Romantic Tragedies for Young and Old

Romeo and Juliet is, of course, Shakespeare's testament to youth and beauty.  The vision of love that it presents is idealistic and pure, doomed to fail because the world is too, too harsh for such purity.  Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, is a testament to mature love -- or what oft passes for love among grown-ups.  The vision of love that it presents is cynical and desperate, doomed to fail because the individuals who practice it are, through and through, corrupt.  Romeo and Juliet are innocents who live in a fallen world.  Antony and Cleopatra are themselves fallen.  Give me Antony and Cleopatra any day.

The curious and distinctive feature of both plays is the two-fold focus of each, as indicated by the titles.  Othello doesn't share the billing with Desdemona, nor does Macbeth with his Lady Macbeth -- though I suspect that if Lady Macbeth asked him, he would do it.  Hamlet, of course, would be incapable of sharing the spotlight with Ophelia for even an instant.  Romeo isn't Romeo, though, without Juliet, and Antony without Cleopatra is an altogether different sort of fellow -- witness Julius Caesar, whose Antony is fascinating and complex, a great manipulator and (like his later counterpart) something of a cipher, but no fool for love, certainly, and no bacchanal neither.  The Antony of Julius Caesar is unquestionably Roman: rational, pragmatic, masculine, with a compelling sense of duty.  The Antony of Antony and Cleopatra is only partly so -- and only when he is outside of Egypt or outside of the influence of Egypt.  He has had an encounter with the non-Roman world, with the luxurious East, and with femininity.  He has been converted, to some extent at least.  In Egypt, instead of restrained Roman stoicism and self-control, he encounters, in almost mystical fashion, license and passion.  He seems to have been unprepared for this experience.  He goes native, almost a prefiguration of Kurtz but in the romantic sphere. 

Antony and Cleopatra is a notoriously messy play, a long one, to boot, with entanglements, reversals, changes of heart.  What does love mean in such a context?  The goal, I believe, in most of Shakespeare's plays is to express depth of feeling, but in the first three acts (and part of the fourth) here, that goal is distant and seems of little interest to the playwright.  The romance here is hardly romanticized.  The modern corollary of Antony and Cleopatra is the punk rock spectacle of Sid and Nancy or the junkie dependency of Drugstore Cowboy.  Antony and his famous lover are strung out on each other, drained by each other, narcotized.  Of course, Sid and Nancy take it deeper down into the gutter, but like them Antony and Cleopatra are outrageous, out of bounds, creatures of the night who patrol the streets for entertainment.  They don't create their own rules -- rather, they defy rules of any sort.  A. D. Nuttall called this relationship "all splendor, all style."  There's no substance here, which is precisely the point.  Clean-cut Antony goes to Egypt and gets his hair spiked.  Someone should tell Sofia Coppola to direct. 

Love between Antony and Cleopatra is inconstant and inconsistent, proceeding in fits and starts, entangled in politics and practicalities.  For Antony, there is always the pull of Rome.  Romeo would have allowed no compromise to enter into his love.  Antony, by comparison, practices a kind of romantic realpolitik, and his cynicism is most apparent in his choice of marriage partners: Fulvia and then Octavia, but never Cleopatra.  To the marriage of true minds, however, he admits no impediments, so long as that marriage remains of the mind -- and of the body -- but nothing on paper.  In The Tempest, Prospero gives us marriage as a means to an end, but at least he had the decency to see to it that his daughter fell in love with the man he would have her marry.  Antony and Cleopatra seems altogether to condemn marriage as a sham.  Comedy itself is indicted, then, and tragedy reigns.  Shakespeare has never been more cynical on the subject of marriage.

And to compare Juliet and Cleopatra -- those two at opposite ends of the virgin-whore dynamic.  The sweetness of Juliet's virginity proves the intimacy of her connection to Romeo, her only lover for all eternity.  Cleopatra has been around the block a few times, of course, most notably with Antony's former boss, the mighty Julius, but she is no less the goddess, and the widespread awe and admiration her beauty and majesty inspire is a wonder to all:

         Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
         Her infinite variety.  Other women cloy
         The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
         Where most she satisfies.  For vilest things
         Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
         Bless her where she is riggish.  (2.2.276-281)

So says Enobarbus.  He speaks for Antony, since Antony himself characteristically has few words to speak his own state.  As for Cleopatra, lips serve consistently as a metonym for all aspects of her self: her words, her body, her kisses -- and therefore her sexuality, her femininity.  "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," she says of her relationship with Antony in Act 1, Scene 3, beginning her elegy almost from the very start.  What Cleopatra comes to represent is mystical and non-Western cult of femininity.  She represents perhaps Shakespeare's most daring venture into the non-Western world.  Antony is unmanned by her, but it is also true that her suicide is (asps aside) in the grand and dignified Roman style.  She has learned as well as she has taught.

The goal in the earlier acts of the play seems to be something different from the Shakespearean standard, which I have characterized as depth of feeling.  Instead, we have a character study and an examination of realism in human behavior.  Along these lines, Antony and Cleopatra is uniquely successful in the Shakespearean canon.  It is precisely when the affair is nearly over that it turns from a fractured event into the stuff of myth.  Initially, it's a self-mythologized tale, with Cleopatra herself elegizing both Antony and her love for him, and it matters little that the words that she uses only partly match up to the reality of what we saw happening in earlier scenes.  It's a convincing job she does of telling what it all means, and even Caesar falls for it, and most audiences will, too, I suspect.  No one could argue that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's best play, but it is a stand-out in some ways, not least of which is the audacity with which Cleopatra steals the show in Act 5.

Of course, Shakespeare can give us other visions of love among the grown-ups.  There are Egeon and Emilia from The Comedy of Errors, at the beginning of the bard's career, and Leontes and Hermione from The Winter's Tale, at the other end.  But those are the loves of comedy and romance.  The latter relationship is certainly fraught with the heavy weight of Leontes' unwarranted mistrust and jealousy, but it is true in the end and achieves a kind of renewed purity through the couple's rediscovery of each other.  The Winter's Tale is a fantasy, Shakespeare at his most optimistic, less concerned with a convincing vision of reality than with a fanciful vision of how things ought to be.