3 - Resisting Self-Erasure in Antony and Cleopatra

Summary

Abstract

This chapter analyzes tropes of negation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a text that interweaves the discourses of love and ecology. Shakespeare binds his romantic leads to their respective geo-political states, effectively grafting them onto the world. The diffusion of personae/ flesh into environment endorses ecological precepts but at the cost of annihilating the self. Ultimately, however, Antony and Cleopatra signals an important shift, anticipating the bounded, autonomous self more typically associated with the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, Antony and Cleopatra calls upon suicide to shore up the emerging conception of selfhood: the theatrics of death confer power on the aesthetic realm, in turn dampening the force of the abject. In this way, Shakespeare reimagines the self and disrupts the customary ecopolitics of tragedy.

Keywords: Abjection; ecocriticism; eco-self; indistinction; Shakespeare; self-erasure

“Men suicide to consolidate a reputation, women suicide to get a reputation.”

—Ceridwen Dovey

Dovey’s deliberate use of catachresis, the discordant transformation of “suicide” from noun to verb, highlights the purposive nature of the specified act. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–07) lends credence to Dovey’s observation, as suicide confers permanence, a lasting iconicity, on Cleopatra. The effect is muted vis-à-vis Antony, partly because dissolution stalks him throughout the play. Indeed, in the opening lines, Antony appears to be outside himself, dispossessed by love. According to Philo, Antony’s “dotage / O’erflows the measure,” and “His captain’s heart … reneges all temper” (1.1.1, 2, 6, 8). The word “heart” appears forty-six additional times, with this linguistic pattern cuing the play’s interest in exploring the unbalancing or fragmenting events of passion on selfhood. At times, Antony recognizes how love disempowers, as when he refers to Cleopatra as a “charm,” a “spell,” and a “witch,” to convey the sinister effect she has on him (4.12.19, 30, 47). Furthermore, the servant Eros attends Antony’s protracted, messy death, as if to confirm the latter’s surrender to love. Ultimately, however, Antony and Cleopatra makes an aggressive bid for the self, so it furthers the metamorphosis getting underway in Doctor Faustus.

To monitor the emerging self, this chapter revisits the tension between autonomy (separation from the world) and dissolution (fusion with the world); both concepts prove essential to early modern tragedy and are likewise of paramount concern in ecological discourse.