In the play, Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra’s speeches often seem like a translucent veneer, expressive, but only partly revealing the underlying raging sea of will and passion. Cleopatra is given to dramatics, and the great Queen of Egypt’s theatricality such an integral part of her that it becomes difficult to imagine her being any other way. Her enthusiasm, petulance, and self absorbed tendency towards psychological game playing accent her striking physicality (however that may be portrayed onstage). Her character has been written as one whose feelings run deep and who wears her proverbial emotions close to their skin. ‘Bigger than life’, people often say, which seems a fitting description for a famously alluring queen who has been lover to, and potentially the ruin of, both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Yet, it could well be that those powerful figures ruin themselves too, wielding power like a firebrand and seeking some moment of cool solace away from the hot torch of sweeping worldly power. They seem naturally drawn to this neriad of the Nile, the great river and sea goddess who rules over her own land. Defined by the location where a great river flows into the sea, Cleopatra represents such a personification of Egypt that the name becomes almost interchangeable with hers, with Egypt being mentioned 43 times in the play, and serving as Antony’s pet name for Cleopatra, as she and the land are not only interchangeable, but are arguably one and the same.
Caesar’s mistake, and Antony’s too, is that Cleopatra herself exudes her own kind of divine heat. Enobarbus famous description of her opens with, “The barge she sat in like a burnished throne/ Burned on the water” (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.201-2).* Although Enobarbus initially describes a kind of passionate and amorous heat, there is also great power in Cleopatra’s character beyond her allure:
I saw her once
(2.2.238-42)**
Hop forty paces through the public street
And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, pour breath forth.
With Cleopatra’s attendant divinity, it is no surprise that Antony, who rules a third of the world as part of the immensely powerful Triumvirate, cannot help but follow her. Beyond passionate considerations, beyond sexual attraction, Antony’s fascination remains acute and incurable. Even when Cleopatra, in speaking to Antony of his wife in Rome, says, “Let her not say ’tis I who keep you here; I have no power upon you; hers you are” (1.3.22-4), the audience can tell already that this is not the case.
When Maecenas says that Antony must leave Cleopatra, Enobarbus responds:
Never. He will not.
(A2.2.244-8)
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.
Cleopatra is a kind of fire unto herself. For all her manipulation, the divine fire within her seems to burn in spite of and beyond herself, touching, altering, assimilating, or consuming virtually everything in her proximity. The play combines power with power, and, more metaphorically, fire with fire, compounding these similars into a sort of rising conflagration in a way that even Octavius Caesar’s rising star cannot oppose. In a way similar to opposing fires that burn each other out, in the face of his attraction, even the powerful Antony cannot survive. When he hears that Cleopatra has died (although she has not really died, but only fostered the rumour to inflame Antony’s passionate sympathies for her), Antony fatally wounds himself, ultimately dying in Cleopatra’s arms.
Yet, even with Antony gone, the attachment remains. In a way, Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s Moby Dick of love. The play looks at the whale of love from all possible angles, from the most base sport, to the most divine and transcendent. The cetacean of human passion is dissected into bones, flesh, and spirit, even as love moves through the play on so many levels, and immortality, as mentioned in the title, figures into that.
With Antony dead by his own hand, and having been captured by Octavius Caesar, the Queen of Egypt seeks to follow him to avoid having Caesar parade her through the streets of Rome like a wild animal in a cage. Cleopatra says:
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me: now no more
The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call; I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life. So; have you done?
Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.(Kisses them. IRAS falls and dies)
(5.2.379-97)
Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desired. Dost thou lie still?
If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world
It is not worth leave-taking.
In this speech, in one sense, the immortal longings mean death. The individual who brings the poisonous Nile serpent to Cleopatra warns her that “his biting is immortal” (5.2.245-6). And yet, immortal means more as well, for Cleopatra speaks of reuniting with Antony, and of his praise of her nobile suicide. She also speaks of transformation, of being fire and air when all her baser elements are gone, suggesting an alchemical transcendence.
Cleopatra dresses for her death, calling for her robe and crown, a preparation that looks forward to more than merely leaving a regal looking corpse (which does not seem to be Cleopatra’s intent). She does cheat Octavius Caesar of his opportunity to parade her as captive through the streets of Rome, but the last words about death are reminiscent of lover, a stroke and pinch that comes in the face of a world unworthy of leave taking.
Critics speculate about the death of Iras, Cleopatra’s maidservant, who falls at her queen’s kiss. We have no specific note that Iras herself has yet been bitten by a snake, although some argue that this may be the likely case, and it is sometimes played this in production. The sudden death may also reaffirm Cleopatra’s own individual connection with divinity–that since the acknowledgement of death occupies the queen’s consciousness, dominating her will, intention, and being, then death may also occupy and act effortlessly on anything in her proximity.
In writing Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare was unlikely to have been thinking specifically about classical Egyptian concepts of an afterlife, but the Christian conceptions of an afterlife in early modern England would have offered ample fodder for that meaning of ‘immortal’ too. In that sense, Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ seem like a door to the great beyond, one in which our robe and crown might still be useful, one in which we still may meet our love and stay to feast, to live on in another, purer way, and one in which we might love again. So often in Shakespeare, immortality suggests a change into a different state. Instead of acting as a finite end, immortality offers an indication of potential transformation, of a transcendence of our earthly state.
In funerary rites, we often describe a person’s nobilities, praising their most admirable characteristics or accomplishments. We speak of them going on to a better place, and there is much of this in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra runs not to flee Octavius, but to meet her Antony, to receive that kiss “Which is my heaven to have” (5.2.302), as she describes it. Her last full exclamation is “O Antony” (311), making it clear that reunion remains the forefront of her mind and purpose. In the end, it is not one’s power or even one’s powerful character that endures. Neither the mighty Antony nor the nearly divine Cleopatra can survive their mortal tenure.
Yet, this play offers the strongest sense that, as much as both of those characters are defined by love, that the quality of love somehow survives in spite of individual endings. Melville’s white whale may be God or devil, and love may be divine, as much as it may bedevil us. The whale destroys what would threaten its perpetuity, dragging Ahab down into an unknown deep. Love remains more mysterious, and its eventual course can be more inexorable than that of the metaphysical whale. We can only hope that, in our lives, love may be so strong, if not similarly fatal. We may hope that our love, like Antony and Cleopatra’s, remains more solid and more durable than the very substance of our lives themselves, wherever those lives may lead.
*Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilders. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015. All citations in this post are from this edition.
**If we leave aside the argument (articulated by John Wilders in his Arden edition) about the two possible, and seemingly distinct interpretations of the last line here, this could also suggest both meanings: that Cleopatra, being breathless, still breathed, and that she exuded all the more power even when her mortal limitations were made evident. This singular incorporation of both potential senses of the line might seem more Shakespearean than either single interpretation of the line.