Bad News: Medium as Message in Antony and Cleopatra

There are respects in which the numerous messengers thronging Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra might be seen as constituting a “medium” in the sense in which Marshall McLuhan employed the term: that is, as extensions of the self profoundly influencing the character of the society in which they are used. This essay examines some of the implications of the fact that individuals and entire cultures in Shakespeare’s play are obliged to resort to the use of intermediaries in order to communicate with one another as well as transact with the world at large. At the same time as they are shown to be indispensable, the dubious role that messengers play in Shakespeare’s tragedy suggests that all such mediatory processes are inherently unstable, and that information obtained by means of external agents functioning as extensions of the individual’s own perceptual and cognitive apparatus inevitably provides only a distorted picture of reality.