“The World Transformed”: Multiple Worlds in Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

a ntony and Cleopatra, perhaps more than any other play by Shakespeare, puts the world on stage. In its setting, it flagrantly violates the Aristotelian unity of space, ranging across the Classical Mediterranean in dizzyingly quick changes of scene. The chorus of the play’s drinking song, “Cup us till the world go round,” might also be taken as the motto of its scenography. The play is like an early modern attempt at a global imaging system that makes visible large-scale networks of commerce and communication. With this difference: in its merry-go-round changes of scene, the play does a better job at showing the impossibility of making far-flung places cohere into a single comprehensible frame. If the physical integrity of the world is lacking in the play, it is supplemented by a surplus of figures. Antony alone is “the triple pillar of the world,” “the demi-Atlas of the earth,” and one whose arm “crested the world” (1.1.12, 1.5.23, 5.2.82). These figures demonstrate that images of the world are inseparable from political attempts to control it. If the triumvirate are the pillars of the world, then the Roman Empire itself is the structure of the world, that is, what makes the world a world and not the “huge rude heape” of Ovid’s chaos. Rome defines the extension of its rule as cosmopolitics. After the flurry of world-hopping throughout the play, the final scene offers a stark contrast in its sense of worldhood. Cleopatra, the life she had built with Antony crumbling after his suicide and the advance of Octavius Caesar, entombs herself in her monument. Where earlier the play had attempted to cap-