He's a puzzling character, Mark Antony, but I've got at least one thing figured out: he's a general, not a politician. Sure, he ends up in control of a third of the Roman empire -- and he has, for a moment at least, a shot at the whole thing, though it seems doubtful that he would know what to do with it or even want it if he had gotten it. What can we say with certainty about Antony?
First of all, Antony has a great capacity for loyalty, though his own sense of allegiance may not always correspond directly with his sworn word. He stays loyal to Julius Caesar, even after Caesar's murder, when it seems that the conspirators clearly have the upper hand and there could be no advantage in remaining loyal to Caesar. He stays loyal to Cleopatra, even though he is married to another woman at the time -- the true bond is to his mistress, not to his wife. Along similar lines, he pledges himself to Octavius Caesar, then without delay breaks his word because he desires to go back to Cleopatra. His loyalty to her trumps his loyalty to Octavius Caesar.
Second, Antony uses rhetoric to advance his cause after Caesar's assassination, this cause being not so much to develop his own claim to power (he makes no such claim) but to undermine the claim to power of the conspirators.
Third, Antony bears a fondness -- a weakness, perhaps -- for revelry (referred to but not seen in Julius Caesar, but playing a stronger role in Antony and Cleopatra). He is a man of war -- a leader of men, certainly -- but a solider, not a statesman. When on the battlefield, he commands; when off the battlefield, he succumbs to simple pleasures.
Fourth, Antony is not a man without feeling, witnessed in his reaction to Julius Caesar's assassination and in his love for Cleopatra, which is fully in keeping with pre-modern/classical notions of romantic love as an all-consuming passion.
Finally, for all of these reasons Antony is out of place as a triumvir. It is the sum of these qualities -- not merely his love for Cleopatra -- that is the true cause of his eventual downfall.
It seems almost, at first, that the Antony of Julius Caesar is not the same as that of Antony and Cleopatra, that Shakespeare might have intended the two plays to stand independent of each other, but before too long it becomes clear that we are dealing with the same character in both plays. The Antony of JC responds to one set of circumstances that he faces, and the Antony of A&C -- a little older, a little more wearied of politics -- responds to another set of them.
In summarizing Antony's character, it's hard not to think of Brando as the perfect embodiment of him. It's been a few years since I've seen that 1950s version of Julius Caesar, and truth be told I can't remember how well Brando portrayed Antony, but the idea of Brando is right for it: tough, muscular (as Brando was at the time), instinctive but also calculating, brutish but also intelligent, masculine yet not without sensitivity. In short, Antony is a typically compelling Shakespearean figure, complex and ambiguous, sometimes self-contradictory, but altogether human. The fact that he bows out of his own tragedy in Act IV and leaves it to Cleopatra to carry on is a stroke of genius on Shakespeare's part: we come to understand in Act V the spirit of the Queen, the spirit that moves Antony to love her, and through her defiance of Octavius Caesar she becomes one of the strongest woman characters to ever carry a fifth act.
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