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Romans, Egyptians, and Crocodiles

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Romans, Egyptians, and Crocodiles Romans, Egyptians, and Crocodiles R h O D R i L E W i S hE PLACES iN WhiCh ShAKESPEARE DEPARTS FROM, elaborates, or rewrites This Plutarchan original provide Antony and Cleopatra not only with its most distinctive characteristics but also with much of its artistic force. The scene on Pompey’s galley is a striking case in point. For Plutarch, it is noteworthy for Pompey’s refusal to heed Menas’s urging that he should seize the opportunity to assassinate Octavius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Lepidus so that he can assume power in their stead.1 Shakespeare retains Plutarch’s narrative outline but offers a much more detailed depiction of the moment that Menas would have Pompey exploit. Perhaps the most celebrated feature of this depiction is the exchange between Lepidus and Antony on what the Nile crocodile is “like.” in what fol- lows, i look afresh at the sources and analogs of this curious reptile, and use them as a tool with which to reconsider the apparent collision between the Roman and Egyptian world views that shapes so much of Shakespeare’s play. The central point, i take it, is that nobody on Pompey’s galley is interested in crocodiles as anything other than a token whose currency has been determined by the value assigned to it within the moral and political economy of Rome. in advancing this interpretation, i would also like to affirm something fundamentally Erasmian about the ways in which Shakespeare uses his source material. his sharp-eyed and assimilative genius did not read for guidance or instruction but instead for what Erasmus called the insigne verbum—the unusual word, image, or phrase that might be put to work within one’s own compositions.2 Sincere thanks to Leonard Barkan, Marisa Bass, Natalya Din-Kariuki, Will Poole, Namratha Rao, Quentin Skinner, and Nigel Smith for commenting on drafts of this essay. To access sup- plemental material for this essay, visit sq.folger.edu. 1 For the traditions to which Antony and Cleopatra responds, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narra- tive and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–75), 5:215–449; A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Marvin Spevack et al. ([New York]: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 384–611. 2 On the insigne verbum, see Erasmus’s De ratione studii (1511), in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Robert D. Sider, J. K. Sowards, Craig R. Thompson, et al., 86 vols. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974–), 24:670. See also De copia (1512), 1.8, 1.9, in Erasmus, Collected Works, 24:302, 303. Shakespeare Quarterly 68.4 (2017): 320–350 © 2018 Folger Shakespeare Library ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 321 We should begin by revisiting the action as it unfolds on Pompey’s galley. The triumvirs are drinking to celebrate the peace. Antony is feeling the effects of the grape, and Lepidus is getting pitifully drunk. The conversation settles on Egypt, whence Antony has recently returned and which neither Lepidus nor Octavius has visited. We first hear Antony providing a complex answer to a question about measuring the level of the Nile and about the agricultural benefits of its flood (2.7.17–23).3 Lepidus then moves on to Egyptian “serpents” (l. 24) and asks for confirmation of the Ovidian commonplace that they are “bred . of your mud by the operation of your sun” (ll. 26–27).4 Lepidus’s “your” is supposed to indicate the condition of belonging to a group (i.e., the class of things Egyptian), but unfortunately for him it sounds like a tactless deployment of the second person genitive.5 Antony has recently reasserted his allegiance to Rome by mar- rying Octavia, and he does not want to have Egypt insinuated as in some sense “his” by someone he has long regarded as an irritating lightweight.6 Particularly because Lepidus’s language closely resembles that in which Antony himself con- trasted Egypt and Rome earlier in the play: unlike “the wide arch / Of the ranged empire,” in Egypt “Our dungy earth alike / Feeds beast as man” (1.1.34–35, 36–37). in any case, Antony’s reply begins to suggest impatience: “They are so” (2.7.28). Glasses are refilled; more drink is taken. Lepidus asks about pyramids (which he botches as “pyramises” [l. 35]) and, after receiving no answer from Antony, fixes on crocodiles: “What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?” (l. 41). in response, Antony turns to prose to articulate something between displeasure and disdain. Lepidus fails to notice; in an aside, Octavius cannot conceal his incredulity at the fact; Antony reassures Octavius that Lepidus is drunk enough to swallow anything. The exchange demands to be quoted in full: ANTONY it is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. it is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. it lives by that which nourisheth it, and the ele- ments once out of it, it transmigrates. LEPiDUS What colour is it of? ANTONY Of it own colour too. 3 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Shakespeare derive from Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (London: Arden, 1995), cited parenthetically. 4 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1.422–37, p. 17. Cf., e.g., Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. hamilton et al. (London: Longman, 2007), 1.1.21; “Satyre 4,” in The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (London: Longman, 2010), ll. 18–19, p. 399. 5 Cf., e.g., “your four negatives make your two affirmatives,” in Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam (London: Arden, 2008), 5.1.19; and see further Kathleen M. Wales, “Generic ‘Your’ and Jacobean Drama: The Rise and Fall of a Pronominal Usage,” English Studies 66.1 (1985): 7–24. 6 On Antony’s disregard for “This . slight unmeritable man,” see Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: Arden, 1998), 4.1.12–40. 322 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY LEPiDUS ’Tis a strange serpent. ANTONY ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. OCTAViUS Will this description satisfy him? ANTONY With the health that Pompey gives him, else he is a very epicure. (ll. 42–53) Antony insults Lepidus with flagrant tautologies and conveys no information about the crocodile other than the facetiously exotic claim—again, derived from Ovid—that it “transmigrates” after death, and an affirmation that its prover- bially deceptive tears are “wet.”7 Octavius takes no interest in the substance of what has been said, and the conversation is abandoned to more wine and song. Before long, Lepidus has to be carried offstage, and Octavius decrees that they are wasting their time: Our graver business Frowns at this levity. What needs more words? Good night. (ll. 120–25) What of the crocodile? As Janet Adelman notes, it is an animal whose appear- ance has “all the complexity of the historical tradition.” She continues, “What we do with so mutable a beast must be left to our critical discretion.”8 To any reader of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596), her point is uncontroversial. For Spenser, crocodiles can emblematize guile, tyranny, lust, cruelty, hypocrisy, justice, uxori- ousness, forcefulness, providential foresight, and even the sun.9 Furthermore, authors since Cicero had suggested that the ancient Egyptians invested croco- diles with a dizzying range of meanings of their own, many of them divine.10 7 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.143–75, pp. 451–52. See further Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986), 86–87. 8 Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New haven, CT: Yale UP, 1973), 61, 62. 9 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 5.7.6–16. See further Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagination in Book V of “The Faerie Queene” (New York: Columbia UP, 1969), 87–107. For an introduction to early modern crocodiliana, see Spencer J. Weinreich, “Thinking with Crocodiles: An iconic Animal at the intersection of Early Modern Religion and Natural Philosophy,” Early Science and Medicine 20.3 (2015): 209–40. See also hans Gossen and August Steier, “Krokodile und Eidechsen,” in Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswis- senschaft, ed. A. F. von Pauly, Georg Wissowa, et al., 1st ser. (Stuttgart, Ger.: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1893–1980), vol. 11.2, cols. 1947–70. 10 See, e.g., Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, ed. Otto heine and Max Pohlenz, 2 vols. (Berlin: Teubner, 1912–22), 5.78–79 (vol. 2, pp. 139–40); Cicero, De natura deorum, ed. Arthur Stan- ley Pease, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: harvard UP, 1955), 1.29.82 (vol. 1, pp. 413–16), 3.19.47–48 (vol. 2, pp. 1075–76); Plutarch, Moralia, ed. Curtius hubert et al.,7 vols. (Leipzig, ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 323 Even so, it is possible to be a lot more precise in probing the significance that Antony’s crocodile might have had for Shakespeare’s first readers and auditors. For example, Quintilian—familiar to any early modern who had made it as far as grammar school—advises that logical games like paradoxes can help to remind the would-be orator that he should attend to every detail of his words. One of these involves an Egyptian crocodile that promises to return a son to his mother if the mother can correctly state what the crocodile will do with her son. She responds that the crocodile will not return her son to her, and, although the answer is truthful, the crocodile refuses to honor its word on the grounds that returning the child would give the lie to the mother’s utterance.11 Crocodilites, or the crocodile’s argument, would retain its place in writing on logic and rhetoric throughout the early modern period, and testified to the importance of keeping your wits both trained and about you.12 There is no struggle to hear an echo of it in the way that Antony treats Lepidus’s drunken witlessness.
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