It Beggars All Description

      The Not-So-Good Doctor (a name I keep invoking in large part because a good friend, one of the first two people to call this blogger "Doctor J" and who constantly still greets me with the words, "Ah, the Good Doctor" -- and so I must ironize it at every opportunity) has decided that he will deliver a lecture on Antony and Cleopatra. I've taught the play once before, years ago, but I have a number of reasons for assuming the task. One of them, the most obvious, is that it's a challenge. A&C is a difficult play to teach well (especially in the short time frame of a week), and it's one of those plays-- along with The Tempest, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice-- that are too easily and too frequently corrupted by overly-political readings. It's also a play of very broad scope, and that in itself tends to engender confusion (and, in reality, student surrender). And then there's Cleopatra, perhaps Shakespeare's greatest female character (her only real competitors are Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, Imogen and Cordelia), and definitely his most complex. The tendency is either to super-mystify Cleopatra or to caricature her, and, as Northrop Frye would say, "this will not do." She has to be understood within her own dramatic context. Those that dare to figure her as a feminist icon (i.e., a woman with power who made use of that power in all of its possible manners) reduce her to politics. Those that figure her as an emotionally insincere Mata Hari reduce her as well. And those that characterize her merely as an emotionally unstable diva reduce her as well. The fact is, she is all of these things and none of these things. She is a character of containment and absence, a character of awareness and obliviousness at the same time, and this is, in part, why she's often either so difficult to understand to so easy to minimize. It's strange to think about 'getting a hold on' Cleopatra, because she is as elusive as an asp: hold her a moment, think you have her figured out, and she wriggles through your hands. She is a character more to behold than to be held. This is not just part of her mystery, it's also part of her identifiability. And it's in this context we have to understand the plaintiff Antony's attraction and fascination, and even the more comprehending and cynical Enobarbus' awkward appreciation. She is the constant theatricist, both predictable and not, and yet constantly magnetic. And part of my task, as I see it, is to make my students realize all of this complexity. I say 'complexity' and not 'paradoxicality': she is not a contradiction, because that would imply that she situates herself from an ethical position and then counteracts that. She is not entirely an enigma, either; she is, in many ways, the counter-Hamlet. It's an interesting fact that Cleopatra keeps associating herself with the elements in the play (fire, air, water, earth): she is the constant metaphor in the making, a something becoming something else, but so often shifting from one basic or knowable form into another.

      This also likely entails taking on some of the common current assumptions of Women's Studies departments. My reading of Cleopatra rejects many of the contemporary isms and theories, and restores to her her mythicality, performed or enacted or exaggerated as it may sometimes be. Is she sincere in her love for Antony? Well, yes and no. It is probably better put that she is not insincere. No wonder she's a figure of fixation: she cannot be fixed, in either the sexual or the situational senses of that word. She resists all theory, and can only be understood fully in her own terms. In this way, she resides with Hamlet and Falstaff and perhaps Lear. As much as glib characterizations may seem to spring ready to the hand (the melancholy Dane, the braggart glutton, the mad titan, the diva queen), they are nothing more than that, glib characterizations that are more inaccurate than they are accurate. She contains multitudes, and perhaps she does so with a kind of deliberate schizophrenia.

      In rereading the play, and thinking about it again with a lecture (i.e., a sustained, and improvised, delivery of an argument) in mind, I'm struck too by my admiration and appreciation of Enobarbus, who is part Falstaff and part Kent (among other things). His presence in the play is stronger than anyone else's, save for Cleopatra's, and he gets an awful lot of the play's best lines, including his lovely "Now he'll outstare the lightning" speech at the end of Act Three, a speech by the way that we might think of in relation to Dubya and his company:

Now he'll outstare the lightning. To be furious,
Is to be frighted out of fear; and in that mood
The dove will peck the estridge; and I see still,
A diminution in our captain's brain
Restores his heart: when valour preys on reason,
It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek
Some way to leave him.

"To be frighted out of fear." Indeed. This follows Antony's reckless, and ill-advised, decision to battle Caesar (Augustus) at sea. And there we have it in seven lines: the tension between romance and reason, between loyalty and betrayal, between practicality and idealism, between wisdom and belief. It also precurses Enobarbus' eventual regret that he does the 'smart' thing in abandoning Antony, and his eventual and prodigal return, a return that fetes only death, his own life become a rebel against his will. He is no mere Judas. He is the cynic who only wishes he could still believe, both in his best friend and in the idea of love itself. His death is brief but poignant.

      The problem with a play like A&C -- see, by the way, as a matter of contrast, John Dryden's revision of the story as All For Love-- is that it resists short explanation. As usual, thinking about this lecture reminds me that the task is not to say this and that, but to determine what not to say, merely for reasons of time and focus. I could probably lecture on the bloody play for weeks on end, constantly exposing nuances and new details: the tapestry is intricate and expansive. I'm reminded, too, that I'll have to deal with the thorny idea of love in the play, which is as metamorphic and yet eternizing as Cleopatra herself. "The idea of love." Oy. It addles the mind thinking how to address that issue, especially to a field of undergraduates. Worse, the prospect of me talking about the idea of love is rather like asking a Protestant about Catholicism. So, in my own way, I guess that I get to be Enobarbus without the death-scene (providing I am not taken down by a student in some attempted assassination cum silencing of my ramblings). Shite, I may just have given them an idea.... Doh!

      I'm also reminded that I haven't taught A&C in some time (five years), and that I have some very particular memories of it. I was so much older then, I'd like to think I'm younger than that now....