While Mark Antony is a great general, one of the three triumvant, it is indeed impossible to feel sympathy for him in his extreme "dotage" for Cleopatra
Literature Essay - ‘It is impossible to feel sympathy for Mark Antony, a man who is nothing more than a strumpet’s fool.’ Do you agree?
While Mark Antony is a great general, one of the three triumvant, it is indeed impossible to feel sympathy for him in his extreme “dotage” for Cleopatra. He “fishes, drinks and wastes the lamps of night in revel”, hence destroying his own reputation, and even losing his masculinity, and thus, respect.
In the opening scene of the play, even before Antony appears, he is constituted by the ideological structure of the Roman world. Antony’s identity is discussed to be in a state of oscillation: “This dotage of our general’s o’erflows the measure.” The “measure” spoken of here refers to a limit that describes the proper standard of Roman identity. Deviation from this identity is what alarms the Roman audience (I.e. Philo and Demetrius). Right from the start, in Philo’s opening speech, we learn that Antony’s heart refuses all self-restraint. His desire is excessive, producing a transformation from a “pillar of the world” -- a firm bearer of the Roman senate, likened to “Mars”, god of war, clad in armour -- “into a strumpet’s fool.”
Antony insists that the measure of his reputation defines his very identity: “If I lose mine honour, I lose myself”. Yet as Demetrius and Philo speak from within the ideological structure, they cast a censorious look at Antony “Take but good note…Behold and see”. Taking “note” might mean to make a written record; transliterating reputation according to the visual evidence beheld. Romean spectatorship measure identity by the relation between visual performance and verbal reputation. The medium of reputation is language -- it is essentially what one hears about or tells. The interest of the visual manifestation lies in the contradiction with reputation it presents and the effect of transformation of identity implied: “The triple pillar of the world transform’d into a strumpet’s fool”. Antony here has been given the position that of a performer. It is performance that effects a destabilising transgression of the imposing regulation of language. Antony visually indicates, instead of verbally, that his “nobleness of life” is “to do thus”, after which they embrace. Hence we see that Antony alternating from verbal to visual has indicated his loss of his honour, hence his identity. The audience’s high opinion of him is also greatly diminished at his role to “cool a gypsy’s lust”, as Antony is unable to produce any evidence of his measured identity.