William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra While Mark Antony is a great general, one of the three triumvant, it

is indeed impossible to feel sympathy for him in his extreme "dotage"

for Cleopatra. He "fishes, drinks and wastes the lamps of night in

revel", hence destroying his own reputation, and even losing his

masculinity, and thus, respect.

In the opening scene of the play, even before Antony appears, he is

constituted by the ideological structure of the Roman world. Antony's

identity is discussed to be in a state of oscillation: "This dotage of

our general's o'erflows the measure." The "measure" spoken of here

refers to a limit that describes the proper standard of Roman

identity. Deviation from this identity is what alarms the Roman

audience (I.e. Philo and Demetrius). Right from the start, in Philo's

opening speech, we learn that Antony's heart refuses all

self-restraint. His desire is excessive, producing a transformation

from a "pillar of the world" -- a firm bearer of the Roman senate,

likened to "Mars", god of war, clad in armour -- "into a strumpet's

fool."

Antony insists that the measure of his reputation defines his very

identity: "If I lose mine honour, I lose myself". Yet as Demetrius and

Philo speak from within the ideological structure, they cast a

censorious look at Antony "Take but good note…Behold and see". Taking

"note" might mean to make a written record; transliterating reputation

according to the visual evidence beheld. Romean spectatorship measure

identity by the relation between visual performance and ve...

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...s resonates.

Caesar, after describing some of Antony's pleasurable immoderations,

says that he "is not more manlike than Cleopatra,; nor the Queen of

Ptolomy more womanly than he." Cleopatra recalls of the time, when she

"drunk him to his bed; Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I

wore his sword Philippan." Consequently, Antony is presented in

several emasculated ways - as a eunuch, a pleasure-seeking boy, and

cross-dressed as a woman.

As a result of all these dynamics, the audience's deference to him is

supplanted with disgust, that such a great man could allow himself to

degenerate to such a position, of losing his identity and replacing it

with an ineffectual one. As such, the disgust disallows the audience

to generate any feelings of sympathy towards him, proving the

statement given to be accurate.