ANTONY         The miserable change now at my end

Lament nor sorrow at, but please your thoughts

In feeding them with those my former fortunes,

Wherein I lived the greatest prince o’th’ world,

The noblest; and do now not basely die,

Not cowardly put off my helmet to

My countryman; a Roman by a Roman

Valiantly vanquished. Now my spirit is going;

I can no more.                        (4.16.53-61)

Despite the terms in which he expresses it, Antony’s words to Cleopatra are on one level touchingly human; please, don’t remember me like this. Remember me the way I used to be. The miserable change now at my end lament nor sorrow at, this indignity and mess and helplessness and pain, and the fact that I’ve lost—try not to let it upset you, don’t let it get to you, and don’t mourn for me that it’s come to this, that this is how it’s ended. Instead, please your thoughts in feeding them with those my former fortunes—think about my glory days and smile, take pleasure the memories of our life together, take delight in just how great I—we—once were. (The language of feeding and pleasing is sensual, even erotic, and entirely characteristic of the lovers’ relationship.) Because, after all, in those days I lived the greatest prince of the world. I was the man, the noblest, the paragon of honour and of courage—and I do now not basely die. I’m not dying a common death, a little death, I’m dying unvanquished, because I have not cowardly put off my helmet to my countryman, to Caesar or any other man (the rejected removal of the helmet is both the doffing of a hat in courteous subjection, bending the knee, and the anticipation of beheading as a conquered enemy). I remain, though, a Roman, and it is therefore by a Roman, by myself, my own hand, that I am valiantly vanquished. I die unconquered. (As so often in this play, there are echoes, ironic ones, of Julius Caesar: at the end of that play, it was Antony himself who described Brutus as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.)

Then suddenly the rhetoric, the entirely understandable self-aggrandizement, which is also a kind of final desperate plea to Cleopatra, the only audience that matters, please, don’t think badly of me, please, don’t remember me like this, stops. Now my spirit is going. This is it. I can no more. No more words. Antony, gone.