Coleridge's one page of general criticism on _Antony and Cleopatra_
contains some notable remarks. 'Of all Shakespeare's historical plays,'
he writes, '_Antony and Cleopatra_ is by far the most wonderful. 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.' In a later sentence he refers to the play as 'this
astonishing drama.' In another he describes the style: '_feliciter
audax_ is the motto for its style comparatively with that of
Shakespeare's other works.' And he translates this motto in the phrase
'happy valiancy of style.'
Coleridge's assertion that in _Antony and Cleopatra_ Shakespeare
followed history more minutely than in any other play might well be
disputed; and his statement about the style of this drama requires some
qualification in view of the results of later criticism as to the order
of Shakespeare's works. The style is less individual than he imagined.
On the whole it is common to the six or seven dramas subsequent to
_Macbeth_, though in _Antony and Cleopatra_, probably the earliest of
them, its development is not yet complete. And we must add that this
style has certain special defects, unmentioned by Coleridge, as well as
the quality which he points out in it. But it is true that here that
quality is almost continuously present; and in the phrase by which he
describes it, as in his other phrases, he has signalised once for all
some of the most salient features of the drama.
It is curious to notice, for example, alike in books and in
conversation, how often the first epithets used in reference to _Antony
and Cleopatra_ are 'wonderful' and 'astonishing.' And the main source of
the feeling thus expressed seems to be the 'angelic strength' or 'fiery
force' of which Coleridge wrote. The first of these two phrases is, I
think, the more entirely happy. Except perhaps towards the close, one is
not so conscious of fiery force as in certain other tragedies; but one
is astonished at the apparent ease with which extraordinary effects are
produced, the ease, if I may paraphrase Coleridge, of an angel moving
with a wave of the hand that heavy matter which men find so intractable.
We feel this sovereign ease in contemplating Shakespeare's picture of
the world--a vast canvas, crowded with figures, glowing with colour and
a superb animation, reminding one spectator of Paul Veronese and another
of Rubens. We feel it again when we observe (as we can even without
consulting Plutarch) the nature of the material; how bulky it was, and,
in some respects, how undramatic; and how the artist, though he could
not treat history like legend or fiction, seems to push whole masses
aside, and to shift and refashion the remainder, almost with the air of
an architect playing (at times rather carelessly) with a child's bricks.
Something similar is felt even in the portrait of Cleopatra. Marvellous
as it is, the drawing of it suggests not so much the passionate
concentration or fiery force of _Macbeth_, as that sense of effortless
and exultant mastery which we feel in the portraits of Mercutio and
Falstaff. And surely it is a total mistake to find in this portrait any
trace of the distempered mood which disturbs our pleasure in _Troilus
and Cressida_. If the sonnets about the dark lady were, as need not be
doubted, in some degree autobiographical, Shakespeare may well have used
his personal experience both when he drew Cressida and when he drew
Cleopatra. And, if he did, the story in the later play was the nearer to
his own; for Antony might well have said what Troilus could never say,
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
But in the later play, not only is the poet's vision unclouded, but his
whole nature, emotional as well as intellectual, is free. The subject no
more embitters or seduces him than the ambition of Macbeth. So that here
too we feel the angelic strength of which Coleridge speaks. If we
quarrelled with the phrase at all, it would be because we fancied we
could trace in Shakespeare's attitude something of the irony of
superiority; and this may not altogether suit our conception of an
angel.
I have still another sentence to quote from Coleridge: 'The highest
praise, or rather form of praise, of this play which I can offer in my
own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether
the "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."' Now, unless the clause here about the
'giant power' may be taken to restrict the rivalry to the quality of
angelic strength, Coleridge's doubt seems to show a lapse in critical
judgment. To regard this tragedy as a rival of the famous four, whether
on the stage or in the study, is surely an error. The world certainly
has not so regarded it; and, though the world's reasons for its verdicts
on works of art may be worth little, its mere verdict is worth much.
Here, it seems to me, that verdict must be accepted. One may notice
that, in calling _Antony and Cleopatra_ wonderful or astonishing, we
appear to be thinking first of the artist and his activity, while in the
case of the four famous tragedies it is the product of this activity,
the thing presented, that first engrosses us. I know that I am stating
this difference too sharply, but I believe that it is often felt; and,
if this is so, the fact is significant. It implies that, although
_Antony and Cleopatra_ may be for us as wonderful an achievement as the
greatest of Shakespeare's plays, it has not an equal value. Besides, in
the attempt to rank it with them there is involved something more, and
more important, than an error in valuation. There is a failure to
discriminate the peculiar marks of _Antony and Cleopatra_ itself, marks
which, whether or no it be the equal of the earlier tragedies, make it
decidedly different. If I speak first of some of these differences it is
because they thus contribute to the individuality of the play, and
because they seem often not to be distinctly apprehended in criticism.
1.
Why, let us begin by asking, is _Antony and Cleopatra_, though so
wonderful an achievement, a play rarely acted? For a tragedy, it is not
painful. Though unfit for children, it cannot be called indecent; some
slight omissions, and such a flattening of the heroine's part as might
confidently be expected, would leave it perfectly presentable. It is, no
doubt, in the third and fourth Acts, very defective in construction.
Even on the Elizabethan stage, where scene followed scene without a
pause, this must have been felt; and in our theatres it would be felt
much more. There, in fact, these two and forty scenes could not possibly
be acted as they stand. But defective construction would not distress
the bulk of an audience, if the matter presented were that of _Hamlet_
or _Othello_, of _Lear_ or _Macbeth_. The matter, then, must lack
something which is present in those tragedies; and it is mainly owing to
this difference in substance that _Antony and Cleopatra_ has never
attained their popularity either on the stage or off it.
Most of Shakespeare's tragedies are dramatic, in a special sense of the
word as well as in its general sense, from beginning to end. The story
is not merely exciting and impressive from the movement of conflicting
forces towards a terrible issue, but from time to time there come
situations and events which, even apart from their bearing on this
issue, appeal most powerfully to the dramatic feelings--scenes of action
or passion which agitate the audience with alarm, horror, painful
expectation, or absorbing sympathies and antipathies. Think of the
street fights in _Romeo and Juliet_, the killing of Mercutio and Tybalt,
the rapture of the lovers, and their despair when Romeo is banished.
Think of the ghost-scenes in the first Act of _Hamlet_, the passion of
the early soliloquies, the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, the
play-scene, the sparing of the King at prayer, the killing of Polonius.
Is not _Hamlet_, if you choose so to regard it, the best melodrama in
the world? Think at your leisure of _Othello_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_
from the same point of view; but consider here and now even the two
tragedies which, as dealing with Roman history, are companions of
_Antony and Cleopatra_. Recall in _Julius Caesar_ the first suggestion of
the murder, the preparation for it in a 'tempest dropping fire,' the
murder itself, the speech of Antony over the corpse, and the tumult of
the furious crowd; in _Coriolanus_ the bloody battles on the stage, the
scene in which the hero attains the consulship, the scene of rage in
which he is banished. And remember that in each of these seven tragedies
the matter referred to is contained in the first three Acts.
In the first three Acts of our play what is there resembling this?
Almost nothing. People converse, discuss, accuse one another, excuse
themselves, mock, describe, drink together, arrange a marriage, meet and
part; but they do not kill, do not even tremble or weep. We see hardly
one violent movement; until the battle of Actium is over we witness
scarcely any vehement passion; and that battle, as it is a naval action,
we do not see. Even later, Enobarbus, when he dies, simply dies; he does
not kill himself.[2] We hear wonderful talk; but it is not talk, like
that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or that of Othello and Iago, at which
we hold our breath. The scenes that we remember first are those that
portray Cleopatra; Cleopatra coquetting, tormenting, beguiling her lover
to stay; Cleopatra left with her women and longing for him; Cleopatra
receiving the news of his marriage; Cleopatra questioning the messenger
about Octavia's personal appearance. But this is to say that the scenes
we remember first are the least indispensable to the plot. One at least
is not essential to it at all. And this, the astonishing scene where she
storms at the messenger, strikes him, and draws her dagger on him, is
the one passage in the first half of the drama that contains either an
explosion of passion or an exciting bodily action. Nor is this all. The
first half of the play, though it forebodes tragedy, is not decisively
tragic in tone. Certainly the Cleopatra scenes are not so. We read
them, and we should witness them, in delighted wonder and even with
amusement. The only scene that can vie with them, that of the revel on
Pompey's ship, though full of menace, is in great part humorous.
Enobarbus, in this part of the play, is always humorous. Even later,
when the tragic tone is deepening, the whipping of Thyreus, in spite of
Antony's rage, moves mirth. A play of which all this can truly be said
may well be as masterly as _Othello_ or _Macbeth_, and more delightful;
but, in the greater part of its course, it cannot possibly excite the
same emotions. It makes no attempt to do so; and to regard it as though
it made this attempt is to miss its specific character and the intention
of its author.
That character depends only in part on Shakespeare's fidelity to his
historical authority, a fidelity which, I may remark, is often greatly
exaggerated. For Shakespeare did not merely present the story of ten
years as though it occupied perhaps one fifth of that time, nor did he
merely invent freely, but in critical places he effected startling
changes in the order and combination of events. Still it may be said
that, dealing with a history so famous, he could not well make the first
half of his play very exciting, moving, or tragic. And this is true so
far as mere situations and events are concerned. But, if he had chosen,
he might easily have heightened the tone and tension in another way. He
might have made the story of Antony's attempt to break his bondage, and
the story of his relapse, extremely exciting, by portraying with all his
force the severity of the struggle and the magnitude of the fatal step.
And the structure of the play might seem at first to suggest this
intention. At the opening, Antony is shown almost in the beginning of
his infatuation; for Cleopatra is not sure of her power over him, exerts
all her fascination to detain him, and plays the part of the innocent
victim who has yielded to passion and must now expect to be deserted by
her seducer. Alarmed and ashamed at the news of the results of his
inaction, he rouses himself, tears himself away, and speeds to Italy.
His very coming is enough to frighten Pompey into peace. He reconciles
himself with Octavius, and, by his marriage with the good and beautiful
Octavia, seems to have knit a bond of lasting amity with her brother,
and to have guarded himself against the passion that threatened him with
ruin. At this point his power, the world's peace, and his own peace,
appear to be secured; his fortune has mounted to its apex. But soon
(very much sooner than in Plutarch's story) comes the downward turn or
counter-stroke. New causes of offence arise between the brothers-in-law.
To remove them Octavia leaves her husband in Athens and hurries to Rome.
Immediately Antony returns to Cleopatra and, surrendering himself at
once and wholly to her enchantment is quickly driven to his doom.
Now Shakespeare, I say, with his matchless power of depicting an inward
struggle, might have made this story, even where it could not furnish
him with thrilling incidents, the source of powerful tragic emotions;
and, in doing so, he would have departed from his authority merely in
his conception of the hero's character. But he does no such thing till
the catastrophe is near. Antony breaks away from Cleopatra without any
strenuous conflict. No serious doubt of his return is permitted to
agitate us. We are almost assured of it through the impression made on
us by Octavius, through occasional glimpses into Antony's mind, through
the absence of any doubt in Enobarbus, through scenes in Alexandria
which display Cleopatra and display her irresistible. And, finally, the
downward turn itself, the fatal step of Antony's return, is shown
without the slightest emphasis. Nay, it is not shown, it is only
reported; and not a line portrays any inward struggle preceding it. On
this side also, then, the drama makes no attempt to rival the other
tragedies; and it was essential to its own peculiar character and its
most transcendent effects that this attempt should not be made, but that
Antony's passion should be represented as a force which he could hardly
even desire to resist. By the very scheme of the work, therefore, tragic
impressions of any great volume or depth were reserved for the last
stage of the conflict; while the main interest, down to the battle of
Actium, was directed to matters exceedingly interesting and even, in the
wider sense, dramatic, but not overtly either terrible or piteous: on
the one hand, to the political aspect of the story; on the other, to the
personal causes which helped to make the issue inevitable.
2.
The political situation and its development are simple. The story is
taken up almost where it was left, years before, in _Julius Caesar_.
There Brutus and Cassius, to prevent the rule of one man, assassinate
Caesar. Their purpose is condemned to failure, not merely because they
make mistakes, but because that political necessity which Napoleon
identified with destiny requires the rule of one man. They spill Caesar's
blood, but his spirit walks abroad and turns their swords against their
own breasts; and the world is left divided among three men, his friends
and his heir. Here _Antony and Cleopatra_ takes up the tale; and its
business, from this point of view, is to show the reduction of these
three to one. That Lepidus will not be this one was clear already in
_Julius Caesar_; it must be Octavius or Antony. Both ambitious, they are
also men of such opposite tempers that they would scarcely long agree
even if they wished to, and even if destiny were not stronger than they.
As it is, one of them has fixed his eyes on the end, sacrifices
everything for it, uses everything as a means to it. The other, though
far the greater soldier and worshipped by his followers, has no such
singleness of aim; nor yet is power, however desirable to him, the most
desirable thing in the world. At the beginning he is risking it for
love; at the end he has lost his half of the world, and lost his life,
and Octavius rules alone. Whether Shakespeare had this clearly in his
mind is a question neither answerable nor important; this is what came
out of his mind.
Shakespeare, I think, took little interest in the character of Octavius,
and he has not made it wholly clear. It is not distinct in Plutarch's
'Life of Antony'; and I have not found traces that the poet studied
closely the 'Life of Octavius' included in North's volume. To
Shakespeare he is one of those men, like Bolingbroke and Ulysses, who
have plenty of 'judgment' and not much 'blood.' Victory in the world,
according to the poet, almost always goes to such men; and he makes us
respect, fear, and dislike them. His Octavius is very formidable. His
cold determination half paralyses Antony; it is so even in _Julius
Caesar_. In _Antony and Cleopatra_ Octavius is more than once in the
wrong; but he never admits it; he silently pushes his rival a step
backward; and, when he ceases to fear, he shows contempt. He neither
enjoys war nor is great in it; at first, therefore, he is anxious about
the power of Pompey, and stands in need of Antony. As soon as Antony's
presence has served his turn, and he has patched up a union with him and
seen him safely off to Athens, he destroys first Pompey and next
Lepidus. Then, dexterously using Antony's faithlessness to Octavia and
excesses in the East in order to put himself in the right, he makes for
his victim with admirable celerity while he is still drunk with the joy
of reunion with Cleopatra. For his ends Octavius is perfectly efficient,
but he is so partly from his limitations. One phrase of his is
exceedingly characteristic. When Antony in rage and desperation
challenges him to single combat, Octavius calls him 'the old ruffian.'
There is a horrid aptness in the phrase, but it disgusts us. It is
shameful in this boy, as hard and smooth as polished steel, to feel at
such a time nothing of the greatness of his victim and the tragedy of
his victim's fall. Though the challenge of Antony is absurd, we would
give much to see them sword to sword. And when Cleopatra by her death
cheats the conqueror of his prize, we feel unmixed delight.
The doubtful point in the character is this. Plutarch says that Octavius
was reported to love his sister dearly; and Shakespeare's Octavius
several times expresses such love. When, then, he proposed the marriage
with Antony (for of course it was he who spoke through Agrippa), was he
honest, or was he laying a trap and, in doing so, sacrificing his
sister? Did he hope the marriage would really unite him with his
brother-in-law; or did he merely mean it to be a source of future
differences; or did he calculate that, whether it secured peace or
dissension, it would in either case bring him great advantage?
Shakespeare, who was quite as intelligent as his readers, must have
asked himself some such question; but he may not have cared to answer it
even to himself; and, in any case, he has left the actor (at least the
actor in days later than his own) to choose an answer. If I were forced
to choose, I should take the view that Octavius was, at any rate, not
wholly honest; partly because I think it best suits Shakespeare's usual
way of conceiving a character of the kind; partly because Plutarch
construed in this manner Octavius's behaviour in regard to his sister at
a later time, and this hint might naturally influence the poet's way of
imagining his earlier action.[3]
Though the character of Octavius is neither attractive nor wholly clear,
his figure is invested with a certain tragic dignity, because he is felt
to be the Man of Destiny, the agent of forces against which the
intentions of an individual would avail nothing. He is represented as
having himself some feeling of this sort. His lament over Antony, his
grief that their stars were irreconcilable, may well be genuine, though
we should be surer if it were uttered in soliloquy. His austere words to
Octavia again probably speak his true mind:
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determined things to destiny
Hold unbewailed their way.
In any case the feeling of fate comes through to us. It is aided by
slight touches of supernatural effect; first in the Soothsayer's warning
to Antony that his genius or angel is overpowered whenever he is near
Octavius; then in the strangely effective scene where Antony's soldiers,
in the night before his last battle, hear music in the air or under the
earth:
'Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him.
And to the influence of this feeling in giving impressiveness to the
story is added that of the immense scale and world-wide issue of the
conflict. Even the distances traversed by fleets and armies enhance this
effect.
And yet there seems to be something half-hearted in Shakespeare's appeal
here, something even ironical in his presentation of this conflict. Its
external magnitude, like Antony's magnificence in lavishing realms and
gathering the kings of the East in his support, fails to uplift or
dilate the imagination. The struggle in Lear's little island seems to us
to have an infinitely wider scope. It is here that we are sometimes
reminded of _Troilus and Cressida_, and the cold and disenchanting light
that is there cast on the Trojan War. The spectacle which he portrays
leaves Shakespeare quite undazzled; he even makes it appear inwardly
small. The lordship of the world, we ask ourselves, what is it worth,
and in what spirit do these 'world-sharers' contend for it? They are no
champions of their country like Henry V. The conqueror knows not even
the glory of battle. Their aims, for all we see, are as personal as if
they were captains of banditti; and they are followed merely from
self-interest or private attachment. The scene on Pompey's galley is
full of this irony. One 'third part of the world' is carried drunk to
bed. In the midst of this mock boon-companionship the pirate whispers to
his leader to cut first the cable of his ship and then the throats of
the two other Emperors; and at the moment we should not greatly care if
Pompey took the advice. Later, a short scene, totally useless to the
plot and purely satiric in its purport, is slipped in to show how
Ventidius fears to pursue his Parthian conquests because it is not safe
for Antony's lieutenant to outdo his master.[4] A painful sense of
hollowness oppresses us. We know too well what must happen in a world so
splendid, so false, and so petty. We turn for relief from the political
game to those who are sure to lose it; to those who love some human
being better than a prize, to Eros and Charmian and Iras; to Enobarbus,
whom the world corrupts, but who has a heart that can break with shame;
to the lovers, who seem to us to find in death something better than
their victor's life.
This presentation of the outward conflict has two results. First, it
blunts our feeling of the greatness of Antony's fall from prosperity.
Indeed this feeling, which we might expect to be unusually acute, is
hardly so; it is less acute, for example, than the like feeling in the
case of Richard II., who loses so much smaller a realm. Our deeper
sympathies are focussed rather on Antony's heart, on the inward fall to
which the enchantment of passion leads him, and the inward recovery
which succeeds it. And the second result is this. The greatness of
Antony and Cleopatra in their fall is so much heightened by contrast
with the world they lose and the conqueror who wins it, that the
positive element in the final tragic impression, the element of
reconciliation, is strongly emphasised. The peculiar effect of the drama
depends partly, as we have seen, on the absence of decidedly tragic
scenes and events in its first half; but it depends quite as much on
this emphasis. In any Shakespearean tragedy we watch some elect spirit
colliding, partly through its error and defect, with a superhuman power
which bears it down; and yet we feel that this spirit, even in the error
and defect, rises by its greatness into ideal union with the power that
overwhelms it. In some tragedies this latter feeling is relatively weak.
In _Antony and Cleopatra_ it is unusually strong; stronger, with some
readers at least, than the fear and grief and pity with which they
contemplate the tragic error and the advance of doom.
3.
The two aspects of the tragedy are presented together in the opening
scene. Here is the first. In Cleopatra's palace one friend of Antony is
describing to another, just arrived from Rome, the dotage of their great
general; and, as the lovers enter, he exclaims:
Look, where they come:
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.
With the next words the other aspect appears:
CLEO. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
ANT. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
CLEO. I'll set a bourne how far to be beloved.
ANT. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.
And directly after, when he is provoked by reminders of the news from
Rome:
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
Is to do thus.
Here is the tragic excess, but with it the tragic greatness, the
capacity of finding in something the infinite, and of pursuing it into
the jaws of death.
The two aspects are shown here with the exaggeration proper in dramatic
characters. Neither the phrase 'a strumpet's fool,' nor the assertion
'the nobleness of life is to do thus,' answers to the total effect of
the play. But the truths they exaggerate are equally essential; and the
commoner mistake in criticism is to understate the second. It is plain
that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is destructive; that in some way
it clashes with the nature of things; that, while they are sitting in
their paradise like gods, its walls move inward and crush them at last
to death. This is no invention of moralising critics; it is in the play;
and any one familiar with Shakespeare would expect beforehand to find it
there. But then to forget because of it the other side, to deny the name
of love to this ruinous passion, to speak as though the lovers had
utterly missed the good of life, is to mutilate the tragedy and to
ignore a great part of its effect upon us. For we sympathise with them
in their passion; we feel in it the infinity there is in man; even while
we acquiesce in their defeat we are exulting in their victory; and when
they have vanished we say,
the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
Though we hear nothing from Shakespeare of the cruelty of Plutarch's
Antony, or of the misery caused by his boundless profusion, we do not
feel the hero of the tragedy to be a man of the noblest type, like
Brutus, Hamlet, or Othello. He seeks power merely for himself, and uses
it for his own pleasure. He is in some respects unscrupulous; and, while
it would be unjust to regard his marriage exactly as if it were one in
private life, we resent his treatment of Octavia, whose character
Shakespeare was obliged to leave a mere sketch, lest our feeling for the
hero and heroine should be too much chilled. Yet, for all this, we
sympathise warmly with Antony, are greatly drawn to him, and are
inclined to regard him as a noble nature half spoiled by his time.
It is a large, open, generous, expansive nature, quite free from envy,
capable of great magnanimity, even of entire devotion. Antony is
unreserved, naturally straightforward, we may almost say simple. He can
admit faults, accept advice and even reproof, take a jest against
himself with good-humour. He is courteous (to Lepidus, for example, whom
Octavius treats with cold contempt); and, though he can be exceedingly
dignified, he seems to prefer a blunt though sympathetic plainness,
which is one cause of the attachment of his soldiers. He has none of the
faults of the brooder, the sentimentalist, or the man of principle; his
nature tends to splendid action and lusty enjoyment. But he is neither a
mere soldier nor a mere sensualist. He has imagination, the temper of an
artist who revels in abundant and rejoicing appetites, feasts his senses
on the glow and richness of life, flings himself into its mirth and
revelry, yet feels the poetry in all this, and is able also to put it
by and be more than content with the hardships of adventure. Such a man
could never have sought a crown by a murder like Macbeth's, or, like
Brutus, have killed on principle the man who loved him, or have lost the
world for a Cressida.
Beside this strain of poetry he has a keen intellect, a swift perception
of the lie of things, and much quickness in shaping a course to suit
them. In _Julius Caesar_ he shows this after the assassination, when he
appears as a dexterous politician as well as a warm-hearted friend. He
admires what is fine, and can fully appreciate the nobility of Brutus;
but he is sure that Brutus's ideas are moonshine, that (as he says in
our play) Brutus is mad; and, since his mighty friend, who was
incomparably the finest thing in the world, has perished, he sees no
reason why the inheritance should not be his own. Full of sorrow, he yet
uses his sorrow like an artist to work on others, and greets his success
with the glee of a successful adventurer. In the earlier play he proves
himself a master of eloquence, and especially of pathos; and he does so
again in the later. With a few words about his fall he draws tears from
his followers and even from the caustic humorist Enobarbus. Like Richard
II., he sees his own fall with the eyes of a poet, but a poet much
greater than the young Shakespeare, who could never have written
Antony's marvellous speech about the sunset clouds. But we listen to
Antony, as we do not to Richard, with entire sympathy, partly because he
is never unmanly, partly because he himself is sympathetic and longs for
sympathy.
The first of living soldiers, an able politician, a most persuasive
orator, Antony nevertheless was not born to rule the world. He enjoys
being a great man, but he has not the love of rule for rule's sake.
Power for him is chiefly a means to pleasure. The pleasure he wants is
so huge that he needs a huge power; but half the world, even a third of
it, would suffice. He will not pocket wrongs, but he shows not the
slightest wish to get rid of his fellow Triumvirs and reign alone. He
never minded being subordinate to Julius Caesar. By women he is not only
attracted but governed; from the effect of Cleopatra's taunts we can see
that he had been governed by Fulvia. Nor has he either the patience or
the steadfastness of a born ruler. He contends fitfully, and is prone to
take the step that is easiest at the moment. This is the reason why he
consents to marry Octavia. It seems the shortest way out of an awkward
situation. He does not intend even to try to be true to her. He will not
think of the distant consequences.
A man who loved power as much as thousands of insignificant people love
it, would have made a sterner struggle than Antony's against his
enchantment. He can hardly be said to struggle at all. He brings himself
to leave Cleopatra only because he knows he will return. In every moment
of his absence, whether he wake or sleep, a siren music in his blood is
singing him back to her; and to this music, however he may be occupied,
the soul within his soul leans and listens. The joy of life had always
culminated for him in the love of women: he could say 'no' to none of
them: of Octavia herself he speaks like a poet. When he meets Cleopatra
he finds his Absolute. She satisfies, nay glorifies, his whole being.
She intoxicates his senses. Her wiles, her taunts, her furies and
meltings, her laughter and tears, bewitch him all alike. She loves what
he loves, and she surpasses him. She can drink him to his bed, out-jest
his practical jokes, out-act the best actress who ever amused him,
out-dazzle his own magnificence. She is his play-fellow, and yet a great
queen. Angling in the river, playing billiards, flourishing the sword he
used at Philippi, hopping forty paces in a public street, she remains
an enchantress. Her spirit is made of wind and flame, and the poet in
him worships her no less than the man. He is under no illusion about
her, knows all her faults, sees through her wiles, believes her capable
of betraying him. It makes no difference. She is his heart's desire made
perfect. To love her is what he was born for. What have the gods in
heaven to say against it? To imagine heaven is to imagine her; to die is
to rejoin her. To deny that this is love is the madness of morality. He
gives her every atom of his heart.
She destroys him. Shakespeare, availing himself of the historic fact,
portrays, on Antony's return to her, the suddenness and the depth of his
descent. In spite of his own knowledge, the protests of his captains,
the entreaties even of a private soldier, he fights by sea simply and
solely because she wishes it. Then in mid-battle, when she flies, he
deserts navy and army and his faithful thousands and follows her. 'I
never saw an action of such shame,' cries Scarus; and we feel the
dishonour of the hero keenly. Then Shakespeare begins to raise him
again. First, his own overwhelming sense of shame redeems him. Next, we
watch the rage of the dying lion. Then the mere sally before the final
defeat--a sally dismissed by Plutarch in three lines--is magnified into
a battle, in which Antony displays to us, and himself feels for the last
time, the glory of his soldiership. And, throughout, the magnanimity and
gentleness which shine through his desperation endear him to us. How
beautiful is his affection for his followers and even for his servants,
and the devotion they return! How noble his reception of the news that
Enobarbus has deserted him! How touchingly significant the refusal of
Eros either to kill him or survive him! How pathetic and even sublime
the completeness of his love for Cleopatra! His anger is born and dies
in an hour. One tear, one kiss, outweighs his ruin. He believes she has
sold him to his enemy, yet he kills himself because he hears that she is
dead. When, dying, he learns that she has deceived him once more, no
thought of reproach crosses his mind: he simply asks to be carried to
her. He knows well that she is not capable of dying because he dies, but
that does not sting him; when, in his last agony, he calls for wine that
he may gain a moment's strength to speak, it is to advise her for the
days to come. Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch the final speech of
Antony. It is fine, but it is not miraculous. The miraculous speeches
belong only to his own hero:
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips;
or the first words he utters when he hears of Cleopatra's death:
Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
And we must sleep.
If he meant the task of statesman and warrior, that is not what his
words mean to us. They remind us of words more familiar and less great--
No rest but the grave for the pilgrim of love.
And he is more than love's pilgrim; he is love's martyr.
4.
To reserve a fragment of an hour for Cleopatra, if it were not palpably
absurd, would seem an insult. If only one could hear her own remarks
upon it! But I had to choose between this absurdity and the plan of
giving her the whole hour; and to that plan there was one fatal
objection. She has been described (by Ten Brink) as a courtesan of
genius. So brief a description must needs be incomplete, and Cleopatra
never forgets, nor, if we read aright, do we forget, that she is a
great queen. Still the phrase is excellent; only a public lecture is no
occasion for the full analysis and illustration of the character it
describes.
Shakespeare has paid Cleopatra a unique compliment. The hero dies in the
fourth Act, and the whole of the fifth is devoted to the heroine.[5] In
that Act she becomes unquestionably a tragic character, but, it appears
to me, not till then. This, no doubt, is a heresy; but as I cannot help
holding it, and as it is connected with the remarks already made on the
first half of the play, I will state it more fully. Cleopatra stands in
a group with Hamlet and Falstaff. We might join with them Iago if he
were not decidedly their inferior in one particular quality. They are
inexhaustible. You feel that, if they were alive and you spent your
whole life with them, their infinite variety could never be staled by
custom; they would continue every day to surprise, perplex, and delight
you. Shakespeare has bestowed on each of them, though they differ so
much, his own originality, his genius. He has given it most fully to
Hamlet, to whom none of the chambers of experience is shut, and perhaps
more of it to Cleopatra than to Falstaff. Nevertheless, if we ask
whether Cleopatra, in the first four Acts, is a tragic figure like
Hamlet, we surely cannot answer 'yes.' Naturally it does not follow that
she is a comic figure like Falstaff. This would be absurd; for, even if
she were ridiculous like Falstaff, she is not ridiculous to herself; she
is no humorist. And yet there is a certain likeness. She shares a
weakness with Falstaff--vanity; and when she displays it, as she does
quite naively (for instance, in the second interview with the
Messenger), she does become comic. Again, though like Falstaff she is
irresistible and carries us away no less than the people around her, we
are secretly aware, in the midst of our delight, that her empire is
built on sand. And finally, as his love for the Prince gives dignity and
pathos to Falstaff in his overthrow, so what raises Cleopatra at last
into pure tragedy is, in part, that which some critics have denied her,
her love for Antony.
Many unpleasant things can be said of Cleopatra; and the more that are
said the more wonderful she appears. The exercise of sexual attraction
is the element of her life; and she has developed nature into a
consummate art. When she cannot exert it on the present lover she
imagines its effects on him in absence. Longing for the living, she
remembers with pride and joy the dead; and the past which the furious
Antony holds up to her as a picture of shame is, for her, glory. She
cannot see an ambassador, scarcely even a messenger, without desiring to
bewitch him. Her mind is saturated with this element. If she is dark, it
is because the sun himself has been amorous of her. Even when death is
close at hand she imagines his touch as a lover's. She embraces him that
she may overtake Iras and gain Antony's first kiss in the other world.
She lives for feeling. Her feelings are, so to speak, sacred, and pain
must not come near her. She has tried numberless experiments to discover
the easiest way to die. Her body is exquisitely sensitive, and her
emotions marvellously swift. They are really so; but she exaggerates
them so much, and exhibits them so continually for effect, that some
readers fancy them merely feigned. They are all-important, and everybody
must attend to them. She announces to her women that she is pale, or
sick and sullen; they must lead her to her chamber but must not speak to
her. She is as strong and supple as a leopard, can drink down a master
of revelry, can raise her lover's helpless heavy body from the ground
into her tower with the aid only of two women; yet, when he is sitting
apart sunk in shame, she must be supported into his presence, she cannot
stand, her head droops, she will die (it is the opinion of Eros) unless
he comforts her. When she hears of his marriage and has discharged her
rage, she bids her women bear her away; she faints; at least she would
faint, but that she remembers various questions she wants put to the
Messenger about Octavia. Enobarbus has seen her die twenty times upon
far poorer moment than the news that Antony is going to Rome.
Some of her feelings are violent, and, unless for a purpose, she does
not dream of restraining them; her sighs and tears are winds and waters,
storms and tempests. At times, as when she threatens to give Charmian
bloody teeth, or hales the luckless Messenger up and down by the hair,
strikes him and draws her knife on him, she resembles (if I dare say it)
Doll Tearsheet sublimated. She is a mother; but the threat of Octavius
to destroy her children if she takes her own life passes by her like the
wind (a point where Shakespeare contradicts Plutarch). She ruins a great
man, but shows no sense of the tragedy of his ruin. The anguish of
spirit that appears in his language to his servants is beyond her; she
has to ask Enobarbus what he means. Can we feel sure that she would not
have sacrificed him if she could have saved herself by doing so? It is
not even certain that she did not attempt it. Antony himself believes
that she did--that the fleet went over to Octavius by her orders. That
she and her people deny the charge proves nothing. The best we can say
is that, if it were true, Shakespeare would have made that clear. She is
willing also to survive her lover. Her first thought, to follow him
after the high Roman fashion, is too great for her. She would live on if
she could, and would cheat her victor too of the best part of her
fortune. The thing that drives her to die is the certainty that she
will be carried to Rome to grace his triumph. That alone decides her.[6]
The marvellous thing is that the knowledge of all this makes hardly more
difference to us than it did to Antony. It seems to us perfectly
natural, nay, in a sense perfectly right, that her lover should be her
slave; that her women should adore her and die with her; that Enobarbus,
who foresaw what must happen, and who opposes her wishes and braves her
anger, should talk of her with rapture and feel no bitterness against
her; that Dolabella, after a minute's conversation, should betray to her
his master's intention and enable her to frustrate it. And when Octavius
shows himself proof against her fascination, instead of admiring him we
turn from him with disgust and think him a disgrace to his species. Why?
It is not that we consider him bound to fall in love with her. Enobarbus
did not; Dolabella did not; we ourselves do not. The feeling she
inspires was felt then, and is felt now, by women no less than men, and
would have been shared by Octavia herself. Doubtless she wrought magic
on the senses, but she had not extraordinary beauty, like Helen's, such
beauty as seems divine.[7] Plutarch says so. The man who wrote the
sonnets to the dark lady would have known it for himself. He goes out of
his way to add to her age, and tells us of her wrinkles and the waning
of her lip. But Enobarbus, in his very mockery, calls her a wonderful
piece of work. Dolabella interrupts her with the cry, 'Most sovereign
creature,' and we echo it. And yet Octavius, face to face with her and
listening to her voice, can think only how best to trap her and drag her
to public dishonour in the streets of Rome. We forgive him only for his
words when he sees her dead:
She looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
And the words, I confess, sound to me more like Shakespeare's than his.
That which makes her wonderful and sovereign laughs at definition, but
she herself came nearest naming it when, in the final speech (a passage
surpassed in poetry, if at all, only by the final speech of Othello),
she cries,
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
The fire and air which at death break from union with those other
elements, transfigured them during her life, and still convert into
engines of enchantment the very things for which she is condemned. I can
refer only to one. She loves Antony. We should marvel at her less and
love her more if she loved him more--loved him well enough to follow him
at once to death; but it is to blunder strangely to doubt that she loved
him, or that her glorious description of him (though it was also meant
to work on Dolabella) came from her heart. Only the spirit of fire and
air within her refuses to be trammelled or extinguished; burns its way
through the obstacles of fortune and even through the resistance of her
love and grief; and would lead her undaunted to fresh life and the
conquest of new worlds. It is this which makes her 'strong toil of
grace' unbreakable; speaks in her brows' bent and every tone and
movement; glorifies the arts and the rages which in another would merely
disgust or amuse us; and, in the final scenes of her life, flames into
such brilliance that we watch her entranced as she struggles for
freedom, and thrilled with triumph as, conquered, she puts her conqueror
to scorn and goes to meet her lover in the splendour that crowned and
robed her long ago, when her barge burnt on the water like a burnished
throne, and she floated to Cydnus on the enamoured stream to take him
captive for ever.[8]
Why is it that, although we close the book in a triumph which is more
than reconciliation, this is mingled, as we look back on the story, with
a sadness so peculiar, almost the sadness of disenchantment? Is it that,
when the glow has faded, Cleopatra's ecstasy comes to appear, I would
not say factitious, but an effort strained and prodigious as well as
glorious, not, like Othello's last speech, the final expression of
character, of thoughts and emotions which have dominated a whole life?
Perhaps this is so, but there is something more, something that sounds
paradoxical: we are saddened by the very fact that the catastrophe
saddens us so little; it pains us that we should feel so much triumph
and pleasure. In _Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, _Othello_, though in a
sense we accept the deaths of hero and heroine, we feel a keen sorrow.
We look back, think how noble or beautiful they were, wish that fate had
opposed to them a weaker enemy, dream possibly of the life they might
then have led. Here we can hardly do this. With all our admiration and
sympathy for the lovers we do not wish them to gain the world. It is
better for the world's sake, and not less for their own, that they
should fail and die. At the very first they came before us, unlike those
others, unlike Coriolanus and even Macbeth, in a glory already
tarnished, half-ruined by their past. Indeed one source of strange and
most unusual effect in their story is that this marvellous passion comes
to adepts in the experience and art of passion, who might be expected to
have worn its charm away. Its splendour dazzles us; but, when the
splendour vanishes, we do not mourn, as we mourn for the love of Romeo
or Othello, that a thing so bright and good should die. And the fact
that we mourn so little saddens us.
A comparison of Shakespearean tragedies seems to prove that the tragic
emotions are stirred in the fullest possible measure only when such
beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved
admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move
the agents, and the conflict which results from these forces, attain a
terrifying and overwhelming power. The four most famous tragedies
satisfy one or both of these conditions; _Antony and Cleopatra_, though
a great tragedy, satisfies neither of them completely. But to say this
is not to criticise it. It does not attempt to satisfy these conditions,
and then fail in the attempt. It attempts something different, and
succeeds as triumphantly as _Othello_ itself. In doing so it gives us
what no other tragedy can give, and it leaves us, no less than any
other, lost in astonishment at the powers which created it.
1905