ANTONY ’Tis well thou’rt gone,
If it be well to live. But better ’twere
Thou fell’st into my fury, for one death
Might have prevented many. Eros, ho!
The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage.
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o’th’ moon,
And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. She dies for’t. Eros, ho!
Exit (4.13.39-49)
A bitter, perhaps slightly blustering tone from Antony: well it’s just as well you’ve gone (he told Cleopatra to get out) if you want to live, that is. There’s bitterness, and weariness too, in his next remark: but better ’twere thou fell’st into my fury, for one death might have prevented many. Cleopatra’s death, at his hand or more generally, might have prevented the deaths of many men in battle, he suggests—but he’s also thinking about deaths in the future, as the result of this catastrophic defeat, including his own. Again, he calls for Eros. The shirt of Nessus is upon me, Antony laments; he invokes the fate of Hercules (identified earlier in the play as his legendary ancestor, and so his patron), unwittingly betrayed by his wife with a shirt soaked in the toxic blood of Nessus, the centaur whom he had earlier slain, which killed him. And it’s Hercules he invokes, again, under the name of Alcides: teach me, thou mine ancestor, thy rage. Let me lodge Lichas—the page who delivered the poisoned shirt—on the horns of the moon(Hercules threw him into the sea; this is the scale of Antony’s passionate rage, the violence of his despair—he’s imagining hurling the unfortunate Lichas even further, into orbit) and with those hands that grasped the heaviest club (Hercules, again) subdue my worthiest self, worthy only of death. Antony is contemplating suicide, and the terms in which he’s doing so, invoking the demi-god, archetype of strength and heroism, are claiming heroism in death, but also underlining the seriousness of his intent and of the situation. Yet he shifts, abruptly, from this elevated, and tragic, rhetoric to a stark and cruel threat: the witch shall die. This is his beloved Cleopatra, reduced to witch, condemned to death, because to the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall under this plot. Antony is still harping on Caesar’s youth, which he takes so personally, seeing it as an extra layer of insult and dishonour, to be defeated by someone whom he regards as an upstart, a puppy, a jumped-up boy. The witch and the boy, they’ve conspired against me; they’ve been my downfall. She dies for’t. Eros, ho!