moral significance of the episode gains in emphasis by his duplication of the chorus. Not only a body of Egyptians, but a troop of Cæsar's soldiers, shrewdly comment on the fatal issue of the story. With scholarly frankness Garnier acknowledges indebtedness not only to Plutarch's "Life of Antony," but to "the fifty-first book of Dion Cassius' history."

Finally the inferior hand of Nicolas de Montreux took up the parable of Cleopatra in 1594. His five-act tragedy of "Cleopatre," alike in construction and plot, closely follows the footsteps of Jodelle's "Cleopatre Captive.

It was such French efforts which gave the cue to the dramatic versions of Cleopatra's history in Elizabethan England, which preceded Shakespeare's work. The earliest of these English experiments was a translation of Garnier's tragedy. This came from the accomplished pen of Sir Philip Sidney's sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke. It was published in 1592, when Shakespeare had just established his fame with his tragedy of purer love-"Romeo and Juliet. "Romeo and Juliet." Although the poet Daniel praises the facility of the countess, who proved for him a generous patroness, her rendering of the French drama leaves an impression of stilted and

1 It is irrelevant to the present survey to pursue the Cleopatra chain of French tragedy through the numerous links of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see pp. xlix and 1, infra). But it may be noted that there came from the Paris press in 1578-midway between Garnier's and Montreux's activities a narrative poem of amorous warmth entitled "Delicieuses amours de Marc Antoine et Cleopatre," by Guillaume Belliard of Blois.

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grotesque formality which does injustice to the simplicity of Garnier's classical French. Two years later, by way of sequel to the countess' work, her protégé Daniel issued an original tragedy of "Cleopatra,” which carried the tale from Antony's suicide to Cleopatra's. Although no mere translator, the English poet is loyal to French guidance and to the Senecan pattern. Literary facility is apparent in all Daniel's verse, and if dramatic feeling be lacking, his play shows poetic conception of his heroine's impassioned temperament. Nor was Daniel willing to drop the topic with the completion of his "Cleopatra." He pursued it some five years later in an imaginary verse-letter from Antony's wife Octavia to her husband; there the Egyptian enchantress is a very shadowy figure of maleficence. A humble camp follower of the Elizabethan army of poets and dramatists, one Samuel Brandon, emulated Daniel's example, and contrived, in 1598, to shift to Octavia the dramatic interest of Antony and Cleopatra's story in "The tragi-comedie of the virtuous Octavia." Brandon's catastrophe is the death of Mark Antony, and Octavia's jealousy of Cleopatra is the main theme. To this piece Brandon appended in the published volume a poetic correspondence on the Ovidian pattern between his heroine and her husband. Modest as is the value of Brandon's efforts, they testify to the variety of aspect which the historic facts offer the dramatic craftsman.

There are touches in all this pre-Shakespearean literature of Antony and Cleopatra which faintly suggests

Shakespeare's design. Daniel's stiff pen seems to adumbrate fragments of Shakespeare's language. But Plutarch is the universal inspirer, and most of the resemblances between the "Antony and Cleopatra" of Shakespeare and the like efforts of his predecessors may all be accidental coincidences due to the general dependence on Plutarch's expansive treasury of fact and observation. The interest of the cognate work of earlier pens does not reside in Shakespeare's direct indebtedness. The main thing to note is that Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen anticipated Shakespeare in discovering the adaptability of Cleopatra's story to purposes of high tragedy. In his choice of the topic, he was a conscious imitator. The circumstance offers one more example of Shakespeare's tendency to follow the path to which others pointed the way, and his eagerness to identify himself with the contemporary trend of taste and sentiment. But in his "Antony and Cleopatra," if anywhere, he proved the well-worn theme to be an Ulysses' bow which none but he could bend to true effect.

For one thing, the plan which all his predecessors followed was distinguished by a simplicity which was foreign to his complex conception of drama. They drew a sharp distinction between the queen's fate and that of her paramour. Her experience appealed to the sixteenth-century pioneers with a force which that of Antony failed to command. Most of the earlier playwrights exclude Antony altogether from their "dramatis personæ," and concentrate their vision on

Cleopatra's sufferings after he has passed away. On the other hand the single piece (by Garnier) which deals at all exhaustively with Antony's fortune is content to draw the curtain with his death and to take leave of a living Cleopatra. Of the many crucial differences in workmanship between Shakespeare and his predecessors, the most palpable and not the least suggestive is the evenness with which Shakespeare divides his energies between hero and heroine, and the completeness with which he unifies the twofold tragedy.

IV

On North's spirited translation of Plutarch's Lives Shakespeare based his great Roman trilogy of "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus.' Not merely does he depend in all the three pieces on Plutarch for his facts, but he accepts North's phraseology wherever it can be made to serve his dramatic purpose. All the poet's historical knowledge of Antony's fatal entanglement in Cleopatra's toils comes from Plutarch's "Life of Antony." The subtly stirring topic would seem to have matured in his mind slowly. On the opening section of Plutarch's biography of Antony he had levied heavy loans six years before in "Julius Cæsar." From a later page of the memoir he introduced into the more recent tragedy of "Macbeth" a pointed reference to Antony's ill-omened rivalry with

Octavius Cæsar,1 and on a digression in Plutarch's text he based his lurid sketch of the misanthropy of Timon of Athens. However rapid his methods of final execution, a close preliminary study of his authority brought him to that "brighter heaven of invention" in which was forged his ultimate conception of Antony and Cleopatra.

Marked as is the contrast in tone and temper between the tragedy of "Julius Cæsar" and that of “Antony and Cleopatra," historic links bind the two pieces closely together. Barely a page of Plutarch intervenes between Antony's order for the honourable burial of Brutus on the battlefield at Philippi, with which "Julius Cæsar " closes, and the victor's first acquaintance with the Egyptian siren Cleopatra, with which "Antony and Cleopatra" opens. Many episodes of Philippi are recalled in the second drama. Cleopatra in a playful mood girds herself with her lover's "sword Philippan." In the crisis of his fate the thoughts of Antony and his companions turn involuntarily to his past triumph over "mad Brutus" and "pale Cassius," and the irony of

1 In "Macbeth," III, i, 54-57, the Scottish king justifies his fear of Banquo by quoting the soothsayer's warning to Antony (as reported by Plutarch) of Octavius Cæsar's fated triumph. Macbeth is afraid that Banquo will overcome him as Octavius Cæsar overcame Mark Antony. His "genius" or daimon is (he believes) controlled by the "genius" or daimon of Banquo:

"There is none but he

Whose being I do fear; and under him

My genius is rebuked, as it is said

Mark Antony's was by Cæsar."