Cleopatra by Harold Bloom

Author:Harold Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 10

This Foul Egyptian Hath Betrayed Me

Antony goes into the battle of Actium with forced confidence:

I would they’d fight i’th’ fire or i’th’ air;

We’d fight there too.

act 4, scene 10, lines 3–4

Disaster is almost immediate:

Scarus:       Swallows have built

In Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augurers

Say they know not, they cannot tell, look grimly,

And dare not speak their knowledge. Antony

Is valiant, and dejected, and by starts,

His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear

Of what he has and has not.       [Enter Antony]

Antony:        All is lost!

This foul Egyptian hath betrayèd me.

My fleet hath yielded to the foe, and yonder

They cast their caps up and carouse together

Like friends long lost. Triple-turned whore! ’Tis thou

Hast sold me to this novice, and my heart

Makes only wars on thee. Bid them all fly;

For when I am revenged upon my charm,

I have done all. Bid them all fly. Be gone!   [Exit Scarus]

O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more.

Fortune and Antony part here; even here

Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts

That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave

Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets

On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked

That overtopped them all. Betrayed I am.

O this false soul of Egypt! This grave charm,

Whose eye becked forth my wars and called them home,

Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,

Like a right gipsy hath at fast and loose

Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.

[Calling] What, Eros, Eros!

act 4, scene 12, 3–30

Antony’s vexed fortunes have him in wild alternation between vain hope and the foreboding of loss. When his fleet, with many Egyptian ships, goes over to Octavius he sensibly concludes that Cleopatra has sold him out. The immensely bitter: “Triple-turned whore” hits at the sequence of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Antony himself. He endures now only to avenge himself on her evil magic and invokes the sunrise he will not live to see.

   The hearts

That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave

Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets

On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is barked

That overtopped them all.

There is a gracious turn in parting from fortune on good terms and then a falling into self-pity as he chides the false-hearted former followers whom he enriched. There is some question as to the word “spannell’d.” The Folio text reads “pannelled,” which was amended to “spanieled.” In Shakespeare’s day “pannell” meant a whore, and that fits the context better, since it applies both to the followers abandoning Antony and to Cleopatra. They dissolve and melt as tributaries to the blossoming Octavius and he, solitary pine tree that stood above them all, is now destroyed by the stripping away of his bark and thus his life.

Betrayed by the fatal charm of Cleopatra the sorceress, who in their sexual union had been the culmination of his career and his destiny, and who had enlisted him in a cheating game, he utters a line so memorable that Shakespeare could not surpass it:

Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.

Cleopatra enters to be waved away as a false enchantress. What are we

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