The actions and emotions of the main characters throughout ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ affect the audience and often increase the dramatic impact of the play. In Act IV scenes xiv and xv the tragedy of the character’s situations is intensified by the emotions portrayed and the language used to portray them. In these two scenes the audience knows more than the characters do and therefore not only can we see the irony in their word but also we realize the mistakes the characters make before they happen and will them not to make them. Thus the scenes are tense for the audience as we wait for Antony to make his final fatal blunder, from the moment he first mentions suicide in Act IV scene xiv,
“Nay weep not, gentle Eros. There is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves.
As Cleopatra’s apparent suicide is conveyed to him by Mardian, Antony’s intentions to commit suicide strengthen as he believes he has lost everything in the world to live for. Just as Cleopatra does in Act IV scene xv when Antony finally dies,
“Till they had stolen our jewel. All’s but naught;”
Exactly as Antony had done when he believed Cleopatra dead, when Antony dies Cleopatra immediately chooses the path of death rather than face the world without Antony. Antony’s expressions of desolation at the beginning of Act IV scene xiv depress and upset the audience as they can no longer see any way for Antony to redeem himself; Antony is no longer a great captain and triumvir. Even Antony knows this and it is this loss of his identity that causes him to believe that there is no longer any reason to live. The sorrow that the audience feels is increased by the fact that Antony was once a noble man and the greatest soldier, but now he is reduced to a man that cannot even support himself (Act 4 Scene xv), he has lost all his strength and it has been all his own doing. Both Cleopatra and Antony convey their feeling to other characters on the stage or just the audience, their anguish and despair effect the audience and create an atmosphere of dramatic desolation.
In ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the lives of the minor characters in the play revolve around the actions and decisions of the protagonists, in these two scenes it is no different. Eros kills himself so that he will not have to kill Antony. The minor characters in Act IV scenes xiv and xv
from the moment when the dying Antony is lifted into her monument and she finds no word of reproach on his lips for what she has done, scales seem to drop from her eyes, and never from then on does she waver in her undeviating resolution to join him in death. What looks like hesitation and toying with the thought of life is but deception utilized with the highest art to make certain that her determination to die is not thwarted. The fact is that the new Cleopatra, with all the histrionic devices of the old Cleopatra at her command, acts so consummately in these last hours of her life that she deceives not only Octavius Caesar but full half the readers of the play. (199)
