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Therefore, she is the true tragic figure and deserves to die in the fifth act. L. T. Fitz complains about the sexist attitudes of critics: In analysis of Shakespeare’s plays critics often employ comparisons of characters from different plays; for example, Hamlet has a more complicated state of mind, is more pensive and more calculating than Othello; or, while King Lear dies almost altruistic, Hamlet does ever self-centered. As for Cleopatra, noone ever rightfully compares her with Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear instead of generically unsuitable female characters (298). Fitz is right in her complaints because most of the critics focus on Antony as if the play were a tragedy of only his. Contrary to those critics who argue that Cleopatra only fulfills Antony’s tragedy, I think his tragedy is rather subservient to her tragedy. Therefore, she should be mentioned with Lear or Othello – Othello’s tragic motive is especially similar to hers – as eminent tragic figures and be taken into that canon of male tragic characters. Antony dies in the fourth act, but Shakespeare reserves an act more in order to prepare Cleopatra as a tragic character and achieves to reverse her notorious representation in the four acts by making her deserve right to be more heroic than Anthony. This extension deliberately serves to get the audience’s attention to the splendor of the lovers (Rozett 159). Until the fifth act the focus is on Antony and the outcome is a clumsy suicide, but a single act suffices her to not only prove her nobility and redeem Antony’s honor, but also outwit Caesar with her triumphant suicide and immortalize their love. However, Shakespeare’s daring design causes ambiguities especially in terms of characterization. Phyllis Rackin refers her “ambivalence,” a “strange combination of degradation and sublimity” to “mysterious powers” she possesses like Shakespeare (205). Shakespeare employs Cleopatra to show the duality of good and evil in Egyptian context. Experience as a whole comprises a continuous existance of, say, the favorable and unfavorable, or pain and pleasure. Antony, calling Cleopatra serpent of Nile, reveals mysterious truths about her being quintessence of fertility of the Nile and abundant sexuality, but at the same time being destructive, death-summoning cause (Payne 270). Within the serpent imagery, the oxymoron “delicious poison” summarizes her nature as juxtaposition of poison and medicine. Having such power, it is not unpredictable that she could annihilate or aggrandize both Antony and herself. Her elaborate suicide is worthy of notice. The serpent exhibits her dual nature with the basket brought for her; figs and asps together in it explicitly represent fruitfulness and death. Rather than the goddess Isis, she is like the god Osiris, who is a life-giver and destroyer and whose annual death and resurrection owing to his dual nature is applicable to her as Enobarbus says “I have seen her die twenty / times” (I. ii. xxx). She then can have pleasure of both figs and asps in the same basket. Ceasar’s diminishing Antony to effeminacy and his elevating Cleopatra to manly worthiness may also suggest Shakespeare’s subtlety.
A late and sudden twist in Cleopatra’s character can really strain our credibility, but of Cleopatra J. Leeds Barroll writes, “rather than praising her pluckiness while secretly scorning or being startled by those other responses painted so vividly by Shakespeare . . . we can do the queen the honor of taking her seriously as a tragic character fashioned by the world’s greatest playwright” (qtd. in Hageman 257). Shakespeare devotes strenuous efforts to stretch human nature but in the boundaries of probability thus to make us believe his twist and apotheosis: even the shrewd Caesar appreciates her virtues, intelligence, and genuine love for Antony.
What happens to Cleopatra is probably an epiphany; she recognizes the merit of the Antony who had been described by many when he was alive as a godlike hero. “But she is in many ways still the former Cleopatra; she schemes” (Mills 156), hiding some of her property, with the assistance of her treasurer Seleucus, from Caesar, so she tests him and the deceitful Proculeius (who Antony, as one of his misjudgments, has said to be reliable), as Caesar and Thyreus has tested her. Also she uses her old trick of begging pity. She kneels before Caesar but this is a feigned plea for mercy as she has already recognized that Caesar talks differently from Dolabella. The “serpent of the old Nile” has a plan to beguile Caesar and has “immortal longings” to eternalize her and Antony’s love. She hears Antony’s call and dressed like a bride-queen replies “Husband,” announcing their eternal marriage (V. ii. 315-322), which can be taken as a metaphor that signifies the marriage of the West and the East and the reconciliation of opposites in Coleridge’s terms. Eugene M. Waith’s observation supports the apotheosis: “in the poetry of her dying speeches there is a magnificent synthesis of the exalted love and courage which both hero and heroine finally achieve” (273). Also, she emphasizes how she has mocked lucky Caesar, somehow takes Antony’s revenge on him, and how she has acted nobly like Romans. “The interpretation of the hero’s character again rests on an antithesis of a broad and a narrow concept of human nature – in this case on the opposition of Cleopatra’s ideal to Caesar’s” (269). What she achieves really astonishes Caesar, who for a moment has to leave his inhuman rationality so as to conceive the exceptional histrionics. Her “infinite variety” fully reveals itself at the end; even with a smile for us as she hastens her death applying more asps to her body when she is jealous of Iras, who might get the first kiss from Anthony in heaven (V. ii. 338-39).
At the end of the play the lovers redeem “their failings … we share in their triumph over Caesar and join Cleopatra in celebrating a love that defies time and circumstance” (Rozett 159). Cleopatra’s imagination of Antony’s triumph over Caesar comes true when Antony’s “magnanimity” transcends “the world of time and change and luck” (Rackin 210). Caesar then recognizes what treasure Antony found in Egypt (211).
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