Let’s
grant it is not
Amiss to tumble on the bed
of Ptolemy,
To give a kingdom for a mirth,
to sit
And keep the turn of tippling with
a slave,
To reel the streets at noon, and
stand the buffet
With knaves that smells of
sweat. Say this becomes him—
As his composure
must be rare indeed
Whom these things cannot
blemish—yet must Antony
No way excuse his
foils when we do bear
So great a weight in
his lightness. If he filled
His vacancy with
his voluptuousness,
Full surfeits and the
dryness of his bones
Call on him for’t. But
to confound such time
That drums him from
his sport, and speaks as loud
As his own state
and ours—’tis to be chid
As we rate boys who,
being mature in knowledge,
Pawn their experience
to the present pleasure,
And so rebel to judgement.
(I.iv.16–33)
In Act I, scene iv, Caesar meets with
Lepidus to discuss the threat that Pompey poses to the empire. Here,
he chastises Antony for staying in Egypt, where he pursues pleasure
at the expense of his duty to the state. Caesar’s speech is significant
for two reasons. First, it defines the Western sensibilities against
which Cleopatra’s Egypt is judged and by which Antony is ultimately
measured. As Caesar dismisses Antony’s passion for Cleopatra as
boyish irresponsibility, he asserts the Roman expectation of duty
over pleasure, reason over emotion. These competing worlds and worldviews
provide the framework for understanding the coming clashes between
Caesar and Antony, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cleopatra and Caesar.
Second, Caesar’s speech to Lepidus is significant for
its suggestion that the oppositional worlds delineated here are
a result of perception. For example, just as our perception of Antony
changes according to the perceptions of other characters—to Caesar
he is negligent and mighty; to Cleopatra, noble and easily manipulated; to
Enobarbus, worthy but misguided—so too our understanding of East
and West depends upon the ways in which the characters perceive
them. To Caesar, Alexandria is a den of iniquity where the noontime
streets are filled with “knaves that smell of sweat.” But we should
resist his understanding as the essential definition of the East; we
need only refer to Cleopatra’s very similar description of a Roman
street to realize that place, as much as character, in Antony and
Cleopatra, is a quilt of competing perceptions: “[m]echanic slaves
/ With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall / Uplift us to the
view” (V.ii.205–207).
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