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16. Beyond Binarism: Eros/Death and Venus/Mars in Antony and Cleopatra and The Faerie Queene Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, like his earlier Venus and Adonis, is known to be generically mixed and even anomalous in the extent and degree to which it combines tragedy, comedy, and romance with lyric, allegory , myth, and history.1 This is the first of several analogies I would draw between Shakespeare’s play and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, that hobgoblin’s garland of epic, romance, lyric, allegory, myth, history, and more. The breaking of formal conventions beyond their generic variousness also connects these works. In Ania Loomba’s view, for example, the nonteleological form of Antony and Cleopatra resists closure, and in Margot Heinemann’s, this play refuses ‘‘a single historical or ethical center.’’2 Together, these de- fining characteristics correspond to what Jonathan Goldberg, quoting Spenser, has described as the ‘‘endlesse worke’’ of The Faerie Queene, an endlessness more readily associated with romance and historical narrative than with classic drama.3 Thoughout Spenser’s six books, refracting figures and events and reverberating words and phrases develop, modify, parody, or reverse perspectives and once stable-seeming points of reference.4 Like Spenser’s poem, Shakespeare’s play is also in good part about gender . It focally concerns one infinitely various female persona, a dramatized conception that can itself be seen as a variation on Spenser’s multiple, refracted female figures. Shakespeare’s leading male persona, again like Spenser ’s cast of refracting male figures, is also complementarily various to an extent less appreciated, I suspect, because harder to assimilate to still-conventional notions of gender. In my view, Antony and Cleopatra is also the pure embodiment of excess: by pure I mean ‘‘crystalline’’ or ‘‘distilled,’’ and ‘‘concentrated absolutely,’’ hence ‘‘conceptual.’’ Excess, as I use the term here, refuses limitation by the quotidian. Virtually by definition it inheres in passion and multiplicity, and, therefore, like the imagination itself, has its basis in earthly materials. Pure excess, itself oxymoronic, refuses categorization and centering, and the most relevant native antecedent of Shakespeare’s 239 240 Reading the Allegorical Intertext play that I see, besides the playwright’s own Venus and Adonis, is Spenser’s romance epic.  First to basics: dates and details pertaining to the plausibility of significant intertextual relations between Antony and Cleopatra and The Faerie Queene. Citations of, and allusions to, Spenser’s third Book in Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play written approximately when his Venus and Adonis was, establish Shakespeare’s close, imaginatively processed knowledge of Spenser’s 1590 volume. Evidence in King Lear, written relatively near but before Antony and Cleopatra, similarly establishes Shakespeare’s reading of Spenser’s second three books of 1596.5 In chapter 13 I have argued that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is ‘‘a seriocomic meditation on the landscape of desire and the kinds of figures it generates in Book III of The Faerie Queene,’’ and I have joined earlier critics in suggesting that Shakespeare’s Venus anticipates his Cleopatra. A brief recapitulation will prove useful. Aside from occasional overlaps in phrasing and imagery, the relationship between Venus and Adonis and The Faerie Queene mainly involves Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and his strikingly thematized , recurrently refracted figure of a female bending over a recumbent male. This silhouetted pietà includes not only Acrasia in Book II, but in Book III also Venus (twice), Cymoent, Belphoebe, Argante, and Britomart (twice). Perspectivism, versionality, and gender are memorably written into the refractions of this figure: variously, lover, mother, virago, enchantress or witch, queen, and numerous aspects of Venus—virgo, armata, genetrix, vulgaris . All these topics and forms, rather than simply the focal, refracting image of the pietà itself, bear most significantly on both Venus and Adonis and Antony and Cleopatra, although the pietà notably occurs in the epyllion, as it does in Cleopatra’s final scene with the mortally wounded Antony. The further relation of Antony and Cleopatra to Venus and Adonis is well attested in critical studies and ranges from specific verbal echoes and rhetorical motifs to character and theme. For example, W. B. C. Watkins notes the extensive connection between the memorably striking ‘‘jennet and courser incident’’ in the epyllion and Cleopatra’s imagining herself as the ‘‘happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony,’’ an equine image of passion variously recurrent in the play.6 Watkins also judges Antony’s and Cleopatra’s love, like Venus’, an ‘‘obsessive disease’’ before describing...

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