Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Struggle Between Reason and Emotion
In his opening lines to Demetrius, Philo complains that
Antony has abandoned the military endeavors on which his reputation
is based for Cleopatra’s sake. His criticism of Antony’s “dotage,”
or stupidity, introduces a tension between reason and emotion that
runs throughout the play (I.i.1). Antony
and Cleopatra’s first exchange heightens this tension, as they argue
whether their love can be put into words and understood or whether
it exceeds such faculties and boundaries of reason. If, according
to Roman consensus, Antony is the military hero and disciplined
statesmen that Caesar and others believe him to be, then he seems
to have happily abandoned his reason in order to pursue his passion.
He declares: “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the
ranged empire fall” (I.i.35–36). The play,
however, is more concerned with the battle between reason and emotion
than the triumph of one over the other, and this battle is waged
most forcefully in the character of Antony. More than any other
character in the play, Antony vacillates between Western and Eastern
sensibilities, feeling pulled by both his duty to the empire and
his desire for pleasure, his want of military glory and his passion for
Cleopatra. Soon after his nonchalant dismissal of Caesar’s messenger,
the empire, and his duty to it, he chastises himself for his neglect
and commits to return to Rome, lest he “lose [him]self in dotage”
(I.ii.106).
As the play progresses, Antony continues to inhabit conflicting identities
that play out the struggle between reason and emotion. At one moment,
he is the vengeful war hero whom Caesar praises and fears. Soon
thereafter, he sacrifices his military position by unwisely allowing
Cleopatra to determine his course of action. As his Roman allies—even
the ever-faithful Enobarbus—abandon him, Antony feels that he has,
indeed, lost himself in dotage, and he determines to rescue his
noble identity by taking his own life. At first, this course of action
may appear to be a triumph of reason over passion, of -Western sensibilities
over Eastern ones, but the play is not that simple. Although Antony
dies believing himself a man of honor, discipline, and reason, our
understanding of him is not nearly as straight-forward. In order
to come to terms with Antony’s character, we must analyze the aspects
of his identity that he ignores. He is, in the end, a man ruled
by passion as much as by reason. Likewise, the play offers us a
worldview in which one sensibility cannot easily dominate another.
Reason cannot ever fully conquer the passions, nor can passion wholly
undo reason.
The Clash of East and West
Although Antony and Cleopatra details
the conflict between Rome and Egypt, giving us an idea of the Elizabethan
perceptions of the difference between Western and Eastern cultures,
it does not make a definitive statement about which culture ultimately
triumphs. In the play, the Western and Eastern poles of the world
are characterized by those who inhabit them: Caesar, for instance,
embodies the stoic duty of the West, while Cleopatra, in all her
theatrical grandeur, represents the free-flowing passions of the
East. Caesar’s concerns throughout the play are certainly imperial:
he means to invade foreign lands in order to invest them with traditions
and sensibilities of his own. But the play resists siding with this
imperialist impulse. Shakespeare, in other words, does not align
the play’s sympathies with the West; Antony and Cleopatra can
hardly be read as propaganda for Western domination. On the contrary,
the Roman understanding of Cleopatra and her kingdom seems exceedingly superficial.
To Caesar, the queen of Egypt is little more than a whore with a
flair for drama. His perspective allows little room for the real power
of Cleopatra’s sexuality—she can, after all, persuade the most decorated
of generals to follow her into ignoble retreat. Similarly, it allows
little room for the indomitable strength of her will, which she
demonstrates so forcefully at the end of the play as she refuses
to allow herself to be turned into a “Egyptian puppet” for the entertainment
of the Roman masses (V.ii.204).
In Antony and Cleopatra, West meets East,
but it does not, regardless of Caesar’s triumph over the land of
Egypt, conquer it. Cleopatra’s suicide suggests that something of
the East’s spirit, the freedoms and passions that are not represented
in the play’s conception of the West, cannot be subsumed by Caesar’s
victory. The play suggests that the East will live on as a visible
and unconquerable counterpoint to the West, bound as inseparably
and eternally as Antony and Cleopatra are in their tomb.
The Definition of Honor
Throughout the play, characters define honor variously,
and often in ways that are not intuitive. As Antony prepares to
meet Caesar in battle, he determines that he “will live / Or bathe
[his] dying honour in the blood / Shall make it live again” (IV.ii.5–7).
Here, he explicitly links the notion of honor to to that of death,
suggesting the latter as a surefire means of achieving the former.
The play bears out this assertion, since, although Antony and Cleopatra
kill themselves for different reasons, they both imagine that the
act invests them with honor. In death, Antony returns to his identity
as a true, noble Roman, becoming “a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly
vanquished” (IV.xvi.59–60), while Cleopatra
resolves to “bury him, and then what’s brave, what’s noble, / Let’s
do it after the high Roman fashion” (IV.xvi.89–90).
At first, the queen’s words seem to suggest that honor is a distinctly
Roman attribute, but Cleopatra’s death, which is her means of ensuring
that she remains her truest, most uncompromised self, is distinctly
against Rome. In Antony and Cleopatra, honor seems
less a function of Western or Eastern culture than of the characters’
determination to define themselves on their own terms. Both Antony
and Cleopatra secure honorable deaths by refusing to compromise
their identities.
