Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 181
Caesar laughs at him. Caesar has no interest in personal courage or
personal honor, though he seeks to put on the appearance of both.
In this late play, Shakespeare seems to see the death of the he-
roic ideal— a death he worked to help bring about— and almost to
mourn for it. The order that Antony represents is clearly passing
away. He and Cleopatra live for excess, plea sure, glory, fame. Caesar
lives coldly and cautiously. He is intrigued by Cleopatra not as a
potential lover, as Pompey, Antony, and Augustus’ uncle Julius
Caesar have been. He wants to use her as a prop in the theater of
his greatness, bringing her to Rome in his triumphal pro cession.
Later her image can appear onstage where a youthful actor will, as
the queen says, “boy” her greatness to the multitudes.
Yet Caesar Augusts will rule well. He will inaugurate the Pax
Romana, the three- hundred- year period of relative peace that is per-
haps connected in Shakespeare’s mind to the peace that the equally
evasive and resourceful Elizabeth provided Britain. Though her
motto is semper idem, always the same, she is as much a shape- shifter
as nearly any character in the plays.
But more even than to Augustus— who is to be respected but
never can be loved— the future seems to belong to Prince Hal. He
is one of those uncommon personages who can stimulate both love
and res pect in the many he enchants. (Augustus stimulates only res-
pect.) The character of Hal is the concentration of all Shakespeare
knows about rulership, after meditating on the unfortunate Richard
and on the icy Bolingbroke, Hal’s father, who becomes Henry IV.
Hal is the simulator par excellence. (He is, one might say, Iago in a
more benign form.) At our fi rst encounter with him, he tells us ex-
actly who and what he is. He is an actor, who will pretend to be a
member of Falstaff ’s tavern world, learning all he can from it and
biding his time as he prepares to rule. He’ll transgress, he says, but
only so that his reformation will shine more brightly than if had al-
ways played by the rules. “I’ll so off end, to make off ense a skill,”