ABSTRACT
Antony is a gambler. He shoots dice, plays cards, draws lots, and bets on cock fights, quail fights, even fishing (2.3.31-36, 4.15.19, 2.5.15-18).1 From a modern perspective, his gaming spirit sorts well with his character: in epic feasts, in drinking bouts, in sexual marathons, the heroically dissolute Antony habitually “wastes / The lamps of night in revel” (1.4.4-5). Cleopatra too loves a wager-it is she who bets on fishing with Antony (and rigs the results), and she speaks even of Antony’s death in a gambler’s language: “The odds is gone, / And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon” (4.16.68-70). Cleopatra too has her dissolute moments, and both possess something close to what moderns might consider a gaming personality-indeed, her high-stakes dinner invitation on the Cydnus may make Cleopatra the original riverboat gambler. But important shades of difference distinguish Renaissance attitudes toward gambling from ours. The upright Octavius, who disdains feasts, displays no interest in sex, and recoils in fastidious distaste from Pompey’s drunken revel, is also a gambler, and a luckier one than Antony. The Renaissance took an intense interest in gambling, and if we can recover some Renaissance thinking, Antony and Cleopatra’s pervasive discourse of gambling can provide a fruitful lens through which to view this robustly complex play.
