False Friends, True Loves: Reading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Illustrations by Austin Hughes

Some years ago I was invited to speak to the American Psychoanalytic Association on the subject of Shakespeare. The invitation surprised, even astonished, me since I recognized nothing in my work that bore the marks of whatever in those days I thought Freudian literary criticism looked like. The surprises kept coming: it turns out that Shakespeare played a regular role in these annual meetings. I learned that the Association chose a specific play each year, that literary scholars and psychoanalysts both gave talks on the play, and that the annual choice of a play was by no means restricted to the most obvious works in the canon such as Hamlet or Othello. When my schedule finally made it possible for me to accept this invitation, the play chosen for that year was Antony and Cleopatra. This was the biggest surprise of all, since it counted as my personal favorite among all the plays and since it is far from the sort of crowd pleaser that we professional Shakespeareans expect amateurs (dare I use the word?) even to have read. All of which may have aligned in its way with the one piece of clear advice that appeared in every communication I received from the Association: “You would be welcome to talk about whatever most interests you which need have absolutely nothing to do with psychoanalysis [emphasis mine].” I leave it to others to speculate on what is likely to emerge when an officer of the American Psychoanalytic Association instructs a non-psychoanalyst speaker that their talk before the Association “need have absolutely nothing to do with psychoanalysis.” Or rather I present a version of what I did talk about as it has been filtered through some ten years of further experience, as well as further experience with that play.

From my earliest memories of learning a foreign language, I have found myself fascinated by the concept of faux amis, or false friends. The expression itself has a poetic, even a tragic, quality suggesting that one has been betrayed by one's nearest and dearest. The real meaning is, of course, more pedestrian: there exist words in different languages that look similar or even identical, but they don't mean the same thing. If you go to a Gymnasium in Germany, chances are you won't be running around a track, since it is not an exercise arena but a school that prepares you for university; and if, while you're there, someone offers you a gift you had better not accept it since Gift in German means poison. For me, the concept lends itself to something more than linguistic morphologies, however: there are entities in history, in culture, in aesthetics that may look alike but prove upon closer observation to be quite different; indeed, more may be gained from contrasting them than from treating them as parallel.

The faux amis that I have in mind are Shakespeare and Freud. Not that they aren't obviously different: what centuries they lived in, what media they operated in, how our own world “uses” them: all these distinctions are readily observable. The line of connection that I have in mind—the “friendship” that may look true but proves to be otherwise—is a common interest in the inner lives of human beings. This is, of course, the center of Freud's project, a subject that he approaches as, essentially, a science. Lovers of the works of Shakespeare, for their part (Freud included), often credit him with a parallel kind of mastery, though it is usually understood as more art than science, insofar as those can be distinguished.

It may be no coincidence that the historical period when this particular talent in rendering the complexity of human beings' inner lives was most at the center of Shakespeare appreciation (or even idolatry) is also the period when Freud was formulating his own psychological theories. One can offer two quite contrasting indicators on the Shakespeare side of things, both of them wielding enormous influence. First, of a serious kind: in 1904, A. C. Bradley published his seminal work, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, which for several generations of scholars and readers located as the central fact of Shakespeare's genius the ability to create characters that were of infinite complexity and at the same time profoundly true to life. Of a less serious kind is the publication in 1851 by Mary Cowden Clarke of a book called The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, which enjoyed an enormous success throughout the Victorian period. Clarke narrated the (totally fabricated) backstories of Ophelia, Juliet, Rosalind, etc., so as to give them the full lives that their circumscribed appearances in Shakespeare's plays necessarily denied them.

Both of these works are based on a principle that my own intellectual formation as a mid-to-late twentieth-century student of literature would find at best misguided and at worst ludicrous: that fictional characters are to be understood in certain respects as the equivalent of real people. In some ways this circumstance touches upon what we might call the dirty little secret of literary fiction. On the one hand, it is clearly nonsensical: lives that are lived in the world have not been scripted and do not operate under the guidance of some authorial plan. On the other hand, if we were not tricked into believing these fictions as some kind of equivalent to the real, then literature, particularly that of a traditional narrative kind, would lose most of its force. Shakespeare's work finds itself at the very crux of this paradox.

I offer this somewhat ponderous explanation of what most of us who read fiction take for granted because Antony and Cleopatra (in common with some other late works of Shakespeare) seems somehow to make a deliberate point of challenging our own readerly, or viewerly, capacity for belief, almost of taunting us or backing us into a corner where we get lost in not knowing what to believe.

Antony and Cleopatra was written around 1607—in other words, about three-quarters of the way through Shakespeare's career. We can imagine it between the bookends of Macbeth (ca. 1606) and Pericles (ca. 1608). In the recent past, in other words, Shakespeare has written a play whose centerpiece is a sustained exercise of deeply ethical introspection coming from a central character who has an acute sense of good and evil at the same time as he chooses evil. And in the immediate future, with the plays from Pericles to The Tempest, he will turn toward legendary figures in fanciful never-never-land settings. As he

enters this transition period in the arc of his production, he has been taking the question of the morally agonizing individual about as far as it can go, and when he turns to writing the late tragicomedies, at the end of the transition period, one might say that fantasy and fairy tale will substitute for the densely represented interior life. No surprise, perhaps, that Antony and Cleopatra should emerge at this moment, with its highly exotic settings, and with a conflicted relationship to the question of character. It is that conflicted relationship that is the principal subject of this paper.

In composing his play, Shakespeare followed very closely—often to the edge of what we would call plagiarism—the biography of Antony in Plutarch's Lives, specifically in the elegantly written translation by Thomas North. Plutarch is masterful at depicting events and (more surprisingly) at recounting speeches, but, especially by modern standards, he is very stingy on motivations. Furthermore, he is much more interested in Antony than he is in Cleopatra, whom he sees almost exclusively from the outside. On top of which, the heritage from antiquity through the Middle Ages, at least as regards Cleopatra, is very negative indeed (Dante places her among the lustful in Canto V of the Inferno), though there are striking signs of change in the Renaissance. All of which adds up to a rather confusing storyboard as Shakespeare assembles his materials for writing this tragedy: the historical events themselves are not always clear, and the same goes for the reasons why the characters act as they do and for the ethical evaluation that we are expected to apply to these acts. Indeed, I would say that all of this left Shakespeare with a set of materials that gave him no very certain indication whether to make a play about the inner lives of human beings or a play about grand events on the world stage. Except, of course, he wasn't left with those materials; he chose them. I believe that at this moment, when he was poised between the psychological density of Macbeth and the make-believe world of the late romances, he embraced that uncertainty, and that embrace leaves its mark on Antony and Cleopatra.

One way to tell the story of that uncertainty is simply to observe the many surprises, U-turns, and changes of heart that characterize the narrative. We may expect that sort of thing from Cleopatra, but it turns out that Antony is no different—more so, perhaps; indeed, even the presumably stolid Caesar, who does everything he can to defeat the title characters and then weeps over the one and eulogizes the other, doesn't seem particularly consistent. Such changes as these become the fundamental characteristic of the action in the play. And I use that word “become” advisedly, in recognition of Antony's ambiguous characterization of his beloved:

These lines, which are spoken almost in the first seconds of the play, establish a sort of program for the ambiguities of human character in the drama, and they turn on the double meaning of “become”—on the one hand, to transform into or come into being, and, on the other hand, to be suitable to, to be a fitting adornment for, as in “Mourning Becomes Electra.” All these contradictory things transform themselves into Cleopatra; and all of them look good on her (at least when one chooses to view her positively). In fact, a dizzying program of metamorphosis and beauty seem to go together in this play—or at least that's the claim implicit in Antony's celebration of Cleopatra at this moment.

As the drama goes on, there is plenty of dizzying change in the plot, and it is not necessarily “becoming” to the characters involved. Antony won't see the Roman messengers, then he will; Cleopatra hates the fact that Antony is married but is horrified when Antony's wife dies and he fails to mourn her sufficiently; he is attached to Cleopatra but agrees swiftly to the politically motivated proposal that he marry Caesar's sister Octavia. Then (skipping lots of other similar events) there are two battles in which Cleopatra abruptly seems to desert him, then he rails at her, then he changes his mind and reattaches himself to her. Following that, he strikes a death blow against himself because she has killed herself, only he doesn't die, plus it turns out she lied about having killed herself. And just when one imagines he might be a little resentful that he has fatally wounded himself owing to a report from Cleopatra about her suicide that was a deliberate falsehood, he turns around and expresses his deepest love for her. And that's just scratching the surface of the way that this play defies our attempt to understand

some consistent or “true-to-life” notion of human character.

Following the narrative is not the only way to tell this story. For the fullest exposure we must look where we always look in Shakespeare: the language. To begin with, a rather innocent exchange, once again from the opening moments of the play. Antony has just offered a grand gesture of his commitment to Egypt and Cleopatra by declaring that Rome may as well melt into the Tiber for all he cares. This should greatly gratify Cleopatra, but it doesn't. “Excellent falsehood,” she responds, possibly in an aside to the audience, or possibly (depending on how it is staged) in a speech that taunts him to his face, and then she continues,

What Cleopatra apparently means to say is that she will pretend to be a fool (i.e., pretend to believe that his anti-Rome, anti-Fulvia protestations are sincere), but that, by contrast to her seeming foolish, Antony will actually be a fool. Except that Cleopatra stops herself before saying “fool” and substitutes “himself.”

And that takes us to the central term that encloses all of this multivalence of meaning: what might it mean to say that Antony will be himself? Shakespeare uses the term self (alone or attached to personal pronouns) sixty-three times in this play. Granted, that may sound more impressive than it is, since “self” is a favorite word throughout his oeuvre (which is interesting in itself); but I'm not sure there is any other play where it bears as much weight. For Cleopatra in the passage just quoted, “himself” is a kind of euphemism for “fool.” For Shakespeare it inaugurates a pattern of describing human character in a way that refuses to describe human character. And there are other locutions, not necessarily involving the word “self,” that point in the same direction. Much of the time the subject is, as here at the beginning, Antony; and one can produce a kind of schematic for the whole action based on this particular linguistic construction as applied to the hero. Moments after the first appearance of that empty equation of “Antony” and “himself,” his follower, Philo, says,

What, if anything, does that mean? Dropping the word property into that sentence reminds us that we are in the world of Aristotelean philosophy, which will later become Lucretian and still later Thomistic philosophy, all of which are fundamentally conscious of the properties of things as an account of their essence. But here the definition of that property is an empty set. To paraphrase those lines, when Antony is not Antony, he is … not Antony. What Antony is, it seems, is a walking tautology.

Tautology is a kind of vacuous circle of meaning, a failed search for signification. We'll return to Antony in a moment, but it's also worth pointing out that the deep structure of the play, in which Roman values are set against Egyptian values, with most of the characters identified with one but torn between the two, constantly involves an attempt to make sense across a definitional divide. If Antony's followers are constantly being asked to explain him and if they constantly respond with an empty equation (Antony = Antony), it's part of a fundamental discursive activity where one person or group of persons tries to understand another and finds that there is no common language to facilitate that understanding. This process expresses itself in one of the most fascinatingly enigmatic exchanges in the play. Antony is being interrogated by his Roman colleague about one of Egypt's most famous wonders:

The crocodile is untranslatable; it can be defined only with reference to itself. In the gaps between one civilization and another, or even perhaps between one individual and another, everything is a tautology, definable only in terms of itself.

And that hollow thread of self will run through the play. Another, more prominent follower of Antony, Enobarbus, when urged by Lepidus to get Antony to talk peace with his fellow Roman triumvirs, says, “I shall entreat him to answer like himself.” What sort of answer will that be? Equivocal, not to say deceitful, as it turns out. In the course of cementing the marriage with Caesar's sister Octavia (and thereby his alliance with Caesar), Antony tries to make a more substantial equation: “if I lose mine honour, / I lose myself”; but the purely strategic circumstances of this marriage, and his swift departure from it to Egypt, where, as he says, his “pleasure lies,” give the lie to any sense that Antony's “self” equals “honour.” (And his follower Scarus will soon say of him, “Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before / Did violate so itself.”) When the first battle is lost, yet another follower says of him, “Had our general / Been what he knew himself, it had gone well.” Here, the usage touches upon one of the most famous contexts of the concept self: γνῶθɩ σεαυτόν, nosce te ipsum, know thyself. But what can that universal injunction mean in this context if the play has refused to define the self that Antony is supposed to know (or what we are supposed to know of him)?

From this point, the plot of Antony's career can be traced through this problematic self. In reaction to the lost battle against Caesar in Act Three, he says, “I have fled myself,”

which contains an interesting double meaning of which more in a moment; and he adds, urging his followers to decamp, “let that be left / Which leaves itself.” When Caesar has collected quite a few of these defectors, he orders them to be placed on the frontlines of the battle, so that, in his words, “Antony may seem to spend his fury / Upon himself.” By the end, it will be clear that both the protagonists are caught up in this empty circuit of self. Cleopatra is throughout the play the very contradiction to nosce te ipsum, as we see from one of her earliest attempts at controlling Antony. She doesn't know where he is in the palace, and sends Charmian with the injunction, “if you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick”: she possesses, in other words, a completely fabricated self, and one that is fabricated by contradiction. Whether all of this becomes her is an open question.

No surprise that the central action in the last part of the play—the action that will, in fact, reunite the lovers—is their respective searches for a suitable way to die. And, as it turns out, a play about self is also a play about suicide, which, after all, contains the Latin word for self, plus the root for “kill.” The tragedy of a self that isn't a self turns into a celebration of heroic suicide. As he prepares to meet his doom, Antony identifies with Hercules: “Let me,” he says, “with those hands that grasp'd the heaviest club, / Subdue my worthiest self.” And he views this choice as a kind of military victory: “Not Caesar's valor hath o'erthrown Antony, / But Antony's hath triumph'd on itself.” He further imagines Cleopatra's (supposed) suicide as asserting her mastery: “she which by her death our Caesar tells / ‘I am conqueror of myself.’” This particular suicide didn't happen (not yet, at any rate), and that might form a bathetic counterargument to the celebration of self-murder, as does the fact that Antony somehow falls on his sword but misses. Yet Shakespeare constructs a plot—taking materials from Plutarch but putting special emphasis on some of them—in which, for Cleopatra, suicide is an authentic triumph. “Triumph” is an especially appropriate term because the whole final movement of the play is a chess game about Caesar's desire to be able to exhibit the living and subjugated Cleopatra as one of the spoils of war when he takes his Egyptian booty back to Rome. She will form one of the grand public displays for which the city, and the empire, is famous.

It's not just the play's final quarter of an hour that concentrates on this point; I would argue that one of the central points of Shakespeare's attraction to this material had to do with the notion of the grand Roman triumph that didn't happen. For Shakespeare this struggle around a triumph is an issue in theatricality. In place of the grand heroic event—heroic for Caesar but antiheroic for Cleopatra—in 31 BCE, which didn't happen, he inserts the Antony and Cleopatra performance in 1607 CE, which did happen. Which is why he chooses this occasion to bring on one of the most breathtaking effects in his entire oeuvre, a true mise en abyme, which is a fancy term for the kind of cereal box that has a picture of a cereal box that has a picture of a cereal box, etc. Cleopatra, expressing the greatest horror of all—a horror from which suicide would free her—in picturing herself as a captive in Rome, imagines that

The Elizabethan theater, it should be recollected, included no female performers; women's roles were played by boys. It is, in short, none other than a “squeaking Cleopatra”—a prepubescent boy in drag—whom we have been watching for the last couple of hours and who himself expresses as the ultimate horror the prospect of a boy impersonating her onstage.

Then, too, there is the matter of suicide. The narrative of these heroic lives in the final phases of the play essentially tricks us into what has to be understood as a theologically outrageous position. The military triumph back in Rome never happens;

triumph as defined and enacted alternatively in the play is double suicide, a mortal sin. It is also, I would argue, the fitting goal of a play in which everyone, both characters and audience, is looking for a self, but either not finding it or else fabricating it from moment to moment. Self-slaughter emerges as something like a blessed relief from that fruitless search.

What we see here, then, is a play which, besides harping on the word self, represents a kind of Shakespearean fatigue with the notion of what we would think of as complex and rounded fictional character. He therefore delivers to us — partly because that's what his sources delivered to him—figures of such inconsistency between insides and outsides that no notion of satisfying fullness can be entertained. So he flaunts that requirement, and offers a work that teaches us to be wary in general of “character” as a central element in fiction. This is particularly appropriate in the case of theatrical fiction, which is after all defined by the very fact that the persons whom we are actually watching are by definition not being themselves.

One final wrinkle in that term self, a potentially crucial distinction that I have so far elided. Consider the difference between “myself” and “my self”—between, in other words, a simple grammatical formation, in which a speaker refers back to a previously named person, and a vastly more complicated proposition, according to which individuals have some sort of inward essence that defines the uniqueness of their being. Consider what happens when we apply this distinction to one of the moments when the hero reflects on his own fate most succinctly, specifically the circumstance that his men will desert him. Should the text read,

Or should it read,

In other words, does it mean “My men may as well flee; after all, speaking for myself, I already have fled”—that is, by joining with Cleopatra's troops when she turned tail. Or does it mean, “I have abandoned my own deepest essence, so they may as well do whatever it is that they want to do, since all bets are off”?

The simple, orthographical answer is that Elizabethan typography and punctuation did not make such distinctions, at least not in any consistent way. The more complicated answer is a historical one—or, to be more precise in the language of literary criticism in our own time, a historicist one. What, in other words, can we assume is the mentality, the episteme, the worldview on this subject in 1607, and how can we shape our own thinking, itself hopelessly mired in 2023, so as to effect a channel of communication with that past moment that is both true to them and meaningful to us? In the whole world of issues about which we would seek the mentality of the past as distinct from our own, there is no topic more vital and alluring than the question of whether people believed in this kind of personal essence, and/or how they might have framed such a belief, or their equivalent for it, either in their heads or in their language.

Perhaps it is best to scale down all this vastness to orthography and to seek guidance in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines words through each stage of their history. Focusing on the subject of that particle self, one goes through ten of the thirteen pages devoted to this word, beginning with Cynewulf in 900 CE—all of them about sameness and grammatical reflexivity—until one finally gets to:

That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness.

The earliest quotation they apply to that definition is from 1674, several decades post-Antony. Yet when you think about it, “that which in a person is really and intrinsically he [or she]”; and “a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness” — it sounds almost like a plot summary of Antony and Cleopatra. Not that Shakespeare has invented the self (though some have claimed it), or that he is “proving” with this play that there is such a thing as the self. Rather, that his play is an essay of self-questioning about how it is that the human personality might be said to be defined, described, or constructed. Which means in the end that Antony and Cleopatra isn't just about whether there is such a thing as fictional personhood, but whether there is anything like real personhood. To return to the historicist mode, it begins to seem as though premodern thought on this subject looks quite a bit like postmodern thought on this subject. Antony and Cleopatra may have helped write some of our own contemporary—and even psychoanalytic—questions about the possibility that human character can be consistently grasped at all.

Leonard Barkan recently retired from Princeton, where he taught literature, classics, and art history. He has published works on Renaissance art and literature, on Berlin, and on Rome. His latest book is entitled Reading Shakespeare Reading Me.

Citations from the play are to William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford, 1994).