Messengers Were Harmed in the Making of This History: Narrating the Past in Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

abstract:Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra repeatedly stages scenes of historical knowledge-making, often foregrounded through two devices: historical mini-narratives and the use of messengers. These devices, over the course of the play, articulate three successive models of the exchange and circulation of historical knowledge. These models effectively explain how we make sense of historical information and, in Cleopatra’s eulogy of Antony, project a sophisticated understanding of historical subjectivity. Enobarbus’s Venus speech, as one model of historiography, emerges from the discourse of interpersonal credibility. His narration of past events is underscored by conditions that legitimize his claims of historical knowledge. Through the play’s imagining of counterfactual history, this essay considers how its representation of Emperor Antony as a “path not taken” in Roman history challenges teleological assumptions that underlie traditional historical narrative. The article shows how Cleopatra’s ironic deconstruction of the myths formed around the dead Antony affords her agency over the making of history. While mocking the pretensions of historical authority, her manipulation of messengers provides a fresh construction of temporality and narrativity. Finally, this essay turns to the ways in which Antony and Cleopatra’s mediations on historiography might inform and complicate a scholarly intervention in contemporary “alt-right” appropriations of early modern culture.