Antony and Cleopatra II

Triangles like Cleopatra/Antony/Octavia’s have been written about since antiquity, and by now, we all know how to recognize the “bad lady” character. She’s had several partners, she’s an ironist, a wit; she has perspective and remove; she lacks a degree of worldly power, and instead must rely upon her charisma and her brain. And she’s bad. What’s bad about her is not made clear, but we all think we know it, simply because she has had this life and exhibits this mix of traits. There must be corruption in her. She is false.

The thing is that I’ve dedicated, like, my entire system of thought to defending “bad ladies,” saying the trope’s disgusting (and it is), that it vilifies traits which are often admirable (it does) in the name of keeping intelligent women in the dirt (where, despite those few successes which educated Americans in particular always seem to think instantly redeem millennia of abuse, they still are). Cleopatra makes mistakes, critical miscalculations, as Antony does, but she’s an enormously impressive person, a hero, brave and clever and self-aware, and that is largely the thrust of the play. But even so, when Cleopatra finally proves that her loyalty to Antony and to her own integrity runs deeper than even her enthusiastic love of life, I found I really needed that proof. It was very satisfying, but also very surprising.

Perhaps this is because I believe in the “bad lady” after all, which would certainly be depressing. Perhaps, slightly more flatteringly to me, I simply expected that Shakespeare would let me down -like most writers do- and have the “bad lady” prove her badness; perhaps I was just bracing for the inevitable token ending, which people like me so often have to ignore with great effort in order to continue to like a piece of fiction, in which she blows it and exposes her essential falsity.

But at any rate she doesn’t, and that makes me like the play, if humanly possible, even more. Yes, Cleopatra is two-faced, but both faces turn toward Antony. She lies continually without lying once to him. His distrust of her is the consistent cause of every bad decision he makes (and he makes almost no good ones), but because the viewer cannot help, out of feminist anxiety and/or hateful hard-wiring, distrusting her until the final scenes, perspective is as hard as it is for the heroes. The force of this hateful hard-wiring is one of the strongest things on earth -this narrative, of a powerful but curiously helpless man caught between a virtuous and a “sinful” woman- and, even though the play eventually rips that narrative up and stomps on it, it does enough damage to the characters.

It takes something like that to even begin to dent Antony and Cleopatra. These people are not tragic heroes. They are winners: mature, experienced, intelligent, glamorous, brave, sexy, sincerely in love. Their faults are modest. Antony feels his age too much, can’t define himself except to opposition; Cleopatra’s panicky and a little too sarcastic. These faults are not tragic flaws in any classic sense; they must be played upon expertly in order to bring them down, and the only way they can really lose is through division.

Maybe one of the tragedies of Caesar’s character is that he doesn’t understand that, though it’s crucial to a victory which he has otherwise orchestrated with a brilliant emotional onslaught on Antony. He never tries to divide the lovers; marrying off Antony to Octavia is meant only to send him the latter back to Egypt and bring things to a head.

I think Octavian (now Augustus?) Caesar is an underrated villain, insofar as any Shakespearean anything is “underrated” (I’m not in touch with the community, but I assume they’ve talked most things over by now.) He’s brilliant but colorless, with displays of emotion alternating (in his moments of greater privacy) with a firm, well-intentioned calculation: he wants, he says, to rule the world merely in the cause of “universal peace.”

There’s nothing to say about Antony’s final days that could possibly improve on the text. His boyish, adrenaline-charged shout after his one small victory (he tells Cleopatra to jump between his ribs, clothes and all, and ride his heart like a horse – a statement which I prefer not to read as a double entendre; it’s more spontaneous and private that way)  is, of course, a lot more depressing than any of the moments of despair and desperate plan-changing that precede and follow. And, Christ, the horrible, undignified things that happen during his botched suicide: the friend who won’t kill him because he cares too much; the friends who won’t finish him off because they never liked him; the necessity by which his incapable body is hauled up into Cleopatra’s pyramid to die, because she’ll be taken hostage if she comes down…it’s a mockery of the stiff, heroic suicides that end Julius Caesar, and thus it’s unbelievably wrenching. You have to cry a little, if only a little.

There are so many brutal putdowns in the play, in general. Mostly toward Antony, it must be said, but elsewhere as well (as when Caesar is making his “we’re more alike than different, you and I” villain-speech, and one of his minions observes that with such a large mirror, of course Caesar sees himself in it – the implication presumably being that Antony’s personality is pretty massive and complex, so of course he invites self-comparisons by people whose dimmer stars have any of his colors).

Btw: yes, I get it, mirrors, facets, all the characters reflect one another, all the characters (not just Cleopatra) have “infinite varieties,” thank God I’m well out of any life circumstance which would require a reading of this play with any sort of eye to structure or allegory.

Also, poor Enobarbus. We saw that coming.