Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra

Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra Christopher Wortham 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 2 Temperance and the End of Time In the instance of Antony and Cleopatra, it is time, I think, to seek an understanding that makes sense of a culture's wholeness . England in the early Jacobean period was as deeply divided , as riven with intellectual factions, and as socially tense as in any other period. But these divisions existed within mental constructs powerful enough to contain them. At this time many of Shakespeare's plays found endorsement not only by being performed publicly under the aegis of the King's Men but also by being commanded for performance at court with a frequency that far exceeded that of Queen Elizabeth's reign.1 I shall not differentiate here between attitudes held in the community of ordinary people and those of the court culture surrounding James I. Shakespeare wrote to accommodate, or bridge, the two milieux since his plays of this time were for performance at the Globe and in the provinces as well as at court, though it is interesting, I believe, that Shakespeare was not always able to make the accommodation without textual alteration . There is reason to believe, for instance, that the discrepant Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear represent, respectively, performances at court and in the public theater.4 The dominance of the court at this time, especially for someone writing under its direct patronage, is reflected in Shakespeare's work, particularly between the years 1603 and 1607, when King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra were written—all plays reflecting Stuart ideology. However, in the case of Antony and Cleopatra there is no competing Quarto record of another performed text, as there is for King Lear, to indicate whether the First Folio text as we have received it is or is not substantially as it was given either at the Globe or at court; in this instance we can do no more than take the good intentions of the First Folio editors on trust. The cast of mind, or set of mental attitudes, which I seek to identify in relation to Antony and Cleopatra is best approached through what recent French historians have termed L'Histoire des mentalités.1* The term mentalité is not particularly felicitous in French and it...