“This intrinsicate knot of life” in Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is a transitional play from his great tragedies to the late romances. In his last plays Shakespeare represents his expanded and comprehensive vision of life with his centrifugal images and expansive symbolism. Thematically this vision is dramatized by the achievement of the virtue of patience by his long-suffering and meandering sea-tossed characters. We can easily find out some thematic resemblance between the late medieval narrative poem, ‘Pearl’ and his romance plays. Both Antony and Cleopatra falls short at the brink of entering that happy paradise of reconciliation at the last moment. However, Shakespeare suggests their happy marriage in death, as did Romeo and Juliet. This after-life vision makes it difficult for us categorize generically both Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra in tragedies and comedies. The titular heroes and heroines in both plays are comically rash and impatient. Shakespeare’s experiment in tragicomedies is made possible by his understanding and detached observation of life as a “mingled yarn’ of some “intrinsicate knots” and entanglements. The apparent bipolarism in Antony and Cleopatra of Rome and Egypt, self-indulgence and military discipline, and the Tiber and the Nile, confounds itself into the final reconciliation of the “mighty opposites” and the vision of life in death and death in life at once. Shakespeare succeed in the play in alchemically transmuting his uncertain historical materials into a cosmic myth-making. The myth-making in his last phase is adumbrate in the play’s expanded spatio-temporal structure and images. “This capacity to correlate opposites” makes possible Shakespeare’s oblique criticism of the heroic honour and political powers that be.