The Love without Secret: Antony and Cleopatra

When I thought, it was time to read something serious, quickly I found Shakespeare so fascinating and even amusing. Together with the chinese translation by 朱生豪, I read the play in original. Old german knowledeges help me a lot by recognizing many words.

Seven years after writing the chronicle play <Julius Caesar>, Shakepeare composed its sequel in the autumn of his own life. Some people suppose, he didn't dare to write a play about the queen of Egypt, before the death of Elisabeth I. But it shouldn't be the only reason, why Shakespeare didn't write the story directly after. In my opinion, even Shakespeare couldn't conjecture the innermost feelings of the hero and heroine of this story, when he was not old ehough.

The tragedy tells a love story, but not an usual one. It's far from the adolescent love between Romeo and Juliet, also fundamentally different from the romance of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra in her time as a maiden. There are a hero and a beauty in the story, also also unusual. Antony was once a true hero, but he is gradually declining. Of course Cleopatra was an incomparable beauty, but her blooming age is also passing away. Their relation has no secret, as queen of Egypt and great general of Rome, they are always under the oversee of attendents and also spies. The love can't be private - from the beginning on they never escape the malicious critics.

According to the recordation of Plutrach, at the time they met each other, the queen of Egypt was 39; There is no doubt that she has lost the peak of her beauty. Antony was 53, also trapped in dilemma. His reputation and authority was strongly challenged by the younger general Pompey Junior and the crack between three giants, Antony himself, Octavius and Lepidus, was also slowly amplified. It's very possible, Antony and Cleopatra found the shadow of him- and herself in each other. Furthermore imaginable, in telling the tragedy of the twight love, Shakespeare was also writing about his own fate.

Losing her youth and blooming beauty, Cleopatra must adapt more tricky artifices to attract the love of Antony. There is a scene full of meaning, after Antony went back to Rome, in her palace Cleopatra recalled the moment when she saw Caesar and his troop. What she never forgets, is even the great general Pompey Senior couldn't move his eyes away from her cheek. That could be her proudest memory. Young girls need no tricks, but they carry away all men around without intention. Cleopatra became extremly capricious and irritable. She lived in horror everyday. She knew very well, what her potential ending might be, just like how she zapped her own brother and sister and gained the crown of Egypt with the power of Caesar, she could be overthrown over night. Ptolemaic Dynasty was nothing more than the puppet of Rome. To fascinate Antony, was her last chance to save her life and power.

Marc Antony, once the great orator in the funeral of Julius Caesar und Mars of Rome, is getting more and more muddled day by day. At the beginning of the play, hearing the death of his wife Fulvia, and the closing threaten of Pompey Jr., Antony could still make up his mind, break up the affair in Alexandria and went back to Rome, in order to save his alliance with Octavius and avoid the crisis. He gained a chance of rebirth for his policital life by marring the sister of Octavius. But unfortunately from then on, he made no more a single correct decision, until the collapse of his army along Nile. After hearing the fake news about the death of Cleopatra, he lost his heart completely. He tried to end his life in a way of a true roman warrior but failed to finish that with stabbing the sword into his own stomach. In the last moment and in great agony, he murmured his last words to the queen, "I can no more". At that moment, all readers will feel an irresistible impluse to commiserate with the former hero. He just couldn't controll himself any more, even though he was trained as a soldier. He couldn't resist the acctraction of Cleopatra, the tricky woman in middle age. He was actually defeated by himself. And Cleopatra also chose to kill herself in the most severe way - let a deadly serpent bite her breast. She also saw the impasse of herself. She was too old to lure a new proctector in Rome. It's better to suicide than to be killed in the hands of enemy.

There is a controversial question, did Antony and Cleopatra really love each other? Or actually they just needed each other? Antony wanted the love of Cleopatra, the former woman of Julius Caesar, to prove himself to be true inheritor of Caesar. He 'loved' her, because she was the most powerful woman ever. Cleopatra needed Antony, not only for the political protection, but also because she would like to prove her unfading beauty, that she still had the allure, which is always a dream of women.

But did Antony and Cleopatra really never love each other? I think they may find the mutual love at the last moment of their life: when their combined army was defeated, when they must choose, either to endure the great shame or to end their lives, when their fates closely tied together, the muddled hero and the ageing beauty might feel the sense of love. At that time, love is no more the exchange of sex and protection, no more about the physical desires, but rather the mutual consolation of two afeared souls.