ABSTRACT
Wounded and bleeding, Shakespeare’s Antony offers himself as a sacrifice to his goddess Cleopatra in a scene that exploits the thrill of sexual transgression, the desire of submission, and the transcendence of death’s embrace-at once dangerous, beautiful, and irrepressibly erotic. Antony clearly desires to perform his suicide as a passionately romantic act, one in which he plays the tortured, despairing lover calling out for his mistress in the ecstatic thralls of death. In submitting himself to his queen and to his own death, Antony expresses the immortal longings that drive his self-slaughter and that underlie his passionate love for Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra culminates in this poetic fusion of death and sexuality characteristic of the Liebstod, or a sensual story of love and death, as developed through the narrative of male masochism.1
