Coda: “Let’s Do’t After the High Roman Fashion”: Funeral and Triumph

Abstract

Harlan suggests that funereal, not triumphal, spoiling becomes the dominant metaphor for the early modern English theater’s cultural work of transmission in these Roman plays. She also argues that the capacity of this ceremony to spoil the subject assures its power as a mode of representation vis-à-vis militant nostalgia. Shakespeare’s replacement of triumph with funeral in Antony and Cleopatra preserves spoiling in a subtle, performative manner, for Antony’s “solemn show,” (5.2.421) or anticipated funeral, displaces his triumphal victory: one mode of social theater replaces another. The play treats a concern we also see in the other chapters: how the elite military subject’s fragmented and fraught materiality becomes a means of engaging with cultural memory and the past.