Subjects:
In the first two acts of Antony and Cleopatra we are presented with the opposing cultures of mysterious, frivolous Egypt and ruthless, imperial Rome. Civil War has broken out, and there is discord both within the triumvirate and opposing camps. The intensity of Antony and Cleopatra’s love causes disharmony. A political marriage for Antony in Rome compounds the situation.
The play opens interrupting Philo and Demetrius mid-conversation and we are made aware of discord within Antony’s own camp. Philo’s remark ‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s / O’erflows the measure’ indicate that Antony’s adoration of Cleopatra is regarded as inappropriate and undignified. The use of imagery conveys the extent of their disgust; the once great warrior ‘is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy’s lust’. They have seen ‘The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool’. As their conversation resumes at the end of scene one, it is clear that disapproval of Antony’s conduct has spread to Rome:
That he approves the common liar, who
. . .
His vacancy with his voluptuousness,
Full surfeits and the dryness of his bones
Call on him for’t. Enobarbus boasts to Maecenas and Agrippa that in Egypt they ‘did sleep day out of countenance and made the night light with drinking’. Caesar confronts Antony about Lucius and Fulvia:
Your wife and brother
Made wars upon me, and their contestation
Was theme for you; and you were the word of war. ’
Antony’s encounter with the soothsayer forebodes the impending conflict between the two triumvirs.
Discord is embedded in Antony and Cleopatra’s tempestuous relationship. Lee notes that Cleopatra ‘sees him [Antony] only in relation to her need of him, ignoring the responsibilities that the world places on him’.
Caesar regards Antony’s conduct as degrading and holds Cleopatra in similar contempt:
…From Alexandria
This is the news: he fishes, he drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he;
Caesar’s anger at Antony’s inertia mounts as he rebukes Lepidus for speaking in his defence:
No way excuse his foils when we do bear
So great weight in his lightness. Her melodramatic language further emphasizes her insecurity: ‘O, never was there a queen / So mightily betrayed!’ The critic R.
Enobarbus is the first to predict discord in the political marriage between Antony and Octavia. Pompey envisages how he may benefit from the instability of their alliance:
Were’t not that we stand up against them all,
‘Twere pregnant they should square between themselves,
For they have entertained cause enough
To draw their swords;
When Antony and Caesar meet in Act Two, Scene Two the atmosphere between them is tense from the start. He had ‘neglected’ to act ‘when poisoned hours had bound me up / From mine own knowledge’. ’
He accuses Antony of breaking the article of their alliance by failing to aid Caesar when he was threatened. Caesar notes ‘for’t cannot be / We shall remain in friendship, our conditions / So diff’ring in their acts. Antony can only make feeble attempts at justifying himself. His indifference towards affairs of Rome is apparent as he dismisses a Roman messenger in scene one.
Essay's Topics
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