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Summary: Act 4: Scene 9
Octavius’s sentries discuss the coming battle as Enobarbus berates himself nearby. Unaware that he is being watched, Enobarbus rails against his life, wishing for its end and hoping that history will mark him as a traitor and a fugitive. After he collapses, the sentries decide to rouse him but discover that he has died. Because he is an important man, they bear his body to their camp.
Read a translation of Act 4: Scene 9.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 10
Antony determines that Octavius means to attack him by sea and declares himself ready. He wishes his enemy were equipped to fight in fire or air, swearing he would meet him in those places if he could.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 11
Octavius holds his armies back, preparing to attack Antony at sea.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 12
Anthony has gone with Scarus to watch the naval battle. Scarus, in an aside, condemns Cleopatra’s fleet as weak, and laments that the soothsayers refuse to share their knowledge regarding the battle’s outcome. Antony watches as the Egyptian fleet betrays him and defects to Octavius. Realizing his predicament, Antony commands Scarus to order his army to flee. Alone, the general blames Cleopatra as a deadly enchantress who has beguiled him to a state of absolute loss. When the queen enters, Antony drives her away, threatening to kill her for her betrayal.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 13
Cleopatra returns to her maids with tales of Antony’s murderous rage. Charmian suggests that her mistress lock herself in a monument and send Antony word that she has killed herself, to quell his anger. Abiding by the plan, Cleopatra sends the eunuch Mardian to deliver the news to Antony and asks him to return with word of her lover’s reaction.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 14
Antony arms himself to kill his lover, telling Eros that he no longer knows who he is now that Cleopatra’s love has proven false. Mardian arrives with his false report of the queen’s death, adding that her last words were “Antony, most noble Antony!” (4.14.37). Antony tells Eros to remove his armor. Overcome with remorse, he declares that he will join Cleopatra in death and beg her forgiveness for thinking him false. He asks Eros to kill him. Horrified, Eros refuses, but Antony reminds him of the pledge he made long ago to follow even Antony’s most extreme wishes. Eros relents. He prepares to stab Antony but then stabs himself instead. Antony praises his soldier’s honor and says he must learn from this example. He falls on his own sword but fails to kill himself. A group of guardsmen refuses to finish the task, and Diomedes, a servant of Cleopatra, reports that the queen is alive and well. It is too late, however, to save Antony’s life. Dying, Antony commands his guards to bear his body to Cleopatra.
Summary: Act 4: Scene 15
From atop the monument with her maids, Charmian and Iras, Cleopatra declares that she will never leave her hiding place. Diomedes appears below and calls up to her that Antony’s guard has brought the wounded Antony. The lovers call to one another. Antony says that he is dying and wishes to embrace her one last time. She replies that she dares not come down from her monument, lest she be captured by Octavius and paraded through the streets as a prisoner of war. Instead, Cleopatra asks the soldiers to heave Antony up to her, which they do. Antony advises the queen to cast herself upon Octavius’s mercy, trusting in the honesty of Octavius’s friend Proculeius. He then recalls his own greatness and reflects on the righteousness of his death: “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (4.16.66–67). He dies, and Cleopatra curses the world. Without Antony, she feels the meaning drain from her life. After her maids revive her from a fainting spell, Cleopatra decides that they must bury Antony in Roman fashion and then help her seek her own death.
Read a translation of Act 4: Scene 15.
Analysis: Act 4: Scenes 9–15
After the jubilant victory of the first half of act 4, the tides of war turn against Antony, and in the second half of act 4 the deaths begin to rack up. Aside from those lost in battle, the first major character to die is Enobarbus. Having already recognized the grave error he made in abandoning Antony’s service, he now seeks a way out of his new predicament. He sees death as the only possible escape, and in his despair, he seems almost to will himself to death. Indeed, Shakespeare neglects to indicate the specific cause of Enobarbus’s demise, making it appear as though the intensity of his grief is sufficient to kill him: “Throw my heart / Against the flint and hardness of my fault, / Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder / And finish all foul thoughts” (4.9.18–20).
Once the second sea battle is lost, the play belongs to Antony until his death—Cleopatra recedes, as does Octavius. In the scenes leading up to his death, Antony’s mixed feelings of betrayal, regret, and, ultimately, love leave him in a swirl of confusion. As may be expected in Shakespeare, such a heady mix of complex thoughts and emotions yields some of the finest language in the play:
O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more.
Fortune and Antony part here; even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar, and this pine is barked
That overtopped them all. (4.12.20–26)
Here, as Antony bids goodbye to “Fortune,” he comes to an important realization from which he cannot recover. Comparing himself to a tree that once towered above all others, he now feels that Cleopatra’s inconstant love, which once “spanieled” at his heels, has made him lose his bark. This metaphor expresses that he feels raw, unprotected, and doomed. Cleopatra enters soon after Antony delivers these lines, and he scares her away with vicious threats. More than anger, however, Antony feels a keen sense of loss. He laments, “I made these wars for . . . the Queen, / Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine— / Which . . . had annexed unto ‘t / A million more, now lost” (4.14.19–22). This expression of regret confirms Antony’s lost sense of self: he no longer possesses either of the identities—military giant or lover—that have previously defined him so well.
Perhaps the surest sign of Antony’s challenged sense of identity appears in the passage where he compares himself to shape-shifting clouds. In act 4, scene 14, he remarks: “Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapor sometime like a bear or lion” (4.14.3–4). With this image in place, Antony tells his attendant, Eros, “not thy captain / Is even such a body”—that is, he’s become as “indistinct / As water in water” (4.14.16–17, 13–14). The existential crisis expressed in these lines suggests that what’s most tragic about Antony’s situation isn’t the spectacular events of loss and betrayal. Rather, it’s the sense that he’s gotten himself ensnared in tangle of relations that has pitted himself against himself. As Antony reflects to Cleopatra on his deathbed: “Not Caesar’s valor hath o’erthrown Antony, / But Antony’s hath triumphed on itself” (4.15.18–19). Though ultimately self-defeated, Antony dies making one last attempt to recuperate his identity, and therefore his sense of honor. Telling Cleopatra to remember him as his former, more heroic self, he makes a final claim for the righteousness of his death: “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (4.15.66–67).
Read more about shape-changing clouds as a symbol.
Even as Antony reckons with how much he has changed, Cleopatra remains very much herself—yet another sign of her almost mythic timelessness. Take, for example, the message she sends to Antony about her suicide. Though done to quell Antony’s anger, this ultimately fatal act recalls the coyly flirtatious falsehoods she orchestrated back in act 1: “If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick” (1.3.4–6). Likewise, when faced with Antony’s death, the queen resolves that “[o]ur size of sorrow, / Proportioned to our cause, must be as great / As that which makes it” (4.15.5–7). These words echo her opening lines, in which she begs Antony to outdo himself and all others with professions of love. Cleopatra’s ongoing performance of the spectacle of love reasserts itself as Antony speaks his dying words:
Antony: I am dying, Egypt, dying.
Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.
Cleopatra: No, let me speak, and let me rail so high
That the false hussy Fortune break her wheel,
Provoked by my offense. (4.15.48–52)
Here, Cleopatra’s self-awareness in her role as grief-stricken lover rises to a near-comic level when she interrupts Antony as he tries to deliver his last words. Even so, the moment also registers the outsized proportion of her love for Antony and grief at his death.
