Enter Demetrius and Philo

PHILO Nay, but this dotage of our General’s

O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,

That o’er the files and musters of the war

Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn

The office and devotion of their view

Upon a tawny front.              (1.1.1-6)

Starting like this – with a mini exposition from two minor-ish characters – is a pretty familiar move in Shakespeare’s tragedies (King Lear, for instance) but it’s particularly effective here because for a split second there’s the possibility of thinking, is that Antony? Oh. And Philo and Demetrius (who aren’t named) get down to it swiftly, not with news of a war (as at the beginning of Hamlet), but of its apparent abandonment. Antony—our General—has given up and given in; his dotage isn’t necessarily that of old age (which it might suggest to a modern ear) but it’s doting, infatuation—love. He’s gone too far, he’s in too deep; his dotage o’erflows the measure. Too much: plenty to the point of excess, not simply in quantity but in its disregard for any kind of measurement at all, which must be founded on a sense of proportion and of reason. The boss has lost it this time, and that his dotage o’erflows the measure suggests wallowing, liquidity, a flood of sensation and sensual abandonment. (Lots and lots of this sort of thing to come.) In the age-old pattern, the age-old fall, Antony’s abandoned war for love. (Benedick mocks Claudio, and himself, for it in Much Ado. Henry V makes comic capital out of it too. This is the stuff of comedy, not tragedy.)

Antony used to concern himself with his troops, with strategy, his goodly eyes not missing a detail of the files and musters of the war, the disposition of the troops, the lowliest infantryman, the smallest point of order; he was in command, completely focused on military business. Anachronistically, Antony’s glowing eyes might suggest the searchlight, or the intense, penetrating, decisive scrutiny of the war room; his eyes used to be alight with the light of battle, glowing like plated Mars, the war-god’s armour bronze or gold in some classical sources, a deep, warm fire, not the silver flash of steel, but hard, hard and impenetrable. Antony’s eyes used to be aglow with military fervour, single-minded focus on the business of the field—the business of war, and of men.

Not any more. And with an office and devotion (terms which suggest worship as much as profession or vocation) as singular and as obsessive his eyes now pursue another war—but on, and for, a tawny front. His gaze is bent, focused, but the sense of turning aside, of the loss of the straight and straightforward is also present; a sense of emasculation, too. Front here is face, brow as well as the front of battle, and tawny is the first of the play’s many racialised epithets. It’s a colour word, suggesting a whole spectrum of browns, sometimes shading towards orange or yellow, rather than red or black; it’s related to tan. It’s a heraldic word (used for a bright brown) and so appropriate in this context which is military and, even more, implicitly concerned with honour and its decline. And it’s also a textile word, often used to describe fabric or garments of this colour—so here the tawny front suggests the tactility and softness of skin and of fabric, in comparison with the hard carapace of Mars’s armour, apparently now disregarded and discarded. Now Antony makes love, not war.