Chapter I
POSITION OF THE PLAY AFTER THE GREAT TRAGEDIES. SHAKESPEARE’S INTEREST IN THE SUBJECT
It may be taken as certain that Shakespeare did not at once set about continuing the story which he had brought to the end of one of its stages in Julius Caesar and of the future progress of which he had in that play given the partial programme. Antony and Cleopatra belongs to a different phase of his development.
Though not published, so far as we know, till it appeared in the Folio Edition of 1623, there is not much difficulty in finding its approximate date; and that, despite its close connection with Julius Caesar in the general march of events and in the re-employment of some of the characters, was some half-dozen years after the composition of its predecessor. The main grounds for this opinion, now almost universally accepted, are the following:
1. We learn from the Stationers’ Register that the publisher, Edward Blount, had entered a “booke called Antony and Cleopatra” on May 20th, 1608. Some critics have maintained that this could not be Shakespeare’s in view of the fact that in November, 1623, license was granted to the same Blount and the younger Jaggard, with whom he was now co-operating, to include in the collected edition the Shakespearian piece among sixteen plays of which the copies were “not formerly entered to other men.” But the objection hardly applies, as the previous entry was in Blount’s favour, and, though he is now associated with Jaggard, he may not have thought it necessary, because of a change of firm as it were, to describe himself as “another man.” Even, however, if the authorship of the 1608 play be considered doubtful, its publication is significant. For, as has often been pointed out, it was customary when a piece was successful at one theatre to produce one on a similar subject at another. The mere existence, then, of an Antony and Cleopatra in the early months of 1608, is in so far an argument that about that time the great Antony and Cleopatra was attracting attention.
2. There is evidence that in the preceding years Shakespeare was occupied with and impressed by the Life of Antony.
(a) Plutarch tells how sorely Antony took to heart what he considered the disloyalty of his followers after Actium.
He forsooke the citie and companie of his frendes, and built him a house in the sea, by the Ile of Pharos, upon certaine forced mountes which he caused to be cast into the sea, and dwelt there, as a man that banished him selfe from all mens companie; saying he would live Timons life, bicause he had the like wrong offered him, that was affore offered unto Timon: and that for the unthankefulnes of those he had done good unto, and whom he tooke to be his frendes he was angry with all men, and would trust no man.
In reference to this withdrawal of Antony’s to the Timoneon, as he called his solitary house, Plutarch inserts the story of Timon of Athens, and there is reason to believe that Shakespeare made his contributions to the play of that name just before he wrote Macbeth, about the year 1606.[187]
[187] See Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy.
(b) In Macbeth itself he has utilised the Marcus Antonius probably for one passage and certainly for another. In describing the scarcity of food among the Roman army in Parthia, Plutarch says:
In the ende they were compelled to live of erbes and rootes, but they found few of them that men doe commonly eate of, and were enforced to tast of them that were never eaten before: among the which there was one that killed them, and made them out of their witts. For he that had once eaten of it, his memorye was gone from him, and he knewe no manner of thing.
Shakespeare is most likely thinking of this when after the disappearance of the witches, he makes Banquo exclaim in bewilderment:
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner. (I. iii. 83.)
In any case Macbeth contains an unmistakable reminiscence of the soothsayer’s warning to Antony.
He ... told Antonius plainly, that his fortune (which of it selfe was excellent good, and very great) was altogether bleamished, and obscured by Caesars fortune: and therefore he counselled him utterly to leave his company, and to get him as farre from him as he could. “For thy Demon,” said he (that is to say, the good angell and spirit that kepeth thee), “is affraied of his, and being coragious and high when he is alone, becometh fearefull and timerous when he commeth neere unto the other.”
Shakespeare was to make use of this in detail when he drew on the Life for an independent play.
O Antony, stay not by his side: Thy demon, that’s thy spirit which keeps thee, is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable Where Caesar’s is not; but, near him, thy angel Becomes a fear, as being o’erpower’d: therefore Make space enough between you. (II. iii. 18.)
But already in Macbeth it suggests a simile, when the King gives words to his mistrust 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 Caesar.[188] (III. i. 54.)
More interesting and convincing is a coincidence that Malone pointed out in Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, which was printed in 1607, but was probably written much earlier. Bussy says to Tamyra of the terrors of Sin:
So our ignorance tames us, that we let His[189] shadows fright us: and like empty clouds In which our faulty apprehensions forge The forms of dragons, lions, elephants, When they hold no proportion, the sly charms Of the Witch Policy makes him like a monster. (III. i. 22.)
[188] I have said nothing of other possible references and loans because they seem to me irrelevant or doubtful. Thus Malone drew attention to the words of Morose in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene: “Nay, I would sit out a play that were nothing but fights at sea, drum, trumpet and target.” He thought that this remark might contain ironical allusion to the battle scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, for instance the stage direction at the head of Act III., Scene 10: “Canidius marcheth with his land army one way over the stage: and Taurus, the lieutenant of Caesar the other way. After their going in is heard the noise of a sea-fight.” But even were this more certain than it is, it would only prove that Antony and Cleopatra had made so much impression as to give points to the satirist some time after its performance: it would not help us to the date. For Epicoene belongs to 1610, and no one would place Antony and Cleopatra so late.
[189] i.e. Sin’s.
Compare Antony’s words:
Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish: A vapour sometimes like a bear or lion ... .... Here I am Antony: Yet cannot hold this visible shape. (IV. xiv. 2 and 13.)
It is hard to believe that there is no connection between these passages, and if there is Shakespeare must have been the debtor; but as Bussy d’Ambois was acted before 1600, this loan is without much value as a chronological indication.
3. Internal evidence likewise points to a date shortly after the composition of Macbeth.
(a) In versification especially valuable indications are furnished by the proportion of what Professor Ingram has called the light and the weak endings. By these terms he denotes the conclusion of the verse with a syllable that cannot easily or that cannot fully bear the stress which the normal scansion would lay upon it. In either case the effect is to break down the independence of the separate line as unit, and to vest the rhythm in the couplet or sequence, by forcing us on till we find an adequate resting-place. It thus has some analogy in formal prosody to enjambement, or the discrepancy between the metrical and the grammatical pause in prosody when viewed in connection with the sense. Now the employment of light and weak endings, on the one hand, and of enjambement on the other, is, generally speaking, much more frequent in the plays that are considered to be late than in those that are considered to be early. The tendency to enjambement indeed may be traced farther back and proceeds less regularly. But the laxity in regard to the endings comes with a rush and seems steadily to advance. It is first conspicuous in Antony and Cleopatra and reaches its maximum in Henry VIII. In this progress however there is one notable peculiarity. While it is unmistakable if the percentage be taken from the light and weak endings combined, or from the weak endings alone, it breaks down if the light endings be considered by themselves. Of them there is a decidedly higher proportion in Antony and Cleopatra than in Coriolanus, which nevertheless is almost universally held to be the later play. The reason probably is that the light endings mean a less revolutionary departure from the more rigid system and would therefore be the first to be attempted. When the ear had accustomed itself to them, it would be ready to accept the greater innovation. Thus the sudden outcrop of light and weak endings in Antony and Cleopatra, the preponderance of the light over the weak in that play, the increase in the total percentage of such endings and especially in the relative percentage of weak endings in the dramas that for various reasons are believed to be later, all confirm its position after Macbeth and before Coriolanus.
(b) The diction tells the same tale. Whether we admire it or no, we must admit that it is very concise, bold and difficult. Gervinus censures it as “forced, abrupt and obscure”; and it certainly makes demands on the reader. But Englishmen will rather agree with the well-known eulogy of Coleridge: “Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspere’s other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellences so expressed.” But in any case, whether to be praised or blamed, it is a typical example of Shakespeare’s final manner, the manner that characterises Coriolanus and the Romances, and that shows itself only occasionally or incompletely in his preceding works.
4. A consideration of the tone of the tragedy yields similar results. It has been pointed out[190] that there is a gradual lightening in the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s plays after the composition of Othello and Lear. In them, and especially in the latter, we move in the deepest gloom. It is to them that critics point who read in Shakespeare a message of pessimism and despair. And though there are not wanting, for those who will see them, glimpses of comfort and hope even in their horror of thick darkness, it must be owned that the misery and murder of Desdemona, the torture and remorse of Othello, the persecution of Lear, the hanging of Cordelia, are more harrowing and appalling than the heart can well endure. But we are conscious of a difference in the others of the group. Though Macbeth retains our sympathy to the last, his story does not rouse our questionings as do the stories of these earlier victims. We are well content that he should expiate his crimes, and that a cleaner hand should inherit the sceptre: we recognise the justice of the retribution and hail the dawn of better times. In Coriolanus the feeling is not only of assent but of exultation. True, the tragedy ends with the hero’s death, but that is no unmitigated evil. He has won back something of his lost nobility and risen to the greatest height his nature could attain, in renouncing his revenge: after that what was there that he could live for either in Corioli or Rome?
[190] Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy.
Antony and Cleopatra has points of contact with both these plays, and shows like them that the night is on the wane. Of course in one way the view of life is still disconsolate enough. The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life: ambitious egoism, uninspired craft and conventional propriety; these are the forces that clash in this gorgeous mêlée of the West and the East. At the outset passion holds the lists, then self-interest takes the lead, but principle never has a chance. We think of Lucifera’s palace in the Faerie Queene, with the seven deadly sins passing in arrogant gala before the marble front, and with the shifting foundations beneath, the dungeons and ruins at the rear. The superb shows of life are displayed in all their superbness and in all their vanity. In the end their worshippers are exposed as their dupes. Antony is a cloud and a dream, Cleopatra no better than “a maid that milks and does the meanest chares”: yet she sees that it is “paltry to be Caesar,” and hears Antony mock at Caesar’s luck. Whatever the goal, it is a futile one, and the objects of human desire are shown on their seamy side. We seem to lose sight of ideals, and idealism would be out of place. Even the passing reference to Shakespeare’s own art shows a dissipation of the glamour. In Julius Caesar Brutus and Cassius had looked forward to an immortality of glory on the stage and evidently regard the theatre as equal to the highest demands, but now to Cleopatra it is only an affair of vulgar makeshifts that parodies what it presents.
I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ the posture of a whore. (V. ii. 219.)
In so far the impression produced is a cheerless one, and Gervinus has gone so far as to say: “There is no great or noble character among the personages, no really elevated feature in the action of this drama whether in its politics or its love affairs.” This is excessive: but it is true that, as in Timon, the suggestion for which came from the same source and the composition of which may be dated a short time before, no very spiritual note is struck and no very dutiful figure is to the fore. And the background is a lurid one. “A world-catastrophe!” says Dr. Brandes, “(Shakespeare) has no mind now to write of anything else. What is sounding in his ears, what is filling his thoughts, is the crash of a world falling in ruins.... The might of Rome, stern and austere, shivered at the touch of Eastern voluptuousness. Everything sank, everything fell,—character and will, dominions and principalities, men and women. Everything was worm-eaten, serpent-bitten, poisoned by sensuality—everything tottered and collapsed.”
Yet though the sultry splendours of the scenes seem to blast rather than foster, though the air is laden with pestilence, and none of the protagonists has escaped the infection, the total effect is anything but depressing. As in Macbeth we accept without demur the penalty exacted for the offence. As in Coriolanus we welcome the magnanimity that the offenders recover or achieve at the close. If there is less of acquiescence in vindicated justice than in the first, if there is less of elation at the triumph of the nobler self than in the second, there is yet something of both. In this respect too it seems to stand between them and we cannot be far wrong if we place it shortly after the one and shortly before the other, near the end of 1607.
And that means too that it comes near the end of Shakespeare’s tragic period, when his four chief tragedies were already composed and when he was well aware of all the requirements of the tragic art. In his quartet of masterpieces he was free to fulfil these requirements without let or hindrance, for he was elaborating material that claimed no particular reverence from him. But now he turns once more to authorised history and in doing so once more submits to the limitations that in his practice authorised history imposed. Why he did so it is of course impossible to say. It was a famous story, accessible to the English public in some form or other from the days of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and at an early age Shakespeare was attracted by it, or at least was conversant with Cleopatra’s reputation as one of the world’s paragons of beauty. In Romeo and Juliet Mercutio includes her in his list of those, Dido, Hero, Thisbe and the rest, who in Romeo’s eyes are nothing to his Rosaline; compared with that lady he finds “Cleopatra a gipsy.”[191] And so indeed she was, for gipsy at first meant nothing else than Egyptian, and Skelton, in his Garland of Laurel, swearing by St. Mary of Egypt, exclaims:
By Mary gipcy, Quod scripsi scripsi.
But in current belief the black-haired, tawny vagrants, who, from the commencement of the sixteenth century, despite cruel enactments cruelly enforced, began to swarm into England, were of Egyptian stock. And precisely in this there lay a paradox and riddle, for according to conventional ideas they were anything but comely, and yet it was a matter of common fame that a great Roman had thrown away rule, honour and duty in reckless adoration of the queen of the race. Perhaps Shakespeare had this typical instance in his mind when in Midsummer Night’s Dream he talks of the madness of the lover who
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. (V. i. 11.)
For to the end the poet ignores the purity of Cleopatra’s Greek descent, and seems by many touches to imagine her as of the same type as those undesirable immigrants against whom the penal laws were of so little avail. Nevertheless he accepts the fact of her charm, and, in As You Like It, among the contributions which the “Heavenly Synod” levied on the supreme examples of womankind for the equipment of Rosalind, specifies “Cleopatra’s majesty.”[192] It is not the quality on which he was afterwards to lay stress, it is not the quality that Plutarch accentuates, nor is it likely to have been suggested by the gipsies he had seen. But there was another source on which he may have drawn. Next to the story of Julius Caesar, the story of Antony and Cleopatra was perhaps the prerogative Roman theme among the dramatists of the sixteenth century[193] and was associated with such illustrious personages as Jodelle and Garnier in France, and the Countess of Pembroke and Daniel in England. It is, as we have seen, highly probable that Shakespeare had read the versions of his compatriots at any rate, and their dignified harangues are just of the kind to produce the impression of loftiness and state.
[191] II. iv. 44.
[192] III. ii. 154.
[193] Besides the plays discussed in the Introduction as having a possible place in the lineage of Shakespeare’s, others were produced on the Continent, which in that respect are quite negligible but which serve to prove the widespread interest in the subject. Thus in 1560 Hans Sachs in Germany composed, in seven acts, one of his homespun, well-meant dramas that were intended to edify spectator or reader. Thus in 1583 Cinthio in Italy treated the same theme, and it has been conjectured, by Klein, that his Cleopatra was known to Shakespeare. Certainly Shakespeare makes use of Cinthio’s novels, but the particulars signalised by Klein, that are common to the English and to the Italian tragedy, which latter I have not been able to procure, are, to use Klein’s own term, merely “external,” and are to be explained, in so far as they are valid at all, which Moeller (Kleopatra in der Tragödien-Literatur) disputes, by reference to Plutarch. An additional one which Moeller suggests without attaching much weight to it, is even less plausible than he supposes. He points out that Octavius’ emissary, who in Plutarch is called Thyrsus, in Cinthio becomes Tireo, as in Shakespeare he similarly becomes Thyreus; but he notes that this is also the name that Shakespeare would get from North. As a matter of fact, however, in the 1623 folio of Antony and Cleopatra and in subsequent editions till the time of Theobald, this personage, for some reason or other as yet undiscovered, is styled Thidias; so the alleged coincidence is not so much unimportant as fallacious. A third tragedy, Montreuil’s Cléopatre, which like Cinthio’s is inaccessible to me, was published in France in 1595; but to judge from Moeller’s analysis and the list of dramatis personae, it has no contact with Shakespeare’s.
Be that as it may, Cleopatra was a familiar name to Shakespeare when he began seriously to immerse himself in her history. We can understand how it would stir his heart as it filled in and corrected his previous vague surmises. What a revelation of her witchcraft would be that glowing picture of her progress when, careless and calculating, she condescended to obey the summons of the Roman conqueror and answer the charge that she had helped Brutus in his campaign.
When she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius him selfe and also from his frendes, she made so light of it, and mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was of gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of her selfe: she was layed under a pavillion of cloth-of-gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus, commonly drawen in picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretie faire boyes apparelled as painters doe set forth god Cupide, with little fannes in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphes Nereides (which are the mermaides of the waters) and like the Graces, some stearing the helme, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of which there came a wonderfull passing sweete savor of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfes side pestered[194] with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongest the rivers side: others also ranne out of the citie to see her comming in. So that in the end, there ranne such multitudes of people one after an other to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market place, in his Imperiall seate to geve audience: and there went a rumor in the peoples mouthes that the goddesse Venus was come to play with the god Bacchus,[195] for the generall good of all Asia. When Cleopatra landed, Antonius sent to invite her to supper with him. But she sent him word againe, he should doe better rather to come and suppe with her. Antonius therefore to shew him selfe curteous unto her at her arrivall, was contented to obey her, and went to supper to her: where he found such passing sumptuous fare that no tongue can expresse it.
[194] obstructed.
[195] Antony had already been worshipped as that deity.
Only by a few touches has Shakespeare excelled his copy in the words of Enobarbus: but he has merely heightened and nowhere altered the effect.
The barge she sat in, like a _burnished throne, Burn’d_ on the water: the poop was beaten gold: Purple the sails and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made _The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes_. For her own person, It beggar’d all description: she did lie In her pavilion—cloth-of-gold of tissue— O’er picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature: on each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem _To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did_ Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes And made their bends adornings: at the helm A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs: and Antony, Enthroned i’ the market-place, did sit alone, _Whistling the air: which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature_.... Upon her landing, Antony sent to her, Invited her to supper: she replied It should be better he became her guest; Which she entreated: our courteous Antony, _Whom ne’er the word of “No” woman heard speak, Being barber’d ten times o’er_, goes to the feast _And for his ordinary pays his heart For what his eyes eat only_. (II. ii. 196.)
And the impression of all this magnificence had not faded from Shakespeare’s mind when in after years he wrote his Cymbeline. Imogen’s chamber
is hang’d With tapestry of silk and silver; the story Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, And Cydnus swell’d above the banks, or for The press of boats or pride.[196] (II. iv. 68.)
[196] It is rather strange that Shakespeare, whose “accessories” are usually relevant, should choose such a subject for the decoration of Imogen’s room. Mr. Bradley, in a note to his essay on Antony and Cleopatra says: “Of the ‘good’ heroines, Imogen is the one who has most of [Cleopatra’s] spirit of fire and air.” This is one of the things one sees to be true as soon as one reads it: can it be that their creator has brought them into association through some feeling, conscious or unconscious, of their kinship in this important respect?
I regret that Mr. Bradley’s admirable study, which appeared when I was travelling in the Far East, escaped my notice till a few days ago, when it was too late to use it for my discussion.
But it was not only the prodigality of charm that would enthral the poet. In the relation of the lovers, in the character of Cleopatra, in the nature of her ascendancy, there is something that reminds us of the story of passion enshrined in the Sonnets. No doubt it is uncertain whether these in detail are to be regarded as biographical, but biographical they are at the core, at least in the sense that they are authentic utterance of feelings actually experienced. No doubt, too, the balance of evidence points to their composition, at least in the parts that deal with his unknown leman, early in Shakespeare’s career; but for that very reason the memories would be fitter to help him in interpreting the poetry of the historical record, for as Wordsworth says: “Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.” So once more Shakespeare may have been moved to “make old offences of affections new,” that is, to infuse the passion of his own youth into this tale of “old unhappy far-off things.” His bygone sorrows of the Sonnets come back to him when he is writing the drama, mirror themselves in some of the situations and sentiments, and echo in the wording of a few of the lines. It is of course easy to exaggerate the importance of these reminiscences. The Dark Lady has been described as the original of Cleopatra, but the original of Cleopatra is the Cleopatra of Plutarch, and in many ways she is unlike the temptress of the poet. She is dowered with a marvellous beauty which all from Enobarbus to Octavius acknowledge, while the other is “foul” in all eyes save those of her lover; her face “hath not the power to make love groan”; and in her there is no hint of Cleopatra’s royalty of soul. Nor is the devotion of Antony the devotion of the sonneteer; it is far more absolute and unquestioning, it is also far more comrade-like and sympathetic; at first he exults in it without shame, and never till the last distracted days does suspicion or contempt enter his heart. Still less is his passing spasm of jealousy at the close like the chronic jealousy of the poet. It is a vengeful frenzy that must find other outlets as well as the self-accusing remonstrances and impotent rebukes of the lyrical complaints. The resemblance between sonnets and play is confined to the single feature that they both tell the story of an unlawful passion for a dark woman—for this was Shakespeare’s fixed idea in regard to Cleopatra—whose character and reputation were stained, whose influence was pernicious, and whose fatal spells depended largely on her arts and intellect. But this was enough to give Shakespeare, as it were, a personal insight into the case, and a personal interest in it, to furnish him with the key of the situation and place him at the centre.
And there was another point of contact between the author and the hero of the tragedy. It is stated in Plutarch’s account of Antony: “Some say that he lived three and fiftie yeares: and others say six and fiftie.” But the action begins a decade, or (for, as we shall see, there is a jumbling of dates in the opening scenes like that which we have noted in the corresponding ones of Julius Caesar) more than a decade before the final catastrophe. Thus Shakespeare would imagine Antony at the outset as between forty-two and forty-six, practically on the same niveau of life as himself, for in 1607-1608 he was in his forty-fourth year. They had reached the same stadium in their career, had the same general outlook on the future, had their great triumphs behind them, and yet with powers hardly impaired they both could say,
Though grey Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha’ we A brain that nourishes our nerves, and can Get goal for goal of youth. (IV. viii. 19.)
There would be a general sympathy of attitude, and it even extends to something in the poet himself analogous to the headlong ardour of Antony. In the years that had elapsed since Shakespeare gave the first instalment of his story in Julius Caesar, a certain change had been proceeding in his art. The present drama belongs to a different epoch of his authorship, an epoch not of less force but of less restrained force, an epoch when he works perhaps with less austerity of stroke and less intellectualism, but—strange that it should be so in advancing years—with more abandonment to the suggestions of imagination and passion. In all these respects the fortunes of Antony and Cleopatra would offer him a fit material. In the second as compared with the first Roman play, there is certainly no decline. The subject is different, the point of view is different, the treatment is different, but subject, point of view and treatment all harmonise with each other, and the whole in its kind is as great as could be.
Perhaps some such considerations may explain why Shakespeare, after he had been for seven years expatiating on the heights of free tragic invention, yet returned for a time to a theme which, with his ideas of loyalty to recorded fact, dragged him back in some measure to the embarrassments of the chronicle history. It was all so congenial, that he was willing to face the disadvantages of an action that straggled over years and continents, of a multiplicity of short scenes that in the third act rise to a total of thirteen and in the fourth to a total of fifteen, of a number of episodic personages who appear without preparation and vanish almost without note. He had to lay his account with this if he dramatised these transactions at all, for to him they were serious matters that his fancy must not be allowed to distort. Indeed he accepts the conditions so unreservedly, and makes so little effort to evade them, that his mind seems to have taken the ply, and he resorts to the meagre, episodical scene, not only when Plutarch’s narrative suggests it, but when he is making additions of his own and when no very obvious advantage is to be secured. This is the only explanation that readily presents itself for the fourth scene of the second act, which in ten lines describes Lepidus’ leave-taking of Mecaenas and Agrippa.[197] There is for this no authority in the Life; and what object does it serve? It may indicate on the one hand the punctilious deference that Octavius’ ministers deem fit to show as yet to the incompetent Triumvir, and on the other his lack of efficient energy in allowing his private purposes to make him two days late at the rendezvous which he himself has advocated as urgent. But these hints could quite well have been conveyed in some other way, and this invented scene seems theatrically and dramatically quite otiose. Nevertheless, and this is the point to observe, it so fits into the pattern of the chronicle play that it does not force itself on one’s notice as superfluous.
[197] Of course the division into scenes is not indicated in the Folio, but a new “place” is obviously required for this conversation. Of course, too, change of scene did not mean so much on the Elizabethan as on the modern stage, but it must always have counted for something. Every allowance made, the above criticism seems to me valid.
It is partly for this reason that Antony and Cleopatra holds its distinctive place among Shakespeare’s masterpieces. On the one hand there is no play that springs more spontaneously out of the heart of its author, and into which he has breathed a larger portion of his inspiration; and on the other there is none that is more purely historical, so that in this respect it is comparable among the Roman dramas to Richard II. in the English series. This was the double characteristic that Coleridge emphasised in his Notes on Shakespeare’s Plays: “There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much—perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historical abstraction.” The angelic strength, the fiery force, the flashes of nature are due to his complete sympathy with the facts, but that makes his close adherence to his authority all the more remarkable.
Chapter II
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, A HISTORY, TRAGEDY, AND LOVE POEM; AS SHOWN BY ITS RELATIONS WITH PLUTARCH
The obligations to Plutarch, though very great, are of a somewhat peculiar kind. Shakespeare does not borrow so largely or so repeatedly from the diction of North as in Coriolanus or even in Julius Caesar. His literal indebtedness is for the most part confined to the exploitation here and there of a few short phrases or sentences, generally of a not very distinctive character. Thus Octavia is described as “having an excellent grace, wisedom and honestie, joined unto so rare a beawtie”; which suggests her “beauty, wisdom, modesty,” in the play (II. ii. 246). Thus, after the scourging of Thyreus, Antony sends Caesar the message:
“If this mislike thee,” said he, “thou hast Hipparchus[198] one of my infranchised bondmen with thee: hang him if thou wilt, or whippe him at thy pleasure, that we may cry quittaunce.”
[198] The irony of the proposal, which Plutarch indicates but does not stress, is entirely lost in Shakespeare. We have already been told that Hipparchus “was the first of all his (i.e. Antony’s) infranchised bondmen that revolted from him and yelded unto Caesar”; so Caesar is invited to retaliate on one of his own adherents.
This becomes:
If he mislike My speech and what is done, tell him he has Hipparchus, my enfranchised bondman, whom He may at pleasure whip, or hang, or torture, As he shall like, to quit me. (III. xiii. 147.)
So, too, Plutarch says of Dolabella’s disclosure to Cleopatra:
He sent her word secretly as she had requested him, that Caesar determined to take his journey through Suria, and that within three dayes he would sende her away before with her children.
The words are closely copied in Dolabella’s statement:
Caesar through Syria Intends his journey, and within three days You with your children will he send before: Make your best use of this: I have perform’d Your pleasure and my promise. (V. ii. 200.)
It is only now and then that such small loans stand out as examples of the “happy valiancy of style” that characterises the drama as a whole. For instance, at the end when Cleopatra is dead and Charmian has applied the asp, the brief interchange of question and answer which Plutarch reports could not be bettered even by Shakespeare.
One of the souldiers seeing her, angrily sayd unto her: “Is that well done, Charmion?” “Verie well,” sayd she againe, “and meete for a Princes discended from a race of so many noble Kings.”
Shakespeare knows when he is well off and accepts the goods the gods provide.
1st Guard. Charmian, is this well done? Charmian. It is well done and fitting for a princess Descended from so many royal kings. (V. ii. 238.)
Perhaps the noblest and one of the closest of these paraphrases is in the scene of Antony’s death. With his last breath he persuades her
that she should not lament nor sorowe for the miserable chaunge of his fortune at the end of his dayes: but rather that she should thinke him the more fortunate, for the former triumphes and honors he had received, considering that while he lived he was the noblest and greatest Prince of the world, and that now he was overcome, not cowardly but valiantly, a Romane by an other Romane.
Shakespeare’s Antony says:
The miserable change now at my end Lament nor sorrow at: but please your thoughts In feeding them with those my former fortunes Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o’ the world, The noblest: and do now not basely die, Not cowardly put off my helmet to My countryman,—a Roman by a Roman Valiantly vanquish’d. (IV. xv. 51.)
As a rule, however, even these short reproductions are not transcripts. Shakespeare’s usual method is illustrated in his recast of Antony’s pathetic protest to Caesar that
he made him angrie with him, bicause he shewed him selfe prowde and disdainfull towards him, and now specially when he was easie to be angered, by reason of his present miserie.
Shakespeare gives a more bitter poignancy to the confession.
Look, thou say He makes me angry with him, for he seems Proud and disdainful, _harping on what I am, Not what he knew I was: he makes me angry_; And at this time most easy ’tis to do ’t, _When my good stars, that were my former guides, Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires Into the abysm of hell_. (III. xiii. 140.)
Much the same estimate holds good of the longer passages derived from North, which for the rest are but few. The most literal are as a rule comparatively unimportant. A typical specimen is the list of complaints made by Antony against Octavius, and Octavius’ rejoinder:
And the chiefest poyntes of his accusations he charged him with, were these: First, that having spoyled Sextus Pompeius in Sicile, he did not give him his parte of the Ile. Secondly, that he did deteyne in his handes the shippes he lent him to make that warre. Thirdly, that having put Lepidus their companion and triumvirate out of his part of the Empire, and having deprived him of all honors: he retayned for him selfe the lands and revenues thereof, which had been assigned to him for his part.... Octavius Caesar aunswered him againe: that for Lepidus, he had in deede deposed him, and taken his part of the Empire from him, bicause he did overcruelly use his authoritie. And secondly, for the conquests he had made by force of armes, he was contented Antonius should have his part of them, so that he would likewise let him have his part of Armenia.
Shakespeare copies even Caesar’s convenient reticence as to the borrowed vessels.
Agrippa. Who does he accuse? Caesar. Caesar: and that, having in Sicily Sextus Pompeius spoil’d, we have not rated him His part o’ the isle: then does he say, he lent me Some shipping unrestored: lastly, he frets That Lepidus of the triumvirate Should be deposed; and, being, that we detain All his revenue. Agrippa. Sir, this should be answer’d. Caesar. ’Tis done already, and the messenger gone. I have told him Lepidus was grown too cruel: That he his high authority abused, And did deserve his change: for what I have conquer’d I grant him part: but then, in his Armenia, And other of his conquer’d kingdoms, I Demand the like. (III. vi. 23.)
Less matter-of-fact, because more vibrant with its fanfare of names, but still somewhat of the nature of an official schedule, is the list of tributaries in Antony’s host.
(He) had with him to ayde him these kinges and subjects following: Bocchus king of Lybia, Tarcondemus king of high Cilicia, Archelaus king of Cappadocia, Philadelphus king of Paphlagonia, Mithridates king of Comagena, and Adallas king of Thracia. All the which were there every man in person. The residue that were absent sent their armies, as Polemon king of Pont, Manchus king of Arabia, Herodes king of Iury; and furthermore, Amyntas king of Lycaonia, and of the Galatians: and besides all these he had all the ayde the king of Medes sent unto him.
The long bead-roll of shadowy potentates evidently delights Shakespeare’s ear as it would have delighted the ear of Milton or Victor Hugo[199]:
He hath assembled Bocchus, the king of Libya; Archelaus Of Cappadocia; Philadelphos king Of Paphlagonia; the Thracian king, Adallas; King Malchus of Arabia; king of Pont; Herod of Jewry; Mithridates, king Of Comagene; Polemon and Amyntas, The kings of Mede and Lycaonia, With a more larger list of sceptres. (III. vi. 68.)
[199] It is interesting to note that it had already caught the fancy of Jodelle, though being more faithful to the text in enumerating only the kings who were actually present and taking no liberties with the names and titles, he failed to get all the possible points out of it. Agrippa says to Octavian:
Le Roy Bocchus, le Roy Cilicien Archelaus, Roy Capadocien, Et Philadelphe, et Adalle de Thrace, Et Mithridate, usoyent-ils de menace Moindre sus nous que de porter en joye Nostre despouille et leur guerriere proye, Pour a leurs Dieux joyeusement les pendre Et maint et maint sacrifice leur rendre? Acte II.
Still, of the longer passages that show throughout a real approximation to North’s language, the two already quoted, the soothsayer’s warning to Antony, and the description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus are the most impressive: and even they, and especially the latter, have been touched up and revised. Shakespeare’s general procedure in the cases where he borrows at all is a good deal freer, and may be better illustrated from the passage in which Octavius recalls the bygone fortitude of Antony.
These two Consuls (Hircius and Pansa) together with Caesar, who also had an armye, went against Antonius that beseeged the citie of Modena, and there overthrew him in battell: but both the Consuls were slaine there. Antonius flying upon this overthrowe, fell into great miserie all at once: but the chiefest want of all other, and that pinched him most, was famine. Howbeit he was of such a strong nature, that by pacience he would overcome any adversitie, and the heavier fortune lay upon him, the more constant shewed he him selfe.... It was a wonderfull example to the souldiers, to see Antonius that was brought up in all finenes and superfluitie, so easily to drink puddle water, and to eate wild frutes and rootes: and moreover it is reported, that even as they passed the Alpes, they did eate the barcks of trees, and such beasts, as never man tasted of their flesh before.
This is good, but Shakespeare’s version visualises as well as heightens Antony’s straits and endurance, and brings them into contrast with his later effeminacy.
When thou once Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel Did famine follow: whom thou fought’st against, Though daintily brought up, with patience more Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign The roughest berry on the rudest hedge: Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of trees thou browsed’st; on the Alps It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh, Which some did die to look on: and all this— It wounds thine honour that I speak it now— Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek So much as lank’d not. (I. iv. 56.)
But including such elaborations, the number of passages repeated or recast from North is not considerable. In the whole of the first act this description of the retreat from Modena is the only one of any consequence, and though the percentage increases as the play proceeds, and they are much more frequent in the second half, even in the fifth act, the proportion of easily traceable lines is fifty-seven to four hundred and forty-six, or barely more than an eighth.
Much more numerous and generally much more noteworthy than the strictly verbal suggestions are those that, conveyed altogether in Shakespeare’s phrase, give such immediate life to the play, whether they supply episodes for acting or merely material for the dialogue. Sometimes a whole paragraph is distilled into a sentence, like that famous bit of domestic chit-chat that must have impressed Plutarch when a boy.
I have heard my grandfather Lampryas report, that one Philotas a Physition, born in the citie of Amphissa, told him that he was at the present time in Alexandria, and studied physicke: and that having acquaintance with one of Antonius cookes, he tooke him with him to Antonius house, (being a young man desirous to see things) to shew him the wonderfull sumptuous charge and preparation of one only supper. When he was in the kitchin, and saw a world of diversities of meates, and amongst others eight wilde boares rosted whole: he began to wonder at it, and sayd, “Sure you have a great number of ghestes to supper.” The cooke fell a-laughing, and answered him: “No,” (quoth he), “not many ghestes, nor above twelve in all: but yet all that is boyled or roasted must be served in whole, or else it would be marred straight. For Antonius peradventure will suppe presently, or it may be in a pretie while hence, or likely enough he will deferre it longer, for that he hath dronke well to-day, or else hath had some other great matters in hand: and therefore we doe not dresse one supper only, but many suppers, bicause we are uncerteine of the houre he will suppe in.”
In what strange ways has the gossip of the inquisitive medical student been transmitted through Lampryas and his grandchild to furnish an arabesque for Shakespeare’s tapestry! And, when we know its history, what a realistic touch does this anecdote lend to Mecaenas’ badinage, though Shakespeare has raised the profuse to the sublime by transferring the banquet from the evening to the morning, suppressing the fact of the relays, and insinuating that this was nothing out of the common!
Mecaenas. Eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there: is this true? Enobarbus. This was but as a fly by an eagle: we had much more monstrous matter of feast, which worthily deserved noting. (II. ii. 183.)
Or again we are told of Cleopatra’s precautions after Actium.
Now to make proofe of those poysons which made men dye with least paine, she tried it upon condemned men in prison. For when she saw the poysons that were sodaine and vehement, and brought speedy death with grievous torments: and in contrary manner, that suche as were more milde and gentle, had not that quicke speede and force to make one dye sodainly: she afterwardes went about to prove the stinging of snakes and adders, and made some to be applied unto men in her sight, some in one sorte, and some in an other. So when she had dayly made divers and sundrie proofes, she found none of all them she had proved so fit as the biting of an Aspicke, the which only causeth a heavines of the head, without swounding or complaining, and bringeth a great desire also to sleepe, with a little swet on the face, and so by little and little taketh away the sences and vitall powers, no living creature perceiving that the pacientes feele any paine. For they are so sorie when any bodie waketh them, and taketh them up; as those that being taken out of a sound sleepe, are very heavy and desirous to sleepe.
This leaves a trace only in three lines of Caesar’s reply when the guard detects the aspic’s trail; but these lines gain in significance if we remember the fuller statement.
Most probable That so she died: for her physician tells me She hath pursued conclusions infinite Of easy ways to die. (V. ii. 356.)
Apart from the great pivots and levers of the action Plutarch has supplied numbers of these minor fittings. Including with them the more literal loans, from which they cannot always be discriminated, we find in addition to the instances already cited the following unmistakable reminiscences: in Act I., Antony’s proposal to roam the streets with Cleopatra; in Act II., the motive assigned for Fulvia’s rising, Antony’s ambiguous position as widower, Sextus Pompeius’ courtesy to Antony’s mother, Charmian’s description of the fishing, the conditions of peace offered to Pompey, Pompey’s flout at the seizure of his father’s house, the bantering of Antony in regard to Cleopatra, the banquet on the galley, Menas’ suggestion and Pompey’s reply; in Act III., Ventidius’ halt in his career of victory and its reason, Octavia’s distraction between the claims of husband and brother, the overthrow of Pompey and deposition of Lepidus, the account of the coronation of Cleopatra and her children, Enobarbus’ remonstrance against Cleopatra’s presence in the armament, the allusion to the war being managed by her eunuch and her maids, the comparison of Octavius’ and Antony’s navies, the name Antoniad given to Cleopatra’s admiral, Antony’s challenge to Octavius, the soldier’s appeal to fight on land, many particulars about the battle of Actium, Antony’s dismissal of his friends with treasure, the embassage of Euphronius and Octavius’ reply, Thyreus’ commission, Antony’s renewed challenge, the birthday celebration; in Act IV., Octavius’ answer to the challenge, Antony’s disquieting speech at the banquet, the supposed departure of his divine patron, the defection of Enobarbus, the reference to the treason of Alexas and others, Antony’s successful sally, his return in triumph and embrace of Cleopatra ere he doffs his armour, her gift to the valiant soldier, the death of Enobarbus, the posting of the footmen on the hills before the final catastrophe, the presage of swallows building on Antony’s ship, the fraternization of the fleets, Antony’s rage at Cleopatra, her flight to the tomb, the message of her death, Antony’s revulsion of feeling at the news, Eros’ plighted obligation and his suicide, the mortal wound Antony gives himself, the second message from Cleopatra, his conveyance to the monument, Cleopatra’s refusal to undo the locks and her expedient of drawing him up, several particulars in the last interview, such as the commendation of Proculeius; in Act V., Dercetas’ announcement to Octavius of Antony’s death, Octavius’ reception of the tidings and his reference to their correspondence, his plans for Cleopatra, the interview of Proculeius with Cleopatra at the Monument, his unobserved entrance, the exclamation of the waiting-woman, Cleopatra’s attempted suicide, the visit of Octavius, his threats concerning Cleopatra’s children, her concealment of her treasure, the disclosure of Seleucus, her indignation at him and apology to Octavius, Octavius’ reception of it, Dolabella’s sympathy with the captive queen, the arrival of the countryman with the figs, the dressing in state, the death of Cleopatra and Iras before the soldiers enter, Charmian’s last service in adjusting the diadem, Octavius’ appreciation of Cleopatra’s courage and command for her burial beside Antony.
This enumeration shows how largely Shakespeare is indebted to Plutarch, and also how his obligations are greatest in the later portion of the play. They become conspicuous a little before the middle of the third act, and the proportion is maintained till the close; for though there are not so many in the fifth act, it is considerably shorter than the fourth or than the last eight scenes of the third.
Shakespeare however obtains from Plutarch not merely a large number of his details, but the general programme of the story and the presuppositions of the portraiture, as will appear from a short summary of Plutarch’s narrative, into which, for clearness’ sake, I insert the principal dates.
After Philippi, Antony gave himself up to a life of ostentation and luxury, interrupted by flashes of his nobler mood, first in Greece and subsequently in Asia. Then came his meeting with Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and in his passion for her all that was worthiest in his nature was smothered. Despite pressing public duties he accompanied her on her return to Alexandria, where he wasted his time in “childish sports and idle pastimes.” In the midst of his dalliance the tidings arrive with which the play opens, in 41 B.C., of the contest of his brother Lucius and his wife Fulvia, first with each other and then with Octavius, of their defeat and expulsion from Italy; as well as of the inroad of the Parthians under Labienus as far as Lydia and Ionia.
Then began Antonius with much a doe to rouse him selfe as if he had been wakened out of a deepe sleepe, and as a man may say comming out of a great dronkennes.
He sets out for Parthia, but in obedience to the urgent summons of Fulvia, changes his course for Italy. On the way he falls in with fugitives of his party who tell him that his wife was sole cause of the war and had begun it only to withdraw him from Cleopatra. Soon afterwards Fulvia, who was “going to meete with Antonius” fell sick and died at Sicyon in 40 B.C.—“by good fortune” comments Plutarch, as now the colleagues could be more easily reconciled. The friends of both were indisposed to “unrippe any olde matters” and a composition was come to whereby Antony obtained the East, Octavius the West, and Lepidus Africa. This agreement, since Antony was now a widower and “denied not that he kept Cleopatra, but so did he not confesse that he had her as his wife,” was confirmed by Antony’s marriage, which every one approved, with Octavius’ dearly loved half-sister Octavia, and it was hoped that “she should be a good meane to keepe good love and amitie betwext her brother and him.”
Meanwhile Sextus Pompeius in Sicily had been making himself troublesome with his pirate allies, and as he had showed great courtesy to Antony’s mother, it seemed good to make peace with him. An interview accordingly took place at Misenum in 39 B.C. as a result of which he was granted Sicily and Sardinia on the conditions mentioned in the play.
Antony was now able to resume his plans for punishing the Parthians and sent Ventidius against them while he still remained in Rome. But moved by the predominance of Octavius and the warning of the soothsayer, he resolved to take up his own jurisdiction, and with Octavia and their infant daughter set out for Greece, where he heard the news of Ventidius’ success in 38 B.C.
In 37 B.C., offended at some reports, he returned to Italy with Octavia, who had now a second daughter and was again with child. By her intercession good relations were restored between the brothers-in-law, each lending the other the forces of which he most stood in need. Octavius employed the borrowed ships against Sextus Pompeius, Antony was to employ the borrowed soldiers against the Parthians.
Leaving his wife and children in Octavius’ care, Antony proceeded directly to Asia.
Then beganne this pestilent plague and mischiefe of Cleopatraes love (which had slept a longe tyme and seemed to have bene utterlie forgotten and that Antonius had geven place to better counsell) againe to kindle and to be in force, so soone as Antonius came neere unto Syria.
He sends for her and to the scandal of the Romans pays her extravagant honours, showers kingdoms upon her, and designates their twin children the Sun and the Moon.
He does not, however, in seeming, neglect his expedition to Parthia, but gathers a huge and well appointed host wherewith to invade it. Nevertheless
this so great and puisant army which made the Indians quake for feare, dwelling about the contry of the Bactrians and all Asia also to tremble: served him to no purpose, and all for the love he bore to Cleopatra. For the earnest great desire he had to lye all winter with her, made him begin his warre out of due time, and for hast to put all in hazard, being so ravished and enchaunted with the sweete poyson of her love, that he had no other thought but of her, and how he might quickly returne againe: more then how he might overcome his enemies.
Not only did Antony choose the wrong season, but in his hurry he left all his heavy engines behind him and thus threw away his chances in advance. The campaign was a series of disasters and ended in an inglorious retreat. The only credit that can be given to him from beginning to end is for efficiency in misfortune and sympathy with his soldiers. Yet even these were impaired by his fatal passion.
The greate haste he made to returne unto Cleopatra, caused him to put his men to great paines, forcing them to lye in the field all winter long when it snew unreasonably, that by the way he lost eight thowsand of his men.
Arrived at the Syrian coast he awaits her coming.
And bicause she taried longer then he would have had her, he pined away for love and sorrow. So that he was at such a straight, that he wist not what to doe, and therefore to weare it out, he gave him selfe to quaffing and feasting. But he was so drowned with the love of her, that he could not abide to sit at the table till the feast were ended: but many times while others banketted, he came to the sea side to see if she were comming.
Meanwhile, in 36 B.C., during the Parthian expedition, Sextus Pompeius had been defeated, his death, not mentioned by Plutarch, following in the ensuing year, and Lepidus had been deposed by Octavius, who gave no account of the spoils. On the other hand, in 34 B.C., Antony, who had overrun and seized Armenia, celebrated his triumph not in Rome but in Alexandria.
Grievances were thus accumulating on both sides, and Octavia once more seeking to mediate, took ship to join her husband with the approval of Octavius, who foresaw the upshot, and regarded it as likely to put his brother-in-law in the wrong.
Antony bade her stop at Athens, promising to come to her, but afterwards, fearing lest Cleopatra should kill herself for grief, he broke tryst, and Octavia returned to Rome where she watched over his interests as best she might. Antony in the meantime accompanied Cleopatra to Egypt and gave the Romans new offence by paying her divine honours and parcelling out the East among her and her children.
Then came the interchange of uncompromising messages in 33 B.C., and Antony bade Octavia leave his house. The appeal to arms was inevitable, and as the taxation to which Octavius was compelled to resort in view of his rival’s great preparation roused general discontent, it was Antony’s cue to invade Italy. But he continued to squander his time in feasts and revels, and in such and other ways further alienated his friends in Rome.
In 32 B.C. Octavius declared war against Cleopatra, and had Antony deprived of his authority. The battle of Actium followed on the 2nd September, 31 B.C. But Antony, after his retirement to Egypt, in some measure recovered from his first despondency at the defeat, and even when he found himself forsaken by allies and troops, continued to live a life of desperate gaiety. After an ignominious attempt at negotiation and a flicker of futile success, the final desertion of his fleet, for which he blamed Cleopatra, put an end to his resistance, and he killed himself in 30 B.C., less, however, in despair at his overthrow than for grief at Cleopatra’s alleged death.
(He) said unto him selfe: “What doest thou looke for further, Antonius, sith spitefull fortune hath taken from thee the only joy thou haddest, for whom thou yet reservedst thy life.”
After mentioning how Antony’s son, Antyllus, and Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion, were betrayed to death by their governors, Plutarch describes how Cleopatra for a while is deterred from suicide chiefly by fears for her other children. Hearing, however, Octavius’ definite plans for her, she obtains leave to offer a last oblation at Antony’s tomb, and thereafter takes her own life. The biography concludes with a notice of Octavia’s care for all Antony’s children, not only Fulvia’s and her own, but those of whom Cleopatra was mother.
It will be seen from this sketch that no incidents of political importance are added, few are altered, and very few omitted by Shakespeare. Of course the dramatic form necessitates a certain concentration, and this of itself, even were there no farther motive, would account for the occasional synchronising of separate episodes. Thus the news of Fulvia’s death and Sextus Pompeius’ aggression is run together with the news of the wars of Fulvia and Lucius and the advance of the Parthians. Thus between the second marriage and the final breach it was convenient to condense matters, and, in doing this, to omit Antony’s flying visit to Italy, blend Octavia’s first and second attempts at mediation, and represent her as taking leave of her husband at Athens. In the same way the months between the battle of Actium and the death of Antony, and the days between the death of Antony and that of Cleopatra might easily be compressed without any hurt to the sentiment of the story. But even of this artistic license Shakespeare avails himself far less systematically than in Julius Caesar. There, as we saw, the action is crowded into five days, though with considerable intervals between some of them. There is no such arrangement in Antony and Cleopatra. Superficially this play is one of the most invertebrate in structure that Shakespeare ever wrote. It gives one the impression of an anxious desire to avoid tampering with the facts and their relations even when history does not furnish ready-made the material that bests fits the drama.
And in the main this impression is correct. Shakespeare supplies a panorama of some ten eventful years in which he can not only cite his chapter and verse for most of the official data, but reproduces, with amazing fidelity, the general contour of the historical landscape, in so far as it was visible from his point of view. And yet his allegiance to the letter has often been exaggerated and is to a great extent illusory. This does not mean merely that his picture fails to approve itself as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when tested by the investigations of modern scholars. His position and circumstances were not theirs. He took Plutarch’s Marcus Antonius as his chief and almost sole authority, resorting possibly for suggestions of situation and phrase to the Senecan tragedies on the same theme, probably for the descriptions of Egypt to Holland’s translation of Pliny or Cory’s translation of Leo, and almost certainly for many details about Sextus Pompeius[200] to the 1578 version of Appian; but always treating the Life not only as his inexhaustible storehouse, but as sufficient guarantee for any statement that it contained. In short he could give the history of the time, not as it was but as Plutarch represented it, and as Plutarch’s representation explained itself to an Elizabethan. It is hardly to his discredit if he underestimates Cleopatra’s political astuteness, and has no guess of the political projects that recent criticism has ascribed to Antony, for of these things his author has little to say. It is hardly to his credit, if, on Appian’s hint, he realises the importance of Sextus Pompeius’ insular position and naval power, for he lived in the days of Hawkins and Drake.
[200] See Appendix D.
But he is not slavishly literal even in his adherence to Plutarch. He adopts his essential and many of his subsidiary facts: he follows his lead in the broad course of events; he does not alter the main lines of the story. But it is surprising to find how persistently he rearranges and regroups the minor details, and how by this means he gives them a new significance. The portions of the play where he has made the narrative more compact are also, roughly speaking, those in which he has taken most liberties in dislocating the sequence, and the result is not merely greater conciseness but an original interpretation. Yet on the other hand we must not either misconstrue the meaning or overstate the importance of this procedure. In the first place it affects not so much the history of events as the portraiture of the persons. In the second place, even in the characterisation it generally adds vividness and depth to the presentation rather than alters the fundamental traits. Thus in Plutarch the soothsayer’s warning to Antony follows, in Shakespeare it precedes, the composition with Pompey. From the chronicler’s point of view this transposition is abundantly unimportant, but it does make a difference in our estimate of Antony: his consequent decision shows more levity and rashness in the play than in the biography. Yet in both his whole behaviour at this juncture is distinctly fickle and indiscreet; so the net result of the displacement is to sharpen the lines that Plutarch has already drawn. And this is true in a greater or less degree of most of the cases in which Shakespeare reshuffles Plutarch’s notes. On the whole, despite dramatic parallax and changed perspective, Antony and Cleopatra is astonishingly faithful to the facts as they were supposed to be. Shakespeare could hardly have done more in getting to the heart of Plutarch’s account, and in reconstructing it with all its vital and essential characteristics disentangled and combined afresh in their rational connection. And since after all Plutarch “meant right” this implies that Shakespeare is not only true to Plutarch, but virtually true to what is still considered the spirit of his subject.[201]
[201] This may be said even if we accept Professor Ferrero’s arguments that Antony’s infatuation for Cleopatra was invented or exaggerated by opponents, and that their relation was to a great extent invented or prescribed by their ambitions. Antony would still be the profligate man of genius, captivated by Asiatic ideals and careless of the interests of Rome. His policy at the close would still, by Professor Ferrero’s own admission, be traceable to the ascendancy which Cleopatra had established over him. And the picture of contemporary conditions would still retain a large measure of truth.
Indeed his most far-reaching modifications concern in the main the manner in which the persons appeal to our sympathies, and in which he wishes us to envisage their story; and these perhaps in a preliminary view can better be indicated by what he has suppressed than by what he has added or recast. There is one conspicuous omission that shows how he deals with character; there are several minor ones that in their sum show how he prescribes the outlook.
To begin with the former, it is impossible not to be struck by the complete deletion of the Parthian fiasco, which in Plutarch occupies nearly a fifth of the whole Life, or a fourth of the part with which Shakespeare deals in this play. It thus bulks large in Antony’s career, and though in the main it may be unsuitable for dramatic purposes, it is nevertheless connected in its beginning, conduct and close, with the story of his love for Cleopatra. Yet we have only one far off and euphemistic reference to it in the words of Eros, when Antony bids him strike.
The gods withhold me! Shall I do that which all the Parthian darts, Though enemy, lost aim, and could not? (IV. xiv. 69.)
Why this reticence in regard to one of the most ambitious enterprises with which the name of Antony was associated? The truth is that the whole management of the campaign detracts grievously from the glamour of “absolute soldiership” with which the dramatist surrounds his hero and through which he wishes us to view him. His silence in regard to it is thus a hint of one far-reaching and momentous change Shakespeare has made in the impression the story conveys, and that is in the character of Antony himself. In the biography he is by no means so grandiose a figure, so opulent and magnificent a nature, as he appears in the play. Gervinus sums up the salient features of Plutarch’s Antony in the following sentence:
A man who had grown up in the wild companionship of a Curio and a Clodius, who had gone through the high school of debauchery in Greece and Asia, who had shocked everybody in Rome during Caesar’s dictatorship by his vulgar excesses, who had made himself popular among the soldiers by drinking with them and encouraging their low amours, a man upon whom the odium of the proscriptions under the rule of the triumvirate especially fell, who displayed a cannibal pleasure over Cicero’s bloody head and hand, who afterwards renewed in the East the wanton life of his youth, and robbed in grand style to maintain the vilest gang of parasites and jugglers, such a man depicted finally as the prey of an elderly and artful courtesan, could not possibly have been made the object of dramatic interest. It is wonderful how Shakespeare on the one hand preserved the historic features of Antony’s character, so as not to make him unrecognisable, and yet how he contrived on the other to render him an attractive personage.
The array of charges Gervinus compiles from Plutarch is not exaggerated. Indeed it could be enlarged and emphasised. Dishonesty in money matters, jealousy of his subordinates, an occasional lack of generalship that almost becomes inefficiency, might be added to the list. But Plutarch’s picture contains other traits that he does not seek to reconcile with those that repel us, but drops in casually and by the way: and in Shakespeare these are brought to the front. Valour, endurance, generosity, versatility, resourcefulness, self-knowledge, frankness, simplicity after a fashion, width of outlook, power of self-recovery, are all attributed to Antony even by his first biographer, though these qualities are overweighted by the mass of his delinquencies. Shakespeare shows them in relief; while the more offensive characteristics, like his youthful licentiousness, are relegated to his bygone past, or, like his jealousy and vindictiveness, are merely suggested by subordinate strokes, such as the break in Ventidius’ triumphant campaign, or the merciless scourging of Thyreus. It is sometimes said that Shakespeare’s Brutus is historically correct and that his Mark Antony is a new creation. The opposite statement would be nearer the truth. We feel that both the biographer and the dramatist have given a portrait of Cleopatra’s lover, and that both portraits are like; but the one painter has been content with a collection of vivid traits which in their general effect are ignoble and repulsive: the other in a sense has idealised his model, but it is by reading the soul of greatness through the sordid details, and explaining them by the conception of Antony, not perhaps at his best but at his grandest. He is still, though fallen, the Antony who at Caesar’s death could alter the course of history; a dissolute intriguer no doubt, but a man of genius, a man of enthusiasms, one who is equal or all but equal to the highest occasion the world can present, and who, if he fails owing to the lack of steadfast principle and virile will that results from voluptuous indulgence and unscrupulous practisings, yet remains fascinating and magnificent even in his ruin. And by means of this transfiguration, Shakespeare is able to lend absorbing interest to his delineation of this gifted, complex, and faulty soul, and to rouse the deepest sympathy for his fate. Despite his loyalty to the historical record he lifts his argument above the level of the Chronicle History, and makes it a true tragedy. In its deference for facts, Antony and Cleopatra is to be ranked with such pieces as Richard II. and Henry VIII., but in its real essence it claims another position. “The highest praise, or rather the highest form of praise, of this play,” says Coleridge, “is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello.”
In another aspect the more obvious of the minor omissions are in their general tendency not less typical of the way in which Shakespeare deals with his subject. For what are those that strike us at first sight? To begin with, many instances of Octavia’s devotion, constancy and principle are passed over, and she is placed very much in the shade. Then there is no reference to the children that sprang from her union with Antony, indeed their existence is by implication denied, and she seems to be introduced as another Iseult of the White Hands. Antony cries to Cleopatra,
Have I my pillow left unpress’d in Rome, Forborne the getting of a lawful race, And by a gem of women, to be abused By one that looks on feeders? (III. xiii. 106.)
Further, the tragic stories of Antony’s son Antyllus and of Cleopatra’s son Caesarion are left unused, Antyllus not being mentioned at all, Caesarion only by the way; though Daniel does not scruple to include both accessories within the narrower limits of a Senecan tragedy. More noticeable still, however, is the indifference with which the children of Antony and Cleopatra are dismissed. They are barely alluded to, though the Queen’s anxiety for their preservation, which supplies acceptable matter not only to Daniel but to Jodelle and Garnier, is avouched by Plutarch’s statement and driven home by North’s vigorous phrase. Plutarch describes her distress of body and mind after Antony’s death and her own capture.
She fell into a fever withal: whereof she was very glad, hoping thereby to have good colour to absteine from meate, and that so she might have dyed easely without any trouble.... But Caesar mistrusted the matter, by many conjectures he had, and therefore did put her in feare, and threatned her to put her children to shameful death. With these threats Cleopatra for feare yelded straight, as she would have yelded unto strokes; and afterwards suffred her selfe to be cured and dieted as they listed.
Shakespeare makes no use of this save in the warning of Octavius:
If you seek To lay on me a cruelty, by taking Antony’s course, you shall bereave yourself Of my good purposes, and put your children To that destruction which I’ll guard them from, If thereon you rely. (V. ii. 128.)
But here the threat is significant of Octavius’ character, not of Cleopatra’s, who makes no reply to it, and remains absolutely unaffected by it. Indeed she shows more sense of motherhood in her dying reference to the asp as “her baby at her breast,” than in all the previous play.
It cannot be doubted that the effect of all these omissions is to concentrate the attention on the purely personal relations of the lovers. And the prominence assigned to them also appears if we compare the Life and the drama as a whole.
It will be noted that in direct quotation, in incident and allusion, in general structure, Shakespeare owes far more to his authority in the last half of the play than in the first: for the closer observance of, and the larger loans from, the biography begin with the central scenes of the third act. But it is at this stage of the narrative that Cleopatra, for a while in the background, once more becomes the paramount person; and few are the allusions to her from the period of Actium that Shakespeare suffers to escape him. Moreover such independent additions as there are in the latter portion of the play, have mostly to do with her; and in six of the invented scenes in the earlier acts she has the chief or at least a leading role. Clearly, when she is in evidence, Shakespeare feels least need to supplement, and when she is absent he has to fill in the gap. And this is significant of his whole conception. Gervinus tries to express the contrast between the Antony of Plutarch and the Antony of Shakespeare by means of a comparison. “We are inclined,” he writes, “to designate the ennobling transformation which the poet undertook by one word: he refined the crude features of Mark Antony into the character of an Alcibiades.” In a way that is not ill said, so far as it goes; but it omits perhaps the most essential point. The great thing about Shakespeare’s Antony is his capacity for a grand passion. We cannot talk of Alcibiades as a typical lover in the literature of the world, but Antony has a good right to his place in the “Seintes Legende of Cupyde.” When three-quarters of a century after Shakespeare Dryden ventured to rehandle the theme in the noble play that almost justifies the audacity of his attempt, he called his version, All for Love or the World well lost. We have something of the same feeling in reading Shakespeare, and we do not have it in reading Plutarch. Plutarch has no eyes for the glory of Antony’s madness. He gives the facts or traditions that Shakespeare reproduced, but he regards the whole affair as a pitiable dotage, or, at best, as a calamitous visitation—regards it in short much as the Anti-Shakesperians do now. After describing the dangerous tendencies in Antony’s mixed nature, he introduces his account of the meeting at the Cydnus, with the deliberate statement which the rest of his story merely works out in detail:
Antonius being thus inclined, the last and extreamest mischiefe of all other (to wit, the love of Cleopatra) lighted on him, who did waken and stirre up many vices yet hidden in him, and were never seene to any; and if any sparke of goodnesse or hope of rising were left him, Cleopatra quenched it straight and made it worse than before.
Similarly his final verdict in the Comparison of Demetrius and Marcus Antonius is unrelenting:
Cleopatra oftentimes unarmed Antonius, and intised him to her, making him lose matters of importaunce, and verie needeful jorneys, to come and be dandled with her about the rivers of Canobus and Taphosiris. In the ende as Paris fledde from battell and went to hide him selfe in Helens armes; even so did he in Cleopatras armes, or to speak more properlie, Paris hidde him selfe in Helens closet, but Antonius to followe Cleopatra, fledde and lost the victorie.... He slue him selfe (to confesse a troth) cowardly and miserably.
Shakespeare by no means neglects this aspect of the case, as Dryden tends to do, and he could never have taken Dryden’s title for his play. Nevertheless, while agreeing with Plutarch, he agrees with Dryden too. To him Antony’s devotion to Cleopatra is the grand fact in his career, which bears witness to his greatness as well as to his littleness, and is at once his perdition and his apotheosis. And so in the third place this is a love tragedy, and has its relations with Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida, the only other attempts that Shakespeare made in this kind: as is indicated even in their designations. For these are the only plays that are named after two persons, and the reason is that in a true love story both the lovers have equal rights. The symbol for it is an ellipse with two foci not a circle with a single centre.[202]
[202] Even in Othello the conspicuous place is reserved for the Moor, and in him it is jealousy as much as love that is depicted.
It has sometimes been pointed out that what is generally considered the chief tragic theme and what was an almost indispensable ingredient in the classic drama of France, is very seldom the Leit-motif of a Greek or a Shakespearian masterpiece. In this triad however Shakespeare has made use of it, and it is interesting to note the differences of treatment in the various members of the group. In Romeo and Juliet he idealises youthful love with its raptures, its wonders, its overthrow in collision with the harsh facts of life. Troilus and Cressida shows the inward dissolution of such love when it is unworthily bestowed, and suffers from want of reverence and loftiness. In Antony and Cleopatra love is not a revelation as in the first, nor an illusion as in the second, but an infatuation. There is nothing youthful about it, whether as adoration or inexperience. It is the love that seizes the elderly man of the world, the trained mistress of arts, and does this, as it would seem, to cajole and destroy them both. It is in one aspect the love that Bacon describes in his essay with that title.
He that preferred Helena, quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas. For whosoever esteemeth too much of Amorous Affection quitteth both Riches and Wisedom. This Passion hath his Flouds in the very times of Weaknesse, which are great Prosperitie and great Adversitie, though this latter hath beene lesse observed. Both which times kindle Love, and make it more fervent, and therefore shew it to be the Childe of Folly. They doe best, who, if they cannot but admit Love, yet make it keepe Quarter, And sever it wholly from their serious Affaires and Actions of life; For if it checke once with Businesse, it troubleth Men’s Fortunes, and maketh Men that they can no wayes be true to their owne Ends.... In Life it doth much mischiefe, Sometimes like a Syren, Sometimes like a Fury. You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy Persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either Ancient or Recent), there is not One that hath beene transported to the mad degree of Love; which shewes that great Spirits and great Businesse doe keepe out this weake Passion. You must except, never the lesse, Marcus Antonius the halfe partner of the Empire of Rome.
Part Siren, part Fury, that in truth is precisely how Plutarch would personify the love of Antony: and yet it is just this love that makes him memorable. Seductive and destructive in its obvious manifestations, nevertheless for the great reason that it was so engrossing and sincere, it reveals and unfolds a nobility and depth in his character, of which we should otherwise never have believed him capable.
These three aspects of this strange play, as a chronicle history, as a personal tragedy and as a love poem, merge and pass into each other, but in a certain way they successively become prominent in the following discussion.
III. THE ASSOCIATES OF ANTONY
The political setting of Julius Caesar had been the struggle between the Old Order and the New. The Old goes out with a final and temporary flare of success; the New asserts itself as the necessary solution for the problem of the time, but is deprived of its guiding genius who might best have elicited its possibilities for good and neutralised its possibilities for evil. In Antony and Cleopatra we see how its mastery is established and confirmed despite the faults and limitations of the smaller men who now represent it. But in the process very much has been lost. The old principle of freedom, which, even when moribund, serve to lend both the masses and the classes activity and self-consciousness, has quite disappeared. The populace has been dismissed from the scene, and, whenever casually mentioned, it is only with contempt. Octavius describes it:
This common body, Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, To rot itself with motion. (I. iv. 44.)
Antony has passed so far from the sphere of his oratorical triumph, that he thinks of his late supporters only as “the shouting plebeians,” who cheapen their sight-seeing “for poor’st diminutives, for doits” (IV. xiii. 33). His foreign Queen has been taught his scorn of the Imperial people, and pictures them as “mechanic slaves, with greasy aprons, rules, and hammers,” and with “their thick breaths, rank of gross diet” (V. ii. 208). Beyond these insults there is no reference to the plebs, except that, as we learn from Octavius, he and Antony have both notified it of their respective grievances against each other; but this is a mere formality that has not the slightest effect on the progress of events, and no citizen or group of citizens has part in the play.
Even the idea of the State is in abeyance. The sense of the majesty of Rome, which inspired both the conspirators and their opponents, seems extinct. No enterprise, whether right or wrong, is undertaken in the name of patriotism. On the very outposts of the Empire, where, in conflict with the national foe, the love of country is apt to burn more clearly than amidst the security and altercation of the capital, we see a general, in the moment of victory, swayed in part by affection for his patron, in part by care for his own interest, but not in the slightest degree by civic or even chivalrous considerations. When Ventidius is urged by Silius to pursue his advantage against the Parthians, he replies that he has done enough:
Who does i’ the wars more than his captain can Becomes his captain’s captain: and ambition, The soldier’s virtue, rather makes choice of loss, Than gain which darkens him. I could do more to do Antonius good, But ’twould offend him; and in his offence Should my performance perish. (III. i. 21.)
And not only is Silius convinced; he gives his full approval to Ventidius’ policy:
Thou hast, Ventidius, that Without the which a soldier, and his sword, Grants scarce distinction. (III. i. 27.)
Are things better with Octavius’ understrappers? They serve him well and astutely, but there is no hint that their service is prompted by any large public aim, and its very efficacy is due in great measure to its unscrupulousness. Agrippa and Mecaenas are ready for politic reasons to suggest or support the marriage of the chaste and gentle Octavia with a voluptuary like Mark Antony, whose record they know perfectly well, and pay decorous attentions to Lepidus while mocking him behind his back: Thyreus and Proculeius make love to the employment, when Octavius commissions them to cajole and deceive Cleopatra; Dolabella produces the pleasantest impression, just because, owing to a little natural manly feeling, he palters with his prescribed obligations to his master. But in none of them all is there a trace of any liberal or generous conception of duty; they are human instruments, more or less efficient, more or less trustworthy, who make their career by serving the purposes of Octavius’ personal ambition.
Or turn to the court of Alexandria with its effeminacy, wine-bibbing, and gluttony. Sextus Pompeius talks of its “field of feasts,” its “epicurean cooks,” its “cloyless sauce” (II. i. 22, et seq.). Antony palliates his neglect of the message from Rome with the excuse that, having newly feasted three kings, he did “want of what he was i’ the morning” (II. ii. 76). But even in the morning, as Cleopatra recalls, he can be drunk to bed ere the ninth hour, and then let himself be clad in female garb (II. v. 21).
It is not indeed to Egypt that this intemperance is confined. The contagion has spread to the West, as we see from the picture of the orgy on board the galley at Misenum; a picture we may take in a special way to convey Shakespeare’s idea of the conditions, since he had no authority for it, but freely worked it up from Plutarch’s innocent statement that Pompey gave the first of the series of banquets on board his admiral galley, “and there he welcomed them and made them great cheere.” But in the play all the boon companions, and not merely the home-comers from the East, cup each other till the world goes round; save only the sober Octavius, and even he admits that his tongue “splits what it speaks.” “This is not yet an Alexandrian feast,” says Pompey. “It ripens towards it,” answers Antony (II. vii. 102). It ripens towards it indeed; but more in the way of crude excess than of curious corruption. In that the palace of the Ptolemies with its eunuchs and fortune-tellers, its male and female time-servers and hangers-on, is still inimitable and unchallenged. It is interesting to note how Shakespeare fills in the previous history of Iras and Charmian, whom Plutarch barely mentions till he tells of their heroic death. In the drama they are introduced at first as the products of a life from which all modesty is banished by reckless luxury and smart frivolity. Their conversation in the second scene serves to show the unabashed protervitas that has infected souls capable of high loyalty and devotion.[203] And their intimate is the absolutely contemptible Lord Alexas, with his lubricity, officiousness and flatteries, who, when evil days come, will persuade Herod of Jewry to forsake the cause of his patrons and will earn his due reward (IV. vi. 12). For there is no moral cement to hold together this ruinous world. After Actium the deserters are so numerous that Octavius can say:
Within our files there are, Of those that served Mark Antony but late, Enough to fetch him in. (IV. i. 12.)
[203] If the ideas were in Shakespeare’s mind that Professor Zielinski of St. Petersburg attributes to him (Marginalien Philologus, 1905), the gracelessness of Charmian passes all bounds. “(Die) muntre Zofe wünscht sich vom Wahrsager allerhand schöne Sachen: ’lass mich an einem Nachmittag drei Könige heiraten, und sie alle als Wittwe überleben; lass mich mit fünfzig Jahren ein Kind haben, dem Herodes von Judaea huldigen soll: lass mich Octavius Caesar heiraten, etc.’ Das ‘Püppchen’ dachte sich Shakespeare jünger als ihre Herrin: fünfzig würde sie also—um Christi Geburt. Ist es nun klar, was das für ein Kind ist, dem Herodes von Judaea huldigen soll.’ Ἐπὰν εὕρητε, ἀπαγγείλατέ μοι, ὅπως κᾀγὼ ἐλθῶν προσκυνήσω αὐτῷ, sagt er selber, Matth. ii. 18. Und wem sagt er es? Den Heiligen drei Königen. Sollten es nicht dieselben sein, die auch in Charmian’s Wunschzettel stehen? Der Einfall ist einer Mysterie würdig: Gattin der heiligen drei Könige, Mutter Gottes, und römische Kaiserin dazu.” Worthy of a mystery, perhaps! but more worthy of a scurrilous lampoon. It might perhaps be pointed out, that, if fifty years old at the beginning of the Christian era, Charmian could only be ten at the opening of the play: but this is a small point, and I think it very likely that Shakespeare intended to rouse some such associations in the mind of the reader as Professor Zielinski suggests. Mr. Furness is rather scandalised at the “frivolous irreverence,” but it fits the part, and where is the harm? One remembers Byron’s defence of the audacities in Cain and objection to making “Lucifer talk like the Bishop of London, which would not be in the character of the former.”
There is not even decent delay in their apostasy. The battle is hardly over when six tributary kings show “the way of yielding” to Canidius, who at once renders his legions and his horse to Caesar (III. x. 33). Shakespeare heightens Plutarch’s statement in regard to this, for in point of fact Canidius waited seven days on the chance that Antony might rejoin them, and then, according to Plutarch, merely fled without changing sides: but the object is to set forth the universal demoralisation and instability, and petty qualifications like that implied in the week’s delay or abandonment of the post instead of desertion to the enemy are dismissed as of no account. In another addition, for which he has likewise no warrant, Shakespeare clothes the prevalent temper in words. When Pompey rejects the unscrupulous device to obtain the empire, Menas is made to exclaim:
For this, I’ll never follow thy pall’d fortunes more. (II. vii. 87.)
Menas is a pirate, but he speaks the thought of the time; for it is only to fortune that the whole generation is faithful. Everywhere the cult of material good prevails, whether in the way of acquisition or enjoyment; and that can give no sanction to payment of service apart from the results.
The corroding influence of the Zeitgeist even on natures naturally honest and sound is vividly illustrated in the story of Enobarbus: and the study of his character is peculiarly interesting and instructive, because he is the only one of the more prominent personages who is practically a new creation in the drama, the only one in whose delineation Shakespeare has gone quite beyond the limits supplied by Plutarch, even while making use of them. Lepidus and Pompey, with whom he proceeds in a somewhat similar fashion, are mere subordinates. Octavius and even Cleopatra are only interpreted with new vividness and insight. Antony himself is exhibited only with the threads of his nature transposed, as, for example, when a fabric is held up with its right side instead of its seamy side outwards. But for Enobarbus, who often occupies the front of the stage, the dramatist found only a few detached sentences that suggested a few isolated traits, and while preserving these intact, he introduces them merely as component elements in an entirely original and complex personality. It is therefore fair to suppose that the character of Enobarbus will be of peculiar importance in the economy of the piece.
Plutarch refers to him thrice. The first mention is not very noticeable. Antony, during his campaign in Parthia, had on one occasion to announce to his army a rather disgraceful composition with the enemy, according to which he received permission to retreat in peace.
But though he had an excellent tongue at will, and very gallant to enterteine his souldiers and men of warre, and that he could passingly well do it, as well, or better then any Captaine in his time, yet being ashamed for respects, he would not speake unto them at his removing, but willed Domitius Ænobarbus to do it.
Thus we see Enobarbus designated for a somewhat invidious and trying task, and this implies Antony’s confidence in him, and his own efficiency.
Then we are told that when the rupture with Caesar came,
Antonius, through the perswasions of Domitius, commaunded Cleopatra to returne againe into Ægypt, and there to understand[204] the successe of this warre,
[204] Observe or await.
a command, which, however, she managed to overrule. Here again in Enobarbus’ counsel we see the hard-headed and honest officer, who wishes things to be done in the right way, and risks ill-will to have them so done. It is on this passage that Shakespeare bases the outburst of Cleopatra and the downright and sensible remonstrance of Enobarbus.
Cle. I will be even with thee, doubt it not. Eno. But why, why, why? Cle. Thou hast forespoke my being in these wars, And say’st it is not fit. Eno. Well, is it, is it? (III. vii. 1.)
More remotely too this gave Shakespeare the hint for Enobarbus’ other censures on Antony’s conduct of the campaign.
Thirdly, in the account of the various misfortunes that befell Antony before Actium, and the varying moods in which he confronted them, Shakespeare read:
Furthermore, he dealt very friendely and courteously with Domitius, and against Cleopatraes mynde. For, he being sicke of an agewe when he went and tooke a little boate to goe to Caesars campe, Antonius was very sory for it, but yet he sent after him all his caryage, trayne and men: and the same Domitius, as though he gave him to understand that he repented his open treason, he died immediately after.
This, of course, supplied Shakespeare with the episodes of Enobarbus’ desertion and death, though he altered the date of the first, delaying it till the last flicker of Antony’s fortune; and the manner of the second, making it the consequence, which the penitent deliberately desires, of a broken heart.
But this is all that Plutarch has to say about the soldier. He is capable; he is honest and bold in recommending the right course; when Antony wilfully follows the wrong one, he forsakes him; but, touched perhaps by his magnanimity, dies, it may be, in remorse.
Now see how Shakespeare fills in and adds to this general outline. Practical intelligence, outspoken honesty, real capacity for feeling, are still the fundamental traits, and we have evidence of them all from the outset. But, in the first place, they have received a peculiar turn from the habits of the camp. Antony, rebuking and excusing his bluntness, says:
Thou art a soldier only, speak no more. (II. ii. 109.)
Indeed he is a soldier, if not only, at any rate chiefly and essentially; and a soldier of the adventurer type, carrying with him an initial suggestion of the more modern gentlemen of fortune like Le Balafré or Dugald Dalgetty, who would fight for any cause, and offered their services for the highest reward to the leader most likely to secure it for them. He has also their ideas of a soldier’s pleasures, and has no fancy for playing the ascetic. In Alexandria he has had a good time, in his own sphere and in his own way indulging in the feasts and carouses and gallantries of his master. He tells Mecaenas, thoroughly associating himself with the exploits of Antony:
We did sleep day out of countenance, and made the night light with drinking. (II. ii. 181.)
He speaks with authority of the immortal breakfast at which the eight wild boars were served, but makes little of it as by no means out of the way. Similarly he identifies himself with Antony in their love affairs when Antony announces his intention of setting out at once:
Why, then, we kill all our women: we see how mortal an unkindness is to them: if they suffer our departure, death’s the word. (I. ii. 137.)
And after the banquet on the galley, when the exalted personages, “these great fellows,” as Menas calls them, have retired more than a little disguised in liquor, he, fresh from the Egyptian Bacchanals, stays behind to finish up the night in Menas’ cabin.
Yet he has a certain contempt for the very vices in which he himself shares, at least if their practitioners are overcome by them and cannot retain their self-command even in their indulgence. When Lepidus succumbs, this more seasoned vessel jeers at him:
There’s a strong fellow, Menas! [pointing to the attendant who carries off Lepidus.] Men. Why? Eno. A’ bears the third part of the world, man: see’st not? (II. vii. 95.)
Nor does he suffer love to interfere with business:
Under a compelling occasion, let women die: it were pity to cast them away for nothing: though, between them and a great cause, they should be esteemed nothing. (I. ii. 141.)
His practical shrewdness enables him, though of a very different nature from Cassius, to look, like Cassius, quite through the deeds of men. He always lays his finger on the inmost nerve of a situation or complication. Thus when Mecaenas urges the need of amity on the Triumvirs, Enobarbus’ disconcerting frankness goes straight to the point that the smooth propriety of the other evades:
If you borrow one another’s love for the instant, you may, when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again: you shall have time to wrangle in when you have nothing else to do. (II. ii. 103.)
Antony silences him, saying he wrongs this presence; but Octavius sees he has hit the nail on the head though in a somewhat indecorous way:
I do not much dislike the matter, but The manner of his speech. (II. ii. 113.)
Just in the same way he takes the measure of the arts and wiles and affectations of Cleopatra and her ladies, and admits no cant into the consolations which he offers Antony on Fulvia’s death:
Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice.... Your old smock brings forth a new petticoat; and indeed the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow. (I. ii. 167.)
Yet he is by no means indifferent to real charm, to the spell of refinement, grace and beauty. Like many who profess cynicism, and even in a way are really cynical, he is all the more susceptible to what in any kind will stand his exacting tests, especially if it contrast with his own rough jostling life of the barracks and of the field. It is in his mouth that Shakespeare places that incomparable description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and there could be no more fitting celebrant of her witchery. Of course the poetry of the passage is supposed in part to be due to the theme, and is a tribute to Cleopatra’s fascinations; but Enobarbus has the soul to feel them and the imagination to portray them. Indeed she has no such enraptured eulogist as he. He may object to her presence in the camp and to her interference in the counsels of war; but that is only because, like Bacon, he believes that “they do best, who if they cannot but admit love, make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life”; it is not because he underrates her enchantment or would advise Antony to forego it. On the contrary, he seems to reproach his general when, in a passing movement of remorse, Antony regrets having ever seen her:
O, sir, you then had left unseen a wonderful piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would have discredited your travel. (I. ii. 159.)
And he not only sees that Antony, despite the most sacred of ties, the most urgent of interests, will inevitably return to her: the enthusiasm of his words shows that their predestinate union has his full sympathy and approval.
Mec. Now Antony must leave her utterly. Eno. Never; he will not; Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. (II. ii. 238.)
And this responsiveness to what is gracious, has its complement in his responsiveness to what is magnificent. He has an ardent admiration for his “Emperor.” He is exceeding jealous for his honour, and has no idea of the mighty Antony stooping his crest to any power on earth. When Lepidus begs him to entreat his captain “to soft and gentle speech” towards Octavius, he retorts with hot pride and zeal, like a clansman’s for his chief:
I shall entreat him To answer like himself: if Caesar move him, Let Antony look over Caesar’s head And speak as loud as Mars. By Jupiter, Were I the wearer of Antonius’ beard, I would not shave’t to-day. (II. ii. 3.)
He glories even in Antony’s more doubtful qualities, his lavishness, his luxury, his conviviality, his success in love, for in all these his master shows a sort of royal exuberance; and they serve in the eyes of this practical but splendour-loving veteran to set off his more technical excellences, the “absolute soldiership,” the “renowned knowledge” on which he also dwells (III. vii. 43 and 46). But with all his enthusiasm for Antony, he is from the first critical of what he considers his weaknesses and mistakes, just as with all his enthusiasm for Cleopatra he has a keen eye for her affectations and interferences. Knowing Antony’s real bent, he sees the inexpedience of the Roman marriage, and foretells the result:
Men. Then is Caesar and he for ever knit together. Eno. If I were bound to divine of this unity, I would not prophesy so. Men. I think the policy of that purpose made more in the marriage than the love of the parties. Eno. I think so too. But you shall find, the band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity. (II. vi. 122.)
He is as contemptuous of Antony’s easy emotionalism as of Octavius’ politic family affection. At the parting of brother and sister, Enobarbus and Agrippa exchange the asides:
Eno. Will Caesar weep? Agr. He has a cloud in’s face. Eno. He were the worse for that, were he a horse; So is he, being a man. Agr. Why, Enobarbus, When Antony found Julius Caesar dead, He cried almost to roaring: and he wept When at Philippi he found Brutus slain. Eno. That year, indeed, he was troubled with a rheum; What willingly he did confound he wail’d, Believe’t, till I wept too. (III. ii. 51.)
It is therefore not hard to understand how, when Antony wilfully sacrifices his advantages and rushes on his ruin, his henchman’s feelings should be outraged and his fidelity should receive a shock. After the flight at Actium, Cleopatra asks him: “Is Antony or we in fault for this?” And Enobarbus, though he had opposed the presence and plans of the Queen, is inexorable in laying the blame on the right shoulders:
Antony only, that would make his will Lord of his reason. (III. xiii. 3.)
He is raised above the common run of the legionaries by his devotion to his master; but his devotion is half instinctive, half critical; and, as a rational man, he can suppress in his nature the faithful dog. For the tragedy of Enobarbus’ position lies in this: that in that evil time his reason can furnish him with no motive for his loyalty except self-interest and confidence in his leader’s capacity; or, failing these, the unsubstantial recompense of fame. He is not Antony’s man from principle, in order to uphold a great cause,—no one in the play has chosen his side on such a ground; and fidelity at all costs to a person is a forgotten phrase among the cosmopolitan materialists who are competing for the spoils of the Roman world. So what is he to do? His instincts pull him one way, his reason another, and in such an one instincts unjustified by reason lose half their strength. At first he fights valiantly on behalf of his inarticulate natural feeling. When Canidius deserts, he still refuses in the face of evidence to accept the example:
I’ll yet follow The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason Sits in the wind against me. (III. x. 35.)
But Antony’s behaviour in defeat, his alternations between the supine and the outrageous, shake him still more; and only the allurement of future applause, not a very cogent one to such a man in such an age, wards off for a while the negative decision:
Mine honesty and I begin to square. The loyalty well held to fools does make Our faith mere folly: yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i’ the story. (III. xiii. 41.)
The paltering of Cleopatra however is a further object lesson:
Sir, sir, thou art so leaky, That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for Thy dearest quit thee. (III. xiii. 63.)
Then the observation of Antony’s frenzy of wrath and frenzy of courage finally convinces him that the man is doomed, and he forms his resolution:
Now he’ll outstare the lightning. To be furious Is to be frighted out of fear: and in that mood The dove will peck the estridge; and I see still A diminution in our captain’s brain Restores his heart: when valour preys on reason, It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek Some way to leave him. (III. xiii. 195.)
There is something inevitable in his recreancy, for the principle that Menas puts in words is the presupposition on which everybody acts; and Antony himself can understand exactly what has taken place:
O, my fortunes have Corrupted honest men! (IV. v. 16.)
Enobarbus’ heart is right, but in the long run it has no chance against the convincing arguments of the situation. And yet his heart has shown him the worthy way, and, in his despair and remorse, it recovers hold of the truth that his head had made him doubt. Observe however that even his revulsion of feeling is brought about by the appeal to his worldly wisdom; it is not by their unassisted power that the discredited whispers of conscience make themselves heard and regain their authority. Enobarbus’ penitence, though sudden, is all rationally explained, and is quite different from the miraculous conversions of some wrong-doers in fiction, who in an instant are awakened to grace for no conceivable cause and by no intelligible means. He is made to realise that he has taken wrong measures in his own interest, by Octavius’ treatment of the other deserters.
Alexas did revolt; and went to Jewry on Affairs of Antony; there did persuade Great Herod to incline himself to Caesar And leave his master Antony: for this pains Caesar hath hang’d him. Canidius and the rest That fell away have entertainment, but No honourable trust. I have done ill: Of which I do accuse myself so sorely, That I will joy no more. (IV. vi. 11.)
Then the transmission to him of his treasure with increase, makes him feel that after all loyalty might have been a more profitable investment:
O Antony, Thou mine of bounty, how would’st thou have paid My better service, when my turpitude Thou dost so crown with gold! (IV. vi. 31.)
But he does not stop here. It is only in this way that his judgment, trained by the time to test all things by material advantage, can be convinced. But when it is convinced, his deeper and nobler nature finds free vent in self-recrimination and self-reproach. He goes on:
This blows my heart: If swift thought break it not, a swifter mean Shall outstrike thought: but thought will do’t, I feel. I fight against thee! No: I will go seek Some ditch wherein to die; the foul’st best fits My latter part of life. (IV. vi. 35.)
And this too is most natural. Antony’s generosity restores to him his old impression of Antony’s magnificence which he had lost in these last sorry days. With that returns his old enthusiasm, and with that awakes the sense of his own transgression against such greatness. He is ready now in expiation to sacrifice the one thing that in the end made him still shrink from treason. He had tried to steady himself, as we have seen, with the thought that the glory of loyalty would be his, if he remained faithful to the last. Now he demands the brand of treachery for his name, though he fain would have Antony’s pardon for himself:
O Antony, Nobler than my revolt is infamous, Forgive me in thine own particular: But let the world rank me in register A master-leaver and a fugitive. (IV. ix. 18.)
Thus he dies heart-broken and in despair. Personal attachment to an individual, the one ethical motive that lingers in a world of self-seekers to give existence some dignity and worth, is the inspiration of his soul. But even this he cannot preserve unspoiled: on accepted assumptions he is forced to deny and desecrate it. He succumbs less through his own fault than through the fault of the age; and this is his grand failure. When he realises what it means, there is no need of suicide: he is killed by “swift thought,” by the consciousness that his life with this on his record is loathsome and alien, a “very rebel to his will,” that only “hangs on him” (IV. ix. 14).
Among the struggling and contentious throng of worldlings and egoists who to succeed must tread their nobler instincts underfoot, and even so do not always succeed, are there any honest and sterling characters at all? There are a few, in the background, barely sketched, half hid from sight. But we can perceive their presence, and even distinguish their gait and bearing, though the artist’s purpose forbade their portrayal in detail.
First of these is Scarus, the simple and valiant fightingman, who resents the infatuation of Antony and the ruinous influence of Cleopatra as deeply as Enobarbus, but whose unsophisticated soldier-nature keeps him to his colours with a troth that the less naïf Enobarbus could admire but could not observe. It is from his mouth that the most opprobrious epithets are hurled on the absconding pair, the “ribaudred nag of Egypt, whom leprosy o’ertake,” and “the doting mallard,” “the noble ruin of her magic” who has kissed away kingdoms and provinces. But as soon as he hears they have fled toward Peloponnesus, he cries:
’Tis easy to’t; and there will I attend What further comes. (III. x. 32.)
He attends to good purpose, and is the hero of the last skirmish; when Antony’s prowess rouses him to applause, from which he is too honest to exclude reproach:
O my brave emperor, this is fought indeed! Had we done so at first, we had droven them home With clouts about their heads. (IV. vii. 4.)
Then halting-bleeding, with a wound that from a T has been made an H, he still follows the chase. It is a little touch of irony, apt to be overlooked, that he, who has cursed Cleopatra’s magic and raged because kingdoms were kissed away, should now as grand reward have his merits commended to “this great fairy,” and as highest honour have leave to raise her hand—the hand that cost Thyreus so dear—to his own lips. Doubtless, despite his late outbreak, he appreciates these favours as much as the golden armour that Cleopatra adds. Says Antony,
He has deserved it, were it carbuncled Like holy Phoebus car. (IV. viii. 28.)
He has: for he is of other temper than his nameless and featureless original in Plutarch, who is merely a subaltern who had fought well in the sally.
Cleopatra to reward his manlines, gave him an armor and head peece of cleene gold: howbeit the man at armes when he had received this rich gift, stale away by night and went to Caesar.
Not so Scarus. He is still at his master’s side on the disastrous morrow and takes from him the last orders that Antony as commander ever gave.
In this Roman legionary the spirit of military obligation still asserts its power; and the spirit of domestic obligation is as strong in the Roman matron Octavia. Shakespeare has been accused of travestying this noble and dutiful lady. He certainly does not do that, and the strange misstatement has arisen from treating seriously Cleopatra’s distortion of the messenger’s report, or from taking that report, when the messenger follows Cleopatra’s lead, as Shakespeare’s deliberate verdict. If the messenger says that she is low-voiced and not so tall as her rival, is that equivalent to the “dull of tongue, and dwarfish” into which it is translated? And finding it so translated, is it wonderful that the browbeaten informant should henceforth adopt the same style himself, and exaggerate her deliberate motion to creeping, her statuesque dignity to torpor, the roundness of her face to deformity—which Cleopatra at once interprets as foolishness—the lowness of her forehead to as much as you please, or, in his phrase, “as she would wish it.” Agrippa, on the other hand speaks of her as one,
whose beauty claims No worse a husband than the best of men: Whose virtue and whose general graces speak That which none else can utter. (II. ii. 130.)
Mecaenas, too, pays his tribute to her “beauty, wisdom, modesty” (II. ii. 246). And if the praises of the courtiers are suspect, they are not more so than the censures with which Cleopatra flatters herself or is flattered. But if we dismiss, or at least discount, both sets of overstatements, and with them Antony’s own phrase, “a gem of women,” uttered in the heat of jealous contrast, there are other conclusive evidences of the opinion in which she is held. Enobarbus speaks of her “holy, cold, and still conversation” (II. vi. 131). Antony thinks of her as patient, even when he threatens Cleopatra with her vengeance by personal assault (IV. xii. 38). Cleopatra, with her finer intuition, even when recalling Antony’s threat, conjectures more justly what that vengeance would be:
Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour Demuring upon me. (IV. xv. 27.)
And elsewhere she asserts that she will not
once be chastised with the sober eye Of dull Octavia. (V. ii. 54.)
It is easy to construct her picture from these hints. Calm, pure, devout, submissive; quite without vivacity or initiative, she presents the old-fashioned ideal of womanhood, that finds a sphere subordinate though august, by the domestic hearth. And this is in the main Plutarch’s conception of her too. But there are differences. The sacrifices of the lady to the exigencies of statecraft is emphasised by the historian: “She was maryed unto him as it were of necessitie, bicause her brother Caesars affayres so required it,” and that even in her year of mourning, so that a dispensation had to be obtained; since it was “against the law that a widow should be maried within tenne monethes after her husbandes death.” Nevertheless her association with Antony is far more intimate in Plutarch than in Shakespeare; she is the mother of his children, feels bound to him, and definitely takes his side. When relations first become strained between the brothers-in-law, and not, as in the drama, just before the final breach, she plays the peace maker, but successfully and on Antony’s behalf. She seeks out her brother; tells him she is now the happiest woman in the world; if war should break out between them, “it is uncertaine to which of them the goddes have assigned the victorie or overthrowe. But for me, on which side soever victorie fall, my state can be but most miserable still.” In Shakespeare this petition, eked out with reminiscences of the appeal of Blanch in King John, and with anticipations of the appeal of Volumnia in Coriolanus, is addressed to Antony, and the even balance of her sympathies is accented and reiterated in a way for which Plutarch gives no warrant.
In the Life again, even when Antony has rejoined Cleopatra, has showered provinces on her and his illegitimate children, and, after the Parthian campaign, is living with her once more, Octavia insists on seeking him out and brings him
great store of apparell for souldiers, a great number of horse, summe of money, and gifts, to bestow on his friendes and Captaines he had about him: and besides all those, she had two thowsand souldiers chosen men, all well armed, like unto the Praetors bands.
She has to return from Athens without seeing Antony, but, despite Caesar’s command, she still lives in her husband’s house, still tries to heal the division, looks after his children and promotes the business of all whom he sends to Rome.
Howbeit thereby, thinking no hurt, she did Antonius great hurt. For her honest love and regard to her husband, made every man hate him, when they sawe he did so unkindly use so noble a Lady.
And finally, when Antony sent her word to leave his house, she took with her all his children save Fulvia’s eldest son who was with his father, and instead of showing resentment, only bewailed and lamented “her cursed hap that had brought her to this, that she was accompted one of the chiefest causes of this civill warre.”
Her even more magnanimous care for all Antony’s offspring without distinction, when Antony is no more, belongs of course to a later date; but all the previous instances of her devotion to his interest fall well within the limits of the play, and yet Shakespeare makes no use of them.
It does not suit him to suggest that Antony ever deviated from his passion for Cleopatra or bestowed his affection elsewhere: indeed, on the eve of his marriage, he reveals his heart and intentions clearly enough. But Shakespeare also knows that without affection to bring it out, there will be no answering affection in a woman like Octavia. She will be true to all her obligations, so long as they are obligations, but no love will be roused to make her do more than is in her bond. And of love there is in the play as little trace on her part as on Antony’s. It is brother and sister, not husband and wife, that exchange the most endearing terms: “Sweet Octavia,” “My dearest sister,” and “my noble brother,” “most dear Caesar”; while to Antony she is “Octavia,” “gentle Octavia,” or at most “Dear Lady,” and to her he is “Good my lord.” At the parting in Rome Caesar has a cloud in his face and her eyes drop tears like April showers. At the parting in Athens there is only the formal permission to leave, on the one hand, and the formal acknowledgment on the other. Evidently, if, as she says, she has her
heart parted betwixt two friends That do afflict each other, (III. vi. 77.)
or if Antony describes her equipoise of feeling as
the swan’s down-feather, That stands upon the swell at full of tide, And neither way inclines, (III. ii. 48.)
it is not because she regards them both with equal tenderness. Her brother has her love; her husband, so long as he deserves it, has her duty. But when he forfeits his claim, she has done with him, unlike Plutarch’s Octavia, who pursues him to the end, and beyond the end, with a self-forgetfulness that her mere covenant could never call forth. Of all this there is nothing in the play. Her appeal to Antony in defence of Caesar is far warmer than her appeal to Caesar on behalf of Antony, and when she definitely hears that Antony has not only joined Cleopatra against her brother but has installed Cleopatra in her own place, she merely says, “Is it so?” and falls silent. No wonder. She is following Antony’s instructions to the letter:
Let your best love draw to that point, which seeks Best to preserve it. (III. iv. 21.)
And again:
When it appears to you where this begins, Turn your displeasure that way; for our faults Can never be so equal that your love Can equally move with them. (III. iv. 33.)
But this tacit assumption, fully borne out by her previous words, that the claims of husband and brother are equal in her eyes, and that the precedence is to be determined merely by a comparison of faults, shows how little of wifely affection Octavia felt, though doubtless she would be willing to fulfil her responsibilities to the smallest jot and tittle.
The hurried, loveless and transitory union, into which Antony has entered only to suit his convenience, for as Enobarbus says, “he married but his occasion here,” and into which Octavia has entered only out of deference to her brother who “uses his power unto her,” has thus merely a political and moral but no emotional significance. This Roman marriage lies further apart from the love story of Antony than the marriage in Brittany does from the love story of Tristram. This diplomatic alliance interferes as little with Octavia’s sisterly devotion to Octavius as the political alliances of Marguerite d’Angoulême interfered with her sisterly devotion to Francis I. And much is gained by this for the play. In the first place the hero no longer, as in the biography, offends us by fickleness in his grand idolatry and infidelity to a second attachment, on the one hand, or by ingratitude to a longsuffering and loving wife on the other. But just for that reason Octavia does not really enter into his life, and claims no full delineation. She is hardly visible, and does not disturb our sympathies with the lovers or force on us moral regards by demuring on them and chastising them with her sober eyes. Nevertheless visible at intervals she is, and then she seems to tell of another life than that of Alexandrian indulgence, a narrower life of obligations and pieties beside which the carnival of impulse is both glorified and condemned. And she does this not less effectually, but a great deal less obtrusively, that in her shadowy form as she flits from the mourning-chamber to the altar at the bidding of her brother, and from Athens to Rome to preserve the peace, we see rather the self-devoted sister than the devoted wife. For in the play she is sister first and essentially, and wife only in the second place because her sisterly feeling is so strong.
Still more slightly sketched than the domestic loyalty of Octavia or even than the military loyalty of Scarus, is the loyalty of Eros the servant; but it is the most affecting of all, for it is to the death. Characteristically, he who obtains the highest spiritual honours that are awarded to any person in the play, is one of a class to which in the prime of ancient civilisation the possibility of any moral life would in theory have been denied. Morality was for the free citizen of a free state: the slave was not really capable of it. And indeed it is clear that often for the slave, who might be only one of the goods and chattels of his owner, the sole chance of escape from a condition of spiritual as well as physical servitude would lie in personal enthusiasm for the master, in willing self-absorption in him. But in a world like that of Antony and Cleopatra such personal enthusiasm, as we have seen, is almost the highest thing that remains. So it is the quondam slave, Eros the freedman, bred in the cult of it, who bears away the palm. Antony commands him to slay him:
When I did make thee free, sworest thou not then To do this when I bade thee? Do it at once; Or thy precedent services are all But accidents unpurposed. Draw, and come. (IV. xiv. 81.)
But Eros by breaking his oath and slaying himself, does his master a better service. He cheers him in his dark hour by this proof of measureless attachment:
Thus do I escape the sorrow Of Antony’s death. (IV. xiv. 94.)
IV. THE POLITICAL LEADERS
So much for the freedman whom Antony hails as his master, thrice nobler than himself. But what about his betters, the “great fellows” as Menas calls them, his rivals and associates in Empire?
Let us run through the series of them; and despite his pride of place we cannot begin lower than with the third Triumvir.
Lepidus, the “slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands,” as he is described in Julius Caesar, maintains the same character here, and is hardly to be talked of “but as a property.” In the first scene where he appears, when he and Octavius are discussing Antony’s absence, he is a mere cypher. Even in this hour of need, Octavius unconsciously and as a matter of course treats Antony’s negligence as a wrong not to them both but only to himself. The messenger never addresses Lepidus and assumes that the question is between Caesar and Pompey alone. At the close this titular partner “beseeches” to be informed of what takes place, and Octavius acknowledges that it is his “bond,” but clearly it is not his choice.
No doubt on the surface he pleases by his moderate and conciliatory attitude. When Octavius is indicting his absent colleague, Lepidus is frank in his excuse:
I must not think there are Evils enow to darken all his goodness: His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven, More fiery by night’s blackness. (I. iv. 10.)
Knowing the zeal and influence of Enobarbus, he recommends his mediation as a becoming and worthy deed, and tries to mitigate his vehemence:
Your speech is passion: But, pray you, stir no embers up. (II. ii. 12.)
And when the Triumvirs meet, the counsels of forbearance, which Shakespeare assigns to him and which in Plutarch are not associated with his name, are just in the right tone:
Noble friends, That which combined us was most great, and let not A leaner action rend us. What’s amiss May it be gently heard: when we debate Our trivial difference loud, we do commit Murder in healing wounds: then, noble partners, The rather, for I earnestly beseech, Touch you the sourest points with sweetest terms, Nor curstness grow to the matter. (II. ii. 17.)
But all this springs from no real kindliness or public spirit. Pompey understands the position:
Lepidus flatters both, Of both is flatter’d: but he neither loves, Nor either cares for him. (II. i. 14.)
It is mere indolence and flaccidity of temper that makes him ready to play the peace-maker, and his efforts are proof of incompetence rather than of nobility. He is so anxious to agree with everybody and ingratiate himself with both parties, that he excites the ridicule not only of the downright Enobarbus, but of the reticent and diplomatic Agrippa:
Eno. O, how he loves Caesar! Agr. Nay, but how dearly he adores Mark Antony! Eno. Caesar? Why, he’s the Jupiter of men. Agr. What’s Antony? The god of Jupiter. Eno. Spake you of Caesar? How! the nonpareil! Agr. O Antony! O thou Arabian bird! Eno. Would you praise Caesar, say “Caesar”: go no further. Agr. Indeed, he plied them both with excellent praises. (III. ii. 7.)
He will be all things to all men that he himself may be saved; and his love of peace runs parallel with his readiness for good cheer. He likes to enjoy himself and soon drinks himself drunk. The very servants see through his infirmity:
Sec. Serv. As they pinch one another by the disposition, he cries out “no more”; reconciles them to his entreaty and himself to the drink.[205] (II. vii. 6.)
[205] I take this much discussed passage to refer to the friction that inevitably arises in such a gathering. The guests are of such different disposition or temperament, that especially after their late misunderstandings they are bound to chafe each other. We have an example of it. Pompey plays the cordial and tactful host to perfection, but even he involuntarily harks back to his grievance:
O, Antony, You have my father’s house,—But, what? we are friends.
I think the meaning of the second servant’s remark is that when such little contretemps occur, as they could not but do in so ill-assorted a company, Lepidus in his role of peace-maker interferes to check them, and drowns the difference in a carouse. But the result is that he befuddles himself.
And they proceed to draw the moral of the whole situation. Lepidus’ ineptitude is due to the same circumstance that brings Costard’s criticism on Sir Nathaniel when the curate breaks down in the pageant. “A foolish mild man; an honest man, look you, and soon dashed. He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, ... but, for Alexander,—alas, you see how ’tis,—a little o’erparted.” Lepidus too is a marvellous good neighbour, but for a Triumvir,—alas, you see how ’tis,—a little o’erparted. He is attempting a part or role that is too big for him. He is in a position and company where his nominal influence goes for nothing and his want of perception puts him to the blush.
Sec. Serv. Why, this it is to have a name in great men’s fellowship: I had as lief have a reed that will do me no service as a partizan I could not heave. First Serv. To be called into a huge sphere, and not to be seen to move in’t, are the holes where eyes should be, which pitifully disaster the cheeks. (II. vii. 12.)
In his efforts at bonhomie, he becomes so bemused that even Antony, generally so affable and courteous, does not trouble to be decently civil, and flouts him to his wine-sodden face, with impertinent school-boy jests about the crocodile that is shaped like itself, and is as broad as it has breadth, and weeps tears that are wet. Caesar, ever on the guard, asks in cautious admonition: “Will this description satisfy him?” But Antony is scornfully aware that he may dismiss punctilios:
With the health that Pompey gives him; else he is a very epicure. (II. vii. 56.)
His deposition, which must come in the natural course of things, is mentioned only casually and contemptuously:
Caesar, having made use of him in the wars ’gainst Pompey, presently denied him rivality: would not let him partake in the glory of the action: and not resting here, accuses him of letters he had formerly wrote to Pompey: upon his own appeal, seizes him: so the poor third is up, till death enlarge his confine. (III. v. 7.)
Accused of letters written to Pompey! So he had been at his old work, buttering his bread on both sides. His suppression is one of the grievances Antony has against Caesar, who has appropriated his colleague’s revenue; and it is interesting to note the defence that Caesar, who never chooses his grounds at random, gives for his apparent arbitrariness:
I have told him, Lepidus was grown too cruel; That he his high authority abused, And did deserve his change. (III. vi. 32.)
So this friend of all the world may be accused of inhumanity and misrule. The charge is plausible. Shakespeare could not here forget that at the proscription, Lepidus is represented as acquiescing in the death of his own brother-in-law to secure the death of Antony’s nephew. Still his alleged cruelty may only have been a specious pretext on Octavius’ part to screen his own designs, and even to transfer his own offences to another man’s shoulders. Pompey says, in estimating the chances of his venture,
Caesar gets money where He loses hearts. (II. i. 13.)
Appian refers to these exactions, but in Plutarch there is as yet no mention of Octavius making himself unpopular by exorbitant imposts, and only at a later time is he said to have done so in preparing for his war with Antony. The subsequent passage, which Shakespeare does not use, or hardly uses, in its proper place, may have suggested the present statement:
The great and grievous exactions of money did sorely oppresse the people.... Hereuppon there arose a wonderfull exclamation and great uprore all Italy over: so that among the greatest faults that ever Antonius committed., they blamed him most for that he delayed to give Caesar battell.... When such a great summe of money was demaunded of them, they grudged at it, and grewe to mutinie upon it.
Does Shakespeare, by antedating Caesar’s oppressive measures, mean to insinuate his own gloss on the charge of cruelty against Lepidus that he found in Plutarch? At any rate in that case Octavius would be merely following the course that Antony had already laid down:
Though we lay these honours on this man, To ease ourselves of divers slanderous loads, He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, To groan and sweat under the business, Either led or driven, as we point the way: And having brought our treasure where we will, Then take we down his load, and turn him off, Like to the empty ass, to shake his ears, And graze in commons. (J. C. IV. i. 19.)
Octavius certainly carries out Antony’s programme in the result, and it would add to the irony of the situation if he had also done so in the process, and, while exploiting Lepidus’ resources, had incidentally eased himself of a slanderous load. No wonder that Antony is annoyed. But if he frets at his colleague’s undoing, we may be sure that apart from personal chagrin, it is only because Octavius’ influence has been increased and his own share of the spoils withheld. Of personal regret there is nothing in his reported reception of the news. Lepidus the man, Antony dismisses with an angry gesture and exclamation: he
spurns The rush that lies before him; cries, “Fool, Lepidus!” (III. v. 17.)
Sextus Pompeius who at one time had a fair chance of entering into a position equal or superior to that of Lepidus, comes higher in the scale than he. He has a certain feeling for righteousness:
If the great gods be just, they shall assist The deeds of justest men. (II. i. 1.)
He has a certain nobility of sentiment that enables him to rise to the occasion. When to his surprise he learns that he will have to reckon with the one man he dreads, he cries:
But let us rear The higher our opinion, that our stirring Can from the lap of Egypt’s widow pluck The ne’er-lust-wearied Antony. (II. i. 35.)
So, when told that he looks older, his reply is magnanimous:
Well, I know not What counts harsh Fortune casts upon my face; But in my bosom shall she never come, To make my heart her vassal. (II. vi. 55.)
Antony confesses that he owes him thanks for generous treatment:
He hath laid strange courtesies and great Of late upon me. (II. ii. 157.)
We presently get to hear what these were, and must admit that he acted like a gentleman:
Though I lose The praise of it by telling, you must know, When Caesar and your brother were at blows, Your mother came to Sicily, and did find Her welcome friendly. (II. vi. 43.)
He has moreover a certain filial piety for the memory of his father, and a certain afterglow of free republican sentiment:
What was’t That moved pale Cassius to conspire; and what Made the all-honour’d, honest Roman, Brutus, With the arm’d rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom, To drench the Capitol: but that they would Have one man but one man? And that is it Hath made me rig my navy: at whose burthen The anger’d ocean foams; with which I meant To scourge the ingratitude that despiteful Rome Cast on my noble father. (II. vi. 14.)
But even if all this were quite genuine, it would not suffice to form a really distinguished character. In the first place Sextus never penetrates to the core of things but lingers over the shows. Thus he has no grip of his present strength or of the insignificance to which he relegates himself by his composition. For Shakespeare differs from Plutarch, and follows Appian, in making his rising a very serious matter.[206] It is this that in the play, and in complete contradiction of the Life, is the chief motive for Antony’s return to Italy: and he gives his reasons. He says that Pompey “commands the empire of the sea” (I. ii. 191),—a great exaggeration of Plutarch’s statement that he “so scoored[207] all the sea thereabouts (i.e., near Sicily) that none durst peepe out with a sayle.” He continues, that “the slippery people” begin to throw all the dignities of Pompey the Great upon his son (I. ii. 193), though there is no hint of this popular support in the history. And he concludes that Pompey’s
... quality, going on, The sides o’ the world may danger. (I. ii. 198.)
[206] See Appendix D.
[207] Scoured.
In Plutarch it is not prudence but courtesy that moves the Triumvirs to negociate with him. His hospitality to Antony’s mother is expressly mentioned as the cause of their leniency; “therefore they thought good to make peace with him.” Similarly Shakespeare may have warrant from Appian, but he certainly has not warrant from Plutarch, to represent Octavius as listening in dismay to reports of malcontents “that only have fear’d Caesar” (I. iv. 38) crowding to Pompey’s banners from love of him; or as harassed by Antony’s absence, when this occasion “drums him from his sport” (I. iv. 29); or as driven by fear of Pompey to “cement their divisions and bind up the petty difference” (II. i. 48). In all these ways Shakespeare treats the trifling disturbance of Plutarch’s account as a civil war waged by not unequal forces. And even after the tension has been somewhat relieved by Antony’s arrival, Octavius bears witness in regard to Pompey’s strength by land that it is
Great and increasing: but by sea He is an absolute master. (II. ii. 165.)
Obviously then Shakespeare conceives Pompey as having much to hope for, and much to lose. But Pompey does not realise his own power. By the treaty he throws away his advantages. In the division of the world he only gets Sicily and Sardinia, which were his already; and in return he must rid all the sea of pirates, and send wheat to Rome. By the first provision he deprives himself of recruits like Menas and Menecrates; by the second, he caters for his scarce atoned enemies. Surely there is justification for Menas’ aside: “Thy father, Pompey, would ne’er have made this treaty” (II. vi. 84), and his like remark to Enobarbus: “Pompey doth this day laugh away his fortune” (II. vi. 109). He practically gives over the contest which he has a fair prospect of winning, and allows himself to be cajoled of the means by which he might at least gain security and power. But the most that he obtains is a paper guarantee for a fraction of the spoils; though he ought to have known that such guarantees are rotten bands with rivals like Octavius, who will only wait the opportunity, that must now inevitably come, to set them aside.
But besides, this magnanimity, which he is so fond of parading, is not only insufficient, even were it quite sterling coin; in his case it rings counterfeit. We cannot forget that his noble sentiments about justice are uttered to Menas and Menecrates, “great thieves by sea.” Is Pompeius Magnus to be avenged, is freedom to be restored by the help of buccaneers who find it expedient to “deny” what they have done by water? Surely all this is not very dexterous make-believe, intended to impose on others or himself. Even his rejection of Menas’ scheme for doing away with the Triumvirs, though it shows his regard for appearances, does not imply any honourable feeling of the highest kind. For listen to his words:
Ah, this thou should’st have done, And not have spoke on’t! In me, ’tis villany; In thee ’t had been good service. Thou must know, ’Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour; Mine honour, it. Repent that e’er thy tongue Hath so betray’d thine act: being done unknown, I should have found it afterwards well done; But must condemn it now. (II. vii. 79.)
Here he shows no moral scruple, but only anxiety about his reputation. He would have no objection to reap the reward of crime, and would even after a decorous interval approve it; but he will not commit or authorise it, because he wishes to pose in his own eyes and the eyes of others as the man of justice, principle and chivalry. He is one of the people who “would not play false and yet would wrongly win,” and who often excite more contempt than the resolute malefactor. And the reason is that their abstention from guilt arises not from tenderness of conscience but from perplexity of intellect. They confound shadow and substance; for by as much as genuine virtue is superior to material success, by so much is material success superior to the illusion of virtue. In the case of Pompey, the treachery of Octavius is almost excused by the ostentation, obtuseness, and half-heartedness of the victim. It is fitting that after being despoiled of Italy he should owe his death to a mistake. This at least is the story, not found in Plutarch, which Shakespeare in all probability adopts at the suggestion of Appian. It is not given as certain even by Appian, who leaves it open to question whether he was killed by Antony’s command or not. But perhaps Shakespeare considers that his futile career should end futilely through the overzeal of an agent who misunderstands his master’s wishes; so he makes Eros tell how Antony
Threats the throat of that his officer That murder’d Pompey. (III. v. 19.)
It suits the dramatist too to free his hero from complicity in such a deed, and exhibit him as receiving the news with generous indignation and regret. Yet such regret is very skin-deep. Even Antony’s chief complaint in regard to Pompey’s overthrow is that he gets none of the unearned increment; or, as Octavius says,
that, having in Sicily Sextus Pompeius spoil’d, we had not rated him His part o’ the isle. (III. vi. 24.)
Higher still in our respect, if not in our affection, but even in our respect not very high, is Octavius at the head of his statesmen, politicians, men of the world, his Mecaenases, Agrippas and the rest, with their savoir faire and savoir vivre. They never let themselves go in thought or in deed; all their words and behaviour are disciplined, reserved, premeditated. Antony’s description of their principal is no doubt true, and it breathes the contempt of the born soldier, who has drunk delight of battle with his peers, for the mere deviser of calculations and combinations:
He at Philippi kept His sword e’en like a dancer; while I struck The lean and wrinkled Cassius; and ’twas I That the mad Brutus ended: he alone Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had In the brave squares of war. (III. xi. 35.)
Nor is there any prestige of genius or glamour of charm to conciliate admiration for such men. Theirs are the practical, rather uninteresting natures, that generally rise to the top in this workaday world. They know what they wish to get; they know what they must do to get it; and the light from heaven never shines on their eyes either to glorify their path or to lead them astray.
The most obvious trait, as Kreyssig remarks, in the somewhat bourgeois personality of Octavius is his sobriety, in every sense of the word: a self-contained sobriety, which, though supposed to be a middle-class virtue, is in him pushed so far as to become almost aristocratic. For it fosters and cherishes his self-esteem; and his self-esteem rises to an enormous and inflexible pride, which finds expression alike in his dignity and in his punctiliousness. In both respects it is outraged by the levity of Antony, which he resents as compromising himself. His colleague must
No way excuse his soils, when we do bear So great weight in his lightness. (I. iv. 24.)
A man like this, fast centred in himself, cannot but despise the impulse-driven populace; he could never have courted it to sway it to his purposes, as Antony did of old; to him it is a rotting water-weed. This temper, lofty and imposing in some respects, is apt to attach undue importance to form and etiquette, as when the “manner” of Enobarbus’ interruption, not its really objectionable because all too incontrovertible matter, arouses his disapproval: but it is a difficult temper to take liberties with. None of his counsellors dreams of venturing with him on the familiarity which Enobarbus, Canidius, and even the common soldier, employ as a matter of course with Antony. And this is partly due to his lack of sympathy, to his deficient social feeling. Such an one plumes himself on being different from and superior to his fellows. He is like the Prince of Arragon in the Merchant of Venice:
I will not choose what many men desire, Because I will not jump with common spirits And rank me with the barbarous multitudes. (M. of V. II. ix. 3.)
It is because Antony’s vices are those of the common spirits and the barbarous multitudes that Octavius despises him:
You shall find there A man who is the abstract of all faults That all men follow. (I. iv. 8.)
His own failings do not lie in the direction of vulgar indulgence. He is a foe to all excess. When the feasters pledge him, he objects to the compulsory carouse:
I could well forbear ’t. It’s monstrous labour, when I wash my brain, And it grows fouler.... I had rather fast from all four days Than drink so much in one. (II. vii. 105.)
And he can address a dignified remonstrance and rebuke to his less temperate associates:
What would you more? Pompey, good night. Good brother, Let me request you off: our graver business Frowns at this levity. Gentle lords, let’s part: You see we have burnt our cheeks.... The wild disguise hath almost Antick’d us all. (II. vii. 126.)
A man of this kind will be externally faultless in all the domestic requirements, a good husband and a good brother, in so far as rigid fidelity to the nuptial tie and scrupulous care for his sister’s provision are concerned. He is honestly shocked at Antony’s violation of his marriage bond. We feel that if Cleopatra did really entertain the idea of subduing him by her charms, it was nothing but an undevout imagination. One might as well think to set on fire “a dish of skim milk,” as Hotspur calls men of this sort.
But the better side of this is his genuine family feeling. His love for his sister may be limited and alloyed, but it is unfeigned. It has sometimes been pointed out that his indignation at Octavia’s scanty convoy when she returns from Athens to Rome, is stirred quite as much on his own behalf as on hers:
Why have you stolen upon us thus? You come not Like Caesar’s sister.... You are come A market maid to Rome; and have prevented The ostentation of our love, which, left unshown, Is often left unlov’d. (III. vi. 42.)
It is quite true that he thinks of what is due to himself, but he does not altogether forget her claims; and even when he regrets the defective “ostentation” of love—a term that is apt to rouse suspicion, no doubt, but less so in Elizabethan than in modern ears—he bases his regret on the just and valid ground that without expression love itself is apt to die. That behind his own “ostentation” of fondness (which of course he is careful not to neglect, for it is a becoming and creditable thing), there is some reality of feeling, is proved by the parting scene. His affectionate farewell and even his gathering tears might be pretence; but he promises to send her regular letters:
Sweet Octavia, You shall hear from me still. (III. ii. 58.)
It really means something when a man like Octavius, busy with the affairs of the whole world, spares time for frequent domestic correspondence.
And yet this admirable brother has not hesitated to arrange for his sister a “mariage de convenance” with Antony, a man whom he disapproves and dislikes. From the worldly point of view it is certainly the most brilliant match she could make; and this perhaps to one of Octavius’ arid nature, with its total lack of sympathy, imagination and generous ideals, may have seemed the main consideration. All the same we cannot help feeling that he was thinking mainly of himself, and, though with some regrets, has sacrificed her to the exigencies of statecraft. Menas and Enobarbus, shrewd and unsentimental observers, agree that policy has made more in the marriage than love. So much indeed is obvious, even if its purpose is what on the face of it it professes to be, the reconcilement of the men it makes brothers-in-law. But, as we shall see, Octavius may have a more tortuous device in it than this.
Treating it meanwhile, however, as an expedient for knitting the alliance with his rival, what inference does it suggest? If for the sake of his own interests, Octavius shows himself far from scrupulous in regard to the sister whom he loves and whose material well-being is his care, what may we expect of him in the case of those who are indifferent or dangerous or hostile?
He has no hesitation about ousting his colleague Lepidus, or ruining the reconciled rebel Pompeius, despite his compacts with both. Then it is Antony’s turn; and Antony is a far more formidable antagonist, with all his superiority in material resources, fertility of genius, proven soldiership and strategic skill. It is not because Octavius is the greater man that he succeeds. It is, in the first place, because he concentrates all his narrow nature to a single issue, while Antony with his greater width of outlook disperses his interest on many things at once. How typical of each are the asides with which respectively they enter their momentous conference. Antony is already contemplating other contingencies:
If we compose well here, to Parthia: Hark, Ventidius. (II. ii. 15.)
Octavius will not be diverted from the immediate business:
I do not know, Mecaenas; ask Agrippa. (II. ii. 16.)
So, too, when the composition has taken place, Antony squanders his strength in the invasion of Parthia, the conquest of Armenia and other annexations, not to mention his grand distraction in Egypt. But Octavius pursues his one purpose with the dogged tenacity of a sleuth hound, removes Pompey who might be troublesome, seizes the resources of Lepidus, and is able to oppose the solid mass of the West to Antony’s loose congeries of Asiatic allies and underlings, whose disunited crowd seems to typify his own unreconciled ambitions.
But even so it is not so much that Octavius wins, as that Antony loses. In another sense than he means, the words of the latter are true:
Not Caesar’s valour hath o’erthrown Antony, But Antony’s hath triumph’d on itself. (IV. xv. 14.)
It is his extraordinary series of blunders, perversities, and follies that play into his antagonist’s hands and give him the trick, though that antagonist holds worse cards and is less expert in many points of the game.
But in so far as Octavius can claim credit for playing it, it is due to cunning and chicane rather than to any wisdom or ability of the higher kind. At the outset he prepares a snare for Antony, into which Antony falls, and by the fall is permanently crippled. It seems more than probable that the marriage with Octavia was suggested, not to confirm the alliance, but to provoke a breach at a more convenient season. The biographer expressly assigns the same sort of ulterior motive to a later act of apparent kindliness, when Octavia was again used as the unconscious pawn. When she, just before the final breach, insists on setting out to join her husband, Plutarch explains:
Her brother Octavius was willing unto it, not for his (i.e. Antony’s) respect at all (as most authors doe report) as for that he might have an honest culler to make warre with Antonius if he did misuse her, and not esteeme of her as she ought to be.
This was quite enough to suggest to Shakespeare a similar interpretation of the marriage project from the first. He does not indeed expressly state but he virtually implies it, as appears if we realise the characters and circumstances of those concerned. At the time the match is being arranged, Enobarbus quite clearly foresees and openly predicts the upshot to Mecaenas and Agrippa. Will they, and especially Agrippa, who is nominal author of the plan and announces it as “a studied not a present thought,” have overlooked so probable an issue? Will it never have occurred to the circumspect and calculating Octavius, who evidently leads up to Agrippa’s intervention and proposal? Or if through some incredible inadvertence it has hitherto escaped them all, will not the vigilant pair of henchmen hasten to inform their master of the unexpected turn that things seem likely to take? Not at all. Despite the convinced and convincing confidence of Enobarbus’ prophecy, they waive it aside. Mecaenas merely replies with diplomatic decorum:
If beauty, wisdom, modesty, can settle The heart of Antony, Octavia is A blessed lottery to him. (II. ii. 247.)
No doubt. But though Touchstone says, “Your If is your only peace-maker,” it can also be a very good peace-breaker on occasion. In Enobarbus’ opinion (and in his own way Octavius is just as shrewd), Octavia with her “holy, cold and still conversation” is no dish for Antony. But though this is now expressly pointed out to Octavius’ confidants, the marriage goes on as though nothing could be urged against it. The reason is that nothing can, from the point of view of the contrivers. If it turns out well, so far good; if it turns out ill, so much the better. Only when it is an accomplished fact, does Caesar give a glimpse of what it involves in the sinister exhortation:
Let not the piece of virtue which is set Betwixt us, as the cement of our love, To keep it builded, be the ram to batter The fortress of it. (III. ii. 28.)
Thus when Antony returns to Cleopatra, as he was bound to do, Octavius manages to represent himself as the aggrieved party, as champion of the sanctity of the hearth, the vindicator of old Roman pieties; and in this way gains a good deal of credit at the outset of the quarrel.
And for the fortunate conduct of it, he is indebted, apart from Antony’s demoralisation, to his adroitness in playing on the weakness of others, rather than to any nobler strength in himself. Thus he irritates Antony’s reckless chivalry, both vain and grandiose, by defying him to give battle by sea at Actium. Antony is not bound even by any punctilio of honour to consent, for Octavius has twice declined a similar challenge.
Ant. Canidius, we Will fight with him by sea. Cle. By sea! What else? Can. Why will my lord do so? Ant. For that he dares us to’t. Eno. So hath my lord dared him to single fight. Can. Ay, and to wage this battle at Pharsalia, Where Caesar fought with Pompey; but these offers, Which serve not for his vantage, he shakes off; And so should you. (III. vii. 28.)
But Octavius knows his man, and this appeal to his audacity, enforced by the command of Cleopatra, determines Antony like a true knight-errant to the fatal course.
This passage is of great significance in Shakespeare’s delineation of Octavius, because, though suggested by Plutarch, it completely alters the complexion and some of the facts of Plutarch’s story. That records the two-fold challenge of Antony, but represents it as answering, not preceding the message of Octavius. Moreover that message contains no reference to a naval combat and has nothing in common with the shape it assumes in the play.
Octavius Caesar sent unto Antonius, to will him to delay no more time, but to come on with his army into Italy: and that for his owne part he would give him safe harber, to lande without any trouble, and that he would withdraw his armie from the sea, as farre as one horse could runne, until he had put his army ashore, and had lodged his men.
That is, in the original Octavius takes the lead in dare-devilry, and seems voluntarily to suggest such terms as even Byrhtnoth at the Battle of Maldon conceded only by request. Shakespeare could not fit this in with his conception of the cold-blooded politician, and substitutes for it a proposal that will put the enemy at a disadvantage; while at the same time he accentuates Octavius’ unblushing knavery, by making him apply this provocation after he has twice rejected offers that do not suit himself.
Again, having won his first victory through Cleopatra’s flight, Caesar cynically reckons for new success on her corruptibility:
From Antony win Cleopatra: promise, And in our name, what she requires; add more, From thine invention, offers: women are not In their best fortunes strong; but want will perjure The ne’er-touch’d vestal: try thy cunning, Thyreus. (III. xii. 24.)
This scheme indeed miscarries owing to Antony’s intervention, but meanwhile it has become unnecessary owing to the torrent of deserters. So Octavius is sure of his case, and can dismiss with ridicule the idea of a single fight. In Plutarch he does so too, but with the implied brag that he would certainly be victor: “Caesar answered him that he had many other wayes to dye then so;” when the he stands for Antony: but owing to North’s fortunate ambiguity Shakespeare takes it as referring to the speaker:
Let the old ruffian know I have many other ways to die; mean time Laugh at his challenge. (IV. i. 4.)
A more subtle contumely; for it implies that Caesar with scornful impartiality acknowledges Antony’s superiority as a sabreur, but can afford to dismiss that as of no moment. His response has already been annotated in advance by Enobarbus, when Antony was inditing his cartel:
Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show, Against a sworder!... That he should dream, Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdued His judgement too. (III. xiii. 29.)
Octavius has by this time the ball at his feet, and can even cast the contemptuous alms of his pity on “poor Antony,” as he calls him (IV. i. 16). Nor are his expectations deceived, for he reckons out everything:
Go, charge Agrippa. Plant those that have revolted in the van, That Antony may seem to spend his fury Upon himself. (IV. vi. 8.)
And though he suffers a momentary check, he presently achieves the final triumph through the treason and baseness of Antony’s Egyptian followers, on which he rightly felt he might rely.
And when he has won the match he makes use of his advantage with more appearance than reality of nobleness. He wishes to have not only the substantial rewards of victory, but the shows and trappings of it as well. He seeks to preserve Cleopatra alive,
for her life in Rome Would be eternal in our triumph. (V. i. 65.)
This is the secret of his clemency and generosity, that he would have her “grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels.” And if he has another reason for sparing her, it is not for the sake of clemency and generosity in themselves, but for the parade of these qualities: as indeed Proculeius unconsciously lets out in the naïf advice he gives her:
Do not abuse my master’s bounty by The undoing of yourself: let the world see His nobleness well acted, which your death Will never let come forth. (V. ii. 44.)
And ably does Octavius play his role: he “extenuates rather than enforces,” gilds his covert threats with promises, and dismisses the episode of the unscheduled treasure with Olympian serenity. His only fault is that he rather overacts the part. His excess of magnanimity, when by nature he is far from magnanimous, tells Cleopatra all she needs to know, and leaves little for the definite disclosures of Dolabella:
He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not Be noble to myself. (V. ii. 191.)
But, though not magnanimous, he is intelligent: and his intelligence enables and enjoins him to recognise greatness when it is no longer opposed to his own interest, and when the recognition redounds to his own credit, by implying that the conqueror is greater still. His panegyrics on Antony, and afterwards on Cleopatra, are very nearly the right things to say and are very nearly said in the right way. When he hears of his rival’s suicide, his first exclamation does not ill befit the occasion:
The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack: ... the death of Antony Is not a single doom; in the name lay A moiety of the world. (V. i. 14.)
But this disinterested emotion does not last long. The awe at fallen greatness soon leads to comparisons with the living greatness that has proved its match. The obsequious bystanders find this quite natural and point it out without a hint of sarcasm:
Agr. Caesar is touch’d. Mec. When such a spacious mirror’s set before him, He needs must see himself.
So Octavius proceeds to a recital of Antony’s merits in which he bespeaks a double portion of the praise he seems to dispense:
O Antony! I have follow’d thee to this; but we do lance Diseases in our bodies: I must perforce Have shown to thee such a declining day, Or look on thine: we could not stall together In the whole world: but yet let me lament, With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts, That thou, my brother, my competitor, In top of all design, my mate in empire, Friend and companion in the front of war, The arm of mine own body, and the heart Where mine his thoughts did kindle,—that our stars, Unreconciliable, should divide Our equalness to this. (V. i. 35.)
And here, as business calls, he breaks off and postpones the rest to “some meeter season.” Similarly when he finds Cleopatra dead he has the insight to do her justice:
Bravest at the last, She levell’d at our purposes, and, being royal, Took her own way. (V. ii. 238.)
Then follows the official valediction:
She shall be buried by her Antony: No grave upon the earth shall clip in it A pair so famous. High events as these Strike those that make them; and their story is No less in pity than _his glory which Brought them to be lamented_. (V. ii. 361.)
So the last word is a testimonial to himself.
These are eulogies of the understanding, not of the heart. They are very different in tone from the tributes of Antony to his patron Julius or his opponent Brutus. The tears and emotion, genuine though facile, of the latter are vouched for even by the sarcasms of Agrippa and Enobarbus. Octavius’ utterance, when he pronounces his farewell, is broken, we may be sure, by no sob and choked by no passion. His éloge has been compared to a funeral sermon, and will not interfere with the victor’s appetite for the fruits of victory. But though his feeling is not stirred to the depths, he is fairly just and fairly acute. He is no contemptible character, this man who carries off the palm from one of infinitely richer endowment. The contrast between the two rivals, and the justification of the success of the less gifted, is summed up in a couple of sentences they exchange at the banquet off Misenum. When Octavius shrinks from the carouse, Antony bids him: “Be a child o’ the time” (II. vii. 106). “Possess it, I’ll make answer,” is Octavius’ reply and reproof.
V. MARK ANTONY
“Be a child o’ the time,” says Antony, and he carries out his maxim to the letter. Only that time could bring forth such a devotee of the joys of life and lavish on him such wealth of enjoyment. But the time was one that devoured its own children. Those who chose to be merely its products, must accept its ordinances, and it was cruel as well as indulgent. It was the manlier as well as the safer course for the child to possess the time, to repudiate its stock, and, if might be, to usurp the heritage.
We must bear the counter admonition of Octavius in mind when we approach the personage to whom it was addressed. All who have a wide range of interests, and with these warmth of imagination and spontaneity of impulse, must feel that their judgment is apt to be bribed by the attractions of Mark Antony. He is so many-sided, so many-ways endowed, so full of vitality and vigour, potentially so affluent and bright, that we look to find his life a clear and abundant stream, and disbelieve our senses when we see a turbid pool that loses itself in the sands. If we listen to the promptings of our blood, we hail him as demi-god, but the verdict of our reason is that he is only a futility. And both estimates base on Shakespeare who inspires and reconciles them both.
Of course we are apt to carry with us to the present play the impression we have received from the sketch of Antony in Julius Caesar. And not without grounds. He is still a masquer and a reveller, he is still a shrewd contriver. But we gradually become aware of a difference. First, the precedence that these characteristics takes is reversed. In Julius Caesar it is the contriving side of his nature that is prominent, and the other is only indicated by the remarks of acquaintances: in Antony and Cleopatra, it is his love of pleasure that is emphasised, while of his contrivance we have only casual glimpses. And the contrast is not merely an alteration in the point of view, it corresponds to an alteration in himself; in the earlier drama he subordinates his luxury to his schemes, and in the latter he subordinates his schemes to his luxury. But this is not all. In the second place, his two main interests have changed in the degree of what may be called their organisation. In Julius Caesar he concentrates all his machinations on the one object of overthrowing the tyrannicides and establishing his power; his pleasures, however notorious, are random and disconnected dissipations without the coherence of a single aim. In Antony and Cleopatra, however manifold they may be, they are all subdued to the service of his master passion, they are all focussed in his love for Cleopatra; while his strategy is broken up to mere shifts and expedients that answer the demand of the hour. Passion has become not only the regulative but the constitutive force in his character.
When the action begins, he is indemnifying himself with a round of indulgence for the strenuous life between the fall of Julius and the victories at Philippi, some of the toils and privations of which, passed over in the earlier play, Octavius now recalls in amazement at the contrast. It is not so strange. One remembers Professor von Karsteg’s indictment of the English that they spare no pains because they live for pleasure. “You are all in one mass, struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on the banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is fatness and ease!”[208] Something similar strikes us in Antony. It is natural that action should be followed by reaction and that abstinence should lead to surfeit. It is doubly natural, when effort and discipline are not prized for themselves or associated with the public good, but have only been accepted as the means to a selfish aim. By them he has acquired more than mortal power: why should he not use it in his own behoof, oblivious of every call save the prompting of desire? A vulgar attitude, we may say; but it is lifted above vulgarity by the vastness of the orbit through which his desire revolves. It is grandiose, and almost divine; in so far at least as it is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. He has a gust for everything and for everything in the highest degree, for each several pleasure and its exact antithesis. In what does he not feel zest? Luxury, banqueting, drunkenness, appeal to him, so that Pompey prays they “may keep his brain fuming” (II. i. 24). Or he acts the god, and with Cleopatra as Isis, dispenses sovereignty from the “tribunal silver’d,” as they sit on their “chairs of gold” (III. vi. 3). Or he finds a relish in vulgar pleasures, and with the queen on his arm, mingles incognito in the crowd, wandering through the streets “to note the qualities of people” (I. i. 52). Or he goes a-fishing, in which art he is a novice and presently becomes a dupe, when he pulls up the salt-fish “with fervency” (II. v. 18). And a willing dupe, the conscious humorous dupe of love to his tricksy enchantress, he is pleased to be in many other ways:
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 Philippian. (II. v. 18.)
[208] The Adventures of Harry Richmond.
In short his breathless pursuit of all sorts of experiences more than justifies the scandalised summary of Octavius:
He fishes, drinks, and wastes The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy More womanly than he. (I. iv. 4.)
And he goes on to describe how Antony has been so indiscriminate as
to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy; To give a kingdom for a mirth; to sit And keep the turn of tippling with a slave; To reel the streets at noon, and stand the buffet With knaves that smell of sweat. (I. iv. 17.)
Yet, however he may seem to sink in his pleasures, he is never submerged; such is his joyousness and strength that they seem to bear him up and carry him along rather than drag him down. As Cleopatra perceives:
His delights Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above The element they lived in. (V. ii. 88.)
It is this demand to share in all the Erdgeist has to offer, that raises Antony above the level of the average sensualist. His dissipations impose by their catholicity and heartiness. His blithe eagerness never flags and nothing mundane leaves him unmoved:
There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch Without some pleasure now. (I. i. 46.)
This is his ideal, an infinity of pastimes under the presidency of his love; and any ideal, no matter what, always dignifies those whom it inspires. But it also demands its sacrifice; and in the present case Antony with a sort of inverse sublimity offers up to it all that the ambitious, the honourable or the virtuous man counts good.
For a life like his is hardly compatible even in theory with the arduous functions of the commander, the governor, the administrator; and in practice it inevitably leads to their neglect. In the opening scene we see him leave unheard the momentous tidings from Rome, and turn aside to embrace his royal paramour. His followers are filled with angry disgust:
Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes That o’er the files and musters of the war Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn, The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front. (I. i. 1.)
The general voice cries out against him at home, where his faults are taunted
With such full licence as both truth and malice Have power to utter. (I. ii. 112.)
His newly arrived friends find the worst libels verified, as Demetrius admits:
I am full sorry That he approves the common liar, who Thus speaks of him at Rome. (I. i. 59.)
Octavius is not unduly severe in his condemnation:
To confound such time, That drums him from his sport, and speaks as loud As his own state and ours,—’tis to be chid As we rate boys, who, being mature in knowledge, Pawn their experience to their present pleasure, And so rebel to judgement. (I. iv. 28.)
Nor is he without qualms himself. Sudden revulsions of feeling disturb his riots when “a Roman thought hath struck him” (I. ii. 87). He feels that stopping short in his labours and relaxing his energy, he gives his baser tendencies the sway, and cries:
O, then we bring forth weeds, When our quick minds lie still. (I. ii. 113.)
This, however, makes things worse rather than better. It does not rouse him to any constant course, it only perplexes his purpose. He does not wish to give up anything: the life at Rome and the life at Alexandria both tug at his heart-strings; and he cannot see that the Eastern and the Western career are not to be reconciled. It is still nominally open to him to make a choice, but at any rate the choice must be made. It must often have occurred to him to throw aside his civil ties, and to set up as independent Emperor with his Egyptian Queen. And apart from old associations there were only two reasons why he should not: lingering respect for his marriage with Fulvia, whom in a way he still loved, and dread of the avenging might of Rome directed by all the craft of Octavius. These impediments are suddenly removed; and their removal belongs to Shakespeare’s conception. It may be traced in part to his own invention, in part perhaps to the suggestion of Appian, but in any case it is of far-reaching significance.
In the biography the situation is fundamentally different, though superficially alike. There Antony is threatened at once in the West and the East. Octavius has driven his wife and brother out of Italy; Labienus, the old foe of Caesarism, has led the Parthians into the provinces. It is to meet these dangers that Antony leaves Egypt, and to the Parthian as the more pressing he addresses himself first. Only at Fulvia’s entreaty does he alter his plan and sail for home with two hundred ships; but her opportune death facilitates a composition with Octavius. Then the alliance between them having been confirmed, and the petty trouble with Sextus Pompeius having been easily settled, Antony is able with ampler resources to turn against the troublesome Parthians.
These are the facts as Caesar narrates them; and according to them Antony had no option but to break off his love affair and set out to face one or both of the perils that menaced him; the peril from Octavius who has defeated him in his representatives, the peril from Labienus who has overrun the Near East. These items are not wanting in Shakespeare, and as the news of them arrives, his Antony exclaims as Plutarch’s might have done:
These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, Or lose myself in dotage. (I. ii. 120.)
But even as he speaks a second messenger arrives who supplements the tidings of the first with new circumstances that are really of much later date and quite different significance in Plutarch, and that entirely alter the complexion of affairs. He hears by word of mouth that Fulvia is dead, and, apparently by letter, that Sextus Pompeius stands up against Caesar and commands the empire of the sea. In Plutarch he is called to Rome by the fact not of Fulvia’s being dead but of her being alive; and her death only prepares the way for a reconciliation when he is already nearing home. Still less is his return connected with the enterprise of Pompey which is mentioned only after the reconciliation is accomplished, and, as we have seen, is treated quite as a detail. But Shakespeare, inserting these matters here and viewing them as he does, dismisses altogether or in part the motive which Plutarch implies for Antony’s behaviour. Indeed they should rather be reasons for his continuing and proceeding further in his present course. One main objection to his connection with Cleopatra is removed, and the way is smoothed to marriage with his beloved. All danger from Rome is for the time at an end; and the opportunity is offered for establishing himself in Egypt while Pompey and Octavius waste each other’s strength, or for making common cause with Pompey, who, as we know, is well inclined to him and takes occasion to pay him court.
But in Shakespeare’s Antony, the very removal of external hindrances gives new force to those within his own heart. Regrets and compunctions are stirred. The memory of his wife rises up with new authority, the entreaties of his friends and the call of Rome sound with louder appeal in his ears:
Not alone The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches, Do strongly speak to us: but the letters too Of many our contriving friends in Rome Petition us at home. (I. ii. 186.)
With a man of his emotional nature, precisely the opportunity so procured to carry out one set of his wishes, gives the other set the mastery. Of his wife’s death he exclaims:
There’s a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it: What our contempt doth often hurl from us, We wish it ours again; the present pleasure, By revolution lowering, does become The opposite of itself: she’s good, being gone; The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on. I must from this enchanting queen break off. (I. ii. 126.)
It is no doubt the nobler and more befitting course that he proposes to himself, but it is so only on the condition that he follows it out with his whole heart. If he takes it up to let it go; if one half or more than one half of his soul lingers with the flesh-pots of Egypt, then nothing could be more foolish and calamitous. He merely throws away the grand chance of realising his more alluring ambition, and advances no step to the sterner and loftier heights. For he will patch up the Roman Triumvirate and rehabilitate the power of Octavius to his own hurt, unless he resolves henceforth to act as a Roman Triumvir and as the dominant partner with Octavius; and he will never again have so good an occasion for legitimising and thus excusing his relation with Cleopatra. This latter step was so obviously the natural one that Octavius almost assumes he must have taken it. On making his proposal for the match with Octavia, Agrippa says: “Great Antony is now a widower,” but Octavius interrupts:
Say not so, Agrippa: If Cleopatra heard you, your reproof Were well deserved of rashness. (II. ii. 122.)
But though he thus shrinks from the irrevocable choice, we see clearly enough at his departure from Egypt that the impulse towards Rome must soon be spent, and that therefore his refusal to commit himself, and his whole enterprise, show rather weakness and indecision than resolution and strength. To soothe Cleopatra he tells her:
Be prepared to know The purposes I bear; which are, or cease, As you shall give the advice. By the fire That quickens Nilus’ slime, I go from thence Thy soldier, servant, making peace or war As thou affect’st. (I. iii. 66.)
He is speaking too true when he says:
Our separation so abides, and flies, That thou, residing here, go’st yet with me, And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee. (I. iii. 102.)
And his last message runs:
Say, the firm Roman to great Egypt sends This treasure of an oyster; at whose foot, To mend the petty present, I will piece Her opulent throne with kingdoms: all the east, Say thou, shall call her mistress. (I. v. 44.)
And with these pledges like so many mill-stones round his neck, he sets off to swim in the dangerous cross-currents of Roman politics. It is true that pledges do not weigh over heavily with him, but in this case their weight is increased by his inner inclinations.
So the reconciliation with Octavius is hollow from the first, and being hollow it is a blunder. Antony of course is able to blind himself to its hollowness and to conduct the negociations with great adroitness. His dignified and frank apology is just what he ought to say, supposing that the particular end were to be sought at all, and it has an air of candour that could not well be consciously assumed:
As nearly as I may, I’ll play the penitent to you: but mine honesty Shall not make poor my greatness, nor my power Work without it. Truth is, that Fulvia, To have me out of Egypt, made wars here; For which myself, the ignorant motive, do So far ask pardon as befits mine honour To stoop in such a case. (II. ii. 91.)
But this is only another instance of the born orator’s faculty for throwing himself into a situation, and feeling for the time what it is expedient to express. It is a fatal gift, which betrays him oftener than it helps. If it prompts his moving utterances over the bodies of Caesar and Brutus, and in so far directly or indirectly assists his cause, it nevertheless even then to some cynical observers like Enobarbus suggests a spice of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy it is not, but it comes almost to the same thing; for the easily aroused emotion soon subsides after it has done its work and yields to some quite contrary impulsion. But meanwhile the worst of it is, that it carries away the eloquent speaker, and hurries him in directions and to distances that are not for his good. With Antony’s real and permanent bias, even a temporary reconcilement with Octavius is a mistake; but what shall we say of his marriage with Octavia? Yet he jumps at it at once; and with that convincing air of sincerity that can only be explained by his really liking it for the moment, exclaims:
May I never To this good purpose, that so fairly shows, Dream of impediment! Let me have thy hand: Further this act of grace: and from this hour The heart of brothers govern in our loves And sway our great designs. (II. ii. 146.)
And again he realises just what is proper to feel and say to his betrothed, and says it so that we are sure he feels it so long as he is speaking:
My Octavia, Read not my blemishes in the world’s report: I have not kept my square: but that to come Shall all be done by the rule. (II. iii. 4.)
Yet she has barely left him, when, at the warning of the soothsayer, and the thought of Octavius’ success in games of chance and sport, he resolves to outrage the still uncompleted marriage and return to his Egyptian bondage:
I will to Egypt: For though I make this marriage for my peace, I’ the East my pleasure lies. (II. iii. 38.)
But when this is his fixed determination, why make the marriage at all? Does he fail to see that it will bring not peace but a sword? Yet he is so hood-winked by immediate opportunism that he bears his share in making Pompey harmless to the mighty brother-in-law he is just about to offend. And knowing his own heart as he does, he can nevertheless assume an air of resentment at the veiled menace in Octavius’ parting admonition: “Make me not offended in your mistrust” (III. ii. 33).
He has truly with all diligence digged a pit for himself. Already he is the wreck of the shrewd contriver whose machinations Cassius so justly feared. And this collapse of faculty, this access of presumption and hebetude belong to Shakespeare’s conception of the case. In Plutarch the renewed agreement of the Triumvirs is expedient and even necessary; the marriage scheme is adopted in good faith and for a period serves its purpose; the granting of terms to Pompey is an unimportant act of grace.
Nevertheless some powers of contrivance Shakespeare’s Antony still retains. He despatches the capable Ventidius on the Parthian campaign, and he has the credit and éclat, when
with his banners and his well-paid ranks, The ne’er-yet-beaten horse of Parthia (Are) jaded out o’ the field. (III. i. 32.)
He himself over-runs and conquers Armenia, and other Asiatic kingdoms, and with his new prestige and resources is able to secure the support of a formidable band of subject kings. When Octavia has returned to Rome and he to Egypt, and war breaks out, he is still, thanks to these allies and to his own veteran legionaries whom he has so often led to victory and spoil, the master of a power that should more than suffice to make the fortune his.
But in his infatuation he throws all his advantages away. He pronounces on himself the verdict which his whole story confirms:
When we in our viciousness grow hard— O misery on’t!—the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgements; make us Adore our errors; laugh at’s, while we strut To our confusion. (III. xiii. 111.)
Of the preliminary blunder, which Plutarch signalises as “among the greatest faults that ever Antonius committed,” viz., his failure to give Octavius battle, when universal discontent was excited at home by Octavius’ exactions, there is no mention, or only a very slight and doubtful one in the play. When Eros has told the news of Pompey’s overthrow and Lepidus’ deposition, Enobarbus at once foresees the sequel:
Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more: And throw between them all the food thou hast, They’ll grind the one the other. (III. v. 14.)
And presently he continues:
Our great navy’s rigg’d. Eros. For Italy and Caesar. More, Domitius, My lord desires you presently; my news I might have told hereafter. Eno. ’Twill be nought: But let it be. Bring me to Antony. (III. v. 20.)
Here we seem to have a faint reminiscence of Plutarch’s statement. Eros takes for granted as the obvious course, that the great navy ready to start will make an immediate descent on the enemy’s stronghold. Enobarbus, who understands Antony, knows that nothing will come of it, and that their destination is Egypt. In point of fact we learn in the next scene that Antony has arrived in Alexandria and there kept his state with Cleopatra.
But if Shakespeare glides over this episode, he dwells with all the greater detail on the array of imbecilities with which Antony follows it up. First, despite the advice of Enobarbus, he lets Cleopatra be present in the war. Then to please her caprice, and gratify his own fantastic chivalry, he sets aside the well-based objections of Enobarbus, of Canidius, of the common soldiers; and accepts Octavius’ challenge to fight at sea, though his ships are heavy, his mariners inexpert, and he himself and his veterans are more used to the dry land. Even so the inspiration of his soldiership and generalship is giving him a slight superiority, when the panic of Cleopatra withdraws her contingent of sixty ships:
Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,— Whom leprosy o’ertake!—i’ the midst o’ the fight, When vantage like a pair of twins appear’d, Both as the same, or rather ours the elder, The breese upon her, like a cow in June, Hoists sail and flies. (III. x. 10.)
Not all is lost even then. But Antony follows the fugitive, when, if he were true to himself, the day might still be retrieved. This is the view that Shakespeare assigns to Canidius; and while all the previous items he derived from Plutarch, only distributing them among his persons, and adding to their picturesqueness and force, this is an addition of his own to heighten the ignominy of Antony’s desertion:
Had our general Been what he knew himself, it had gone well. (III. x. 25.)
And the explanation of his “most unnoble swerving,” if in one way an excuse, in another is an extra shame to his manhood, and too well justifies Enobarbus’ dread of Cleopatra’s influence:
Your presence needs must puzzle Antony; Take from his heart, take from his brain, from’s time, What should not then be spared. (III. vii. 11.)
The authority for the idea that Antony was in a manner hypnotised by her love, Shakespeare found, like so much else, in the Life, but he enhances the effect immeasurably, first by putting the avowal in Antony’s own lips, and again by the more poignant and pitiful turn he gives it. Plutarch says:
There Antonius shewed plainely, that he had not onely lost the corage and hart of an Emperor, but also of a valliant man, and that he was not his owne man: (proving that true which an old man spake in myrth that the soule of a lover lived in another body, and not in his owne) he was so caried away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had bene glued into her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also.
Antony cries in the play:
O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?... Thou knew’st too well My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings, And thou shouldst tow me after: o’er my spirit Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods Command me.... You did know How much you were my conqueror: and that My sword, made weak by my affection, would Obey it on all cause. (III. x. 51.)
But in Shakespeare’s view the final decision was not reached even at the battle of Actium. Despite that disaster and the subsequent desertions, Antony is still able to offer no inconsiderable resistance in Egypt. In direct contradiction of Plutarch’s statement, he says, after the reply to Euphronius and the scourging of Thyreus:
Our force by land Hath nobly held; our sever’d navy too Have knit again, and fleet, threatening most sea-like. (III. xiii. 169.)
Whether this be fact or illusion, it shows that in his own eyes at least some hope remains: but in the hour of defeat he was quite unmanned and seemed to give up all thought of prolonging the struggle. When for the first time after his reverse we meet him in Alexandria, he prays his followers to “take the hint which his despair proclaims” (III. xi. 18), and to leave him, with his treasure for their reward. This circumstance Shakespeare obtained from Plutarch, but in Plutarch it is not quite the same. There the dismissal takes place at Taenarus in the Peloponnesus, the first stopping-place at which Antony touches in his flight, and apparently is dictated by the difficulty of all the fugitives effecting their escape. At any rate he was very far even then from despairing of his cause, for in the previous sentence we read that he “sent unto Canidius, to returne with his army into Asia, by Macedon”; and some time later we find him, still ignorant of the facts, continuing to act on the belief “that his armie by lande, which he left at Actium, was yet whole.”[209] Here on the other hand he has succeeded in reaching his lair, and it is as foolish as it is generous to throw away adherents and resources that might be of help to him at the last. But he is too despondent to think even of standing at bay. He tells his friends:
I have myself resolved upon a course Which has no need of you. (III. xi. 9.)
[209] He learns the truth however before he sends Euphronius as delegate.
That course was to beseech Octavius by his schoolmaster,
To let him breathe between the heavens and earth, A private man in Athens. (III. xii. 14.)
Here he touches the bottom mud of degradation and almost sinks to the level of Lepidus who did obtain permission to live under surveillance at Circeii “till death enlarged his confine.” And here too Shakespeare follows Plutarch, but here too with a difference. For in the biography this incident comes after some time has elapsed, and new disappointments and new indulgences have made deeper inroads in Antony’s spirit. In one aspect no doubt he is less pitiable in thus being brought to mortification by degrees. In Shakespeare he adopts this course before ever he has seen the Queen, and in so far shows greater weakness of character. Like Richard II. he bows his head at once, and without an effort takes “the sweet way to despair.” Yet just for that reason he is from another point of view less ignoble. It is the sudden sense of disgrace, the amazement, the consternation at his own poltroonery that turns his knees to water. But the very immediacy and poignancy of his self-disgust is a guarantee of surviving nobility that needs only an occasion to call it forth. The occasion comes in the refusal of his own petition and the conditional compliance with Cleopatra’s. Antony’s answer to this slighting treatment is his second challenge. This too Shakespeare obtained from Plutarch, but of this too he altered the significance and the date. In Plutarch it is sent after Antony’s victorious sally, apparently in elation at that trifling success, and is recorded without other remark than Octavius’ rejoinder. In Shakespeare it is the retort of Antony’s self-consciousness to the depreciation of his rival, and it is the first rebound of his relaxed valour. When the victor counts him as nought he is stung to comparisons, and feels that apart from success and external advantages he is still of greater worth:
Tell him he wears the rose Of youth upon him; from which the world should note Something particular: his coin, ships, legions, May be a coward’s; whose ministers would prevail Under the service of a child as soon As i’ the command of Caesar: I dare him, therefore, To lay his gay comparisons apart, And answer me declined, sword against sword, Ourselves alone. (III. xiii. 20.)
Of course it is absurd and mad; and the madness and absurdity are brought out, in the play, not in the Life, by the comments of Enobarbus, Octavius and Mecaenas. Indeed at this juncture Antony’s valour, or rather his desperation, does not cease to prey on his reason. His insult to Caesar in the scourging of his messenger is less an excess of audacity than the gnash of the teeth in the last agony: as Enobarbus remarks:
’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp Than with an old one dying. (III. xiii. 94.)
Octavius may treat these transports of a great spirit in the throes as mere bluster and brutality, and find in them a warrant for his ruthless phrase, “the old ruffian.” There is a touch of the ruffian in Antony’s wild outbursts. Even the mettlesome vein in which he commands another gaudy night on Cleopatra’s birthday is open to Enobarbus’ disparagement: that a diminution of his captain’s brain restores his heart. Truly the last shreds of prudence are whirled away in his storm of recklessness and anguish and love. At the defiant anniversary feast his soul is so wrung with gratitude to his true servants and grief at the near farewell, that he must give his feelings words though they will discourage rather than hearten the company. Cleopatra does not understand it, for her own nature has not the depth of Antony’s, and deep can only call to deep. “What means this?” she asks.
Eno. ’Tis one of those odd tricks which sorrow shoots Out of the mind. (IV. ii. 14.)
Again, in amazement at his tearful pathos, she exclaims: “What does he mean?” And with an effort at cynicism, Enobarbus, who has scoffed at Antony’s emotion over the bodies of Caesar and Brutus, replies: “To make his followers weep”; for Enobarbus tries to think that it is merely the orator’s eloquence that runs away with him in his melting mood. Nevertheless his own sympathies are touched for the moment: “I, an ass, am onion-eyed.” In truth none can mistake the genuine feeling of Antony’s words, though at the hint he can at once change their tone and give them an heroic and even a sanguine turn.[210]
Know, my hearts, I hope well of to-morrow; and will lead you Where rather I’ll expect victorious life Than death and honour. (IV. ii. 41.)
[210] Which latter for the rest may be found in North but not in Plutarch. “To salve that he had spoken he added this more unto it, that he would not leade them to battell, where he thought not rather safely to returne with victorie, then valliantly to dye with honor.” Cf. μὴ προάξειν ἐπὶ τὴν μάχην, ἐξ ἧς αὑτῷ θάνατον εὐκλεᾶ μᾶλλον ἢ σωτηρίαν ζητεῖν καὶ νίκην.
But whatever deductions be made, Antony’s last days in Alexandria bring back a St. Martin’s summer of genial power and genial nobility that are doubly captivating when set off against the foil of Caesar’s coldness. The grand proportions of his nature, that are obscured in the vintage time of success and indulgence, show forth again when the branches are bare. No doubt he again and again does the wrong things, or at least the things that lead to no useful result. His patron god deserts him as in Plutarch, but that god in Shakespeare is not Bacchus but Hercules, and he departs earlier than in the story and not on the last night before the end; for the withdrawal of the divine friend is now less the presage of death than the symbol of inefficacy. Antony’s insight and judgment may be failing; his flashes of power may be like his flashes of jealousy, and indicate the dissolution of his being. Still when all is said and done, he seems to become bolder, grander, more magnanimous, as the fuel is cut off from his inward fire and it burns and wastes in its own heat. His reflux of heroism cannot save him against the material superiority and concentrated ambition of Octavius, for it is not the consequent energy that commands success and that implies a consequent purpose in life: but all the more impressive and affecting is this gallant fronting of fate. As Cleopatra arms him for his last little victory, he cries with his old self-consciousness:
O love, That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew’st The royal occupation! thou shouldst see A workman in ’t. (IV. iv. 15.)
He welcomes the time for battle:
This morning, like the spirit of a youth, That means to be of note, begins betimes. (IV. iv. 26.)
Cleopatra recognises his greatness and his doom:
He goes forth gallantly. That he and Caesar might Determine this great war in single fight! Then, Antony,—but now—well, on. (IV. iv. 36.)
That day he does well indeed. He pursues the recreant Enobarbus with his generosity and the vanquished Romans with his valour. He returns victorious and jubilant to claim his last welcoming embrace.
O thou day o’ the world, Chain mine arm’d neck; leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing. (IV. viii. 13.)
Then the morrow brings the end. His fleet deserts, and for the moment he suspects Cleopatra as the cause, and overwhelms her with curses and threats. The suspicion is natural, and his nature is on edge at the fiasco, which this time is no fault of his.
The soul and body rive not more in parting Than greatness going off.[211] (IV. xiii. 5.)
[211] A familiar thought with Shakespeare. Compare Anne’s reference to Katherine in Henry VIII.:
O, God’s will! much better She ne’er had known pomp: though’t be temporal, Yet, if that quarrel, fortune, do divorce It from the bearer, ’tis a sufferance panging As soul and body’s severing. (II. iii. 12.)
This scene is almost certainly Shakespeare’s.
But his mood changes. Even before he hears Cleopatra’s disclaimer and the news of her alleged death, he has become calm, and only feels the futility of it all; he is to himself “indistinct, as water is in water” (IV. xiv. 10). Then comes the message that his beloved is no more, and his resolution is fixed:
Unarm me, Eros; the long day’s task is done, And we must sleep. (IV. xiv. 36.)
His thoughts are with his Queen in the Elysian fields where he will ask her pardon,[212] and he only stays for Eros’ help. But when Eros chooses his own rather than his master’s death, Antony in his large-hearted way gives him the praise, and finds in his act a lesson.
Thrice-nobler than myself! Thou teachest me, O valiant Eros, what I should, and thou couldst not. (IV. xiv. 95.)
The wound he deals himself is not at once fatal. He lives long enough to comfort his followers in the heroic words:
Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp fate To grace it with your sorrows: bid that welcome Which comes to punish us, and we punish it Seeming to bear it lightly. Take me up: I have led you oft: carry me now, good friends, And have my thanks for all.[213]
[212] Dido and her Æneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (IV. xiv. 52.)
We have not got much further in explaining Shakespeare’s allusion than when Warburton made the Warburtonian emendation of Sichaeus for Æneas. Shakespeare had probably quite forgotten Virgil’s
Illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat: ... atque inimica refugit In nemus umbriferum. (Æ. vi. 469.)
Perhaps he remembered only that Æneas, ancestor and representative of the Romans, between his two authorised marriages with ladies of the “superior” races, intercalated the love-adventure, which alone seized the popular imagination and which of all the deities Venus alone approved, with ran African queen.
[213] No word of this in Plutarch.
He has heard the truth about Cleopatra, and only importunes death that he may snatch that one last interview sacred to his love of her, his care for her, and to that serene, lofty dignity which now he has attained. The world seems a blank when this full life is out; and looking at the race that is left, we feel inclined to echo Cleopatra’s words above the corpse:
O, wither’d is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. (IV. xv. 64.)