Time and timelessness in "Antony and Cleopatra"

Time and timelessness in Antony and Cleopatra

Tony Tanner discusses the different ideas of time that we get from Antony and Cleopatra. In Egypt, time often seems suspended – or perhaps the leading characters wish it were so. In the wider world, ruled by Rome, historical events hurry onwards. He discusses how Roman ideas of time and an Egyptian state of timelessness clash in the play.

There is a great stress on ‘time’ in Antony and Cleopatra, and it is well to remember that this is a history play. The outcome of the events it dramatized was the so-called ‘Augustan peace’, during which Christ was born and the pagan Empire – which Virgil called the Empire without end – was established, according to later writers, as a divine preparation for the Christian Empire. Octavius Caesar, himself a pagan, unknowingly laid the way for the True City, so in Christian terms the struggles and battles in the play affect, not merely his society, but all human society, the orbis terrae of Augustine. The events of the play are indeed of ‘world’ importance – world-shattering, world-remaking (the word ‘world’ occurs at least forty-five times in the play). By the same token, an earlier pagan world is being silenced, extinguished, and history – as the audience would know – is on Caesar’s side. He is in time with Time. Antony and Cleopatra are out of time, in more than one sense. Thus, at the beginning, when Antony decides that he must return to Rome, Cleopatra silences his apologies, referring to the time-out-of-time when they were together – ‘Eternity was in our lips and eyes’ – while Antony, thinking Romanly for the moment, refers to ‘the strong necessity of time’. Egypt, in this play, is a timeless present, which is to say an Eternity.

It can hardly escape our attention that the play is full of messengers from the start – two in the first scene, some thirty-five in all, with nearly every scene having a messenger of some kind. The play itself is extremely episodic, with some forty-two scenes (no scene breaks at all in the Folio), which makes for a very rapid sequence of change of place. There are nearly two hundred entrances and exits, all contributing to what Dr Johnson called the ‘continual hurry’ and ‘quick succession’ of events, which ‘call the mind forward without intermission’. This can all be interpreted in different ways, but it certainly depicts a world in constant movement, in which time and place move and change so quickly that the whole world seems in a ‘hurry’ and in a state of flux – fluid, melting, re-forming. Messengers and messages bring information from the outside – they are interruptions, irruptions, precipitants of change. History is going on, and on, and at an ever accelerating pace. Yet the remarkable thing is that time seems somehow to stand still in Egypt – both within and without the reach of ‘messages’; both vulnerable to history yet outside it. When Antony is away, Cleopatra simply wants to ‘sleep out this great gap of time’ (I, v, 6). (When she first approaches Antony in her ‘barge’, the city goes out to see her, leaving Antony alone ‘Whistling to th’ air; which, but for vacancy,/Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,/And made a gap in nature’ – II, ii, 222–4. It is as if Cleopatra creates ‘gaps’ – gaps in time, gaps in nature.) For Rome, Egypt represents a great waste of time while the ‘business’ of history is going on. The word ‘business’, more often than not, carries pejorative connotations in Shakespeare. It is notable that Caesar interrupts his formulaic (as I hear it), elegiac ‘praise’ of the dead Antony because of – a messenger: ‘The business of this man looks out of him;/ We’ll hear him what he says’ (V, i, 5o: my italics). He never completes the speech. Conversely, Cleopatra interrupts history to complete her poetic re-creation of Antony – from which no ‘business’ can distract her. From the Egyptian perspective, history itself is a ‘gap of time’, and Cleopatra, though growing physically older (‘wrinkled deep in time’), seems to linger in Eternity, waiting for Antony to return from the trivial – though world-shattering – distractions of history.

From Tony Tanner, in Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1993.