Shakespeare's Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and...

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Shakespeare's Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Antony and CleopatraAuthor(s): Paul YachninSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, No. 2, Elizabethan and JacobeanDrama (Spring, 1993), pp. 343-363Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/451003 .

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SEL 33 (1993) ISSN 0039-3657

Shakespeare's Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in

Antony and Cleopatra

PAUL YACHNIN

What might Antony and Cleopatra tell us about English political culture of around 1606, and what might it tell us about Shakespeare's theater's relationship with that culture?' In this essay, I want to suggest answers to these questions in terms of the new historicist focus on the "theatricality of power and the power of theatricality," but I want to avoid and critique two related assumptions which, I will suggest, have undermined new historicism's attempts to historicize texts such as Shakespeare's plays. Overall, I want to be able to enlist in this analysis of Antony and Cleopatra the powerful new historicist practice of interpreting "literary" texts in terms of large-scale discursive formations which cut across kinds of discourse usually kept separate in conventional criticism, but I want also to make that practice more historical by insisting on both the historically specific differences among kinds of discourse and the importance of writerly intentionality and readerly understanding-by insisting, that is, that the operations of minds are as pertinent to our accounts of the past as are the operations of power.

The first new historicist assumption which I want to critique is that all texts in any given culture at a particular historical juncture tell fundamentally the same story (so that one need not take into account the differences among individual texts, kinds of texts, or

Paul Yachnin, of the Departmellt of English, University of British Columbia, has published on Shakespeare, Middleton, and the politics of the early modern theater. A book, The Powerless Theater: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, is forthcoming. He is also a member of the editorial team at work on the Oxford Complete Works of Thomas Middleton.



ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

the interpretative fields in which texts are inscribed).2 At stake here, of course, is the question of the agency of writers and readers, the degree to which the historically specific meaning of any text is constituted by the ways in which it is meant and received; and beyond that, at stake is the proper recognition of the relations between, on the one side, the minds of writers and readers and, on the other, the inscription of texts in particular interpretative fields, a process which is certainly not in anyone's control. Whereas new historicists typically read texts in terms of a transpersonal sociodiscursive system which is seen to do its work at a level below the horizon of consciousness of writers and readers, I am interested in the never fully autonomous ways in which writers intend and readers understand the meaning of texts at particular historical junctures and in terms of particular interpretative fields.

The second assumption to be examined is that subversion is always already contained, since, according to new historicists, subversion is to be seen, not as deployed by individuals in order to achieve certain political ends, but as the unseen harbinger of future social formations.3This second assumption is already giving way to much more open-minded interpretative practices, but the first, grounded in the deconstructive rejection of agency and intentionality, continues to exercise a counter-productive hold on much new historicist criticism. Moreover, the increasingly outmoded idea that history operates "over the heads" of people is not really separable from the practice of reading all texts belonging to a particular historical juncture as if they told the same basic story-the first rejects intentionality with regard to the production of culture, broadly defined; the second rejects intentionality with regard to the production of writing, especially literary writing.

In the interests of contesting this model of a unified, transpersonal, and "mindless" discursive field, I will interpret the commercial-theater play Antony and Cleopatra as a text whose politics of loyalty had connections with but also differences from texts such as King James's 1603 speech to Parliament, Francis Bacon's courtly and progressivist The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), or Ben Jonson's "patronage" poem, "To Penshurst" (ca. 1612). In part, my argument is that the material conditions of the production and reception of texts condition how they mean, what kind of "weight" they are accorded. Words played by an actor at the Globe meant differently from words intoned by the king before Parliament; printed words meant differently from written words, and printed words in a play-quarto differed from words in a tract dedicated to the king and from words in a folio; and not all folios carried the same cultural weight.

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PAUL YACHNIN

Moreover, I want to suggest that, beyond the paratextual level, literary texts' representations of political issues differed from what I will call "polemical" representations of the same issues by virtue of literature's willingness to allow the emergence of ideological contradiction and its unwillingness to attempt to police the production of meaning. On this account, polemical writing (such as James's speech or Bacon's Advancement) can be seen as attempting to prescribe interpretation in order to be able to intervene in particular matters; in contrast, literary writing can be seen as noninterventionist since its unwillingness to police meaning opens it to widely differing interpretations even as it opens to examination the very political culture in which it is interpreted. But while literature might be noninterventionist by virtue of both its openness to differing interpretations and its usual inscription in a "playful" interpretative field, it does not necessarily follow that literature is without historical consequences. On the contrary, a "powerless" literary text such as Antony and Cleopatra could contribute to historical change both because its interpretative openness allowed it to be enlisted and deployed in particular controversies and because its interpretative openness itself-and Shakespeare's style of interiorized characterization which made that openness possible-provided a model of depth and surface as presence and representation which connected up with the early modern production of the private self as incommensurable with public identity.4

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's display of political and personal relations between subjects and masters places loyalty at the center of the system of relations whose elaboration seems, on the face of it, devoted to the goal of legitimating an absolutist politics of loyalty. On this account, the subject's "deep," or noncontractual, loyalty to the sovereign authenticates both absolutist monarchy and absolutism's fantasy of the sovereign's metaphysical superiority over the subject that of itself calls forth the subject's loyalty. If, however, the subject's loyalty is construed as legitimating or authenticating the sovereign's absolute right to rule, then that loyalty itself must also in some way be absolute or "sovereign," since loyalty is not loyalty if it is sustained by either expectation of reward or mere dumb abjection. My particular claim in this essay, then, is that Antony and Cleopatra displayed "absolutist loyalty" in such elaborate detail that absolutism's deeply conflicted dependence on "sovereign subjectivity" was able to emerge into the consciousnesses of the members of its 1606-1607 audiences. Two related claims are that Shakespearean "depth" characterization, especially with regard to Cleopatra, Antony,

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Enobarbus, and Dolabella, is on the same political ground as the play's "worrying at" absolutism, and that such a style of characterization contributed to a large-scale shift toward seeing the political order in terms of contractual relations among sovereign subjects rather than in terms of a metaphysics of dominance and subordination.

My desire to argue that a style of characterization contributed to what I am calling "sovereign subjectivity'" (Foucauldian critics would call it "subjection") suggests how much ground I share with new historicism. But whereas new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt or Steven Mullaney might tend to see Antony and Cleopatra's disclosure of ideological contradiction and of the hollowness of imperial claims to divine right as part of a process of the subjection of the members of the audience-something that happens to them-I want to emphasize the audience's active seeing of contradiction and imperial hollowness.5 So where Greenblatt might claim that the audience's awareness of the deficiencies of the king only served to enhance monarchical rule,6 I would want to emphasize the fact that the audience chose to accept the play's invitation to see the monarchy subversively-that reading for subversive meaning is a matter of consent with regard to literary texts, since "literary" discourse is peculiarly open to interpretation.7 The fact of Shakespeare's audience's active participation in the production of meaning suggests that we should be wary of our own tendency to see meaning being produced "over the heads" of the audience; on the contrary, that participation suggests that audiences themselves produced meaning out of ongoing negotiations with playwrights, players, and a range of conditioning forces such as the discursive field in which the commercial drama was inscribed, the genre of the play in question, the material conditions of theatrical production, contemporary idiomatic and lexical peculiarities, and pertinent topical contexts.8

I. "No, let me speak": The Language of Command

In Antony and Cleopatra, the relation of sovereign and subject sets the pace of the action: the decisive celerity of the play's scene- shifting is keyed to the rhythm of command and response. An early example is the first scene between Antony and Enobarbus, the last movement of I.ii, which turns emphatically toward action when Antony's no-nonsense verse supplants Enobarbus's prosey verbosity. Here the political relation of dominance and subordination underlies and is enacted in Enobarbus's submission to and adoption of Antony's poetic idiom:

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PAUL YACHNIN

ANTONY. The business she hath broached in the state Cannot endure my absence. ENOBARBUS. And the business you have broached here cannot be without you; especially that of Cleopatra's, which wholly depends on your abode. ANTONY. No more light answers. Let our officers Have notice what we purpose....

Say our pleasure, To such whose place is under us, requires Our quick remove from hence. ENOBARBUS. I shall do't.

(I.ii. 172-98)9

In light of the fact that so much of the play's dialogue is between characters of differing rank, it is not surprising that the rhythm of command and response sets the dramatic pace. The language of command, however, colors also the scenes between social equals. The play's first scene, for example, derives its rhythm and psychological interest from Cleopatra's manipulation of the language of command. Her first lines are strongly rhythmic and regular (against Antony's hypermetrical responses):

CLEOPATRA. If it be love indeed, tell me how much. ANTONY. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned. CLEOPATRA. I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved. ANTONY. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new

earth. (I.i. 14-17)

Cleopatra's appropriation of a "Roman" language of command works to undermine Antony's authority. As a consequence of her provocative commands, both direct and indirect ("'Do this, or this; / Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that."' "Therefore hear it, Antony." "Call in the messengers" [lines 22-23, 27, 29]), Cleopatra succeeds in eliciting from Antony a hyperbolic language of command: "Let Rome in Tiber melt . . . The nobleness of life / Is to do thus. . . in which I bind, / On pain of punishment, the world to weet / We stand up peerless" (lines 33-40); and having called it forth, Cleopatra succeeds in characterizing it as play- acting. This theatricalizing of Antony's commanding language ("Excellent falsehood! / Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?" [lines 40-41]) prepares the way for Antony's increasing subordination to other, more authentically commanding speakers

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A N T O N Y AND C L E O P A TR A

by suggesting Antony's actorly submission to language as script. However, as we will see, Cleopatra's theatricalization of Antony's language of command, her splitting of Antony away from the words he speaks, also prepares the ground for a theatricalizing view of the subject in a different key-the subject as sovereign, as radically private, inward and unconstrained by any signifying practice, including the language of command.

The only scenes unaffected by the language of command are those between members of the ruled class. A scene like I.ii.1-79, in which characters of equal rank converse good-humoredly, oblivious to the pressure of an ominous fate ("You have seen and proved a fairer former fortune / Than that which is to approach" [lines 34- 35]), constitutes a hiatus in the plot, and its gaiety dissolves at the mere approach of a sovereign presence: "Hush! Here comes Antony. / Not he; the Queen" (line 80). In contrast, virtually all the scenes that contribute to the advancement of the plot are concerned with a struggle for hegemonic power that is expressed by and realized through a competition for the right to speak the language of command. Antony and Caesar's first meeting, for example, begins with a competitive exchange of imperatives:

CAESAR. Sit. ANTONY. Sit, sir. CAESAR. Nay then.

(II.ii.30-32)

In spite of their attempts afterwards to conclude a peace, these five bristling words reveal at the outset that there can be only one sovereign, that only one character in any given scene can claim the language of command. In part, then, the business of the monological nature of the production of the language of command (since in any group there can be only one competent speaker) is to demonstrate the inevitability and naturalness of absolutist one- person rule. Consequently, it surprises us less than it surprises Caesar that he and Antony "could not stall together / In the whole world" (V.i.39-40).

We realize early on that the play is moving inexorably toward the emergence of a world of auditors crystallized around one and only one speaker. Thus Antony's language of command grows weaker as Caesar's grows stronger. Antony comments on the diminishment of his authority when his servants balk at his command to whip Caesar's Thidias, the messenger who "performs / The bidding of the fullest man" (III.xiii.86-87). We can note also how Enobarbus's aside both draws out in length and comments on the moment of breakdown:

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PAUL YACHNIN

ANTONY. Approach therel-Ah, you kite! Now, gods and devils!

Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried "Ho!", Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth And cry "Your will?" Have you no ears? I am Antony yet.

Enter servants Take hence this Jack and whip him.

ENOBARBUS (aside). 'Tis better playing with a lion's whelp Than with an old one dying. ANTONY. Moon and stars! Whip him!

(III.xiii.89-96)

The dying Antony loses his competence as a speaker of the language of command: Eros disobeys Antony's order to kill him; and Eros's disobedience is emulated by four other soldiers, all of whom refuse to dispatch their Emperor, and a fifth (Diomedes) who does not even respond to Antony's desperate command (IV.xiv.50-118). Finally, Antony prevails upon his Guard to bear him where Cleopatra bides: once there, Cleopatra denies his request that she descend to exchange a last kiss, enjoins him not to speak, and flatly contradicts his last two hortatives:

ANTONY. I am dying, Egypt, dying. Give me some wine, and let me speak a little. CLEOPATRA. No, let me speak . . .

ANTONY. One word, sweet queen. Of Caesar seek your honour, with you safety. O! CLEOPATRA. They do not go together. ANTONY. Gentle, hear me: None about Caesar trust but Proculeius. CLEOPATRA. My resolution and my hands I'll trust, None about Caesar.

(IV.xv.4 1-50)

Antony's loss of power tends to constrain his speaking within an elegiac range characterized by the subjunctive mood and the past tense. His telescoping of time within moments of Cleopatra's feigned death ("Since Cleopatra died, / I have lived in such dishonour that the gods / Detest my baseness" [IV.xiv.55-57]) demonstrates both the sense of belatedness that has burdened him increasingly in the play and also the way in which the sense of

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living on after the end of his own history deprives him and is reflected by the loss of the imperative mood and present tense, both of which are appropriated by Caesar.

In her turn, Cleopatra must also give up to Caesar her claim to the language of command. On the face of it, Cleopatra's submission is straightforward; she gives over command of her servant Seleucus to Caesar by shifting from the imperative to the subjunctive ("This is my treasurer. Let him speak, my lord" [V.ii.142]), and Caesar assumes command flawlessly ("Forbear, Seleucus" [line 175]). At the end Caesar is sovereign speaker; his very ease of command indicates the absoluteness of a discursive power inherent in a politico-linguistic system comprising a community of competent auditors, all attending to the one and only competent speaker.

Caesar's centrality as the only speaker in a world of auditors parallels KingJames's absolutist fantasy and several actual stagings of his own politico-linguistic relationship with the Parliament and people of England. He had convened Parliament, James told his auditors 19 March 1603, so that "you who are here presently assembled to represent the Body of this whole Kingdome . . . may with your owne eares heare, and that I out of mine owne mouth may deliver unto you the assurance of my due thankefulnes for your sojoyfull and generall applause to the declaring and receiving of mee in this Seate."10 Self-styled as lex loquens,' James described the people to whom he was thankful as able to express emotion through gesture and sound, but as fundamentally inarticulate: "Or shall it ever bee blotted out of my minde, how at my first entrie into this Kingdome, the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet mee? their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection, their mouthes and tongues uttering nothing but sounds of joy, their hands, feete, and all the rest of their members in their gestures discovering a passionate longing, and earnestnesse to meete and embrace their new Soveraigne."'2 Several years later in 1615, in "A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings,"James followed a conventional divine right idea in order to explain the hegemony of his words as an effect of his transcendent relationship with the Word: "For touching my particular . . . that one of the maynes for which God hath advanced me upon the loftie stage of the supreme Throne, is, that my words uttered from so eminent a place for Gods honour . . . might with greater facilitie be conceived."13

Caesar's position at the end of the play, like KingJames's wished- for ascendancy, is one of total politico-linguistic hegemony. His, and the play's, last lines are in the form of a command so confident of obedience that it can slide casually toward a tone of solicitation:

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PAUL YACHNIN

"Come, Dolabella, see / High order in this great solemnity" (V.ii.363-64). However, Dolabella's silent exit in the wake of Caesar's command is problematic since, while it clearly denotes obedience, it might also suggest the persistence of Dolabella's secret loyalty to the dead Cleopatra, to whom he has betrayed Caesar's confidence.

The doubleness of Dolabella's silence, suggesting both loyalty and disloyalty, culminates a thematic bifurcation in the last movement of the play (IV.xiv-V.ii). Here one-half of the drama gathers into a counterplot against the main plot of Caesar's acquisition of the sole rights to speak the language of command. The counterplot points toward the disjunction between the language of command on the one hand and loyalty on the other. In terms of this counterplot, Eros's disobedience is an act of loyalty rather than betrayal, Cleopatra's contradiction of Antony's injunctions to seek her honor and safety of Caesar signals her allegiance to Antony rather than her disloyalty, Seleucus's apparent betrayal of Cleopatra possibly signifies his unshaken loyalty to her intention, itself only apparent, to "do't after the high Roman fashion" (IV.xv.86),14 and Dolabella's wordlessly attentive obedience to Caesar perhaps indicates the persistence of his secret disloyalty.

On this account, as Caesar becomes the "Sole sir o' th' world" (V.ii.120), the language of command becomes increasingly less able to define or reveal loyalty. The disjunction between the language of command and the phenomenon of loyalty has the effect of producing a mystified version of loyalty as radically inward and so unconstrained by and independent of its outward linguistic accidents. We might say, then, that Antony and Cleopatra mystifies loyalty by making it the effect of the equally mystified sovereign subjectivity of the "loyalist"; and that it problematizes loyalty so construed by making its existence in the loyalist the central marker of the metaphysical superiority of the master. In other words, Shakespearean loyalty produces or makes visible a deep contradiction within absolutism itself, in that Shakespearean loyalty seems more naturally an element in a consensual or contractual political model, and therefore seems irreconcilable with the divinely ordained absolutist order that it is seen to underwrite.

II. "He that can endure to follow": Loyalty under Pressure

Each of the competitors for political sovereignty-Antony, Cleopatra, Caesar, and Pompey-is surrounded by a group of followers. Lepidus, as Paul Lawrence Rose has pointed out, can immediately be recognized as a nonstarter by virtue of his lack of

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lieutenants.15 Under the pressure of misfortune, many followers fall away, revealing by their betrayals of their masters the fact that men often only pretend to be loyal. In several instances, not surprisingly, we find the reality of self-interest behind the appearance of loyalty, so that events often exemplify Lear's Fool's insight about seeming loyalty:

That sir, which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form,

Will pack when it begins to rain, And leave thee in the storm.

(II.iv.78-81)16

On the face of it, Seleucus is one of those motivated by self- interest rather than loyalty ("of no more trust / Than love that's hired!" [V.ii.154-55]). Certainly, many of Antony's followers flee to Octavius Caesar because they serve and seek for gain; even the nominally "good" service performed by Ventidius is compromised by his scrupulous self-promotion and distrust of his master (III.i). However, and importantly, neither Menas nor Enobarbus abandons his respective master for gain or for any kind of self- aggrandizement. For this reason, their betrayals of their masters can be seen to reveal the foundational contradiction that, while guaranteeing the "deep" reality of loyalty, also puts loyalty deeply in question.

An examination of Enobarbus and Menas at the critical moment of betrayal suggests that men and women are loyal only to masters whose will is unconditionally free and sovereign in that it is undetermined by ideology, law, or morality. At the crucial moment in his career, Menas's master, Gnaeus Pompey, forgoes his freedom to act by submitting himself to the discursive formation of honor. Pompey abandons his sovereign will and becomes what he earlier had shown signs of becoming-the unknowing subject of ideological forces over against his own will and desire. Here, in response to Menas's offer to make him "the earthly Jove" (II.vii.67), Pompey allows his will to be determined, in a strangely fractured way, by the letter (as opposed to the spirit) of "honor" and by an aristocratic/mercantile dichotomizing of motivation, both of which show Pompey's abject relationship with community values and judgment. Pompey's subjection to "honor" invalidates Menas's loyalty by revealing Menas's politico-sacral "devotion" to be mere "dotage":

POMPEY. Ah, this thou shouldst have done, And not have spoke on't. In me 'tis villainy;

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PAUL YACHNIN

In thee't had been good service. Thou must know 'Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour; Mine honour, it. Repent that e'er thy tongue Hath so betrayed thine act. Being done unknown, I should have found it afterwards well done, But must condemn it now. Desist, and drink. MENAS (aside). For this I'll never follow thy palled fortunes

more. Who seeks, and will not take when once 'tis offered, Shall never find it more.

(II.vii.73-83)

The process of Antony's subjection runs the course of the four acts in which he has a part. From Philo's point of view, Antony's "dotage" on Cleopatra is accomplished at the outset: "you shall see in him / The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet's fool" (I.i. 11-13); however, Enobarbus recognizes, as does Cleopatra, that Antony's subordination is in reality "sport," a kind of willful self-indulgence, and that Antony "will be himself' (line 43). We have already seen how Cleopatra's theatricalizing of Antony undermines his sovereignty of will by suggesting his actorly submission to language as script. But in view of Antony's "self- sameness" through these early scenes, we can also see that Cleopatra's theatricalizing of Antony constitutes a kind of grudging praise, since an actor remains himself as actor regardless of the role he plays.

Antony begins not to be himself in earnest at the Battle of Actium, where he is surprised by the subjection of his will to his "dotage" on Cleopatra. That Antony can both be "transformed" (to use Philo's word) by his subjection to Cleopatra and be surprised at his own transformation (so that something of Antony himself is seen to remain intact-that something that is surprised) suggests the fundamental nature of the reconfiguring of personhood in which Shakespeare's play is participating. Antony's transformation entails a shift from equating the core of personhood with sovereign will to equating it with sovereign subjectivity. The politics of this shift will become clearer, but even here we can begin to see how Shakespeare's move toward equating personhood with sovereign subjectivity rather than with sovereign will might have contributed (at least at a notional level) to a far more egalitarian distribution of the sense of dignity and personal integrity, or wholeness, among all people, sovereigns and subjects alike.

Antony understands the consequences of the loss of his sovereign will: since loyalty is grounded in the absolute freedom

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of the master, a master whose actions are determined by forces over against his will has forgone his mastery, and cannot have loyal followers:

My very hairs do mutiny, for the white Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them For fear and doting . . .

Leave me, I pray, a little. Pray you now, Nay, do so; for indeed I have lost command. Therefore I pray you.

(III.xi. 13-24)

Enobarbus "endures to follow" Antony in spite of Antony's subjection. However, it becomes increasingly apparent to Enobarbus that his loyalty is not loyalty, but itself an unconstrained act of will, so that Enobarbus ceases to be Antony's follower in fact, even before he leaves him; that is, Antony's defection from his own sovereignty of will forces Enobarbus into the paradoxical position of having to recover his own freedom in order to persist as Antony's loyal follower. The urgency of Enobarbus's dilemma results from the fact that he sees his "loyalty" increasingly as "dotage" and so increasingly indicative of deficiencies which threaten his personhood as it is constructed by the absolutist politics of loyalty. We might even say that the inward configuration of personhood that makes possible Enobarbus's capacity for deep loyalty to a social superior itself precludes the possibility of his being loyal to any such person.

Here the foundational contradiction that drives Shakespeare's politics of loyalty fitfully toward sovereign subjectivity is fully displayed. The radical inwardness of loyalty is called forth (in the play and by absolutism itself) in order to relieve hierarchical political relations of the destabilizing flaw of "serving for gain" by inscribing such relations in the politico-sacral terms of the metaphysical superiority of the ruler over the subject, so that the subject is seen to be "devoted" to the master rather than merely "bound" as if by contract. However, in this case, since Antony proves far less than a sovereign master, Enobarbus must see, if only provisionally, that he is himself the author of his loyalty to Antony. This in turn suggests, again provisionally, that the central enabling condition of absolutist hierarchy, the noncontractual devotion of the subject to the ruler, is also absolutism's central weakness, especially in view of the way "sovereign subjectivity" has figured in the development of modern contractual and egalitarian political systems.17

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Antony's unaccountable bounty consequent upon Enobarbus's defection serves to recuperate Enobarbus's loyalty by "revealing" the persistence of Antony's sovereign will. Antony's capacity to surprise his lieutenant (IV.vi.20-25) restores his metaphysical mastery over Enobarbus so completely that Enobarbus literally dies of a broken heart. More precisely, Enobarbus's personhood is reinscribed in a simplified field of absolutist relations, the simplification consisting in a shift from a reliance on the "loyalist's" inwardness to the loyalist's body. In other words, Antony's sovereignty of will is now guaranteed by virtue of its uncanny hold over Enobarbus's body rather than by virtue of Enobarbus's psychological devotion. The body's loyalty is visible, public, and incontestable as against the occlusiveness and indeterminacy of the loyalty held by sovereign subjectivity. Enobarbus's "embodiment" of devotion, then, might seem to mark the stabilization of an absolutist politics of loyalty in terms of the ruler's command over the very bodies of his subjects; but such stabilization cannot be achieved in view of the play's willingness to display ideological contradiction rather than to propagandize in favor of state positions (such as we have in King James's characterization of his subjects' inarticulate but devoted bodies). Perhaps it is because of this openness to contradiction that the play declines to determine incontestably Enobarbus's corporeal fate. 18

III. "My love makes religion to obey": Cleopatra's Inscrutability

In the case of Enobarbus, Antony and Cleopatra maneuvers to guard an absolutist politics of loyalty against the threat of sovereign subjectivity by shifting the authenticating mark of loyalty onto the body of the subject. The success of this maneuver, however, is questionable given the inadequacy of the body as a substitute for the mind, an inadequacy seemingly borne out by Enobarbus's body's failure to die for Antony in a fully convincing way.

The best case the play makes for the sovereignty of will and its capacity to command "deep" loyalty has to do, of course, with Cleopatra, whose sovereign presence, we can note, has a hold over Iras's body far surer than the hold the restored Antony obtains over Enobarbus.'9 With regard to Cleopatra's sovereign will, we can usefully historicize Janet Adelman's seminal analysis of Cleopatra's inscrutability in order to suggest the historically specific politics of Antony and Cleopatra's style of characterization, a style that constructs Cleopatra's core as both inaccessibly interiorized and uncannily powerful.

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Adelman argues that Cleopatra's inscrutability serves a theatrical purpose in that it demands that the audience itself enact the romantic "faith" that she sees as central to the experience of the play: "This frustration [of not knowing positively either Cleopatra's motives or purposes] is not an end in itself: it forces us to participate in the experience of the play and ultimately to make the same leap of faith that the lovers make."20 Of special importance in this regard, Adelman suggests, is the way the play exacts our faith in Cleopatra's love for Antony: "If we are finally convinced of Cleopatra's love-and I think we are-we have had to develop a faith nearly as difficult as Antony's, a faith in what we cannot know."21

In this view, the audience is inclined to be loyal to Cleopatra (to believe in her love for Antony in the absence of positive knowledge) because the indeterminacy attendant upon her characterization as inscrutable, commands our belief in the unconstrained and undetermined freedom of her will. We become her followers, that is, because she is not following the script, or, more precisely, because her meaning is neither limited nor determined by the text that produces her.

We can perhaps understand the text's production of a sovereignty that transcends the very text that produces it by considering Cleopatra's speech, "I dreamt there was an emperor Antony" (V.ii.76-92). Were this speech a soliloquy, its semantic range would extend from the speaker's unquestioning confidence in her claims about Antony to extreme uncertainty about those claims. It would, in any case, have reference only to her own state of mind, and would not have reference to any other person in any effective way. It would, that is, be a speech indicative of Cleopatra's subjectivity rather than of any relationship between subjectivity and world through the mediation of will. However, since the speech is made to, or in the presence of, Dolabella, its range possibly extends beyond the self-referential so as to include the possibility of Cleopatra wanting to have a certain effect on Dolabella. The consequent interpretative dilemma (is the speech primarily the expression of a state of mind or is it primarily an act [in both senses of the word]?) produces our sense of Cleopatra's sovereign will, for the reason that her language eludes definition as either expressive or instrumental. Were it one or the other, it would determine Cleopatra as a character in one way or another; as it is, Cleopatra's language tracklessly traverses the ground between subjectivity and will in ways that suggest her radical inward freedom but also her political power over others.

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It is important to note that Cleopatra comes to stand as the model of the sovereign will which commands loyalty by virtue of its freedom from all legal, moral, and ideological constraints at the very moment that she passes into history. While Dolabella's emotional defection from Caesar testifies to her charismatic power and while his avowal of loyalty even suggests the politico-sacral nature of that power-"Madam, as thereto sworn, by your command, / Which my love makes religion to obey" (V.ii.198- 99)-her dominance over the servant of the "fullest man" seems not to diminish the actual fullness of Caesarean rule. What Cleopatra's posthumous hold over Dolabella's "deep" loyalty does do, however, is to strip Caesarean rule of its claim to be grounded in the metaphysical superiority of the ruler. Here we can compare Shakespeare's demystification of the relations of power with Jonson's aristocratic mystification of real economic relations in "To Penshurst." In that poem, written for Sir Robert Sidney, Jonson represents the Penshurst tenants (and, of course, himself as poet in relation to his patron) as motivated by love and a sense of wonder rather than by any expectation of a quid pro quo:

But all come in, the farmer, and the clown: And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy [i.e., the Penshurst manor-house itself] lord, and lady,

though they have no suit. Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, Some nuts, some apples . . . But what can this (more than express their love) Add to thy free provisions, far above The need of such?22

In the present-day of Antony and Cleopatra's conclusion, then, and by implication in the present-day of 1606-1607, Antony and Cleopatra seems to suggest that absolutist hierarchical relations are in fact grounded in and existing in tension with the fundamentally contractual and egalitarian nature of relations among sovereign subjects.

Cleopatra's sovereignty of will is therefore related in complex ironic ways to Elizabethan and Jacobean "divine right" arguments for the absolute power of the monarch over against both the polity and the law. According to contemporary thinking about "divine right" monarchy, the king is answerable only to God, and therefore his will can be neither coerced nor determined by either his subjects' will or the law. A good king will obey the Law, but he

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does not have to, and his law-breaking cannot be judged by his subjects.23 According to King James, in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, "the duetie, and alleageance of the people to their lawfull king, their obedience, I say, ought to be to him, as to Gods Lieutenant in earth, obeying his commands in all thing, except directly against God, as the commands of Gods Minister, acknowledging him a Judge set by God over them, having power to judge them, but to be judged onely by God."24 Accordingly, absolute monarchs are "free" by virtue of the transcendent, inscrutable, and private drama that they play face-to-face with God. Cleopatra's inscrutable play with some higher and/or inward reality thus would have been seen to resemble and also perhaps to mark the passing into history or political mythology of the English monarch's invisible relations with the divine.25

IV. "Come, Dolabella, see": Sovereign Subjectivity

In 1605, perhaps a year before the opening performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe, Francis Bacon, in The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, anticipated Dolabella's politico-sacral loyalty to Cleopatra when he wrote that he saw King James as inscrutable and radically inward or other, and therefore as admirable and inspiring of duty: "Wherefore representing your Majesty many times unto my mind, and beholding you not with the inquisitive eye of presumption to discover that which the Scripture telleth me is inscrutable, but with the observant eye of duty and admiration. . . I have been touched, yea and possessed with an extreme wonder."26 The desire for career advancement that to a degree underlay Bacon's argument for the "advancement of learning" produces its own ironic countertext; but that desire, coupled with the fact that the tract was written for the king, produces also a historically specific context which must be seen to limit the interpretative operations of irony. In the context of the cliental flattery of the king, that is, Bacon's text can be seen to have worked to suppress the contradictions inherent in an absolutist politics of loyalty, contradictions whose disclosure was to be facilitated by Antony and Cleopatra's failed attempt to produce a version of absolutist relations untroubled by sovereign subjectivity.

The Advancement endorses a view of the mind as capable of comprehending both the natural and sociopolitical worlds,27 and as naturally inclined to act on the basis of that knowledge "to the benefit and use of men."28 The appeal for the king's support of Bacon's scientific and philanthropic project, however, must guard

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against certain logical extensions of its own assumptions; most important, the inquiry into "the inwardness of all secrets"29 cannot be seen to be prying into the history or effectiveness of monarchical rule relative to other political systems. Hence Bacon's numerous disclaimers of any intent to "discover that which ... is inscrutable," his assertion that "learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, maniable, and pliant to government,"30 and also his division of knowledge into licit and illicit kinds-"the pure knowledge of nature and universality" on one side and "the proud knowledge of good and evil" on the other.3l On this account, the human ability to understand King James is just the same as our capacity to fathom God-productive of "no perfect knowledge, but wonder, which is broken knowledge."32 Bacon, that is, could look but chooses not to look "with the inquisitive eye of presumption," the eye that would see James's "absolute" monarchy itself as the product of discernible historical forces and particular political interests.

In spite of, from our point of view, and also because of Bacon's maneuvering, the special exclusion of James's "inscrutable" rule from the otherwise all-embracing universe of knowledge presses on our reading of the text the ironic impression that the "wonder" said to be produced by King James is the product of the author's own self-interest and rhetorical strategies rather than any quality inhering in the king himself. We work to equate the politics of The Advancement with those of Antony and Cleopatra by reading Bacon as actor, seeming to believe what we assume he does not believe. What this ironic reading suggests to us is that, while Bacon is playing Dolabella to James's Cleopatra, their "real" political relationship is far closer to that one obtaining between Dolabella and Octavius at the end of the play, where Dolabella's obedience covers his inward disloyalty, so as to reconfigure their relationship as fundamentally (but covertly) contractual. What we need to take into account, however, is that The Advancement had no reader more authoritative than the king, and no purpose more central to its author's interests than pleasing that reader.

The point here is twofold. First, in their respective contexts, but also in themselves, The Advancement and Antony and Cleopatra negotiated the contradictions inherent in an absolutist politics of loyalty in different ways-Bacon's courtly tract covering contradiction and suppressing the interpretative operations of irony, Shakespeare's play allowing contradiction to be grasped by refusing to police the production of meaning. Second, Bacon's meaning should not be seen as an effect of his failure to grasp the fact of ideological contradiction, of contradiction "writing itself'

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through Bacon's text; on the contrary, as I have noted, and as he himself recorded, Bacon chose to look at the king with the "eye of

duty and admiration" rather than with "the inquisitive eye of presumption."

These differences between Bacon and Shakespeare challenge the idea that the contradiction at the heart of absolutist loyalty was "writing itself" through both The Advancement and Antony and

Cleopatra. While the absolutist politics of loyalty was indeed vexed

by a foundational contradiction, it was only in certain texts, in certain kinds of discourse, in certain sociopolitical contexts, and at that only in the hands of certain writers, that this contradiction was allowed to emerge into consciousness, and so to perform or to contribute to political change. What is remarkable, then, about Bacon's and Shakespeare's treatments of the ideological "flaw" in absolutism are the ways in which the two texts-and the two

writers-managed the production of meaning for different contexts, readerships/audiences, and purposes.

To be fair to Antony and Cleopatra as it was likely performed in 1606-1607, the failure of absolutist loyalty in the play did not stand or fall on Dolabella's silent obedience to the Emperor. Amid the hubbub of Caesar's train carrying offstage the three "dead"

boy-actors, Cleopatra's bed, and the basket of figs, and in view of the centrality of the figures of Cleopatra and Caesar, the actor

playing Dolabella would have had little opportunity to make a powerful impression on the audience.

That the question of Dolabella's political relationship with Caesar would have tended to become a secondary consideration in the actual staging of the play is hardly surprising given both the normal theatrical focus on major characters and the open- endedness of the political meaning of Shakespearean drama. Such

openness to interpretation enables, of course, several readings: one that puts aside Dolabella entirely; one that puts aside Dolabella's emotional defection from Caesar in order to see his, Dolabella's, silent obedience as an authentication of absolutist loyalty; or one that sees Dolabella's silence as continuous with his

deep loyalty to Cleopatra and so indicative of his sovereign subjectivity. However, the fact that Dolabella is commanded/ invited by Caesar to "see / High order in this great solemnity," to "see to it" that due respect is paid to the lovers' corpses, or "to witness," and by witnessing to approve or even to legitimate Caesar's treatment of those corpses, tends to train the audience's attention on Dolabella for a moment. Such attention enhances the

interpretative prospect of reassigning the political victory from the "universal landlord" to the subject who, following the absolutist

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politics of loyalty to their logical conclusion, finds himself free to determine his own allegiance, and consequently finds that, in terms of what is most important, he stands and has always stood on even ground with his "sovereign."33

NOTES

1Essays that focus on political theory as an explict interest in Antony and Cleopatra include Paul Lawrence Rose, "The Politics of Antony and Cleopatra," SQ 20, 4 (Autumn 1969): 379-89; and Marilyn Williamson, "The Political Context in Antony and Cleopatra," SQ21, 3 (Summer 1970): 241-51. H. Neville Davies, "Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra," SSt 17 (1985): 123-58; and my "'Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom': Antony and Cleopatra in Its Time," Renaissance and Reformation 15, 1 (Winter 1991): 1-20 usefully contextualize the play in terms of the particular historical moment of its production. Recent work on the play's politics of gender and/or representation builds on work byJanet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on "Antony and Cleopatra" (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973); and Phyllis Rackin, "Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry," PMLA 87, 2 (March 1972): 201-12. See Theodora A. Jankowski, "'As I Am Egypt's Queen': Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and the Female Body Politic," Assays 5 (1989): 91-110; Jyotsna Singh, "Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, "Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 99-121; and Madelon Sprengnether, "The Boy Actor and Femininity in Antony and Cleopatra," in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and BernardJ. Paris (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), pp. 19 1-205.

2For the unhistorical uniformity of Stephen Greenblatt's readings of various Renaissance texts, see Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87, 4 (Fall 1988): 743-86.

3The classic new historicist formulation of the idea of subversion as harbinger of unforeseeable large-scale cultural change is Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets," rprt. in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 21-65. Greenblatt's post-Marxist view of historical change as transpersonal and as driven by an internal logic has been vigorously contested by scholars such as Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 13-31; Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 40-85; and Frank Lentricchia, "Foucault's Legacy: A New Historicism?" in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 23142.

4This part of my essay takes up and extends interests which I have discussed in "The Powerless Theater," ELR 21, 1 (Winter 1991): 49-74 and "Shakespeare and the Idea of Obedience: Gonzalo in The Tempest," Mosaic 24, 2 (Spring 1991): 1-18.

5I am extrapolating from new historicist work on other Shakespearean plays. See Greenblatt, Negotiations, pp. 17-18, 47-65; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 88-115, esp. pp. 102-103; and Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 43-81.

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6Greenblatt, Negotiations, p. 64: "Power belongs to whoever can command and profit from this exercise of the imagination, hence the celebration of the charismatic ruler whose imperfections we are invited at once to register and to 'piece out."

7I differ here with Annabel Patterson's important argument for the coded subversiveness of much Renaissance literature since her model of "functional ambiguity" seems to me to lead to the conclusion that Renaissance literary texts were subversive only insofar as readers chose to see them in that way. See Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

8In "'Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom,'" I develop a reading of Antony and Cleopatra in terms of the local meanings of particular words and "languages." For ground-breaking work on topicality, see Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 1-50.

9All quotations from Antony and Cleopatra are from the New Penguin edition, ed. Emrys Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

'0James I, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918), p. 269.

"Quoted byJonathan Goldberg,James I and the Politics of Literature:Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), p. 21.

'2James I, p. 269. '5James I, p. 169. See Goldberg (esp. pp. 17-27) for a brilliant analysis of

James's politics of language. "See Brents Stirling, "Cleopatra's Scene with Seleucus: Plutarch, Daniel,

and Shakespeare," SQ 15, 2 (Spring 1964): 299-311 for the competing ways of reading the Seleucus scene.

'5Rose, p. 385. '6The Fool's lines are quoted by Williamson, pp. 246-50. '7On divine right as "a quintessentially modern doctrine," see Charles

Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 185-98; the basic study of the relationship between "possessive individualism" and the development of modern political systems is C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

"As he carries the dead (?) Enobarbus offstage, the "Second Watch" says "Come on then; he may recover yet" (IV.ix.33). Note also that the stage direction "He dies" (line 23) is not in F, and that the word "raught" ("The hand of death hath raught him" [line 29]) can mean "snatch at or after" in addition to "reach" (OED).

"At V.ii.291sd, Iras falls dead after kissing the lips of the dying Cleopatra. 20Adelman, p. 14. 2'Adelman, p. 24. '2Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1975), p. 96. 23For Elizabethan and Jacobean views on absolute monarchy, see James

Daly, "The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England," HistoricalJournal 21, 2 (June 1978): 227-50; Richard L. Greaves, "Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives,"Journal of British Studies 22, 1 (Fall 1982): 23-34;J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London and New York: Longman, 1986), pp. 9-56.

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Daly is particularly enlightening concerning the positive connotations of "absolute" (as unconditional, independent, superior to all civil authority, free) during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

24James I, p. 61. 25See my "'Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom'" for a discussion of the play

in terms of Shakespeare's construction of the shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean rule as a "Fall" from millenarian aspiration into secular history.

26Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965), p. 198. Also see Goldberg (pp. 55-112, 230-39) on "the absolutist trope of state secrets."

7Bacon, pp. 202-203. 28Bacon, p. 235. 9Bacon, p. 203.

30Bacon, p. 211. 31Bacon, p. 202. '2Bacon, p. 204. 33An earlier version of this essay was prepared for a recent Shakespeare

Association of America seminar chaired by Rebecca Bushnell and Constance Jordan. I wish to thank the cochairs, and also Richard McCoy for his very helpful written response. More recently, Anthony Dawson read and commented productively on an intermediate version. Penelope Rensely saved me from numerous errors.

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