Binding the Void: The Erotics of Place in <em>Antony and Cleopatra</em>

Abstract

When leaves for Rome in act 1 of Shakespeare's play, Cleopatra left alone to indulge in a vision of him on his horse. She asks Charmian,Where think'st thou he Stands he, or sits he?Or does he walk? Or he on his horse?О horse, to weight of Antony!Do bravely, horse! For wot'st thou whom thou mov'st?The of this earth, armAnd burgonet of men. He's speaking now,Or murmuring Where's my serpent of old Nile?For so he calls me.(1.5.18-26)'Two things stand out in Cleopatra's daydream: first, its unmistakable eroticism, and second, its preoccupation with Antony's whereabouts. Its eroticism lies in Cleopatra's desire not simply to observe on his horse, but to become happy horse he mounts, to bear weight of Antony (1.5.20) herself.2 Cleopatra's fantasy palpably erotic- perhaps sodomi tical or submissive or bestial or idolatrous-it also manifestly placiai. She would have it that she can both be Antony's place and place him-that is, fix him in time and space (Ah, ha! You're caught! [2.5.16], she later dreams). Cleopatra's playfulness competes with her longing; it becomes clear that erotic self-indulgence contending with a compulsion to locate her lover. Her Where think'st thou he now? just one among many iterations of what we might call interrogative place deixis. At her entrance in 1.2, Cleopatra asks, Saw you my lord? and Was he not here? (1.2.79). Where he? (1.3.1) are her first words in following scene and then See he is (1.3.2). Even in her dream, Cleopatra imputes to an answering version of her recurring compulsion: Where's my serpent of old Nile? (1.5.25, emphasis mine). So compelling question of where for Cleopatra that she voices it in her fantasy of her lover's private murmurs.Of all murmurings that she could dream into mouth of her demi-Atlas (22), Cleopatra's where confirms our readiness to charge love with daunting task of anchoring or placing us in world. Often conceptualized through spatial schemas, love can create a sense of place but can also produce a profound anxiety about displacement, or what Edward Casey calls place-panic-the fear of being without a place and consequently lost in void of space. In Casey's philosophical history of place and space, he writes that the prospect of a strict void, of an utter no-place, felt to be intolerable. So intolerable, so undermining of personal or collective identity this prospect, that practices of placefixing and place-filling are in motion right away.3 The threat of a boundless, infinite void looms large for lovers whose affair constantly figured as larger than life. The language of infinity, permeability, and excess cued at every turn of Shakespeare's play, opening with image of a dotage that o'erflows measure (1.1.1-2). Perhaps this why Cleopatra concerned about boundaries from very start, when she instructs to specify precisely much (1.1.14) and then (1.1.16) he loves her. She, in turn, will set a how far to be beloved (1.1.16).4In Cleopatra's language of limits and longing for boundaries, I find evidence of play's larger investment in erotics of placiality. In this essay, I explore erotic implications of bounded place and of limitless space to show how act of placing one's lover-both metaphorically and physically, in fantasy and in reality-is a primary source of eros in and Cleopatra. I begin by exploring erotics of place, as opposed to space. A close examination of language of containment in Shakespeare's play reveals that bourn of bounded place gets its erotic charge from metaphor of sexual bondage, drawing as it does from formal and temporal features of masochism. When and Cleopatra emplace each other or become each other's place, they typically enfetter and embrace each other. …