Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Antony and Cleopatra both delights and bewilders with its extraordinary diversity. Classical mythology, biblical apocalypse and thematic insistence on the virtue of temperance meet in enlightening combinations and puzzling disjunctions. Critical analysis, precisely because it is analysis, tends to isolate one or two aspects of the play and to discuss them to the exclusion of others. Perhaps it is time to ask whether one should attempt a synthesis that makes some attempt to see the dominant motifs in the play in relation to each other: is there any way that we can begin to see this play whole? And, if we can, can we test our impressions against likely overall responses among members of Shakespeare's first audience? For if this play meant anything in particular when it was first performed, its mysteries will only be yielded up to those who are prepared to inquire what those particularities were. In short, what I am proposing here is the study of Antony and Cleopatra as a cultural artefact that can be reliably interpreted only in terms of the broad cultural context from which it emerged. Literary attempts to consider texts contextually have flourished in the last twenty years, but the dominant modes of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have tended to employ the relationship between text and context in order to demonstrate that each subversively deconstructs the other. In drama, subversions are frequently important because, as Mikhail Bakhtin and others have demonstrated, carnivalesque inversions of norms lie at the heart of the Western cultural experience in the theater.1 It is not always useful, however, to follow the pathways of subversive irony, anomaly, and cultural contradiction to the exclusion of what is cohesive. To be more specific, alternative readings of Shakespeare are valuable and to be welcomed as long as they admit that alternatives to the alternatives have at least equal validity.2