My interest in the grotto-esque1 as a transgressive art form
present in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra stems from
the play's intertwining socio-political and gender transgressions
and also from the imagery which is highlighted at the end of the
last scene by the allusion to the cave, the etymological starting
point that links the grotesque with the grotto-esque. The agent
of Cleopatra's success in depriving Octavius Caesar of his triumph,
in which she was to be put on show as the principal freak, is
given full credit for the resolution of the plot A somewhat marginalized
First Guard draws attention to the aspic's trail, to the phallic
serpent of the Nile, the cave-dweller bred of Nilus's regenerative
slime and the instrument of Cleopatra's ecstatic death. As a transcendent
symbol of Egyptian culture (the circled oroborus and serpent that
sucks life from the bosom of the Great-Mother-Isis) it is a symbol
of rejuvenation and eternity. The cave that is marked with its
slime can in turn be identified with the cavernous anatomical
female body, traditionally womb and tomb, vessel of birth and
death, and here in the play-world of Antony and Cleopatra,
the instigator of the dismemberment and re-creation of a noble
identity.
My literalization of the grotesque as grotto-esque derives from
the historic cultural event in fifteenth century Rome when Nero's
Golden Palace across from the Coliseum was ex-cavated. That excavation
represented one of the most controversial retrievals of Roman
culture in the Italian Renaissance, uncovering as it did a series
of strange mysterious drawings, with fantastical designs intermingling
vegetation, animal and body parts. This event cannot be considered
as the discovery or the origin of what is now called the grotesque
the category of the grotesque as such emerged only later
with the renewed interest in aesthetic treatises like the De
Architectura (ca 27 B.C.) of the Roman writer Marcus Vitruvius
Pollio, writing during the reign of Augustus on the new style.
Vitruvius linked the classical style with the natural order and
in contrast, in deprecatory fashion, pointed to the grotto-esque
style as a repository of unnatural, frivolous and irrational connections
in things which transgress the laws of nature and proportion:
[] For our contemporary artists decorate the walls with monstrous
forms rather than reproducing clear images of the familiar world.
Instead of columns they paint fluted stems with oddly shaped leaves
and volutes, and instead of pediments arabesques; the same with
candelabra and painted edifices, on the pediments of which grow
dainty flowers unrolling out of robes and topped, without rhyme
or reason, by little figures. The little stems, finally, support
half-figures crowned by human or animal heads. Such things, however,
never existed, do not now exist, and shall never come into being.
(Quoted by Kayser 20)
In other words, the grotto art emerged as a category in relation
to the norms it exceeded.
Often trivialized and debased by critics throughout the late Renaissance,
grotesqueries such as those that Vitruvius describes and similar
to those that Raphael juxtaposed with Christian art in the Vatican
Loggias (1517-1519) became popular as design elements around and
in the margins of serious art work. They became less popular after
Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti's condemnation of them in 1582 (Morel
121). He related the monstrous hybrid figures of this sensual
mannerist art form to pagan cults associated with the infernal
regions (reiterating much of the protest St Bernard made against
the monstrous elements figuring in romanesque art.) The Church
no longer viewed the grotesqueries as frivolous, outlandish exaggeration
or wild burlesque, but saw in them a challenge to orthodox perception,
which Michel Foucault (1985) might well have described in terms
of a pagan ethos of esthetic self-transformation opposing the
Christian ethos that privileges dutiful regulation of conduct
over esthetic self-regulation. Indeed, the reconciliation of ethos
and eros has always proved to be something of a Gordian knot.
We may find a parallel reaction to hybrid monsters in the anti-theatrical
writers of late sixteenth century England. In a pamphlet entitled
A Mirrour of Monsters, written in 1587, William Rankins
views the category of the "monstrous" not only in biological
terms identified with moral transgression and demonic possession
(as in the Middle Ages) but also in analogical terms, extending
it to the ideological and socio-political sphere, and to all theatrical
phenomena, which he construed as pagan, culturally alien and threatening.
In Rankins's pamphlet, monstrousness is also identified with insupportable
transgression of class and cultural boundaries; its subtitle refers
to "the infectious sight of Playes", inferring that
the theatre may even facilitate cultural and individual
metamorphoses and boundary-crossings.
Shakespeare draws inspiration from the shifting forms of grotto
art and flouts such anti-theatrical writings as Rankins's in making
a play like Antony and Cleopatra, which might be seen to
champion the cause of a theatre that, if left to dream its dreams,
and not shackled to the restrictive ideals of verisimilitude,
will reveal its capacity to renegotiate a relationship between
so-called "monstrous" transgressions and the often mis-recognized
norms of a society's culture. Antony and Cleopatra straddle categories
of high and low culture as Shakespeare uses the grotto-esque to
re-think the discourse of normativeness. After a degrading interregnum
in which both embody a certain amount of "grotesque realism"
in the style of M. Bahktin's grotesque body, they are uplifted
to become figures in which the human form divine again manifests
itself.
What Vitruvius and sundry later classical-minded writers call
the "fantastic" signifies a pronounced divergence from
the normal and natural, a non-realistic representation that has
a marked element of exaggeration, of extremeness about it. However,
if a literary creation has no pretensions to a connection with
reality, the work cannot be labeled "grotesque" because
it is precisely the conviction that the grotesque world, however
strange, has affinities with our world and even suggests possible
worlds, that makes it powerful and disturbing. The confusion of
the real with the unreal will give rise to reactions ranging from
delight in novelty and amusement at a divergence from the normal
to anxiety about the unfamiliar and the unknown, once a certain
degree of abnormality has been reached. As Philip Thomson (24)
points out, the ambivalent nature and radicality of the abnormal
that is present in the grotesque are largely responsible for a
not infrequent condemnation of the grotesque as offensive, uncivilized
and threatening. As André Chastel argues in La Grottesque
(70), a certain topsy-turvy carnival element characterizes
the grotto-esque. We find human figures in ridiculous contorsions,
and a satirical tone may also be present. As a rule, indecent
gestures and preposterous metamorphoses are represented. In the
mannerist grotto-esque art forms the Rabelaisian "substantifique
moëlle" may even be hidden behind playful metamorphoses
that bear the stamp of pagan mythology and its veiled truths.
The "variety" and "strangeness" that Montaigne
attributes to the grotesque actually underpin Shakespeare's representation
of Cleopatra and her Egyptian court. Her "infinite variety"
(2.2.241) generates oppositional pleasure and anxiety in the stage
world as well as in the audience.
In the play, Egypt is a country defined by carnival festivity
and carnival inversion associated with what Marilyn French (23)
calls the "outlaw" feminine principle. Pleasure is generated
and experienced by the Egyptian court to the full. The most fundamental
dynamic of the play consists in the constant mediation between
carnivalesque femininity and masculine officialdom, represented
by the Lenten kill-joy Octavius or, to put it in more Freudian
terms, his body-denying tyranny of the human will. Egypt is full
of comic exuberance and characterized by a lyric romantic quality
engendered by the vitalities of the natural world However the
nimble spirit of mirth allied to Cleopatra's mischievous Puck-like
nature can emerge as either poisonous or medicinal: the "antics"
of the gypsy queen are capable of unloosing either fertility or
evil.
As M. French specifies, "the outlaw feminine principle is
rebellious against any permanency except the cyclic permanency
of nature"(24) It is seen as both "castrating"
and as a source of energy and force Life in Egypt is characterized
by drunken revels (2.5.20-21), "soft hours" for love,
sport and pleasure (1.1.45-48), banqueting, moody music, colourful
dress and a general sense of luxury, splendour and idleness. The
Nile River is at the centre of the conception of Egypt its
annual overflow bringing fertility, even out of destruction, as
Antony explains to Caesar in 2.7.19-22. Its slime yields rich
harvests, but also swarms of insects and serpents which breed
in spontaneous generation of the sun. However, the fertility of
the Nile is in fact undercut in the play by its sinister aspects
it also breeds carrion-eating flies and gnats (3.13.170)
and the dire symbol of evil, the poisonous serpent.
In the sixteenth century, Egypt was still venerated for its learning
and also shared Asia's fame for luxurious living, rich cloths,
fine carpets, silks and spices. However, a narrative of African
degeneration, a counter-discourse of disrespect was also shared
by Egypt from early times. In Antony and Cleopatra the
stereotypical association of European Rome with reason and African
Egypt with passion, feminity, and transgressive sexuality is strongly
felt. Europe's racial lexicon included dark skin, gypsies (associated
with deceit), conquest, degeneration Antony at times assumes a
Roman discourse which renders Cleopatra a whore and a trickster:
his "false soul of Egypt" and "grave charm"
(4.12.25); a "right gipsy" (4.12.28) by whom he says
he was "beguil'd [] to the very heart of loss." (4.12.28),
all tell-tale formulations of an ingrain fear of cultural "otherness"
as a threat to the consoling certainties of conventional life,
and fear of the transgressive female as a new and alien persona
threatening the constitutive definitions of Roman cultural norms.
Normativeness in the play is defined with regard to the Roman
absolute. Cleopatra's excessive sensuality contrasts strongly
with the coldness of the Roman Octavia, who is a "statue"
rather than a "breather" (3.3.21) and so unlike Cleopatra
who maliciously speculates on the sexual attractiveness of Octavia,
her rival, coming to the conclusion that "There is nothing
in her yet" (3.3.23). Octavia is considered by Agrippa to
be the "studied" (2.2.146) match for Antony, and Maecenas
sees her as "A blessed lottery" of "beauty, wisdom,
modesty" (2.2.251-253), capable of settling the heart of
Antony. To Caesar, she is the apogee of womanhood, "a piece
of virtue" (3.2.28), but also a useful commodity when in
need of a political alliance. To Antony, she is a "lady"
and a "gem" (3.13.110) to whom he would do all by the
rule (if he were not a liar) She symbolizes those virtues of the
mean or measure that can reconcile the estranged Caesar and Antony,
and "hoop" (2.2.122), "knot" (2.2.135) and
"cement" (3.2.29) them together in one world-conquering
enterprise. He also represents female chaste constancy, "the
lynch pin of the basic contract of civilization" (French
128) which enables the begetting of lawful heirs, a possibility
Antony seemingly regrets when enraged by Cleopatra's vacillating
allegiance:
Have I left my pillow unpressed in Rome
Forborne the getting of a lawful race
And by a gem of women, to be abused
By one that looks on feeders? (3.13.107-110)
In direct contrast to Octavia, the highly sexed Cleopatra can
be viewed as a manifestation of the grand bogeyman of the Protestant
ethos. As the unruly libertine female, she is a mark of the ultraliminal,
a perilous realm in which all kinds of transformation are possible,
including the grotto-esque. The gamesome Cleopatra fishes her
Antony, hooks him to her rudder and has him enthroned in the market
place with great pomp and ostentation. From catching big fish
in carnival revels she moves onto bigger catches in the political
sphere. The subversive potential of the carnivalised feminine
principle becomes most threatening when its manifestations move
out of the liminal world of carnival games and into the political
arena itself. Caesar's railing against Antony, his alienated countryman,
whom he refers to as his emasculated "competitor", "not
more manlike/ Than Cleopatra" (1.4.5-6), bears witness to
the anxiety generated by the hybrid Antony:
CAESAR:
Let's grant it is not amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy,
To give a kingdom for a mirth..
[]
[] yet must Antony
No way excuse his foils when we do bear
So great weight in his lightness. (1.4.16-18; 23-25)
Antony might be related here to one of the caryatids that are
found in grotto-esque ornamentation he is no longer the
"triple pillar of the world" (1.1.12) that Philo described
him as, but, "transformed into a strumpet's fool" (1.1.12-13),
the pillar now, like a caryatid, tapers off into a figure of lightness,
into "the bellows and the fan/ To cool a gipsy's lust".
(1.1.9-10)
Normativeness in the play is most frequently expressed by Roman
male viewers. In all of her activities, Cleopatra is the object
of profane surmise, and male discursive formations, produced by
Roman empiricism, present her as the ambivalent configuration
of the female grotesque. Most of the Romans view her as the polluting
and polluted grotesque female, liable to inflict Antony with "Full
surfeits and the dryness of his bones"(1.4.27). As the fisher
of men she herself admits that she "trades in (carnal) love"
(2.5.2), drinks her men to bed, emasculates them with games of
cross-dressing and one-upmanship: the incident of the salt-fish
in 2.5.10-18 echoes the "salt" Cleopatra of 2.1.21,
the emblem of baited vice who triumphs over Antony's male Roman
earnestness in various rollicking sexual encounters:
CLEOPATRA:
. next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan. (2.5.18-23)
Roman commentators in the play reduce Cleopatra to a sensual temptress
whom their civilized customs condemn. The vocabulary they use
throughout the play conveys an orthodox sense of continence and
a Stoic fear of the generative powers of the kinetic. Her "infinite
variety" is again portrayed in the transitional shapes with
which her grotto-esque body is endowed: she is a "gipsy"
and "strumpet" (1.1.13) to Philo, to Pompey she is a
bewitching sensual temptress (2.1.22-27). To Maecenas and Agrippa
a magnificent sexual object and "trull" (3.6.98); to
Octavius, a "whore", to Scarus "Yon ribaudred nag
of Egypt" (3.10.10). It is Antony himself who gives her the
most disturbing shapes. Framed by his Roman institutionalized
world, and therefore still harboring a tendency to appeal to the
bundle of values that his civilized mind has registered, when
under damaging pressure from fears of betrayal by Cleopatra, he
refers to her as a "kite" (3.13.91), a "boggler"
(3.13.113), a "morsel cold upon Caesar's dead trencher",
(3.13.119-120), "triple-turned whore"(4.12.13), "right
gipsy" (4.12.28) and "spell" (4.12.30).
Other commentators reveal a repressed fascination with her and
with her dangerous fertile culture. The drunk Lepidus is keen
to hear Antony's description of the Egyptian serpents and crocodiles
"bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun"
(2.7.26-27); Maecenas and Agrippa privately draw Enobarbus aside
to hear the inside story of Egypt's wonders. Spell-bound by the
description of Cleopatra on her barge at Cydnus, Agrippa cannot
help but express his admiration :
Royal wench!
She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed;
He plough'd her, and she cropp'd. (2.2.236-28)
Momentarily, Agrippa subverts the established moral order he upholds
and can no longer contain his emotion. Enobarbus's description
of Cleopatra on her barge makes her defects sound like perfections.
She arouses every sense with her rich clothing, music and perfume
and in her self-conscious staging of herself, she appears not
as a gaudy imitation of an imitation, but a living, neo-Platonic
intimation of a spiritual realm, a transcendent royal queen, "O'erpicturing
that Venus where we see /The fancy outwork nature". (2.2.210-211).
Shakespeare's source for his additions to Plutarch's account of
Cleopatra at Cydnus is Lucretius's De rerum natura, a repository
of Romanized Epicurean philosophy in which is to be found Lucretius's
invocation of the Venus genetrix of the Roman race and
of all things under heaven, the conceiver of good and dispeller
of evil whose creative activity overcomes the god of war. "What
Venus did with Mars" is not the subject of moralistic condemnation
on the part of Lucretius, but an allegory of love overcoming strife.
Shakespeare seems to be hinting at the possibility for some human
tolerance to colour the ascetic Roman world in which ideals of
manhood are
presented by Ceasar as "drinking the stale of horses and
the gilded puddle which beasts would cough at" or "eating
strange flesh" (1.4.63-69). Enobarbus's erotic account of
Cydnus presents Cleopatra as sublime excess, a living ideal that
surpasses the most gorgeous fancy.
Grotto-esque art breaks down and restructures the familiar into
incongruous associations. Fantasies of the unconscious and of
the ideal are juxtaposed, the rational and irrational mingle together.
In the Shakespearean universe value structures are seriously questioned
through incongruous analogies, and synthesis and integration are
urged for. As in the grotto-esque designs where the masculine
and feminine share the characteristic of flux, in Antony and
Cleopatra Shakespeare attempts a synthesis of the two principles
and examines the kinds of worlds that would result when one or
the other principle becomes absurd, neglected, devalued or exiled.
If the male Romans attempt to distort the feminine Egyptian world
into a female grotesque, the Egyptian gaze also twists and contorts
the neat contours of the Roman world. Rome also has its male freaks
and monsters. In the first scene of the play, Philo, acting as
a kind of Mannerist Sprecher2 figure, attempts to insert
a Roman normative perspective on Antony and to guide the audience
response. His gaze is somewhat voyeuristic as he distances himself
from the scene, finding nonetheless the grotesqueries that he
views there alluring. The attraction-repulsion principle of the
grotesque works on him and on his Roman companion Demetrius like
a spell. Antony "approves the common liar" with his
behaviour in this moving tableau and somehow satisfies the Puritan
gaze he is subjected to. However, the observed also direct their
gaze back at the Roman idealists as the dramatist attempts to
renegotiate mutual boundaries to increase the sensitivity and
tolerance for "otherness". The audience is ultimately
invited to establish its own criteria of "normativeness".
Cleopatra reveals how the Dionysiac life-giving energies are lacking
in the impoverished Roman psyche. In the very first scene she
reflects back her vision of Octavius Caesar when she mimes his
playing at petty empire-building games, deliberately confusing
him with Antony's scolding, hen-pecking wife, Fulvia (1.1.30):
Do this or this;
Take in that kingdom and enfranchise that;
Perform't or else we damn thee. (1.1.23-25)
Octavius is portrayed as an imperious businessman with shrewish
feminine attributes. Cleopatra's playful impersonation of him
reveals how a respect for differences is required how Roman
imperialists also have their freakish attributes which the Egyptian
Bacchannals of the grotesque masque of act 2 scene 7 might have
improved if only "Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne" (2.7.108)
had not been frowned upon by Caesar's "graver business"
(2.7.114-115). The monstrousness of the feasts and sexual appetites
of the Egyptians begs definition against the monstrous ambition
of Pompey to own the seas, against the monstrous treachery of
Caesar in turning against the gullible Lepidus, or against the
vile lies of Caesar who vaunts gentleness and promises civility
to his captive, Cleopatra, when planning to use her in his triumph
:
How honorable and how kindly we
Determine for her; for
Caesar cannot live to be ungentle (5.1. 59-61)
Love is shown to be lacking in the entire grain of Caesar whose
ignorance of fluid human contact reduces social intercourse to
slight threads tied by messengers and whose interpersonal relationships
include bartering a sister for a political alliance.
Paradoxically, Antony's normativeness is presented by his Roman
acquaintances as being of an ideal magnitude. The most recurrent
points of reference used in the play are Hercules and plated Mars,
the ideal warriors. Antony's established reputation had embodied
a set of images which were all lawful and culturally authoritative
in the eyes of his institutionalized society. But the issue of
his cultural egregiousness is renegotiated within the play - the
constitutive categories of normativeness and deviation (or monstrousness)
are subject to negotiation. Antony is finally uplifted by his
unrepressed sexual desire and the unbending Caesar, in his final
defeat by Cleopatra, is invited to renegotiate the relationship
of the "monstrous" to the norms he assumed to be absolute.
Shakespeare achieves this renegotiation through integrating the
dynamics of the grotto-esque art. The comic exuberance of Egypt
is used as a counter-discourse to the dour Roman ethos. Comic
degradation and dismemberment put Antony through the somewhat
painful process of a breakdown of identity. His liminal experience
- "Here I am Antony,/ Yet cannot hold this visible shape
"(4.14.13-14) might well be described in the terms used by
Michel Foucault to define transgression and fulfillment. For Foucault,
transgression is a form of contestation of values that carries
them all to their limits: "To contest [transgress] is to
proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves
its limit and where the limit defines being."("A Preface
to Transgression" 35) Transgression takes us beyond the deadening
and consoling certainties of conventional life, and, like the
transgressive grotto art forms, may lead to the exploration of
alternative aesthetic forms of existence.
Antony openly contests his culture's values throughout the play.
In the opening scene we see him kissing away the kingdoms that
he had previously striven to conquer:
The nobleness of life
Is to do thus, when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do't - (1.1.38-40)
Once under Cleopatra's spell, like his mythical ancestor Hercules
who fell under female domination, he undergoes what amounts to
a Dionysiac ritual of flaying as he sloughs off the outer skin
to reveal the identity of the inner man. Pleasure and virtue are
finally reconciled in the Aldine dolphin (5.2.88) that Cleopatra
evokes to depict Antony, her "man of men" (1.5.74).
He is re-created and re-shaped by the Shakespearean synthesis
that Cleopatra strives to accomplish. As Barbara Bono (165) rightly
argues, to Roman analytical distinctions made between sexual and
social matters, she prefers androgyny and emotionally charged
intimacy; in place of moralistic choice she favours syncretism.
In a final performance of grotto-esque transgression, she achieves
the transcendent re-creation of the constrictive Roman world by
integrating Roman Stoicism into her orgiastic Egyptian version
of suicide, thereby attaining the status of myth for herself and
for her lover:
CLEOPATRA:
[] and then, what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do't after the high Roman fashion
And make death proud to take us. (4.15.91-93)
By avoiding the degrading exhibition of herself as an alien freak
in Caesar's long-desired "eternal" (5.1.66) triumph,
she escapes the clutches of the "common liar" and the
over-simplified interpretation as a female grotesque that the
unromantic, Stoic Roman crowd, trained in a given set of civilized
customs, would make of the Venus-Isis-Cleopatra :
[] Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o'tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'th'posture of a whore.
[] (5.2.214-219)
[] I am again for Cydnus
To meet Mark Antony. (5.2.227-228)
As Edgar Wind reminds us in his interpretations of the two Venuses
in Botticelli's "Primavera" and "The Birth of Venus":
one should not assume that the vulgar Venus is purely sensuous
and does not share in the celestial glory [] While a purely sensuous
instinct will incline to misplace the source of visual beauty
in the body and seek the fruition of beauty in animal pleasure
alone, the human lover will recognize that the Venus who appears
clothed in an earthly garment is an image of the celestial. (138-139)
Wind thus warns the viewer not to make a dyadic moral contrast
between the Venere vulgare, or Aphrodite Pandemos, the
Lucretian Venus of fruitful nature and the Venere celeste,
or Aphrodite Urania, born of Zeus and the ocean spume,
and a symbol of divine inspiration. >>From a synthesis of
the dichotomies of virtue and pleasure, of Stoicism and Epicureanism,
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra derive the neo-Platonic unifying
concept of a passionate spiritual love for divine truth, infusing
their tragic defeat with the transcendent thrust of love's triumph.
Grotto-esque transgressions continue right up to the end of the
play, with Caesar, "ass unpolicied" (5.2.301-302), donning
the robes of Hymen to wed the dead lovers in a bridal tomb. The
eulogy he pronounces in his closing speech points to a certain
recognition on his own part that the Old Adam and the discourse
of desire that constituted him must, like the skin of the aspic,
be cast off to make way for the new:
She shall be buried by her Antony.
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. (5.2.352-357)