When Enobarbus deserts Anthony, he leaves behind everything but his regret. ‘I have done ill,’ he says, ‘Of which I do accuse myself so sorely / That I will joy no more’ (4.6.17-19).1 When Anthony sends along his general’s treasure, increased by his own gifts, Enobarbus is stricken with grief and self-disdain:
This blows my heart–
If swift thought break it not, a swifter mean
Shall outstrike thought; but thought will do’t, I feel.
I fight against thee? No, I will go seek
Some ditch wherein to die–the foul’st best fits
My latter part of life. (4.6.33-38)
Overcome with guilt, his heart begins to break. So Enobarbus wanders the night, repenting his desertion. He is ‘alone the villain of the earth’ (4.6.29), and thinking himself alone in both literal and spiritual darkness, he supplicates to the moon:
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which being dried with grief, will break to powder,
And finish all foul thoughts. O Anthony,
Nobler than my revolt is infamous,
Forgive me in thine own particular,
But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver, and a fugitive.
O Anthony! O Anthony! (4.10.12-23)
The stage direction attending his final line – He dies – tells the actor how to navigate the speech’s end. But the audience – watching from within the fiction and from out in the theatre – are allowed for some lines to think he has merely lain down and fallen asleep. Or maybe fainted. It takes the rousing attempts of watchmen to discover the truth: Enobarbus has died of a broken heart.
The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra is full of famous deaths, although, unusually for a martial play, not one occurs during battle. Enobarbus, Eros, Anthony, Iras, Charmian, and Cleopatra die in some privacy, and most die by their own hands, ‘after the high Roman fashion’ (4.16.88). Of all the notable ends – Eros’ plot twist; Anthony’s unfortunate aim; Cleopatra’s tool of choice – the sudden, weaponless death of Enobarbus may be most surprising to modern audiences.
But heartache, heartbreak, and grief were accepted causes of death in Renaissance England. Margaret Radcliffe, a Maid of Honor to Queen Elizabeth I, died of a broken heart after the death of her twin brother.2 John Ford’s play The Broken Heart ends with just such a death. Kent begs his own heart to break after the death of Lear. And Brabantio calls for grief specifically to shear his thread of life.
46 deaths by grief cited in this detail from a bill of deaths in London parishes, 10 December 1665 (Wing G491, EEBO).
Perhaps even more surprisingly, modern medicine is proving these early modern assessments. Recent studies on emotion suggest that when people report physiological responses to emotional stimuli – like butterflies in the stomach of one falling in love – they aren’t just speaking metaphorically. Well, of course no one will have just incubated a gastric colony of monarch butterflies, but they might show measurable changes in blood flow.
A small octopus trap.
What’s more, doctors have identified a deadly syndrome called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, named to describe a swelling of the left ventricle into the shape of an octopus pot (i.e. ‘takotsubo’ – get one for yourself on ebay). Exact causes are not fully identified, but current research suggests that it occurs most commonly in postmenopausal women who suffer some sudden emotional or physical stress. They present with symptoms similar to a heart attack. Sound familiar? Luckily we, unlike Enobarbus, can make a full recovery in a month or two.
— Cassie Ash, BST Resident Dramaturg
1 All lines taken from Anthony and Cleopatra, Edited by Michael Neill, The Oxford Shakespeare, Clarendon Press, 1994.
2Unusually for the time, an autopsy was performed and found ‘certeyne stringes striped all over her harte’ (quoted in Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, Oxford UP, 2016, p. 50).