In his essay on Antony and Cleopatra (as found in a collection entitled Love & Friendship) Allan Bloom proudly declares that Shakespeare “was the first philosopher of history” (297). Does this relegate Shakespeare to the role of a mere historian? Bloom reminds us that, contrary to popular historicist opinions today, Shakespeare’s collection of plays allows us to explore enduring questions in light of a particular time and place –he presents a history of permanence, rather than a suppression or subservience to prevailing winds.
According to Bloom, the most important distinction in Shakespearean drama exists between ancients and moderns. Shakespeare shares the Renaissance passion for a rebirth of antiquity and its understanding of Greek and Roman philosophy, politics, and art. But how should he speak to the moderns and can they be learned from? These were the kinds of questions posed by Shakespeare when at last the Italian Renaissance arrived in England. As Bloom notes, the central difference between ancients and moderns is Christianity, an unstoppable moral revolution which transformed ancient virtues into “splendid vices.”
“The two contrary moralities [classical and Christian] produced an extreme tension in the spirits of the most interesting men and women of this time and a perhaps productive conflict in the goals of nations… The Bible versus Aristotle’s Ethics, or Plato’s Republic and Plutarch’s heroes versus the prophets and the saints, is a choice that can be as alive to us as it was to Shakespeare. It may be true that Shakespeare presents his Greek and Roman heroes in modern dress on the stage, but they come equipped with ancient souls, which Shakespeare grasped in his profound readings of Plutarch and Homer as well as others. He understood them by imitating them, and in imitating them he allows us to understand them. In them we see the strengths and weaknesses of what is for us the most interesting and decisively different past” (298).
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (which is based on Plutarch’s Life of Antony) presents us with a very different kind of love than, say, Romeo and Juliet. The latter presents a small-town love affair between two callow youngsters, while the former shows two world historical figures acting on a stage that was for the first time the whole world. In Shakespeare’s day, Rome was regarded as an extraordinary political achievement, a four-hundred-year republic which was followed by hundreds of years of imperial rule, the legacy of which only ended in the 20th century when the last of the kaisers and the czars, or Caesars, were overthrown.
From the beginning of the play, the republic has been destroyed (as shown in Julius Caesar) and now the question of who will be the sole ruler becomes paramount. There is no dispute about the best form of government, just a question of which man has the resolve and ambition to rule the whole earth. “It is important to note that the battle of Actium, Octavius’s final victory over Antony, takes place just thirty-one years prior to the birth of Jesus and the new kind of empire connected with him that gradually took over the ground where the old kind of empire was encamped” (299).
At any rate, in the play Antony is torn between his duties in the triumvirate alongside Octavius contra his love for Cleopatra –he famously declares “Let Rome in Tiber melt!” In doing so, he trades the whole world for a woman (perhaps not unlike Paris in Homer’s Iliad). “This play pushes the political and the erotic imagination to their absolute extremes” (299). Unlike Plutarch’s contempt for Antony’s love, Shakespeare seduces us with flowery poetry –it is a less obscene play than Romeo and Juliet—and it overflows with the sweet scents of the exotic east, a product of Rome’s decadent empire (a reminder of the stark contrast with Coriolanus wherein bravery and continence are more highly regarded).
“This is a play that reminds us of the human beauty of antiquity and makes us regret the loss of it… this antiquity has the living presence of the great god Eros without the artificial imitation of it Rousseau and his Romantic followers tried to reinsert into the unerotic bourgeois world. There was within Christianity a terrible accusation leveled against this dethroned god, but even those like Machiavelli, who tried to restore this unity to man, to close the gap between the ought and the is, were pretty much willing to sacrifice the god rather than to reestablish the sacrifices made to him in antiquity… Shakespeare, as I contend and internal evidence strongly supports, understood Machiavelli very well and profited from that great man’s teaching… Antony and Cleopatra provides evidence for what caused him not to permit the simplification of man for the sake of political purposes. He obviously wants to promote political efficacy and love of glory, but, as in so many other things, he is dedicated to the phenomenon man. He looks all over in the best places in order to be able to describe that phenomenon. Antony and his destructive passion for Cleopatra are an important part of that phenomenon. Shakespeare reproduces both an austere concern for politics and a sympathy with eros that only Plato adumbrates in the enigmatic relation between the Republic and the Symposium, one apparently giving everything to politics and the other apparently giving everything to love” (300).
Plato understands the backbones of the human soul to be spiritedness (or the passion of the warrior) and eros (the passion of the lover). Antony partakes in both passions (two horses depicted in Plato’s Phaedrus) but they do not seem to work well for him. At this time, Rome is left with mere “bureaucratic regulation, rather than ruling, and sexual decadence rather than love” (301). Both warrior and lover are now more problematic when united in the soul of a single man. Antony marks the end of antiquity. Antony suffers Aristotelian immoderation which seems to affect his capacity to act well. Yet he is the only one in the play who loves (clear-eyed Enobarbus is sympathetic toward his passion, while Octavius is unerotic). His love comes from a perspective of distance from Rome and its greatness, and while it is distinct from a Christian viewpoint, both Antony and Paul share a similarly distant vantage point when looking upon Rome. “This tragedy is redolent with allusions to the secular revolution taking place at the moment when antiquity has reached its peak and modernity is aborning” (303). This comes amidst the arrival of soothsayers, prophecies, eunuchs, and Octavius a forthcoming time of universal peace. “At the climax, soldiers hear trumpets underground and say that they signal the departure of Antony’s god, Hercules. New gods, in no way affectionate toward Antony, will take Hercules’s place. Antony’s East is where the new religion will come after he fails, a part of the world full of miraculous possibilities” (303).
Antony’s strength has been tragically sapped by his love for Cleopatra. “He is typical of the late republic in his political criminality and his personal licentiousness. He behaves like an Olympian god, beyond the limits of the moral virtues. There is hardly a hero more impure for whom Shakespeare gives us any sympathy. Shakespeare depicts him as an extraordinary example of the classical morality of unswerving loyalty to friends and implacable hatred of enemies. Shakespeare’s dislike of moralism makes him capable of taking this antique type so seriously” (304). The brazenly sexual, adulterous affair of Antony and Cleopatra is nevertheless a sympathetic union (in spite of Antony’s overbearing, rebel wife Fulvia back in Rome). They are both driven to each other by ineluctable need, they must possess each other regardless of the consequences –“few men or women are capable of such selfish self-forgetting” (305). Bloom fondly notes: “What an interest in and taste for women Shakespeare had, giving us Juliet and Miranda at one end of the spectrum and Cleopatra at the other, with an astonishing variety in between!” (307).
Bloom wrestles with the ephemeral, voluptuous, and protean nature of Cleopatra, in contrast to the love of Antony, and the unerotic bureaucracy of Octavius: “I do not say that Shakespeare means Cleopatra to represent nature itself, but rather there is something here of the ancient appreciation of nature as the almost ineffable standard by which all that time and custom can do is measured. There is nothing in this view of nature to remind us of the abstract, teleological nature that pedants speak of, a nature enveloped in a cobweb of moralistic abstractions that strangle it. It is the wondrous foundation that provides us with those fundamental experiences that are truly ends in themselves and which are almost always forgotten in the lives of toiling mortals. Even the priests themselves must abandon their moralisms to conform to her infinite variety. It is this awareness of nature that I believe accounts for the extraordinary beauty of this play, which stands out among so many other beautiful plays” (309-310).
As the play progresses, Antony becomes hostage to fortune, listening to Cleopatra’s desire for war instead of Enobarbus’s pleas to avoid war. And when war seems inevitable, Enobarbus begs Antony to fight on land where he at least has the upper hand, but again Antony allows Cleopatra to make the fateful decision to fight at sea (the battle of Actium, or the “peak political moment” of the play) where unpredictable fortune reigns. In Athens, the movement from land forces to seafare during the Persian Wars introduced the tumultuous democracy, as the trend away from land warfare continued. And Bloom offers some remarkable insights into the character of Enobarbus, who “represents the classical view of reason as the governor of the passions not the handmaiden. The ancient view meant that the passions, none of them evil in themselves, are to be ruled and used for the sake of the good and the noble…At the risk of superficial schematization, I would say that the classical view was succeeded by a Christian one which believed that the passions are both irresistibly powerful and hopelessly corrupt and that reason is too weak and too deceptive an instrument to master them. They can be held in check only by fear, sense of sin, conscience, and guilt” (315). And modern Romantics elevate the passions above reason, as evidenced in the works of Romantic novelists which often portray the bourgeois as contemptible (excluding Jane Austen). However, Shakespeare’s sympathy with Antony’s erotic mania is more consistent with Socrates’s defense on behalf of eros in Phaedrus.
Antony’s death, which he believes to be akin to Cato’s suicide in the name of the republic, is actually a more sorrowful affair, and it marks the decline and terminus of the old world. “The old world is no longer viable; the new one is unbearable” (317-318). Antony’s suicide seems to be the last gasp of antiquity, wherein death for the sake honor was more important than the fear of sin. As Antony dies, he does not harbor the same deep moral concerns that either Macbeth or Othello face, but this ability to confront us with an image of the ancients as they understood themselves is a mark of Shakespeare’s true triumph with Antony and Cleopatra.
Bloom, Allan. Love & Friendship. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, (1993).
In the introduction to Love & Friendship, entitled “The Fall of Eros,” Bloom states: “This book is an attempt to recover the power, the danger, and the beauty of eros under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poetic writers.” In the book, Bloom includes essays on Rousseau, Stendhal, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Tolstoy, as well as Shakespeare, Montaigne, la Boetie, and Plato.