Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

We see instead rigidity, resolution, and the rejection of a restricted notion of a woman's place. Lady Macbeth is the strongest character in the play. From the first moment we see her she is resolute, apparently without moral reservation, and devastatingly scornful of her husband's inner struggles, which she equates with unman-liness.

as she repeatedly makes clear, she sees herself as the stronger, the dominant, the more conventionally “masculine” of the two.

The theme of killing the father, whether parricide or regicide, is everywhere in Macbeth. Parents killed by children, and also children killed by parents.

Macbeth is prospectively haunted by signs of blood, even before the murder, as “gouts of blood,” signs of the “bloody business” at hand, appear on the spectral dagger.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

2.2.58– 61

But by the third act, determined now on the murder of Banquo, Macbeth has detached the bloody hand from himself and made it an instrument of infernal darkness:

Duncan's principal symbols were light and fertility. In the sleepwalking scene these are reversed, so that we have not fertile blood, progeny, but spilt blood, death; not day but night; not sleep but wakefulness;

By framing his play about medieval Scotland with a mention of the healing touch of the English king, the playwright is able to underscore a crucial opposition. Macbeth's bloody hand brings death; Edward's holy hand brings life and health. Scotland is a land diseased and sick, needing a physic to purge it.

For Macbeth, whatever else it is, remains the sublimest and most “modern” of morality plays.

Antony and Cleopatra

Play 31

The curriculum of the Stratford grammar school where Shakespeare studied included Ovid's Metamorphoses, William Lily's Grammatica Latina, and Aesop's Fables, and even some moral philosophy (Cicero) and Roman classics (Sallust).

Plutarch's Parallel Lives suggested a way of reading history that did, indeed, look backward and forward at once.

History taught, and it also warned; the stories of yesterday's

heroes were models for conduct, statecraft, and martial prowess, but were also lessons about pride, vainglory, and the fleetingness of fame.

Shakespeare's magnificent baroque creation Antony and Cleopatra,

Is it a tragedy, the tragedy of Antony, or is it the greatest and most excessive of Shakespeare's history plays?

is the play about the end of the old order in Rome, and the coming of the new? Is it about a young, political Octavius Caesar who resembles Prince Hal in his cold calculation?

What is the relationship between love and war, and love and order, in Antony and Cleopatra?

At the outset, then, there is excess and there is paradox.

Antony is a heroic, historical figure—a man of epic abilities, a representative of the old order of giants, a man who could regain his place in history as a “triple pillar

of the world,” but who has at the present moment lost himself in dotage, sex, and infatuation. This is the Roman view. But the view from Egypt is very different, as we should expect.

True love is excess, and is not to be bounded.

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra is built on a contrast of antithetical places very similar to that of Greece and Troy in Troilus and Cressida. (The three love tragedies whose titles link the names of star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, have a great deal in common thematically: each expands the personal onto a larger stage of history and myth.)

Caesar is the spirit of Rome in this play: puritanical, efficient, bloodless.

Repeatedly, Egypt is imaged and established as a place of excess, of boundlessness in desire and will,

In fact, Cleopatra, casting about for recreation when Antony is

away, demonstrates at once the nature of Egyptian life and its changeability.

These are the entertainments of Egypt: sex, food, appetite, music, drinking, betrayal—and performance.

Like all quasi-magical or prophetic figures in these plays—the

the witches in Macbeth, for example, or the Fool in Lear—the Soothsayer may be understood as existing both as an independent character (he has lines; an actor plays the role) and as an aspect of Antony's conscience and consciousness, here warning him of dangers he partly comprehends but also resists.

All the attributes of Egypt are also attributes of its queen: fertility, excess, playing, omens, sex,

and appetite.

And yet this object of consummate art is, in the next breath, described by the same Enobarbus in terms of her shortcomings. In fact, her shortcomings are part of the paradox that makes her irresistible:

She makes hungry where most she satisfies. Cleopatra is more than

a woman, she is sexual appetite itself, she is beauty and charm. Even the priests regard her carnal desire as holy. And at the same time, Cleopatra is human weakness, pettiness, and frailty,

Her humanity, like her pettiness and her changeability, somehow increases rather than decreases her astonishing erotic power...

The story of Mars and Venus, the story of a war god enslaved by a love goddess, was a popular subject for Renaissance painters.

When Antony calls Cleopatra “the armourer of my heart,” and has her buckle on his armor for the ill-fated fight with Caesar, in which she will betray him, an early modern audience

might well think of this famous scenario of unmanning by love. More specifically, Shake- speare's audiences might also call to mind Helen's unbuckling of Hector in Troilus and Cressida:

The rough soldier Enobarbus is alarmed by this tendency on Antony's part, this power of Egypt to make the hero effeminate, subjugated to a woman.

O thy vile lady She has robbed me of my sword!

4.15.22–23

Hercules was sometimes imagined as a buffoon as well as a hero, because at one point in his “labors”

became enslaved to Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and was forced to dress like a woman and do women's work. Here the analogy is clear: both heroes made captive to powerful Eastern queens, emasculated in the public view.

also of the strongly held views among many political and religious thinkers of the time that women should not rule over men.

How does the play invite us to view Antony's choice? Are his soldiers right when they gossip about him at the beginning of the play—is this “dotage,” the infatuation of an old soldier for a bewitching siren?

Folly, or heroism? The crux of the play is embodied in this paradox, the essential paradox of Cleopatra's nature.

One of the unusual things about this play is the way in which its amorous stakes are mirrored in the oddness of its structure,

its sprawling dramatic shape. It is not usual to find notations in these plays like “act 3, scene 12” or “act 4, scene 14.”