- 1 Antony and Cleopatra, The Arden Shakespeare, edited by R. H. Case (1906), rev. M. R. Ridley, London (...)
1William Shakespeare’s second Roman tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra (1608) offers a multiple perspective on the story of Antony’s love for the Queen of Egypt and his subsequent fall from power. A reading of the general context for the play shows its relevance to the Stuart politics of union (Parry 1981), as well as to the broader expectations of the audience. Interestingly, such expectations, as far as entertainment is concerned, are met with the insertion of codes from civic pageantry and court entertainment within the dramatic texture of the play—offering thus a variety of perspectives, in particular on the subject of the Mediterranean world. The theme of a Mediterranean dream appears both within the characters and in the wealth of the poetic imagery. There is an ambiguity in the use of the adjective Mediterranean, a term which will be used in the following lines in a restricted sense, with such connotations as exotic, foreign, and ornamental entertainment, and not as the sea itself. As to the word dream, its sense is also restricted here to imagination, and particularly visual imagination (Sabatier 121). The question whether authors such as Plutarch were considered English rather than foreign, since they were directly applied to Elizabethan and Jacobean England, is an open one, acculturation being one of the main features of the period, as contemporary translations into the vernacular amply document.
2Regarding Stuart politics, the play echoes the court masque of 1606 (Jones-Davies 67) devoted to a dream of political union, Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei. Following D. J. Gordon’s study, this masque given in Whitehall to celebrate the wedding of the Earl of Essex and Frances Howard "was dynastic. It was calculated to tie together the political and family interests of great powers […] but intended for other ears than theirs." (Gordon 157). Arguably, Shakespeare’s second Roman play also stages a political dream of union into a single Empire in the conflict which opposes Cleopatra and Octavius Caesar. The play shows Antony’s marriage to Octavius’s sister (II, sc. ii) and the resulting collapse of Cleopatra’s own dream of an Egyptian marriage with Rome. But a more ‘mystical’ union lies at the core of the tragedy, the ultimate ‘wedding’ of Antony by Cleopatra.
3In the play, the characterisation of Antony’s complex persona is grounded upon the theory of man’s nature which informs the books of emblems, from Whitney’s Emblemes to Ripa’s Iconologia which Ben Jonson’s 1606 court Masque Hymenaei uses. Indeed, the equivalence between visual images and abstract ideas in emblems is, according to Ben Jonson (Gordon 160-1), essential to establish a communication with the audience. For example, the dramatist establishes a correspondence between his picture of man as a microcosm and the dreamed mysteries of the macrocosm ruled by universal harmony, thanks to a pun on the Latin homophones Union/Unio/Juno, goddess of marriage who unites bodies and souls. Such classical references also belong to the characters’ parlance in Shakespeare’s play, casting their expressions and thoughts into the mould of a fictional so-called Mediterranean culture and thus creating a general Mediterranean—i.e. entertaining, ornamental and exotic—world for audiences to transform these literary types into real visible and audible people. Moreover, there is a negotiation of the distance between the world of Plutarch and the ordinary lived experience of characters in Shakespeare’s play which is remarkably similar to Jonson’s own choice of a historical distance of Roman rituals and Inigo Jones’s Italianate architectural settings when in need of symbolizing the marriage of kingdoms, i.e. Scotland and England. In Hymenaei, "this choice implies an attempt to make spectators, and readers, see the union in a new way." (Gordon 177). As the study of Shakespeare’s play will hopefully show, the crux of the matter will be the shift from the Elizabethan—and Classical Roman—prejudice about Plutarch’s lovers to a new Jacobean perspective on a passion exceptionally sublimated into an eternal love.
4We are told by studies of Early Tudor opinion, how such prejudice was encouraged by translations of Italian novelle into English from the 1560s to the 1580s. For old reformers such as Roger Ascham and his treatise The Scholemaster (1570) the peninsula is the mother of all evils (Camard, Geoffroy). The ‘Italianate’ transgression is part of the expectations of the audience, which creates an ironic perspective on the Romans themselves who are not pictured in the play as the ideal of courage conveyed by classical texts. This view of Italy itself as morally condemnable transpires in the characterisation of Octavius as an unpleasant double-dealer as far as Cleopatra is concerned (V, sc. ii, l.112-189), while Antony is sharply criticised by Octavius for his inappropriate behaviour in Egypt: "You have broken/The article of your oath" (II, ii, 81). The moral condemnation of the lovers already appears in Latin authors such as Horace, Virgil and Plutarch or Pliny the Elder: "All reiterate that Cleopatra’s love destroyed Antony and led him into monstrous crimes." (Dickey in Brown 144-157). Beerbohm’s production of the play in 1906 still relies on clichés such as "Antony falls on his couch murmuring’ Cleopatra’, and covering his eyes that he may shut out the present and dream of her, again to the faint sound of oriental music. You will search in vain for any indication of this ‘business’ in Shakespeare; but it is ingeniously, and quite legitimately invented; it helps the unity of impression."(Daily Telegraph, 28 December 1906 (Brown 53).
5Enobarbus’s ironic description of Cleopatra on her barge as Voluptas is therefore grounded on the established literary tradition. However, a close reading of his report of the scene shows significant changes in the description of the scene. As far as the barge is concerned, Plutarch’s list of music instruments are shortened to flutes (Iselin 162), and only the details of the colours of the barge are kept (Chiari 2015). As to Plutarch’s later allusion to perfume, it is displaced to contrast with the wharves "pestered with innumerable multitudes" and thus become a quality of the wind which is shared by the water. By completing Plutarch’s description of the barge with a reference to the elements, i.e. wind and water, the lines express love and desire, with qualifiers such as "amorous", or "burn’d on the water", and verbs of action such as "kept stroke", "they beat", "to follow". As to the alliteration in [b], "barge", "burnish’d", "burn’d", "beaten", it contrasts audibly with the following alliteration in [w], "winds", "with", water", follow", the climax being reached with the hypallage: "winds were love-sick". The elements become a mirror of Cleopatra’s passion with the simile: "as amorous of their strokes" which suggests the strokes of a lover. There is a careful awakening of the audience’s senses such as touch with "strokes", smell with "perfume", hearing with the above quoted alliterations, and visual sensitiveness to colour: "beaten gold", "purple sails" and "silver oars". The text thus turns the barge into an emblem of Cleopatra’s body by the verbs of action and the qualifiers of elements. Without going as far as also suggesting the body of Antony in love with Cleopatra (Smith 2010, xiv), the ekphrasis—verbal depiction of a work of art—is clearly at work here: a witness, Enobarbus, is depicting the effect of the picture on his imagination. Other pictures are recalled as well in Cleopatra’s portrait.
- 2 On the familiarity of the educated class under Elizabeth I with Italian paintings, see Elizabeth Go (...)
6Significant changes are noticeable in Plutarch’s description of her person: while the historian gives us information telling us she was dressed like Venus, the poet uses a parallel with paintings2 and a hyperbole: "over-picturing that Venus where we see/The fancy outwork nature." The hyperbole lies in the multiplication of images as well as the emphasis of paralipsis: "it beggar’d all description "(l.198). The iconography of Venus and Cupid is heightened by the blowing of a light wind, and "divers-colour’d’ fans", giving unity to the picture and physical reality in a time-space which is framed like a picture in movement. The description of the gentlewomen echoes the late sixteenth century mannerist taste for elongated silhouettes—advocated by Dürer—"made their bends adorning" (l.208), while an evocation of more intimate perceptions is achieved by the lexical field of touch: "silken", "swell", "touches", "hands", as well as the perfume which is now "strange". Because of these changes, Plutarch’s source text (Ridley ed., 1971, 246-247) is given a double perspective in Shakespeare’s own text. Arguably, Enobarbus’s ironical comment focuses on Antony rather than on the Queen of Egypt, suggesting that, though a tough Roman himself, he is not insensitive to beauty.
7In addition to the practice of ekphrasis, I would like to suggest that the significance of the barge scene for the Early Modern audience could be briefly re-contextualised within the cultural practices of Tudor and Jacobean politics, with events such as civic pageants, scenes which have been described in detail by David Bergeron (Bergeron 1971). The example of Queen Elizabeth will serve to help contextualize the significance of Cleopatra’s barge show for contemporaries. Like progress shows or royal entries, civic pageants celebrated Elizabeth I’s presence, her spiritual, mystical, transformation power, a form which was established from the outset in the 1559 royal entry, or rather her passage through London the day before her coronation. Recalling this moment, David Bergeron writes, quoting the Italian ambassador Il Schifanoya: "The houses on the way were all decorated; there being on both sides of the street, from Blackfriars to St. Paul’s, wooden barricades, on which the merchants and artisans of every trade leant in long black gowns." The crowd gaping at Cleopatra’s barge in Shakespeare’s play is similar to the London crowd described as having carefully staged their eloquent presence. Continuing his emphasis on the ‘colour’ of the event, Il Schifanoya describes Elizabeth as "dressed in a royal robe of very rich cloth of gold, with a double-raised stiff pile, and on her head over a coif of gold, beneath which was her hair, a plain gold crown without lace, as a princess, but covered with jewels and nothing in her hand but gloves."(Bergeron 1971, 11-14). One is reminded of the coronation portrait (Arnold), an oil painting on a wood panel dated 1610 presumed to be a copy of a Hilliard miniature in the private collection of Welbeck Abbey (Laroque 130).
8As Bruce R. Smith (Bergeron 2011, 220-246) explains, the connection between pageants, or their equivalent in Jacobean court masques, and Shakespeare’s art as a dramatist, is a significant element of his plays. The author argues that the street pageants actually brought to life the commonplaces of emblems, and therefore belonged to the Shakespearean audience’s expectations and private encyclopaedia:
- 3 Shakespeare’s plays fall into three categories. An early period in which emblems from pageants are (...)
In the mumming devices that introduced holiday visitors into noble households, in the street shows that greeted royalty […] in the speeches and spectacles that heralded dancing at court […] Shakespeare found three things: a repertory of stock subjects and stock sentiments […] a widely understood visual vocabulary […] a ready-made dramatic syntax for turning that vocabulary of words and images into theatrical ones.3
- 4 Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, Leiden, 1586 (Smith fig.2). Cleopatra is still the emblem o (...)
9Two examples from Antony & Cleopatra are given by the author: the icon of Hercules at the Crossroads which appears in Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems is suggested (IV, iii, 13-16)4, and, in the following scene, the arming of Antony by Cleopatra and Eros (IV, iv, 1-21). The latter can be seen as an explicitly ironic inversion of the disarming of Mars by Eros and Venus that is found in Plato’s Symposium and Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a common subject of Renaissance painting. That these two pictorial references have the Platonist function of pageant pictures is shown by the presence on the stage of spectators in both scenes: in the first scene, a company of soldiers comment on the music of the hautboys which they hear and which they see as the sign that "the god Hercules, whom Antony, loved/Now leaves him" (IV, iii, 13-16). In the following scene, Antony’s army is visualised as a "Pageant of Valor and Voluptas", a conceit which transpires in his puns on ‘armor’ and ‘amor’ such as: "Thou art/The armorer of my heart" (IV, iv, 6-7), and "Thou fumblest, Eros, and my queen’s a squire/More tight at this than thou" (IV, iv, 14-15). While to Bruce Smith the two scenes are references to icons from classical culture which, at least for the educated spectator, belonged to a commonplace iconography from which civic pageants and court masques might also borrow, Cleopatra’s mise-en-scene of herself on her barge arguably also fits within this pageant pattern. The pageant is a tableau involving four roles: the monarch and the crowd as spectators, a presenter giving the explanation as in an emblem, and the monarch as a show within the show for the crowd. In the barge scene, the four roles are referred to explicitly (Bergeron 2011, 114). Here Enobarbus is in the role of the presenter of the pageant, and being a Roman, i.e. prejudiced, spectator in this scene, also expresses the Elizabethan classical view of Cleopatra. But the pageant always implying the role of the monarch as playing a part in the show, Cleopatra is indeed part of the show. In the barge scene, however, the role of the ‘monarch’ as addressee of the tableau is not played by Cleopatra but by Antony. And, ironically, as Enobarbus does not fail to note, Antony had enthroned himself as if for a pageant but the crowd’s attention is attracted instead by Cleopatra elsewhere. As a result, instead of sitting in the middle of the audience, he was "enthroned I’ the market-place" but "did sit alone, /Whistling to the air" (II, ii, 214-216). It appears as if the four roles which make a civic pageant have been subverted by Cleopatra’s own mise-en-scene of herself as a royal lady masquer about to open the ball.
10This subverted perspective on Cleopatra’s barge pageant addresses the imaginations of the Early Tudor audiences of 1608 and their expectations grounded on both civic popular pageants, and for the more educated, the pageants of court Masques. Moreover, Enobarbus’s presence as a commentator of the barge pageant also enacts a double perspective on the tableau (Sabatier 176), both admiration for Cleopatra as Mediterranean Voluptas and awareness of Antony’s weaknesses.
11More importantly, however, a double, or subverted, perspective is also perceptible in the characterisation of the two historical figures revived from the past. The characterisation of Antony and Cleopatra shows they are aware of their mythological descent, since Antony sees himself as the heir of the demigod Hercules and Cleopatra as the Goddess Isis. Plutarch tells us "the house of the Antonii discended from Hercules," (Plutarch, in Ridley 241) and the divine essence of rulers is usually associated with Egyptian mythology. It is therefore highly significant in the play that Hercules himself should be both the apparent victim of passion and the symbol of victory over passion. As Jackson I. Cope writes:
[…] the mythographers devote several pages to the deeds and iconography of Hercules […] if they differ in many particulars, none fails to focus a part of his exegesis upon Hercules as the great representative of man’s spiritual triumph over the passions, often making him the exemplar of apotheosis through his deliberate rejection of the body. (Cope 36-37)
12The implication that the stage imagery embodied by persons, properties and actions would act like an ‘allegorical’ image as an emblem book vignette, while the dialogue, like the emblem book’s verse, explicates and elaborates this image, lies at the heart of the characters’ deceitful and ambivalent use of both posture and dialogue (Doebler 7). This is arguably a characteristic which is brought to its climax of complexity in Cleopatra’s dealings with the Roman would be colonizers as the superior Egyptian goddess Isis in her Monument, and in Antony’s ambiguous understanding of his role as Hercules. In a study of the Herculean figure in Early Tudor drama, Eugene Waith analyses the embodiment of the myth in Antony’s own words, speaking of traits which the character exhibits in the play, such as his prodigious feasting and love-making, his generosity in "spending his substance prodigally."(Waith 115). It is this emblematic image of the demi-god of mythology which informs the expression of Cleopatra’s own dream and its ultimate restoration with key-words such as "bestrid the ocean" "crested the world", "all the tuned spheres", "rattling thunder". As for her final lines to a captivated Dolabella turned her intimate confessor: "to imagine/An Antony were nature’s piece, ‘gainst fancy/Condemning shadows quite" (V, ii, 81-88), they will be commented below. On his part, Antony is increasingly aware of the model he has inherited, which appears in his complaint that he "cannot hold this visible shape" (IV, xiv, 14); this ‘image’ collapses in his imagination when he hears the news of Cleopatra’s death, and he consequently strips off his armour. In doing so it seems that he is deliberately ruining this "visible shape", i.e. the visible shape of his model Hercules.
13The tragic fall of the hero is punctuated throughout the play by ominous signs from the Gods; an Egyptian soothsayer tells Cleopatra’s women of their future (I, ii, 1-75) but the dialogue between them is playful as they poke fun at him: "Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay" (I, ii, 49). Moreover, we understand superstition is at work in this fortune-telling and that he is only partly right, as in "You have seen and prov’d a fairer former fortune/Than that which is to approach" (I, ii, 59). When the same character, who claims to be the Gods’ confident, accompanies Antony to Rome, he warns him to stay away from Caesar and partly encourages him to return to Egypt (II, iii, 10-30). Later the above mentioned departure of the god Hercules is made explicit (IV, iii) as an ill-omen by the soldiers on the eve of Antony’s battle against Caesar at Alexandria. By repeating the soothsayer’s entrances at different moments and in different places, the playwright explicitly underscores the uncontrollable nature of the secret powers which govern the characters’ destiny (Garber 125-136). Embodying Christian prejudice against superstition as in Julius Caesar, his voice of warning in Rome (II, iii, 10-22) also suggests Antony’s own inner premonition of disaster. The soothsayer acts as a confident enabling the audience to hear some of Antony’s innermost thoughts. Later, it is Eros who acts as a confident while Antony expresses his doubts about his destiny. In a near quotation from Hamlet, Antony uses the cloud simile to express his self-analysis: "Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish […] mock our eye with air" (IV, xiv, 2-14). Both soothsayer and companion of arms provide us with means of discovering the protean image of Hercules as an ambivalent emblem of both mythological immortality and human mortality.
14The references to Hercules are consistent with the Jacobean interest in mythology for its wealth of entertaining tableaux. The study of the poet George Chapman’s Court Masques by Jackson I. Cope draws attention to the Jacobean interest in mythology in a more explicit manner, which raises the question of this ornamental and poetic dimension in Shakespeare’s play as a means to explore the deeper implications of neo-platonism, or the body/soul dichotomy, the image, tableau, pageant, being the body, and the meaning being the soul (Cope 14-76). Of the Hercules iconography, Jackson Cope writes:
Cesare Ripa describes a number of Herculean icons under the rubric of virtu in his Iconologia and one repeatedly meets the lion of spiritual fortitude and the boar of corporeal passion. […] heroic virtue in man is that state in which reason has so overcome the sensitive affections that it arrives at a point whence it cannot be separated from virtuous means. (Cope 37)
15The paradoxical figure of Hercules as the victorious hero of many encounters and the defeated lover of Dejanira which is central to the dramatization of Antony’s character in Shakespeare’s play, offered the possibilities of anti-masques and their deconstruction by masques in Stuart entertainment (Cope 32-36). Moreover, the use of a Mediterranean mythological figure to characterize Antony serves to provide a perspective where imagination and dream can thrive, both within the play thanks to Cleopatra’s own dreaming power, and onstage for the audience. A similar antithesis can be seen in the dramatization of Cleopatra’s own character as both Queen of Egypt connoting the fashion for Egyptian mysteries in the Renaissance (Yates 205-290) and as the embodiment of female attraction.
16When in Act V, the action progresses towards Cleopatra’s timely escape from Rome’s enslaving practices, the negative view of Cleopatra’s influence and ambition is still foregrounded by Caesar’s humiliating question: "Which is the Queen of Egypt?" (V, ii, 112) forcing Cleopatra to kneel in public acknowledgment of her defeat and to hand out a list of her possessions (V, ii, 145). Actually, while this final encounter is most urbane in words—Caesar in the role of the gentleman paying due respects to his equal in rank, Cleopatra also referring to their equal status "should we shift states, yours would be mine" (V, ii, 151)—, yet the dialogue also conveys threats such as Caesar’s conditions: "If you apply yourself to our intents" (V, ii, 125) and wiles such as Cleopatra’s use of her feminine "frailties" calling him "sole sir o’ the world" (V, ii, 119). We know that deception is intended on both sides: Caesar has expressed his plan earlier: "her life in Rome/ Would be eternal in our triumph" (V, I, 65-66), and Cleopatra has been told by Dolabella (Cl. "He’ll lead me then in triumph./Dol. Madam, he will, I know’t" (V, ii, 109-110). We have been given a vivid and detailed depiction of the Roman pageant which lies in wait for her should Caesar capture her alive "Antony/Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’the posture of a whore." (V, ii, 217-220).
- 5 A debate between Egyptian and Roman iconography is documented by D. J. Gordon comparing Cartari’s I (...)
17Regarding the double perspective on Cleopatra which the play develops, it exhibits a dialectic of anti-masque and masque which is found in Ben Jonson’s contemporary opus: The Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Masque of Beauty (1608) (Jones-Davies 46, 52, 55). The ‘anti-masque of blackness’ depicts the purification of a foreign woman from a distant land by her adoption of the beauty of English ladies. Cleopatra’s image, her re-appropriation by an English dramatist and his audience can indeed ‘blanch’ her into an ideal of supreme femininity. "The dark ladies are Ethiopians dwelling by the river Niger, which flows into the western ocean. They have a vision in which they are instructed to seek a land whose name ends in—tania, where their complexion will be refined." (Parry 45). The inspiration came from an Italian 1579 entertainment in Florence which opened on to young Ethiopians and Persians and the theme of crossing the sea to unite Europe and Africa (Jones-Davies 47). Jonson calls the landing of the ladies from their shell and opening the ball ‘mute hieroglyphics’—explaining his choice "as well for strangeness, as relishing of antiquitie, and more applying to that original doctrine of sculpture, which the Aegyptians are said, first, to have brought from the Aethiopians." (Parry 46).5 It thus seems quite relevant to Shakespeare’s play to see the difference between Octavius’s planned pageant of Cleopatra as his prisoner and the pageant of her final mise-en-scene in her Monument as an instance of the concept of masque and anti-masque which Ben Jonson uses when he calls the Masque of Blackness an anti-masque with a sequel, the masque of Beauty, in which the throne of Harmony and the components of Beauty were embodied in several figures. In Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra, it might be argued that the ‘anti-masque of Blackness’ Octavius plans to offer to the Romans has a sequel in which Cleopatra elaborates her own ‘masque of Beauty’ in a similar ‘throne of Harmony’, i.e. her Monument.
18In Act V, in which Cleopatra is the sole heroine on stage, she restores her own image of Antony’s persona in a dialogue with Octavius Caesar’s emissary Dolabella. While the latter should be making sure she will be captured for Caesar’s triumph, he instead turns into an admirer and a confident warning her of the latter’s intentions. His name is historically attested by Plutarch, but the scene making him her confident in lament over her loss and the monumental proportions of her portrait, achieves a form of antonomasia, the proper noun literally expressing the ‘beautiful suffering’ which he is the witness of. In this sense, Dolabella here is the counterpart of Eros in the earlier scene quoted above, both characters bearing a symbolic name for the theme of Love.
19She depicts Antony as the Hercules of her dreams and restores his heroic dimension in her confidences and lament to her confident (V, ii, 82): "His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm". The first five lines strike a note of apotheosis which echoes an iconography of baroque skies suggesting a world without limits, a world of boundless space: ocean, world, spheres, orb create an image of macrocosmic dimensions. If there is a Mediterranean dream in the play, it owes much to Cleopatra’s powerful imagination. She is thus both object and subject in a distant land of onstage dreams for the audience. Antony’s body is gesturing out of human proportion in this immensity: ‘bestrid’, ‘crested’, ‘voice […] as the spheres’, ‘tuned’ referring to the music of the spheres, and ‘thunder’ is used as an image to depict chaos caused by his body’s movement: ‘quail’, ‘shake’, and music turned to ‘rattling’. Cleopatra then turns to a psychological portrait of Antony in which the soul or ‘pneuma’ of the hero is equally macrocosmic in scale: "For his bounty,/ There was no winter in’t; and autumn ‘twas /That grew the more by reaping". She then pulls back from the close view to a wider perspective of his persona within the elements: water, air, fire, but also wealth and political power on the scale of an Empire (in the play the world is described as it then was, i.e. Alexander’s Empire: the Mediterranean as sea and as union between different civilizations, and the Middle East). By dreaming of a macrocosm for her hero’s microcosm, in a truly Hermetic manner (Richer), she gives shape to a Monumental Elegy and Epitaph for the image of the dead hero. As Cleopatra exclaims: "his delights /Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above /The elements they lived in: in his livery /Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were/As plates dropped from his pockets" (V, ii, 82-92).
20She finally concludes by a parallel between images of daydreaming and images of nature’s truth, in words which echo the art of painting and maybe even Mantegna’s frescoes (Peacock 172), as she says: "It’s past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff /To vie strange forms with fancy, yet to imagine /An Antony were nature’s piece, ‘gainst fancy, /Condemning shadows quite". The use of ‘shadows’ for painting revives the Platonic debate between shadow and substance (Sabatier 213-219). Moreover, the motif of the epitaph of Antony as Hercules gathers a new significance when one examines the semantics of Cleopatra’s own self-eulogy and epitaph. All the resources of Cleopatra’s artifice are devoted to the performance of her own end as a pageant of royal distinction. Like a rite of coronation, the scene is contrived as a ceremonial realization of the ancient motto that for the Renaissance best expressed the aristocratic art of dying: finis coronat opus.
21The theatricality of her self-eulogy and performance of her ‘Entombment’ "is emphasized by words such as ‘show’, ‘play’, ‘act’, ‘perform’ "which draw attention to the scene as an exhibition of the monumentalizing power of art." (Neill 323). During the long time (Act V) devoted to Cleopatra after Antony’s death (Act IV, xv), we see her achieve her transformation into a mythological figure as she becomes "marble", but also "fire and air" (V, ii, 288) and uses her image for one last expression of her "immortal longings" (V, ii, 280).
22Cleopatra tells her attendants: "Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have/Immortal longings in me. […] I am fire, and air; my other elements /I give to baser life" (V, ii, 279-280 & 288-289). Usually these lines are interpreted as her fantasy about meeting Antony again as her husband, and union by love—despite his being officially married to Octavia. However, from the point of view of the Jacobean interest in mythology and the rewriting of Catholic iconography, words such as "immortal", "air", "fire" confirm the Aristotelian view that the diaphanous ether is both inside us and outside, emphasising the sense of breathing (Sabatier 43) instead of vision and hearing. The breath of the actor is a commonplace topos of the art of the theatre as a vehicle for the lovers’ souls. In Cleopatra’s self-eulogy and entombment, fire and air are the elements which outrule "baser elements" in the Mediterranean world of the two above quoted Jacobean masques. Similarly, in Shakespeare’s play, the Mediterranean world is the object of imaginings both among the Romans and the Egyptians. As to the Monument pageant, it is truly the body of an apotheosis which is its soul (Bergeron (1971) 244).
23To conclude, one might say that Cleopatra’s imaginative use of her Monument as a masque of Beauty in response to the anti-masque of Blackness planned by Octavius in Rome relies upon the audience’s familiarity not only with court masques, but more generally with civic pageants. There is a mise-en-abyme of the tableau of the dead Queen of Egypt with her companions who complete the emblem vignette with their own bodies, while Octavius’s belated entrance confirms, in his role as the traditional ‘presenter’ of pageant tableaux, the double perspective on Cleopatra as victorious and free Queen and as stage-manager. The Monument ‘masque of beauty’ therefore retains the more popular structure of the civic pageant, while we are made aware of the equally double perspective on the ‘mystery’ of love in the union of the lovers which obliterates any conventional iconography of Cleopatra as Voluptas and Antony as Hercules unarmed by Venus and Cupid.
- 6 Alciati has an Emblem showing Love as the wind, called "The Power of Love" (Emblemata, 1621) (D. J. (...)
24Thus the infinite variety of the play is given unity in this ultimate pageant which echoes the initial barge pageant’s use of the icon of the wind as an emblem of Love.6 If Beerbohm perpetuates the Early Tudor cliché of the lovers, as mentioned above, it is noteworthy that, at the same period, W. B. Yeats, in an Essay called "Emotion of Multitude", re-appropriates the Platonism of the play. Redefining the symbolic meaning of icons in art, Yeats writes: "there cannot be great art without the limited life of the fable, […] and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it" (Yeats, in Garber 126). The play Antony and Cleopatra literally allows us to see "Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt", as the poet-dramatist already does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V, i, 11). In Early Modern England the Mediterranean dream is one of the "forms of things unknown" which "imagination bodies forth", and which "the poet’s pen" turns to shapes, giving "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name" (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, ii, 14-16).