payment page
Summary: Act 5: Scene 1
Octavius orders Dolabella to deliver to Antony a command for his surrender. After Dolabella leaves, Dercetus, one of Antony’s men, enters carrying Antony’s sword. He explains that Antony has died by his own hand, and with his old master dead, Dercetus offers his services to Octavius. Octavius remarks that the passing of such a great man ought to be marked by great tumult and mourning—after all, the death of Antony, as one of the two remaining triumvirs, “is not a single doom” but the end of one-half of the world (5.1.21). Agrippa notes the irony of their mourning Antony’s death after having fought him so fiercely. Octavius and his men agree that Antony was a great man, and Octavius declares it proper to mourn him.
A messenger arrives from Cleopatra to ask what Octavius intends for the queen. Octavius promises to be honorable and kind to her, and he dispatches Cleopatra’s messenger with assurances, bidding her to be of good heart. Although Octavius tells Cleopatra that he intends to cause her no shame, he plans to force her to live in Rome, where she will be his eternal triumph. To this end, he orders some of his men, led by Proculeius, to prevent Cleopatra from committing suicide and thus robbing him of renown.
Read a translation of Act 5: Scene 1.
Summary: Act 5: Scene 2
Proculeius arrives at the queen’s monument and asks Cleopatra’s terms for giving herself up to Octavius. Cleopatra remembers that Antony told her to trust Proculeius and tells the Roman she hopes the emperor will allow her son to rule Egypt. Proculeius assures her of Octavius’s generosity and says he will soon repay her supplication with kindness. Meanwhile, his soldiers, having slipped into the monument, move to seize Cleopatra. The queen draws a dagger, hoping to kill herself before being taken captive, but Proculeius disarms her. He orders the soldiers to guard the queen until Octavius arrives, and Cleopatra cries that she will never allow herself to be carried through Rome as a trophy of the empire’s triumph.
Dolabella arrives and takes over for Proculeius. The queen converses with him, discussing her dreams (in which she sees a heroic vision of Antony), and then persuades Dolabella to admit that Octavius plans to display her as a prisoner of war. Octavius arrives and promises to spare Cleopatra’s children and treat her well if she doesn’t kill herself. She gives him a scroll that catalogs all her wealth, but when she asks her treasurer, Seleucus, to confirm that she has given Octavius everything, he contradicts her. Cleopatra rails against Seleucus’s treachery, but Octavius assures her that he doesn’t desire her wealth.
When Octavius leaves, Cleopatra admits to her maids that she doubts his intentions, remarking that he is merely charming her with words. Rather than succumb to the infamy of being a spectacle for the entertainment of filthy Roman crowds, Cleopatra resolves to kill herself. She would rather die than see herself imitated by a boy actor, who would portray her as a common whore. She orders Charmian and Iras to dress her in her most queenly robes. When they have done so, she admits into her presence an anonymous countryman. He brings her a basket of figs in which, concealed, there are several poisonous snakes known as asps.
Dressed in her finest royal garments, Cleopatra kisses her maids goodbye. Iras falls dead, then Cleopatra takes a snake from the basket and presses it to her breast. She applies another asp to her arm, then dies. As the guards rush in to discover the dead queen, Charmian presses the snake to herself and joins her mistress in death. Dolabella enters, followed by Octavius. They realize the manner of the suicide, and Octavius orders Cleopatra to be buried next to Antony in a public funeral.
Read a translation of Act 5: Scene 2.
Analysis: Act 5: Scenes 1 & 2
Act 4 arguably belonged to Antony, centering the pains of loss and betrayal that led him to a crisis of identity and, finally, to suicide. By contrast, act 5 belongs to Cleopatra. Of the many performances Cleopatra stages throughout the play, the multilayered act she gives to triumph over the Romans in act 5, scene 2 is, without doubt, her greatest. Here, her complex character seems to have secret longings and undisclosed motivations. For instance, she seems resigned to joining Antony in death at the end of act 4, scene 15, resolving to commit suicide. We may wonder, then, why Cleopatra bothers convincing Dolabella to reveal Octavius’s desire to turn her into the empire’s trophy. Octavius’s intentions wouldn’t matter to someone as committed to dying as Cleopatra says she is. Similarly, her motivations for trying to preserve her possessions from Octavius are unclear. Perhaps she entertains a hope of starting a new life despite Antony’s death. If so, she may only be pretending to court death until Dolabella’s admission of Octavius’s plans makes her death a necessity.
All that said, it is also clear that Cleopatra is enormously grieved by Antony’s death. As she has done before, she describes him as a man who was greater than any mere mortal. Indeed, she likens him to an enormous statue like the Colossus of Rhodes: “His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm / Crested the world. His voice was propertied / As all the tunèd spheres” (5.2.102–104). She then goes on to say that, though he’s a man whose colossal magnitude is the stuff of the imagination, he was in fact real, and the sheer greatness of his reality far outstrips his legendary status. Just as Antony’s decline gave rise to some of his most moving speeches, Cleopatra’s grief yields some of the play’s most extraordinary language. This language powerfully reflects the immensity of her pain. As ever, Cleopatra gauges her performance to match the intensity of her emotion, which Dolabella observes in his remark: “Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it / As answering to the weight” (5.2.125–26).
In the end, Cleopatra’s bravura maneuvering around the Roman forces to ensure her own death demonstrates how, to the bitter end, she wishes to remain absolutely in control of her fate. As with her other performances, then, Cleopatra only allows others—and us in the audience—to glimpse a narrow view of her character. Indeed, we arguably never get total access to the inner depths of Cleopatra, and so we are left to contend with her various complexities and contradictions. As she prepares to make her final exit, she takes on a role that, like her previous incarnations as enchantress, queen, and shrew, reflects only one aspect of her character. Now she strikes an ironic pose as wife and mother, “nursing” her “child,” the venomous asp. But to understand Cleopatra in her final moments as a mere domestic—as an uncompromised lover and dutiful wife—is to reduce her to a single aspect of her character. She may claim to be “marble-constant” (5.2.293), but before dying she also indicates that she is made of something much more changeable: “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.344–45).
Cleopatra’s actions in the face of death make a final gesture at the stark difference between the two civilizations that have clashed over the course of the play: Egypt and Rome. In her last moments of life, Cleopatra continues to embody the symbolic characteristics of Egypt: passionate and with an inclination toward theatricality. She deftly outmaneuvers the men who want to prevent her suicide. In doing so, she refuses these Romans’ desire for power and containment. Above all, she flouts Octavius, who would keep her like a trophy. Though Octavius has won the war and laid claim to the entire Roman Empire, Cleopatra seeks to win a different, more intimate conflict. As she puts it just before applying the asp to her breast: “Methinks I hear / Antony call. I see him rouse himself / To praise my noble act. I hear him mock / The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men / To excuse their after wrath” (5.2.338–42). Hence, though motivated by her desire to reunite with Antony, it’s also clear that her suicide will deprive Octavius of the victory he believes he has won over her and Egypt.
Read more about how the play details the conflict between Rome and Egypt.
