"Antony and Cleopatra": Antony’s suicide

Antony and Cleopatra:Antony’s suicide

This extract concerns the suicide of Antony after his forces have been defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Actium. It discusses why Shakespeare makes it so difficult for Antony to do this, arguing that the indignity of the scene is a consequence of the devotion that Antony has earlier required from his men.

Antony, as we have seen, has not been good at steeling men for a long time now; making them weep is where he is strong. Eros is already well softened when Antony puts his awful request to him, and his initial reluctance is countered thus:

            Eros,

Wouldst thou be window’d in great Rome, and see

Thy master thus with pleach’d arms, bending down

His corrigible neck, his face subdued

To penetrative shame; whilst the wheel’d seat Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded His baseness that ensued?

There is a strange, rather fleshly vividness in Antony’s conjured image of himself and his shame here – ‘pleach’d arms’, ‘corrigible neck’, ‘face subdued to penetrative shame’. It is an effect partly of imagining the compassion that there is to be felt on his behalf by another, of his knowing perhaps too well what a devotion to his own person is like and where it is susceptible. We might pass over in silence the success with which Antony reverses what we normally mean by sympathetic imaginativeness. But the speech is, for its further purpose, a failure; he makes himself, for anyone who loves him – and who indeed doesn’t? – supremely unkillable…

Shakespeare might be plucking at our nerves when he has Antony botch his suicide, but there is nothing arbitrary about Antony’s inability to find anyone who will mercifully – it’s no longer a question of nobility – kill him. The excruciating indignities that attend his last hours are the price he pays for having made himself too much a man, too much a thing of emotion: for his followers an object of too piteous and reverential a love. Our moral sense easily accommodates the idea that penalties attach to hardness of heart; we are more reluctant to believe that nature also penalises its opposite. But could anything be more pointed than the preparedness of his guards to offer laments over a half-alive Antony, but not put an end to his pain?

First Guard	What’s the noise?
Antony	I have done my work ill, friends: O make an end
	Of what I have begun.
Second Guard	The star is fall’n.
First Guard	And time is at his period.
All	Alas, and woe!
Antony	Let him that loves me, strike me dead.
First Guard	Not I.
Second Guard	Nor I.
Third Guard	Nor any one.
	(Exeunt Guards)

The tributes and the tears that have flowed so freely through the play flow still; but their crazy inappropriateness here, their being the last things Antony now requires, their positive hindrance of what he does want, is given us with the sharp apparentness of something close to farce. Here is devotion indeed! Everyone, it seems, is too beautifully devoted to Antony to help him. ‘Let him that loves me, strike me dead’ – he might have fared better with an appeal to loyalties less warm and affections less intimate. As it is he could not have fared worse. There is more than just the prudence of the ordinary soldier in the frantic refusal and dispersal of the guards; they shy from Antony as from some untouchable. The murderous instincts that a Macbeth or Coriolanus calls up might strike us as paying, after all, a greater tribute. They certainly pay a more serviceable one. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword; he who lives by love enjoys the same justice but dies at the hands of a crueller antagonist.

From Howard Jacobson, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: Gentle Madam, No’, 1987. (First published as same  in 1978).