Cleopatra's Revenge

The following note is for readers who have had difficulty understanding Shakespeare's Hyperontologyby H.W. Fawkner, a book published in 1990 over the imprint of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.On page 142, Professor Fawkner writes:"What is being adumbrated... is a vast hyperontological move in which the play brings its forces to a point of final crisis by opening the question of space." On page 143, he adds:

Cleopatra... comes to master death in an erotically possessive way that is truly astonishing; what is possessed is something that in itself marks the absence and impossibility of possession; and through this infiltration (within her being) of the cancellation of possession/presence, we come to feel that this woman who so forcefully embodies presence now also, almost inadvertantly, is about to embody its opposite. Cleopatra, precisely through her extraordinary condensation of being as presence, comes to dramatize the intensest possible feeling of the absence and absencing of presence. Her final minutes of vanishing breath totalize the space of nonpresence.

As a book on Shakespeare, Professor Fawkner's work may seem off-topic, but only because the common reader expects it to be about William Shakespeare when in fact its subject is the poet's lesser-known cousin , Q.E.D. Shakespeare (1558-1631), whose play Cleopatra's Revenge has recently been unearthed in a warehouse in Ossining, New York.

Following is an excerpt from Cleopatra's Revenge:

Scene:Alexandria

Enter Cleopatra, Iris, Charmian

Charmian: The Roman warrior's heart is thrall to thee.

Cleopatra: In good sooth, thinkst thou so? Wherefore, my pet?

Charmian: What you possess marks absence in itself.

Cleopatra: Fie, every slut marks absence in herself.

Iris:

But thy fair absence is downright impossible,

Thy being is infiltrated with cancellation,

Thy lips like coral, hair like glittering jet,

Breasts like melons, in short thou art a woman

Who forcefully embodies presence/absence.

Cleopatra:

Thy honeyed words assuage--

(Enter Antony)

Zounds, Antony!

Why comest thou hither?

Antony: To master death in an erotically possessive way.

Cleopatra:

That is truly astonishing. Be mine,

But first, condense being as presence.

Antony: Why?

Cleopatra: To dramatize the intensest possible feeling.

Antony (embracing her):

Do I clasp heaven, or Elysium,

Or do I clasp the absencing of presence?

Let empire go, and victories in battle,

I will have thee, my present absence!My--

(Enter Octavius)

Octavius: Your lewd embraces mark the absence of impossibility.

(Octavius and Antony fight and kill each other.)

Cleopatra:

Give me my robe, put on my crown, I feel

The adumbration of hyperontology,

And with this naked steel which I draw forth,

I shall, in final minutes of vanishing breath,

Totalize the spacity of nonpresence.(Dies)

Iris:There dies a queen! But what is spacity?

Charmian: She meant space, fool. That is, she adumbrated it.

In the Ossining manuscript, the play breaks off at this point, where the scribe frustratingly begins copying out page 240 of Thomas J. Haskell's The Emergence of Professional Social Science (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1977), as follows:

Whether a man has "anything to say" is determined by asking how familiar he is with the work of other enquirers--whose own credibility, in turn, depends in large part upon theirmutual familiarity.The patent circularity of this familial test of credibility would be amusing if we did not place so much trust in it and depend so heavily upon it. The danger that such self-justifying communities will drift into a truly circular scholasticism, utterly divorced from reality, is not to be dismissed lightly...