PHILO                         His captain’s heart,

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,

And is become the bellows and the fan

To cool a gipsy’s lust.

Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her ladies [Charmian and Iras], the train, with eunuchs fanning her.   (1.1.6-10SD)

Philo continues his dismayed? resentful? angry? disgusted? narration of Antony’s fall, his decline from military leader into lover. He used to be all soldier, Philo laments, his heart, his captain’s heart so big, so active, full of courage that it would burst the buckles on his breast, burst his very armour in the scuffles of great fights. Antony the scrapper, the warrior, the super-hero, simultaneously down in the dirt and larger than life. But that’s all gone. His heart now reneges all temper: he’s left all that behind, and he’s out of control in a different way; he’s no longer the temperate, logical, cool-headed (if breast-plate-bursting) general, but rather unbalanced, overcome, unbounded, excessive. Steel, too, is tempered to give it strength and endurance: it’s as if Antony’s very armour and with it his character has become flimsy, crumpled and melted. His heart doesn’t pound with adrenaline, pump with aggression any longer; it’s a thing of air, not blood, the bellows—which at least sounds fiery and industrial, a forge?—the bellows and the fan (much lighter, even more airy, feathers not steel) to cool a gipsy’s lust. The fan may cool, but bellows fan flames to ever-greater intensity, greater heat, greater passion. Antony’s become an accessory, not an agent; he’s enthralled by this gipsy (another racialised epithet), gipsy as Egyptian, in its usual etymology, but also vagabond, outsider, other. Antony himself has become other, the opposite of everything he has been.

There isn’t long to wait after all before the protagonists appear, Antony himself and his gipsy queen, and actual fans are there, presumably ostrich feathers, fanning the lovers languorously, sensuously, exotically. The flourish, the fanfare of the court replaces the trumpet calls of the battle-field; the troops of soldiers have given way to Cleopatra’s ladies and other servants. Some of Cleopatra’s servants, the ones with the fans, are apparently recognisable as eunuchs, suggesting that Antony himself—who has just been described as fanning Cleopatra’s lust, to both cool, sate, and inflame her—is also emasculated, as dominated by Cleopatra as her eunuchs. The balance of the scene could shift to be predominantly women, no longer recognisable as the masculine world evoked, represented and lamented by Demetrius and Philo. Those censorious Roman soldiers are very definitely not in Kansas any longer.