chief evidence of Rome's security is in the language
itself: in Julius Caesar the name "Rome" becomes a personifi
cation, a term of familiar address woven into her citizens'
discourse, so that we cannot imagine any limit to her life.
Instead of asking God's blessing for Rome, these characters
keep referring to Rome as a familiar household god:

Rome, thou has lost the breed of noble bloods! (I.ii.151)

What trash is Rome,

What rubbish and what offal, when it serves

For the base matter to illuminate

So vile a thing as Caesar! (I.ii.108-11)

By all the gods that Romans bow before,

I here discard my sickness! Soul of Rome!

Brave son, derived from honourable loins! (ILi.320-22)

Are yet two Romans living such as these ?

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!

It is impossible that ever Rome

Should breed thy fellow. (V.iii.98-101)

There is a certain easiness and relaxation of attitude toward a

state that breeds and mourns, that alternately can be described
as trash and given a soul. The multiplicity of forms and activi

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 T H E P I L L A R OF T H E W O R L D

ties of which Rome is metaphorically capable makes it seem as

continuous and indestructible as life itself. This personified con
ception of Rome is carried over into Antony and Cleopatra:

He was dispos'd to mirth; but on the sudden

A Roman thought hath struck him. (I.ii.86-87)

. . . with which I meant

To scourge th' ingratitude that despiteful Rome

Cast on my noble father. (II.vi.21-23)

Contemning Rome, he has done all this and more

In Alexandria. (III.vi.1-2)

Let Rome be thus

Inform'd. (Ill.vi. 19-20)

Sink Rome, and their tongues rot

That speak against us! (III.vii.16-17)

We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,

Let's do it after the high Roman fashion

And make death proud to take us. (IV.xv.86-88)

In the verbal texture of these plays Rome is truly an Eternal

City. Its internal divisions and civil wars themselves are evi
dence of its durability. They even swell its fortunes. Though
Shakespeare did not write the two plays consecutively, there
are many internal signs that he meant the political history of
Antony and Cleopatra to pick up where Julius Caesar left off;
and a striking fact about this continuity is that conspiracy and
civil war seem not to have weakened the state but to have
strengthened and enlarged it, until the triumvirs of Rome have
become the triple pillars of the world.4 The identification of
Rome with the entire civilized world is pervasive in Antony
and Cleopatra, and it frequently becomes explicit, as in Pompey's
address to the triumvirs during the negotiations:
To you all three,
The senators alone of this great world,
Chief factors for the gods. . . (II.vi.8-10)

40
 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

Rome has achieved a cosmic identity. Her political foundations

have become so secure that her imagined destiny transcends the
timeserving deeds of men. For Shakespeare's dramatic purpose
Rome now becomes an idea, an abstract value with an almost
allegorical significance. Having certified imaginatively the per
manence of Rome as a political institution, Shakespeare is free
to scrutinize the idea of Rome and to treat it as only one item
in a pluralistic world of values.
Once he can do that, he attributes to Romepre-eminently
in the person of Octavius Caesara political opportunism and
a human mediocrity that amply confirm Cleopatra's final judg
ment, " "Pis paltry to be Caesar." Octavius, a man essentially
unmarked by malice or by love, is full of the cloistered virtue
of the letter of the law. He is all but a cipher of the public
world, a Roman Henry V, who, as the late Harold Goddard
pointed out, is as quick to give up his sister for an empire as
man ever was to give an empire for a whore.5 He violates the
pact with Pompey, deposes and executes Lepidus, and seeks
every means to ruin Antony and insure Cleopatra's public
humiliation. After rejecting Antony's challenge to personal
combat and defeating him at Actium, he sends Thyreus to prey
upon Cleopatra,

From Antony win Cleopatra. Promise,

And in our name, what she requires; add more,
From thine invention, offers. Women are not
In their best fortunes strong, but want will perjure
The ne'er-touch'd Vestal. Try thy cunning, Thyreus.
(III.xii.27-31)

and he repeatedly assures Cleopatra that he intends her no

shame, only in order to preserve her from suicide so that he
might lead her through Rome in triumph. " . . . feed, and
sleep," he says to her at last, as if she were being fattened for
lions. To be sure, Octavius is not so heartless as to remain un
touched by the love and death of Antony and Cleopatra. When
he hears of Antony's suicide, he says that "it is a tidings to wash
the eyes of kings"; and when at last Cleopatra has frustrated

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 T H E P I L L A R OF T H E W O R L D

his designs by her suicide, nevertheless he orders her to be

buried with Antony in full solemnity. " . . . their story is/
No less in pity than his glory which/ Brought them to be
lamented," he says at the end. But these generous sentiments are
never permitted to qualify his political opportunism, as when,
his eyes freshly washed by the tidings of Antony's death, he
renews his effort to deceive Cleopatra so that she may be led
through Rome in triumph. He said of the dead Antony, "I must
perforce/ Have shown thee such a declining day,/ Or look on
thine," voicing a political theory that is conspicuous in Plutarch,
but which the play has shown is not in the least shared by
Antony. 6 The ideological rigidity of his commitment to this
theory is the principal source of Caesar's mischievous politics.
Octavius is only the play's most conspicuous example of
Roman opportunism and duplicity. In Menas, Pompey, and in
Antony himself, we have further evidence of degradation in
the political values of Rome. To Menas' grotesque plan for
cutting loose the ship on which the triumvirs are feasting and
then cutting their throats, Pompey makes a hypocritical reply
that is equally characteristic of Shakespeare's English and his
Roman plays:
Ah, this thou shouldst have done,
And not have spoken on't! In me 'tis villany ;
In thee 't had been good service. Thou must know,
'Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour;
Mine honour, it. Repent that e'er thy tongue
Hath so betray'd thine act. Being done unknown,
I should have found if afterwards well done,
But must condemn it now. Desist, and drink.
(II.vii.70-86)

Antony's lieutenant Ventidius shows another facet of debased

Roman honor when, after his victory in Parthia, he explains
that although he can conquer still more territory for Antony,
Antony would become jealous if he did. He makes in advance
the necessary adjustment of Antony's profit to Antony's honor:
"Better to leave undone, than by our deed/ Acquire too high
a fame, when him we serve's away." (Ill.i. 14-15)

42
 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

This public world is naturally impatient of private feelings.

Its calculating politics drain off the passions; and Octavius
exemplifies its norm of temperament as well as its public prac
tice. In his political efficiency he rejects everything personal,
whether it is Antony's challenge to individual combat, or the
reeling camaraderie of Pompey's banquet. Coupled with his
devastating exposure of Roman pretensions in the banquet
scene on Pompey's galleyboth in the drunkenness of the
celebrants and in Menas' plan for killing themShakespeare
gives us a portrait of Octavius as nevertheless the most repellent
Roman of them all. His superior restraint only enhances his
unloveliness. This impersonality permeates his conduct through
out the play, from his reference to his sister as a "piece of
virtue" that will "cement" him to Antony, to his desire to show
his love for her publicly, "Which, left unknown,/ Is often left
unlov'd," and finally to his effort to humiliate Cleopatra. At
tempting to woo Cleopatra from Antony, Thyreus says of his
master:

But it would warm his spirits

To hear from me you had left Antony
And put yourself under his shrowd,
The universal landlord. (III.xiii.69-72)

The juxtaposition of "warm . . . spirits," "shroud," and "uni

versal landlord" implies a fundamental inhumanity that is
Caesar's private counterpart to his political practice.
In this respect Octavia is unhappily her brother's sister. To
all Romans but Enobarbusto Octavius, Agrippa, Maecenas,
Menas, and Antony himselfshe is an ideal woman; and all
share Maecenas' hope that her "beauty, wisdom, modesty, can
settle/ The heart of Antony." We come to perceive and admire
these virtues, and so does Antony. But they cannot settle his
heart, because Octavia appeals only to that forensic fragment of
himself that found its halting voice in the overblown rhetoric
of his farewell to Cleopatra. Enobarbus explains with customary
accuracy her incompatibility with Antony: "Octavia is of a holy,
cold, and still conversation"; and her attempt to reconcile

43 *
 THE PILLAR OF T H E WORLD

Antony and Octavius, although it is nobly aimed at preserving

peace in the family and the world, is inadequately grounded in
loyalty to Antony and justifies the description.
Shakespeare's image of Rome, then, is variegated and com
plex, yet coherent. I have spoken of the degradation of Roman
values; but behind that lies a high ideal of selfless devotion to
the public good, a belief that honor, honesty, and order come
before profit and pleasure, and that men must be loyal above
all to those public duties that guarantee the human community.
This ideal brings Antony back to Rome and prompts his
marriage to Octavia. But behind the idealized public values
is the suppression of private feeling and the cold impersonality
of the political leader. This human inadequacy of the Roman
ideal leaves Antony's marriage spiritually unconsummated and
frees him for Egypt. At its worst the Roman ideal is perverted
into Octavius' systematic spoliation of the world. At its best
it produces the holy coldness of Octavia, in whom the breath
of life has been diminished almost to nothing.
Cleopatra is set in deliberate contrast to Octavia, and Cleo
patra is nothing less than Egypt and human feeling. She is all
heat and motion and immoderate overflowing; she can barely
be contained in loving, teasing, and then missing Antony, and
is overwhelmed into a kind of madness by her jealousy of
Octavia. She is truly the incarnation of private life, and she
begins by regarding all public loyalties as forms of timeserving.
She resists totally Antony's efforts to subject his personal life
to public standards: she assumes that his Roman obligations
are distracting and irrelevant to his life with her, and she is
merely impatient to discover that "A Roman thought hath
struck him." Later she will be schooled to the importance of
public values, so that after Antony's death she chooses to kill
herself "after the high Roman fashion." But at the beginning
she balances Octavius and his sister by showing us both the
perversion and the human inadequacy of merely private values.
In one sense Cleopatra is committed to the public world from
the start, simply as Queen of the Nile. Like Richard II, Prince

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 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

Hal, and Julius Caesar, she is a public figure whether she likes
it or not; and like them, she takes a histrionic satisfaction in
her role. But she refuses to honor by word or deed the expecta
tions of the public world. She uses her public status simply as
an instrument of her pleasure and an extension of her privacy.
She is selfish and spoiled, and she overcomes all obstacles to
her desire simply by making the world her oyster. For one
thing, she needs the world as a large enough stage to support
her Alexandrian revels. Nothing less than the public eye can
do justice to the scope and vitality of her private life, and all
her pleasures (or almost all) are had in the open. In the play's
first scene Antony proposes their evening's sport, not by invit
ing her to bed, but by reminding her of her wish to "wander
through the streets and note/ The qualities of people." Later
Enobarbus reports,

I saw her once

Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection
And, breathless, pow'r breathe forth. (11.ii.233-37)

and we never think to ask what was the occasion for this per
formance, for in Enobarbus' description the action justifies it
self. Cleopatra and "the public street" are ornaments to each
other, and they measure each other's value. In the same way the
grandeur of her appearance at Cydnus, in Enobarbus' famous
description, constitutes an autonomous value, since her perfumes
and her fans and her mermaids command the homage of the
city and of nature.
But however much Cleopatra lives her intimate life in the
open air, private and public values do not meet and merge in
her. Her beauty and passion vanquish all other considerations,
and the public world exists simply to show her off. Cleopatra
recognizes as a condition of her grandeur that she must outwit
the world and bend it to her purpose. She devotes her intelli
gence and energy to cultivating those wily arts by which she can

' 45 *
 THE PILLAR OF T H E WORLD

impose her interests upon the world and twist its great men
around her fingers. The world must either be her plaything, as
when she is ready to "unpeople" Egypt and fill the sea with
messengers to express her passion for Antony, or it must be her
enemy until it can be made her plaything.
From the beginning Egypt is her plaything, Rome her enemy.
Whether the values of Rome are represented by Antony or
Octavius, Enobarbus or Thyreus or Octavia, she deploys her
cunning to subdue them to her will. When Antony has been
struck by his "Roman thought" at the beginning of the play,
she sets out to trick him in order to recapture his attention. At
Actium she flees apparently out of fear; but her flight is also
consistent with the strategy of beguilement by which she has
ever tried to keep Antony from taking his honor too seriously.
After the defeat at Actium she flirts with Thyreus, reminding
him that she has had other lovers before Antony, and subtly
implying that Caesar might be next. And she continues bar
gaining with Caesar, first through his underlings and then
directly, even as she is tricking Antony into killing himself
because of the false report of her death.
This wiliness of Cleopatra's is surely aimed at saving her
own skin; but it has also a broader and more profound purpose.
She is no less deceitful toward her lover than toward their
common enemies, because she supposes that all public com
mitments, Antony's no less than Caesar's, threaten the integrity
of her existence. She recognizes no distinction between the letter
and the spirit of the Roman world, and until Antony's death she
is blind to his growing difference from Octavius. At the begin
ning of the play she mocks Antony's Roman business, urging
him to hear the messengers:
Nay, hear them, Antony.

Fulvia perchance is angry; or who knows

If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent

His pow'rful mandate to you: 'Do this, or this;

Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that.

Perform't, or else we damn thee.' (I.i.19-24)

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 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE WORLDS

And near the end of the play, on the day of Antony's short-
lived victory by land, she voices precisely the same attitude:

Lord of lords!
O infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught? (IV.viii.16-18)

There is something oddly inappropriate in this response to

Antony's victory. Almost all critics of the play, whatever their
disagreements about other matters, regard the land battle as a
moral triumph for Antony. Win or lose, do or die, Antony has
momentarily overcome his weakness and stood up to the mark.
But what we regard as a triumph Cleopatra considers a lucky
escape; what we think is Antony's true and proper business
she calls "the world's great snare." His "infinite virtue," for her,
is something more than his having come off with his life: he
has been "uncaught" spiritually as well as physically. He is
smilingly aloof from his own victory.
There is evidence that Cleopatra has always expected Antony
to take for granted her unremitting contempt for public values
that threaten her comfort. She not only keeps betraying him
but seems to assume that he should have expected her to do
so, and not have taken offense. At Actium she insists upon
participating in the battle, against the advice of Enobarbus and
others, "as the president of my kingdom." But it is clear from
everything we have learned about her, and from her conduct at
Actium, that the entire function of the president of her king
dom is to become the object of universal gaze and wonder.
Actium, like Cydnus, is for her a parade ground; and after the
debacle she is surprised to discover that Antony supposed
differently: "O my lord, my lord,/ Forgive my fearful sails!
I little thought/ You would have followed." Her business at
Actium was to cavort upon that stage where Antony made war.
After the defeat she flirts with Thyreus not with the desire to
betray Antony but only because she is Cleopatra; and again
she is genuinely surprised that Antony should suspect her

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loyalty. To his charge that she has "mingled eyes" with Thyreus,
she answers, "Not know me yet?"; and her magnificent speech
that follows (III.xiii.15867) indicates that this remark is in
no way disingenuous.
Cleopatra dazzles us by her wild effort to personalize all of
life and to vivify the world by her beauty and her passions. To
our own time, which repeatedly compares itself regretfully to
Rome, her celebration of the self, with all its recklessness, seems
vastly preferable to all calculated claims to selfless public virtue.
But her recklessness is finally self-destructive. It is not simply
that in her antipathy to Rome she resorts to deceits and violence
that subvert legitimate public values like honesty, loyalty,
marriage, and public order, no less than Octavius ignores private
values. Just as the ideal of Roman public life, carried far enough,
becomes in Octavius the impersonal Machiavellian cynicism that
is its opposite, so Cleopatra's persistence merely in private
pleasure brings her to an inchoate restlessness where the self
has no contour and therefore no substance. At the beginning
of the play her quick shifts from mirth to sadness are designed
to beguile only Antony. But in the three marvelous scenes
where she is busy missing Antony, when she shifts from dreams
of mandragora to dreams of former lovers, and from music to
billiards to fishing, she is trying to beguile herself; and without
the discipline of any commitment to those public values that
have separated Antony from her, she is as unsuccessful with
herself as she was with him. Her spirit can find no rest, and
finally loses all coherence in venting itself upon the messenger
who brings the news of Antony's marriage to Octavia. We find
that outburst bewitching, perhaps, but only in the same un
comfortable way that we admire Octavius' sobriety at Pompey's
banquet. For Cleopatra is doing violence not only to the
messenger but to herself. In Cleopatra as in Octavius there
is a surrender of human dignity, in him by an excessive self-
control that stifles emotion, and in her by a failure of control
that dissipates all emotion and causes Charmian to cry out,
"Good madam, keep yourself within yourself,/ The man is
innocent." Rome and Egypt truly require the discipline of each

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other. As I have suggested, that is the discipline Antony pur

sues; and later I will show how at the end of the play Cleo
patra gleans it from him.
But now we must leave Antony and Cleopatra and explore
the significant history of Shakespeare's long concern with the
conflict of public and private values. In order to appreciate
fully the significance of Shakespeare's resolution of the conflict
in Antony and Cleopatra, ideally one should trace the develop
ment of the theme throughout his earlier plays. But the firm
contours of that development are capable of being identified
more briefly and selectively; and in this time-bound world I
will confine myself to the cycle of history plays from Richard
II to Henry V, to Julius Caesar, and to Hamlet and King Lear,
a group of plays in which I believe Shakespeare enacted the
larger part of his development.

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