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 not only with its most distinctive characteristics but also with much of its artistic force. The scene on ’s galley is a striking case in point. For , it is noteworthy for Pompey’s refusal to heed Menas’s urging that he should seize the opportunity to assassinate Octavius , , 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 . 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 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 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 , 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 , 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 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 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 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. The play itself provides us with several further clues. For example, if we believe Cleopatra’s own account of the matter, Antony imagines her as his “ser- pent of old Nile” (1.5.26). Serpent here not only denotes a snake like the but also the category of lethally dangerous animals of which the crocodile is the bulkiest representative.13 Like Lepidus’s “strange serpent,” Antony’s term of endearment functions as a synecdoche in which the whole is made to speak for the part. But as the residue of Revelation 12:9 (in which Satan the tempter is an “old serpent”) might suggest, nothing here is uncomplicated.14 Antony toys with

Ger.: Teubner, 1925–78), 381b–c (“isis and Osiris,” vol. 2, fasc. 3, pp.72–73), 976a–c (“On the intelligence of Animals,” vol. 6, pp. 55–56); Persius and , Saturae, ed. W. V. Clausen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Juvenal, 15.1–2, 9–11 (pp. 166, 167); [Laurence humphrey], The Nobles or of Nobilitye. The Original nature, dutyes, right, and Christian Institucion thereof (London, 1563), sig. m8v. 11 Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae libri duodecim, ed. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 1.10.5–6 (vol. 1, pp. 59–60). 12 See, e.g., Moriae encomium (1511) and Ecclesiastes (1535), bk. 2, in Erasmus, Collected Works, 27:96–97 (Moriae encomium), 68:687–88 (Ecclesiastes); Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logique, ed. Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College Editions, 1972), 210–11. See further E. J. Ashworth, Lan- guage and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974), 114–15. 13 As Topsell puts it, “By Serpents we understand . . . all venomous Beasts, whether creeping without legges, as Adders and Snakes, or with legges, as Crocodiles and Lizards, or more neerely compacted bodies, as Toades, Spiders and Bees.” See Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents (London, [1608]), 10. 14 Quotation from the 1599 edition of Geneva Bible; see The Bible: That is, the Holy Scrip- tures in the Old and New Testament (London, 1599). henry Peacham the younger would later emblematize Satan as a crocodile: see his Minerva Britanna, or A Garden of Heroical Devises (London, 1612), 154. 324 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY the notion that Cleopatra has beguiled him into breaking his marriage vows and neglecting his “Roman thought[s]” (1.2.88), but he cannot say for certain that he hasn’t been duped. Even so, Antony might very well have something (or some- one) other than an actual crocodile in mind when describing a being that can only be understood in relation to itself: just as Plutarch’s Antony makes much of the posture that he and Cleopatra are nonpareil, so we can be sure that his Shake- spearean incarnation shares the view of Cleopatra’s incomparable singularity expressed by Enobarbus.15 Such a reading is only enhanced by the recollection that, in expertly stage-managing her death during the final movements of Act 5, Cleopatra appears to win herself a transmigration of sorts.16 More on this below. Lepidus’s preoccupation with the crocodile also gestures to its least con- testable meaning for the early moderns: along with the pyramids and the Nile, the crocodile stands for Egypt in its entirety.17 As such, representations of the crocodile became a ready emblem for the corruptions typically associated with the ancient Egyptian way of life. Take the expanded editions of Cesare Ripa’s compendious Iconologia (1603) that appeared after 1613. Building on the account given in Valeriano’s popular Hieroglyphica (1556), Ripa used the croco- dile to represent lussuria, or what Florio translates as the family of vices that include “luxurie, letcherie, lust, superfluitie and excesse in carnall pleasures, riot, and ranknesse.”18 Ripa’s emblem (figure 1), shows a woman of decidedly Cleopatran bearing—an almost entirely nude female figure, covered only nominally with a scarf; she might pass for an Africanized version of Raphael’s La Fornarina or Piero di Cosimo’s fantastic portrait of Simonetta Vespucci—holding Venus’s bird, the dove, and sitting on top of a crocodile.19 There is thus more than one way in which to look at the crocodile that Shakespeare scripts for Antony and Lepidus, and we should remember that

15 “For they made an order betwene them, which they called Amimetobion (as much to say, no life comparable and matcheable with it) one feasting ech other by turnes, and in cost, exceed- ing all measure and reason.” See “Antonius,” in Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared Together, trans. iames Amyot and Thomas North (London, 1579), 982, cf. 1004. On Enobarbus, see discussion at nn. 47–49 below. 16 See Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 321–22; Eric S. Mallin, Godless Shakespeare (London: Continuum, 2007), 112–14. 17 See Weinreich, “Thinking with Crocodiles,” 213–15. 18 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 2 vols. (Siena, 1613), 2:15; Pierio Valeriano Bolzani, Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Aegyptiorum literis commentarii (Basel, 1556), fols. 205v–8r (bk. 29). John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London, 1611), s.v., “Lussúria,” sig. Bb2r. 19 On the dove as symbol of Venereal lust, see Vincenzo Cartari’s Images of the Gods of the Ancients: The First Italian Mythography, ed. and trans. John Mulryan (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2012), 408 (section 15, “Venus”). immediately before deciding to part ways with him, Enobar- bus compares Antony to a dove (3.13.202). ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 325

Figure 1. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 2 vols. (Siena, 1613), 2:15. Rare Book Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. inducing this perspectival multiplicity is a part of Shakespeare’s dramatic pur- pose. Nonetheless, it might reasonably be concluded that some of these van- tages have more to recommend them than others. For the remainder of this essay, i want to introduce several further points of reference in considering Antony’s crocodile, and to explore some of the ways in which they enable us to reconsider the galley scene within the dramaturgy of the play as a whole. As i hope to establish, the crocodile reveals some essential but frequently overlooked truths about the relationship between the Roman and Egyptian world views that Shakespeare presents; about the ways in which Antony and Cleopatra fashion their image as lovers; and about Rome’s lack of interest in 326 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Egypt as anything other than a screen on which to project conflicting versions of its self-image. i First, however, several steps backward. Specifically, to Basel in late 1515. As Erasmus rushed to prepare his edition of the New Testament in parallel Greek and text, he realized that it would need to be prefaced with a defense of his critical procedures. When his Novum Instrumentum (1516) was published, this took the form of a short work titled the “Methodus.” By the time of his heavily revised second edition—now renamed the Novum Testamentum—in 1519, he had been able to write something much lengthier. This was the Ratio verae theologiae (1518), in which he outlined a new theological curriculum and mode of study. it was nothing short of a critical and exegetical manifesto, and it took the place of the “Methodus” in all further editions of his Greek-Latin New Testament; it was also frequently reprinted in its own right.20 One of the Ratio’s core arguments is that the logical niceties of scholastic philosophy are worth less than the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric when attempting to interpret the works of scripture. in advancing this case, Erasmus settles on a characteristically vivid example: “But, i ask you, what are you divid- ing or defining or summarizing if you do not know the dynamism and the nature of the things which are being discussed? What has it profited you, if you are disputing with reference to the crocodile, to treat in great syllogistic style with the ‘celarent’ or ‘baroco’ form when you do not know whether a crocodile is a kind of tree or animal?”21 The “celarent” and “baroco” forms are two kinds of the verse that those learning syllogistic logic were taught in order to help them memorize the frequently tortuous routines of their discipline.22 Although Eras- mus thus affirms that he understood the utility of mnemonics and other prac- tical aids to learning, the claim of greatest moment here is one that he often made elsewhere: namely, that syllogistic is fundamentally trivial. As it paid no heed to learning about the historical world, its formulations were unavoidably

20 On the Ratio, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977), 59–127; Jean-Claude Margolin, “Ex philologo theologus? Philologus et theologus? Réflexions autour de la Ratio verae theologiae,” Rinascimento 48 (2008): 197–228. 21 Translation from Donald Morrison Conroy, “The Ecumenical Theology of Erasmus of Rotterdam: A Study of the Ratio verae theologiae, Translated into English and Annotated” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1974). 91. For a critical text of the Latin original, see Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus ausgewählte Werke, ed. Annemarie holborn and hajo holborn (Munich: C. h. Beck, 1933), 186. 22 On mnemonic verse, see further Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), 10–13. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 327 circular and tautologous. They comprised sterile abstractions that were devoid of content and that lacked any purpose other than to propagate the cultural authority of the scholastic theologians who professed them.23 in the specific context of the Ratio, Erasmus insisted that cleaving to syllogistic prevented the clergyman from keeping in view the true scopus of the Bible, and thereby dam- aged his ability to guide his congregation. Just as one keen to visualize crocodiles could not hope to do so through the tautological operations of scholastic logic and should instead turn to books of natural history, so the would-be servant of the holy Ghost should be prepared to commit himself to the rewarding labors of grammar and philology. Erasmus was an enthusiastic natural historian, and his writings are shot through with discussions of animal life. These discussions usually lean on Aris- totle and Pliny (themselves often dependent on earlier writers such as herodotus), and are usually glossed with Erasmus’s own moralizing interpreta- tions. Crocodiles exemplify this rule perfectly.24 in mentioning them as he does in the Ratio, Erasmus must therefore have felt himself on solid ground. To some extent, he was: the Ratio succeeds in its goal of highlighting the misguidedness of tackling scriptural questions armed with logic alone. The problem is that Erasmus’s stated zoological authorities are unreliable, even in their descriptions of the crocodile’s physical appearance. Moreover, their accounts of crocodilian physiology and behavior barely exceed educated guesswork and owe as much to folklore (crocodile tears and so forth) as they do to empirical rigor. By the later sixteenth century, remarkably little had changed. Even the most sophisticated zoologists had not been able to examine living specimens of the crocodile, and their accounts of it were dependent on book learning, moralizing, and—occasionally—the taxidermist’s art. Consider, for example, the almost comically misguided representation of an encounter between a crocodile and a hippopotamus (figure 2) included in the fourth book of Conrad Gesner’s Histo- ria animalium (1551–58). Conforming to the rhetoric of visuality common to so much writing about exotic phenomena, Gesner insists that his illustration

23 Cf., e.g., the Moriae encomium, in Erasmus, Collected Works, 27:129, 133–34. 24 See, e.g., Erasmus, Collected Works, 23:233–34, 250 (Parabolae); 31:7; 32:270; 33:8, 222; 35:195, 206 (Adagia); 40:629, 1038–40, 1042 (Colloquia). Of his sources, see Aristotle, De ani- malibus historia, ed. Leonhard Dittmeyer (Leipzig, Ger.: Teubner, 1907), 503a1–14 (pp. 47–48), 558a15–24 (p. 207), 612a21–24 (p. 365); Aristotle, De partibus animalium, ed. Bern- hard Langkavel (Leipzig, Ger.: Teubner, 1868), 660b26–34 (p. 57), 690b18–691a6 (pp. 132–33), 691a28–691b27 (pp. 134–35); , Naturalis historia, ed. Ludwig von Jan and Karl Mayhoff, 6 vols. (Leipzig, Ger.: Teubner, 1875–1906), 8.37–38 (vol. 2, pp. 77–78); herodotus, Historiae, libri I–IV, ed. N. G. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), 2.68–70 (pp. 166–68). Also cf. Solinus, The Excellent and Pleasant Work . . . Polyhistor, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1587), sig. U2r–X2r (ch. 44). See related discussion in Debra hawhee, Rhet- oric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016), 133–59. 328 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY (Zürich, Conradi Conradi Gesneri medici Historiae Tigurini animalium liber IIII. Qui est de piscium & aquatilium animantium natura Conrad Gesner, Conrad Gesner, 1558), 494. Rare of494. Library. 1558), Department Book Division, Rare University Books Princeton and Special Collections, Figure Figure 2. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 329 (Zürich, Conradi Conradi Gesneri medici Historiae Tigurini animalium liber IIII. Qui est de piscium & aquatilium animantium natura Conrad Gesner, Conrad Gesner, Figure Figure 3. Rare of361. Library. 1558), Department Book Division, Rare University Books Princeton and Special Collections, 330 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY replicates a detail from the reliefs decorating the base of the first- or second-cen- tury sculpture known as the Vatican Nile. But it seems clear that neither he nor his immediate source, the well-traveled Pierre Belon, had studied this work for himself.25 Elsewhere, his authorities enabled him to capture the physical form of a crocodile with far more accuracy (figure 3). So it is that in writing his English natural histories, Edward Topsell learned from Gesner in more ways than one. For instance, he asserts his narrative integrity by claiming to “haue seene a Croc- odile in England brought out of Egypt dead, and killed with a Musket.” But even if true, Topsell’s first-hand experience was incidental to the content of his work: he was content to copy Gesner’s less fanciful crocodile, just as he had reproduced the encounter with the hippopotamus in an earlier work.26 A similar disconnec- tion can be found in English travel writings relating encounters with crocodilians in the wild. George Sandys is a fine case in point. he explored Egypt in person but offered a first-hand account of the crocodile that depends almost entirely on the recapitulation of received humanist wisdom.27 By contrast, an English adven- turer who happened to catch and kill a Mexican crocodile (or caiman or alliga- tor) in October 1567 does not seem to have had recourse to such learned expe- dients: “he was 23 foote by the rule, headed like a hogge, in bodie like a serpent, full of scales as broad as a sawcer, his taile long and full of knots, as bigge as a fawcon shotte [i.e., a small cannonball], he hath foure legges, his feete have long nailes like unto a dragon.”28 Like a pig, a snake, and a dragon—and very large. Job hortop does not know what to make of what he has seen, and hopes that his readers will be excited to find themselves in a similar position. Shakespeare understood that his contemporaries regarded crocodiles less as objects of natural enquiry than as spectacles or oddities—and as vehicles for folk- loric or moralizing belief. For instance, taking his cue from Thomas Nashe, he draws attention to the crocodiles and crocodile skins that decorated many a Wunderkam- mer, or cabinet of curiosities (figure 4). When Romeo dilates at length on the poor “apothecary” from whom he will procure the poison with which to relieve his heart- break, he notes that “in his needy shop a tortoise hung, / An alligator stuffed, and

25 Cf. Pierre Belon, L’histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins (Paris, 1551), fol. 50r; Pierre Belon, De aquatilibus, libri duo (Paris, 1553), 25. See further Molly Swetnam-Burland, “Egypt Embodied: The Vatican Nile,” American Journal of Archaeology 113.3 (2009): 439–57, esp. 445–46; and, on the rhetoric of visuality, see François hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 248–58. 26 Topsell, Historie of Serpents, 126–40, esp. 128. See further Joan Barclay Lloyd, African Ani- mals in Renaissance Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 103–10. For the croco- dile and the hippo, see Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), 328. 27 George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey Began An: Dom: 1610 (London, 1615), 100–101. 28 Job hortop, The Trauailes of an English Man (London, 1591), 12. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 331 other skins / Of ill-shaped fishes.”29 As Antony’s remarks to Lepidus have already suggested, crocodile tears are another Shakespearean commonplace, while the out- landish cast of hamlet’s grief for the dead Ophelia finds expression in his vow to “eat a crocodile” despite the notoriously impenetrable toughness of its hide.30 Much more might be said about the cultural status of early modern croco- diles, but it should be clear that Erasmus’s Ratio and its contexts confirm that which the first portion of this essay has already proposed: the crocodiles in Antony and Cleopatra cannot be said to have any single point of origin. Never- theless, i want to suggest that Erasmus enables us to discern that there is some- thing distinctive about these crocodiles and that this distinctiveness arises in virtue of the all but infinite variety with which crocodilian life had long been comprehended in the Greco-Latin west. For Shakespeare as for Erasmus, croco- diles exceed discursive convention and can therefore be used to indict the arts of language for their representational poverty. The difference between them is that, for Erasmus, the crocodile exposes the logic-chopping abstraction of scholastic theory, whereas for Shakespeare it exposes the treacherously unstable founda- tions of the humanist rhetoric that Erasmus held so dear. it is true that, in the absence of a philological smoking gun of one kind or another, we cannot say how, when, or in what form Shakespeare might have encountered the Ratio. Accordingly, and although it seems to me very likely that Shakespeare does recall Erasmus’s crocodile in the exchange between Antony and Lepidus, i hesitate to label it a “source” in the strictest sense. But i also take the view that this want of circumstantial specificity is untroubling. We are similarly unsure of the circumstances in which Shakespeare encountered , Ovid, and Seneca, and, just as their writings enable us to discern features of Shakespeare’s art that would otherwise remain hidden from view, so Erasmus furnishes us with a valuable intertext through which to reconsider the scene on Pompey’s galley. Coming at Antony and Cleopatra from this perspective, what we see is not simply that Lepidus is drunk and that Antony is able to get away with behaving disrespectfully toward him. Nor are we invited to consider some larger point

29 Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (London: Arden, 2012), 5.1.37, 42–44. Nashe satirizes his enemy Gabriel harvey as having dissected a rat, “and after hangd her over his head in his studie, instead of an Apothecaries Crocodile, or dride Alligatur.” See Have With you to Saffron- Walden [1596], in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 3:67. Cf., e.g., Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 147–48. On Wunderkammern, see Weinreich, “Thinking with Crocodiles,” esp. 227–37; Lor- raine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 84–86. 30 Hamlet, ed. harold Jenkins (London: Arden, 1982), 5.1.271. On crocodile tears, cf. King John, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 4.3.107–8; King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Arden, 1999), 3.1.226–27; Othello, ed. E. A. J. honigmann (London: Arden, 1997), 4.1.245. 332 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Figure 4. Ferrante imperato, Dell’historia naturale (Naples, 1599), sig. a3v–4r. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, shelfmark Lister E 1. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 333 334 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY about the inconsequentiality of conventional language, perhaps to conclude— with the denizens of Swift’s academy in Lagado—that things in themselves are the only truly significant mode of discourse.31 instead, we find Shakespeare leading us to the heart of Roman rhetorical culture. Most crucially, to an inter- rogation of its insistence on the visual qualities of successful rhetorical per- formance, and to the conclusion that this insistent visuality leads to an engage- ment with reality that is as superficial as it is self-serving. For the Romans and their humanist heirs, the most effective way for the orator to accomplish his ends is for him to make his audience “see” the things (people, places, objects, events, etc.) that he wants to discuss.32 The rhetorical term of art associated with this visually compelling intensity is the Greek ἐνάργεια (enargeia), which in Latin was variously rendered as evidentia, illustra- tio, demonstratio, repraesentatio, imaginatio, and sub oculos subjectio. Cicero and Quintilian insist on its importance, and their ideas resonate through the rheto- ric manuals of the sixteenth century—Erasmus’s De copia prominent among them.33 Quintilian gives a typically lucid account of what is at stake. Translating the Greek φαντασίας (phantasias) as “visions,” he notes that these mental phe- nomena comprise “the images through which things absent are represented to the mind so distinctly that we seem to see them with our eyes and to have them actually before us: the man who can best conceive such images will have the greatest power in moving the emotions.”34 The ability to summon these “visions”

31 Cf. James P. hammersmith, “The Serpent of Old Nile,” Interpretations 14.1 (1982): 11–16; John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 121–22. 32 On moving an audience by seizing its powers of vision and imagination, see, e.g., Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 72–80; Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (ithaca, NY: Cor- nell UP, 1995), esp. 2–79. 33 Of classical sources, see Cicero, Academicorum reliquiae cum Lucullo, ed. Otto Plasberg (Leipzig, Ger.: Teubner, 1922), 2.6.17 (p. 35); Cicero, Rhetorica, ed. A. S. Wilkins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902–3), 3.202 (De oratore, vol. 1, p. 201), 26.97 (Topica, vol. 2, p. 266), 6.19–20 (Partitiones oratoriae, vol. 2, pp. 205–6); Incerti auctoris De ratione dicendi ad C. Herennium libri IV, ed. Friedrich Marx (Leipzig, Ger.: Teubner, 1894), 4.39.51, 4.55.68–69 (pp. 349–50, 373–75); Quintilian, , 4.2.63–65 (vol. 1, pp. 212–13), 6.2.29–35 (vol. 1, pp. 335–36), 8.3.61–72 (vol. 2, pp. 443–45), 9.2.40–41 (vol. 2, p. 497). Of early modern ones, see, e.g., Erasmus, Collected Works, 24:577–89 (De copia, 2.5); Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes & Tropes (London, 1550), sig. E1v; Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994), 203–5 (bk. 3); henry Peacham the elder, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. O2r. See further Cave, The Cor- nucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 27–34, 102–11; heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012). 34 “Quas φαντασίας Graeci vocant (nos sane visiones appellemus), per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur, has ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 335 in oneself—thereafter to hold them forth to the mind’s eye of one’s listeners— was the of what enargeia involved. Thus Philip Sidney: “For as in out- ward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks . . . might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge.” it is the ability to deliver an “inward conceit” of “true lively knowledge” that, for Sidney’s rhetorical poetics, both defines good poetry and means that it should be distinguished as a “speaking picture.”35 Mere descriptions, howsoever copious, will “never satisfy” that which successfully mimetic art can deliver: the experience of being a “witness” to the events or phe- nomena in question. it is easy to discern how this rhetorical method works well for “things absent” that are known or that can readily be imagined from an audience’s everyday experience. What it cannot so straightforwardly represent is absent objects that are unknown to the audience one seeks to move. if rhetorical suc- cess depends on being able to harness and manipulate the “visions” of an audi- ence, an unknown entity must be accommodated to an audience’s frame of ref- erence if it is to be “seen” in the desired fashion. here, the most obvious and important medium through which to accomplish such acts of accommodation is the class of metaphorical language—particularly the simile. With this in mind, the orator could turn to poetic writing as a storehouse of figurative lan- guage to be used in generating enargeia, and as a lesson in how to generate fig- urative language of his own.36 he might also quote or allude to authoritative works of either history or poetry to help his audience form a likeness of an unfamiliar object; likewise, he might exploit proverbs, sententiae, or popular wisdom both to uphold and to amplify the picture he is trying to present. in the rhetorical handbooks, such maneuvers belonged to the “topic of testimony” and were some of the early modern rhetorician’s favorite stocks-in-trade.37 For example, rather than conjuring an image of a far-flung place like Egypt ex novo, an early modern English orator could present it in familiar, and hopefully com- quisquis bene ceperit is erit in adfectibus potentissimus.” See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.29–30 (vol. 1, p. 335), my translation. 35 A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 85, 80. 36 See, e.g., Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8.3.72 (vol. 2, p. 445), 8.6.19–20 (vol. 2, pp. 465–66); Sherry, Treatise of Schemes & Tropes, sig. C4v. See further Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 182–88. 37 Wilson, Rule of Reason, 121–22. See further R. W. Serjeantson, “Testimony: The Artless Proof,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 181–94. 336 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY pelling, terms through the pictures of it sketched by authors like herodotus and Pliny.38 Clearly then, enargeia was invaluable in helping the rhetorician to accomplish his ends. But it also underscores something fundamental about the nature of rhetoric that Shakespeare understood well: if, as he does, the effective rhetori- cian needs to be able to move both the ignorant and “the common liar” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1.61), the veracity of his utterances can only be an incidental virtue. his goal is victory rather than the pursuit of truth, and he must say whatever he needs to in order to take his audience with him. if his audience has never seen Egypt but must be persuaded to form a view of it pursuant to some imperative or other of Roman policy, then persuade it he shall, no matter that this view be fictional or sensationalistic. “Behold and see” (l. 13), enjoins Philo as the play begins. But he only does so after establishing the moral framework within which Antony—“The triple pillar of the world transformed / into a strumpet’s fool”—should be considered (ll. 12–13). The injunction to “see,” as if it were an appeal to objectivity rather than an affirmation of an observer’s indi- vidual viewpoint, occurs with startling frequency throughout Antony and Cleopatra. And yet at no point in the play is seeing anything other than a pro- foundly normative activity. As Octavius puts it to Lepidus, “You may see . . . and henceforth know, / it is not Caesar’s natural vice to hate / Our great competi- tor” (1.4.1–3).39 Octavius’s “natural” does some artful work, but the force of his comment is to affirm the ways in which he would like to be regarded—and in which he knows Lepidus would like to regard him. Returning now to the scene on Pompey’s galley, the rhetorical context of the crocodile makes incontestable one basic point: Antony cannot be bothered to go through the rhetorical motions in bringing the unfamiliar reptile to life. Lepidus has confirmed his irrelevance, and Antony has no interest in swaying him one way or another. The crocodile is like itself, and, if the foolish older man cannot therefore imagine what it looks like, no great matter. This reading is valuable, but to fixate on it would be to obscure another and more revealing aspect of the exchange between the triumvirs, one that in its turn discloses an important truth about the play. Namely, that Antony himself at no point evinces an interest in the reality either of crocodiles or of life in Egypt more generally. he is only concerned with what such things mean to him, which, as we

38 On received representations of Egypt, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 268–308. See further Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007). 39 Cf., e.g., 1.2.140, 148; 1.3.2, 62, 65; 2.7.91 (in jest); 3.3.41–42; 3.11.30; 4.3.23–29; 4.4.9, 16–17; 4.14.7; 4.15.64; 5.1.35, 73–77; 5.2.34, 43, 149. Antony’s flimsy “Would i had never seen her!” (1.2.159) is especially telling: characters see what they are disposed to see. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 337 are reminded over and over again when we first see him and Cleopatra interact (“Let Rome in Tiber melt” [1.1.34]), lends itself to a summary of the least demanding sort: Egypt is appealing because it is not the Rome in which he rose to power and in which he no longer feels in the ascendant. Antony has seen croc- odiles in the flesh, to be sure. But they have to him been an engagingly alien curiosity in which he takes no interest as anything more than an analog of the Cleopatra who, he likes to pretend, has used her boundless “cunning” (1.2.152) to entrap him. One piece of touristic exotica with which to explain another; both employed to navigate a midlife crisis whose origins lie on the slopes of the seven hills. The crocodiles on Pompey’s galley thus do duty for all inhabitants of Egypt: they are entities defined by what Antony and his fellow Romans need them to be, and exist only through folkloric commonplaces and the tautologies with which Erasmus had indicted the scholastic theologians. Shakespeare’s point is that appearances, and plausibility, are everything within the world of the Roman rhetorician that the humanist culture to which he belonged had long claimed as its own. Things as they really are, or might really be, are simply not pertinent pro- vided one’s account of them is vivid enough to hold an audience’s attention. The ends accomplished, what needs more words? ii From here, an inquiry into the meaning and significance of Antony’s croco- dile might proceed in several different directions. For instance, Shakespeare without doubt intends Antony and Cleopatra to affirm a grimly instrumental vision of Roman rhetorical discourse. For Cicero, Quintilian, and Erasmus, only the virtuous man could fully attain the quality of eloquence, but for “pragmatic” late humanists such as the unfortunate Petrus Ramus and Shakespeare’s admirer Gabriel harvey, rhetorical virtuosity was open to anyone who perfected the technical skills of the art.40 Shakespeare goes some distance along the path advanced by Ramus and harvey but ultimately diverges from them. They took the cultivation of pragmatic humanism to be a good and desirable thing. Shake- speare, by contrast, grants the value of exposing the bedrock on which the rhetorical enterprise must rest, but he depicts such pragmatism as dangerously ambivalent. in Antony and Cleopatra, the scope and cynosure of Romanitas is neither virtue nor clear-sightedly Machiavellian statecraft. Rather, it is the pur- suit and priggishly hypocritical maintenance of power. Recall that as two of the triumvirs deride the loss of judgment in the third, we in the audience see all three men as a sort of inset play through the contemptuously sober eyes of

40 See Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities, 184–200. On the orator as an ideally virtuous man (vir bonus), see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12.1.1–45, 12.1.3 for the claim that virtue is a necessary component of eloquence (vol. 2, pp. 692–701). 338 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Menas. Menas discerns a chance to remove them from the scene and for Pompey to rule in their place. Pompey approves the plan, but, as he feels that discussing it ahead of time is an affront to his “honour” as a Roman (2.7.77,78), he instructs Menas to abandon it. Menas is appalled that Pompey should be so feebly seduced by his own self-image, and abandons him just as Enobarbus will desert Antony after the indecorous catastrophe of Actium. in this vision of Rome, “honour” really is just “a word.”41 By acknowledging this state of affairs, Menas is not dramatized as a figure of treachery, but as one who—like hubert in King John—has more courage and clarity of vision than the man he serves. Everything other than power politics takes the form of delusion (in which the Romans reassure themselves of their better natures) or disguise (in which they attempt to convince their victims of the same). Perhaps so, but if we are to understand how the instrumentality of rhetoric matters to a reading of Antony and Cleopatra, it is necessary to look more closely at the ways in which the exchange on Pompey’s galley enables us to probe the mutual standing of Rome and Egypt in the play at large. if crocodiles are of no interest to Antony, Octavius, or Lepidus as anything other than tokens with which to contest the exercise of Roman , what status do crocodiles— and Cleopatra, and Egypt, and the purportedly Egyptian-pharaonic philosophy of life—have within the drama as a whole? The opening scenes offer much with which to help us to address this cluster of questions. Take what looks to be the definitively Egyptian lovemaking with which Antony and Cleopatra make themselves known: hedonistic, passionate, unguarded, and therefore the more sincere, and so on. As many critics of the play have noticed, there is something more than slightly histrionic here: to Cleopatra’s boast that she can limit the degree to which she is loved, Antony responds “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17). Things only get stagier from there, particularly as Cleopatra affects possessive jealousy at Antony’s responsibilities to Fulvia and Octavius. We nonetheless indulge them and resist the prurient moralizing with which Philo has sought to frame the action. They act out the paradoxes and excesses of a poem like Donne’s “Good Morrow” not in mannered self-indulgence, but because they have no alternative: they are middle-aged lovers doing whatever they can to evade the painful realities of time and their past lives.42 in his lyric beginning “When first we faced, and touching showed / how well we knew the early moves,” Philip Larkin explores the dynamics of Antony and Cleopatra’s rela-

41 The formulation is Falstaff ’s. See King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Arden, 2002), 5.1.133–34. 42 “Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown; / Let us possess our world: each hath one, and is one.” See Donne, Complete Poems, 198. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 339 tionship with brilliantly unflinching tenderness. Such couples cannot hope to escape the pull of their histories: “But when did love not try to change / The world back to itself—no cost, / No past, no people else at all— / Only what meeting made us feel, / So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?”43 As Antony and Cleopatra have histories that are more complex and freighted than most others in their position, so their compensatory efforts are all the more ostenta- tiously showy. “Excellent falsehood!” (l. 41) indeed. Bumping up against mor- tality, self-awareness is overridden by the compulsion to act. But from the perspective of this essay, the rub is that the roles Antony and Cleopatra assume as lovers are no less Roman than the newly arrived letter from Octavius that animates the second half of the opening scene. As the play goes to some lengths to establish, they figure themselves as Venus and , the Roman gods of love and war. When isis is mentioned in this connection, she does not express native Egyptian mystery. instead, she is typologically con- sumed within —just as Antony’s hercules is little more than the eastward looking face of his Mars.44 There is no space here to explore this large topic further, and i hope to return to it on another occasion. But consider the habitually mutable, highly metaphorical, and frequently immoderate modes of discourse that characterize life in and around Cleopatra’s court. These are nothing other than an exemplification of the so-called Asiatic style of oratory that, as Plutarch observes, had been Antony’s own since his youth: “he vsed a manner of phrase in his speeche, called Asiatik . . . and [it] was much like to his manners and life: for it was full of ostentation, foolishe brauerie, and vaine ambition.”45 it is this “manner of phrase” that Shakespeare so powerfully con- trasts to Brutus’s clipped reasonableness in Julius Caesar, a fact that gives the lie to any suggestion that the Asiatic mode may be sympathetic to the poetic or cre- ative mindsets (remember Cinna the Poet)—much less to anything authenti- cally Egyptian. Rather, Asianism denotes a rhetorical style more elaborate, and more concerned with wordplay, than the Atticism preferred by Octavius and Brutus. indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, if the Asiatic style had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it as a foil to the laconic brevity championed by the Atticists: that is, precisely because the Attic style could not always be trusted to move an audience appropriately. Unadorned masculine virtue may have been its own reward, but it was taking no chances. it could also

43 Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 315. 44 See Raymond B. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus Did with Mars,’” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966): 210–27. For a digest of some other Roman parts inhabited by Antony and Cleopatra, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 119–33. 45 Plutarch, Lives, 971 (“Antonius”). 340 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY congratulate itself on eschewing the florid of the eastern peoples over whom it proposed to exercise dominion.46 There is no better example or vindication of the Asiatic style than Enobarbus’s set-piece oration describing how Cleopatra “pursed up” Antony’s “heart upon the river of Cydnus” (2.2.197). in making comprehensible Cleopatra’s unfamiliar allure, Enobarbus deploys the full range of simile, metaphor, testimony, paradox, and hyperbole at his disposal: the Ovidian conceit that Cleopatra “makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (ll. 247–48) is a good case in point.47 Further, as Eno- barbus claims merely to amplify Cleopatra’s own act of inventive display (he imagines her “O’erpicturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature” [ll. 210–11]), we might also think of his words as an elaborate ekphra- sis.48 The key point here is that, although Cleopatra’s appearance is avowedly Venereal to begin with, it is never other than a deliberate self-presentation: she is not a goddess, rather she has carefully made herself look like one.49 Both a work of artifice and an artificer; a sort of Pygmalion, Galatea, and Venus rolled into one. Furthermore, her long experience of Rome and Roman men enables her to know what Antony wants to “see and behold” long before he has laid eyes on her. it is her decision to appear as if she were a Roman fantasy of Venus that allows Enobarbus to recreate her image so powerfully and vividly: her perform- ance at Cydnus was, in itself, already accommodated to the expectations of a Roman audience. Thus, in Act 5, we see Cleopatra readying herself for another definitively visual performance. “Go fetch / My best attires,” she instructs Charmian, “i am again for Cydnus / To meet Mark Antony” (5.2.226–28). The one exception, on Octavius’s account, is that Cleopatra appeared “in th’habili- ments of the goddess isis” (3.6.17) when she and Antony publicly asserted their dominion over the eastern portion of the empire. But this, as Octavius also

46 See Cicero, Brutus, 50–53 (vol. 2, pp. 13–14) and Orator, 20–32 (vol. 2, pp. 116–20), 230–31 (vol. 2, pp. 185–86), in Rhetorica. See also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12.10.1–25 (vol. 2, pp. 723–28); Erasmus, Collected Works, 24:299–301 (De copia, 1.4–6); Richard Sherry, A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike (London, 1555), fol. 10r; Ulrich von Wil- amowitz-Möllendorff, “Asianismus und Atticismus,” Hermes 35 (1900): 1–52. On Asianism in Antony and Cleopatra, see the detailed account in Rosalie Littell Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974), 168–207. 47 See Adelman, Common Liar, 113–22; Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 166–97. On the conceit, cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.466 (p. 81). 48 Sylvester’s translation of du Bartas has “Apelles Venus, which allur’d well-neere / As many Loves, as Venus self had heere: / Are proofes enough that learned Painting can / Can [sic] God- desse-like another Nature frame.” See The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, trans. Josuah Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 1:286 (week 1, day 6), cf. 1:124–25 (week 1, day 1) and 1:257 (week 1, day 5). 49 See Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 228–29. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 341 explains, is political theater: a quasi-pharaonic masquerade, carefully fitted to the “common showplace where they exercise” (l. 12). Octavius’s uncharacteristi- cally open rage at it results from the fact that he is no mean exponent of this game himself, and fears that he has been outplayed. Despite the commonplaces of critical tradition, this is not a world in which there is a collision between Roman and Egyptian mores, tastes, or systems of belief. Nor is it one in which competing Roman and Egyptian ideologies bleed into one another as if they were no more fixed than the shapes in the clouds. To restate the case as baldly as possible, this is because Egypt as seen in Antony and Cleopatra is a conjuring trick in which the Egyptians themselves have no choice but to participate: it is only ever through the Roman imagination that we are allowed to behold Cleopatra, crocodiles, pyramids, or the mud of the Nile. What Shakespeare’s drama anatomizes is not a clash between Egypt and Rome, but a conflict between two different versions of Romanitas. On the one hand, the epic impersonality of the Augustan age as imagined by Virgil; on the other, the vio- lence and witty sensuousness of Ovid’s Amores, where “Mars doth rage abroad without all pitty, / And Venus rules in her Aeneas Citty.”50 Both visions project themselves as the one true representation of Rome, and both are concomitantly unprepared to acknowledge any struggle for precedence with the other. Most crucially for our purposes, neither vision has the slightest interest in the reality— or in distorting the reality—of life in Egypt: the territories of Egypt are within the Roman sphere of influence, and that is enough. Of course, we know how this story ends. Furthermore, and as many students of Antony and Cleopatra have noted, the place of Egypt within the play is readily compatible with the postcolonial discourse of “othering.”51 Such readings are espe- cially apt in relation to what would become the Augustan assertion of Roman imperium as a masculine redemption-through-domination of the feminine, degenerate, and luxurious East. Up to a point, yes. But the fact remains that for the duration of the play, Egypt is one with Antony’s crocodile. it is not conven- tionally “other” or subaltern, but is rendered invisible by the chasm between res

50 On the Ovidian features of the play, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 203–14. See also Adelman, Common Liar, 131–49. The quotation is from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid, Amores, 1.8.41–42, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill et al., 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–98), 1:24. For a related account of Shakespeare’s Egypt and Rome, see Paul A. Cantor, “Antony and Cleopatra: Empire, Globalization, and the Clash of Civilizations,” in Shakespeare and Politics: What a sixteenth- century playwright can tell us about twenty-first-century politics, ed. Bruce E. Altschuler and Michael A. Genovese (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), 65–83. 51 See, e.g., Gillies, Geography of Difference, 1–7, 25–34, 112–23; Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1989), 119–41; Loomba, Shake- speare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 112–34. 342 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY and verba, by the parochialism and indifference to truth of Roman politics and rhetoric. Such invisibility is, without question, a precondition of the attempt to remake conquered cultures in forms palatable to their colonizers; likewise, the Ovidian Egypt projected throughout Antony and Cleopatra fits well with Said’s claim that orientalism works as a “citationary” mode of discourse.52 But Shake- speare’s concern is to analyze the origins of this invisibility in Roman rhetorical culture, not to explore its consequences once the action of the play concludes. The peculiar burden of his Cleopatra is to understand that she and her realm can only be apprehended in virtue of her enemies’ habits of thought and speech. iii There are few things more Roman—or more in keeping with humanist notions of civic order—than Cleopatra’s insistence that she must perform herself in order to accomplish her desired ends. here, we can usefully turn to Cicero’s De officiis (“Of Duties”), the foundational text of humanist moral philosophy and a work well known to Shakespeare.53 Cicero propounds the view that to discover one’s true self is to discover the various parts that one has been fitted to play within the well-ordered drama of human life.54 These parts were defined by the social virtues of honor (honestas) and seemliness or propriety (decorum), and were known as personae. This Latin term is the etymon of the English “person,” but for Cicero it has a more specific meaning. Personae were the masks worn by Roman actors to make their characters known on the stage; by extension they came to stand both for onstage characters as a whole, and for the actors who played them. Nicholas Grimald’s 1556 translation of the De officiis captures Cicero’s sense well: Let euerie man therfore know his owne disposition: and let him make himself a sharpe judge bothe of his vices, and of his vertues: leste players maye seeme to haue more discretion, than we. For they doo choose not the best enterludes, but the fittest for themselues. For who vpon their voices be bolde, they take Epigones, and Medea: who vpon gesture, do take Menalippa, & Clytemnestra. . . . Shal a player then see this in the stage, that a wiseman shall not see in his

52 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 176–77. 53 On the sixteenth-century centrality of the De officiis, see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to Humanities, 2–3, 19–23; Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, MA: harvard UP, 1980), 106–33; howard Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf, 1998), esp. 42–46, 132–42. On Shakespeare and the De Officiis, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: U of illinois P, 1944), 2:578–616; Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 18–37; Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017), 19–30. 54 Cicero, De officiis, ed. Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1.11–16 (pp. 5–8), 1.21–22 (pp. 9–10), 1.93–151 (pp. 38–63). Cf. idem, Tusculan Disputations, 2.58–59 (vol. 1, pp. 174–75). ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 343 life? We shall chieflie therefore labour in those thinges, wherunto we shall be moste apte.55 Despite the externality of one’s personae, their dependence on the natural force of one’s disposition, enabling one to perform a script governed by honestas and decorum, meant that, for Cicero, they comprised one’s truest identity. Further- more, and as these mask-making metaphors imply, such identities were far from singular. Decorum demands that one behave differently in different situations, making it necessary to adopt personae that differ according to the contexts in which one has to operate. if one is a magistrate, one must set aside one’s ami- able persona if a friend appears on trial in one’s court.56 Any student of Julius Caesar will recognize Shakespeare’s understanding of this model, and perhaps also his dissatisfaction with it. For instance, Brutus urges his fellow republicans to steel themselves for the conspiratorial task ahead in unambiguously Ciceronian terms: “Let not our looks put on our purposes, / But bear it as our Roman actors do, / With untired spirits and formal con- stancy.”57 While in character, an actor is indeed a model of constant decorum. What Brutus forgets is that, the performance over, an actor sheds his mask before going on to play other roles. in due course, the conspirators will fail pre- cisely because they cannot match the dexterity or art with which Antony is able to employ differing rhetorical personae. The political significance of the per- sonae, and of the dramatic language used to make sense of them, is again under- scored when Shakespeare has Coriolanus explain his exile from Rome to Vir- gilia: “Like a dull actor now, / i have forgot my part and i am out, / Even to a full disgrace.”58 his lines are unwittingly prophetic. Although he has cast off the mantle of Rome, and of Roman military virtue, he has come to find his new Volscian role irreconcilable with his Roman past. Accordingly, he will try to fashion—to mediate, even—a new part for himself. With bleak predictability, he will fail, and his failure will have fatal consequences. in his instant of self- analytical acuity, Coriolanus shows himself to have more than prowess in common with Antony. in brief, it is Antony’s failure to maintain the integrity of his warlike persona that vexes Octavius and the common liar alike. That he should have conducted himself differently in Egypt and in the arms of an extramarital lover need not,

55 Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Thre Bokes of Duties, to Marcus his Sonne, trans. Nicholas Grimalde (London, 1556), fol. 45r (cf. De officiis, 1.114 [pp. 46–47]). See further Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003), 120–38. 56 Cicero, De officiis, 3.43 (p. 126). 57 Julius Caesar, 2.1.224–26 (see n. 6). 58 Coriolanus, ed. Peter holland (London: Arden, 2013), 5.3.40–42. 344 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY in itself, have been a cause for concern. The problem is that, under the influence of Cleopatra, he allowed this amatory persona to predominate, thereby negating the decorum and the honestas with which he should, in conformity with the Roman ideology, have governed himself and his affairs. Yes, Cleopatra entreats him to “play one scene / Of excellent dissembling, and let it look / Like perfect honour” (1.3.79–81) as he prepares to leave her for Rome, but this notion of honor is a pastiche of what Antony the Roman understands by the term. For him, it connotes being “the best of men; / Whose virtue and whose general graces speak / That which none else can utter” (2.2.136–38): one who can per- fectly play the lover, the fighter, or the dutiful husband as circumstances demand; one who, after Aeneas, is prepared to forsake the love of an African queen for the greater glory of his patria. So it is that when Octavius venerates Antony’s martial accomplishments in the Alps, he praises his conduct “so like a soldier” (1.4.71, emphasis added). Similitude is not imitation or pretense, but is a higher and more virtuous form of reality that Antony has allowed himself to besmirch. The definitive instance of this comes in Cleopatra’s reminiscence to Charmian of joyous times in Antony’s company: “i drunk him to his bed, / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / i wore his sword Philippan” (2.5.21–23). Antony and Cleopatra were no doubt enjoying themselves, but, for the ideal of Rome that Antony has been proud to embody, their activities com- prise the world turned upside down. By the same token, it is the Roman emphasis on the maintenance of decorum that allows Octavius apparently to differ so radically from himself in his char- acterizations of Cleopatra: as the agent of Antony’s corruption, she is a “whore” (3.6.68); as the ruler of territories whose value he would like to emphasize, she is his “dear queen” (5.2.184); as his captive, he is quite content to drag her through the streets of Rome as an exemplar of what happens to those who resist Roman dominion. Although the personae through which he apprehends her differ from context to context, there is no contradiction here. he has no inter- est in apprehending her in any other way, much less as she “really” is: people are their personae and are as such inherently plural. For Octavius and his ideology, the key to this doctrine is that the vigorously upright Roman male should at all times be able to control the ways in which he shows his face to the world. Thus, when Antony disgraces himself at Actium by turning to follow the flee- ing Cleopatra “like a doting mallard,” Scarus asserts that he “never saw an action of such shame. / Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before / Did violate so itself ” (3.10.20, 22–24). Not just a battle lost, but an identity. Antony’s gradual realization of the fact clears his path to being the only character in the play able to cast his gaze beyond the Roman attachment to displays of visual order. having suffered a final military defeat and believing himself betrayed by Cleopa- ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 345 tra, he can make the persona of neither the lover nor the soldier retain its form: “thou yet behold’st me?” (4.14.1) he enquires of Eros, only to insist that there is no stable Antony for his follower to behold. in place of the quintessential Roman, he now recognizes a protean being figured by the shapes in the clouds:

ANTONY That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct As water is in water. EROS it does, my lord. ANTONY My good knave Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body. here i am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. (ll. 9–14) The choice of language echoes the ideas about creativity that, for many renais- sance theorists of the visual and poetic arts, clustered around the “image made by chance.” here, the ability to “see” the likenesses of things in the clouds reveals the powerfully projective imagination required by all true artists. Antony inverts this usage by imaginatively transfiguring the clouds not to create something new, but to reveal how his formerly distinct self-image has been unpainted from within by his appetites and misapprehensions.59 it is not possible to fashion a self less in thrall to humanist notions of Romanitas than this, and the disconcerted Antony retreats from the sight of it into that most Roman of safe spaces: the terminal dignity of suicide. Except, of course, that he has now closed himself off from this too. he bungles the act, just as Brutus had before him. Both he and Cleopatra nevertheless proceed to strike the Ovidian pose that Antony’s stature had been so great that only he could overcome himself.60 As so often, Shakespeare affirms that nothing dies harder than the urge to think well of oneself. But the utmost index of Antony’s failure to escape the world of multiple personae for one of imaginative mutability and fluidity is that he and Cleopatra so speedily seek to remake him in Roman likeness. Antony misreads Virgil in dreaming that he and Cleopatra might outdo Dido and Aeneas in the splendor of their afterlife (ll. 52–55).61 And Cleopatra elaborates on her earlier vision of Antony as hercules (“his legs bestrid the ocean” [5.2.81; cf., e.g., 1.3.85]), before declaring that he is as such “nature’s piece ’gainst fancy” (5.2.98)—that is, a work of natural virtuosity that surpasses even her own ingenuity at Cydnus, where Enobarbus tells us that “The

59 See Rhodri Lewis, “Shakespeare’s Clouds and the image Made by Chance,” Essays in Criticism 62.1 (2012): 1–24. 60 4.15.15–18. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 13.390 (p. 386). After helping Brutus to kill him- self, Strato tells a similar lie (“Brutus only overcame himself ”), only for it speedily to be exposed by Messala’s questioning (Julius Caesar, 5.5.57–66 [see n. 6]). 61 Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, in Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 6.467–74 (p. 24), where Dido refuses to receive Aeneas in the underworld. 346 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY fancy outwork[ed] nature.” But she is only setting the scene for her final perform- ance, in which nature will be entirely subsumed within the demands of her art. here, Antony is again Mars and she is again Venus (“O eastern star!” [5.2.307]); after expertly pulling the wool over Octavius’s eyes as to her true intentions, she even dresses in the costume with which she originally captured Antony’s heart. Like any good Roman, she now declares herself of marmoreal constancy (l. 239), and, although this claim is slightly offset by her crown falling “awry” in the act of dying (l. 317), Charmian is on hand to straighten it out. her stated goal here is “to keep decorum” (l. 17), just as, in her capture, Octavius makes it known that he wishes “the world [to] see / his nobleness well acted” (ll. 43–44). The duel between the two is thus conducted in explicitly and unambiguously Roman terms. Although Cleopatra’s success thwarts Octavius’s plans to parade her in triumph through Rome, he is impressed by the spectacle she has choreographed: “she looks [. . . ] / As she would catch another Antony / in her strong toil of grace” (ll. 345–47). The demands of her decorum have prevailed over his, and, as it would not be magnani- mous of him to resist the defeat, he gives orders that she and Antony be buried together: “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous” (ll. 358–59). Presumably, he has no plans to discuss these arrangements with his sister. A good deal more might be said about the play’s closing scene, but i want only to stress one aspect of it here: Cleopatra does not transmigrate from one sort of being into another, as Julius Caesar does (into a star) at the end of Ovid’s Meta- morphoses. Such a reading may have the virtue of echoing both Antony’s croco- dile and the metamorphic clouds with which he traces his dissolution, but is wholly out of keeping with Cleopatra’s artfully realized goal of seeing Octavius “Unpolicied” (l. 307). She is playing a political game, by rigorously political rules. Before Antony and Cleopatra begins, she reigned as a client queen. in Antony, and in Antony’s Roman legions, she sees a chance for autonomous freedom, and it is through the expression of Antony’s martial power that she gets to act the part of something distinctively Egyptian in the person of isis. The paradox, and the con- straint, of her position is that she can maintain it only by presenting Antony with a vision of herself, and of Egypt, that matches his transculturated Roman fan- tasies of what she and her country are supposed to be. The further complication is that Antony and Cleopatra fall in love with one another, and do so through the medium of their fantastically Roman self-presentations as Mars and Venus. Unfortunately for them both, Antony proves unable to match this serious play to the part of the military leader who must take the fight to Octavius. Strikingly, Shakespeare has no interest in turning this failing into the morality tale of many earlier Cleopatra plays.62 he instead focuses his attention on the exploration of

62 See Warren Chernaik, The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cam- bridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 140–64. ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 347 Rome’s power to determine the conditions in which Egypt, and the class of things Egyptian, can be taken to signify anything at all. Cleopatra, like Antony some of the time, seems to realize that she is acting— not least when taunting her lover that he does not know the real Cleopatra (3.13.162). in representing a world of pretended or contingent virtue, self-con- scious pretense might even become a virtue in and of itself—the more so when set against the complacent self-regard of the Roman civic order. But Cleopatra knows she has never had any choice in the matter. As she finds herself cornered by Octavius’s forces, her circumstances change only in degree: the space in which her royal and amatory personae are able to express themselves is dimin- ished, not distorted. She is equal to the challenge and responds by establishing an image of Antony and herself not merely as perfect lovers, but as perfectly Roman lovers. She even nods to the dolphins that adorn the prophetic repre- sentation of Actium on Aeneas’s shield in book 8 of the Aeneid (the same shield depicts the fate that Cleopatra escapes through suicide) by figuring Antony’s “delights” as “dolphin-like” (5.2.87, 88).63 We are left to infer that Antony rather than Octavius is the perfect Roman and that Cleopatra offers a proleptic repu- diation of the Augustan propaganda with which Virgil would attempt to dig- nify Octavius’s rule.64 it seems more than coincidental to note that, according to the Plinian lore repeated by Erasmus and Topsell, dolphins were the mortal enemies of the crocodile.65 Octavius claims the eastern empire by force of arms, but Cleopatra intuits that posterity might well be hers. iV Aeneas’s shield has no crocodiles on it, but in the historical aftermath of Antony and Cleopatra’s defeat, crocodiles were not far from the thoughts of the Roman authorities: as the emblem of a conquered nation, the crocodile chained to a palm tree appeared on a great many coins. One of these (figure 5) was minted in present-day Turkey and is inscribed “Aegypto capta,” a phrase that requires no elaboration. Another was minted in southern Gaul and was taken to have borne the inscription “Colligavit nemo,” or “never before bound.” 66 This

63 Virgil, Aeneid, 8.626–731 (pp. 301–5). See further Adelman, Common Liar, 71–73. 64 See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 21–48; Robert Alan Gurval, Actium and : The Politics and Emotions of Civil War (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 137–278. 65 Pliny, Naturalis historia, 8.38 (vol. 2, p. 78); Erasmus, Collected Works, 33:8, 35:401–2 (Adagia), 39:181, 40:1038 (Colloquia); Topsell, Historie of Serpents, 129, 137. For a set-piece battle between dolphins and crocodiles at the mouth of the Nile (in which dolphins prevail), see Seneca, L. Annaei Senecae Naturalium quaestionum libros, ed. harry M. hine (Stuttgart, Ger.: Teubner, 1996), 4A.2.13–14 (pp. 179–80). 66 See Rubem Amaral Jr., “The Reverse of the As of Nîmes: An Emblematic Puzzle,” in The International Emblem: From Incunabula to Internet, ed. Simon McKeown (Newcastle upon Tyne, 348 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY numismatic tradition in due course became the basis for a famous sixteenth- century emblem (figure 6), first printed in Claude Paradin’s Devises heroïques (1557). Paradin’s work was put into English in 1591, and the translation seems to have crossed Shakespeare’s desk around the time he cowrote —the play that was entered into the register of the Stationers’ Company at the same time as Antony and Cleopatra (albeit that Antony and Cleopatra would have to wait until the 1623 Folio to begin its career in print). in Paradin’s gloss, Octavius used the “chained” “crocodile” to signifie that none before him did euer subdue Egypt, and triumphed ouer it. For the Crocodile representeth Egipt, which is to be found onely in the riuer Nilus, by the commodie whereof all Egypt is made fruitfull. Besides the Croc- odile is fastened to the Palme tree, that thereby the beholders might be admonished that the godly Prince Augustus triumphed ouer all Egypt, by get- ting of which victorie and peace, he was recreated and refreshed, as a drie and thirstie ground is with a showre of raine. Finally, this simbole signifieth that Augustus got the victorie, and preuailed against Antonius, and Cleopatra of famous memorie.67

Figure 5. Silver denarius of Octavian (28–27 BCE), minted in Pergamum. Yale University Art Gallery.

UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 47–68. As Amaral discusses, the expansion of “Col Nem” to “Colligavit nemo” is contested. On the numismatic Cleopatra, see further John Cun- nally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999), 18, 57, 64. 67 The Heroicall Deuises of M. Claudius Paradin Canon of Beauieu, trans. P. S. (London, 1591), 82. On Paradin and Pericles, see William O. Scott, “Another ‘heroical Devise’ in Pericles,” Shake- ROMANS, EGYPTiANS, AND CROCODiLES 349

Figure 6. Claude Paradin, The Heroicall Devises of M. Claude Paradin Canon of Beauieu, trans. P. S. (London, 1591), p. 81. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, shelfmark Douce P 756.

Paradin deftly encapsulates the cultural and political dynamics to which Egypt is subject after the defeat of Cleopatra.68 They are dynamics that Cleopatra also grasps well: rather than allowing herself to be taken to Rome in triumph, she would prefer to be abandoned to the crocodile’s natural environment in “Nilus’ mud,” or for Octavius to “make / My country’s high pyramides my gibbet / And hang me up in chains!” (5.2.57, 58–61). A little later, she flatters Octavius that on account of his victory, she and her fellow Egyptians are “Your scutcheons and your signs of conquest,” who “shall / hang in what place you please” (ll. 134–35). Octavius has no need to confirm or deny his dominance and demurs respectfully enough. speare Quarterly 20.1 (1969): 91–95; John Klause, “A Shakespearean Scene in Pericles, ii,” Notes and Queries 62.4 (2015): 578–83. 68 See Molly Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), esp. 71–82. 350 ShAKESPEARE QUARTERLY in concluding, i want to propose that in these lines, as in the exchange about crocodiles on Pompey’s galley, Paradin’s emblem provides us with an illuminat- ing point of reference—one, moreover, that Shakespeare might very plausibly have had in mind when writing Antony and Cleopatra. Like Cleopatra, the croc- odile represents Egypt as the Romans see it. Like Cleopatra (and like Egypt in its totality), the reality of its existence is of no more interest to the Romans than, say, Caliban is to Trinculo: a piece of subjugated exotica with which to advertise, and to advance, a project of imperial domination.69 Deprived of his chance to bring Cleopatra to Rome as an emblem of his victory in the East, Octavius is not cast down. Although the crocodile is not as potent a public rela- tions symbol as Cleopatra would have been, it will do the job perfectly well. The nature of the chained beast may remain a mystery to Lepidus and most Romans, but it vividly records the capitulation of Egypt to the masculine virtue of Rome. Further, the many different meanings with which crocodiles could be invested helps Octavius in his larger goal of portraying his victory as one that vanquishes the luxuriously feminine corruptions of the East: the peace would not have been disturbed had Antony not succumbed to the sensual disorder of the Egyptian world view. in reality, and as Shakespeare’s insistence on compet- ing visions of Romanitas makes abundantly clear, Octavius’s conflict with Antony and Cleopatra is a civil war: at Actium as at Philippi, one Rome tri- umphs over another. Egypt and all its inhabitants, be they human or crocodil- ian, are incidental to Octavius’s imperial-epic ends. Through Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare exposes the purported heroism of those ends for the mendaciously appetitive sham that it is.

69 On Trinculo and Caliban, see The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden, 1999), 2.2.27–32.