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Article Excerpt
WHEN OCTAVIUS CAESAR receives the news of Antony's suicide, at the end of act 5, scene 1 of Antony and Cleopatra, he invites his Council of War to
Go with me to my Tent, where you shall see How hardly I was drawne into this Warre, How calme and gentle I proceeded still In all my Writings. Go with me, and see What I can shew in this. (5.1.73-77) (1)
Octavius is anxious to furnish textual evidence that will support his account of his "calme and gentle" actions toward Antony and his reluctant entry into war against him. He is not alone in valuing how he will be viewed by posterity. Antony applauds the "Noblenesse in Record" (4.14.100) that suicide brings, and Cleopatra famously frets lest Rome's "quicke Comedians / Extemporally will stage vs," and, while still alive, she will be forced to witness "Some squeaking Cleopatra Boy my greatnesse / I'th' posture of a Whore" (5.2.215-16, 219-20). W. B. Worthen notes that "Antony and Cleopatra is, of course, centrally concerned with how events are written into narrative, transformed into history, literature, and myth"; (2) C. C. Barfoot has suggested that "the chief protagonists in Antony and Cleopatra are above all committed to fulfilling the destiny of their names," acutely aware "of how the future will regard them when they are entirely in the past"; (3) indeed, as Garrett Sullivan sums up, Antony and Cleopatra is "a play dominated by the retrospective characterization of people and events." (4)
In an important essay, Linda Charnes has demonstrated how, de spite their shared concern for posterity, the characters' approaches to posthumous reputation--and their success in achieving it--vary widely. While noting that "all the 'actors' in this play are obsessed with playing to reviewers near and far," she argues that "they are not equally in control of the effects of their performances" since Rome is "the play's 'original' center of the narrative imperative, of the incitement to discourse that drives imperialist historiography." In her reading the play "represents the ultimate triumph of Octavius, who will later sculpt himself into the Augustus of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid," writers who had a profound influence on Renaissance readers such as Shakespeare. Not only did he have "a monumental machinery of language at his disposal," but "[a]s Augustus Caesar, Octavius was to become chief executive of a massive discursive empire, the productions of which would be referred to again and again, from Dante to Pope, as models of literary, moral, and historical 'authority.'" (5)
The historical Octavius certainly provided for posterity, not only through his patronage of great writers, but also by leaving to the safekeeping of the Vestal Virgins "a catalogue of his achievements which he wished to be inscribed on bronze tablets and set up in front of his mausoleum"; in the sixteenth century, a copy of this text was found inscribed in the temple of Rome and Augustus in Ancyra in Galatia (modern Ankara), and fragments of the text were later found in Apollonia and Antioch in Pisidia, testifying to the emperor's success in disseminating his version of his life. (6) This emphasis on documentary culture chimes with the portrait of Octavius given in one of Shakespeare's sources, Sir Thomas North's Englishing of "The Life of Octavius Caesar Augustus" by the French Calvinist Simon Goulart (included in the 1603 edition of Plutarch's Lives). Goulart depicts Octavius as "learned in the liberall sciences, very eloquent, and desirous to learne," a bookworm for whom reading is a favorite and enthralling pursuit. Delighting in the great authors, he would plunder their works for "sentences teaching good maners," and "having written them out word by word, he gave out a copy of them to his familiars: and sent them about to the governours of provinces, and to the magistrates of ROME and of other cities." He was, Goulart reveals, "not curious to set himselfe out, as little caring to be shauen, as to weare long haire: and in stead of a looking-glasse, reading in his booke, or writing, even whilest the Barber was trimming of him." Even "in the middest of all his infinite affairs" while at war, "he did reade, he wrote, and made orations amongst his familiars." This was no sprezzatura performance, but a painstakingly careful and prepared campaign. Although he "had speech at commaundement, to propound or answer to any thing in the field," Octavius "never spake unto the Senate nor people, nor to his souldiers, but he had first written and premeditated that he would say unto them." In order not to "deceive his memory, or lose time in superfluous speech," the emperor "determined ever to write all that he would say" (Goulart claims he was "the first inventer" of this habit). No matter to whom he was talking--even his wife--"he would put that downe in his writing tables, because he would speake neither more nor lesse." (7)
For Shakespeare's Octavius similarly, the image he will present to posterity lies in "all my Writings." Charnes's account assumes a triumphalist narrative not only of Octavius's imperialism, but of the Renaissance humanist claims for the continuing dominance of Roman textual achievements. But, as I shall argue, the play's attitude to such a narrative is by no means secure: (8) while Charnes's argument may be a valid claim for the lasting success of Octavius's version of historiography into the Renaissance, it fails to address the complexities of the characters' multifarious bids for posterity in Antony and Cleopatra. To return to the specific incident of inviting his officers into his tent to view his writings: this moment, surely a crucial point in Octavius's propaganda campaign, (9) is taken directly from Plutarch's life of Antony:
Caesar [i.e., Octavius] hearing these newes [of Antony's death], straight withdrewe himselfe into a secret place of his tent, and there burst out with teares, lamenting his hard and miserable fortune, that had bene his friend and brother in law, his equall in the Empire, and companion with him in sundry great exploits and battels. Then he called for all his friends, and shewed them the letters Antonius had written to him, and his answers also sent him againe, during their quarrell and strife: and how fiercely and proudly the other answered him, to all just and reasonable matters he wrote unto him. (10)
But the play's adaptation of this passage seriously weakens the force of Octavius's appeal to his writings. Plutarch tells how Octavius produces "the letters Antonius had written to him," as well as "his answers also sent him againe," and depicts an ongoing, responsible epistolary exchange, as Antonius "fiercely and proudly ... answered ... all just and reasonable matters [Octavius] wrote unto him." In the play, however, we are promised only "all my Writings," only one side of a supposed correspondence. Moreover, on hearing the news, Shakespeare's Octavius does not retire to his tent to weep, but instead launches into his eulogy for Antony, only to interrupt himself:
Heare me good Friends, But I will tell you at some meeter Season, The businesse of this man lookes out of him, Wee'l heare him what he sayes. (5.1.48-51)
The interruption, "this man," turns out to be an "Aegyptian," his "businesse," a message from Cleopatra. Octavius sends the man back with assurances that he will not be "ungentle" to his prisoner (5.1.60), but is struck with the idea that Cleopatra might kill herself and sends Proculeius, Gallus, and Dolabella to prevent it; (11) only then does he issue his invitation to view his "Writings." The effect of this interruption is twofold: first, it hints at the likelihood of Cleopatra's suicide in the following scene; and second, it ensures--as Octavius dispatches his men on various missions--that the writings are presented to a sadly depleted Council, probably only numbering two, Agrippa and Maecenas. It betrays the fact that Octavius' letters are going to mean little to posterity compared with the iconic act of Cleopatra's suicide.
As I shall argue, this incident is just one of a series of moments when Octavius's textual bid for history is pitted against a non-textual bid by Cleopatra. Far from leading to Octavius's posthumous dominance, Antony and Cleopatra consistently challenges the grounds on which Roman historiography is to be built--Octavius's "Writings," his letters--and, in so doing, offers a different, and determinedly theatrical, challenge to the sway of Roman epistolary historiography.
It is, of course, a commonplace to read Antony and Cleopatra as a confrontation between two civilizations, west and east, Rome and Egypt, Caesar and Cleopatra. (12) In the words of John F. Danby, Shakespeare is writing "the vast containing opposites of Rome and Egypt, the World and the Flesh," (13) or as Maurice Charney puts it, "Rome and Egypt represent crucial moral choices, and they function as symbolic locales in a manner not unlike Henry James's Europe and America." (14) The play's imagery pits Rome against Egypt relentlessly: cold versus hot, rigour versus luxury, scarcity versus bounty, masculine versus feminine, political versus domestic, rational versus irrational, Attic versus Asiatic, virtus versus voluptas. (15) Rome takes a passive role in this battle of binaries, often suggested as the negative of Egypt, rather than being fully portrayed in its own right: Rome is not, simply because Egypt is, a place of pleasure, sensuality, sex, appetite, shifting moods, sudden violence, infinite--and destabilizing--variety. In these readings, Antony is torn between the two: though Roman-born, he is easily swayed by Egyptian pleasures--Danby memorably summarizes his choice as between "soldiering for a cynical Rome or whoring on furlough in reckless Egypt." (16) Recent criticism has successfully complicated this binary model, while still preserving its basic terms: we now see the Rome in Egypt and the Egypt in Rome, their complementarity, the specularity of the two cultures, the complex ways in which we are led to see one through the eyes of the other. (17) But an examination of the modes of communication used by the two cultures--letters, messages, messengers, the kinds of communication that by their very nature have to work across those cultures--provides us with a way of understanding not only the differences between Egypt and Rome, but also their points of contact, practical and ideological. (18) Antony and Cleopatra is a play overrun with messages and messengers, (19) and necessarily so. With its action spread across two continents, disparate events have to be reported, verbally or by letter, in order to provoke...
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