ABSTRACT
Though traditionally belonging to the ‘Roman plays’, Antony and Cleopatra is nonetheless unique among them, being, in fact, no less Egyptian than Roman. In other words, in this play the Roman identity stands opposite a powerful otherness: an Egyptian identity which concurs, by its very opposition, to define the Roman identity itself. Moreover, though defeated by the newly born Roman Empire, this Egyptian otherness is a powerful menace, and in the end Caesar himself says that Cleopatra, though dead, ‘looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace’ (5.2. 344-6).1 Who knows, in a remote future Cleopatra might indeed wake up, and her ‘grace’ might ‘catch’ someone else …
‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’, cries Antony in the first scene, ‘and the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall. Here is my space’ (1.1. 33-4). The Roman world is a world of rigid ranks and boundaries, but from the beginning this powerful architectural order is threatened with dissolution by Egypt’s ‘space’. The very first words of the play, uttered by the Roman soldier Philo, are, in fact: ‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s / O’erflows the measure’ (1.1. 1-2). This first image, as is so often the case in Shakespeare, is of crucial importance: from the very first line something immeasurable (connected to an Egyptian space) is on the verge of brimming over a limit (connected to Roman space) – an overflowing of all measures which, we shall see, by no means concerns merely Antony’s ‘dotage’.
