Antony and Cleopatra and the dramaturgy of shame

ABSTRACT

In William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is conceived of as a character acting in the context of a large-scale exposure to shame and shaming: by his Roman compatriots, enemies and friends alike, by his own estimate of his life in Egypt, and in the eyes of the audience who witness his failure to live up to a Roman code of military honour. Using examples from the critical reception dedicated to the issue of shame in Antony and Cleopatra, this essay argues that the play’s dramaturgy of placing this character in the field of shame increases the probability of readers and audiences accepting also the contents for which Antony is being shamed, contents based on a misogynistic, racialised, and homophobic understanding of masculinity. The play itself, however, offers some relief from these constructions in a second strand pursuing a dramaturgy not of shame but of attachment which opens the door to readings resistant to the dramaturgy of shame.

KEYWORDS:

• Shakespeare
• Antony and Cleopatra
• shame
• masculinity
• interpellation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All references are to the following edition: Shakespeare, William (1990). Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. David Bevington. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

2. So much so that critics have doubted just how ashamed he really is. Ewan Fernie for example thinks that this is not true shame but ‘shame performed’ (Fernie, 2002: 216).

3. These symptoms and avoidance strategies have been amply described by various schools of psychological and sociological inquiry into the phenomenon of shame, maybe nowhere in more detail than in Silvan Tomkins’s richly phenomenological evocation of shame in Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (2008). For further seminal studies, see also Wurmser (1981) and Lynd (1958). Specifically on gender and shame as well as male effeminacy or homosexuality and shame, see Lehtinen (1998), Bartky (1990), Halperin and Traub (2009), and of course the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, especially the contributions collected in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003).

4. For a comprehensive presentation of a critical tradition hostile to Cleopatra often to the point of misogyny (and racism), see Fitz (1977).

5. If we follow Tomkins, this aspect is central in that he sees shame as an affect designed to reduce a preexisting affect he calls ‘interest’. That is, for there to be shame, there must have been interest, and the existence of this interest is never fully reduced in the sense that the shame itself is testimony to its continuing power. Only in a state of affective indifference would shame have no purchase.

6. For a discussion of how affect in general can and is being used for political ends, though not using the example of early modern culture, see Ahmed (2014).

7. Arguably, this is a masculinity that is on its way to being supplanted by the more strategic, as it were Machiavellian politics of Octavius, who is the real representative of the new dispensation (see Dollimore, 2004: 204–15).

8. Fernie is also quick to insist on the serious threat of castration and sodomy behind the play’s word play about limp swords and penetrative emotions (Fernie, 2002: 211–15).

9. In this estimate, Fernie is not alone. For the vexed debate on the play’s generic location as a tragedy, see Deats (2005).

10. For a most thorough review of the various strands of criticism and stage history, including the pro-Rome and pro-Egypt strands, see Sara Munson Deats’ excellent review essay (Deats, 2005).

11. Deats’s own examples show that these trends persist very much beyond the 1970s, as we also saw with the example of Fernie as one of the play’s ‘moralistic commentators’.

12. The most influential voice here is Norman Rabkin’s (1981), who in a number of very influential readings, including a reading of Antony and Cleopatra, pursues the idea that Shakespeare’s plays work as trompe-l’oeils along the lines of the famous duck-rabbit invoked by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Gombrich.

13. See for example the quite funny scene in which Antony stomps up and down vowing that he ‘must be gone’, that Cleopatra is ‘cunning past man’s thought’ and ‘Would I had never seen her’, while Enobarbus reacts with amusement until Antony finally insists that he will have ‘no more light answers’ (1.2: 128–69).

14. I cannot agree with those for whom the scene in which Cleopatra receives Caesar’s emissary Thidias can be read in any other way than ironically. David Bevington, for example, thinks that Cleopatra’s answer to Thidias’ suggestion ‘[Caesar] knows that you embrace not Antony/As you did love, but as you feared him’ needs lengthy explanation and may emerge as ironic only in the hands of a good actress: ‘He is a god and knows/What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded,/But conquered merely’ (cf. Bevington’s footnote to 3.13: 62–63). But given Cleopatra’s aristocratic autonomy (and her pride in it) it seems clear that the very idea that there could be anything ‘mere’ about being conquered must be a bitter irony.

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Ingrid Hotz-Davies

Ingrid Hotz-Davies is professor for English literature and gender studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She specialises in Early Modern literature, women’s writing, and ‘queer’ literatures. Among her recent publications is a collection on The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics (2017) and much of her work is focused on the deployment of affect, specifically shame, in literature.