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Antony breaks into a wild cry as he remembers his ancient prowess and Octavius's :

:

Yes, my lord, yes; he at Philippi kept

His sword e'en like a dancer; while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius ;

Cleo. Ah, stand by.

yet now

-No matter.

Iras. Go to him, madam, speak to him:
He is unqualitied with very shame.

Cleo. Well then, sustain me: O!

Supported by them she falls before him; and a 'Pardon, pardon!' exquisitely uttered, with wet eyes, twice or thrice, suffices to change his delirious despair into a rapture of lyric passion :—

wrath.

Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates
All that is won and lost.

The reconciliation is more pathetic than the Shakespeare has communicated a subtle flavour of artifice to Cleopatra's serious moods. He also hints the background of passion in her skittish ones. Plutarch describes, among other 'foolish sports,' which 'it were too fond a part of me to reckon up,' how Cleopatra played a trick upon Antony 'when he went to angle for fish,' by commanding one of her men 'to dive under water. . . and to put some old salt-fish upon his bait. . . . When he had hung the fish on his hook, Antonius, thinking he had taken a fish indeed, snatched up his line presently. Then they all fell a-laughing' Thus crudely obtruded, this farcical incident would have endangered the dignity of Antony: Shakespeare allows us to see it only mellowed by half-pathetic reminiscence; and its memory is effaced the next moment by her outburst of wild eagerness at the arrival of news from him:

Char.

'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.

Cleo.

That time,-O times !—

I laugh'd him out of patience; and that night

I laugh'd him into patience.

Enter a Messenger.

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In the final catastrophe the Shakespearean Cleopatra preserves more completely than Plutarch's this finely-tempered mixture of coquetry and love. When Antony is brought to her monument to die (iv. 15.), her grief finds vent in moving hyperboles, but she does not rend her garments, or her face; nor does she, when visited by Cæsar, receive him 'Naked in her smock, with her hair plucked from her head, her voice small and trembling, her eyes sunk into her head with continual blubbering, and moreover the most part of her stomach torn in sunder.' These were the signs of a grief, not deeper, perhaps, but certainly less. concerned with its own dignity of pose and artistic effect than hers. Plutarch's Cleopatra dies in her royal robes; but there is no further hint than this of the Shakespearean Cleopatra's superb dying speech, -with its lightning interchanges of passion, pathos, theatrical self-consciousness, and malicious triumph. Her 'immortal longings' prompt her to die with the utmost spectacular éclat. She tingles with exultation at dying nobly 'in the high Roman fashion,' at so little inconvenience, and her thought flies at once to, Antony's applause and Cæsar's baffled rage. She renounces the flesh, she feels herself all 'fire and air,' and a few moments later she is snatching the 1 North, u.s., p. 412.

deadly asp to her arm in jealous frenzy, lest her dead waiting-woman should receive Antony's first kiss, 'which is my heaven to have,' in the Elysian fields.

The tragic interest, however, evidently centres not in Cleopatra, but in the victim of her 'strong toil of grace.' In tracing the operation of her spell upon Antony, Shakespeare on the whole follows Plutarch's facts as far as they go; but he interprets and expands them in the light of his own finer psychology and humaner ethics. Some coarser and duller touches in both characters he effaces. The hoyden disappears in her; the vulgar debauchee, the sour misanthrope, and the gull, in him. In her most wilful and wanton moods she is still the queen; and Antony, revelling or raging, blindly rushing on his fate or desperately succumbing to it, is still the great-hearted man of genius. His subjection to Cleopatra is even more absolute in proportion as it acts through subtler and more complicated sources of attraction. It is just

as fatal to his judgment and, for a moment, to his instinct of military honour. His fatuous decision to 'fight at sea,' and his unmanly flight in the train of Cleopatra and her fugitive galleys, seal his fate as surely in the play as in the history; and Shakespeare exposes them, through the mouth of Enobarbus, as incisively as Plutarch. But for Plutarch the whole relation of Antóny to Cleopatra, and indeed of lovers in general, is typified in this fatuous oblivion of his better self. 'There Antonius showed plainly,' he indignantly comments, that he .. was not his own

1 'And sometime also when he would go up and down the city disguised like a slave in the night, and would peer into poor men's windows and their shops, and scold and brawl with them within the house, Cleopatra

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would be also in a chambermaid's array, and amble up and down the streets with him, so that sometimes Antonius bare away both mocks and blows' (North, u.s., p. 348).

man; (proving that true which an old man spake in mirth, that the soul of a lover lived in another body, and not in his own) he was so carried away with the vain love of this woman, as if he had been glued to her.' But for Shakespeare this rough-and-ready analysis of the love-spell was clearly inadequate. Enobarbus himself allows that the 'diminution in our captain's brain restores his heart' (iii. 13. 198); and if we add that the heart in its turn reacted upon the brain, the wonderful Fourth Act may be called an expansion of those closing words of the Third. The entire Act,

with its swift changes of scene and mood, its superb alternations of rapture, despair, glory, rage, forgiveness, and farewell, represents some two pages of plain prose narrative. Regarded as a contribution to the action these fifteen scenes are certainly disproportionate. The land-fight which Antony wins (iv. 7.-9.) and the sea-fight which he loses (iv. 10.-12.) do not change the issue already decided at Actium. But these oscillations of the outward plot open new and wonderful glimpses into the being of Antony and Cleopatra themselves. The sense of impending doom

calls out the finer elements of them both.

Antony

is no longer the effeminate fugitive, but the idolised chieftain, whose hinted foreboding of the end

Haply you shall not see me more; or if,
A mangled shadow,

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moments the caprices of the courtesan, arms her lord for battle, and welcomes him home like a wife:

Thou fumblest, Eros; and my queen's a squire
More tight at this than thou.

.

'My nightingale,' he greets her, 'we have beat them to their beds.' The second desertion of her ships (iv. 12.) to Cæsar gives him once more 'savage cause' for

rage; but his fury, though it still outroars the horned herd, has the poignancy of a dying cry, and gives way at moments, as in the wonderful little scene with Eros (iv. 14.), to strangely intense imaginings of death.

No other figure is allowed to compete with these two. The entire political action, so far as they do not take part in it, falls palpably into the background, and its feuds and factions are outlined in low relief. Antony's doings in the Parthian wars are wholly omitted; his long sojourn in Rome becomes a brief visit. Of his two wives, Fulvia is only heard of as a troublesome thorn in his flesh, and Octavia's 'holy, cold, and still conversation' is denuded of charm for us as for Antony. He has an exquisite phrase for her stillness, as for everything else; but his marriage is purely diplomatic, even nominal, and it hardly needed the shrewdness of Enobarbus to foresee that 'the band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity'1 (ii. 6. 128). Octavius himself, the supreme force in the mechanical movement of the action, but, like his sister, unconcerned in its vital tragedy, is drawn, like his uncle in Julius Cæsar, with a cold and unsympathetic hand. In Richard II. Shakespeare had drawn a far more engaging portrait of the born ruler profiting by the fatuities of a brilliant child of impulse. The patriotic and political animus of the Histories allows the balance of interest to tremble between Bolingbroke and Richard, as it certainly does not between Cæsar and Antony. To the Shakespeare of 1607, engrossed with the pathology of genius, the mastery of the world by cool sagacity was of less interest than the loss of it

1 He has 'Forborne the getting of a lawful race' (iii. 13. 107). Plutarch's Octavia for some years effectually replaces Cleopatra in Antony's love, bears

him several children, and succeeds in reconciling husband and brother when apparently on the verge of the conflict which actually broke out three years later.

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