Antony and CLEOPATRA (IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS)

"Success in heroic love being impossible, better to fail heroically than to succeed in mediocrity". -- Northrop Frye

Antony and Cleopatra is sprawling. A huge cast of characters, numerous locations, a very fragmented and fast-paced middle portion with plenty of scenes, and very richly developed main players. Though Antony is no slouch, the real emphasis, of course, is on Cleopatra.

I admit that for as realistic and non-mythological as this play is in comparison to the other plays we have studied, a lot of it went over my head. I'll be lucky if I even got the 24% of Shakespeare that Dr. Sexson equated to the 89% of Stephen King. Regardless, there's a lot to be said about the titular characters. Inherent in the play's setting is a lot of dichotomy between Antony and Cleopatra and the worlds they live in. As mentioned in class, the Roman and the Egyptian societies have vastly different characteristics-- white versus black, masculinity versus femininity , reason versus passion, fluid and indistinct versus fixed, and many, many more.

As mentioned in Northrop Frye's look at Antony and Cleopatra, the character of Antony does not adhere to one society's tendencies completely. He finds himself drifting back and forth between the world of desire and love of Cleopatra's Egypt and the politics and heroism of Caesar's Rome. Frye noted that Antony has a very interesting place on the typical stratification of literary characters, which looks a little something like this:

1. Divine beings, or a hero descended from the gods.
2. Romantic heroes and lovers. Human, but not subject to ordinary limitations.
3. Kings and other commanding figures in social or military authority.
4. The ordinary folk.
5. Unfortunate people, assumed to possess less freedom that us.

(132-133)

By the love he has for Cleopatra, Antony rises above the ranks of Caesar in the respect that he has "a heroic dimension that makes him a romantic legend" (133). However, Frye notes that Shakespeare references Plutarch in making one of the only mythic references in the play. In Act IV Sc 3, the mention of Hercules abandoning Antony means that he technically falls short of true deity status. However, one could argue that in his death and with the nature of the legendary story, a certain divinity is bestowed upon the character.

On the other hand, you have Cleopatra--a much more colorful character around whom the play revolves.. and there's no doubt about the fact that she knows it, too. The discussion continued ad infinitum about the character of Cleopatra very much embodying drama with every grand gesture and emotional tirade. As queen of Egypt, she very much already is a goddess (134)--so why shouldn't she act like one?

I found the fact that her dramatic style being associated with the constant presence of an audience of some sort present with her to create an interesting but confusing portrait of her. As big as her emotions are played out, as violently as she treats the messengers who displease her, as dramatic as her death really is, do we really know anything about the real Cleopatra? To me, there always seemed to be a sense of artifice in every action, even if the emotion behind it was one of sincerity.


With Cleopatra that outrageousness and power create a figure so unmistakably her that, as Frye said, she fully expected to maintain her kingdom, her man, and her goddess persona in the afterlife. I would say that her ferocity, passion, and taste for the theatrical coupled with Antony's spectacular (though failed) attempt at maintaining love with Cleopatra makes for the stuff of legends. Shakespeare certainly has a way of escalating the business of humans to mythic proportions.