CAESAR                      What is’t thou sayst?

DERCETUS     I say, O Caesar, Antony is dead.

CAESAR          The breaking of so great a thing should make

A greater crack. The round world

Should have shook lions into civil streets,

And citizens to their dens. The death of Antony

Is not a single doom; in the name lay

A moiety of the world.          (5.1.12-19)

There’s incredulity from Caesar, his attention finally caught—what is’t thou sayst?—he processes what Dercetus has said, puts two and two together with the sword—but also, perhaps, just a hint of irritation: Caesar is doing politics, getting on with business and this weird guy with the bloody sword and the slightly opaque pronouncements is an interruption, a distraction. At least initially. (There’s also a sly echo of Cleopatra right at the beginning of the play, when she hears of the death of Antony’s wife Fulvia: can Fulvia die? Cleopatra’s being sarcastic, whereas Caesar’s response is, it seems, genuine, as the rest of his speech establishes.) Dercetus spells it out: I say, O Caesar, Antony is dead. There it is, someone’s finally said it out loud. Antony, dead.

Caesar’s response is thrilling, a reminder of the complexity of this largely unlikeable character right until the last. The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack. That’s it? Those few words, to express such an enormous thing, not just a huge piece of news but an idea—Antony, dead? That’s momentous, the end of an era—and how could I not know, how could I not have felt it? The death of Antony, that’s world-shaking, earth-shattering. There should have been thunder, explosions, deafening noise. The round world should have shook lions into civil streets; there should have been portents, signs and wonders, lions wandering the streets of the city, and citizens to their (the lions’) dens, a wholesale inversion, the world upside-down. (An echo of the portents of the death of Julius Caesar, which included a lioness giving birth in the capitol.) Because the death of Antony is not a single doom, the end of the life of one man only; rather, in the name lay a moiety of the world. Half the empire (Lepidus, as ever, doesn’t get a look in) was in his name alone. (Antony was, in some senses, Caesar’s other half too; in his death, Caesar has lost something of himself, something essential to his own self-definition and image. Who is Caesar, without Antony?) Antony, dead?