The question of time is part of a general psychological reorientation which takes place in the Renaissance and appears in many of Shakespeare’s plays as a theme upon which to reflect. Time, no longer beneficial, becomes a source of anxiety: feudal time, linked to land and cultivation, providing comfort because the eternal repetition of natural cycles gives the illusion of reversibility, and therefore of a time which is redeemable, gives way to the notion of linear time, irreversible, unredeemable, the time of History (cf. Le Goff, Panofsky, Deleuze). In Antony and Cleopatra, we find these different concepts of time battling against each other; Rome’s opposition to Alexandria, and Caesar’s opposition to Antony represent also two contrasting notions of time. Caesar’s time, and indeed Rome’s time, is very close to this new, modern concept, whose roots lie also in the springs and coils of renaissance machinery, time linked to power and money; wasting time means ‘being similar to beasts, he who wastes his time does not deserve to be called a man’ (cf. Le Goff). This is the kind of time Antony cannot face. Antony is tied to the past, but also to time as Aion, Cleopatra and Egypt’s time, associated with the ever-present, (cf. Heraclitus, Augustine), a time which is outside of history, a time which does not seem to lead inexorably to death and which is opposed to time as Chronos, linear and irreversible, time of history, the time of Rome. But Chronos is not simply ‘time the destroyer’; it opposes itself to chaos, it also means order, it means law. Roman time and Egyptian time can be seen as belonging to these two categories as does Caesar’s time when confronted with Antony’s time.
Constructive Power and Discordant Discourses in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra