hauled aloft

Act IV, Sc 15 of Antony and Cleopatra presents particular problems of staging. In the previous scene, Antony, believing that Cleopatra has killed herself, falls on his own sword and - alive but dying - is carried to the monument where she has hidden herself. As scene 15 opens, Cleopatra and her attendants enter 'aloft' - that is on some area raised above the stage - and when Antony is brought in 'below', the directions specify that the attendants should 'heave' him up to join her

The direction is laconic and there has been much debate about how the scene might have been staged in the Elizabethan theatre. As Michael Neill says in his OUP edition of the play:

We must conclude either that the technical solutions were so self-evident that Shakespeare did not bother to elaborate his stage direction, or that he relied on the ingenuity of his colleagues to realize a scene that he had conceived in largely symbolic terms.

Neill cites an essay by Leslie Thomson which locates the symbolic importance of this physical movement in its reference to 'the related ideas of weight, bearing, drawing, rising, and falling that fill the play'. And he also points to the tension arising between the act as a symbol of 'tragic transcendence' and as 'a black-comic re-enactment of Cleopatra's fishing sport described in 2.5'.

This earlier scene recalls the anecdotes presented in Plutarch's Life of Antony and consists of a conversation between Cleopatra and her attendant, Charmian:

Cleopatra
Give me mine angle; we'll to the river: there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn'd fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say 'Ah, ha! you're caught.'

Charmian
'Twas merry when
You wager'd on your angling; when your diver
Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he
With fervency drew up.

Cleopatra
That time,--O times!--
I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night
I laugh'd him into patience; and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan.

Cleopatra's speech about the 'tawny-finn'd fishes' immediately precedes the arrival of a messenger with news of Antony's marriage to Octavia, far away in Rome. And so that 'hauling aloft' of the dying man echoes the earlier hope of passion - of hooking the beloved and drawing him into one's own world. Indeed, in Peter Hall's 1987 production, Antony was hauled up in a net, like a hooked fish being landed.

I'm interested in this idea of the symbolism of the vertical line, the movement 'aloft' from 'below', the connection between lower and upper world. Is there a symbolism to the fish's elevation and, if so, what does the movement signify?