Enter [below] Antony, [carried by] the guard

CLEOPATRA   O, sun,

Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in; darkling stand

The varying shore o’th’ world. O, Antony,

Antony, Antony! Help, Charmian,

Help, Iras, help, help, friends below!

Let’s draw him hither.

ANTONY                     Peace. Not Caesar’s valour

Hath o’erthrown Antony, but Antony’s

Hath triumphed on itself.

CLEOPATRA   So it should be,

That none but Antony should conquer Antony.

But woe ’tis so!                      (4.16.9-18)

As she watches Antony enter, on the shoulders or in the arms of his men, Cleopatra imagines not simply the setting of the sun, the great gilded source of heat and light with which Antony has been identified, but a kind of universal collapse, as the sun burns its sphere, the concentric, crystalline orbit in which it moves around the earth in the Ptolomaic system, implodes, explodes—and leaves the world in darkness. Cleopatra, anachronistically, imagines a supernova followed by a black hole. The end of everything. Darkling stand the varying shore of the world (one of the best lines EVER); everything which had been formerly under the sun, the great variety of the earth and all that is in it, will be covered in darkness: it’s a kind of reverse creation of the world, an uncreation. That’s how cataclysmic this sight of the dying Antony is. All Cleopatra can do, after that great invocation of light not simply falling into darkness but destroying itself for all time, is to cry: O, Antony, Antony, Antony! Then urgency, time to do something, to attempt to bring him to her—so she calls on her women, with her aloft, Charmian and Iras, and on the friends below (notably she now addresses these anonymous soldiers, whom she would usually have regarded as nonentities, as friends, just as Antony has tended to). Help! Let’s draw him thither, lift, drag, hoist him up. We’ve got to try. She’s frantic.

Antony calls for calm: peace. And he attempts to reassure her, and also to assert a kind of restoration, an elevation of his own, not least in his dignified speech: I’m OK, I’m not utterly reduced, not completely abject, for not Caesar’s valour hath o’erthrown Antony, but Antony’s hath triumphed on itself. I’m undefeated: Caesar has not conquered me, but rather my own courage, my own honour has had its ultimate triumph, in my death on my own terms, by my own hand. I am unconquered. Cleopatra immediately recovers some dignity, as the world shrinks, as ever, to the two of them, and she replies in his own idiom; they understand each other. So it should be—yes, that’s exactly right—that none but Antony should conquer Antony. Fitting, absolutely. A triumph. But then a wobble: but woe ’tis so! It’s still a shame, a pity, a sorrow. The greatest grief.