“Let’s do ’t after the high Roman fashion and make death proud to take us”: The Finale of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28925/2311-259x.2025.3.2Keywords:
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Renaissance, liminality, suicide, psychoanalysis, gender studies, erotic, politicalAbstract
The article is dedicated to the interpretation of the finale of William Shakespeare’s Roman play Antony and Cleopatra through the lens of liminality — the marginal, transitional state in which the main characters find themselves before death. This study is relevant in light of the increasing attention paid in contemporary humanities to such concepts as boundary experience, psychological breakdown, and identity transformation in literature.
The novelty of this literary research lies in reading the play’s ending within the context of liminality theory as a ritual initiation, where the heroes’ deaths acquire existential and symbolic meaning. The subject of analysis is the behaviour and psychological reflections of Antony and Cleopatra, who consciously choose suicide as a way out of an irreversible situation arising from the conflict between the political and the erotic.
The goal of this article is to outline the interpretation of the protagonists’ psychological self-reflections in a liminal situation that ends in suicide. To achieve this goal, methods of psychoanalytic criticism, hermeneutics, and “close reading” of the literary text were used.
The study results in the conclusion that, in the play’s finale, death for the protagonists is not a defeat but an act of dignity. It is shown that the characters, fearing the triumph of their adversary (Octavius Caesar) and public disgrace, and also unable to imagine their lives without their beloved, recognize the inevitability of death, which they perceive as the only acceptable outcome. Shakespeare emphasises that through this act, Antony and Cleopatra not only thwart Octavius Caesar’s plans but also force him to acknowledge their human dignity, ultimately becoming a triumph of love over vain earthly affairs. The lovers’ final actions (changing attire, farewells, the ritualization of death) are perceived as a sacred preparation for a transition to another state of being.
Prospects for further study include expanding the analysis of liminal states and the ritualisation of death in the works of Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers, as well as a deeper exploration of the psychoanalytic aspects of choosing death and identity transformation in fiction.
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