LOVE, LOSS and MOURNING in SHAKESPEARE’s ANTHONY
and CLEOPATRA
I am going to present some thoughts on this moving and enthralling play
with its rich imagery, sensual language and the memorable verse that has
been described as ‘linguistically gorgeous’ with at its centre the
passionate and ultimately destructive relationship between Anthony and
Cleopatra – the tragically human on-off affair between Anthony and his
‘Egyptian dish’. I’ll be making some links with the themes and ideas
within the play and Andrew Hilton’s production, which anticipate Philip
Stokoe’s thoughts on the underlying relationship between these two
legends and the difficulties they have in coming together to form an
intimate adult relationship.
In my researches I came across a number of views and reflections on
Shakespeare’s play, various perspectives and wide ranging
interpretations. For example A. P. Reimer in his book ‘A Reading of
Shakespeare’s “Anthony and Cleopatra” ‘suggests that it can be read
either ‘as the fall of a great general, betrayed in his dotage by a
treacherous strumpet’, that is, a man of great capacities, courageous and
noble who in his humanity succumbed to Cleopatra, the treacherous
temptress or else (very differently) it can be viewed as a celebration of
transcendental love’.
However, my thoughts about the relationship between the two lovers, as
we get to know them through Shakespeare’s words and the action of the
play, are perhaps a bit more down to earth: as a drama involving two
people with extravagant feelings and extravagant lives for whom the
move to a more settled state, a mature intimate adult relationship, is
compromised not so much by the political exigencies, as the underlying
unconscious aspects of their personalities, in particular a mutual difficulty
with mourning, the capacity to manage what has to be relinquished and
lost, including the loss of hopes, power and position, as well as of
significant people.
I’m suggesting that the unfolding political events that Cleopatra and her
lover are drawn into rather than being responsible for, fit with the
impossibility of coming together, which has its origins in the underlying
unconscious difficulties within Anthony and Cleopatra’s characters; two
people passionately involved with each other, who cannot bear to be
apart, but for whom the reality of being together is psychically as well as
politically unobtainable; exceptional people with an unexceptional
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problem, struggling for permanence, permanence that for these lovers is
only possible in death.
We see that Anthony, an already fallen man, is in thrall to Cleopatra,
Cleopatra is besotted with Anthony, and that these are two people who
can neither live without each other nor live together. A key aspect of the
play, which I think Philip will expand on later.
So one question for us to consider might then be, what is the evidence
from the play that might support this supposition and also, does Andrew’s
production and the performances we’ve seen here at the Tobacco Factory
reflect this or a different perspective?
Of course Anthony and Cleopatra are players on a world stage and the
struggle for power, and their feelings for each other, are entwined. They
are conscious of their legendary status. Two larger than life figures,
totally absorbed with each other, as we see from the violence of their
frequent quarrels and the extravagant (and of course poetically wondrous)
language that they use to express their feelings for each other.
We as the audience are caught up as spectators curious and excited by
this very public affair, wondering what is going on as Enobarbus helps us
to keep track. In the ‘barge’ speech he conjures up for Agrippa and
Maecenas, and of course us, Anthony’s first vision of Cleopatra and the
Egyptian world he is to so totally succumb to –
‘I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.’
Act 2. 2. 200-207
Today it is in the pages of magazines like Heat Magazine and Hello that
the private affairs of public couples are endlessly aired fuelling a public
fascination. Jordan and Pete, Posh and Becks – it goes on. For those of us
who work clinically we are also aware that in social service offices and
therapy rooms couples caught up with the drama of their relationships,
who find it difficult either to be together or apart, come to attention, with
their children, like the affairs of state largely out of mind. Cleopatra and
Anthony too, like these couples, are unable to keep hold of thoughts of
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their own babies, their children, who we hear of only briefly later in the
play.
As we have seen the action of the play spans several years and moves
rapidly from place to place, from Alexandria, Rome, Sicily, Actium and
Athens and back to Rome and Egypt leaving us as the audience trying to
catch up with ‘where the action is’, left wondering – there is concretely
no settled state, no sense of constancy. This sense of unsettledness
resonates with the state of mind of both Anthony and Cleopatra, and the
relationship between them and we see very vividly the oscillations in
thought and mood within, and between, the lovers in the performances.
But whilst this compelling couple appear besotted with each other, as has
been pointed out they seldom express love in the present but rather
remembered from the past, and always as an ideal –
‘Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven’
Act 1. 3. 36-8
These thoughts are not original and again I think the Shakespearean
scholar A. P. Reimer is able to capture succinctly the dilemma of the
central characters. He points out that when Anthony renounces Cleopatra
and returns to Rome, he finds that his position cannot be sustained as
easily as he thought and that ‘Throughout the play she (Cleopatra)
struggles to fix Anthony firmly in her ‘strong toil of grace’, to keep him
captive yet not passive, still the imperial Anthony who yearns for a world
of action and power. But once he is trapped this emotional satisfaction is
lost. Whenever he is by her side, she mocks and torments him: whenever
she is assured of his loyalty, she instinctively rejects him, in a sense
driving him back to Rome.’ For example Cleopatra goads Anthony
saying ‘What, says the married woman you may go?
Would she had never given you leave to come!
Let her not say ‘tis I that keep you here.
I have no power upon you; hers you are.’
Act 1.3.21-25
At the beginning of the play Anthony has neglected his military duties
and is indulging himself in Egypt at the court of Cleopatra, and in
Andrew’s production our first impression is of this timeless, indolent
feminine world of Shakespeare’s imagination, a place for private passion
and desire, full of enticements, which contrasts with the disciplined world
of Rome.
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Philo speaks of this ‘dotage of our general’s’ which in Rome is viewed as
scandalous ‘His captain’s heart.......is become the bellows and the fan
(arousing and satisfying) to cool a gipsy’s lust....The triple pillar of the
world transformed into a strumpet’s fool.’ Act 1.1. 1,6,12,13 So
Anthony’s former greatness is contrasted with his present decay and we
have a picture of a man in conflict between the Egyptian and Roman
aspects of himself and with his external relationships. During the course
of the play we are to witness Anthony’s painfully increasing isolation.
Meanwhile, however, angry and concerned Octavius wants Anthony back
in Rome to help deal with the threat of rebellion from Pompey while the
allure of his ‘gipsy’ is pulling Anthony in the opposite direction.
(Remembering that in England in the 16th century gipsies were thought
to have come from Egypt and ‘gipsy’ was also a contemptuous term for a
promiscuous woman.)
In the following scene the news of the death of Fulvia, Anthony’s wife,
the event that precipitates Anthony’s return to Rome, is broken to him.
And so at the very beginning of the play we are concerned with death and
its consequences, and we observe Anthony’s response to this loss. Can he
register what this loss means to him personally? Certainly he seems to
return guiltily to Rome, and a Roman part of his mind, apparently
avoiding the intense and disturbing emotions that the opportunity to be
more fully involved with Cleopatra may have stirred up.
Anthony, full of self reproach speaking of Fulvia says –
‘There’s a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.
What our contempts doth often hurl from us
We wish it ours again.’
Here Anthony expresses the wish that he had kept those things which he
had thrown away in contempt. And in the same conscience stricken vein
goes on ‘She’s good, being gone.
The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.’
And in this moment too there is a sense of Anthony’s guilt and regret
together with some awareness of the destructive course he has been on ‘I must from this enchanting queen break off.
Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,
My idleness doth hatch.’
Act 1. 2. 129-37
However Anthony’s return to Rome and the Roman world is at the
expense of any lasting capacity to stay in touch with his feelings about
the meaning for him of Fulvia’s death, his loss of power and status and
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his choice to leave Egypt and Cleopatra. The lovers’ exchanges before
Anthony leaves for Rome are more serious in tone but end with the idea,
expressed by Anthony, that although Anthony and Cleopatra are to be
separated physically they will remain united spiritually, a retreat to
another imaginary and idealised world –
‘Our separation so abides and flies
That thou, residing here, goes yet with me,
And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee.’
Act 1. 4. 104-6
Anthony cannot think about what giving up his place at Cleopatra’s side
involves, he cannot mourn the loss of his Egyptian world, the loss of the
idyll that he and Cleopatra have shared and he pre-empts the envious and
jealous feelings that moving away from his Egyptian queen give rise to
with recourse to fantasy. For Cleopatra this move to Rome and its
associations is an unforgiveable betrayal and she has no internal resources
to manage the loss of her exclusive place in Anthony’s mind.
Being in an intimate relationship involves bearing the difficult feelings of
envy, love, hate and dependence and managing the loss and
disillusionment associated with coming to terms with the discrepancies
between the idealized love object and the actual characteristics of a
partner, in order to be able to attain lasting contentment. In his paper ‘The
Aim of Psycho-Analysis’ the psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle
(drawing on the work of Melanie Klein) is concerned with the importance
of the internalization of the first good object, the good breast, and the
capacity to mourn to the favourable development of the personality.
Quote ‘...the capacity to mourn, or pine for a loss, and the capacity to
remember the lost object are inseparably linked. Without the memory
there can be no mourning, and without the mourning there can be no
memory.’
Later in the paper he expands on the significance of the first good object
‘Where there has been a favourable development, and the concept of the
first good object is well established, together with the capacity to
remember it with love, there is far less difficulty in being able to
recognize the parental relation as an example of the innate preconception
of coitus as a supremely creative act’.......he goes on ‘But where the
development has been unfavourable, the mis-conception of intercourse as
a by-product of fantasies of total projective identification will remain as a
nodal point for the development of every form of perversion and insanity’
- emphasising that early difficulties in the beginning of linking up with an
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object impede the necessary development of the capacity to become part
of a couple.
Of course Shakespeare’s play doesn’t give us any direct evidence
concerning the external figures in the early environment of Anthony and
Cleopatra, or of their internal objects, and he also omits from the drama
some of the more disturbing aspects of the historic lovers’ characters,
including their cruelty and murderousness, their ‘perversion and
insanity’. However anyone who saw the recent BBC programme
‘Cleopatra, Portrait of a Killer’ will be aware of some of the known and
inferred aspects of the historic Cleopatra’s early environment; the
murderous queen of the Nile whose own mother’s origins are uncertain
and who went on, in keeping with her imperial status, to marry her
brothers, the boy kings Ptolemy XIII and XIV, the ‘Queen of Ptolemy’
Act 1.4.6 that Caesar refers to, and who later, in order to guard her own
self interest and secure her place on the throne of Egypt, also orders Mark
Anthony to instigate the murder of her sister Arsinoe.
In Shakespeare’s play we do nevertheless see evidence of a particular sort
of insanity. The lovers seem largely preoccupied with the narcissistic
satisfactions of their relationship, excited by their involvement with each
other, living a life of luxury and self indulgence but unable to face reality
– personally and politically. Cleopatra, of whom it is said that ‘th’air,
which, but for vacancy, had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too, and made a
gap in nature.’ Act 2. 2. 226 is in love with Anthony the invincible
general not a defeated Anthony. Anthony is captivated by the goddess of
the Nile, not the Cleopatra who will be a captive of Octavius. A couple
who are only on stage briefly alone together, and who seem in love with
the idea of being in a relationship whilst avoiding the fears of actually
being in a permanent relationship, with all the anxieties that becoming
part of a couple psychically involves. This excited, but defensive, way of
relating helps Anthony and Cleopatra to avoid the task of facing reality
and loss, of becoming separate individuals in themselves, of reclaiming
parts of themselves from each other, rather than resorting to excessive
projection into each other.
It is evident that Cleopatra exercises tremendous power over Anthony
who we see in the play as a flawed and reduced man, not the once
powerful, outstanding noble figure that is spoken of. Anthony was cruel
and irresponsible, but by involving himself in the narcissistic world of his
relationship with Cleopatra, their oneness serves to deplete his character,
but also enables him to avoid owning the more disturbing destructive
aspects of his personality.
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If we understand normal mourning as a conscious response to facing an
actual loss or disappointment, with all the painful emotional work that is
involved, and pathological mourning as more to do with the unconscious,
the situation in which the individual ‘cannot consciously perceive what he
has lost’, a state of being associated with a profound diminution in selfesteem, described by Freud in his classic paper ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ it is also possible to be mindful of the different conscious
and unconscious manoeuvres, including denial, idealization, and the use
of manic defences, that are employed to avoid the painful work of
mourning.
In normal mourning, when it is possible to acknowledge the loss, there
can be a working through of the experience over time, and consequent
enrichment of the mourner who, having given up the lost object, is then
available for new relationships and new possibilities. However, the
capacity to mourn is very dependent on the mother’s ability to handle
separation with care, to wean her baby gently and to bear the associated
feelings that are stirred up, such as anger, guilt and sadness. When the
mother is either emotionally absent, or unable to bear sadness, the baby
has an experience which leaves them with a sense that such feelings are
unbearable and cannot be worked through, giving rise to phantasies about
the reasons for the loss which are then a source of further anxiety.
Depressive anxieties about damaging or exhausting the object are largely
absent from the play. However, persecutory fears that may leave the baby
feeling unloved or unwanted, do find an echo in Cleopatra’s feelings
about what goes on in Rome, and in the Roman part of Anthony’s mind
from which Cleopatra feels excluded –
‘He was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden
A Roman thought hath struck him.’
Act 1.2.87
For Cleopatra it is thoughts of Rome, and early in the play thoughts and
reminders of Fulvia, Anthony’s wife, her perceived rival, that stir up
Cleopatra’s jealousy and possessiveness. ‘Fulvia perchance is angry’ Act
1.1.21 or we might imagine Cleopatra is angry, to be reminded of Fulvia,
Rome and those aspects of Anthony’s life and loves she is excluded from.
So what do we observe when these legends are faced with loss? The play
is framed by the death of Fulvia, and Anthony’s reactions to this event at
the beginning of the play, which I’ve touched on, and at the end of the
play, Cleopatra’s lengthy preparations for her own dramatic death by
suicide, following Anthony’s death, the humiliation of her defeat at sea
and the realisation that she will not again be able to ‘pack cards with
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Caesar’. Act 4.14.19 In turn Anthony and Cleopatra are confronted with
real external loss with personal and political implications, but ‘cannot
(repeating Freud’s words) consciously perceive what he (they) has lost’.
As Anthony lies dying Cleopatra speaks movingly of the meaning of his
loss to her –
‘Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty?..........the odds is gone
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.’
Act 4. 15. 63-69
However after Anthony’s death this depth of feeling is not sustained,
perhaps partly out of guilt since Cleopatra’s own actions played a part in
Anthony’s death. She then gives some of her most passionate speeches
about her lover pointing to the fantasy that sustained their relationship.
Her vision of Anthony is one we never see in the play, but for a while we
are transported into another world, away from the humiliation that awaits
Cleopatra in Rome, and instead we are captivated by the Anthony of
Cleopatra’s imagination ‘I dreamt there was an emperor Anthony.’
Act 5.2.75
‘His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder.....’
Act 5.2. 81-85
A vision that Cleopatra wants to acquire and incorporate. Cleopatra then
turns to Dolabella
‘Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?’
Dolabella replies ‘Gentle madam, no.’
Act 5.2.91-93
At this point Cleopatra is confronted with, but she is unable to bear, the
truth of Dolabella’s words, to face reality and to mourn the idealised
relationship of her imaginings. Faced with loss of power and haunted by
the possibility of her humiliation in Rome, and life under Roman rule, she
has recourse to fantasy or death 8
‘Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring!’
Act 5.2. 56-59
So, with a determination to die, at the end of the play Cleopatra stage
manages her own death (which the historic queen had rehearsed many
times using slaves as understudies) and, wearing her crown and dressed in
her queenly robes to help confirm her belief that she is a triumphant, not a
defeated woman, speaks with a magnificent outpouring of emotion of the
‘Immortal longings in me.......and later ‘Husband, I come! Now to that
name my courage prove my title!’ Act 5. 2. 280, 286.
However, Cleopatra has died in near-triumph, not triumph. The
impossibility of sustaining her precarious internal state, since she is
unable to face the loss of her idealized relationship with Anthony, and her
loss of pride and power, as well as the impossibility of maintaining her
place in the external world have exhausted her.
Quoting Reimer ‘the diadem reminds us that she has not attained full
perfection…..the magnificence of Cleopatra’s death is already a thing of
the past, a fragment of the memory. …the fate of the great lovers is
virtually forgotten and seems unimportant. But as she approaches death
she has become nearer to becoming ‘a gipsy in a new sense, and with a
deeper meaning, an outcast of society, hunted and finally destroyed.’
After Cleopatra’s death the world continues but the play soon ends. Egypt
is lost to the Roman world, to Octavius Caesar’s empire and we are, I
think, reminded of the ‘Hello magazine’ part of our minds which has
hunted Cleopatra and her lover.
The lovers have been unable to mourn the idea that they are the only two
in the world and Cleopatra has retreated to an illusion of immortality
which we are subsequently moved and affected by, since the plight of
Anthony and his queen is one we know about, the difficult task of facing
reality, internal and external, and the painful work of mourning.
Ann Morris
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