Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Equal signs “=” before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold=
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS
AND THEIR BACKGROUND
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SHAKESPEARE’S
ROMAN PLAYS
AND THEIR BACKGROUND
BY
M. W. MACCALLUM
M.A., HON. LL.D., GLASGOW
PROFESSOR OF MODERN LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1910
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
TO
D. M. M·C.
“De Leev is Allens op de Welt,
Un de is blot bi di.”
PREFACE
Shakespeare’s Roman plays may be regarded as forming a group by
themselves, less because they make use of practically the same
authority and deal with similar subjects, than because they follow the
same method of treatment, and that method is to a great extent peculiar
to themselves. They have points of contact with the English histories,
they have points of contact with the free tragedies, but they are not
quite on a line with either class. It seems, therefore, possible and
desirable to discuss them separately.
In doing so I have tried to keep myself abreast of the literature
on the subject; which is no easy task when one lives at so great a
distance from European libraries, and can go home only on hurried and
infrequent visits. I hope, however, that there is no serious gap in the
list of authorities I have consulted.
The particular obligations of which I am conscious I have indicated
in detail. I should like, however, to acknowledge how much I owe
throughout to the late F. A. T. Kreyssig, to my mind one of the sanest
and most suggestive expositors that Shakespeare has ever had. I am
the more pleased to avow my indebtedness, that at present in Germany
Kreyssig is hardly receiving the learned, and in England has never
received the popular, recognition that is his due. It is strange that
while Ulrici’s metaphysical lucubrations and Gervinus’s somewhat
ponderous commentaries found their translators and their public,
Kreyssig’s purely humane and literary appreciations were passed over.
I once began to translate them myself, but “habent sua fata libelli,”
the time had gone by. It is almost exactly half a century ago since his
lectures were first published; and now there is so much that he would
wish to omit, alter, or amplify, that it would be unfair to present
them after this lapse of years for the first time to the English
public. All the same he has not lost his value, and precisely in
dealing with the English and the Roman histories he seems to me to be
at his best.
One is naturally led from a consideration of the plays to a
consideration of their background; their antecedents in the drama, and
their sources, direct and indirect.
The previous treatment of Roman subjects in Latin, French, and English,
is of some interest, apart from the possible connection of this or
that tragedy with Shakespeare’s masterpieces, as showing by contrast
the originality as well as the splendour of his achievement. For this
chapter of my Introduction I therefore offer no apology.
On the other hand the sketches of the three “ancestors” of
Shakespeare’s Roman histories, and especially of Plutarch, need perhaps
to be defended against the charge of irrelevancy.
In examining the plays, one must examine their relations with their
sources, and in examining their relations with their sources, one
cannot stop short at North, who in the main contributes merely the
final form, but must go back to the author who furnished the subject
matter. Perhaps, too, some of the younger students of Shakespeare may
be glad to have a succinct account of the man but for whom the Roman
plays would never have been written. Besides, Plutarch, so far as
I know, has not before been treated exactly from the point of view
that is here adopted. My aim has been to portray him mainly in those
aspects that made him such a power in the period of the Renaissance,
and gave him so great a fascination for men like Henry IV., Montaigne,
and, of course, above all, Shakespeare. For the same reason I have made
my quotations exclusively from Philemon Holland’s translation of the
_Morals_ (1st edition, 1603) and North’s translation of the _Lives_
(Mr. Wyndham’s reprint), as the Elizabethan versions show how he was
taken by that generation.
The essay on Amyot needs less apology. In view of the fact that he was
the immediate original of North, he has received in England far less
recognition than he deserves. Indeed he has met with injustice. English
writers have sometimes challenged his claim to have translated from the
Greek. To me it has had the zest of a pious duty to repeat and enforce
the arguments of French scholars which show the extreme improbability
of this theory. Unfortunately I have been unable to consult the Latin
version of 1470, except in a few transcripts from the copy in the
British Museum: but while admitting that a detailed comparison of
that with the Greek and the French would be necessary for the formal
completion of the proof, I think it has been made practically certain
that Amyot dealt with all his authors at first hand. At any rate he
is a man, who, by rendering Plutarch into the vernacular and in many
instances furnishing the first draught of Shakespeare’s phrases, merits
attention from the countrymen of Shakespeare.
Of North, even after Mr. Wyndham’s delightful and admirable study,
something remains to be said in supplement. And he too has hardly
had his rights. The _Morall Philosophie_ and the _Lives_ have been
reprinted, but the _Diall of Princes_ is still to be seen only in
the great libraries of Europe. A hurried perusal of it two years ago
convinced me that, apart from its historical significance, it was
worthy of a place among the _Tudor Translations_ and would help to
clear up many obscurities in Elizabethan literature.
I at first hoped to discuss in a supplementary section the treatment
of the Roman Play in England by Shakespeare’s younger contemporaries
and Caroline successors, and show that while in some specimens
Shakespeare’s reconciling method is still followed though less
successfully, while in some antiquarian accuracy is the chief aim, and
some are only to be regarded as historical romances, it ultimately
tended towards the phase which it assumed in France under the influence
of the next great practitioner, Corneille, who assimilated the
ancient to the modern ideal of Roman life as Shakespeare never did
and, perhaps fortunately, never tried to do. But certain questions,
especially in regard to the sources, are complicated, and, when
contemporary translations, not as yet reprinted, may have been used,
are particularly troublesome to one living so far from Europe. This
part of my project, therefore, if not abandoned, has to be deferred;
for it would mean a long delay, and I am admonished that what there is
to do must be done quickly.
I have complained of the lack of books in Australia, but before
concluding I should like to acknowledge my obligations to the
book-loving colonists of an earlier generation, to whose irrepressible
zeal for learning their successors owe access to many volumes that
one would hardly expect to see under the Southern Cross. Thus a 1599
edition of Plutarch in the University Library, embodying the apparatus
of Xylander and Cruserius, has helped me much in the question of
Amyot’s relations to the Greek. Thus, too, I was able to utilise,
among other works not easily met with, the first complete translation
of Seneca’s Tragedies (1581), in the collection of the late Mr. David
Scott Mitchell, a “clarum et venerabile nomen” in New South Wales.
May I, as a tribute of gratitude, inform my English readers that this
gentleman, after spending his life in collecting books and manuscripts
of literary and historical interest, which he was ever ready to place
at the disposal of those competent to use them, bequeathed at his death
his splendid library to the State, together with an ample endowment for
its maintenance and extension?
For much valuable help in the way of information and advice, my thanks
are due to my sometime students and present colleagues, first and
chiefly, Professor E. R. Holme, then Mr. C. J. Brennan, Mr. J. Le
Gay Brereton, Mr. G. G. Nicholson, Dr. F. A. Todd; also to Messrs.
Bladen and Wright of the Sydney Public Library for looking out books
and references that I required; to Mr. M. L. MacCallum for making
transcripts for me from books in the Bodleian Library; to Professor
Jones of Glasgow University for various critical suggestions; above
all to Professor Butler of Sydney University, who has pointed out to
me many facts which I might have overlooked and protected me from
many errors into which I should have fallen, and to Professor Ker of
University College, London, who has most kindly undertaken the irksome
task of reading through my proofs.
M. W. MACCALLUM
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY,
_27th April, 1909_.
CONTENTS
_INTRODUCTION_
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ROMAN PLAYS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 1
1. “Appius and Virginia.” The Translation of “Octavia” 2
2. The French Senecans 19
3. English Followers of the French School.
“The Wounds of Civil War” 44
II. SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF HISTORY 73
III. ANCESTRY OF SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS
1. Plutarch 95
2. Amyot 119
3. North 141
_JULIUS CAESAR_
I. POSITION OF THE PLAY BETWEEN THE HISTORIES AND THE
TRAGEDIES. ATTRACTION OF THE SUBJECT FOR SHAKESPEARE
AND HIS GENERATION. INDEBTEDNESS TO PLUTARCH 168
II. SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL 187
III. THE TITULAR HERO OF THE PLAY 212
IV. THE EXCELLENCES AND ILLUSIONS OF BRUTUS 233
V. THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF BRUTUS. PORTIA 255
VI. THE REMAINING CHARACTERS 275
_ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_
I. POSITION OF THE PLAY AFTER THE GREAT TRAGEDIES.
SHAKESPEARE’S INTEREST IN THE SUBJECT 300
II. _ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_, A HISTORY, TRAGEDY, AND LOVE
POEM; AS SHOWN BY ITS RELATIONS WITH PLUTARCH 318
III. THE ASSOCIATES OF ANTONY 344
IV. THE POLITICAL LEADERS 368
V. MARK ANTONY 391
VI. CLEOPATRA 413
VII. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 439
_CORIOLANUS_
I. POSITION OF THE PLAY BEFORE THE ROMANCES.
ITS POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC ASPECTS 454
II. PARALLELS AND CONTRASTS WITH PLUTARCH 484
III. THE GRAND CONTRAST. SHAKESPEARE’S CONCEPTION
OF THE SITUATION IN ROME 518
IV. THE KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS OF CORIOLANUS 549
V. THE GREATNESS OF CORIOLANUS. AUFIDIUS 571
VI. THE DISASTERS OF CORIOLANUS AND THEIR CAUSES 598
_APPENDICES_
A. NEAREST PARALLELS BETWEEN GARNIER’S _Cornélie_ IN THE
FRENCH AND ENGLISH VERSIONS AND _Julius Caesar_ 628
B. THE VERBAL RELATIONS OF THE VARIOUS VERSIONS OF
PLUTARCH, ILLUSTRATED BY MEANS OF VOLUMNIA’S SPEECH 631
C. SHAKESPEARE’S ALLEGED INDEBTEDNESS TO APPIAN IN
_Julius Caesar_ 644
D. SHAKESPEARE’S LOANS FROM APPIAN IN _Antony and Cleopatra_ 648
E. CLEOPATRA’S _One Word_ 653
F. THE “INEXPLICABLE” PASSAGE IN _Coriolanus_ 657
INDEX 660
_INTRODUCTION_
CHAPTER I
ROMAN PLAYS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Plays that dealt with the History of Rome were frequent on the
Elizabethan stage, and all portions of it were laid under contribution.
Subjects were taken from legends of the dawn like the story of
Lucretia, and from rumours of the dusk like the story of Lucina; from
Roman pictures of barbarian allies like Massinissa in the South, or
barbarian antagonists like Caractacus in the North; as well as from the
intimate records of home affairs and the careers of the great magnates
of the Republic or Empire. But these plays belong more distinctively
to the Stuart than to the Tudor section of the period loosely named
after Elizabeth, and few have survived that were composed before the
beginning of the seventeenth century. For long the Historical Drama
treated by preference the traditions and annals of the island realm,
and only by degrees did “the matter of Britain” yield its pride of
place to “the matter of Rome the Grand.” Moreover, the earlier Roman
Histories are of very inferior importance, and none of them reaches
even a moderate standard of merit till the production of Shakespeare’s
_Julius Caesar_ in 1600 or 1601. In this department Shakespeare had
not the light to guide him that he found for his English Histories in
Marlowe’s _Edward II._, or even in such plays as _The Famous Victories
of Henry V._ The extant pieces that precede his first experiment,
seem only to be groping their way, and it is fair to suppose that the
others which have been lost did no better. Their interest, in so far
as they have any interest at all, lies in the light they throw on the
gradual progress of dramatic art in this domain. And they illustrate
it pretty fully, and show it passing through some of the main general
phases that may be traced in the evolution of the Elizabethan Tragedy
as a whole. At the outset we have one specimen of the Roman play in
which the legitimate drama is just beginning to disengage itself from
the old Morality, and another in which the unique Senecan exemplar is
transformed rather than translated to suit the primitive art of the
time. Then we have several more artistic specimens deriving directly
or indirectly from the French imitators of Seneca, which were the most
dignified and intelligent the sixteenth century had to show. And lastly
we have a specimen of what the Roman play became when elaborated by the
scholar-playwrights for the requirements of the popular London stage.
A survey of these will show how far the ground was prepared for
Shakespeare by the traditions of this branch of the drama when he
turned to cultivate it himself.
1. APPIUS AND VIRGINIA. THE TRANSLATION OF OCTAVIA
The crudest if not the earliest of the series is entitled _A new
Tragicall Comedie of Apius and Virginia_, by R. B., initials which
have been supposed with some probability to stand for Richard Bower,
who was master of the Chapel Royal at Windsor in 1559. It was first
printed in 1575, but must have been written some years before. A
phrase it contains, “perhaps a number will die of the sweat,” has been
thought to refer to the prevalence of the plague in 1563, and it may
be identified with a play on the same subject that was acted at that
time by the boys of Westminster. At any rate several expressions show
beyond doubt that it was meant for representation, but only on the
old-fashioned scaffold which was soon to be out-of-date. Its character
and scope belong too, in part, to a bygone age. The prologue proclaims
its ethical intention with the utmost emphasis:
You lordings all that present be, this Tragidie to heare
Note well what zeale and loue heerein doth well appeare,
And, Ladies, you that linked are in wedlocke bandes for euer
Do imitate the life you see, whose fame will perish neuer:
But Uirgins you, oh Ladies fair, for honour of your name
Doo lead the life apparent heere to win immortall fame.[1]
It is written in commendation of chastity and rebuke of vice:
Let not the blinded God of Loue, as poets tearm him so,
Nor Venus with her venery, nor Lechors, cause of wo,
Your Uirgins name to spot or file: deare dames, obserue the life
That faire Verginia did obserue, who rather wish(ed) the knife
Of fathers hand hir life to ende, then spot her chastety.
As she did waile, waile you her want, you maids, of courtesie.
If any by example heere would shun that great anoy,[2]
Our Authour would rejoyce in hart, and we would leap for joy.
[1] Quotations taken, with a few obvious emendations, from Mr. Farmer’s
reproduction in the Tudor Facsimile Texts.
[2] The hurt of impurity, not of death.
No Moral Play could be more explicit in its lesson, and the Moral Play
has also suggested a large number of the personages. Conscience,
Justice, Rumour, Comfort, Reward, Doctrine, Memory, are introduced,
and some of them not only in scenes by themselves, but in association
with the concrete characters. Occasionally their functions are merely
figurative, and can be separated from the action that is supposed to
be proceeding: and then of course they hardly count for more than the
attributes that help to explain a statue. Thus, when Appius resolves to
pursue his ruthless purpose, he exclaims:
But out, I am wounded: how am I deuided!
Two states of my life from me are now glided:
and the quaint stage direction in the margin gives the comment: “Here
let him make as thogh he went out, and let Consience and Justice come
out of[3] him, and let Consience hold in his hande a Lamp burning, and
let Justice haue a sworde and hold it before Apius brest.” Thus, too,
another stage direction runs: “Here let Consience speake within:
‘Judge Apius, prince, oh stay, refuse: be ruled by thy friende:
What bloudy death with open shame did Torquin gaine in ende?’”
[3] Altered unnecessarily to _out after_ by Mr. Carew Hazlitt in his
edition of Dodsley’s _Old English Plays_. Appius’ words imply that the
two principles pass from his life, and the spectators are asked to
imagine that they actually see the process.
And he answers: “Whence doth this pinching sounde desende?” Here
clearly it is merely the voice of his own feelings objectified: and in
both instances the interference of the Abstractions is almost wholly
decorative; they add nothing to the reflections of Appius, but only
serve to emphasise them. This however is not always the case. They
often comport themselves in every respect like the real men and women.
Comfort stays Virginius from suicide till he shall see the punishment
of the wicked. Justice and Reward (that is, Requital) summoned by the
unjust judge to doom the father, pronounce sentence on himself. In the
end Virginius enters in company with Fame, Doctrina, and Memory.
Other of the characters, again, if more than general ideas, are less
than definite individuals. There is a sub-plot not at all interwoven
with the main plot, in which the class types, Mansipulus, Mansipula,
and their crony, Subservus, play their parts. With their help some
attempt is made at presenting the humours of vulgar life. They quarrel
with each other, but are presently reconciled in order to divert
themselves together, and put off the business of their master and
mistress, hoping to escape the punishment for their negligence by
trickery and good luck. But we do not even know who their master and
mistress are, and they come into no contact with either the historical
or the allegorical figures.
The only personage who finds his way into both compartments of the
“Tragicall Comedie” is Haphazard the Vice, who gives the story such
unity as it possesses. His name happily describes the double aspect of
his nature. On the one hand he stands for chance itself; on the other
for dependence on chance, the recklessness that relies on accident,
and trusts that all will end well though guilt has been incurred. In
this way he is both the chief seducer and the chief agent, alike of the
petty rogues and of the grand criminal. To the former he sings:
Then wend ye on and folow me, Mansipulus,[4] Mansipula,
Let croping cares be cast away; come folow me, come folow me:
Subseruus is a joly loute
Brace[5] Haphazard, bould blinde bayarde![6]
A figge for his uncourtesie that seekes to shun good company!
[4] Text, _Mansipula_.
[5] Altered by Hazlitt to “brave.” It probably means “embrace.”
[6] A horse that does not see where it is going.
To Appius’ request for advice he replies:
Well, then, this is my counsell, thus standeth the case,
Perhaps such a fetche as may please your grace:
There is no more wayes but _hap_ or _hap not_,
Either hap or els hapless, to knit up the knot:
And if you will hazard to venter what falles,
Perhaps that Haphazard will end all your thralles.
His distinctive note is this, that he tempts men by suggesting that
they may offend and escape the consequences. In the end he falls into
the pit that he has digged for others, and when his hap is to be
hanged, like a true Vice he accepts the _contretemps_ with jest and
jape.
Yet despite the stock-in-trade that it takes over from Morality or
Interlude, _Appius and Virginia_ has specialties of its own that were
better calculated to secure it custom in the period of the Renaissance.
The author bestows most care on the main story, and makes a genuine
attempt to bring out the human interest of the subject and the persons.
In the opening scene he tries, in his well-meaning way, to give the
impression of a home in which affection is the pervading principle, but
in which affection itself is not allowed to run riot, but is restrained
by prudence and obligation. Father, mother, and daughter sing a ditty
in illustration of this sober love or its reverse, and always return to
the refrain:
The trustiest treasure in earth, as we see,
Is man, wife, and children in one to agree;
Then friendly, and kindly, let measure be mixed
With reason in season, where friendship is fixed.
There is some inarticulate feeling for effect in the contrast between
the wholesomeness of this orderly family life and the incontinence
of the tyrant who presently seeks to violate it. And the dramatic
bent of the author—for it is no more than a bent—appears too in the
portraiture of the parties concerned. The mingled perplexity and dread
of Virginius, when in his consciousness of right he is summoned to the
court, are justly conceived; and there is magnanimity in his answer
to Appius’ announcement that he must give judgment “as justice doth
require”:
My lord, and reason good it is: your seruaunt doth request
No parciall hand to aide his cause, no parciall minde or brest.
If ought I haue offended you, your Courte or eke your Crowne,
From lofty top of Turret hie persupetat me downe:
If treason none by me be done, or any fault committed,
Let my accusers beare the blame, and let me be remitted.
Similarly, the subsequent conflict in his heart between fondness for
his daughter and respect for her and himself is clearly expressed. And
her high-spirited demand for death is tempered and humanised by her
instinctive recoil when he “proffers a blow”:
The gods forgeue thee, father deare! farewell: thy blow do bend—
Yet stay a whyle, O father deare, for fleash to death is fraile.
Let first my wimple bind my eyes, and then thy blow assaile,
Nowe, father, worke thy will on me, that life I may injoy.
But the most ambitious and perhaps the most successful delineation is
that of Appius. At the outset he is represented as overwhelmed by his
sudden yearning. Apelles, he thinks, was a “prattling fool” to boast of
his statue; Pygmalion was fond “with raving fits” to run mad for the
beauty of his work, for he could make none like Virginia. Will not the
Gods treat him as they treated Salmacis, when Hermophroditus, bathing
in the Carian fountain near the Lycian Marches, denied her suit?
Oh Gods aboue, bend downe to heare my crie
As once ye[7] did to Salmasis, in Pond hard Lyzia by:
Oh that Virginia were in case as somtime Salmasis,
And in Hermofroditus stede my selfe might seeke my blisse!
Ah Gods! would I unfold her armes complecting of my necke?
Or would I hurt her nimble hand, or yeelde her such a checke?
Would I gainsay hir tender skinne to baath where I do washe?
Or els refuse her soft sweete lippes to touch my naked fleshe?
Nay! Oh the Gods do know my minde, I rather would requier
To sue, to serue, to crouch, to kneele, to craue for my desier.
But out, ye Gods, ye bend your browes, and frowne to see me fare;
Ye do not force[8] my fickle fate, ye do not way my care.
Unrighteous and unequall Gods, unjust and eke unsure,
Woe worth the time ye made me liue, to see this haplesse houre.
This, we may suppose, is intended for a mad outbreak of voluptuous
passion, “the nympholepsy of some fond despair”; and, as such, it
is not very much worse than some that have won the applause of more
critical ages. It may suggest the style of the Interlude in the
_Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, or more forcibly, the “_King Cambyses’_
vein” that was then in vogue (for Preston’s play of that name,
published about a couple of years later than the probable date when
this was performed, is in every way the nearest analogue to _Appius
and Virginia_ that the history of our stage has to offer). But in
comparison with the normal flow of the Moralities, the lines have
undoubtedly a certain urgency and glow. And there are other touches
that betray the incipient playwright. Appius is not exhibited as a
mere monster; through all his life his walk has been blameless, and
he is well aware of his “grounded years,” his reputation as judge,
and the value of good report. He is not at ease in the course he now
adopts; there is a division in his nature, and he does not yield to his
temptation without forebodings and remorse.
Consience he pricketh me contempnèd,
And Justice saith, Judgement wold haue me condemned:
Consience saith, crueltye sure will detest me;[9]
And Justice saith, death in thend will molest me:
And both in one sodden, me thinkes they do crie
That fier eternall my soule shall destroy.
[7] In original, _he_.
[8] Heed.
[9] Make me detestable.
But he always comes back to the supreme fact of his longing for
Virginia:
By hir I liue, by hir I die, for hir I joy or woe,
For hir my soule doth sinke or swimme, for her, I swere, I goe.
And there are the potentialities of a really powerful effect in the
transition from his jubilant outburst when he thinks his waiting is at
an end:
O lucky light! lo, present heere hir father doth appeare,
to his misgivings when he sees the old man is unaccompanied:
O, how I joy! Yet bragge thou not. Dame Beuty bides behinde.
And immediately thereafter the severed head is displayed to his view.
Nor was R. B., whether or not he was Richard Bower, Master of the
Chapel children, quite without equipment for the treatment of a
classical theme, though in this respect as in others his procedure is
uncertain and fumbling in the highest degree. The typical personages of
the under-plot have no relish of Latinity save in the termination of
the labels that serve them as names, and they swear by God’s Mother,
and talk glibly of church and pews and prayer books, and a “pair of
new cards.” Even in the better accredited Romans of Livy’s story there
are anachronisms and incongruities. Appius, though ordinarily a judge,
speaks of himself as prince, king or kaiser; and references are made
to his crown and realm. Nevertheless the author is not without the
velleities of Humanism. He ushers in his prologue with some atrocious
Latin Elegiacs, which the opening lines of the English are obliging
enough to paraphrase:
Qui cupis aethereas et summas scandere sedes,
Vim simul ac fraudem discute, care, tibi.
Fraus hic nulla juvat, non fortia facta juvabunt:
Sola Dei tua te trahet tersa fides.
Cui placet in terris, intactae paludis[10] instar,
Vivere Virginiam nitere, Virgo, sequi:
Quos tulit et luctus, discas et gaudia magna,
Vitae dum parcae scindere fila parant.
Huc ades, O Virgo pariter moritura, sepulchro;
Sic ait, et facies pallida morte mutat.
Who doth desire the trump of fame to sound unto the skies,
Or els who seekes the holy place where mighty Joue he lies,
He must not by deceitfull mind, nor yet by puissant strength,
But by the faith and sacred lyfe he must it win at length;
And what[11] she be that virgins lyfe on earth wold gladly leade,
The fluds that Virginia did fall[12] I wish her reade,
Her doller and hir doleful losse and yet her joyes at death:
“Come, Virgins pure, to graue with me,” quoth she with latest breath.
[10] Professor Butler, to whom I am indebted for other emendations
of the passage, which is very corrupt in the printed text, suggests
_Palladis_, which gives a meaning, _the Virgin goddess_, and saves the
metre. But I am not sure that R. B. had any bigoted objection to false
quantities.
[11] _I.e._ “whoever.”
[12] Fall, causative; “the tears she copiously shed.”
In the same way there is throughout a lavish display of cheap boyish
erudition. Thus Virginius, reckoning up his services to Appius,
soliloquises:
In Mars his games, in marshall feates, thou wast his only aide,
The huge Carrebd his[13] hazards thou for him hast[14] ofte assaied.
Was Sillas force by thee oft shunde or yet Lady Circe’s[15] lande,
Pasiphae’s[16] childe, that Minnotaur, did cause thee euer stande?
[13] Charybdis.
[14] Original, _was_.
[15] So Hazlitt; in the original _Adrice_.
[16] In the original, _Lacefaer_.
We are here indeed on the threshold of a very different kind of art, of
which, in its application to Roman history, a sample had been submitted
to the English public two years previously in the _Octavia_ ascribed to
Seneca.
The Latin Tragedy, merely because it was Latin, and for that reason
within the reach of a far greater number of readers, was much better
known than the Greek at the period of the Renaissance. But apart from
its advantage in accessibility, it attracted men of that age not
only by its many brilliant qualities but by its very defects, its
tendency to heightened yet abstract portraiture, its declamation, its
sententiousness, its violence, its unrestfulness. It had both for
good and bad a more modern bearing than the masterpieces of Hellenic
antiquity, and in some ways it corresponded more closely with the
culture of the sixteenth century than with our own. It was therefore
bound to have a very decisive influence in shaping the traditions of
the later stage; and the collection of ten plays ascribed to Seneca,
the poor remainder of a numerous tribe that may be traced back to
the third century before Christ, furnished the pattern which critics
prescribed for imitation to all who would achieve the tragic crown.
And if this was true of the series as a whole, it was also true of the
play, which, whatever may be said of the other nine, is certainly not
by Seneca himself, the poorest of them all, with most of the faults and
few of the virtues of the rest, _Octavia_, the sole surviving example
of the _Fabula Praetexta_, or the Tragedy that dealt with native Roman
themes. The _Octavia_, however, was not less popular and influential
than its companions, and has even a claim to especial attention
inasmuch as it may be considered the remote ancestress of the Modern
Historic Play in general and of the Modern Roman Play in particular.
It inspired Mussato about 1300 to write in Latin his _Eccerinis_,
which deals with an almost contemporary national subject, the fate
of Ezzelino: it inspired the young Muretus about 1544 to write his
_Julius Caesar_, which in turn showed his countrymen the way to treat
such themes in French. Before eight years were over they had begun
to do so, and many were the Roman plays composed by the School of
Ronsard. Certainly Seneca’s method would suit the historical dramatist
who was not quite at home in his history, for of local colour and
visual detail it made small account, and indeed was hardly compatible
with them. And it would commend itself no less to men of letters who,
without much dramatic sympathy or aptitude, with no knowledge of stage
requirements, and little prospect of getting their pieces performed,
felt called upon _honoris causâ_ to write dramas, which one of the most
distinguished and successful among them was candid enough to entitle
not plays but treatises. It is worth while to have a clear idea of
the _Octavia_ from which in right line this illustrious and forgotten
progeny proceeded.
The date of the action is supposed to be 62 A.D. when Nero, who had for
some time wished to wed his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, and had murdered
his mother, partly on account of her opposition, divorced his virtuous
wife, his step-sister Octavia, and exiled her to Pandataria, where
shortly afterwards he had her put to death. The fact that Seneca is one
of the persons in the piece, and that there are anticipatory references
to Nero’s death, which followed Seneca’s compulsory suicide only after
an interval of three years, sufficiently disposes of the theory that
the philosopher himself was the author.
The text accepted in the sixteenth century suffered much, not only from
the corruption of individual expressions, but from the displacement
of entire passages. Greatly to its advantage it has been rearranged
by later editors, but in the following account, their conjectures,
generally happy and sometimes convincing, have been disregarded, as
they were unknown to Thomas Nuce, who rendered it into English in
1561. In his hands, therefore, it is more loosely connected than it
originally was, or than once more it has become for us; and something
of regularity it forfeits as well, for the dislocated framework led
him to regard it as a drama in only four acts. Despite these flaws in
his work he is a cleverer craftsman than many of his colleagues in
Senecan translation, whose versions of the ten tragedies, most of them
already published separately, were collected in a neat little volume in
1851.[17]
[17] It is from this that I quote. I have not been able to see either
the first edition or the reprint for the Spenser Society.
An original “argument” summarises the story with sufficient clearness.
Octauia, daughter to prince Claudius grace,
To Nero espousd, whom Claudius did adopt,
(Although Syllanus first in husbandes place
Shee had receiu’d, whom she for Nero chopt[18]),
Her parentes both, her Make that should have bene,
Her husbandes present Tiranny much more,
Her owne estate, her case that she was in,
Her brother’s death, (pore wretch), lamenteth sore.
Him Seneca doth persuade, his latter loue,
Dame Poppie, Crispyne’s wife that sometime was,
And eake Octauias maide, for to remoue.
For Senecks counsel he doth lightly passe[19]
But Poppie ioynes to him in marriage rites.
The people wood[20] unto his pallace runne,
His golden fourmed shapes[21]; which them sore spytes,
They pull to ground: this uprore, now begunne,
To quench, he some to griesly death doth send.
But her close cased up in dreadful barge,
With her unto Compania coast to wend
A band of armed men, he gave in charge.
This programme the play proceeds to fill in.
In the first act Octavia, unbosoming herself to her nurse, relieves her
heart of its woe and horror. She recounts the misfortunes of her house,
the atrocities of her lord, his infidelities to her, her detestation
of him. The nurse is full of sympathy, but admonishes her to patience,
consoling her with assurances of the people’s love, and reminding her
of the truancies that the Empress of Heaven had also to excuse in her
own husband and brother:
Now, madam, sith on earth your powre is pight
And haue on earth Queene Junos princely place,
And sister are and wyfe to Neroes grace,
Your wondrous restles dolours great appease.[22]
[18] Exchanged.
[19] Has small consideration.
[20] Mad.
[21] Statues.
[22]
Tu quoque terris altera Juno
Soror Augusti
coniunxque graves vince dolores. (Line 224, ed. Peiper & Richter).
This is now assigned to the chorus.
The chorus closes the act with a variation on the same themes, passing
from praises of Octavia’s purity and regrets for the ancient Roman
intolerance of wrong, to the contrasted picture of Nero’s unchallenged
malignity.
The second act commences with a monologue by Seneca on the growing
corruption of the age, which is interrupted by the approach of his
master in talk with the Prefect. His words, as he enters, are:
Dispatch with speede that we commaunded haue:
Go, send forthwith some one or other slaue,
That Plautius cropped scalpe, and Sillas eke,
May bring before our face: goe some man seeke.[23]
Seneca remonstrates, but his remonstrances are of no avail; and in
a long discussion in which he advocates a policy of righteousness
and goodwill and the sacredness of Octavia’s claims, he is equally
unsuccessful. The act, to which there is no chorus, concludes with
Nero’s determination to flout the wishes of the people and persist in
the promotion of Poppaea:
Why do we not appoynt the morrow next
When as our mariage pompe may be context?[24]
The third act is ushered in with one of those boding apparitions of
which the Senecan Tragedy is so fond. The shade of Agrippina rises, the
bridal torch of Nero and Poppaea in her hand:
Through paunch of riuened earth, from Plutoes raigne
With ghostly steps I am returnd agayne,
In writhled wristes, that bloud do most desyre,
Forguyding[25] wedlocke vyle with Stygian fire.[26]
[23]
Perage imperata: mitte qui Plauti mihi
Sillaeque caesi referat abscissum caput. (Line 449.)
[24]
Quin destinamus proximum thalamis diem? (Line 604.)
[25] Guiding to ruin.
[26]
Tellure rupta Tartaro gressum extuli
stygiam cruenta praeferens dextra facem
thalamis scelestis. (Line 605.)
She bewails her crimes on her son’s behalf and his parricidal
ingratitude, but vengeance will fall on him at last.
Although that Tyrant proude and scornful wight
His court with marble stone do strongly dyght,
And princelike garnish it with glistering golde:
Though troupes of soldiours, shielded sure, upholde
Their chieftaynes princely porch: and though yet still
The world drawne drye with taskes even to his will
Great heapes of riches yeeld, themselues to saue;
Although his bloudy helpe the Parthians craue,
And Kingdomes bring, and goods al that they haue;
The tyme and day shall come, when as he shall,
Forlorne, and quite undone, and wanting all,
Unto his cursed deedes his life, and more,
Unto his foes his bared throate restore.[27]
As she disappears, Octavia enters in conversation with the chorus, whom
she dissuades from the expression of sympathy for her distress lest
they should incur the wrath of the tyrant. On this suggestion they
denounce the supineness of the degenerate Romans in the vindication of
right, and exhort each other to an outbreak.
[27]
Licet extruat marmoribus atque auro tegat
superbus aulam, limen armatae ducis
servent cohortes, mittat immensas opes
exhaustus orbis, supplices dextram petant
Parthi cruentam, regna divitias ferant:
veniet dies tempusque quo reddat suis
animam nocentem sceleribus jugulum hostibus
desertus ac destructus et cunctis egens. (Line 636.)
In the fourth act, Poppaea, terrified by an ominous dream of Nero
stabbing her first husband, and of Agrippina, a firebrand in her grasp,
leading her down through the earth, rushes across the stage, but is
stayed by her nurse, who soothes and encourages her, and bids her
return to her bridal chamber. Yet it seems as though her worst fears
were at once to be realised. The chorus, acknowledging the charms of
the new Empress, is interrupted by the hurried arrival of a messenger.
He announces that the people are in uproar, overthrowing the statues of
Poppaea, and demanding the restitution of Octavia. But to what purpose?
The chorus sings that it is vain to oppose the resistless arms of love.
It is at least vain to oppose the arms of Nero’s soldiers. Confident in
their strength he enters, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter,
and expectant of a time when he will exact a full penalty from the
citizens:
Then shall their houses fall by force of fire;
What burning both, and buildings fayre decay,[28]
What beggarly want, and wayling hunger may,
Those villaines shall be sure to have ech day.[29]
Dreaming of the future conflagration, he is dissatisfied with the
prefect, who tells him that the insurrection has been easily quelled
with the death of one or two, and meanwhile turns all his wrath against
the innocent cause of the riot. The play does not, however, end with
the murder of Octavia. She informs the chorus that she is to be
dispatched in Agrippina’s death-ship to her place of exile,
But now no helpe of death I feele,
Alas I see my Brothers boate:
This is the same, whose vaulted keele
His Mother once did set a flote.
And now his piteous Sister I,
Excluded cleane from spousall place
Shall be so caried by and by;[30]
No force hath virtue in this case.[31]
[28] Destruction of fair buildings.
[29]
Mox tecta flammis concidant urbis meis,
ignes ruinae noxium populum premant
turpisque egestas saeva cum luctu fames. (Line 847.)
[30] At once.
[31]
Sed iam spes est nulla salutis:
fratris cerno miseranda ratem,
hac en cuius vecta carina
quondam genetrix
nunc et thalamis expulsa soror
miseranda vehar. (Line 926.)
And the final song of the chorus, with a touch of dramatic irony,
wishes her a prosperous voyage, and congratulates her on her removal
from the cruel city of Rome:
O pippling puffe of western wynde,
Which sacrifice didst once withstand,
Of Iphigen to death assignde:
And close in Cloude congealed clad
Did cary hir from smoking aares[32]
Which angry, cruell Virgin had;
This Prince also opprest with cares
Saue from this paynefull punishment
To Dian’s temple safely borne:
The barbarous Moores, to rudenesse bent,
Then[33] Princes Courtes in Rome forlorne
Haue farre more Cyuile curtesie:
For there doth straungers death appease
The angry Gods in heauens on hie,
But Romayne bloude our Rome must please.[34]
[32] Altars.
[33] Than.
[34]
Lenes aurae zephyrique leves
tectam quondam nube aetheria
qui vixistis raptam saevae
virginis aris Iphigeniam,
hanc quoque tristi procul a poena
portate precor templa ad Triviae.
Urbe est nostra mitior Aulis
et Maurorum {note} barbara tellus;
hospitis illic caede litatur
numen superum,
civis gaudet Roma cruore. (Line 1002.)
{note} Better reading, Taurorum.
There could be no greater contrast than between _Appius and Virginia_,
with its exits and entrances, its changefulness and bustle, its mixture
of the pompous and the farcical; and the monotonous declamation,
the dismissal of all action, the meagreness of the material in the
_Octavia_. And yet they are more akin than they at first sight appear.
Disregard the buffoonery which the mongrel “tragicall comedie”
inherited from the native stock, and you perceive traits that suggest
another filiation. The similarity with the Latin Play in its English
version is, of course, misleading, except in so far as it shows how
the Senecan drama must present itself to an early Elizabethan in
the light of his own crude art. The devices of the rhetorician were
travestied by those who knew no difference between rhetoric and rant,
and whose very rant, whether they tried to invent or to translate, was
clumsy and strained. Hence the “tenne tragedies” of Seneca and the
nearly contemporary Mixed Plays have a strong family resemblance in
style. In all of them save the _Octavia_ the resemblance extends from
diction to verse, for in dialogue and harangue they employ the trailing
fourteen-syllable measure of the popular play, while in the _Octavia_
this is discarded for the more artistic heroic couplet. In this and
other respects, T. N., as Nuce signs himself, is undoubtedly more at
his ease in the literary element than others of the group; nevertheless
he is often content to fly the ordinary pitch of R. B. This is most
obvious when their performances are read and compared as a whole, but
it is evident enough in single passages. The Nurse, for example, says
of Nero to Octavia:
Eft steppèd into servile Pallace stroke,
To filthy vices lore one easly broke,
Of Divelish wicked wit this Princocks proude,
By stepdames wyle prince Claudius Sonne auoude;
Whome deadly damme did bloudy match ylight,
And thee, against thy will, for feare did plight.[35]
[35] The original author has a right to complain:
Intravit hostis hei mihi captam domum
dolisque novercae principis factus gener
idemque natus iuvenis infandi ingeni
scelerum capacis dira cui genetrix facem
accendit et te iunxit invitam metu. (Line 155.)
These words might almost suit the mouths of Appius and his victims.
But leaving aside the affinities due to the common use of English
by writers on much the same plane of art, the London medley is not
immeasurably different from or inferior to the Roman _Praetexta_,
even when confronted with the latter in its native dress. In both the
characterisation is in the same rudimentary and obvious style, and
shows the same predilection for easily classified types. There is even
less genuine theatrical tact in the Latin than in the English drama.
The chief persons are under careful supervision and are kept rigidly
apart. Nero never meets Octavia or Poppaea, Poppaea and Octavia never
meet each other. No doubt there are some successful touches: the first
entrance of Nero is not ineffective; the equivocal hopefulness of the
last chorus is a thing one remembers: the insertion of Agrippina’s
prophecy and Poppaea’s dream does something to keep in view the future
requital and so to alleviate the thickening gloom. Except for these,
however, and a few other felicities natural to a writer with long
dramatic traditions behind him, the _Octavia_ strikes us as a series
of disquisitions and discussions, well-arranged, well-managed, often
effective, sometimes brilliant, that have been suggested by a single
impressive historical situation.
2. THE FRENCH SENECANS
These salient features are transmitted to the Senecan dramas of France,
except that the characterisation is even vaguer, the declamation
ampler, and the whole treatment less truly dramatic and more obviously
rhetorical; of which there is an indication in the greater relative
prominence of monologue as compared with dialogue, and in the excessive
predilection for general reflections,[36] many of them derived from
Seneca and Horace, but many of them too of modern origin.
[36] “Jodelle’s und Garnier’s Dramen sind reicher an Sentenzen als die
Seneca’s, Jodelle hat mehr als doppelt so viel.” _Gedankenkreis ...
in Jodelle’s und Garnier’s Tragödien_, by Paul Kahnt, who gives the
results of his calculations in an interesting table.
At the head of the list stands the _Julius Caesar_ of Muretus, a play
which, even if of far less intrinsic worth than can be claimed for
it, would always be interesting for the associations with which it is
surrounded.
Montaigne, after mentioning among his other tutors “Marc Antoine
Muret,” que le France et l’Italie recognoist pour le meilleur orateur
du temps, goes on to tell us: “J’ay soustenu les premiers personnages
ez tragedies latines de Buchanan, de Guerente et de Muret, qui se
representerent en nostre college de Guienne avecques dignité: en cela,
Andreas Goveanus, nostre principal, comme en toutes aultres parties de
sa charge, feut sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France; et
m’en tenoit on maistre ouvrier.”
The _Julius Caesar_ written in 1544 belongs to the year before
Montaigne left Bordeaux at the age of thirteen, so he may have taken
one of the chief parts in it, Caesar, or M. Brutus, or Calpurnia.
This would always give us a kind of personal concern in Muret’s short
boyish composition of barely 600 lines, which he wrote at the age of
eighteen and afterwards published only among his _Juvenilia_. But it
has an importance of its own. Of course it is at the best an academic
experiment, though from Montaigne’s statement that these plays were
presented “avecques dignité,” and from the interest the principal took
in the matter, we may suppose that the performance would be exemplary
in its kind. Of course, too, even as an academic experiment it does
not, to modern taste, seem on the level of the more elaborate tragedies
which George Buchanan, “ce grand poëte ecossois,” as Montaigne
reverently styles his old preceptor, had produced at the comparatively
mature age of from thirty-three to thirty-six, ere leaving Bordeaux two
years before. It is inferior to the _Baptistes_ and far inferior to
the _Jephthes_ in precision of portraiture and pathos of appeal. But
in the sixteenth century, partly, no doubt, because the subject was
of such secular importance and the treatment so congenial to learned
theory, but also, no doubt, because the eloquence was sometimes so
genuinely eloquent, and the Latin, despite a few licenses in metre and
grammar, so racy of the classic soil, it obtained extraordinary fame
and exercised extraordinary influence. For these reasons, as well as
the additional one that it is now less widely known than it ought to
be, a brief account of it may not be out of place.
The first act is entirely occupied with a soliloquy by Caesar, in which
he represents himself as having attained the summit of earthly glory.
Let others at their pleasure count their triumphs, and name
themselves from vanquished provinces. It is more to be
called Caesar: whoso seeks fresh titles elsewhere, takes
something away thereby. Would you have me reckon the regions
conquered under my command? Enumerate all there are.[37]
Even Rome has yielded to him, even his great son-in-law admitted his
power,
and whom he would not have as an equal, he has borne as a
superior.[38]
[37]
Numerent triumphos, cum volent, alii suos,
Seque {note} subactis nominent provinciis.
Plus est vocari Caesarem; quisquis novos
Aliunde titulos quaerit, is jam detrahit:
Numerare ductu vis meo victas plagas?
Percurrito omnes.
{note} Insert _ex_.
[38]
quemque noluerat parem,
Tulit priorem.
What more is to be done?
My quest must be heaven, earth is become base to me....
Now long enough have I lived whether for myself or for my
country.... The destruction of foes, the gift of laws to
the people, the ordering of the year, the restoration of
splendour to worship, the settlement of the world,—than
these, greater things can be conceived by none, nor pettier
be performed by me.... When life has played the part
assigned to it, death never comes in haste and sometimes too
late.[39]
[39]
Coelum petendum est: terra jam vilet mihi....
Jam vel mihi, vel patriae vixi satis....
Hostes perempti, civibus leges datae,
Digestus annus, redditus sacris nitor,
Compostus orbis, cogitari nec queunt
Majora cuiquam, nec minora a me geri....
Cum vita partes muneris functa est sui,
Mors propera nunquam, sera nonnunquam venit.
The chorus sings of the immutability of fortune.
In the second act Brutus, in a long monologue, upbraids himself with
his delay.
Does the virtue of thy house move thee nought, and nought
the name of Brutus? Nought, the hard lot of thy groaning
country, crushed by the tyrant and calling for thine aid?
Nought the petitions in which the people lament that Brutus
comes not to champion the state? If these things fail to
touch thee, thy wife now gives thee rede enough that thou
be a man; who has pledged her faith to thee in blood, thus
avouching herself the offspring of thine uncle.[40]
[40]
Nihilne te virtus tuorum commovet,
Nomenque Bruti? nihil {note} gementis patriae,
Pressae a tyranno, opemque poscentis tuam
Conditio dura? nil libelli supplices,
Queis Brutum abesse civitatis vindicem
Cives queruntur? Haec parum si te movent,
Tua jam, vir ut sis, te satis conjux monet,
Fidem cruore quae tibi obstrinxit suam.
Testata sic se avunculi prolem tui.
{note} Certainly read _nil_.
He raises and meets the objections which his understanding offers:
Say you he is not king but dictator? If the thing be
the same, what boots a different name? Say you he shuns
that name, and rejects the crowns they proffer him: this
is pretence and mockery, for why then did he remove the
tribunes? True, he gave me dignities and once my life; with
me my country outweighs them all. Whoso shows gratitude to
a tyrant against his country’s interest, is ingrate while he
seeks to be stupidly grateful.[41]
And his conclusion is
The sun reawakening to life saw the people under the yoke, and
slaves: at his setting may he see them free.[42]
To him enters Cassius exultant that the day has arrived, impatient for
the decisive moment, scarce able to restrain his eagerness. Only one
scruple remains to him; should Antony be slain along with his master?
Brutus answers:
Often already have I said that my purpose is this,
to destroy tyranny but save the citizens.
_Cass._ Then let it be destroyed from its deepest roots, lest if
only cut down, it sprout again at some time hereafter.
_Brut._ The whole root lurks under a single trunk.
_Cass._ Think’st thou so? I shall say no more. Thy will
be done: we all follow thy guidance.[43]
[41]
At vero non rex iste, sed dictator est.
Dum res sit una, quid aliud nomen juvat?
At nomen illud refugit, et oblatas sibi
Rejicit coronas. Fingere hoc et ludere est.
Nam cur Tribunos igitur amovit loco?
At mihi et honores et semel vitam dedit.
Plus patria illis omnibus apud me potest.
Qui se tyranno in patriam gratum exhibet,
Dum vult inepte gratus esse, ingratus est.
[42]
Phoebus renascens subditos cives jugo,
Servosque vidit: liberos videat cadens.
[43]
Jam saepe dixi, id esse consilium mihi,
Salvis perimere civibus tyrannida.
_Cass._ Perimatur ergo ab infimis radicibus,
Ne quando posthac caesa rursum pullulet.
_Bru._ Latet sub uno tota radix corpore.
_Cass._ Itan’ videtur? amplius nil proloquar.
Tibi pareatur; te sequimur omnes ducem.
The chorus sings the glories of those who, like Harmodius with his
“amiculus,” destroy the tyrants, and the risks these tyrants run.
In the third act Calpurnia, flying in panic to her chamber, is met by
her nurse, to whom she discloses the cause of her distress. She has
dreamed that Caesar lies dead in her arms covered with blood, and
stabbed with many wounds. The nurse points out the vanity of dreams and
the unlikelihood of any attempt against one so great and beneficent,
whose clemency has changed even foes to friends. Calpurnia, only half
comforted, rejoins that she will at least beseech him to remain at home
that day, and the chorus prays that misfortune may be averted.
In the fourth act Calpurnia tries her powers of persuasion. To her
passionate appeal, her husband answers:
What? Dost thou ask me to trust thy dreams?
_Cal._ No; but to concede something to my fear.
_Caes._ But that fear of thine rests on dreams alone.
_Cal._ Assume it to be vain; grant something to thy wife.[44]
She goes on to enumerate the warning portents, and at length Caesar
assents to her prayers since she cannot repress her terrors. But here
Decimus Brutus strikes in:
High-hearted Caesar, what word has slipped from thee?[45]
He bids him remember his glory:
O most shameful plight if the world is ruled by Caesar and
Caesar by a woman.... What, Caesar, dost thou suppose the
Fathers will think if thou bidst them, summoned at thy
command, to depart now and to return when better dreams
present themselves to Calpurnia. Go rather resolutely and
assume a name the Parthians must dread: or if this please
thee not, at least go forth, and thyself dismiss the
Fathers; let them not think they are slighted and had in
derision.[46]
[44]
Quid? Somniis me credere tuis postulas?
_Cal._ Non: sed timori ut non nihil tribuas meo.
_Caes._ At iste solis nititur somniis timor.
_Cal._ Finge esse vanum: tribuito aliquid conjugi.
[45]
Magnanime Caesar, quod tibi verbum excidit?
[46]
O statum deterrimum,
Si Caesar orbem, Caesarem mulier regit!...
Quid, Caesar, animi patribus credis fore,
Si te jubente convocatos jusseris
Abire nunc, redire, cum Calpurniae
Meliora sese objecerint insomnia?
Vade potius constanter, et nomen cape
Parthis timendum; aut, hoc minus si te juvat,
Prodito saltem, atque ipse patres mittito:
Ne negligi se, aut ludibrio haberi putent.
Caesar is bent one way by pity for his wife, another by fear of these
taunts; but, at last, leaving Calpurnia to her misgivings, he exclaims:
But yet, since even to fall, so it be but once, is better
than to be laden with lasting fear; not if three hundred
prophet-voices call me back, not if with his own voice the
present Deity himself warn me of the peril and urge my
staying here, shall I refrain.[47]
The chorus cites the predictions of Cassandra to show that it would
sometimes be wise to follow the counsel of women.
In the fifth act Brutus and Cassius appear in triumph.
_Brut._ Breathe, citizens; Caesar is slain!... In the Senate
which he erewhile overbore, he lies overborne.
_Cass._ Behold, Rome, the sword yet warm with blood, behold
the hand that hath championed thine honour. That
loathsome one who in impious frenzy and blind rage
had troubled thee and thine, sore wounded by this same
hand, by this same sword which thou beholdest, and
gashed in every limb, hath spewed forth his life in
a flood of gore.[48]
[47]
Sed tamen quando semel
Vel cadere praestat, quam metu longo premi;
Non si tracentis vocibus vatum avocer,
Non si ipse voce propria praesens Deus
Moneat pericli, atque hic manendum suadeat,
Me continebo.
[48]
_Brut._ Spirate cives! Caesar interfectus est....
In curia, quam oppresserat, oppressus jacet.
_Cass._ En, Roma, gladium adhuc tepentem sanguine;
En dignitatis vindicem dextram tuae.
Impurus ille, qui furore nefario,
Rabieque caeca, te et tuos vexaverat,
Hac, hac manu, atque hoc, hocce gladio, quem vides,
Consauciatus, et omnibus membris lacer
Undam cruoris, et animum evomuit simul.
As they leave, Calpurnia enters bewailing the truth of her dream, and
inviting to share in her laments the chorus, which denounces vengeance
on the criminals. Then the voice of Caesar is heard in rebuke of their
tears and in comfort of their distress. Only his shadow fell, but he
himself is joined to the immortals.
Weep no more: it is the wretched that tears befit. Those
who assailed me with frantic mind—a god am I, and true is
my prophecy—shall not escape vengeance for their deed. My
sister’s grandson, heir of my virtue as of my sceptre, will
require the penalty as seems good to him.[49]
[49]
Desinite flere: lacrymae miseros decent.
Qui me furenti, (vera praemoneo Indiges)
Sunt animo adorti, non inultum illud ferent.
Heres meae virtutis, ut sceptri mei,
Nepos sororis, arbitratu pro suo
Poenos reposcet.
Calpurnia recognises the voice, and the chorus celebrates the bliss of
the “somewhat” that is released from the prison house of the body.
It is interesting to note that Muretus already employs a number of the
_motifs_ that reappear in Shakespeare. Thus he gives prominence to the
self-conscious magnanimity of Caesar: to the temporary hesitation of
Brutus, with his appeal to his name and the letters that are placed in
his way; to his admiration for the courage and constancy of Portia; to
his final whole-heartedness and disregard of Caesar’s love for him; to
his prohibition of Mark Antony’s death; to Cassius’ vindictive zeal and
eager solicitation of his friend; to Calpurnia’s dream, and the contest
between her and Decimus Brutus and in Caesar’s own mind; to Caesar’s
fatal decision in view of his honour, and his rejection of the fear of
death; to the exultation of Brutus and Cassius as they enter with their
blood-stained swords after the deed is done. And more noticeable than
any of these details, are the divided admiration and divided sympathy
the author bestows both on Brutus and Caesar—which are obvious even
in the wavering utterances of the chorus. We are far removed from the
times when Dante saw Lucifer devouring Brutus and Cassius in two of
his mouths with Judas between them; or when Chaucer, making a composite
monster of the pair, tells how “false Brutus-Cassius,”
“That ever hadde of his hye state envye,”
“stikede” Julius with “boydekins.” But we are equally far from the
times when Marie-Joseph Chénier was to write his tragedy of _Brutus et
Cassius, Les Derniers Romains_. At the renaissance the characteristic
feeling was enthusiasm for Caesar and his assassin alike, though it was
Shakespeare alone who knew how to reconcile the two points of view.[50]
Of the admiration which Muret’s little drama excited there is
documentary proof. Prefixed to it are a number of congratulatory
verses, and among the eulogists are not only scholars, like
Buchanan,[51] but literary men, members of the Pléiade—Dorât, Baïf,
and especially Jodelle, who has his complimentary conceits on the
appropriateness of the author’s name, Mark Antony, to the feat he has
accomplished.
[50] I am quite unable to agree with Herr Collischonn’s view that
Muret’s play is more republican in sentiment than that of Grévin.
In both there is some discrepancy and contradiction, but with
Muret, Caesar is a more prominent figure than Brutus, taking part
in three scenes, if we include his intervention after death, while
Brutus appears only in two, and to my mind Caesar makes fully as
sympathetic an impression. On the other hand, the alleged monarchic
bias of Grévin’s work cannot be considered very pronounced, when,
as M. Faguet mentions in his _Tragédie française au XVIͤ Siècle_,
“it was reprinted in the time of Ravaillac with a preface violently
hostile to the principle of monarchy.” But see Herr Collischonn’s
excellent introduction to his _Grevin’s Tragödie “Caesar,” Ausgaben und
Abhandlungen, etc., LII_.
[51] See Ruhnken’s edition of Muretus. For the text I have generally
but not always used Collischonn’s reprint.
But this last testimony leads us to the less explicit but not less
obvious indications of the influence exercised by Muret’s tragedy which
appear in the subsequent story of literary production. This influence
was both indirect and direct. The example of this modern Latin play
could not but count for something when Jodelle took the further step
of treating another Roman theme in the vernacular. In the vernacular,
too, Grévin was inspired to rehandle the same theme as Muretus,
obtaining from his predecessor most of his material and his apparatus.
These experiments again were not without effect on the later dramas of
Garnier, two of which were to leave a mark on English literature.
The first regular tragedy as well as the first Roman history in the
French language was the _Cléopatre Captive_ of Jodelle, acted with
great success in 1552 before Henry II. by Jodelle’s friends, who at
the subsequent banquet presented to him, in semi-pagan wise, a goat
decked with flowers and ivy. The prologue[52] to the King describes the
contents.
“C’est une tragedie
Qui d’une voix plaintive et hardie
Te represente un Romain, Marc Antoine,
Et Cleopatre, Egyptienne royne,
Laquelle après qu’Antoine, son amy,
Estant desjà vaincu par l’ennemy,
Se fust tué, ja se sentant captive,
Et qu’on vouloit la porter toute vive
En un triomphe avecques ses deux femmes,
S’occit. Icy les desirs et les flammes
De deux amants: d’Octavian aussi
L’orgueil, l’audace et le journel soucy
De son trophée emprains tu sonderas.”
But this programme conveys an impression of greater variety and
abundance than is justified by the piece. In point of fact it begins
only after the death of Antony, who does not intervene save as a ghost
in the opening scene, to bewail his offences and announce that in a
dream he has bid Cleopatra join him before the day is out.[53] Nor do
we hear anything of “desirs et flammes” on his part; rather he resents
her seductions, and has summoned her to share his torments:
[52] _Ancien Théatre François_, Tome IV. ed Viollet Le Duc.
[53] As he puts it, rather comically to modern ears:
‘Avant que ce soleil qui vient ores de naistre,
Ayant tracé son jour, _chez sa tante se plonge_.’
Or se faisant compagne en ma peine et tristesse
Qui s’est faite longtemps compagne en ma liesse.
The sequel does little more than describe how his command is carried
out. Cleopatra enters into conversation with Eras and Charmium, and
despite their remonstrances resolves to obey. The chorus sings of the
fickleness of fortune: (Act I.). Octavianus, after a passing regret
for Antony, arranges with Proculeius and Agrippa to make sure of her
presence at his triumph. The chorus sings of the perils of pride:
(Act II.). Octavianus visits the Queen, dismisses her excuses, but
grants mercy to her and her children, and pardons her deceit when her
retention of her jewellery is exposed by Seleucus. But Seleucus is
inconsolable for his offence as well as his castigation, and exclaims:
Lors que la royne, et triste et courageuse,
Devant Cesar aux chevaux m’a tiré,
Et de son poing mon visage empiré,
S’elle m’eust fait mort en terre gesir,
Elle eust preveu à mon present desir,
Veu que la mort n’eust point esté tant dure
Que l’eternelle et mordante pointure
Qui jà desjà jusques au fond me blesse
D’avoir blessé ma royne et ma maistresse.
The chorus oddly enough discovers in her maltreatment of the
tale-bearer a proof of her indomitable spirit, and an indication that
she will never let herself be led to Rome: (Act III.). Cleopatra now
explains that her submission was only feigned to secure the lives
of her children, and that she herself has no thought of following
the conqueror’s car. Eras and Charmium approve, and all three depart
to Antony’s tomb to offer there a last sacrifice, which the chorus
describes in full detail: (Act IV.). Proculeius in consternation
announces the sequel:
“J’ay veu (ô rare et miserable chose!)
Ma Cleopatre en son royal habit
Et sa couronne, au long d’un riche lict
Peint et doré, blesme et morte couchée,
Sans qu’elle fust d’aucun glaive touchée,
Avecq Eras, sa femme, à ses pieds morte,
Et Charmium vive, qu’en telle sorte
J’ay lors blasmée: ‘A a! Charmium, est-ce
Noblement faict?’ ‘Ouy, ouy, c’est de noblesse
De tant de rois Egyptiens venuë
Un tesmoignage.’ Et lors, peu soustenuë
En chancelant et s’accrochant en vain,
Tombe a l’envers, restans un tronc humain.”
The chorus celebrates the pitifulness and glory of her end, and the
supremacy of Caesar: (Act _V._).
Thus, despite the promises of the prologue, the play resolves itself to
a single _motif_, the determination of Cleopatra to follow Antony in
defiance of Octavianus’ efforts to prevent her. Nevertheless, simple as
it is, it fails in real unity. The ghost of Antony, speaking, one must
suppose, the final verdict, pronounces condemnation on her as well as
himself; yet in the rest of the play, even in the undignified episode
with Seleucus, Jodelle bespeaks for her not only our sympathy but our
admiration. It is just another aspect of this that Antony treats her
death as the beginning of her punishment, but to her and her attendants
and the women of Alexandria it is a desirable release. The recurrent
theme of the chorus, varied to suit the complexion of the different
acts, is always the same:
Joye, qui dueil enfante
Se meurdrist; puis la mort,
Par la joye plaisante,
Fait au deuil mesme tort.
Half a dozen years later, in 1558, the _Confrères de la Passion_ were
acting a play which Muretus had more immediately prompted, and which
did him greater credit. This was the _Cesar_ of Jacques Grévin, a young
Huguenot gentlemen who, at the age of twenty, recast in French the
even more juvenile effort of the famous scholar, expanding it to twice
the size, introducing new personages, giving the old ones more to do,
and while borrowing largely in language and construction, shaping it
to his own ends and making it much more dramatic. Indeed, his tragedy
strikes one as fitter for the popular stage than almost any other of
its class, and this seems to have been felt at the time, for besides
running through two editions in 1561 and 1562, it was reproduced by
the _Confrères_ with great success in the former year. Of course its
theatrical merit is only relative, and it does not escape the faults
of the Senecan school. Grévin styles his _dramatis personae_ rather
ominously and very correctly “entre-parleurs”; for they talk rather
than act. They talk, moreover, in long, set harangues even when they
are conversing, and Grévin so likes to hear them that he sometimes lets
the story wait. Nor do they possess much individuality or concrete
life. But the young author has passion; he has fire; and he knows the
dramatic secret of contrasting different moods and points of view.
He follows his exemplar most closely, and often literally, in the
first three acts, though even in them he often goes his own way. Thus,
after Caesar’s opening soliloquy, which is by no means so Olympian
as in Muret, he introduces Mark Antony, who encourages his master
with reminders of his greatness and assurances of his devotion. In
the second act, after Marcus Brutus’ monologue, not only Cassius but
Decimus has something to say, and there is a quicker interchange of
statement and rejoinder than is usual in such a play. In the third
act, the third and fourth of Muretus are combined, and after the
conversation of Calpurnia with the Nurse, there follow her attempts
to dissuade her husband from visiting the senate house, the hesitation
of Caesar, the counter-arguments of Decimus; and in conclusion, when
Decimus has prevailed, the Nurse resumes her endeavours at consolation.
The fourth act is entirely new, and gives an account of the
assassination by the mouth of a Messenger, who is also a new person, to
the distracted Calpurnia and her sympathetic Nurse. In the fifth Grévin
begins by returning to his authority in the jubilant speeches of Brutus
and Cassius, but one by Decimus is added; and rejecting the expedient
of the ghostly intervention, he substitutes, much more effectively,
that of Mark Antony, who addresses the chorus of soldiers, rouses them
to vengeance, and having made sure of them, departs to stir up the
people.
Altogether a creditable performance, and a distinct improvement on the
more famous play that supplied the groundwork. One must not be misled
by the almost literal discipleship of Grévin in particular passages, to
suppose that even in language he is a mere imitator. The discipleship
is of course undeniable. Take Brutus’ outburst:
Rome effroy de ce monde, exemple des provinces,
Laisse la tyrannie entre les mains des Princes
Du Barbare estranger, qui honneur luy fera,
Non pas Rome, pendant que Brute vivera.
And compare:
Reges adorent barbarae gentes suos,
Non Roma mundi terror, et mundi stupor.
Vivente Bruto, Roma reges nesciet.
So, too, after the murder Brutus denounces his victim:
Ce Tyran, ce Cesar, ennemi du Senat....
Ce bourreau d’innocens, ruine de nos loix,
La terreur des Romains, et le poison des droicts.
The lines whence this extract is taken merely enlarge Muretus’ conciser
statement:
Ille, ille, Caesar, patriae terror suae,
Hostis senatus, innocentium carnifex,
Legum ruina, publici jures lues.
But generally Grévin is more abundant and more fervid even when he
reproduces most obviously, and among the best of his purple patches are
some that are quite his own. He indeed thought differently. He modestly
confesses:
Je ne veux pourtant nier que s’il se trouve quelque traict
digne estre loué, qu’il ne soit de Muret, lequel a esté mon
precepteur quelque temps es lettres humaines, et auquel je
donne le meilleur comme l’ayant appris de luy.
All the same there is nothing in Muretus like the passage in which
Brutus promises himself an immortality of fame:
Et quand on parlera de Cesar et de Romme,
Qu’on se souvienne aussi qu’il a esté un homme,
Un Brute, le vangeur de toute cruauté,
Qui aura d’un seul coup gaigné la liberté.
Quand on dira, Cesar fut maistre de l’empire,
Qu’on die quant-et-quant, Brute le sceut occire.
Quand on dira, Cesar fut premier Empereur,
Qu’on die quant-et-quant, Brute en fut le vangeur.
Ainsi puisse a jamais sa gloire estre suyvie
De celle qui sera sa mortelle ennemie.
Grévin’s tragedy had great vogue, was preferred even to those of
Jodelle, and was praised by Ronsard, though Ronsard afterwards
retracted his praises when Grévin broke with him on religious grounds.
His protestantism, however, would be a recommendation rather than
otherwise in England, and one would like to know whether some of
the lost English pieces on the same subject owed anything to the
French drama. The suggestion has even been made that Shakespeare was
acquainted with it. There are some vague resemblances in particular
thoughts and phrases,[54] the closest of which occurs in Caesar’s
pronouncement on death:
Il vault bien mieux mourir
Asseuré de tout poinct, qu’incessament perir
Faulsement par la peur.
[54] Enumerated by Collischonn in his excellent edition, see above. He
has, however, overlooked the one I give.
This suggests:
Cowards die many times before their deaths:
The valiant never taste of death but once.
(II. ii. 32.)
Herr Collischonn also draws attention to a coincidence in situation
that is not derived from Plutarch. When the conspirators are discussing
the chances of Caesar’s attending the senate meeting, Cassius says:
Encore qu’il demeure
Plus long temps à venir, si fault il bien qu’il meure:
and Decimus answers:
Je m’en vay au devant, sans plus me tormenter,
Et trouveray moyen de le faire haster.
It is at least curious to find the same sort of addition, in the same
circumstances and with the same speakers in Shakespeare.
_Cassius._ But it is doubtful yet,
Whether Caesar will come forth to-day, or no....
_Dec. Brut._ Never fear that: if he be so resolved,
I can o’ersway him....
For I can give his humour the true bent
And I will bring him to the Capitol.
(II. i. 194, 202, 210.)
Such _minutiae_, however, are far from conclusive, especially since, as
in the two instances quoted, which are the most significant, Plutarch,
though he did not authorise, may at any rate have suggested them. The
first looks like an expansion of Caesar’s remark when his friends
were discussing which death was the best: “Death unlooked for.” The
second follows as a natural dramatic anticipation of the part that
Decimus actually played in inducing Caesar to keep tryst. They may
very well have occurred independently to both poets; or, if there be
a connection, may have been transmitted from the older to the younger
through the medium of some forgotten English piece. There is more
presumptive evidence that Grévin influenced the _Julius Caesar_ of Sir
William Alexander, Earl of Stirling; but Stirling’s paraphrase of his
authorities is so diffuse that they are not always easy to trace. His
apparent debts to Grévin may really be due to the later and much more
famous French Senecan Garnier, two of whose works have an undoubted
though not very conspicuous place in the history of the English Drama
generally, and especially of the Roman Play in England.
_Cornélie_, the earlier and less successful of the pair, written in
Garnier’s twenty-eighth year, was performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne
in 1573, and was published in 1574. The young author was not altogether
unpractised in his art, for already in 1568 he had written a drama
on the subject of Portia, but he has not yet advanced beyond his
predecessors, and like them, or perhaps more obviously than they, is
at the stage of regarding the tragedy “only as an elegy mixed with
rhetorical expositions.” The episode that he selected lent itself to
such treatment.
Cornelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, had after the loss of her
first husband, the younger Cassius, become the wife of Pompey the
Great, of whose murder she was an eye-witness. Meanwhile her father
still made head against Caesar in Africa, and the play deals with
her regrets and suspense at Rome till she learns the issue of this
final struggle. In the first act Cicero soliloquises on the woes of
the country, which he traces to her lust of conquest; and the chorus
takes up the burden at the close. In the second Cornelia bewails her
own miseries, which she attributes to her infidelity in marrying
again: Cicero tries to comfort her and she refuses his comfort, both
in very long harangues; and the chorus describes the mutability of
mortal things. In the third act she narrates an ominous dream in which
the shade of Pompey has visited her. Scarcely has she left the stage
when Cicero enters to announce the triumph of Caesar and the death of
Scipio. Cornelia re-enters to receive the urn with Pompey’s ashes, the
sight of which stirs her to new laments for herself and imprecations
against Caesar. The chorus dwells on the capriciousness of fortune. In
the fourth act the resentment against Caesar is emphasised by Cassius
in discourse with Decimus Brutus, and the chorus sings of Harmodios and
Aristogeiton; but after that Caesar and Antony come in and discuss the
means to be taken for Caesar’s safety, Antony advocating severity and
caution, Caesar leniency and confidence. This act is closed by a chorus
of Caesar’s friends, who celebrate his services and virtues. The fifth
act is chiefly occupied with the messenger’s account of Scipio’s last
battle and death, at the end of which Cornelia at some length declares
that when she has paid due funeral rites to husband and father, she
will surrender her own life.
From this analysis it will be seen that _Cornélie_ as a play is about
as defective as it could be. The subject is essentially undramatic,
for the heroine—and there is no hero—has nothing to do but spend her
time in lamentations and forebodings, in eulogies and vituperations.
Yet the subject is more suitable than the treatment. There is no trace
of conflict, internal or external; for the persons maintain their own
point of view throughout, and the issue is a matter of course from
the first. There is no entanglement or plot; but all the speakers, as
they enter in turn, are affected with a craving to deliver their minds
either in solitude or to some congenial listener: and their prolations
lead to nothing. Even the unity of interest, which the classicists
so prized, and over-prized, is lacking here, despite the bareness of
the theme. Cicero has hardly less to say than Cornelia, and in two
acts she does not so much as appear, while in one of them attention
is diverted from her sorrows to the dangers of Caesar. The heroine no
doubt retains a certain kind of primacy, but save for that, M. Faguet’s
description would be literally correct: “The piece in the author’s
conception might be entitled _Thoughts of various persons concerning
Rome at the Date of Thapsus_.”[55] The _Cornélie_ is by no means devoid
of merit, but that merit is almost entirely rhetorical, literary, and
poetical. The language is never undignified, the metres are carefully
manipulated; the descriptions and reflections, many of them taken from
Lucan, though sometimes stilted, are often elevated and picturesque.
But the most dramatic passages are the conversations in the fourth
act, where the _inter-locuteurs_, as Garnier calls the characters with
even more reason than Grévin calls those of his play _entre-parleurs_,
are respectively Decimus Brutus and Cassius, Caesar and Mark Antony:
and this is typical for two reasons. In the first place, these scenes
have least to do with the titular subject, and are, as it were,
mere excrescences on the main theme. In the second place, they are
borrowed, so far as their general idea is concerned, from Grévin, as
Grévin in turn had borrowed them from Muretus; and even details have
been transmitted to the cadet in the trinity from each and both of
his predecessors. Thus in the _Cornélie_ Decimus not very suitably
replaces or absorbs Marcus Brutus, but the whole tone and movement of
the interview with Cassius are the same in all the three plays, and
particular expressions reappear in Garnier that are peculiar to one or
other of his elder colleagues or that the later has adapted from the
earlier. For example, Garnier’s Cassius describes Caesar as
[55] _Tragédie Française au XVIͤ Siècle._
un homme effeminé
Qui le Roy Nicomede a jeune butiné.[56]
[56] _Garnier’s Tragédies_, ed. Foerster.
There is no express reference to this scandal in Muretus, but it
furnishes Grévin’s Decimus with a vigorous couplet which obviously has
inspired the above quotation:
N’endurons plus sur nous regner un Ganimede
Et la moitié du lict de son Roy Nicomede.
Here, on the other hand, is an instance of Garnier getting a phrase
from Muretus that Grévin passed over. Decimus says in excuse of his
former patron:
Encor’ n’est il pas Roy portant le diadême:
to which Cassius replies:
Non, il est Dictateur: et n’est-ce pas de mesme?
In the Latin both objection and answer are put in the lips of Marcus
Brutus, but that does not affect the resemblance.
At vero non rex iste, sed dictator est.
Dum res sit una, quid aliud nomen juvat?
In other cases the parallelism is threefold. Thus Garnier’s Cassius
exclaims:
Les chevaux courageux ne maschent point le mors
Sujets au Chevalier qu’avecque grands efforts;
Et les toreaux cornus ne se rendent domtables
Qu’à force, pour paistrir les plaines labourables.
Nous hommes, nous Romains, ayant le coeur plus mol,
Sous un joug volontaire irons ployer le col.
Grévin’s Marcus Brutus said:
Le taureau, le cheval ne prestent le col bas
A l’appetit d’un joug, si ce n’est pas contraincte:
Fauldra il donc que Rome abbaisse sous la craincte
De ce nouveau tyran le chef de sa grandeur?
In Muretus the same personage puts it more shortly:
Generosiores frena detrectant equi:
Nec nisi coacti perferunt tauri jugum:
Roma patietur, quod recusant belluae.
In the scene between Caesar and Antony the resemblances are less marked
in detail, partly owing to the somewhat different role assigned to the
second speaker, but they are there; and the general tendency, from the
self-conscious monologue of Caesar with which it opens, to the dialogue
in which he gives expression to his doubts, is practically the same in
both plays.
And these episodes are of some importance in view of their subsequent
as well as their previous history. Though neither entirely original
nor entirely relevant, they seem, perhaps because of their comparative
fitness for the stage, to have made a great impression at the time.
It has been suggested that they were not without their influence on
Shakespeare when he came to write his _Julius Caesar_: a point the
discussion of which may be reserved. It is certain that they supplied
Alexander, though he may also have used Grévin and even Muretus, with
the chief models and materials for certain scenes in his tragedy on the
same subject. Thus, he too presents Caesar and Antony in consultation,
and the former prefaces this interchange of views with a high-flown
declaration of his greatness. Thus, too, the substance of their talk
is to a great extent adapted from Garnier and diluted in the process.
Compare the similar versions of the apology that Caesar makes for his
action. In Alexander he exclaims:
The highest in the heaven who knows all hearts,
Do know my thoughts as pure as are their starres,
And that (constrain’d) I came from forraine parts
To seeme uncivill in the civill warres.
I mov’d that warre which all the world bemoanes,
Whil’st urged by force to free my selfe from feares;
Still when my hand gave wounds, my heart gave groanes;
No Romans bloud was shed, but I shed teares.[57]
[57] Works of Sir William Alexander, Glasgow, 1872. _Julius Caesar_,
II. i.
It is very like what Garnier’s Caesar says:
J’atteste Jupiter qui sonne sur la terre,
Que contraint malgré moy j’ay mené ceste guerre:
Et que victoire aucune où j’apperçoy gesir
Le corps d’un citoyen, ne me donne plaisir:
Mais de mes ennemis l’envie opiniatre,
Et le malheur Romain m’a contraint de combattre.
So, too, when Antony asserts that some are contriving Caesar’s death,
the speakers engage in a dialectical skirmish:
_Caesar._ The best are bound to me by gifts in store.
_Antony._ But to their countrey they are bound farre more.
_Caesar._ Then loathe they me as th’ enemy of the state?
_Antony._ Who freedom love, you (as usurper) hate.
_Caesar._ I by great battells have enlarg’d their bounds.
_Antony._ By that they think your pow’r too much abounds.
The filiation with Garnier is surely unmistakable, though it cannot be
shown in every line or phrase.
_Antoine._ Aux ennemis domtez il n’y a point de foy.
_Cesar._ En ceux qui vie et biens de ma bonté reçoivent?
_Antoine._ Voire mais beaucoup plus à la Patrie ils doivent.
_Cesar._ Pensent-ils que je sois ennemy du païs?
_Antoine._ Mais cruel ravisseur de ses droits envahis.
_Cesar._ J’ay à Rome soumis tant de riches provinces.
_Antoine._ Rome ne peut souffrir commandement de Princes.
The scene with the conspirators Stirling treats very differently and
much more freely. It had had, as we have seen, a peculiar history.
In Muretus it was confined to Marcus Brutus and Cassius, in Grévin
Decimus Brutus is added, in Garnier Decimus is retained and Marcus
drops out. Alexander discriminates. He keeps one discussion for Marcus
and Cassius, in so far restoring it to the original and more fitting
form it had obtained from Muretus, though he transfers to Marcus
some of the sentiments that Garnier had assigned to Decimus. But the
half-apologetic rôle that Decimus plays in Garnier had impressed
him, and he did not choose to forego the spice of variety which this
contributed. So he invents a new scene for him in which Cicero takes
the place of Cassius and solicits his support. But though the one
episode is thus cut in two, and each of the halves enlarged far beyond
the dimensions of the original whole, it is unquestionable that they
owe their main suggestion and much of their matter to the _Cornélie_.
Since then Garnier, when his powers were still immature, could so
effectively adapt these incidental passages, it is not surprising that
he should by and by be able to stand alone, and produce plays in which
the central interest was more dramatic.
Of these we are concerned only with _Marc Antoine_, which was acted
with success at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1578, and was printed in the
same year. In it Garnier has not altogether freed himself from his
former faults. There are otiose personages who are introduced merely
to supply general reflections: Diomedes, the secretary, on the pathos
of Cleopatra’s fall; Philostratus, the philosopher, on the overthrow
of the Egyptian monarchy. There is no interaction of character on
character, all the protagonists being so carefully excluded from each
other that Octavianus does not meet Antony, Antony does not meet
Cleopatra, Cleopatra does not meet Octavianus. The speeches are still
over long, and the “sentences” over abundant. Nevertheless there is a
real story, there are real characters; and the story and characters
admit, or rather demand, an effective alternation of passion.
The time comprises the interval between Antony’s final reverse and the
suicide of Cleopatra: it is short, but a good deal longer than what
Jodelle allowed himself in the companion play. Further, the situation
is much more complex and less confined, so that Garnier, while
borrowing many _motifs_ from Jodelle, or from their common authority,
Plutarch, is able to avoid the monotony of _Cléopatre Captive_. Nor
does the coherence suffer. It is true that the account of Antony’s
death, announced by Dercetas, occurs as with Shakespeare in the fourth
act; but the play is rightly named after him and not after the Queen.
He is the principal and by far the most interesting figure, and it
is his tragic fate to which all that precedes leads up, and which
determines all that follows.
The first act, as so often in these Senecan plays, is entirely
occupied with a soliloquy, which Antony declaims; but even this has
a certain share of dramatic life, though rather after the fashion of
a dramatic lyric than of a dramatic scene. He rages against what he
supposes to be the crowning perfidy of his mistress, he recalls all
that his infatuation has cost him; the worst of his woes is that they
are caused by her; but he must love her still. The second act has at
the opening and the close respectively the unnecessary monologues of
Philostratus and Diomedes, but they serve as setting for the animated
and significant conversation between Cleopatra and her women. From it
we learn that of the final treason at least she is innocent, but she
is full of remorse for the mischief that her love and her caprices
have done, and determines, despite the claims of her children, to
expiate it in death. Then, entering the monument she despatches
Diomedes with her excuses to Antony. To him we return in the third
act, which is central in interest as in position, and we hear him
disburden his soul to his friend Lucilius. His fluctuations of feeling,
shame at his undoing, passion for the fair undoer, jealousy lest his
conqueror should supplant him in love as in empire, are delineated with
sympathetic power:
Ait Cesar la victoire, ait mes biens, ait l’honneur
D’estre sans compagnon de la terre seigneur,
Ait mes enfans, ma vie au mal opiniâtre,
Ce m’est tout un, pourveu qu’il n’ait ma Cleopatre:
Je ne puis l’oublier, tant j’affole, combien
Que de n’y penser point servoit non plus grand bien.
He remembers his past glory and past prowess, and it stings him that he
should now be overcome by an inferior foe:
un homme effeminé de corps et de courage
Qui du mestier de Mars n’apprist oncque l’usage.
But he has only himself to blame, for he has debased his life:
N’ayant soing de vertu, ny d’aucune louange;
Ains comme un porc ventru touille dedans la fange,
A coeur saoul me voitray en maints salles plaisirs,
Mettant dessous le pied tous honnestes desirs.
Now it only remains for him to die. In the fourth act Octavianus
dwells on the arduousness of his triumphs and the enormity of Antony’s
offences, in order to justify a ruthless policy; and a discussion
follows between him and Agrippa, like the one between Julius and Antony
in the _Cornélie_, except that here the emperor and his adviser have
their parts reversed. When his resolution seems fixed Dercetas enters
in dismay with tidings that Antony has sought to take his own life,
and that mortally wounded he has been drawn up into the monument to
breathe his last in Cleopatra’s arms. For a moment his conqueror’s
heart is touched. But only for a moment. He speedily gives ear to the
warning of Agrippa, that to secure her treasures and preserve her life,
Cleopatra must be seized. In the fifth act she has all her preparations
made to follow her lord. In vain Euphron tries to stay her by gathering
her children round and predicting their probable fate:
_Eufron._ Desja me semble voir
Cette petite enfance en servitude cheoir,
Et portez en trionfe, ...
Et au doigt les monstrer la tourbe citoyenne.
_Cleopatre._ Hé! plutost mille morts.
But she persists in her resolve and dismisses them. Her only regret is
that she has delayed so long,
Et ja fugitive Ombre avec toy je serois,
Errant sous les cyprès des rives escartees.
She has waited only to pay the due rites, but now she is free to
breathe her last on her lover’s corpse:
Que de mille baisers, et mille et mille encore
Pour office dernier ma bouche vous honore.
Et qu’en un tel devoir mon corps affoiblissant
Defaille dessur vous, mon ame vomissant.
3. ENGLISH FOLLOWERS OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL. “THE WOUNDS OF CIVIL WAR”
The _Marc Antoine_ is the best tragedy on a Roman theme, and one of
the best imitations of Seneca that France in the sixteenth century
has to show. It deserved to find admirers on the other side of the
Channel, and it did. Among the courtly and cultured circles in whose
eyes the Latin drama was the ideal and criterion to which all poets
should aspire and by which their achievements should be tested, it was
bound to call forth no little enthusiasm. In England ere this similar
attempts had been made and welcomed, but none had been quite so moving
and interesting, above all none had conformed so strictly to the
formal requirements of the humanist code. In _Gorboduc_, the first of
these experiments, Sidney, lawgiver of the elect, was pleased to admit
the “honest civility” and “skilful poetry,” but his praises were not
without qualification:
As it is full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases,
clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of
notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach,
and so obtayne the very end of Poesie: yet in troth it
is very defectious in the circumstaunces: which greeveth
mee, because it might not remaine as an exact model of all
Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place, and time, the
two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For
where the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and
the uttermost time presupposed in it, should be, both by
Aristotles precept, and common reason, but one day: there is
both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined.[58]
[58] _Apologie for Poetrie_, Arber’s reprint.
Nor in such respects were things much better in the _Misfortunes of
Arthur_, by Thomas Hughes, which was composed in 1587, the year after
Sidney’s death. But meanwhile France had been blessed with a play at
least the equal of these native products in poetry and pathos, and much
more observant of the unities that scholars were proclaiming. If the
scene was not absolutely unchanged, at least the changes were confined
within the area of a single town. If the time was not precisely marked,
and in Plutarch’s narrative slightly exceeded the orthodox limits,
still Garnier had so managed it that the occurrences set forth might
easily be conceived to take place in a single day. It seems just the
modern play that would have fulfilled the desire of Sidney’s heart;
and since it was composed in a foreign tongue, what could be more
fitting than that Sidney’s sister, the famous Countess of Pembroke,
who shared so largely in Sidney’s literary tastes and literary gifts,
should undertake to give it an English form? It may have been on her
part a pious offering to his _manes_, and in 1590, four years after her
brother’s death, her version was complete.[59] She was well fitted for
her task, and she has discharged it well. Sometimes she may take her
liberties, but generally she is wonderfully faithful, and yet neither
in diction nor versification is she stiffer than many contemporary
writers of original English verse. Here, for instance, is Diomed’s
eulogy of Cleopatra’s charm:
Nought liues so faire. Nature by such a worke
Hir selfe, should seeme, in workmanship hath past.
She is all heau’nlie: neuer any man
But seing hir, was rauish’d with hir sight.
The Allablaster couering of hir face,
The corall colour hir two lipps engraines,
Hir beamie eies, two sunnes of this our world,
Of hir faire haire the fine and flaming golde,
Hir braue streight stature and her winning partes
Are nothing else but fiers, fetters, dartes.
Yet this is nothing to th’ enchaunting skilles,
Of her coelestiall Sp’rite, hir training speache,
Hir grace, hir Maiestie, and forcing voice,
Whether she it with fingers speache consorte,
Or hearing sceptred kings ambassadors
Answer to eache in his owne language make.
[59] There is an edition of this by Miss Alice Luce,
_Literarhistorische Forschungen_, 1897, but I am told it is out of
print, and at any rate I have been unable to procure it. The extracts
I give are transcripts from the British Museum copy, which is indexed
thus: _Discourse of Life and Death written in French by P. Mornay.
Antonius a tragedie, written also in French by R. Garnier. Both done in
English by the Countesse of Pembroke, 1592_. This edition has generally
been overlooked by historians of the drama, from Professor Ward to
Professor Schelling (probably because it is associated with Mornay’s
tract), and, as a rule, the translation of Garnier is said to have
been first published in 1595. That and the subsequent editions bear a
different title from the neglected first; the _Tragedie of Antonie_,
instead of _Antonius_.
This excellently preserves many details as well as the pervading tone
of the original:
Rien ne vit de si beau, Nature semble avoir
Par un ouvrage tel surpassé son pouvoir:
Elle est toute celeste, et ne se voit personne
La voulant contempler, qu’elle ne passionne.
L’albastre qui blanchist sur son visage saint,
Et le vermeil coral qui ses deux lévres peint,
La clairté de ses yeux, deux soleils de ce monde,
Le fin or rayonnant dessur sa tresse blonde,
Sa belle taille droitte, et ses frians attraits,
Ne sont que feux ardents, que cordes, et que traits.
Mais encor ce n’est rien aupres des artifices
De son esprit divin, ses mignardes blandices,
Sa maiestie, sa grace, et sa forçante voix,
Soit qu’ell’ la vueille joindre au parler de ses doigts,
Ou que des Rois sceptrez recevant les harangues,
Elle vueille respondre à chacun en leurs langues.
The most notable privilege of which the translation makes use is to
soften or refine certain expressions that may have seemed too vigorous
to the high-bred English lady. This, for example, is her rendering of
the lines already quoted in which Antony denounces his voluptuous life:
Careless of uertue, careless of all praise,
Nay, as the fatted swine in filthy mire,
With glutted heart I wallow’d in delights,
All thoughts of honor troden under foote.
Similarly, in Cleopatra’s closing speech, the original expression, “mon
ame vomissant,” yields to a gentler and not less poetical equivalent:
A thousand kisses, thousand thousand more
Let you my mouth for honor’s farewell give:
That, in this office, weake my limmes may growe
Fainting on you, and fourth _my soule may flowe_.
As the deviations are confined to details, it is not necessary to
repeat the account of the tragedy as a whole. These extracts will show
that Garnier’s _Marc Antoine_ was presented to the English public in
a worthy dress; and the adequacy of the workmanship, the appeal to
cultivated taste, the prestige of the great Countess as “Sidney’s
sister, Pembroke’s mother,” her personal reputation among literary men,
procured it immediate welcome and lasting acceptance. Fifteen years
after its first publication it had passed through five editions, and
must have been a familiar book to Elizabethan readers who cared for
such wares. Moreover, it directly evoked an original English play that
followed in part the same pattern and treated in part the same theme.
In 1594 appeared the _Cleopatra_ of Samuel Daniel, dedicated to Lady
Pembroke with very handsome acknowledgments of the stimulus he had
received from her example and with much modest deprecation of the
supplement he offered. His muse, he asserts, would not have digressed
from the humble task of praising Delia,
had not thy well graced Antony
(Who all alone, having remained long)
Requir’d his Cleopatra’s company.
These words suggest that it was not written at once after the
Countess’s translation: on the other hand there can have been no
very long delay, as it was entered for publication in October, 1593.
The first complete and authorised edition of _Delia_ along with the
_Complaint of Rosamond_, which Daniel does not mention, had been given
to the world in 1592; and we may assume from his own words that the
_Cleopatra_ was the next venture of the young author just entering his
thirties, and ambitious of a graver kind of fame than he had won by
these amatorious exercises. He had no reason to be dissatisfied with
the result, and perhaps from the outset his self-disparagement was not
very genuine. His play was reprinted seven times before his death, and
these editions show one complete revision and one thorough recast of
the text. Poets are not wont to spend such pains on works that they
do not value. The truth is that Daniel’s _Cleopatra_ may take its
place beside his subsequent _Philotas_ among the best original Senecan
tragedies that Elizabethan England produced. Its claims, of course,
are almost exclusively literary and hardly at all theatrical, though
some of the changes in the final version of 1607 seem meant to give
a little mobility to the slow-paced scenes. But from first to last
it depends on the elegiac and rhetorical qualities that characterise
the whole school, and in its undivided attention to them recalls
rather Jodelle’s _Cléopatre Captive_ than Garnier’s _Marc Antoine_.
The resemblance to the earlier drama is perhaps not accidental. The
situation is precisely the same, for the story begins after the death
of Antony, and concludes with the account of Cleopatra’s suicide. Thus,
despite Daniel’s statement, his play is not in any true sense a sequel
to the one which the Countess had rendered, nor is it the case, as
his words insinuate, that in the _Antonius_ Cleopatra still delayed
to join her beloved: on the contrary we take leave of her as she is
about to expire upon his corpse. So though his patroness’s translation
may very well have suggested to him his heroine, it could not possibly
prescribe to him his argument. And surely after Garnier had shown the
more excellent way of treating the subject so as to include both the
lovers, this truncated section of the history would not spontaneously
occur to any dramatist as the material most proper for his needs. It
seems more than likely that Daniel was acquainted with Jodelle’s play,
and that the precedent it furnished, determined him in his not very
happy selection of the final episode to the exclusion of all that went
before. A careful comparison of the two _Cleopatras_ supports this
view. No doubt in general treatment they differ widely, and most of
the coincidences in detail are due to both authors having exploited
Plutarch’s narrative. But this is not true of all. There are some
traits that are not to be accounted for by their common pedigree, but
by direct transmission from the one to the other. Thus, to mention
the most striking, in Jodelle Seleucus is made to express penitence
for exposing the Queen’s misstatement about her treasure. There is
no authority for this: yet in Daniel the new _motif_ reappears. Of
course it is not merely repeated without modification. In Jodelle
it is to the chorus that the culprit unbosoms himself; in Daniel it
is to Rodon, the false governor who has betrayed Caesarion, and who
similarly and no less fictitiously is represented as full of remorse
for his more heinous treason. But imitators frequently try in this
fashion to vary or heighten the effect by duplicating the rôles they
borrow; and Daniel has done so in a second instance, when he happened
to get his suggestion from Garnier. In the _Marc Antoine_, as we
saw, there is the sententious but quite superfluous figure of the
philosopher Philostratus; Daniel retains him without giving him more
to do, but places by his side the figure of the equally sententious
and superfluous philosopher Arius. In Rodon we have just such another
example of gemination. It is safe to say that the contrite Seleucus
comes straight from the pages of Jodelle; and his presence, if there
were any doubt, serves to establish Daniel’s connection with the first
French Senecan in the vernacular.
But the Countess’s protégé differs from her not only in reverting to an
elder model: he distinctly improves on her practice by substituting for
her blank verse his own quatrains. The author of the _Defence of Ryme_
showed a right instinct in this. Blank verse is doubtless the better
dramatic measure, but these pseudo-Senecan pieces were lyric rather
than dramatic, and it was not the most suitable for them. The justice
of Daniel’s method is proved by its success. He not only carried the
experiment successfully through for himself, which might have been
a _tour de force_ on the part of the “well-languaged” poet, but he
imposed his metre on successors who were less skilled in managing it,
like Sir William Alexander.
Such, then, is the _Cleopatra_ of Daniel, a play that, compared even
with the contemporary classical dramas of France, belongs to a bygone
phase of the art; a play that is no play at all, but a series of
harangues interspersed with odds and ends of dialogue and the due
choric songs; but that nevertheless, because it fulfils its own ideal
so thoroughly, is admirable in its kind, and still has charms for the
lover of poetry.
The first act is occupied with a soliloquy of Cleopatra,[60] in which
she laments her past pleasure and glory, and proclaims her purpose of
death.
Thinke, Caesar, I that liu’d and raign’d a Queene,
Do scorne to buy my life at such a rate,
That I should underneath my selfe be seene,
Basely induring to suruiue my state:
That Rome should see my scepter-bearing hands
Behind me bound, and glory in my teares;
That I should passe whereas Octauia stands,
To view my misery, that purchas’d hers.[61]
[60] That is, in the original version. Subsequently Daniel threw a
later narrative passage describing Cleopatra’s parting from Caesarion
and Rodon into scenic form, introduced it here, and followed it up with
a discussion between Caesar and his advisers. This seems to be one of
his attempts to impart more dramatic animation to his play, and it
does so. But as dramatic animation is not what we are looking for, the
improvement is doubtful.
[61] Dr. Grosart’s Edition.
She has hitherto lived only to temporise with Caesar for the sake of
her children, but to her late-born love for Antony her death is due.
She remembers his doting affection, and exclaims:
And yet thou cam’st but in my beauties waine,
When new appearing wrinckles of declining
Wrought with the hand of yeares, seem’d to detaine
My graces light, as now but dimly shining ...
Then, and but thus, thou didst loue most sincerely,
O Antony, that best deseru’d it better,
This autumn of my beauty bought so dearely,
For which in more then death, I stand thy debter.
In the second act Proculeius gives an account of Cleopatra’s capture,
and describes her apparent submission, to Caesar, who suspects that it
is pretence. In the first scene of the third act Philostratus and Arius
philosophise on their own misfortunes, the misfortunes of the land, and
the probable fate of Cleopatra’s children. The next scene presents the
famous interview between Caesar and Cleopatra, with the disclosures
of Seleucus, to which are added Dolabella’s avowal of his admiration,
and Caesar’s decision to carry his prisoner to Rome. In the fourth act
Seleucus, who has betrayed the confidence of his mistress, bewails his
disloyalty, to Rodon, who has delivered up Caesarion to death; but they
depart to avoid Cleopatra, whom Dolabella has informed of the victor’s
intentions, and who enters, exclaiming:
What, hath my face yet powre to win a louer?
Can this torn remnant serue to grace me so,
That it can Caesar’s secret plots discouer,
What he intends with me and mine to do?
Why then, poore beauty, thou hast done thy last
And best good seruice thou could’st doe unto me:
For now the time of death reueal’d thou hast,
Which in my life didst serue but to undoe me.
In the first scene of the fifth act Titius tells how Cleopatra has sent
a message to Caesar, and in the second scene we learn the significance
of this from the Nuntius, who himself has taken her the asps.
Well, in I went, where brighter then the Sunne,
Glittering in all her pompeous rich aray,
Great Cleopatra sate, as if sh’ had wonne
Caesar, and all the world beside, this day:
Euen as she was, when on thy cristall streames,
Cleare Cydnos, she did shew what earth could shew:
When Asia all amaz’d in wonder, deemes
Venus from heauen was come on earth below.
Euen as she went at firste to meete her loue,
So goes she now againe to finde him.
But that first, did her greatnes onely proue,
This last her loue, that could not liue behind him.
Her words to the asp are not without a quaint pathetic tenderness,
as she contrasts the “ugly grimness” and “hideous torments” of other
deaths with this that it procures:
Therefore come thou, of wonders wonder chiefe,
That open canst with such an easie key
The doore of life: come gentle cunning thiefe
That from our selues so steal’st our selues away.
And her dallying with the accepted and inevitable end is good:
Looke how a mother at her sonnes departing,
For some farre voyage bent to get him fame,
Doth entertaine him with an ydle parting
And still doth speake, and still speakes but the same:
Now bids farewell, and now recalles him backe,
Tels what was told, and bids againe farewell,
And yet againe recalles; for still doth lacke
Something that Loue would faine and cannot tell:
Pleased he should goe, yet cannot let him goe.
So she, although she knew there was no way
But this, yet this she could not handle so
But she must shew that life desir’d delay.
But this is little more than by-play and make-believe. She does the
deed, and when Caesar’s messengers arrive, it is past prevention.
For there they found stretcht on a bed of gold,
Dead Cleopatra; and that proudly dead,
In all the rich attire procure she could;
And dying Charmion trimming of her head,
And Eras at her feete, dead in like case.
“Charmion, is this well done?” sayd one of them.
“Yea, well,” sayd she, “and her that from the race
Of so great Kings descends, doth best become.”
And with that word, yields to her faithfull breath
To passe th’ assurance of her loue with death.
One more example of the influence of the French Senecans remains to
be mentioned, and though, as a translation, it is less important
than Daniel’s free reproduction, the name of the translator gives it
a special interest. The stately rhetoric of the _Cornélie_ caught
the fancy of Thomas Kyd, who from the outset had found something
sympathetic in Garnier’s style, and, perhaps in revolt from the
sensationalism of his original work, he wrote an English version which
was published in 1594. When this was so, it need the less surprise us
that the Senecan form should still for years to come be cultivated
by writers who had seen the glories of the Elizabethan stage, above
all for what would seem the peculiarly appropriate themes of classic
history: that Alexander should employ it for his _Julius Caesar_ and
the rest of his _Monarchic Tragedies_ even after Shakespeare’s _Julius
Caesar_ had appeared, and that Ben Jonson himself should, as it were,
cast a wistful, backward glance at it in his _Catiline_, which he
supplies, not only with a chorus, but with a very Senecan exposition
by Sylla’s ghost. If this style appealed to the author of _The Spanish
Tragedy_, it might well appeal to the more fastidious connoisseurs
in whom the spirit of the Renaissance was strong. It was to them
Kyd looked for patronage in his new departure, and he dedicates his
_Cornelia_ to the Countess of Suffolk, aunt of the more memorable lady
who had translated the _Marc Antoine_.
In execution it hardly equals the companion piece: the language is less
flexible and graphic, and the whole effect more wearisome; which,
however, may be due in part to the inferior merit of the play Kyd had
to render, as well as to the haste with which the rendering was made.
But he aims at preserving the spirit of the French, and does preserve
it in no small degree. The various metres of the chorus are managed
with occasional dexterity; the rhyme that is mingled with the blank
verse of the declamation relieves the tedium of its somewhat monotonous
tramp, and adds point and effectiveness. A fair specimen of his average
procedure may be found in his version of the metaphorical passage in
Cassius’ speech, that, as has been pointed out, can be traced back to
Grévin and Muretus.
The stiff-neckt horses champe not on the bit
Nor meekely beare the rider but by force:
The sturdie Oxen toyle not at the Plough
Nor yeeld unto the yoke, but by constraint.
Shall we then that are men and Romains borne,
Submit us to unurged slauerie?
Shall Rome, that hath so many ouerthrowne
Now make herselfe a subject to her owne?[62]
[62] Kyd, ed. Boas. The _Cornelia_ has also been edited by H. Gassner;
but this edition, despite some considerable effort, I have been unable
to procure.
Kyd was certainly capable of emphasis, both in the good and the bad
sense, which stands him in good stead when he has to reproduce the
passages adapted from Lucan. These he generally presents in something
of their native pomp, and indeed throughout he shows a praiseworthy
effort to keep on the level of his author. The result is a grave and
decorous performance, which, if necessarily lacking in distinctive
colour, since the original had so little, is almost equally free from
modern incongruities. It can hardly be reckoned as such that Scipio
grasps his “cutlass,” or that in similar cases the equivalent for a
technical Latin term should have a homely sound. Perhaps the most
serious anachronism occurs when Cicero, talking of “this great town” of
Rome, exclaims:
Neither could the flaxen-haird high Dutch,
(A martiall people, madding after Armes),
Nor yet the fierce and fiery humord French....
Once dare t’assault it.
Garnier is not responsible: he writes quite correctly:
Ny les blons Germains, peuple enragé de guerre,
Ny le Gaulois ardent.
This, however, is a very innocent slip. It was different when another
scholar of the group to which Kyd belonged treated a Roman theme in a
more popular way.
But before turning to him it may be well to say a word concerning the
influence which these Senecan pieces are sometimes supposed to have had
on Shakespeare’s Roman plays that dealt with kindred themes.
And in the first place it may be taken as extremely probable that he
had read them. They were well known to the Elizabethan public, the
least famous of them, Kyd’s _Cornelia_, reaching a second edition
within a year of its first issue. They were executed by persons
who must have bulked large in Shakespeare’s field of vision. Apart
from her general social and literary reputation, the Countess of
Pembroke was mother of the two young noblemen to whom the first folio
of Shakespeare’s plays was afterwards dedicated on the ground that
they had “prosequutted both them and the author living with so much
favour.” Some of Daniel’s works Shakespeare certainly knew, for there
are convincing parallelisms between the _Complaint of Rosamond_ on
the one hand, and the _Rape of Lucrece_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ on
the other; nor can there be much question about the indebtedness of
Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_ to Daniel’s _Delia_. Again, with Kyd’s acting
dramas Shakespeare was undoubtedly acquainted. He quotes _The Spanish
Tragedy_ in the _Taming of the Shrew_, _Much Ado About Nothing_, _King
Lear_; and the same play, as well as _Solyman and Perseda_, if that
be Kyd’s, in _King John_: nor is it to be forgotten that many see
Kyd’s hand and few would deny Kyd’s influence in _Titus Andronicus_,
and that some attribute to him the lost _Hamlet_. All these things
considered, Shakespeare’s ignorance of the English Senecans would be
much more surprising than his knowledge of them. Further, though his
own method was so dissimilar, he would be quite inclined to appreciate
them, as may be inferred from the approval he puts in Hamlet’s mouth
of _Æneas’ tale to Dido_, which reads like a heightened version of
the narratives that occur so plentifully in their pages. So there is
nothing antecedently absurd in the conjecture that they gave him hints
when he turned to their authorities on his own behalf.
Nevertheless satisfactory proof is lacking. The analogies with
Garnier’s _Marc Antoine_ not accounted for by the obligation of both
dramatists to Plutarch are very vague, and oddly enough seem vaguer in
the translation than in the original. Of this there is a good example
in Antony’s words when he recalls to his shame how his victor
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had
In the brave squares of war.
(_A. and C._ III. x. 39.)
There is similarity of _motif_, and even the suggestion of something
more, in his outburst in Garnier:
Un homme effeminé de corps et de courage
Qui du mestier de Mars n’apprist oncque l’usage.
But only the _motif_ is left in the Countess of Pembroke’s rendering:
A man, a woman both in might and minde,
In Marses schole who neuer lesson learn’d.
The alleged parallels are thus most apparent when Shakespeare is
collated with the French, and of these the chief that do not come from
Plutarch have already been quoted in the description of the _Marc
Antoine_. They are neither numerous nor striking. Besides Antony’s
disparagement of his rival’s soldiership there are only three that in
any way call for remark. In Garnier, Cleopatra’s picture of her shade
wandering beneath the cypress trees of the Underworld may suggest, in
Shakespeare, her lover’s anticipation of Elysium, “where souls do couch
on flowers” (_A. and C._ IV. xiv. 51); but there is a great difference
in the tone of the context. Her dying utterance:
Que de mille baisers, et mille et mille encore
Pour office dernier ma bouche vous honore:
is in the wording not unlike the dying utterance of Antony:
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips;
(_A. and C._ IV. xv. 20.)
but there is more contrast than agreement in the ideas. Above all,
Cleopatra’s horror at the thought of her children being led in triumph
through Rome and pointed at by the herd of citizens is close akin to
the feeling that inspires similar passages in Shakespeare (_A. and
C._ IV. xv. 23, V. ii. 55, V. ii. 207); but even here the resemblance
is a little deceptive, since in Shakespeare she feels this horror for
herself.
The correspondences between Shakespeare and Daniel are equally
confined to detail, but they are more definite and more significant.
It is Daniel who first represents Cleopatra as scorning to be made a
spectacle in Rome; and her resentment at Caesar’s supposing
That I should underneath my selfe be seene,
might have expressed itself in Shakespeare’s phrase,
He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself.
(_A. and C._ V. ii. 191.)
Noteworthy, too, in the same passage, is her reluctance to pass before
the injured Octavia, for there is no mention of this point in Plutarch,
but Shakespeare touches on it twice. Further, her very noticeable
references to her waning charms, her wrinkles, her declining years
have their analogies in Shakespeare and in Shakespeare alone; for
Plutarch expressly says that she was “at the age when a woman’s beawtie
is at the prime.” The tenderness in tone of her address to the asp
is common and peculiar to both English poets; and her adornment in
preparation for death suggests to each of them, but not to Plutarch,
her magnificence when she met Antony on the Cydnus.[63]
[63] The last point is mentioned by Mr. Furness (Variorum Edition), who
cites others, of which one occurs in Plutarch and the rest seem to me
untenable or unimportant.
These coincidences are interesting, but they are not conclusive. They
are none of them such as could not occur independently to two writers
who vividly realised the meaning of Plutarch’s _data_; for he, as it
were, gives the premises though he does not draw the inference. Thus
he says nothing of Cleopatra’s disdain for the Roman populace, but he
does make the knowledge that she must go to Rome determine her to die.
He says nothing of her recoil from the thought of Octavia seeing her
in her humiliation, but he does tell us of her jealousy of Octavia’s
superior claims. He never hints that Cleopatra was past her bloom,
but his praise of her as at her prime belongs to 41 B.C., and the
closing incident to 30 B.C., when she was in her thirty-ninth year. He
does not attribute to her any kindly greeting of the asp, but he does
report that she chose it as providing the easiest and gentlest means
of death. And though in describing her suicide he makes no reference
to the meeting on the Cydnus, he dwells on the glorious array on both
occasions, and the fancy naturally flies from one to the other. Each
of these particulars separately might well suggest itself to more than
one sympathetic reader. The most that can be said is that in their
mass they have a certain cogency. In any case, however, characteristic
and far-reaching as some of them are, they bear only on details of the
conception.
The possible connection of _Julius Caesar_ with the _Cornélie_ is of
a somewhat different kind. It is restricted almost entirely to the
conversations between Cassius and Decimus Brutus on the one hand,
and between Cassius and Marcus Brutus on the other. It is thought to
show itself partly in particular expressions, partly in the general
situation. So far as the former are concerned, it is neither precise
nor distinctive; and it is rather remarkable that, as in the case
of the _Marc Antoine_, more is to be said for it when Shakespeare’s
phraseology is compared with that of the original than when it is
compared with that of the translation.[64] In regard to the latter M.
Bernage, the chief advocate of the theory, writes:
In the English play (_Julius Caesar_), as in our own, Brutus
and Cassius have an interview before the arrival of the
Dictator; the subject of their conversation is the same; it
is Cassius too who “strikes so much show of fire” (_fait
jaillir l’etincelle_) from the soul of Brutus.... These
characters are painted by Garnier in colours quite similar
(to Shakespeare’s), and he is momentarily as vigorous and
great. In like manner ... Caesar crosses the stage after
the interview of the two conspirators; he is moreover
accompanied by Antony.[65]
[64] See Appendix A.
[65] _Étude sur Garnier_, 1880.
In the whole tone and direction of the dialogue, too, Shakespeare
resembles Garnier and does not resemble Plutarch. The _Life_ records
one short sentence as Brutus’ part of the colloquy, while Cassius does
nothing more than explain the importance of the anonymous letters and
set forth the expectations that Rome has formed of his friend. There is
no denunciation in Plutarch of Caesar either for his overgrown power or
for his “feeble temper”; there is no lament for the degeneracy of the
Romans; there is no reference to the expulsion of the kings or appeal
to Brutus’ ancestry; all of these matters on which both the dramatists
insist. And at the end the two friends are agreed on their policy and
depart to prosecute their plans, while in Garnier as in Shakespeare
Brutus comes to no final decision.
It would be curious if this conjecture were correct, and if this famous
scene had influenced Shakespeare as it was to influence Alexander.
There would be few more interesting cases of literary filiation, for,
as we have seen, there is no doubt that here Garnier bases and improves
on Grévin, and that Grévin bases and improves on Muretus; so the
genealogy would run Muretus, Grévin, Garnier, Kyd, Shakespeare.
Here the matter may rest. The grounds for believing that Shakespeare
was influenced by Garnier’s _Marc Antoine_ are very slight; for
believing that he was influenced by Daniel’s _Cleopatra_ are somewhat
stronger; that he was influenced by Garnier’s _Cornélie_ are stronger
still; but they are even at the best precarious. In all three instances
the evidence brought forward rather suggests the obligation as possible
than establishes it as certain. But it seems extremely likely that
Shakespeare would be acquainted with dramas that were widely read and
were written by persons none of whom can have been strange to him; and
in that case their stateliness and propriety may have affected him in
other ways than we can trace or than he himself knew.
Meanwhile the popular play had been going its own way, and among other
subjects had selected a few from Roman history. We may be certain
that slowly and surely it was absorbing some of the qualities that
characterised the imitations of the classics; and this process was
accelerated when university men, with Marlowe at their head, took a
leading share in purveying for the London playhouse. The development
is clearly marked in the general history of the drama. Of the Roman
play in this transition phase, as treated by a scholar for the
delectation of the vulgar, we have only one specimen, but it is a
specimen that despite its scanty merit is important no less for the
name of the author than for the mode of the treatment. That author
was Thomas Lodge, so well known for his songs, novels, pamphlets, and
translations. As dramatist he is less conspicuous, and we possess
only two plays from his hand. In one of them, _A Looking Glass for
London and England_, which gives a description of the corruption and
repentance of Nineveh, and was acted in 1591, he co-operated with
Robert Greene. Of the other,[66] _The Wounds of Civill War: Lively set
forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and Scilla: As it hath beene
publicquely plaide in London, by the Right Honourable the Lord High
Admirall his Servants_, he was sole author, and it is with it that
we are concerned. It was printed in 1594, but was probably composed
some years earlier.[67] In any case it comes after the decisive
appearance of Marlowe; but Lodge was far from rivalling that master
or profiting fully by his example, and indeed is inferior to such
minor performers as Peele or Greene. Moreover, in the present case he
adds to his general dramatic disabilities, the incapacity to treat
classical history aright. In this respect, indeed, he improves on the
Senecan school by borrowing graphic minutiae from Plutarch, such as
the prefiguration of Marius’ future glory in his infancy by the seven
eagles, the account of the Gaul’s panic in Minturnae, or the unwilling
betrayal of Antonius by the slave. But on the other hand he astonishes
us by his failure to make use of picturesque incidents which he must
have known; like Sulla’s flight for shelter to his rival’s house, the
relief of Marius by the woman whom he had sentenced, the response
of the exile from the ruins of Carthage. And even when he utilises
Plutarch’s touches, Lodge is apt to weaken or travesty them in his
adaptation. The incident of the eagles, though it furnishes two of the
best passages in the play, illustrates the enfeeblement. Plutarch had
said:
[66] I quote from Dodsley’s _Old English Plays_, ed. Hazlitt.
[67] Professor Ward calls attention to the stage direction (Act III.):
“Enter Sylla in triumph in his chair triumphant of gold, drawn by four
Moors; before the chariot, his colours, his crest, his captains, his
prisoners; ... bearing crowns of gold and manacled.” This, he points
out, seems a reminiscence of the similar situation in _Tamburlaine
II._, Act iv. sc. 3.: “Enter Tamberlaine drawn in his chariot by the
Kings of Trebizon and Soria, with bits in their mouths, reins in his
left hand, and in his right hand a whip with which he scourgeth them.”
From this Professor Ward infers that Lodge’s play belongs approximately
to the same date as Marlowe’s, possibly to 1587. It may be so, but
there are some reasons for placing it later. The mixture of rhyme and
prose instead of the exclusive use of blank verse would suggest that
the influence of _Tamburlaine_ was not very immediate. It has some
points of contact with the _Looking Glass_ which Lodge wrote along with
Greene. It has the same didactic bent, though the purpose is political
rather than moral, for the _Wounds of Civill War_ enforces on its
very title page the lesson that Elizabethans had so much at heart,
the need of harmony in the State. Like the _Looking Glass_ it deals
rather with an historic transaction than with individual adventures,
for it summarises the whole disastrous period of the conflict between
Marius and Sulla. And like the _Looking Glass_ it visualises this by
scenes taken alike from dignified and low life, the latter even more
out of place than the episodes of the Nineveh citizens and peasants
in the joint work. In so far one is tempted to put the two together
about 1591. And there is one detail that perhaps favours this view—the
introduction of the Gaul with his bad English and worse French. In
Greene’s _James IV._ (c. 1590) the assassin hired to murder Queen
Dorothea is also a Frenchman who speaks broken English, and in that
play such a personage is quite in keeping, violating the probabilities
neither of time nor of place. It is, therefore, much more probable
that, if he proved popular, Lodge would reproduce the same character
inappropriately to catch the applause of the groundlings, than that
Lodge should light on the first invention when that invention was quite
unsuitable, and that Greene should afterwards borrow it and give it a
fit setting. In the latter case we can only account for the absurdity
by supposing that Lodge carried much further the anachronism in
_Cornelia_ of “the fierce and fiery-humour’d French.”
When Marius was but very young and dwelling in the contry,
he gathered up in the lappe of his gowne the ayrie of an
Eagle, in the which were seven young Eagles; whereat his
father and mother much wondering, asked the Sooth-sayers,
what that ment? They answered, that their sonne one day
should be one of the greatest men in the world, and that
out of doubt he should obtain seven times in his life the
chiefest office of dignity in his contry.
Plutarch is not quite sure about the trustworthiness of this story, for
the characteristic reason that “the eagle never getteth but two younge
ones,” and his hesitation may have led Lodge to modify the vivid and
improbable detail. Favorinus the Minturnian tells the story thus:
Yonder Marius in his infancy
Was born to greater fortunes than we deem:
For, being scarce from out his cradle crept,
And sporting prettily with his compeers,
On sudden seven young eagles soar’d amain,
And kindly perch’d upon his tender lap.
His parents wondering at this strange event,
Took counsel of the soothsayers in this:
Who told them that these seven-fold eagles’ flight
Forefigurèd his seven times consulship.
And this version, with only another slight variation, is repeated
rather happily in the invented narrative of the presage of Marius’
death:
Bright was the day, and on the spreading trees
The frolic citizens of forest sung
Their lays and merry notes on perching boughs;
When suddenly appeared in the east
Seven mighty eagles with their talons fierce,
Who, waving oft above our consul’s head,
At last with hideous cry did soar away:
When suddenly old Marius aghast,
With reverend smile, determin’d with a sigh
The doubtful silence of the standers-by.
“Romans,” he said, “old Marius must die:
These seven fair eagles, birds of mighty Jove,
That at my birthday on my cradle sat,
Now at my last day warn me to my death.”
But the other two passages Lodge modernises beyond recognition and
beyond decency.
Of the attempt on Marius’ life at Minturnae, Plutarch narrates very
impressively:
Now when they were agreed upon it, they could not finde a
man in the citie that durst take upon him to kill him; but
a man of armes of the Gaules, or one of the Cimbres (for
we finde both the one or the other in wryting) that went
thither with his sword drawen in his hande. Now that place
of the chamber where Marius lay was very darke, and, as it
is reported, the man of armes thought he sawe two burninge
flames come out of Marius eyen, and heard a voyce out of
that darke corner, saying unto him: “O, fellowe, thou,
darest thou come to kill Caius Marius?” The barbarous Gaule,
hearing these words, ranne out of the chamber presently,
castinge his sworde in the middest of the flower,[68] and
crying out these wordes onely: “I can not kill Caius Marius.”
[68] Floor.
Here is Lodge’s burlesque with the Gaul nominated Pedro, whose name
is as unsuitable to his language as is his language to his supposed
nationality.
_Pedro._ Marius tu es mort. Speak dy preres in dy sleepe,
for me sal cut off your head from your epaules, before you
wake. Qui es stia?[69] What kinde of a man be dis?
_Favorinus._ Why, what delays are these? Why gaze ye thus?
_Pedro._ Notre dame! Jésu! Estiene! O my siniors, der be
a great diable in ce eyes, qui dart de flame, and with de
voice d’un bear cries out, “Villain, dare you kill Marius?”
Je tremble; aida me, siniors, autrement I shall be murdered.
_Pausanins._ What sudden madness daunts this stranger thus?
_Pedro._ O, me no can kill Marius; me no dare kill Marius!
adieu, messieurs, me be dead, si je touche Marius. Marius
est un diable. Jesu Maria, sava moy!
_exit fugiens._
[69] Probably: “Qui est lá?” the misprint of _i_ for _l_ is common.
Things are scarcely better in the episode of Antonius’ betrayal.
Plutarch has told very simply how the poor man with whom the orator
took refuge, wishing to treat him hospitably, sent a slave for wine,
and how the slave, by requiring the best quality for the distinguished
guest, provoked the questions of the drawer. In Lodge the unsuspecting
serving man becomes a bibulous clown who blabs the secret in a drunken
catch that he sings as he passes the soldiers:
O most surpassing wine,
The marrow of the vine!
More welcome unto me
Than whips to scholars be.
Thou art, and ever was,
A means to mend an ass;
Thou makest some to sleep,
And many mo to weep,
And some be glad and merry.
With heigh down derry, derry.
Thou makest some to stumble
A many mo to fumble
And me have pinky neyne.[70]
More brave and jolly wine!
What need I praise thee mo,
For thou art good, with heigh-ho!...
(_To the Soldiers_):
You would know where Lord Antony is? I perceive you.
Shall I say he is in yond farm-house? I deceive you.
Shall I tell you this wine is for him? The gods forfend.
And so I end.
[70] Pink eyes.
Lodge is not more fortunate with his additions. Thus, after Sylla’s
final resignation, two burghers with the very Roman names of Curtall
and Poppy are represented as tackling the quondam dictator.
_Curtall._ And are you no more master-dixcator, nor
generality of the soldiers?
_Sylla._ My powers do cease, my titles are resign’d.
_Curtall._ Have you signed your titles? O base mind, that
being in the Paul’s steeple of honour, hast cast thyself
into the sink of simplicity. Fie, beast!
Were I a king, I would day by day
Suck up white bread and milk,
And go a-jetting in a jacket of silk;
My meat should be the curds,
My drink should be the whey,
And I would have a mincing lass to love me every day.
_Poppy._ Nay, goodman Curtall, your discretions are very
simple; let me cramp him with a reason. Sirrah, whether is
better good ale or small-beer? Alas! see his simplicity that
cannot answer me; why, I say ale.
_Curtall._ And so say I, neighbour.
_Poppy._ Thou hast reason; ergo, say I, ’tis better be a
king than a clown. Faith, Master Sylla, I hope a man may now
call ye knave by authority.
Even more impertinent, because they violate the truth of character and
misrepresent an historical person, are some of the liberties Lodge
takes with Marius. Such is the device with the echo, which he transfers
from the love scenes of poetical Arcady, where it is quite appropriate,
to the mountains of Numidia, where it would hardly be in place even if
we disregarded the temperament and circumstances of the exile.
_Marius._ Thus Marius lives disdain’d of all the gods,
_Echo._ Gods!
_Marius._ With deep despair late overtaken wholly.
_Echo._ O, lie!
_Marius._ And will the heavens be never well appeased?
_Echo._ Appeased.
_Marius._ What mean have they left me to cure my smart?
_Echo._ Art.
_Marius._ Nought better fits old Marius’ mind then war.
_Echo._ Then, war!
_Marius._ Then full of hope, say, Echo, shall I go?
_Echo._ Go!
_Marius._ Is any better fortune then at hand?
_Echo._ At hand.
_Marius._ Then farewell, Echo, gentle nymph, farewell.
_Echo._ Fare well.
_Marius._ (soliloquises). O pleasing folly to a pensive man!
Yet Lodge was a competent scholar who was by and by to translate _The
Famous and Memourable Workes of Josephus, a Man of Much Honour and
Learning among the Jewes_, and the _Works both Moral and Natural of
Lucius Annaeus Seneca_. And already in this play he makes Sylla’s
genius, invisible to all, summon him in Latin Elegiacs audible only
to him. If then the popular scenes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays do
not make a very Roman impression, it should be remembered that he is
punctilious in comparison with the University gentleman who preceded
him. Nor did the fashion of popularising antique themes with vulgar
frippery from the present die out when Shakespeare showed a more
excellent way. There is something of very much the same kind in
Heywood’s _Rape of Lucrece_ which was published in 1608.
But these superficial laches are not the most objectionable things in
the play. There is nothing organic in it. Of course its neglect of the
unities of time and place is natural and right, but it is careless
of unity in structure or even in portraiture. The canvas is crowded
with subordinate figures who perplex the action without producing a
vivid impression of their own characters. A few are made distinct by
insistence on particular traits, like Octavius with his unbending civic
virtue, or Antonius with his ‘honey-dropping’ and rather ineffectual
eloquence, or Lepidus with his braggard temporising. The only one
of them who has real individuality is the younger Marius, insolent,
fierce, and cruel, but full of energy and filial affection, and too
proud to survive his fortunes. He perhaps is the most consistent and
sympathetic person in the piece; which of itself is a criticism, for
he occupies a much less important place than the two principals,
expressly announced as the heroes in the title-page. It is difficult
even to guess the intention of the author in this delineation of them,
and in any case the result is not pleasing. Marius, despite a certain
amount of tough fortitude—which for the rest is not so indomitable as
in Plutarch—and a rude magnanimity displayed in the imaginary scene
with Sylla’s daughter and wife, is far from attractive; and it comes
as a surprise that after all his violence and vindictiveness he should
meet his death “with a reverend smile” in placid resignation. But with
Sylla matters are worse. He would be altogether repulsive but for
his courage, and Lodge seems to explain him and his career only by
appealing to his own adopted epithet of Felix or Fortunate. His last
words are:
Fortune, now I bless thee
That both in life and death would’st not oppress me.
And when, “to conclude his happiness,” his sumptuous funeral is
arranged, Pompey expresses the same idea in the lines that close the
play:
Come, bear we hence this trophy of renown
Whose life, whose death was far from Fortune’s frown.
The problem of his strange story is not so much stated as implied,
and far less is there any attempt at a solution. After all his
blood-guiltiness, he too, like Marius, passes away in peace, but with
him the peacefulness rises to the serenity of a saint or sage. To his
friend he exclaims:
My Flaccus, worldly joys and pleasures fade;
Inconstant time, like to the fleeting tide
With endless course man’s hopes doth overbear:
Now nought remains that Sylla fain would have
But lasting fame when body lies in grave.
To his wife, who soon after asks:
How fares my lord? How doth my gentle Sylla?
he replies still more devoutly:
Free from the world, allied unto the heavens;
Not curious of incertain chances now.
There is thus no meaning in the story. The rival leaders are equally
responsible for the Wounds of Civil War, but end as happily as though
they had been benefactors of society. And this is by no means presented
as an example of tragic irony, in which case something might be said
for it, but as the natural, fitting, and satisfactory conclusion. Yet
Plutarch tells of Marius’ sleeplessness, drunkenness, and perturbation,
and of Sylla‘s debaucheries and disease. These were hints, one might
have thought, that would have suited the temper of an Elizabethan
dramatist; but Lodge passes them over.
It is the same with the public story. If Rome is left in quiet it is
only because Sylla’s ruthlessness has been ‘fortunate’; it is not
represented as the rational outcome of what went before, nor is there
any suggestion of what was to follow after.
The merit of the play, such as it is, lies in its succession of
stirring scenes—but not the most stirring that might have been
selected—from the career of two famous personalities in the history
of a famous State. It is almost incredible that in barely more than
half a dozen years after its publication London playgoers were
listening to _Julius Caesar_ with its suggestive episodes, its noble
characterisation, and full realisation of what the story meant.
Yet Lodge’s play is probably as good as any of those based on Roman
History till Shakespeare turned his attention to such subjects. The
titles of a number of others have come down to us. Some of these are
of early date and may have approximated to the type of _Apius and
Virginia_. Others would attempt the style of Seneca, either after the
crude fashion of _Gorboduc_ or subsequently under the better guidance
of the French practitioners; and among these later Senecans were
distinguished men like Lord Brooke, who destroyed a tragedy on _Antony
and Cleopatra_ in 1601, and Brandon, whose _Vertuous Octavia_, written
in 1598, still survives.[71] In others again there may have been an
anticipation or imitation of the more popular manner of Lodge. But the
fact that they were never published, or have been lost, or, in one or
two cases where isolated copies are extant, have not been thought worth
reprinting, affords a presumption that their claims are inferior, and
that in them no very characteristic note is struck. It is pretty safe
to suppose that they did not contain much instruction for Shakespeare,
and that none of them would bridge the gap between Lodge’s medley and
Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
[71] It is in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington and is
inaccessible to me. It is described as claiming sympathy for Antony’s
neglected wife.
The progress made since the middle of the century was, of course,
considerable. A pioneer performance, like _Apius and Virginia_, had
the merit of pushing beyond the landmarks of the old Morality, and of
bringing Roman story within the ken of English playgoers, but it did
nothing more. It treated this precisely as it might have treated any
other subject, and looked merely to the lesson, though, no doubt, it
sought to make the lesson palatable with such dramatic condiments as
the art of the day supplied. The Senecans, inspired by the _Octavia_,
make a disinterested effort to detach and set forth the conception of
old Roman greatness, as it was given that age to understand it, and
these productions show no impropriety and much literary skill, but
the outlines and colours are too vague to admit of reality or life.
Lodge is realistic enough in his way, but it is by sacrificing what is
significant and characteristic, and submerging the majesty of ancient
Rome in the banalities and trivialities of his own time. No dramatist
had been able at once to rise to the grandeur of the theme and keep a
foothold on solid earth, to reconcile the claims of the ideal and the
real, the past and the present. That was left for Shakespeare to do.
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE’S TREATMENT OF HISTORY
The turn of the centuries roughly bisects the dramatic career of
Shakespeare. In the first half he had written many comedies and a few
tragedies; in the second he was to write many tragedies with a few
plays which, on account of the happy ending and other traits, may
be assigned to the opposite class. But beyond these recognised and
legitimate subdivisions of the Romantic Drama, he had also before 1600
busied himself with that characteristic product of the Elizabethan
Age, the Historical Play dealing with the national annals. In this
kind, indeed, he had been hardly less abundant than in comedy, the
proportions being nine of the one to eleven of the other. Then suddenly
he leaves it aside, and returns to it only at the close in _Henry
VIII._, which moreover is but partially his handiwork.
Thus, while the tragic note is not inaudible in the earlier period of
his activity nor the comic note in the later, the third, that sounded
so loud in the sixteenth century, utterly or all but utterly dies away
in the seventeenth.
Why this should be so it is impossible to say. It may be that the
patriotic self-consciousness stirred by the defeat of the Armada and
the triumph of England waned with the growing sense of internal
grievances and the loss of external prestige, and that the national
story no longer inspired such curiosity and delight. It may be that
Shakespeare had exhausted the episodes which had a special attraction
for contemporaries and himself. It may be that he found in the records
of other lands themes that gave his genius freer scope and more fully
satisfied the requirements of his art. Or all these considerations may
have co-operated.
For the last of them there is at any rate this much to say, that,
though the play on native history virtually disappears, the Historical
Play as such survives and wins new triumphs. The Roman group resembles
the English group in many ways, and, where they differ, it has
excellences of its own.
What are the main points in which respectively they diverge or coincide?
(1) There is no doubt that it was patriotic enthusiasm that called into
existence the Chronicle Histories so numerous in Elizabeth’s reign,
of which the best in Shakespeare’s series are only the consummate
flower. The pride in the present and confidence in the future of
England found vent, too, in occupation with England’s past, and since
the general appetite could not be satisfied by the histories of every
sort and size that issued from the press, the vigorous young drama
seized the opportunity of extending its operations, and stepped in to
supply the demand. Probably with a more definite theory of its aims,
methods, and sphere there might have been less readiness to undertake
the new department. But in the popular conception the play was little
else than a narrative presented in scenes. The only requirement was
that it should interest the spectators, and few troubled themselves
about classic rule and precedent, or even about connected structure
and arrangement. And when by and by the Elizabethan Tragedy and
Comedy became more organic and vertebrate, the Historic Play had
secured recognition, and was able to persist in what was dramatically
a more rudimentary phase and develop without regard to more exacting
standards. Shakespeare’s later Histories, precisely the superlative
specimens of the whole species, illustrate this with conspicuous
force. The subject of _Henry IV._, if presented in summary, must
seem comparatively commonplace; the ‘argument’ of both parts, if
analysed, is loose and straggling; the second part to a great extent
repeats at a lower pitch the _motifs_ of the first; yet it is hardly
if at all less excellent than its predecessor, and together they
represent Shakespeare’s grand achievement in this kind. In _Henry
V._, which has merits that make it at least one of the most popular
pieces that Shakespeare ever wrote, the distinctively narrative wins
the day against the distinctively dramatic. Not only are some of the
essential links supplied only in the story of the chorus, but there
is no dramatic collision of ideas, no conflict in the soul of the
hero, except in the scenes preliminary to Agincourt, not even much of
the excitement of suspense. It is a plain straightforward history,
admirably conveyed in scene and speech, all the episodes significant
and picturesque, all the persons vividly characterised, bound to stir
and inspire by its sane and healthy patriotism; but in the notes that
are considered to make up the _differentia_ of a drama, whether ancient
or modern, it is undoubtedly defective.
In proportion then as Shakespeare realised the requirements of the
Chronicle History, and succeeded in producing his masterpieces in this
domain, he deviated from the course that he pursued in his other plays.
And this necessarily followed from the end he had in view. He wished
to give, and his audience wished to get, passages from the history of
their country set forth on the stage as pregnantly and attractively as
possible; but the history was the first and chief thing, and in it the
whole species had its _raison d’être_. History delivered the material
and prescribed the treatment, and even the selection of the episodes
treated was determined less perhaps by their natural fitness for
dramatic form, than by the influence of certain contemporary historic
interests. For the points which the average Elizabethan had most at
heart were—(1) The unity of the country under the strong and orderly
government of securely succeeding sovereigns, who should preserve it
from the long remembered evils of Civil War; (2) Its rejection of
Papal domination, with which there might be, but more frequently among
the play-going classes, there was not associated the desire for a
more radical reconstruction of the Church; (3) The power, safety and
prestige of England, which Englishmen believed to be the inevitable
consequence of her unity and independence. So whatever in bygone times
bore on these matters and could be made to illustrate them, whether by
parallel or contrast, was sure of a sympathetic hearing. And in this
as in other points Shakespeare seems to have felt with his fellow-men
and shared their presuppositions. At least all the ten plays on English
history in which he is known to have had a hand deal with rivalry for
the throne, the struggle with Rome, the success or failure in France
accordingly as the prescribed postulates are fulfilled or violated.
It may have been his engrossment in these concerns that sometimes led
him to choose subjects which the mere artist would have rejected as of
small dramatic promise.
When he turned to the records of antiquity, the conditions were very
different. Doubtless to a man of the Renaissance classical history in
its appeal came only second, if even second, to the history of his own
land; doubtless also to the man who was not a technical scholar, the
history of Rome had far more familiar charm than the history of Greece.
When, therefore, Shakespeare went outside his own England in search
for historical themes, he was still addressing the general heart,
and showed himself in closer accord with popular taste than, _e.g._
Chapman, whose French plays are perhaps next to his own among the best
Elizabethan examples of the historical drama. But we may be sure that
Ambois and Biron and Chabot were much less interesting persons to the
ordinary Londoner than Caesar and Antony and Coriolanus. Not merely
in treatment, but in selection of the material—which cannot fail to
influence the treatment—Shakespeare was in touch with common feeling
and popular taste.
All the same a great deal more was now required than in the case of
the English series. In that the story of a reign or the section of
a reign, the chronicle of a flimsy conspiracy or a foreign campaign
might furnish the framework for a production that would delight the
audience. It was otherwise when dramatist and spectators alike knew the
history only in its mass, and were impressed only by the outstanding
features. Just as with individuals so with nations, many things become
significant and important in those of our familiar circle that would
seem trivial in mere strangers and acquaintances. If the Roman plays
were to be popular as the English ones had been, Shakespeare was bound
to select episodes of more salient interest and more catholic appeal
than such as had hitherto sometimes served his turn. In the best of
the English plays we constantly wonder that Shakespeare could get
such results from stories that we should have thought in advance to
be quite unfit for the stage. But the fall of Caesar and the fate of
those who sought to strangle the infant empire, the shock of opposing
forces in Augustus and Antony and the loss of the world for Cleopatra’s
love, the triumph and destruction of the glorious renegade from whose
wrath the young republic escaped as by fire—that there are tragic
possibilities in themes like these is patent to a casual glance. It
is significant that, while of the subjects handled in the English
histories only the episode of Joan of Arc and the story of Richard
III. have attracted the attention of foreign dramatists, all the Roman
plays have European congeners. One of the reasons may be, that though
the events described in the national series are dramatic enough for
national purposes, they do not like the others satisfy the severer
international test.
And to a difference in the character of the material corresponds a
difference in the character of the treatment. The best of the English
plays, as we have seen, are precisely those that it would be hardest to
describe in terms of the ordinary drama. The juvenile _Richard III._
is the only one that could nowadays without objection be included in a
list of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But with the Roman plays it is quite
the reverse. In the main lines of construction they are of tragic
build; there is invariably a tragic problem in the hero’s career; and
it reaches a tragic solution in his self-caused ruin. So they are
always ranked with the Tragedies, and though here and there they may
show a variation from Shakespeare’s usual tragic technique, it would
occur to no one to alter the arrangement.
(2) Yet these little variations may remind us that after all they
were not produced under quite the same presuppositions as plays like
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_, or even _King Lear_ and _Macbeth_. In a sense
they remain _Histories_, as truly histories as any of their English
analogues. The political vicissitudes and public catastrophes do not
indeed contribute the chief elements of interest. Here as everywhere
Shakespeare is above all occupied with the career of individuals,
with the interaction of persons and persons, and of persons and
circumstances. Nevertheless in these plays the characters are always
exhibited in relation to the great mutations in the State. Not merely
the background but the environment and atmosphere are supplied by the
large life of affairs. It is not so in _Lear_, where the legend offered
no tangible history on which the imagination could take hold; it is
only partially so in _Macbeth_, where Shakespeare knew practically
nothing of the actual local conditions; nor, had it been otherwise, was
there anything in these traditions of prerogative importance for later
times. But in the Roman plays the main facts were accredited and known,
and of infinite significance for the history of the world. They could
not be overlooked, they had to be taken into account.
For the same reason they must no more be tampered with than the
accepted facts of English History. The two historical series are again
alike in this, that they treat their sources with much more reverence
than either the Comedies or the other Tragedies show for theirs. Even
in _Lear_ the dramatist has no scruple about altering the traditional
close; even in _Macbeth_ he has no scruple about blending the stories
of two reigns. But in dealing with the professedly authentic records
whether of England or Rome, Shakespeare felt that he had to do with the
actual, with what definitely had been; and he did not conceive himself
free to give invention the rein, as when with a light heart he reshaped
the caprices of a novel or the perversions of a legend. As historical
dramatist he was subordinated to his subject much in the same way as
the portrait painter. He could choose his point of view, and manage
the lights and shades, and determine the pose. He could emphasize
details, or slur them over, or even leave them out. He could interpret
and reveal, so far as in him lay, the meaning and spirit of history.
But he had his marching orders and could no more depart from them to
take a more attractive way of his own, than the portrait painter can
correct the defects of his sitter to make him an Apollo. It cannot
always have been easy to keep true to this self-denying ordinance.
Despite the suitability of the subject in general suggestion and even
in many particular incidents there must have been a recalcitrance to
treatment here and there; and traces of this may be detected, if the
Roman plays are compared with the tragedies in which the genius of
Shakespeare had quite unimpeded sway. To some of the chief of these
traces Mr. Bradley has called attention. Thus there is in the middle of
_Antony and Cleopatra_, owing to the undramatic nature of the historic
material, an excessive number of brief scenes “in which the _dramatis
personae_ are frequently changed, as though a novelist were to tell his
story in a succession of short chapters, in which he flitted from one
group of his characters to another.” In _Coriolanus_, “if Shakespeare
had made the hero persist and we had seen him amid the flaming ruins of
Rome, awaking suddenly to the enormity of his deed and taking vengeance
on himself ... that would merely have been an ending more strictly
tragic[72] than the close of Shakespeare’s play.” In _Julius Caesar_
the “famous and wonderful” quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is
“an episode the removal of which would not affect the actual sequence
of events (unless we may hold that but for the emotion caused by the
quarrel and reconciliation Cassius would not have allowed Brutus
to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at
Philippi).” Mr. Bradley discusses this in another connection, and here,
as we shall see, Shakespeare only partially adheres to his authority.
In the same play, however, we have the episode of the poet Cinna’s
murder which, however useful in illustrating the temper of the mob
and suggestive in other respects, is nevertheless a somewhat crude
intrusion of history, for it leads to nothing and in no way helps on
the action. But Shakespeare will put up with an occasional awkwardness
in the mechanism rather than fail to give what he considers a faithful
picture. As in the best English Histories he omits, he compresses, he
even regroups; but he never consciously alters the sense, and to bring
out the sense he utilises material that puts a little strain on his art.
[72] _I.e._ more tragic in the technical sense. Of course Mr. Bradley
is quite aware that as it stands _Coriolanus_ is “a much nobler play.”
It is right to add that he expresses no opinion whether the actual
close of Shakespeare’s play “was due simply to his unwillingness to
contradict his historical authority on a point of such magnitude.” At
any rate, I am convinced that in his eyes that was a sufficient ground.
Yet of course this does not mean that in the Roman any more than
in the English plays he attempts an accurate reconstruction of the
past. It may even be doubted whether such an attempt would have been
intelligible to him or to any save one or two of his contemporaries.
To the average Elizabethan (and in this respect Shakespeare was an
average Elizabethan, with infinitely clearer vision certainly, but
with the same outlook and horizon) the past differed from the present
chiefly by its distance and dimness; and distinctive contrasts in
manners and customs were but scantily recognised. A generation later
French audiences could view the perruques and patches of Corneille’s
Romans without any sense of incongruity, and the assimilation of the
ancient to the modern was in some respects much more thorough-going in
Shakespeare’s England. In all his classical pieces the impression of
historic actuality and the genuine antique _cachet_ is only produced
when there is a kind of inner kinship between the circumstances to
be represented and the English life that he knew. There was a good
deal of such correspondence between Elizabethan life and Roman life,
so the Roman Tragedies have a breath of historic verisimilitude and
even a faint suggestion of local colour. There was much less between
Elizabethan life and Greek life, so _Timon_ and _Troilus and Cressida_,
though true as human documents, have almost nothing Hellenic about
them. But even in the Roman plays, so soon as there is anything that
involves a distinctive difference between Rome and London Shakespeare
is sure to miss it. Anachronisms in detail are of course abundantly
unimportant, though a formidable list of them could be computed. In
_Julius Caesar_ there are clocks that strike, and the crowd throw up
their sweaty nightcaps. The arrangements of the Elizabethan stage
furnish Cleopatra and Comminius with similes. Menenius is familiar with
funeral knells and batteries and Galen’s prescriptions.
These are _minutiae_ on which students like Bacon or Ben Jonson might
set store, but in regard to which Shakespeare was quite untroubled
and careless. Perhaps they deserve notice only because they add one
little item to the mass of proof that the plays were written by a
man of merely ordinary information, not by a trained scholar. But
for themselves they may be disregarded. It is not such trifles that
interfere with fidelity to antiquity. But in weightier matters,
too, Shakespeare shows an inevitable limitation in reproducing a
civilisation that was in some aspects very different from his own,
and for which he had no parallel in his own experience. He shows a
precisely analogous limitation when he deals with themes from English
History that were partly alien to the spirit of the time. Of this _King
John_ furnishes the grand example. We all know why that troublesome
reign is memorable now, not merely to the constitutional historian,
but to the man in the street and the child on the school bench. Yet
Shakespeare makes no mention of Runnymede or the Great Charter; and
we may assume that he, like most Elizabethans, if interested in such
matters at all, would have been unsympathetic to a movement that
extorted liberties by civil strife. To him the significant points
are the disputed succession, the struggle with the Pope, the initial
invasion of France by England when the Kingdom is of one accord, and
the subsequent invasion of England by France, when it is divided
against itself. So _King John_, though very true to human nature and
even to certain aspects of the period, pays no heed to the aspect which
other generations have considered the most important of all, and one
which on any estimate is not to be overlooked. But if Shakespeare thus
misses a conspicuous feature in a set of occurrences that took place
among his own people less than four hundred years before, we need not
wonder if he failed to detect the peculiar features of ancient Rome
as it existed at a further distance of twelve or sixteen centuries.
His approximation to the actual or alleged conditions varies indeed
in the different plays. It is closest in _Antony and Cleopatra_. In
that there is hardly a personage or circumstance for which he had not
some sort of a clue. He knew about soldiers of fortune like Enobarbus
and pirate-adventurers like Menas; a ruler like Henry VII. had in him
a touch of Octavius, there were not a few notabilities in Europe who
carried a suggestion of Mark Antony, the orgies of Cleopatra’s court
in Egypt were analogous to those of many an Italian or French court at
the Renaissance. It is all native ground to Shakespeare and he would
feel himself at home. On the other hand, he is least capable of seeing
eye to eye the primitive republican life which on Plutarch’s evidence
he has to depict in _Coriolanus_. The shrewd, resolute, law-abiding
Commons, whom some of the traditions that Plutarch worked up seem meant
to exalt; the plebs that might secede to the Holy Mount, but would not
rise in armed revolt; that secured the tribunate as its constitutional
lever with which it was by and by to shift the political centre of
gravity, this was like nothing that he knew or that anybody else knew
about till half a century had elapsed. He could only represent it in
terms of a contemporary city mob; and the consequence is that though
he has given a splendid picture that satisfies the imagination and
even realises some of Plutarch’s hints, it is not true to the whole
situation as envisaged by Plutarch.[73] _Julius Caesar_ occupies a kind
of intermediate position, and for that reason illustrates his method
most completely. He could understand a good deal of the political
crisis in Rome on which that story turns, from the existing conditions
or recent memories of his own country. In both a period of civil
turmoil had ended in the establishment of a strong government. In both
there were nobles who from principle or interest were opposed to the
change, so he could enter into the feelings of the conspirators. In
both the centralisation of authority was the urgent need, so he could
appreciate the indispensableness of the Empire, the ‘spirit of Caesar.’
But of zeal for the republican theory as such he knows nothing, and
therefore his Brutus is only in part the Brutus of Plutarch.
[73] Of course Shakespeare could not be expected to anticipate the
later theories and researches that go to prove that the political power
of plebs and tribunate has been considerably antedated.
Thus Shakespeare in his picture of Rome and Romans, does not give the
notes that mark off Roman from every other civilisation, but rather
those that it possessed in common with the rest, and especially with
his own. He even puts into it, without any consciousness of the
discrepancy, qualities that are characteristic of Elizabethan rather
than of Roman life. And the whole result, the quickening of the antique
material with modern feeling in so far as that is also antique, and
occasionally when it is not quite antique, is due to the thorough
realisation of the subject in Shakespeare’s own mind from his own
point of view, with all the powers not only of his reason, but of his
imagination, emotion, passion, and experience. Hence his delineations
are in point of fact more truly antique than those of many much more
scholarly poets, who can reproduce the minute peculiarities, but not,
what is more central and essential, the living energy and principle of
it all. This was felt by contemporaries. We have the express testimony
of the erudite Leonard Digges, who after graduating as Bachelor in
Oxford, continued his studies for many years in several foreign
universities, and consequently was promoted on his return to the
honorary degree of Master, a man who, with his academic training and
academic status, would not be apt to undervalue literal accuracy. But
he writes:
So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius: oh! how the audience
Were ravish’d, with what wonder went they thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-labour’d _Catiline_,—
Sejanus too was irksome.
Ben Jonson in _Sejanus_ and _Catiline_ tried to restore antiquity in
its exclusive and exceptional traits. Shakespeare approached it on
its more catholic and human side, interpreted it by those qualities
in modern life that face towards the classical ideal, and even went
the length of using at unawares some that were more typical of his
new world. And Jonson’s Roman plays were felt to be well-laboured and
irksome, while his filled the spectators with ravishment and wonder.
In both series then, English and Roman alike, Shakespeare on the one
hand loyally accepted his authorities and never deviated from them on
their main route, but on the other he treated them unquestioningly
from his own point of view, and probably never even suspected that
their own might be different. This is the double characteristic of his
attitude to his documents, and it combines pious regard for the assumed
facts of History with complete indifference to critical research. He
is as far as possible from submitting to the dead hand of the past,
but he is also as far as possible from allowing himself a free hand
in its manipulation. His method, in short, implies and includes two
principles, which, if separated, may easily become antagonistic, and
which, in point of fact, have led later schools of the historic drama
in quite opposite directions. A short examination of these contrasted
tendencies may perhaps help to throw a clearer light on Shakespeare’s
own position.
The one that lays stress on the artist’s right to take counsel with
his own ideas has been explained by Lessing in a famous passage of
the _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, which is all the more interesting for the
present purpose, that throughout it tacitly or expressly appeals to
the practice of Shakespeare. Lessing starts with Aristotle’s doctrine
that poetry is more pregnant than history, and asks why, when this is
so, the poet does not keep within the kingdom of his imagination, why
more especially the dramatist descends to the lower artistic level
of the historian to trespass on the domain of prosaic fact. And he
answers that it is merely a matter of convenience. There is advantage
to be gained from illustrious position and impressive associations;
and moreover the playwright finds it helpful that the audience should
already have some idea of the story to be told, that they should, as
it were, meet him half way, and bring to the understanding of his
piece some general knowledge of the persons. He gains his purpose if
he employs famous names which appear in a nimbus of associations, and
saves time in describing their characters and circumstances; and thus
they attune our minds for what is to come and serve as so many labels
by means of which, when we see a new play, we may inform ourselves
what it is all about. The initial familiarity and the prestige it
implies are fulcra for moving the interest of the beholders. The
historical dramatist, therefore, must be careful not to alter the
current conceptions of character; but, with that proviso, he has almost
unlimited powers, and may omit or recast or invent incidents, or forge
an entirely new story, just as he pleases, so long, that is, as he
leaves the character intact and does not interfere with our idea of the
hero. In that case the historic label would be more of a hindrance than
a help to our enjoyment.
Lessing’s view of the Historic Drama (and there is no doubt that he
thought he was describing the method of Shakespeare) is therefore
that it is a free work of fiction woven around characters that are
fairly well known. He was certainly wrong about Shakespeare, and his
theory strikes us nowadays as strangely inadequate, but it had very
important results. It directly influenced the dramatic art of Germany,
and it would be hard to overestimate the share it had in determining
Schiller’s methods of composition. It was in the air at the time of
the Romantic Movement in France, and is really the principle on which
Hugo constructs his more important plays in this kind. Schiller’s
treatment of history is very free; he invents scenes that have no
shadow of foundation in fact, and yet are of crucial importance in his
idealised narrative; he invents subordinate persons who are hardly less
conspicuous than the authentic principals, and who vitally affect the
plot and action. All his plays contain these licenses. Such episodes as
the interview between Mary and Elizabeth, of Jeanne Darc’s indulgence
of her pity illustrate the first, such figures as Mortimer or Max and
Thekla illustrate the second; but what would _Mary Stuart_ or the _Maid
of Orleans_ or _Wallenstein_ be without them? And with Victor Hugo this
emancipation from authority is pushed to even greater lengths. Plays
like _Le Roi s’amuse_ or _Marion de Lorme_ might recall the vagaries of
early Elizabethan experiments like Greene’s _James IV._, were it not
that they are works of incomparably higher genius. Hugo has accepted
the traditional view of a French king and a French court, but all the
rest is sheer romance on which just here and there we detect the trail
of an old _mémoire_.
Now, some of the extreme examples suggest a two-fold objection to
Lessing’s account as a quite satisfactory explanation of the species.
In the first place, when the poet carries his privilege of independence
so far, why should he not go a step further and invent his entire
drama, names and all? As it is, we either know something of the real
history or we do not. If we do not, what is the advantage of appealing
to it? If we do, will not such lordly disregard of facts stir up the
same recalcitrance as disregard of traditional character, and shall
we not be rather perplexed than aided by the conflict between our
reminiscences and the statements of the play?
And, in the second place, is the portrayer of human nature to take
his historical persons as once for all given and fixed, so that he
must leave the accepted estimate of them intact without attempting
to modify it? Surely that would be to deprive the dramatist of his
greater privilege and the drama of its greatest opportunity. For then
we should only see a well-known character illustrated or described
anew, displaying its various traits in this or that set of novel
surroundings. But there would be little room for the sort of work that
the historic drama is specially fitted to do, viz. the exposition
of ambiguous or problematic natures, which will give us a different
conception of them from the one we have hitherto had.
Hence there arose in Germany a view directly opposed to that of
Lessing, and Lotze does not hesitate to recommend the most painstaking
investigation and observance of the real facts. The poet, he thinks,
will find scope enough in giving a new interpretation of the career
and individuality of the hero, after he has used all the means in his
power to bring home to his imagination the actual circumstances from
which they emerged. Probably little was known in England of this theory
of Lotze’s, though utterances to the same effect occur in Carlyle,
especially in his remarks on Shakespeare’s English Histories; yet
it seems to give a correct account of the way in which most English
historical dramas were constructed in the nineteenth century. Sir Henry
Taylor, while calling _Philip van Artevelde_ “a dramatic romance,” is
careful to state that “historic truth is preserved in it, as far as the
material events are concerned.” Mr. Swinburne, in his trilogy on Mary
Stuart, versifies whole pages of contemporary writers (_e.g._ in the
interview of Mary and Knox taken almost verbatim from Knox’s _History
of the Reformation_), and in his prose essay seems specially to value
himself on his exact delineation of her career, and his solution of
the problem of her strange nature. But the prerogative instance is
furnished by Tennyson. In his dedication of _Harold_, he writes to
Lord Lytton: “After old-world records like the Bayeux Tapestry and the
Roman de Rou, Edward Freeman’s _History of the Norman Conquest_ and
your father’s historical romance treating of the same theme have been
mainly helpful to me in writing this drama.” He puts his antiquarian
researches first, his use of the best modern critical authorities
second, and only in the third place an historical romance, to which for
the rest Freeman has said that he owes something himself. Nor would it
be difficult to show that in _Queen Mary_ and _Becket_ he has followed
the same lines. And on such lines it is clear that the historical
dramatist’s only aim must be to present in accurate though artistic
form a selection of the incidents and circumstances of the hero’s life
and times, and place them in such mutual relation that they throw new
light on the nature and destiny of the man.
But from this point of view the functions of the poet and the historian
will tend to coalesce, and it is just this that at first sight rouses
suspicion. After all can we so reproduce the past as to give it real
immediate truth? It is hardly possible by antiquarian knowledge
quickened by ever so much poetic power to galvanise into life a state
of things that once for all is dead and gone. And meanwhile the mere
effort to do so is apt to make the drama a little frigid, as Tennyson’s
dramas are. We are seldom carried away on a spontaneous stream of
passion; for after all the methods of the historian and the poet are
radically different, and the painful mosaic work of the one is almost
directly opposed to the complete vision, the creation in one jet, which
may be rightly expected of the other.
But it is noteworthy that though the two schools which we have just
discussed, make appeal to Shakespeare, his own procedure does not
precisely agree with that of one or other. He is too much of the
heaven-born poet for the latter; he has too genuine a delight in facts
for the former. He has points of contact with both, but in a way he
is more _naïf_ and simple-minded than either. He at the same time
accepts the current conception of character with Lessing, and respects
the allegations of history with Carlyle. But though he begins with
the ordinary impression produced by his hero, he does not stop there.
Such an impression is bound to be incoherent and vague. Shakespeare
probes and defines it; he tests it in relation to the assumed facts on
which it is based; he discovers the latent difficulties, faces them,
and solves them, and, starting with a conventional type, leaves us
with an individual man. In doing this he treats the facts as a means,
not as an end, but he does not sophisticate them. We hardly ever find
fictitious persons and scenes in Schiller’s style, and when we do the
exception proves the rule, for they have not the same function as in
Schiller’s theatre. Falstaff plays his part aside, as it were, from
the official history, he belongs to the private life of Prince Hal,
and is impotent to affect the march of public events. People like
Lucius in _Julius Caesar_, or Nicanor in _Coriolanus_, or Silius in
_Antony and Cleopatra_ do not interfere in the political story; they
are present to make or to hear comments, or at most to assist the
inward interpretation. No unhistorical person has historical work to
do, and no unhistorical episode affects the historical action.[74] Yet
he quite escapes from the chill and closeness of the book-room. He
engages in no critical investigations to sift out the genuine facts. He
does not study old tapestry or early texts. Unhampered by the learned
apparatus of the scholar, undistracted by the need of pausing to verify
or correct, he speeds along on the flood-tide of his own inspiration,
which takes the same course with the interests of the nation. For it is
the reward of the intimate sympathy which exists between him and his
countrymen, that he goes to work, his personal genius fortified and
enlarged by the popular enthusiasms, patriotic or cosmopolitan. And
nothing can withstand the speed and volume of the current. There is a
great contrast between the broad free sweep of his Histories, English
or Roman, that lift us from our feet and carry us away, and the little
artificial channels of the antiquarian dramas, on the margin of which
we stand at ease to criticise the purity of the distilled water. Yet
none the less he is in a sense more obedient to his authorities than
any writer of the antiquarian school. Just because, while desiring to
give the truth as he knows it, he is careless to examine the accuracy
or estimate the value of the documents he consults; and just because,
while determined to give a faithful narrative, he spares himself all
labour of comparison and research and takes a statement of Holinshed
or Plutarch as guaranteeing itself, he is far more in the hands of
the guide he follows than a later dramatist would be. He takes the
text of his author, and often he has not more than one: he accepts it
implicitly and will not willingly distort it: he reads it in the light
of his own insight and the spirit of the age, and tries to recreate the
agents and the story from the more or less adequate hints that he finds.
[74] Even the intervention of the Bastard in _King John_ was guaranteed
by the old play and was doubtless considered authentic by Shakespeare.
Now, proceeding in this way it is clear that while in every case
Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his historical sources must be great,
it will vary greatly in quality and degree according to the material
delivered to him. The situations may be more or less dramatic, the
narrative more or less firmly conceived. And among his sources
Plutarch occupies quite an exceptional place. From no one else has
he ‘conveyed’ so much, and no one else has he altered so little.
And the reason is, that save Chaucer and Homer, on whom he drew for
_Troilus and Cressida_, but from whom he could assimilate little that
suited his own different ideas, no other writer contained so much
that was of final and permanent excellence. To put it shortly, in
Plutarch’s _Lives_ Shakespeare for the first and almost the only time
was rehandling the masterpieces of a genius who stood at the summit of
his art. It was not so in the English Histories. One does not like to
say a word in disparagement of the Elizabethan chronicles, especially
Holinshed’s, on which the maturer plays are based. They are good
reading and deserve to be read independently of the dramatist’s use of
them. But they are not works of phenomenal ability, and they betray the
infancy of historical writing, not only in scientific method, which in
the present connection would hardly matter, but in narrative art as
well. Cowley in _his_ Chronicle, _i.e._ the imaginary record of his
love affairs, breaks off with a simile and jest at their expense. If,
he says, I were to give the details,
I more voluminous should grow—
(Chiefly if I like them should tell
All change of weathers that befell)
Than Holinshed and Stowe.
Their intention is good, and they often realise it so as to interest
and impress, but the introduction of such-like trifles as Cowley
mentions, without much relevance or significance, may give us the
measure of their technical skill. Again, though in the second and
third part of _Henry VI._ Shakespeare was dealing with the work of
Marlowe, we have to remember, first, that his originals were composite
pieces not by Marlowe alone, and, further, that even Marlowe could not
altogether escape the disabilities of a pioneer.
In Plutarch, however, Shakespeare levied toll on no petty vassal
like the compilers of the Chronicles, or innovating conqueror like
the author of _Tamburlaine_, but on the king by right divine of a
long-established realm. And the result is that he appropriates more,
and that more of greater value, than from any other tributary.
CHAPTER III
ANCESTRY OF SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS
1. PLUTARCH[75]
Plutarch, born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, about 45 or 50 A.D., flourished
in the last quarter of the first and the earliest quarter of the
second century. He came of good stock, which he is not reluctant to
talk about. Indeed, his habit of introducing or quoting his father,
his grandfather, and even his great grandfather, gives us glimpses
of a home in which the prescribed pieties of family life were
warmly cherished; and some of the references imply an atmosphere of
simplicity, urbanity, and culture.
[75] See Plutarch’s works _passim_, especially North’s version of
the _Lives_ reprinted in the _Tudor Translations_, and the _Morals_
translated by Philemon Holland (1603). See also Archbishop Trench’s
_Lectures on Plutarch_.
The lad was sent to Athens to complete his education under Ammonius,
an eminent philosopher of that generation, though in Carlyle’s phrase,
‘now dim to us,’ who also took part in what little administrative
work was still intrusted to provincials, and more than once held the
distinguished position of strategos. Thus, as in childhood Plutarch was
trained in the best domestic traditions of elder Greece, so now he had
before his eyes an example of such active citizenship as survived in
the changed condition of things.
The same spirit of reverence for the past presided over his routine of
study. His works afterwards show a wide familiarity with the earlier
literature and philosophy of his country, and the foundations of this
must have been laid in his student days. It was still in accordance
with accepted precedents and his own reminiscent tastes, that when he
set out on his travels, he should first, as so many of his predecessors
were reported to have done, betake himself to the storied land of
Egypt. We know that this must have been after 66 A.D., for in that
year, when Nero made his progress through Greece, Plutarch tells us
that he was still the pupil of Ammonius. We know, further, that he must
have visited Alexandria, for he mentions that in his grandfather’s
opinion his father gave too large a banquet to celebrate their
homecoming from that city. But he does not inform us how much of Egypt
he saw, or how long was his stay, or in what way he employed himself.
It is only a probable conjecture at most that his treatise on _Isis and
Osiris_ may be one of the fruits of this expedition.
Of another and later journey that took him to Italy, there is more to
be said. Plutarch at an early age, whether before or after the Egyptian
tour, had already been employed in public affairs. He tells us:
I remember my selfe, that when I was but of yoong yeres I
was sent with another in embassage to the Proconsul: and
in that my companion staid about I wot not what behind, I
went alone and did that which we had in commission to do
together. After my returne when I was to give an account
unto the State, and to report the effect of my charge and
message back again, my father arose, and taking me apart,
willed me in no wise to speak in the singular number and
say, _I departed or went_, but, _We departed_; item not
_I said_ (or _quoth I_) but _We said_; and in the whole
narration of the rest to joine alwaies my companion as if he
had been associated and at one hand with me in that which I
did alone.[76]
[76] _Instructions for them, etc._
Such courtesy conciliates good will, and he was subsequently sent ‘on
public business’ to Rome. This must have been before 90 A.D., when
Rusticus, whom Plutarch mentions that he met, was condemned to death,
and when the philosophers were expelled from the city; and was probably
some time after 74 A.D., the date of their previous expulsion, when,
moreover, Plutarch was too young to be charged with matters so weighty
as to need settlement in the capital. But it is not certain whether
this was his only visit to Italy, and whether he made it in the reign
of Vespasian or of Domitian. His story of a performing dog that took
part in an exhibition in presence of Vespasian, has been thought to
have the verisimilitude of a witnessed scene, and has been used to
support the former supposition: his description of the sumptuousness
of Domitian’s buildings makes a similar impression, and has been used
to support the latter. All this must remain doubtful, but some things
are certain: that his business was so engrossing, and those who came
to him for instruction were so numerous, that he had little time for
the study of the Latin language; that he delivered lectures, some of
which were the first drafts of essays subsequently included in the
_Moralia_; that he had as his acquaintances or auditors several of the
most distinguished men in Rome, among them Mestrius Florus, a table
companion of Vespasian, Sosius Senecio, the correspondent of Pliny,
and that Arulenus Rusticus afterwards put to death by Domitian, who
on one occasion would not interrupt a lecture of Plutarch’s to read
a letter from the Emperor; that he traversed Italy as far north as
Ravenna, where he saw the bust of Marius, and even as Bedriacum, where
he inspected the battlefields of 69 A.D.
But though Plutarch loved travel and sight-seeing, and though he was
fully alive to the advantages of a great city, with its instructive
society and its collections of books, his heart was in his native
place, and he returned to settle there. “I my selfe,” he says, “dwelle
in a poore little towne, and yet doe remayne there willingly, least it
should become lesse.”[77] And in point of fact he seems henceforth only
to have left it for short excursions to various parts of Greece. One of
these exhibits him in a characteristic and amiable light. Apparently
soon after his marriage a dispute had broken out between the parents of
the newly wedded pair, and Plutarch in his conciliatory way took his
wife, as we should say, ‘on a pilgrimage,’ to the shrine at Thespiae
on Mount Helicon to offer a sacrifice to Love.[78] This is in keeping
with all the express utterances and all the unconscious revelations he
makes of his feeling for the sacredness of the family tie. He was one
of those whose soul rings true to the claims of kith and kin. He thanks
Fortune as a chief favour for the comradeship of his brother Timon,
and delights to show off the idiosyncrasies of his brother Lamprias.
We do not know when his marriage took place, but if Plutarch acted on
his avowed principles, it must have been when he was still a young
man, and it was a very happy one. As we should expect; for of all the
affections it is wedded love that he dwells on most fully, and few have
spoken more nobly and sincerely of it than he. Again and again he gives
the point of view, which is often said to have been attained by the
Modern World only by the combined assistance of Germanic character and
Christian religion. Thus he says of a virtuous attachment:
[77] _Life of Demosthenes._
[78] _Love._
But looke what person soever love setleth upon in mariage,
so as he be inspired once therewith, at the very first,
like as it is in Platoes Common-wealth, he will not have
these words in his mouth, _Mine_ and _Thine_; for simply
all goods are not common among all friends, but only those
who being severed apart in body, conjoine and colliquate as
it were perforce their soules together, neither willing nor
believing that they should be twaine but one: and afterward
by true pudicitie and reverence one unto the other, whereof
wedlock hath most need.... In true love there is so much
continency, modesty, loyalty and faithfulnesse, that though
otherwhile it touche a wanton and lascivious minde, yet
it diverteth it from other lovers, and by cutting off all
malapert boldnesse, by taking downe and debasing insolent
pride and untaught stubornesse, it placeth in lieu thereof
modest bashfulnesse, silence, and taciturnity; it adorneth
it with decent gesture and seemly countenance, making it
for ever after obedient to one lover onely.... For like
as at Rome, when there was a Lord Dictatour once chosen,
all other officers of state and magistrates valed bonnet,
were presently deposed, and laied downe their ensignes of
authority; even so those over whom love hath gotten the
mastery and rule, incontinently are quit freed and delivered
from all other lords and rulers, no otherwise than such as
are devoted to the service of some religious place.[79]
[79] _Love._
His wife bore him at least five children, of whom three died in
childhood, the eldest son, “the lovely Chaeron,” and then their little
daughter, born after her four brothers, and called by her mother’s
name, Timoxena. The letter of comfort which Plutarch, who was absent
at Tanagra, sent home after the death took place, is good to read.
There is perhaps here and there a touch that suggests the professional
moralist and rhetorician: as when he recounts a fable of Aesop’s
to enforce his advice; or bids his wife not to dwell on her griefs
rather than her blessings, like “those Criticks who collect and gather
together all the lame and defective verses of Homer, which are but few
in number; and in the meane time passe over an infinite sort of others
which were by him most excellently made”; or warns her to look to her
health because, if “the bodie be evill entreated and not regarded with
good diet and choice keeping, it becometh dry, rough and hard, in such
sort as from it there breathe no sweet and comfortable exhalations
unto the soule, but all smoakie and bitter vapors of dolour griefe
and sadnesse annoy her.” These were the toll Plutarch paid to his age
and to his training. But the tender feeling for his wife’s grief, and
the confidence in her dignified endurance of it are very beautiful
and human. And his descriptions of the child’s sweet nature, which
he does not leave general, but after his wont lights up with special
reminiscences, and which, he insists, they must not lose from mind or
turn to bitterness but cherish as an abiding joy, strike the note that
is still perhaps most comforting to mourners. After telling over her
other winsome and gracious ways, he recalls:
She was of a wonderfull kinde and gentle nature; loving she
was againe to those that loved her, and marvellous desirous
to gratifie and pleasure others: in which regards she both
delighted me and also yielded no small testimonie of rare
debonairetie that nature had endued her withall; for she
would make pretie means[80] to her nourse, and seeme (as it
were) to intreat her to give the brest or pap, not only to
other infants but also to little babies[81] and puppets and
such-like gauds as little ones take joy in and wherewith
they use to play; as if upon a singular courtesie and
humanitie shee could finde in her heart to communicate and
distribute from her owne table even the best things that
shee had, among them that did her any pleasure. But I see
no reason (sweet wife) why these lovely qualities and such
like, wherein we took contentment and joy in her life time,
should disquiet and trouble us now after her death, when we
either think or make relation of them: and I feare againe,
lest by our dolour and griefe, we abandon and put cleane
away all the remembrance thereof; like as Clymene desired to
do when she said
“I hate the bow so light of cornel tree:
All exercise abroad, farewell for me,”
as avoiding alwaies and trembling at the commemoration
of her sonne which should do no other good but renew her
griefe and dolour; for naturally we seeke to flee all that
troubleth and offendeth us. We oughte therefore so to
demeane ourselves, that, as whiles she lived, we had nothing
in the world more sweet to embrace, more pleasant to see or
delectable to heare than our daughter; so the cogitation
of her may still abide and live with us all our life time,
having by many degrees our joy multiplied more than our
heavinesse augmented.[82]
[80] = Coax.
[81] Dolls.
[82] _Epistle to Wife._
And then there is the confident expectation of immortality to mitigate
the present pang of severance.
But Plutarch and his wife had other consolations as well. Two sons,
Aristobulus and a younger Plutarch, lived to be men, and to them he
dedicated a treatise on the _Timaeus_. We know that one of them at
least married and had a son in his father’s lifetime. Beyond his
domestic circle Plutarch had a large number of friends in Chaeronea
and elsewhere, including such distinguished names as Favorinus the
philosopher and Serapion the poet; and being, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase,
an eminently “clubbable man,” he was often host and guest at banquets,
fragments of the talk at which he has preserved in his _Symposiacs_.
Almost the only rigorous line in his portrait is contributed by Aulus
Gellius, his later contemporary, and the friend of their common friend
Favorinus. Gellius[83] represents the philosopher Taurus as telling
about “Plutarchus noster”—a phrase that shows the attachment men felt
for him—a story of which Dryden gives the following free and amplified
but very racy translation:
[83] _Noctes Atticae_, I. xxvi.
Plutarch had a certain slave, a saucy stubborn kind of
fellow; in a word one of these pragmatical servants who
never make a fault but they give a reason for it. His
justifications one time would not serve his turn, but his
master commanded that he should be stripped and that the law
should be laid on his back. He no sooner felt the smart but
he muttered that he was unjustly punished, and that he had
done nothing to deserve the scourge. At last he began to
bawl out louder; and leaving off his groaning, his sighs,
and his lamentations, to argue the matter with more show
of reason: and, as under such a master he must needs have
gained a smattering of learning, he cried out that Plutarch
was not the philosopher he pretended himself to be; that
he had heard him waging war against all the passions, and
maintaining that anger was unbecoming a wise man; nay,
that he had written a particular treatise in commendation
of clemency; that therefore he contradicted his precepts
by his practices, since, abandoning himself over to his
choler, he exercised such inhuman cruelty on the body of
his fellow-creature. “How is this, Mr. Varlet?” (answered
Plutarch). “By what signs and tokens can you prove that I am
in passion? Is it by my countenance, my voice, the colour
of my face, by my words or by my gestures that you have
discovered this my fury? I am not of opinion that my eyes
sparkle, that I foam at the mouth, that I gnash my teeth, or
that my voice is more vehement, or that my colour is either
more pale or more red than at other times; that I either
shake or stamp with madness; that I say or do anything
unbecoming a philosopher. These, if you know them not, are
the symptoms of a man in rage. In the meantime,” (turning to
the officer who scourged him) “while he and I dispute this
matter, mind your business on his back.”
This story, as we have seen, comes from one who was in a position to
get authentic information about Plutarch, and it may very well be
true; but it should be corrected, or at least supplemented, by his own
utterances in regard to his servants. “Sometimes,” he says, “I use to
get angry with my slaves, but at last I saw that it was better to spoil
them by indulgence, than to injure myself by rage in the effort to
amend them.” And more emphatically:
As for me I coulde never finde in my hart to sell my drawght
Oxe that hadde plowed my lande a longe time, because he
coulde plowe no longer for age; and much lesse my slave to
sell him for a litle money, out of the contrie where he had
dwelt a long time, to plucke him from his olde trade of life
wherewith he was best acquainted, and then specially, when
he shalbe as unprofitable for the buyer as also for the
seller.[84]
[84] _Cato Major._
Plutarch was thus fully alive to the social and domestic amenities
of life, and to his responsibilities as householder, but he did not
for them overlook other claims. He became priest of Apollo in Delphi,
and for many years fulfilled the priestly functions, taking part
in the sacrifices, processions and dances even as an old man; for
philosopher as he was, his very philosophy supplied him with various
contrivances for conformity with the ancient cult, and he probably
had no more difficulty about it than a modern Hegelian has with the
Thirty-nine Articles. His deeper religious needs would be satisfied by
the Mysteries, in which he and his wife were initiated.
He was equally assiduous in public duties, which he did not despise
for the pettiness to which under the Roman domination they had shrunk.
In his view even the remnants of self-government are to be jealously
guarded and loyally employed, though they may concern merely parochial
and municipal affairs, and for them vigilant training and discipline
are required.
Surely impossible it is that they should ever have their
part of any great roial and magnificall joy, such as indeed
causeth magnanimitie and hautinesse of courage, bringeth
glorious honour abroad or tranquillitie of spirit at home,
who have made choice of a close and private life within
doors, never showing themselves in the world nor medling
with publicke affaires of common weale; a life, I say,
sequestered from all offices of humanitie, far removed
from any instinct of honour or desire to gratifie others,
thereby to deserve thankes or winne favour: for the soul,
I may tell you, is no base and small thing; it is not vile
and illiberal, extending her desires onely to that which is
good to be eaten, as doe these poulpes[85] or pour cuttle
fishes which stretch their cleies as far as to their meat
and no farther: for such appetites as these are most quickly
cut off with satietie and filled in a moment. But when the
motives and desires of the minde tending to vertue and
honestie, to honour and contentment of conscience are once
growen to their vigour and perfection, they have not for
their limit, the length and tearme onely of one man’s life;
but surely the desire of honour and the affection to profit
the societie of men, comprehending all aeternitie, striveth
still to goe forward in such actions and beneficiall deedes
as yield infinite pleasures that cannot be expressed.[86]
[85] Polypes.
[86] _That a man cannot live pleasantly, etc._
He was true to his principles. He not only officiated as Archon of
Chaeronea, but, “gracing the lowliest act in doing it,” was willing to
discharge the functions of a more subordinate post, which some thought
beneath his dignity.
Mine answer is to such as reprove me, when they find me
in proper person present, at the measuring and counting
of bricks and tiles, or to see the stones, sand and
lime laid downe, which is brought into the citie: “It
is not for myselfe that I builde, but for the citie and
commonwealth.”[87]
[87] _Instructions for them, etc._
He was thus faithful over a few things; tradition made him ruler over
many things. It is related that Trajan granted him consular rank and
directed the governor of Achaia to avail himself of his advice. This
was embellished by the report that he had been Trajan’s preceptor; and
in the Middle Ages a letter very magisterial in tone was fabricated
from him to his imperial pupil. It was even said that in his old age
Hadrian had made him governor of Greece.
There is a poetic justification for such legends. The government of
Trajan and Hadrian was felt to be such that the precepts of philosophy
might very fittingly have inspired it, and that the philosopher might
very well have been the administrator of their policy. And indeed it
is perhaps no fable that Plutarch had something to do with the better
_régime_ that was commencing; for his nephew Sextus of Chaeronea, who
may have inherited something of his uncle’s spirit, was an honoured
teacher of Marcus Aurelius, and influenced his pupil by his example
no less than by his teaching. The social renovation which was then in
progress should be remembered in estimating Plutarch’s career. Gibbon
says: “If a man were called to fix the period in the History of the
World, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and
prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from
the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Probably this
statement would need to be, if not greatly qualified, at least greatly
amplified, before it commanded universal assent, but, as it stands,
there is a truth in it which anyone can perceive. There was peace
throughout a great portion of the world; there was good government
within the Empire; there was a rejuvenescence of antique culture,
literature, and conduct. Indeed, the upward tendency begins with
the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and even the thwarting influence
of Domitian’s principate would be felt in Rome rather than in the
provinces. It was in this time of “reaction against corruption” that
Plutarch flourished, and his later life especially fell well within
that Indian summer of classical civilisation that Gibbon celebrates.
The tradition that he survived till the accession of Antonine may be
incorrect, but he certainly enjoyed eight years of Trajan’s government,
and, by Eusebius’ statement, was still alive in the third year of
Hadrian’s reign. It is to his latter days that his _Lives_ as a whole
are assigned, partly on account of the casual reference to contemporary
events that some of them contain.
Plutarch’s character, circumstances, and career in a world which was
reaching its close, well fitted him for the work that he did. This
Greek citizen of the Roman Empire had cultivated his mind by study and
travel, and had assimilated the wisdom of wide experience and pregnant
memories which Antiquity had amassed in earlier times and to which
this interval of revival was heir. Benevolent and dutiful, temperate
and devout, with a deep sense of his public obligations and the ethos
of his race, he sympathised with the best principles that had moulded
the life of olden days, and that were emerging to direct the life of
the present. And he combined his amplitude of traditional lore and
enthusiasm for traditional virtue in a way that made him more than
an antiquary or a moralist. The explorer and practitioner of antique
ideas, in a sense he was their artist as well.
His treatment and style already suggest the manifold influences that
went to form his mind. One of his charms lies in his quotations, which
he culls, or rather which spring up of their own accord, from his
reading of the most various authors of the most different times. He is
at home in Greek literature, and likes to clinch his argument with a
saying from the poets, for he seems to find that their words put his
thought better than he could himself. But this affects his original
expression. Dryden writes:
Being conversant in so great a variety of authors, and
collecting from all of them what he thought most excellent,
out of the confusion or rather mixture of their styles he
formed his own, which partaking of each was yet none of
them, but a compound of them all:—like the Corinthian metal
which had in it gold and brass and silver, and yet was a
species in itself.
There may be a suggestion of the curious mosaic-worker in his
procedure, something of artifice, or at least of conscious art; and
indeed his treatises are not free from a rhetorical and sometimes
declamatory strain.[88] That in so far is what Courier means when he
says that Plutarch writes in the style of a _sophistes_; but it was
inseparable from his composite culture and academic training, and it
does not interfere with his sincerity and directness.
[88] Even in the narrative passages one is conscious that the
descriptions have been worked up. Take, _e.g._ the following passage
from the _Life of Marius_:—
Ἐπεὶ δὲ πολλοὺς τῶν Ἀμβρώνων οἰ Ῥωμαῖοι διαφθείραντες ἀνεχώρησαν ὀπίσω
καὶ σκότος ἐπέσχεν, οὐχ ὥσπερ εὐτυχήματι τοσούτῳ τὸν στρατὸν ἐδέξαντο
παιᾶνες ἐπινίκιοι καὶ πότοι κατὰ σκηνὰς καὶ φιλοφροσύναι περὶ δεῖπνα,
καὶ, τὸ πάντων ἥδιστον ἀνδράσιν εὐτυχῶς μεμαχημένοις, ὕπνος ἤπιος,
ἀλλ’ ἐκείνην μάλιστα τὴν νύκτα φοβερὰν καὶ ταραχώδη διήγαγον. Ἦν μὲν
γὰρ αὐτοῖς ἀχαράκωτον τὸ στρατόπεδον καὶ ἀτείχιστον, ἀπελείποντο δὲ
τῶν βαρβάρων ἔτι πολλαὶ μυριάδες ἀήττητοι καὶ σνμμεμιγμένων τούτοις,
ὅσοι διαπεφεύγεσαν, τῶν Ἀμβρώνων ὀδυρμὸς ἦν διὰ νυκτὸς, οὐ κλαυθμοῖς
ούδὲ στεναγμοῖς ἀνθρώπων ἐοικῶς, ἀλλὰ θηρομιγής τις ὠρυγὴ καὶ βρύχημα
μεμιγμένον ἀπειλαῖς καὶ θρήνοις ἀναπεμπόμενον ἐκ πλήθους τοσούτου τά
τε πέριξ ὄρη καὶ τὰ κοῖλα τοῦ ποταμοῦ περιεφώνει. Καὶ κατεῖχε φρικώδης
ἦχος τὸ πεδίον.
(XX. Döhner’s Edition.)
Or take this from the _Life of Sulla_:—
Τὴν δὲ κραυγὴν καὶ ἀλαλαγμὸν οὐκ ἔστεγεν ὁ ἀὴρ ἐθνῶν τοσούτων ἅμα
καθισταμένων εἰς τάξιν. Ἤν δὲ ἅμα καὶ τὸ κομπῶδες καὶ σοβαρὸν αὐτῶν
τῆς πολυτελείας οὐκ ἀργὸν οὐδὲ ἄχρηστον εἰς ἔκπληξιν, ἀλλ’ αἵ τε
μαρμαρυγαὶ τῶν ὅπλων ἠσκημένων χρνσῷ τε καὶ ἀργύρῳ διαπρεπῶς αἵ
τε βαφαὶ τῶν Μηδικῶν καὶ Σκυθικῶν χιτώνων ἀναμεμιγμέναι χαλκῷ καὶ
σιδήρῳ λάμποντι πυροειδῆ καὶ φοβερὰν ἐν τῷ σαλεύεσθαι καὶ διαφέρεσθαι
προσέβαλλον ὄψιν, ὤστε τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ὑπὸ τὸν χάρακα συστέλλειν ἑαυτοὺς
καὶ τὸν Σύλλαν μηδενὶ λόγῳ τὸ θάμβος αὐτῶν ἀφελεῖν δυνάμενον βιάζεσθαί
τε ἀποδιδράσκοντας οὐ βονλόμενον ἡσυχίαν ἄγειν καὶ φέρειν βαρέως
ἐφυβρίζοντας ὁρῶντα κομπασμῷ καὶ γέλωτι τοὺς βαρβάρους.
(XVI. Döhner’s Edition.)
This is very different from the unstudied charm of Herodotus. Even in
North’s translation, though something of the cunning has been lost in
the selection and manipulation of the words, it is easy to see that the
pictures are elaborate both in their general effect and their details.
Now the Romaines, after they had overcome the most parte of the
Ambrons, retyring backe by reason the night had overtaken them, did
not (as they were wont after they had geven such an overthrow) sing
songes of victory and triumphe, nor make good chere in their tentes
one with an other, and least of all sleepe: (which is the best and
sweetest refreshing for men that have fought happely), but contrarily
they watched all that night with great feare and trouble, bicause their
campe was not trenched and fortified, and bicause they knewe also that
there remained almost innumerable thowsandes of barbarous people, that
had not yet fought: besides also that the Ambrons that had fled and
scaped from the overthrow, did howle out all night with lowd cries,
which were nothing like men’s lamentacions and sighes, but rather like
wild beastes bellowing and roaringe. So that the bellowinge of such a
great multitude of beastly people, mingled together with threates and
waylinges, made the mountains thereabouts and the running river to
rebounde againe of the sounde and ecco of their cries marvellously:
by reason whereof, all the valley that lay between both, thundered to
heare the horrible and fearfull trembling.
The ayer was even cut a sunder as it were with the violence of the
noyse and cries of so many sundry nations, which altogether did put
them selves in battell ray. The sumptuousness of their furniture
moreover, was not altogether superfluous and unprofitable, but served
greatly to feare the beholders. For the glistering of their harnesse,
so richly trimmed and set forth with gold and silver, the cullers of
their arming coates upon their curaces, after the facion of the Medes
and Scythians, mingled with the bright glistering steele and shining
copper, gave such a showe as they went and removed to and fro, that
made a light as clere as if all had bene on a very fire, a fearfull
thing to looke upon. In so much as the Romaines durst not so much as
once goe out of the trenches of their campe, nor Sylla with all his
perswasion coulde take away this great conceived feare from them:
wherefore, (and bicause also he would not compell them to goe forth in
this feare) he was driven not to stirre, but close to abide, (though
it grieved him greatly) to see the barbarous people so proudly and
villanously laugh him and his men to scorne.
His philosophy makes a similar impression. He is an eclectic or
syncretist, and has learned from many of the mighty teachers of
bygone times. Plato is his chief authority, but Plato’s doctrines are
consciously modified in an Aristotelian sense, while nevertheless those
aspects of them are made prominent which were afterwards elaborated
by Neo-Platonism strictly so-called. But Plutarch, though he has the
good word of Neo-Platonic thinkers, is not himself to be reckoned
of their company. He is comparatively untouched by their mysticism,
borrowed freely from the Theosophy of the East, and he stands in closer
lineal relation to the antique Greek spirit than some, like Philo, who
precede him in time. He was so indifferent to the Semitic habit of
mind that, despite his almost omnivorous curiosity, he never thought
it worth while to instruct himself in the exact nature of Judaism or
its difference from the Syrian cult, far less to spend on Christianity
so much as a passing glance. He approaches Neo-Platonism most nearly
in certain religious imaginings which, as he himself recognised, have
affinity with beliefs which prevailed in Persia and Egypt; but even
so, he hardly ceases to be national, for these were the two countries
with which in days of yore Greece had the most important historic
connections. And moreover, his interest in such surmises is not, in
the first place, a speculative one, but springs from the hope of his
finding some explanation of and comfort for the trials and difficulties
of actual life. For on the whole he differs from Plato chiefly in
his subordination of theory to practice. This compels him to accept
loans from the very schools that he most criticises, the Stoics, the
Sceptics, the Epicureans themselves. It is his preoccupation with
conduct, rather than eclectic debility, that makes him averse to
any one-sided scheme, and inclined to supplement it with manifold
additions. But as in his style, so in his thought, he blends the
heterogeneous elements to his own purpose, and fixes on them the stamp
of his own mind. It is not without reason that his various treatises
are included under the common title of _Moralia_. He may dilate on the
worship of _Isis and Osiris_, or _The Face appearing within the Roundle
of the Moone_; he may discuss _Whether creatures be more wise, they of
the land or those of the water_; _What signifieth this word Ei engraven
over the Dore of Appolloes Temple in the City of Delphi_, and various
other recondite matters; but the prevailing impression is ethical,
and he is at his best when he is discoursing expressly on some moral
theme, on _Unseemly and Naughty Bashfulnesse_, or _Brotherly Love_,
or _Tranquillitie and Contentment of Mind_, or the _Pluralitie of
Friends_, or the question _Whether this common Mot be well said ‘Live
Hidden.’_ There is the background of serious study and philosophic
knowledge, but against it is detached the figure of the sagacious and
practical teacher, who wishes to make his readers better men and better
women, but never forgets his urbanity and culture in his admonitions,
and drives them home with pointed anecdote and apt quotation. And the
substance of his teaching, though so sane and experimental that it
is sometimes described as obvious and trite, has a generous, ideal,
and even chivalrous strain, when he touches on such subjects as love,
or devotion, or the claims of virtue; and his sympathy goes out
spontaneously to noble words or deeds or minds.
It is an easy step from the famous _Moralia_ to the still more
famous _Parallel Lives_. “All history,” says Dryden, in reference
to the latter, “is only the precepts of moral philosophy reduced
into examples.” This, at least, is no bad description of Plutarch’s
point of view; and his methods do not greatly differ in the series of
essays and in the series of biographies. In the essays he did not let
himself be unduly hampered by the etiquette of the Moral Treatise, but
expatiated at will among Collections and Recollections, and embroidered
his abstract argument with the stories that he delights to tell.
As historian, on the other hand, he is not tied down to historical
narration and exposition, but indulges his moralising bent to the full.
He is on the lookout for edification, and is seldom at a loss for a peg
to hang a lecture on. And these discourses of his, though the material
is sometimes the sober drab of the decent _bourgeois_, are always fine
in texture, and relieved by the quaintness of the cut and the ingenuity
of the garnishing: nor are they the less interesting that they do not
belong to the regulation historical outfit. Such improving digressions,
indeed, are among Plutarch’s charms. “I am always pleased,” says
Dryden, “when I see him and his imitator Montaigne when they strike a
little out of the common road; for we are sure to be the better for
their wandering. The best quarry does not always lie on the open field,
and who would not be content to follow a good huntsman over hedges and
ditches, when he knows the game will reward his pains.”[89]
[89] There are so many good things, despite all the inevitable
mistakes, in Dryden’s _Life of Plutarch_, that one half regrets that
Professor Ker’s plan did not allow him to include at least part of it
in his admirable selection. Thus, in excuse for omitting the catalogue
of Plutarch’s lost works, which had been given in full in the Paris
edition: “But it is a small comfort to the merchant to pursue his bill
of freight when he is certain his ship is cast away; moved by the like
reason, I have omitted that ungrateful task.”
Proceeding in this way it is not to be expected that Plutarch should
compose his _Lives_ with much care for dexterous design. Just as in his
philosophy he has no rigidly consequent system of doctrine, so in his
biographies he has no orderly or well-digested plan. The excellences
that arise from a definite and vigorous conception of the whole are
not those at which he aims. He would proceed very much at haphazard,
were it not for the chronological clue; which, for the rest, he is very
willing to abandon if a tempting by-path presents itself, or if he
thinks of something for which he must retrace his steps. Yet, no more
than in his metaphysics is he without an instinctive method of his own.
The house is finished, and with all its irregularities it is good to
dwell in; the journey is ended, and there has been no monotony on the
devious track. There is this advantage indeed in his procedure over
that of more systematic biographers, that it offers hospitality to all
the suggestions that crowd for admission. None is rejected because it
is out of place and insignificant. Gossip and allotria of every kind
that do not make out their claims at first sight, and that the more
ambitious historian would exclude as trivial, find an entry if they can
show a far-off connection with the subject. And, lo and behold, they
often turn out to be the most instructive of all.
But Plutarch welcomes them without scrutinising them very austerely. He
submits their credentials to no stringent test. He is no severe critic
of their authenticity. He takes them where he finds them, just as he
picks up philosophic ideas from all quarters, even from the detested
Epicureans, without condemning them on account of their suspicious
source: it is enough for him if they adapt themselves to his use.
Nor does he educe from them all that they involve. He does not even
confront them with each other, to examine whether opposite hints about
his heroes may not lead to fuller and subtler conceptions of them. This
is the point of the charge brought against him by St. Évremond, that
he might have carried his analysis further and penetrated more deeply
into human nature. St. Évremond notes how different a man is from
himself, the same person being just and unjust, merciful and cruel;
“which qualities,” proceeds the critic, “seeming to belie each other
in him, [Plutarch] attributes these inconsistencies to foreign causes.
He could never ... reconcile contrarieties in the same subject.” He
never tried to do so. He collects a number of vivid traits, which,
like a number of minute lines, set forth the likeness to his own mind,
but he is ordinarily as far from interrogating and combining his
impressions as he is from subjecting them to any punctilious test. He
exhibits characters in the particular aspects and manifestations which
history or hearsay has presented, and is content with the general
sense of verisimilitude that these successive indications, credited
or accredited, have left behind. But he stops there, and does not
study his manifold data to construct from them a consistent complex
individuality in its oneness and difference. And if this is true of him
as biographer, it is still truer of him as historian. He touches on all
sorts of historical subjects—war, policy, administration, government;
and he has abundance of acute and just remarks on them all. But it is
not in these that his chief interest lies, and it is not over them that
he holds his torch. This does not mean that he fails to perceive the
main drift of things or to appreciate the importance of statecraft.
Mr. Wyndham, defending him against those who have “denied him any
political insight,” very justly shows that, despite “the paucity of his
political pronouncements,” he has a “political bent.” His choice of
heroes, in the final arrangement to which they lent themselves, proves
that he has an eye for the general course of Greek and Roman history,
for the impotence into which the city state is sunk by rivalry with
neighbours in the one case, for its transmutation into an Empire on the
other: “The tragedy of Athens, the drama of Rome,” says Mr. Wyndham,
“these are the historic poles of the _Parallel Lives_.” And Plutarch
has a political ideal: the “need of authority and the obligation of
the few to maintain it—by a ‘natural grace’ springing on the one hand
from courage combined with forbearance, and leading, on the other, to
harmony between the rulers and the ruled—is the text, which, given out
in the _Lycurgus_, is illustrated throughout the _Parallel Lives_.” So
much indeed we had a right to expect from the thoughtful patriot and
experienced magistrate of Chaeronea. The salient outlines of the story
of Greece and Rome could hardly remain hidden from a clear-sighted man
with Plutarch’s knowledge of the past: the relations of governor and
governed had not only engaged him practically, but had suggested to him
one of his most pithy essays, _Praecepta gerendae Reipublicae_, a title
which Philemon Holland paraphrases in stricter accordance with the
contents, _Instructions for them that manage Affaires of State_. But
this does not carry us very far. Shakespeare in his English Histories
shows at least as much political discernment and political instinct. He
brings out the general lesson of the wars of Lancaster and York, and in
_Henry V._ gives his conception of the ideal ruler. But no one would
say that this series shows a conspicuous genius for political research
or political history. The same thing is true, and in a greater degree,
of Plutarch. He is public-spirited, but he is not a publicist. He
has not much concern or understanding for particular measures and
movements and problems, however critical they may be. It is impossible
to challenge the justice of Archbishop Trench’s verdict, either in its
general scope or in its particular instances, when he says:
One who already knows the times of Marius and Sulla will
obtain a vast amount of instruction from his several _Lives_
of these, will clothe with flesh and blood what would else,
in some parts, have been the mere skeleton of a story; but
I am bold to say no one would understand those times from
him. The suppression of the Catilinarian Conspiracy was the
most notable event in the life of Cicero; but one rises
from Plutarch’s _Life_ with only the faintest impression of
what that conspiracy, a sort of anticipation of the French
Commune, and having objects social rather than political,
meant. Or take his _Lives_ of the Gracchi. Admirable in
many respects as these are, greatly as we are debtors to
him here for important facts, whereof otherwise we should
have been totally ignorant, few, I think, would affirm that
he at all plants them in a position for understanding that
vast revolution effected, with the still vaster revolution
attempted by them, and for ever connected with their names.
In Plutarch the historian, as well as the biographer, is subordinate to
the ethical teacher who wishes to enforce lessons that may be useful to
men in the management of their lives. He gathers his material for its
“fine moral effects,” not for “purposes of research.”[90]
[90] De Quincey says: “Nor do I believe Wordsworth would much have
lamented on his own account if all books had perished, except the
entire body of English poetry and Plutarch’s Lives.... I do not mean to
insinuate that Wordsworth was at all in the dark about the inaccuracy
or want of authentic weight attaching to Plutarch as historian, but
his business with Plutarch was not for _purposes of research_; he was
satisfied with his _fine moral effects_.” So too one of Plutarch’s
latest editors, Mr. Holden, says in a similar sense: “Plutarch has
no idea of historic criticism.... He thought far less of finding out
and relating what actually occurred than of edifying his readers and
promoting virtue.”
Plutarch, then, had already composed many disquisitions to commend his
humane and righteous ideas, and it was partly in the same didactic
spirit that he seems to have written his _Parallel Lives_. At the
beginning of the _Life of Pericles_ he says:
Vertue is of this power, that she allureth a mans minde
presently to use her, and maketh him very desirous in his
harte to followe her: and doth not frame his manners that
beholdeth her by any imitation but by the only understanding
and knowledge of vertuous deedes, which sodainely bringeth
unto him a resolute desire to doe the like. _And this is the
reason why methought I should continew still to write on the
lives of noble men._
And similar statements occur again and again. They clearly show the
aim that he consciously had in view. The new generation was to be
admonished and renovated by the examples of the leading spirits who
had flourished in former times. And since he was addressing the whole
civilised world, he took his examples both from Roman and from Grecian
History, and arranged his persons in pairs, each pair supplying the
matter for one book. Thus he couples Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades
and Coriolanus, Alexander and Caesar, Dion and Brutus, Demetrius and
Antony. Such parallelism is a little far-fetched, and though some of
the detailed comparisons with which it is justified, are not from
Plutarch’s hand, and belong to a later time, it of itself betrays
a certain fondness for symmetry and antithesis, a leaning towards
artifice and rhetoric which, as we have seen, the author owed to his
environment. He wishes in an eloquent way to inculcate his lessons,
and is perhaps, for the same reason, somewhat prone to exaggerate the
greatness of the past, and show it in an idealised light. But this
is by no means the pose of the histrionic revivalist. It corresponds
to an authentic sentiment in his own nature, which loved to linger
amid the glooms and glories of tradition, and pay vows at the shrine
of the Great Departed. “The cradle of war and statecraft,” says Mr.
Wyndham, “was become a memory dear to him, and ever evolved by his
personal contact with the triumphs of Rome. From this contrast flowed
his inspiration for the _Parallel Lives_—his desire as a man to draw
the noble Grecians, long since dead, a little nearer to the noon-day of
the living; his delight as an artist in setting the noble Romans, whose
names were in every mouth, a little further into the twilight of more
ancient Romance.”
But this transfiguration of the recent and resurrection of the remoter
past, in which Mr. Wyndham rightly sees something “romantic,” does not
lay Plutarch open to the charge of vagueness or unreality. He was saved
from such vices by his interest in human nature and suggestive _ana_
and picturesque incidents on the one hand, and by his deference for
political history and civil society on the other.
He loved marked individualities: no two of his heroes are alike, and
each, though in a varying degree, has an unmistakable physiognomy of
his own. There is no sameness in his gallery of biographies, and even
the legends of demigods yield figures of firm outline that resist the
touch. This is largely due to his joy in details, and the imperious
demand his imagination makes for them. In his _Life of Alexander_
he uses words which very truly describe his own method, words which
Boswell[91] was afterwards to quote in justification of his own similar
procedure.
The noblest deedes doe not alwayes shew men’s vertues and
vices, but often times a light occasion, a word, or some
sporte, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear
more plaine, then the famous battells wonne wherein are
slaine tenne thousande men, or the great armies, or cities
wonne by siege or assault. For like as painters or drawers
of pictures, which make no accompt of other parts of the
bodie, do take the resemblaunces of the face and favor of
the countenance, in the which consisteth the judgement of
their maners and disposition; even so they must give us
leave to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde only,
and thereby shewe the life of either of them, referring you
unto others to wryte the warres, battells and other great
thinges they did.[92]
[91] _Johnson’s Life_, ed. B. Hill, i. 31.
[92] _Life of Alexander._
So he likes to give the familiar traits and emphasise the suggestive
nothings that best discover character. But his purpose is almost
always to discover character, and, so far as his principal persons
are concerned, to discover great character. Though so assiduous in
sharking up their mannerisms, foibles, and oddities, their tricks of
gait or speech or costume, he is not like the Man with the Muck Rake,
and is not piling together the rubbish of tittle-tattle just because
he has a soul for nothing higher. Still less does he take the valet’s
view of the hero, and hold that he is no hero at all because he can
be seen in undress or in relations that show his common human nature.
Reverence for greatness is the point from which he starts, reverence
for greatness is the star that guides his course, and his reverence
is so entire, that on the one hand he welcomes all that will help him
to restore the great one in his speech and habit as he lived, and on
the other, he assumes that the greatness must pervade the whole life,
and that flashes of glory will be refracted from the daily talk and
walk. Like Carlyle, though in a more _naïf_ and simple way, he is a
hero-worshipper; like Carlyle he believes that the hero will not lose
but gain by the record of his minutest traits, and that these will only
throw new light on his essential heroism. In the object he proposed
to himself he has succeeded well. “Plutarch,” says Rousseau, almost
reproducing the biographer’s own words, “has inimitable dexterity
in painting great men in little things, and he is so happy in his
selection, that often a phrase, a simile, a gesture suffices him to
set forth a hero. That is the true art of portraiture. The physiognomy
does not display itself in the main lines, nor the characters in
great actions; it is in trifles that the temperament discloses
itself.” An interesting testimony; for Rousseau, when he sets up as
character-painter, belongs to a very different school.
It is not otherwise with his narratives of actions or his descriptions
of scenes, if action or scene really interest him; and there is little
of intrinsic value, comic or tragic, vivacious or stately, familiar or
weird, that does not interest him. Under his quick successive strokes,
some of them so light that at first they evade notice, some of them
so simple that at first they seem commonplace, the situation becomes
visible and luminous. He knows how to choose the accessories and what
to do with them. When our attention is awakened, we ask ourselves how
he has produced the effect by means apparently so insignificant; and we
cannot answer. Here he may have selected a hint from his authorities,
there he may derive another from the mental vision he himself has
evoked, but in either case the result is equally wonderful. Whether
from his tact in reporting or his energy in imagining, he contrives to
make us view the occurrence as a fact, and a fact that is like itself
and like nothing else.
But again Plutarch was saved from wanton and empty phantasms by his
political bias. He was not a politician or a statesman or an historian
of politics or institutions, but he was a citizen with a citizen’s
respect for the State. “For himself,” to quote Mr. Wyndham once more,
“he was painting individual character, and he sought it among men
bearing a personal stamp. But he never sought it in a private person,
or a comedian, nor even in a poet or a master of the Fine Arts.” He
confines himself to public men, as we should call them, and never
fails to recollect that they played their part on the public stage.
And this not only gave a robustness of touch and breadth of stroke
to his delineations; the connection with well-known and certified
events preserved him from the worst licenses to which the romantic
and rhetorical temper is liable. Courier, indeed, says of him that
he was “capable of making Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia, if it
would have rounded his sentence ever so little.” But though he may be
credulous of details and manipulate his copy, and with a light heart
make one statement at one time and a different one at another, the sort
of liberty Courier attributes to him is precisely the one he does not
take. Facts are stubborn things, and the great outstanding facts he is
careful to observe: they bring a good deal else in their train.
2. AMYOT[93]
A book like the _Parallel Lives_ was bound to achieve a great
popularity at the Renaissance. That it was full of instruction and
served for warning and example commended it to a generation that was
but too inclined to prize the didactic in literature. Its long list of
worthies included not a few of the names that were being held up as
the greatest in human history, and these celebrities were exhibited
not aloft on their official pedestals, but, however impressive and
imposing the _mise-en-scène_ might be, as men among men in the
private and personal passages of their lives. And yet they were not
private persons but historical magnates, the founders or leaders of
world-renowned states: and as such they were particularly congenial to
an age in which many of the best minds—More and Buchanan, L’Hôpital
and La Boëtie, Brand and Hutten—were awakening to the antique idea of
civic and political manhood, and finding few unalloyed examples of it
in the feudalised West. It was not enough that Plutarch was made more
accessible in the Latin form. He deserved a vernacular dress, and after
various tentative experiments this was first satisfactorily, in truth,
admirably, supplied by Bishop Amyot in France.
[93] See De Blignières’ _Essai sur Amyot_, and Amyot’s translations
_passim_, with the prefatory epistles.
Jacques Amyot was born in October, 1513, in Melun, the little town on
the Seine, some thirty miles to the south-east of Paris. His parents
were very poor, but at any rate from his earliest years he was within
the sweep of the dialect of the Île de France, and had no _patois_
to unlearn when he afterwards appeared as a literary man. Perhaps
to this is due some of the purity and correctness which the most
fastidious were afterwards to celebrate in his style. These influences
would be confirmed when as a lad he proceeded to Paris to pursue his
studies. His instructors in Greek were—first, Evagrius, in the college
of Cardinal Lemoine, and afterwards, Thusan and Danès, who, at the
instance of Budaeus, had just been appointed _lecteurs royaux_ in
Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Stories are told of the privations
that he endured in the pursuit of scholarship, how his mother sent him
every week a loaf by the watermen of the Seine, how he read his books
by the light of the fire, and the like; but similar circumstances are
related of others, and, to quote Sainte Beuve, are in some sort “the
legend of the heroic age of erudition.” It is better authenticated
that he supported himself by becoming the domestic attendant of richer
students till he graduated as Master of Arts at the age of nineteen.
Then his position began to improve. He became tutor in important
households, to the nephews of the Royal Reader, and to the children of
the Royal Secretary. Through such patrons his ability and knowledge
were made known to the King’s sister, Marguérite de Valois, the
beneficent patroness of literature and learning. He had proceeded to
Bourges, it is said, to study law, but by her influence was appointed
to discharge the more congenial functions of Reader in the Greek and
Latin Languages, and was soon promoted to the full professorship. The
University of Bourges was at the time the youngest in France save that
of Bordeaux, having been founded less than three-quarters of a century
before in 1463, when the Renaissance was advancing from conquest to
conquest in Italy, and when Medievalism was moribund even in France.
The new institution would have few traditions to oppose to the new
spirit, and there was scope for a missionary of the New Learning. For
some ten or twelve years Amyot remained in his post, lecturing two
hours daily, in the morning on Latin, in the afternoon on Greek. No
doubt such instruction would be elementary in a way; but even so, it
was a laborious life, for in those days the classical teacher had few
of the facilities that his modern colleague enjoys. It was, however, a
good preparation for Amyot’s peculiar mission, and he even found time
to make his first experiments in the sphere that was to be his own. By
1546 he had completed a translation of the _Aethiopica_ of Heliodorus,
the famous Greek romance that deals with the loves and adventures
of Theagenes and Chariclea. Amyot afterwards, on the authority of a
manuscript which he discovered in the Vatican, identified the author
with a Bishop of Tricca who lived in the end of the fourth century, and
of whom a late tradition asserted that when commanded by the provincial
synod either to burn his youthful effusion or resign his bishopric,
he chose the latter alternative. “Heliodorus,” says Montaigne, when
discussing parental love, “ayma mieulx perdre la dignité, le proufit,
la devotion d’une prelature si venerable, que de perdre sa fille,
fille qui dure encores bien gentille, mais à l’aventure pourtant un
peu curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et
sacerdotale, et de trop amoureuse façon.”[94] In the case of the young
French professor it had happier and opposite consequences, for it
procured him from the king the Abbey of Bellozane. This gift, one of
the last that Francis bestowed for the encouragement of letters, was
partly earned, too, by a version of some of Plutarch’s _Lives_, which
Amyot presented to his royal patron and had executed at his command.
[94] II. viii., _De l’affection des pères aux enfants_.
With an income secured Amyot was now in a position to free himself from
the drudgery of class work, and follow his natural bent. In those days
not all the printed editions of the classics were very satisfactory,
and some works of the authors in whom he was most interested still
existed only in manuscript or were known only by name. He set out for
Italy in the hope of discovering the missing _Lives_ of Plutarch and
of obtaining better texts than had hitherto been within his reach, and
seems to have remained abroad for some years. For a moment he becomes a
conspicuous figure in an uncongenial scene. In May, 1551, the Council
of Trent had been reopened, but Charles delayed the transaction of
business till the following September. The Italian prelates, impatient
and indignant, were hoping for French help against the emperor, but
instead of the French Bishops there came only a letter from the “French
King addressed to ‘the Convention’ which he would not dignify with
the name of a council. The King said he had not been consulted about
their meeting. He regarded them as a private synod got up for their own
purposes by the Pope and the Emperor and he would have nothing to do
with them.”[95] It was Amyot who was commissioned with the delivery and
communication of the ungracious message. Probably the selection of the
simple Abbé was intended less as an honour to him than as an insult to
the assemblage. At any rate it was no very important part that he had
to play, but it was one which made him very uncomfortable. He writes:
“Je filois le plus doux que je pouvois, me sentant si mal et assez pour
me faire mettre en prison, si j’eusse un peu trop avant parle.” He was
not even named in the letter, and had not so much as seen it before
he was called to read it aloud, so that he complains he never saw a
matter so badly managed, “si mal cousu,” but he delivered the contents
with emphasis and elocution. “Je croy qu’il n’y eust personne en toute
la compagnie qui en perdist un seul mot, s’il n’estoit bien sourd, de
sorte que si ma commission ne gisoit qu’a présenter les lettres du
roy, et à faire lecture de la proposition, je pense y avoir amplement
satisfait.”
But his real interests lay elsewhere, and he brought back from Italy
what would indemnify him for his troubles as envoy and please him more
than the honour of such a charge. In his researches he had made some
veritable finds, among them a new manuscript of Heliodorus, and Books
XI. to XVII. of Diodorus Siculus’ _Bibliotheca Historica_, only the two
last of which had hitherto been known at all. His treatment of this
discovery is characteristic,[96] both of his classical enthusiasm and
his limitations as a classical scholar. He did not, as the specialist
of that and perhaps of any age would have done, edit and publish the
original text, but contented himself with giving to the world a French
translation. But the _Historic Library_ has neither the allurement of
a Greek romance nor the edification of Plutarch’s _Lives_; and in this
version, which for the rest is said to be poor, Amyot for once appealed
to the popular interest in vain.
[95] Froude, _Council of Trent_, chap. xii.
[96] See M. de Job’s remarks in Petit de Julleville’s _Littérature
Française_.
The Diodorus Siculus appeared in 1554, and in the same year Henry II.
appointed Amyot preceptor to his two sons, the Dukes of Orleans and
Anjou, who afterwards became respectively Charles IX. and Henry III. As
his pupils were very young their tuition cannot have occupied a great
deal of his time, and he was able to pursue his activity as translator.
In 1559, besides a revised edition of _Theagenes and Chariclea_, there
appeared anonymously a rendering, probably made at an earlier date,
of the _Daphnis and Chloe_, a romance even more “curieusement et
mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale” than its
companion. But it is with his own name and a dedication to the King
that Amyot published almost at the same date his greatest work, the
complete translation of Plutarch’s _Parallel Lives_. If his Heliodorus
gave him his first step on the ladder of church preferment, his
Plutarch was a stronger claim to higher promotion. Henry II., indeed,
died before the end of the year, but the accession of Amyot’s elder
pupil in 1560, after the short intercalary reign of Francis II., was
propitious to his fortunes, for the new king, besides bestowing on him
other substantial favours, almost immediately named him Grand Almoner
of France.
Amyot was an indefatigable but deliberate worker. Fifteen years had
elapsed between his first appearance as translator and the issue of his
masterpiece. Thirteen more were to elapse before he had new material
ready for the press. The interval in both cases was filled up with
preparation, with learned labour, with the leisurely prosecution of his
plan. A revised edition of the _Lives_ appeared in 1565 and a third
in 1567, and all the time he was pushing on a version of Plutarch’s
_Moralia_. Meanwhile in 1570 Charles gave him the bishopric of Auxerre;
and without being required to disown the two literary daughters of his
vivacious prime, “somewhat curiously and voluptuously frounced and of
too amorous fashion” though they might be, he had yet to devote himself
rather more seriously to his profession than he hitherto seems to have
done. He set about it in his usual steady circumspect way. He composed
sermons, first, it is said, writing them in Latin and then turning
them into French; he attended faithfully to the administration of his
diocese; he applied himself to the study of theological doctrine,
and is said to have learned the _Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas by
heart.[97] These occupations have left their trace on his next work,
which was ready by 1572. Not only are Plutarch’s moral treatises
perfectly consonant in tone with Amyot’s episcopal office, but the
preface is touched with a breath of religious unction, of which his
previous performances show no trace. Perhaps the flavour is a little
too pronounced when in his grateful dedication to his royal master he
declares: “The Lord has lodged in you singular goodness of nature.” The
substantive needs all the help that can be wrung from the adjective,
when used of Charles IX. in the year of St. Bartholomew. But Amyot,
though the exhibiter of “Plutarch’s men,” was essentially a private
student, and was besides bound by ties of intimacy and obligation to
his former pupil, who had certainly done well by him. Nor was the
younger brother behindhand in his acknowledgments. Charles died before
two years were out (for Amyot had a way of dedicating books to kings
who deceased soon after), and was lamented by Amyot in a simple and
heartfelt Latin elegy. But his regrets were quite disinterested, for
when Henry III. succeeded in 1574, he showed himself as kind a master,
and in 1578 decreed that the Grand Almoner should also be Commander of
the Order of the Holy Ghost without being required to give proofs of
nobility.
[97] Twelve volumes!
Invested with ample revenues and manifold dignities, Amyot for the
next eleven years lived a busy and simple life, varying the routine
of his administrative duties with music, of which he was a lover and
a practitioner; with translations, never published and now lost, from
the Greek tragedians, who had attracted him as professor, and from
St. Athanasius, who appealed to him as bishop; above all, with the
revision of his Plutarch, for which he never ceased to collect new
readings. Then came disasters, largely owing to his reputation for
partiality and complaisance. When the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise
were assassinated in 1589, he was accused by the Leaguers of having
approved the crime and of having granted absolution to the King. This
he denied; but his Chapter and diocesans rose against him, the populace
sacked his residence, and he had to fly from Auxerre. Nor were his
woes merely personal. On August 3rd the House of Valois, to which he
was so much beholden, became extinct with the murder of Henry III.;
and however worthless the victim may have been, Amyot cannot have been
unaffected by old associations of familiarity and gratitude. Six days
later he writes that he is “the most afflicted, desolate and destitute
poor priest I suppose, in France.” His private distress was not of long
duration. He made peace with the Leaguers, denounced the “politicians”
for supporting Henry IV., returned to his see, resumed his episcopal
duties, though he was divested of his Grand Almonership, and was able
to leave the large fortune of two hundred thousand crowns. But he did
not survive to see the establishment of the new dynasty or the triumph
of Catholicism, for he died almost eighty years old in February, 1593,
and only in the following June was Henry IV. reconciled to the Church.
Perhaps had he foreseen this consummation Amyot would have found some
comfort in the thought that a third pupil, a truer and greater one than
those who were no more, would reign in their stead, and repair the
damage their vice and folly had caused. “Glory to God!” writes Henry of
Navarre to his wife, “you could have sent me no more pleasant message
than the news of the zest for reading which has taken you. Plutarch
always attracts me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me, for
he was for long the instructor of my early years. My good mother, to
whom I owe everything, and who had so great a desire to watch over my
right attitude and was wont to say that she did not wish to see in her
son a distinguished dunce, put this book in my hands when I was all but
an infant at the breast. It has been, as it were, my conscience, and
has prescribed in my ear many fair virtues and excellent maxims for my
behaviour and for the management of my affairs.”[98]
[98] Vive Dieu! vous ne m’auriés sceu rien mander qui me fust plus
agréable que la nouvelle du plaisir de lecture qui vous a prins.
Plutarque me soubrit toujours d’une fresche nouveauté; l’aymer c’est
m’aymer, car il a esté longtemps l’instituteur de mon bas age: ma bonne
mère à laquelle je doibs tout, et qui avoit une affection si grande
de veiller à mes bons deportmens, et ne vouloit pas (ce disoit-elle)
voir en son filz un illustre ignorant, me mist ce livre entre les
mains, encores que je ne feusse à peine plus un enfant de mamelle. Il
m’a esté comme ma conscience et il m’a dicté à l’oreille beaucoup de
bonnes honestetés et maximes excellentes pour ma conduite, et pour le
gouvernment de mes affaires.
Amyot has exerted a far-reaching influence on the literature of his own
country and of Europe. Though as a translator he might seem to have no
more than a secondary claim, French historians of letters have dwelt on
his work at a length and with a care that are usually conceded only to
the achievements of creative imagination or intellectual discovery. And
the reason is that his aptitude for his task amounts to real genius,
which he has improved by assiduous research, so that in his treatment,
the ancillary craft, as it is usually considered, rises to the rank
of a free liberal art. He has the insight to divine what stimulus and
information the age requires; the knowledge to command the sources that
will supply them; the skill to manipulate his native idiom for the new
demands, and suit his expression, so far as may be, both to his subject
and to his audience. Among the great masters of translation he occupies
a foremost place.
Of spontaneous and initiative power he had but little. He cannot
stand alone. For Henry II. he wrote a _Projet de l’Eloquence Royal_,
but it was not printed till long after his death; and of this and
his other original prose his biographer, Roulliard, avows that the
style is strangely cumbersome and laggard (_estrangement pesant et
traisnassier_). Even in his prefaces to Plutarch he is only good
when he catches fire from his enthusiasm for his author. Just as his
misgivings at the Council of Trent, his commendations of his royal
patrons, his concessions to his enemies of the League, suggest a defect
in independent force of character, so the writings in which he must
rely on himself show a defect in independent force of intellect.
Nor is he a specialist in scholarship. Already in 1635, when he had
been less than a century in his grave, Bachet de Méziriac, expert in
all departments of learning, exposed his shortcomings in a Discourse
on Translation, which was delivered before the Academy. His critic
describes him as “a promising pupil in rhetoric with a mediocre
knowledge of Greek, and some slight tincture of Polite Letters”;
and asserts that there are more than two thousand passages in which
he has perverted the sense of his author. Even in 1580-81, during
Amyot’s lifetime, Montaigne was forced to admit in discussion with
certain learned men at Rome that he was less accurate than his
admirers had imagined. He was certainly as far as possible from being
a _Zunftgelehrter_. His peculiar attitude is exactly indicated by
his treatment of the missing books of Diodorus which it was his good
fortune to light upon. He is not specially interested in his discovery,
and has no thought of giving the original documents to the world. At
the same time he has such a reverence for antiquity that he must do
something about them. So with an eye to his chosen constituency, his
own countrymen, he executes his vernacular version.
For of his own countrymen he always thought first. They are his
audience, and he has their needs in his mind. And that is why he made
Plutarch the study of his life. His romances are mere experiments for
his pastime and equipment:[99] his Diodorus is a task prescribed by
accident and vocation: but his Plutarch is a labour of love and of
patriotism. It was knowledge of antiquity for which the age clamoured
and of which it stood in need; and who else could give such a summary
and encyclopaedia of Classical Life as the polyhistor of Chaeronea,
who interested himself in everything, from details of household
management to the government of states, from ancestral superstitions
to the speculations of philosophers, from after-dinner conversation to
the direction of campaigns; but brought them all into vital relation
with human nature and human conduct? Plutarch appealed to the popular
instinct of the time and to the popular instinct in Amyot’s own breast.
It is his large applicability “distill’d through all the needful
uses of our lives” and “fit for any conference one can use” that,
for example, arouses the enthusiasm of Montaigne. After mentioning
that when he writes he willingly dispenses with the companionship or
recollection of books, he adds:
[99] As he himself states in the _Proesme of Théagène et Chariclée_.
He has occupied himself with this only, “aux heures extraordinaires,
pour adoucir le travail d’autres meilleures et plus fructueuses
traductions,” so as to be made “plus vif à la consideration des choses
d’importance.”
But it is with more difficulty that I can get rid of
Plutarch: he is so universal and so full that on all
occasions and whatever out-of-the-way subject you have
taken up, he thrusts himself into your business, and holds
out to you a hand lavish and inexhaustible in treasures
and ornaments. I am vexed at his being so much exposed to
the plunder of those who resort to him. I can’t have the
slightest dealings with him myself, but I snatch a leg or
a wing.[100]
And again:
I am above all grateful to [Amyot] for having had the
insight to pick out and choose a book so worthy and so
seasonable, to make a present of it to his country. We
dunces should have been lost, if this book had not raised
us out of the mire. Thanks to it we now dare to speak and
write. With it the ladies can lecture the school-masters.
It is our breviary.[101]
[100] Je me puis plus malaysement desfaire de Plutarque; il est si
universel et si plein, qu’à toutes occasions, et quelque subject
extravagant que vous ayez prins, il s’ingère à vostre besongne,
et vous tend une main liberale et inespuisable de richesses et
d’embellissements. Il m’en faict despit, d’estre si fort exposé au
pillage de ceulx qui le hantent: je ne le puis si peu raccointer, que
je n’en tire cuisse ou aile (iii. 5).
[101] Mais, surtout, je lui sçais bon gré d’avoir sceu trier et choisir
un livre si digne et si à propos, pour en faire présent à son pais.
Nous aultres ignorants estions perdus, si ce livre ne nous eust relevé
du bourbier: sa mercy nous osons à cette heure et parler et escrire;
les dames en regentent les maistres d’eschole; c’est notre bresviaire
(ii. 4).
“In all kinds Plutarch is my man,” he says elsewhere. And indeed it
is obvious, even though he had not told us, that Plutarch with Seneca
supplies his favourite reading, to which he perpetually recurs. “I have
not,” he writes, “systematically acquainted myself with any solid books
except Plutarch and Seneca, from whom I draw like the Danaides, filling
and pouring out continually.”[102] To the latter he could go for
himself; for the Greek he had to depend on Amyot. For combined profit
and pleasure, he says, “the books that serve me are Plutarch, _since he
is French_, and Seneca.”[103] But it is to the former that he seems to
give the palm.
Seneca is full of smart and witty sayings, Plutarch of
things: the former kindles you more and excites you, the
latter satisfies you more and requites you better; he guides
us while the other drives us.[104]
[102] Je n’ay dressé commerce avecques aulcun livre solide sinon
Plutarque et Senecque, où je puyse comme les Danaïdes remplissant et
versant sans cesse (i. 25).
[103] Les livres qui m’y servent, c’est Plutarque depuis qu’il est
françois, et Seneque (ii. iv.). Of course Montaigne knew some Greek
and read it more or less. He has even his own opinion about Plutarch’s
style (see page 104), and M. Faguet conjectures: “It is quite
conceivable that Montaigne compared the translation with the text, and
that it is a piece of mere affectation when he says he knows nothing of
the Greek.” But doubtless he read the French much more habitually and
easily.
[104] Seneque est plein de poinctes et saillies, Plutarque de choses;
celuy là vous eschauffe plus et vous esmeut, cettuy ci vous contente
davantage et vous paye mieulx; il nous guide, l’aultre nous poulse (ii.
10).
It is indeed impossible to imagine Montaigne without Plutarch, to whom
he has a striking resemblance both in his free-and-easy homilies and in
his pregnant touches. It is these things on which he dwells.
There are in Plutarch many dissertations at full length well
worth knowing, for in my opinion he is the master-craftsman
in that trade; but there are a thousand that he has merely
indicated; he only points out the track we are to take if we
like, and confines himself sometimes to touching the quick
of a subject. We must drag (the expositions) thence and put
them in the market place.... It is a dissertation in itself
to see him select a trivial act in the life of a man, or a
word that does not seem to have such import.[105]
[105] Il y a dans Plutarque beaucoup de discours estendus très dignes
d’estre sceus, car, à mon gré, c’est le maistre ouvrier de telle
besongne; mais il y en a mille qu’il n’a que touchez simplement; et
guigne seulement du doigt par où nous irons, s’il nous plaist; et
se contente quelquefois de ne donner qu’une attaincte dans le plus
vif d’un propos. Il les fault arracher de la, et mettre en place
marchande.... Cela mesme de luy voir trier une legere action en la vie
d’un homme, ou un mot qui semble ne porter cela, c’est un discours (i.
25).
But Montaigne did not stand alone in his admiration. He himself, as
we have seen, bears witness to the widespread popularity of Amyot’s
Plutarch and the general practice of rifling its treasures. Indeed,
Plutarch was seen to be so congenial to the age, that frequent
attempts had been made before Amyot to place him within the reach
of a larger circle than the little band of Greek scholars. In 1470,
_e.g._ a number of Italians had co-operated in a Latin version of the
_Lives_, published at Rome by Campani, and this was followed by several
partial translations in French.[106] But the latter were immediately
superseded, and even the former had its authority shaken, by Amyot’s
achievement.
This was due partly to its greater intelligence and faithfulness,
partly to its excellent style.
In regard to the first, it should be remembered that the criticism of
Amyot’s learning must be very carefully qualified. Scholarship is a
progressive science, and it is always easy for the successor to point
out errors in the precursor, as Méziriac did in Amyot. Of course,
however, the popular expositor was not a Budaeus or Scaliger, and the
savants whom Montaigne met in Rome were doubtless justified in their
strictures. Still the zeal that he showed and the trouble that he took
in searching for good texts, in conferring them with the printed books
and in consulting learned men about his conjectural emendations,[107]
would suggest that he had the root of the matter in him, and there is
evidence that expert opinion in his own days was favourable to his
claims.[108]
[106] There were also translations in Italian, Spanish, and German;
but none of them had anything like the literary importance of Amyot’s,
and they were made from the Latin, not from the Greek. Of Hieronymus
Boner, for instance, who published his _Plutarch, Von dem Leben der
allerdurchlauchtigsten Griechen und Romern_ (1st edition, Augsburg,
1534), it is misleading to say that he “anticipated” Amyot. Merzdorf
writes of Boner’s versions of Greek authors generally (_Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie_) that he “turned them into German not from the
original Greek but from Latin translations. Moreover, one must not
expect from him any exact rendering, but rather a kind of paraphrase
which he accommodates to the circumstances of the time.”
[107] See his preface, towards the close.
[108] In later days, too, Mr. Holden, who has busied himself with
Plutarch, says “Amyot’s version is more scholarlike and correct than
those of Langhorne or Dryden and others.”
At the time when he was translating the _Lives_ into French two
scholars of high reputation were, independently of each other,
translating them into Latin. Xylander’s versions appeared in 1560,
those of Cruserius were ready in the same year, but were not published
till 1564. They still hold their place and enjoy consideration. Now,
they both make their compliments to Amyot. Xylander, indeed, has only
a second-hand acquaintance with his publication, but even that he has
found valuable:
After I had already finished the greater part of the work,
the _Lives of Plutarch_ written by Amyot in the French
language made their appearance. And since I heard from
those who are skilled in that tongue, a privilege which I
do not possess, that he had devoted remarkable pains to the
book and used many good MSS., assisted by the courtesy of
friends, I corrected several passages about which I was in
doubt, and in not a few my conjecture was established by the
concurrence of that translator.[109]
[109] Cum jam majorem operis partem absolvissem, prodierunt Vitae
Plutarchi gallicâ linguâ ab Amyoto conscriptae. Quem cum praeclaram
ei libro operam impendisse ex iis qui linguae ejus sunt periti (quod
mihi non datum est) et usum multis ac bonis codicibus audirem; amicorum
adjutus ... officio, nonnullos, de quibus dubitabam, locos correxi; in
haud paucis mea conjectura est illius interpretis suffragio comprobata
(Ed. 1560). Xylander’s friends must have given him yeoman’s help, for
he frequently discusses Amyot’s readings, generally adopting them; and
for the whole life of Cato, he even goes so far as to avow: “Amyoti
versionem secutus sum, Graecis non satis integris.”
Cruserius, again, in his prefatory _Epistle to the Reader_, warmly
commends the merits of Xylander and Amyot, but refers with scarcely
veiled disparagement to the older Latin rendering, which nevertheless
enjoyed general acceptance as the number of editions proves, and was
considered the standard authority.
If indeed (he writes) I must not here say that I by myself
have both more faithfully and more elegantly interpreted
_Plutarch’s Lives_, the translation of which into Latin
a great number of Italians formerly undertook without much
success; this at least I may say positively and justly that
I think I have done this.[110]
On the other hand “Amiotus” has been a help to him. When he had
already polished and corrected his own version, he came across
this very tasteful rendering in Brussels six months after it had
appeared. “This man’s scholarship and industry gave me some light on
several passages.”[111] It is well then to bear in mind, when Amyot’s
competency is questioned, that by their own statement he cleared up
things for specialists like Xylander and Cruserius. And this is all
the more striking, that Cruserius, whom his preface shows to be very
generous in his acknowledgments, has no word of recognition for his
Italian predecessors even though Filelfo was among their number.[112]
But his Epistle proceeds: “To whom (_i.e._ to Amyot) I will give this
testimony that nowadays it is impossible that anyone should render
Plutarch so elegantly in the Latin tongue, as he renders him in his
own.”[113] And this praise of Amyot’s style leads us to the next point.
[110] Ego quidem si dicere hîc non valeam, vitas me Plutarchi, quas
plurimi sumpserunt antehac Itali Latine reddendas parum feliciter, me
explicavisse unum et verius et mundius; hoc certe dicere queo liquide
et recte, esse arbitratum me hoc effecisse (_Epistola ad Lectorem_,
1561, edition 1599).
[111] Interea cum jam polivissem atque emendassem vitas meas Plutarchi,
ostendit mihi Bruxellae, ubi agebam illustrissimi principis mei
legatus, secretarius regius editas elegantissime ab Amioto linguâ
gallicâ vitas Plutarchi, quae exierant tamen in publicum sex menses
antequam eas viderem. Hujus viri mihi eruditio et diligentia aliquid
lucis nonnullis in locis attulit. Cui ego hoc testimonium dabo: non
posse fieri, ut quisquam hoc tempore Plutarchum tam vertat ornate
linguâ Latina quam vertit ille suâ (_Ib._).
[112] Amyot’s own attitude is very similar. He cites the Latin versions
in proof of the hardness of the original, and challenges a comparison
of them with his own.
[113] Interea cum jam polivissem atque emendassem vitas meas Plutarchi,
ostendit mihi Bruxellae, ubi agebam illustrissimi principis mei
legatus, secretarius regius editas elegantissime ab Amioto linguâ
gallicâ vitas Plutarchi, quae exierant tamen in publicum sex menses
antequam eas viderem. Hujus viri mihi eruditio et diligentia aliquid
lucis nonnullis in locis attulit. Cui ego hoc testimonium dabo: non
posse fieri, ut quisquam hoc tempore Plutarchum tam vertat ornate
linguâ Latina quam vertit ille suâ (_Ib._).
If Amyot claims the thanks of Western Europe for giving it with
adequate faithfulness a typical miscellany of ancient life and thought,
his services to his country in developing the native language are
hardly less important. Before him Rabelais and Calvin were the only
writers of first-rate ability in modern French. But Rabelais’ prose
was too exuberant, heterogeneous and eccentric to supply a model;
and Calvin, besides being suspect on account of his theology, was of
necessity as a theologian abstract and restricted in his range. The new
candidate had something of the wealth and universal appeal of the one,
something of the correctness and purity of the other.
Since Plutarch deals with almost all departments of life, Amyot had
need of the amplest vocabulary, and a supply of the most diverse
locutions. Indeed, sometimes the copious resources of his vernacular,
with which he had doubtless begun to familiarise himself among the
simple folk of Melun, leave him in the lurch, and he has to make loans
from Latin or Greek. But he does this sparingly, and only when no other
course is open to him. Generally his thorough mastery of the dialect of
the Île de France, the standard language of the kingdom, helps him out.
Yet he is far from adopting the popular speech without consciously
manipulating it. He expressly states that he selects the fittest,
sweetest, and most euphonious words, and such as are in the mouths
of those who are accustomed to speak well. The ingenuousness of his
utterance, which is in great measure due to his position of pioneer
in a new period, should not mislead us into thinking him a careless
writer. His habit of first composing his sermons in Latin and then
translating them into French tells its own story. He evidently realised
the superiority in precision and orderly arrangement of the speech of
Rome, and felt it a benefit to submit to such discipline the artless
_bonhomie_ of his mother tongue. But since he is the born interpreter,
whose very business it was to mediate between the exotic and the
indigenous, and assimilate the former to the latter, he never forgets
the claims of his fellow Frenchmen and his native French. He does not
force his idiom to imitate a foreign model, but only learns to develop
its own possibilities of greater clearness, exactitude, and regularity.
It is for these excellencies among others, “pour la naifeté et purété
du language en quoi il surpasse touts aultres,”[114] that Montaigne
gives him the palm, and this purity served him in good stead during
the classical period of French literature, which was so unjust to
most writers of the sixteenth century, and found fault with Montaigne
himself for his “Gasconisms.” Racine thought that Amyot’s “old style”
had a grace which could not be equalled in our modern language. Fénelon
regretfully looks back to him for beauties that are fallen into disuse.
Nor was it only men of delicate and poetic genius who appreciated his
merits. Vaugelas, the somewhat illiberal grammarian and purist, is the
most enthusiastic of the worshippers.
What obligation (he exclaims) does our language not owe to
him, there never having been anyone who knew its genius and
character better than he, or who used words and phrases
so genuinely French without admixture of the provincial
expressions which daily corrupt the purity of the true
French tongue. All stores and treasures are in the works of
this great man. And even to-day we have hardly any noble and
splendid modes of speech that he has not left us; and though
we have cut out a half of his words and phrases, we do not
fail to find in the other half almost all the riches of
which we boast.
[114] ii. 4.
It will be seen, however, that in such tributes from the seventeenth
century (and the same thing is true of others left unquoted), it is
implied that Amyot is already somewhat antiquated and out of fashion.
He is honoured as ancestor in the right line of classical French, but
he is its ancestor and not a living representative. Vaugelas admits
that half his vocabulary is obsolete, Fénelon regrets his charms just
because their date is past, Racine wonders that such grace should have
been attained in what is not the modern language.
And this may remind us of the very important fact, that Amyot could not
on account of his position deliver a facsimile of the Greek. Plutarch
lived at the close of an epoch, he at the beginning. The one employed
a language full of reminiscences and past its prime; the other, a
language that was just reaching self-consciousness and that had the
future before it. Both in a way were artists, but Plutarch shows his
art in setting his stones already cut, while Amyot provides moulds for
the liquid metal. At their worst Plutarch’s style becomes mannered and
Amyot’s infantile. By no sleight of hand would it have been possible to
give in the French of the sixteenth century an exact reproduction of
the Greek of the second. Grey-haired antiquity had to learn the accents
of stammering childhood.
Sometimes Amyot hardly makes an attempt at literal fidelity. The style
of his original he describes as “plein, serré et philosophistorique.”
With him it retains the fulness, but the condensation, or rather what a
modern scholar describes as “the crowding of the sentence,”[115] often
gives place to periphrasis, and of the “philosophistorique” small trace
remains. Montaigne praises him because he has contrived “to expound
so thorny and crabbed[116] an author with such fidelity.” What is
most crabbed and thorny in Plutarch he passes over or replaces with
a loose equivalent; single words he expands to phrases; difficulties
he explains with a gloss or illustration that he does not hesitate to
insert in the text; and he is anxious to bring out the sense by adding
more emphatic and often familiar touches.
[115] Mr. Holden.
[116] Espineux et ferré (ii. iv.). Perhaps _ferré_ should be rendered
_difficult_ rather than _crabbed_. But even _thorny and difficult_ are
hardly words that one would apply to Plutarch. Montaigne’s meaning may
perhaps be illustrated by the criticism of Paley: “Plutarch’s Greek is
not like Lucian’s, fluent and easy, nor even clear.” He uses many words
not in the ordinary Greek vocabulary; and he too often constructs long
sentences, the thread of which separately as well as the connection
cannot be traced without close attention. Hence he is unattractive as a
writer.
The result of it all undoubtedly is to lend Plutarch a more popular
and less academic bearing than he really has. Some of Amyot’s most
attractive effects either do not exist or are inconspicuous in his
original. The tendency to artifice and rhetoric in the pupil of
Ammonius disappears, and he is apt to get the credit for an innocence
and freshness that are more characteristic of his translator. M. Faguet
justly points out that Amyot in his version makes Plutarch “a simple
writer, while he was elegant, fastidious, and even affected in his
style.” ... He “emerges from Amyot’s hands as _le bon Plutarque_ of the
French people, whereas he was certainly not that.” Thus it is beyond
dispute that the impression produced is in some respects misleading.
But there is another side to this. Plutarch in his tastes and ideals
did belong to an older, less sophisticated age, though he was born
out of due time and had to adapt his speech to his hyper-civilised
environment. Ampère has called attention to the picture, suggested
by the facts at our disposal, of Plutarch living in his little
Boeotian town, obtaining his initiation into the mysteries, punctually
fulfilling the functions of priest, making antiquities and traditions
his hobby. “There was this man under the rhetorician,” he adds, “and
we must not forget it. For if the rhetorician wrote, it was the other
Plutarch who often dictated.” Of course in a way the antithesis is an
unreal one. Plutarch was after all, as every one must be, the child of
his own generation, and his aspirations were not confined to himself.
The _Sophistes_ is, on the one hand, what the man who makes antiquity
and traditions his hobby, is on the other. Still it remains certain
that his love was set on things which pertained to an earlier and less
elaborate phase of society, to “the good old days” when they found
spontaneous acceptance and expression. On him the ends of the world
are come, and he seeks by all the resources of his art and learning to
revive what he regards as its glorious prime. His heart is with the men
“of heart, head, hand,” but when he seeks to reveal them, he must do so
in the chequered light of a vari-coloured culture.
Hence there was a kind of discrepancy between his spirit and his
utterance; and Amyot, removing the discrepancy, brings them into a
natural harmony. There is truth in the paradox that the form which
the good bishop supplies is the one that was meant for the matter.
“Amyot,” says Demogeot, summing up his discussion of this aspect of the
question, “has in some sort created Plutarch, and made him truer and
more complete than nature made him.”
But though Plutarch’s ideas seem from one point of view to enter
into their predestined habitation, this does not alter the fact that
they lose something of their distinctive character in accommodating
themselves to their new surroundings. It is easy to exaggerate their
affinity with the vernacular words, as it is easy to exaggerate the
correspondence between author and translator. Thus Ampère, half in
jest, pleases himself with drawing on behalf of the two men a parallel
such as is appended to each particular brace of _Lives_. Both of
them lovers of virtue, he points out, for example, that both had a
veneration for the past, of which the one strove to preserve the
memories even then beginning to fade, and the other to rediscover and
gather up the shattered fragments. Both experienced sad and troublous
times without having their tranquillity disturbed, the one by the
crimes of Domitian or the other by the furies of St. Bartholomew’s.
Both belonged to the hierarchy, the one as priest of Apollo, the other
as Bishop of Auxerre.
But it is not hard to turn such parallels into so many contrasts. The
past with which Plutarch was busy was in a manner the familiar past
of his native country or at least of his own civilisation; but Amyot
loved the past of that remote and alien world in which for ages men had
neglected their heritage and taken small concern. The sequestered life
of the provincial under the Roman Empire, a privacy whence he emerges
to whatever civil offices were within his reach, is very different
from the dislike and refusal of public activity that characterises
the Frenchman in his own land at a time when learning was recognised
as passport to high position in the State. The priest of a heathen
cult which he could accept only when explained away by a rationalistic
idealism, and which was by no means incompatible with his family
instincts, was very different from the celibate churchman who ended by
submitting to the terms imposed by the intolerance of the Holy League.
The analogies are there, and imply perhaps a strain of intellectual
kinship, but the contrasts are not less obvious, and refute the idea of
a perfect unison.
Now, it is much the same if we turn from the writers to their writings.
All translation is a compromise between the foreign material and the
native intelligence, but in Amyot the latter factor counts most.
Classical life is very completely assimilated to the contemporary
life that he knew, but such contemporary life was in some ways quite
unlike that which he was reproducing. There is an illusory sameness
in the effects produced as there is an illusion of coincidence in
the characters and careers of the men who produce them, and this may
have its cause in real contact at certain points. But the gaps that
separate them are also real, though at the time they were seldom
detected. “Both by the details and the general tone of his version,”
says M. Lanson, “[Amyot] modernises the Graeco-Roman world, and by this
involuntary travesty he tends to check the awakening of the sense for
the differences, that is, the historic sense. As he invites Shakespeare
to recognise the English _Mob_ in the _Plebs Romana_, so he authorises
Corneille and Racine and even Mademoiselle Scudéry to portray under
ancient names the human nature they saw in France.”
And this tendency was carried further in Amyot’s English translator.
3. NORTH
Of Sir Thomas North, the most recent and direct of the authorities
who transmitted to Shakespeare his classical material, much less is
known than of either of his predecessors. Plutarch, partly because
as original author he has the opportunity of expressing his own
personality, partly because he uses this opportunity to the full in
frank advocacy of his views and gossip about himself, may be pictured
with fair vividness and in some detail. Such information fails in
regard to Amyot, since he was above all the mouthpiece for other men;
but his high dignities placed him in the gaze of contemporaries, and
his reputation as pioneer in classical translation and nursing-father
of modern French ensured a certain interest in his career. But North,
like him a translator, had not equal prominence either from his
position or from his achievement. Such honours and appointments as he
obtained were not of the kind to attract regard. He was a mere unit in
the Elizabethan crowd of literary importers, and belonged to the lower
class who never steered their course “to the classic coast.” He had no
such share as Amyot in shaping the traditions of the language, but was
one writer in an age that produced many others, some of them greater
masters than he. Yet to us, as the immediate interpreter of Plutarch to
Shakespeare, he is the most important of the three, the most famous and
the most alive. Sainte Beuve, talking of Amyot, quotes a phrase from
Leopardi in reference to the Italians who have associated themselves
forever with the Classics they unveiled: “Oh, how fair a fate! to be
exempt from death except in company with an Immortal!” This fair fate
is North’s in double portion. He is linked with a great Immortal by
descent, and with a greater by ancestry.
Thomas North, second son of the first Baron North of Kirtling, was
born about 1535, to live his life, as it would seem, in straitened
circumstances and unassuming work. Yet we might have anticipated for
him a prosperous and eminent career. He had high connections and
powerful patrons; his father made provision for him, his brother helped
him once and again, a royal favourite interested himself on his behalf.
His ability and industry are evident from his works; his honesty and
courage are vouched for by those in a position to know; the efficiency
of his public services received recognition from his fellow-citizens
and his sovereign. But with all these advantages and qualifications he
was even in middle age hampered by lack of means, and he never had much
share in the pelf and pomp of life. Perhaps his occupation with larger
concerns than personal aggrandisement may have interfered with his
material success. At any rate, in his narrower sphere he showed himself
a man of public interest and public spirit, and the authors with whom
he busies himself are all such as commend ideal rather than tangible
possessions as the real objects of desire. And we know besides that he
was an unaggressive man, inclined to claim less than his due; for in
one of his books he professes to get the material only from a French
translation, when it is proved that he must have had recourse to the
Spanish original as well.
This was his maiden effort, _The Diall of Princes_, published in 1557,
when North was barely of age and had just been entered a student of
Lincoln’s Inn; and with this year the vague and scanty data for his
history really begin. He dedicates his book to Queen Mary, who had
shown favour to his father, pardoning him for his support of Lady Jane
Grey, raising him to the peerage, and distinguishing him in other
ways. But on the death of Mary, Lord North retained the goodwill of
Elizabeth, who twice kept her court at his mansion, and appointed him
Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. The family had
thus considerable local influence, and it was not diminished when, on
the old man’s death in 1564, Roger, the first son, succeeded to the
title. Before long the new Lord North was made successively an alderman
of Cambridge, Lord Lieutenant of the County, and High Steward; while
Thomas, who had benefited under his father’s will, was presented to the
freedom of the town. All through, the career of the junior appears as a
sort of humble pendant to that of the senior, and he picks up his dole
of the largesses that Fortune showers on the head of the house. What he
had been doing in the intervening years we do not know, but he cannot
have abandoned his literary pursuits, for in 1568, when he received
this civic courtesy, he issued a new edition of the _Diall_, corrected
and enlarged; and he followed it up in 1570 with a version of Doni’s
_Morale Filosofia_.
Meanwhile the elder brother was advancing on his brilliant course. He
had been sent to Vienna to invest the Emperor Maximilian with the Order
of the Garter; he had been commissioned to present the Queen on his
return with the portrait of her suitor, the Archduke Charles; he had
held various offices at home, and in 1574 he was appointed Ambassador
Extraordinary to congratulate Henry III. of France on his accession,
and to procure if possible toleration for the Huguenots and a renewal
of the Treaty of Blois. On this important legation he was accompanied
by Thomas, who would thus have an opportunity of seeing or hearing
something of Amyot, the great Bishop and Grand Almoner who was soon to
be recipient of new honours from his royal pupil and patron, and who
had recently been drawing new attention on himself by his third edition
of the _Lives_ and his first edition of the _Morals_.[117] It may well
be that this visit suggested to Thomas North his own masterpiece,
which he seems to have set about soon after he came home in the end of
November. At least it was to appear in January, 1579, before another
lustre was out; and a translation even from French of the entire
_Lives_, not only unabridged but augmented (for biographies of Hannibal
and Scipio are added from the versions of Charles de l’Escluse),[118]
is a task of years rather than of months.
[117] I do not know what authority Mr. Wyndham has for his statement
that Amyot’s version of the _Morals_ “fell comparatively dead.” It is,
of course, much less read nowadays, but at the time it ran through
three editions in less than four years (1572, 1574, 1575), and for the
next half century there are frequent reprints.
[118] These, translated from the Latin collection of 1470, to which
they had been contributed by Acciaiuoli, were included in Amyot’s third
edition.
The embassage, despite many difficulties to be overcome, had been a
success, and Lord North returned to receive the thanks and favours
he deserved. He stood high in the Queen’s regard, and in 1578 she
honoured him with a visit for a night. He was lavish in his welcome,
building, we are told, new kitchens for the occasion; filling them with
provisions of all kinds, the oysters alone amounting to one cart load
and two horse loads; rifling the cellars of their stores, seventy-four
hogsheads of beer being reinforced with corresponding supplies of
ale, claret, white wine, sack, and hippocras; presenting her at her
departure with a jewel worth £120 in the money of the time. In such
magnificent doings he was by no means unmindful of his brother, to whom
shortly before he had made over the lease of a house and household
stuff. Yet precisely at this date, when Thomas North was completing
or had completed his first edition of the _Lives_, his circumstances
seem to have been specially embarrassed. Soon after the book appeared
Leicester writes on his behalf to Burleigh, stating that he “is a very
honest gentleman and hath many good parts in him which are drowned only
by poverty.” There is perhaps a certain incongruity between these words
and the accounts of the profusion at Kirtling in the preceding year.
Meanwhile Lord North, to his reputation as diplomatist and courtier
sought to add that of a soldier. In the Low Countries he greatly
distinguished himself by his capacity and courage; but he was called
home to look after the defences of the eastern coast in view of the
expected Spanish invasion, and this was not the only time that the
Government resorted to him for military advice.
No such important charge was entrusted to Thomas, but he too was ready
to do his duty by his country in her hour of need, and in 1588 had
command of three hundred men of Ely. In the interval between this and
the distressful time of 1579 his position must have improved; for
in 1591, in reward it may be for his patriotic activity, the Queen
conferred on him the honour of knighthood, which in those days implied
as necessary qualification the possession of land to the minimum value
of £40 a year. This was followed by other acknowledgments and dignities
of moderate worth. In 1592 and again in 1597 he sat on the Commission
of Peace for Cambridgeshire. In 1598 he received a grant of £20 from
the town of Cambridge, and in 1601 a pension of £40 a year from the
Queen. These amounts are not munificent, even if we take them at the
outside figure suggested as the equivalent in modern money.[119] They
give the impression that North was not very well off, that in his
circumstances some assistance was desirable, and a little assistance
would go a long way. At the same time they show that his conduct
deserved and obtained appreciation. Indeed, the pension from the Queen
is granted expressly “in consideration of the good and faithful service
done unto us.”
He also benefited by a substantial bequest from Lord North, who had
died in 1600, but he was now an old man of at least sixty-six, and
probably he did not live long to enjoy his new resources. Of the
brother Lloyd records: “There was none better to represent our State
than my Lord North, who had been two years in Walsingham’s house,
four in Leicester’s service, had seen six courts, twenty battles,
nine treaties, and four solemn jousts, whereof he was no mean part.”
In regard to the younger son, even the year of whose death we do not
know, the parallel summary would run: “He served a few months in an
ambassador’s suite; he commanded a local force, he was a knight, and
sat on the Commission of Peace; he made three translations, one of
which rendered possible Shakespeare’s Roman Plays.”[120]
[119] That is, if we multiply them by eight.
[120] Most of the facts of the foregoing sketch are taken from the
articles on the Norths in the _Dictionary of National Biography_,
which, however, must not be considered responsible for the inferences.
This is his “good and faithful service” unto us, not that he fulfilled
duties in which he might have been rivalled by any country justice or
militia captain. And, “a good and faithful servant,” he had qualified
himself for his grand performance by a long apprenticeship in the
craft. Like Amyot, he devotes himself to translation from first to
last, but unlike Amyot he knows from the outset the kind of book that
it is given him to interpret. He is not drawn by the fervour of youth
to “vain and amatorious romance,” nor by conventional considerations to
the bric-a-brac of antiquarianism. From the time that he has attained
the years of discretion and comes within our knowledge, he applies his
heart to study and supply works of solid instruction.
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.
It is characteristic, too, both of his equipment and his style, that
though he may have known a little Greek and certainly knew some Latin,
as is shown by a few trifling instances in which he gives Amyot’s
expressions a more learned turn, he never used an ancient writer
as his main authority, but confined himself to the adaptations and
translations that were current in modern vernaculars.
Thus his earliest work is the rendering, mainly from the French, of the
notable and curious forgery of the Spanish Bishop, Antonio de Guevara,
alleged by its author to have been derived from an ancient manuscript
which he had discovered in Florence. It was originally entitled _El
Libro Aureo de Marco Aurelio, Emperador y eloquentissimo Orator_, but
afterwards, when issued in an expanded form, was rechristened, _Marco
Aurelio con el Relox de Principes_. It has however little to do with
the real Marcus Aurelius, and the famous _Meditations_ furnish only
a small ingredient to the work. It is in some ways an imitation of
Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, that is, it is a didactic romance which aims
at giving in narrative form true principles of education, morals,
and politics. But the narrative is very slight, and most of the book
is made up of discussions, discourses, and epistles, the substance
of which is in many cases taken with a difference from Plutarch’s
_Moralia_. These give the author scope to endite “in high style”;
and in his balanced and erudite way of writing, which with all its
tastelessness and excess has a far-off resemblance to Plutarch’s more
rhetorical effects, as well as in his craze for allusions and similes,
he anticipates the mannerisms of the later Euphuists. But despite the
moralisings and affectations (or rather, perhaps, on account of them,
for the first fell in with the ethical needs of the time, and the
second with its attempts to organise its prose), the book was a great
favourite for over a hundred years, and Casaubon says that except the
Bible, hardly any other has been so frequently translated or printed.
Lord Berners had already made his countrymen acquainted with it in
shorter form, but North renders the _Diall of Princes_ in full, and
even adds another treatise of Guevara’s, _The Favored Courtier_, as
fourth book to his second edition.
It is both the contents and the form that attract him. In the title
page he describes it as “right necessarie and pleasaunt to all
gentylmen and others which are louers of vertue”; and in his preface he
says that it is “so full of high doctrine, so adourned with auncient
histories, so authorised with grave sentences, and so beautified with
apte similitudes, that I knowe not whose eies in reding it can be
weried, nor whose eares in hearing it not satisfied.”
That North’s contemporaries agreed with him in liking such fare is
shown by the publication of the new edition eleven years after the
first, and even more strikingly by the publication of John Lily’s
imitation eleven years after the second. For Dr. Landmann has proved
beyond dispute that the paedagogic romance of _Euphues_, in purpose, in
plan, in its letters and disquisitions, its episodes and persons, is
largely based on the _Diall_. He has not been quite so successful in
tracing the distinctive tricks of the Euphuistic style through North to
Guevara. It has to be remembered that North’s main authority was not
the Spanish _Relox de Principes_, but the French _Orloge des princes_;
and at the double remove a good many of the peculiarities of Guevarism
were bound to become obliterated: as in point of fact has occurred. It
would be a mistake to call North a Euphuistic writer, though in the
_Diall_, and even in the _Lives_, there are Euphuistic passages. Still,
Guevara did no doubt affect him, for Guevara’s was the only elaborate
and architectural prose with which he was on intimate terms. He had not
the advantage of Amyot’s daily commerce with the Classics, and constant
practice in the equating of Latin and French. In the circumstances a
dash of diluted Guevarism was not a bad thing for him, and at any rate
was the only substitute at his disposal. To the end he sometimes uses
it when he has to write in a more complex or heightened style.
But if the Spanish Bishop were not in all respects a salutary model,
North was soon to correct this influence by working under the guidance
of a very different man, the graceless Italian miscellanist, Antonio
Francesco Doni. That copious and audacious conversationalist could
write as he talked, on all sorts of themes, including even those in
which there was no offence, and seldom failed to be entertaining. He
is never more so than in his _Morale Filosofia_, a delightful book to
which and to himself North did honour by his delightful rendering. The
descriptive title runs: “The Morall Philosophie of Doni: drawne out
of the auncient writers. A worke first compiled in the Indian tongue,
and afterwards reduced into diuers other languages: and now lastly
Englished out of Italian by Thomas North.” This formidable announcement
is a little misleading, for the book proves to be a collection of the
so-called Fables of Bidpai, and though the lessons are not lacking,
the main value as well as the main charm lies in the vigour and
picturesqueness of the little stories.[121]
[121] A charming reprint was edited by Mr. Joseph Jacobs in 1888.
Thus in both his prentice works North betrays the same general bias.
They are both concerned with the practical and applied philosophy of
life, and both convey it through the medium of fiction: in so far they
are alike. But they are unlike, in so far as the relative interest of
the two factors is reversed, and the accent is shifted from the one
to the other. In the _Diall_ the narrative is almost in abeyance, and
the pages are filled with long-drawn arguments and admonitions. In the
_Fables_ the sententious purpose is rather implied than obtruded, and
in no way interferes with the piquant adventures; which are recounted
in a very easy and lively style.
North was thus a practised writer and translator, with a good knowledge
of the modern tongues, when he accompanied his brother to France in
1574. In his two previous attempts he had shown his bent towards
improving story and the manly wisdom of the elder world; and in the
second, had advanced in appreciation of the concrete example and the
racy presentment. If he now came across Amyot’s Plutarch, we can
see how well qualified he was for the task of giving it an English
shape, and how congenial the task would be. Of the _Moral Treatises_
he already knew something, if only in the adulterated concoctions
of Guevara, but the _Lives_ would be quite new to him, and would
exactly tally with his tastes in their blend of ethical reflection
and impressive narrative. There is a hint of this double attraction
in the opening phrase of the title page: “The Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans compared by that grave learned _Philosopher_ and
_Historiographer_, Plutarch of Chaeronea.” The philosophy and the
history are alike signalised as forming the equipment of the author,
and certainly the admixture was such as would appeal to the public as
well as to the translator.
The first edition of 1579, imprinted by Thomas Vautrouillier and John
Wight, was followed by a second in 1595, imprinted by Richard Field
for Bonham Norton. Field, who was a native of Stratford-on-Avon, and
had been apprenticed to Vautrouillier before setting up for himself,
had dealings with Shakespeare, and issued his _Venus and Adonis_ and
_Rape of Lucrece_. But whether or no his fellow townsman put him
in the way of it, it is certain that Shakespeare was not long in
discovering the new treasure. It seems to leave traces in so early a
work as the _Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, which probably borrowed from
the life of _Theseus_, as well as in the _Merchant of Venice_, with
its reference to “Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia”; though it did
not inspire a complete play till _Julius Caesar_. In 1603 appeared
the third edition of North’s Plutarch, enlarged with new Lives which
had been incorporated in Amyot’s collection in 1583: and this some
think to have been the particular authority for _Antony and Cleopatra_
and _Coriolanus_.[122] And again a fourth edition, with a separate
supplement bearing the date of 1610, was published in 1612; and of
this the famous copy in the Greenock Library has been claimed as
the dramatist’s own book. If by any chance this should be the case,
then Shakespeare must have got it for his private delectation, for
by this time he had finished his plays on ancient history and almost
ceased to write for the stage. But apart from that improbable and
crowning honour, there is no doubt about the value of North’s version
to Shakespeare as dramatist, and the four editions in Shakespeare’s
lifetime sufficiently attest its popularity with the general reader.
[122] The whole question about the editions which Shakespeare read is
a complicated one. Two things are pretty certain: (1) He must have
used the first edition for _Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, which was in all
likelihood composed before 1595, when the second appeared. (2) He must
have used the first or second for _Julius Caesar_, which was composed
before 1603, when the third appeared. It is more difficult to speak
positively in regard to _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_. It has
been argued that the former cannot have been derived from the first two
editions, because in them Menas’ remark to Sextus Pompeius runs:
“Shall I cut the gables of the ankers, and make thee Lord
not only of Sicile and Sardinia, but of the whole Empire of
Rome besides?”
In the third edition this is altered to _cables_, and this is the form
that occurs in Shakespeare:
“Let me cut the cable;
And, when we are put off, fall to their throats:
All there is thine.”
(_A. and C._ II. vii. 77.)
But this change is a very slight one that Shakespeare might easily make
for himself on the same motives that induced the editor of the _Lives_
to make it. And though attempts have been made to prove that the fourth
edition was used for _Coriolanus_, there are great difficulties in
accepting so late a date for that play, and one phrase rather points
to one of the first two editions (see Introduction to _Coriolanus_).
If this is really so, it affects the case of _Antony and Cleopatra_
too, for it would be odd to find Shakespeare using the first or second
edition for the latter play, and the third for the earlier one.
Still, such things do occur, and I think there is a tendency in those
who discuss this point to confine Shakespeare over rigidly to one
edition. In the twentieth century it is possible to find men reading or
re-reading a book in the first copy that comes to hand without first
looking up the date on the title page. Was this practice unknown in
Shakespeare’s day?
This popularity is well deserved. Its permanent excellences were
sure of wide appreciation, and the less essential qualities that
fitted Plutarch to meet the needs of the hour in France, were not
less opportune in England. North’s prefatory “Address to the Reader”
describes not only his own attitude but that of his countrymen in
general.
There is no prophane studye better than Plutarke. All other
learning is private, fitter for Universities then cities,
fuller of contemplacion than experience, more commendable
in the students them selves, than profitable unto others.
Whereas stories, (_i.e._ histories) are fit for every
place, reache to all persons, serve for all tymes, teache
the living, revive the dead, so farre excelling all other
bookes as it is better to see learning in noble mens lives
than to reade it in Philosophers writings. Nowe, for the
Author, I will not denye but love may deceive me, for I must
needes love him with whome I have taken so much payne, but
I bileve I might be bold to affirme that he hath written
the profitablest story of all Authors. For all other were
fayne to take their matter, as the fortune of the contries
where they wrote fell out; But this man, being excellent in
wit, in learning, and experience, hath chosen the speciall
actes, of the best persons, of the famosest nations of the
world.... And so I wishe you all the profit of the booke.
This passage really sums up one half the secret of Plutarch’s
fascination for the Renaissance world. The aim is profit, and profit
not merely of a private kind. The profit is better secured by history
than by precept, just as the living example is more effectual than
the philosophic treatise. And there is more profit in Plutarch
than in any other historian, not only on account of his personal
qualifications, his wit, learning, and experience, but on account of
his subject-matter, because he had the opportunity and insight to
choose the prerogative instances in the annals of mankind. Only it
should be noted that the profit is conceived in the most liberal and
ideal sense. It is the profit that comes from contact with great souls
in great surroundings, not the profit of the trite and unmistakable
moral. This Amyot had already clearly perceived and set forth in a fine
passage of which North gives a fine translation. The dignity of the
historian’s office is very high:
Forasmuch as his chiefe drift ought to be to serve the
common weale, and that he is but as a register to set downe
the judgements and definitive sentences of God’s Court,
whereof some are geven according to the ordinarie course
and capacitie of our weake naturall reason, and other some
goe according to God’s infinite power and incomprehensible
wisedom, above and against all discourse of man’s
understanding.
In other words history is not profitable as always illustrating
a simple retributive justice. It may do that, but it may also do
otherwise. Some of its awards are mysterious or even inscrutable. The
profit it yields is disinterested and spiritual, and does not lie in
the encouragement of optimistic virtue. And this indicates how it may
be turned to account. The stuff it contains is the true stuff for
Tragedy.
The remaining half of Plutarch’s secret depends on the treatment,
which loses nothing in the hands of those who now must manage it; of
whom the one, in Montaigne’s phrase, showed “the constancy of so long
a labour,” and the other, in his own phrase, “took so much pain,” to
adapt it aright. But just as the charm of style, though undiminished,
is changed when it passes from Plutarch to Amyot, so too this takes
place to some degree when it passes from Amyot to North. North was
translating from a modern language, without the fear of the ancients
before his eyes. Amyot had translated from Greek, and was familiar
with classical models. Not merely does this affect the comparative
fidelity of their versions, as it was bound to do, for North, with two
intervals between, and without the instincts of an accurate scholar,
could not keep so close as even Amyot had done to the first original.
Indeed he sometimes, though not often, violates the meaning of the
French, occasionally misinterpreting a word, as when he translates
Coriolanus’ final words to his mother: “Je m’en revois (i.e. _revais_,
_retourne_) vaincu par toy seule,” by “I _see_ myself vanquished by you
alone”; more frequently misconstruing an idiom, as when he goes wrong
with the negative in passages like the following: “Ces paroles feirent
incontinent penser à Eurybides et craindre que les Atheniens ne s’en
voulussent aller et les abandonner”; which he renders: “These wordes
made Eurybides presently thinke and feare that the Athenians would
_not_ goe, and that they would forsake them.”[123]
[123] Themistocles.
But the same circumstance affects North’s mode of utterance as well.
It is far from attaining to Amyot’s habitual clearness, coherence, and
correctness. His words are often clumsily placed, his constructions are
sometimes broken and more frequently charged with repetitions, he does
not always find his way out of a complicated sentence with his grammar
unscathed or his meaning unobscured. One of the few Frenchmen who take
exception to Amyot’s prose says that “it trails like the ivy creeping
at random, instead of flying like the arrow to its mark.” This is
unfair in regard to Amyot; it would be fairer, though still unfair, in
regard to North. Compare the French and English versions of the passage
that deals with Mark Antony’s “piscatory eclogue.” Nothing could be
more lucid or elegant than the French.
Il se meit quelquefois à pescher à la ligne, et voyant
qu’il ne pouvoit rien prendre, si en estoit fort despit et
marry à cause que Cléopatra estoit présente. Si commanda
secrettement à quelques pescheurs, quand il auroit jeté sa
ligne, qu’ilz se plongeassent soudain en l’eau, et qu’ilz
allassent accrocher à son hameçon quelques poissons de ceulx
qu’ilz auroyent eu peschés auparavent; et puis retira aussi
deux or trois fois sa ligne avec prise. Cleopatra s’en
aperceut incontinent, toutes fois elle feit semblant de
n’en rien sçavoir, et de s’esmerveiller comme il peschoit
si bien; mais apart, elle compta le tout à ses familiers,
et leur dit que le lendemain ilz se trouvassent sur l’eau
pour voir l’esbatement. Ilz y vindrent sur le port en grand
nombre, et se meirent dedans des bateaux de pescheurs, et
Antonius aussi lascha sa ligne, et lors Cleopatra commanda
à lun de ses serviteurs qu’il se hastast de plonger devant
ceulx d’Antonius, et qu’il allast attacher a l’hameçon de
sa ligne quelque vieux poisson sallé comme ceulx que lon
apporte du païs de Pont. Cela fait, Antonius qui cuida qu’il
y eust un poisson pris, tira incontinent sa ligne, et adonc
comme lon peult penser, tous les assistans se prirent bien
fort à rire, et Cleopatra, en riant, lui dit: “Laisse-nous,
seigneur, à nous autres Ægyptiens, habitans[124] de Pharus et
de Canobus, laisse-nous la ligne; ce n’est pas ton mestier.
Ta chasse est de prendre et conquerer villes et citez, païs
et royaumes.”
[124] Greek Βασιλεῦσιν. Does the _habitans_ come from the 1470 Latin
version? A later emendation is ἁλιεῦσιν.
The flow of the English is not so easy and transparent.
On a time he went to angle for fish, and when he could take
none, he was as angrie as could be, bicause Cleopatra stoode
by. Wherefore he secretly commaunded the fisher men, that
when he cast in his line, they should straight dive under
the water, and put a fishe on his hooke which they had taken
before: and so snatched up his angling rodde and brought up
a fish twise or thrise. Cleopatra found it straight, yet she
seemed not to see it, but wondred at his excellent fishing:
but when she was alone by her self among her owne people,
she told them howe it was, and bad them the next morning
to be on the water to see the fishing. A number of people
came to the haven, and got into the fisher boates to see
this fishing. Antonius then threw in his line, and Cleopatra
straight commaunded one of her men to dive under water
before Antonius men and to put some old salte fish upon his
baite, like unto those that are brought out of the contrie
of Pont. When he had hong the fish on his hooke, Antonius,
thinking he had taken a fishe in deede, snatched up his line
presently. Then they all fell a-laughing. Cleopatra laughing
also, said unto him: “Leave us, (my lord), Ægyptians (which
dwell in the contry of Pharus and Canobus) your angling
rodde: this is not thy profession; thou must hunt after
conquering realmes and contries.”
This specimen is in so far a favourable one for North, that in
simple narrative he is little exposed to his besetting faults, but
even here the superior deftness of the Frenchman is obvious. We
leave out of account little mistranslations, like _on a time_ for
_quelquefois_,[125] or _the fishermen_ for _quelques pescheurs_,[126]
or _alone by herself_ for _apart_. We even pass over the lack of
connectedness when _they_ (_i.e._ the persons informed) _in great
number_[127] becomes the quite indefinite _a number of people_, and
the omission of the friendly nudge, so to speak, _as you can imagine_,
_comme lon peult penser_. But to miss the point of the phrase _pour
voir l’esbatement_, _to see the sport_, and translate it _see the
fishing_, and then clumsily insert the same phrase immediately
afterwards where it is not wanted and does not occur; to change the
order of the _fishe_ and the _hooke_ and entangle the connection
where it was quite clear, to change _s’esmerveiller_ to _wondred_,
the infinitive to the indicative past, and thus cloud the sense; to
substitute the ambiguous and prolix _When he had hong the fish on his
hooke_, for the concise and sufficient _cela fait_—to do all this and
much more of the same kind elsewhere was possible only because North
was far inferior to Amyot in literary tact. In the English version we
have often to interpret the words by the sense and not the sense by the
words; and this is a demand which is seldom made by the French.
[125] Yet in these three cases, where North is certainly behind Amyot
as a narrator, he is more faithful to the Greek. This is the sort of
thing that makes one ask whether he was not really in closer contact
with the original than he professes to have been. One remembers his
similar modesty in regard to the _Diall_, which, nominally from the
French, really made use of the Spanish as well.
[126] Yet in these three cases, where North is certainly behind Amyot
as a narrator, he is more faithful to the Greek. This is the sort of
thing that makes one ask whether he was not really in closer contact
with the original than he professes to have been. One remembers his
similar modesty in regard to the _Diall_, which, nominally from the
French, really made use of the Spanish as well.
[127] Yet in these three cases, where North is certainly behind Amyot
as a narrator, he is more faithful to the Greek. This is the sort of
thing that makes one ask whether he was not really in closer contact
with the original than he professes to have been. One remembers his
similar modesty in regard to the _Diall_, which, nominally from the
French, really made use of the Spanish as well.
But there are compensations. All modern languages have in their
analytic methods and common stock of ideas a certain family
resemblance, in which those of antiquity do not share; and in
particular French is far closer akin to English than Greek to French.
Since North had specialised in the continental literature of his day
and was now dispensing the bounty of France, his allegiance to the
national idiom was virtually undisturbed, even when he made least
change in his original. He may be more licentious than Amyot in his
treatment of grammar, and less perspicuous in the ordering of his
clauses, but he is equal to him or superior in word music, after the
English mode; and he is even richer in full-blooded words and in
phrases racy of the soil. Not that he ever rejects the guidance of
his master, but it leads him to the high places and the secret places
of his own language. So while he is quick to detect the rhythm of the
French and makes it his pattern, he sometimes goes beyond it; though he
can catch and reproduce the cadences of the music-loving Amyot, it is
sometimes on a sweeter or a graver key. Take, for instance, that scene,
the favourite with Chateaubriand, where Philip, the freedman of Pompey,
stands watching by the headless body of his murdered master till the
Egyptians are sated with gazing on it, till they have “seen it their
bellies full” in North’s words. Amyot proceeds:
Puis l’ayant layé de l’eau de la mer, et enveloppé d’une
sienne pauvre chemise, pour ce qu’il n’avoit autre chose, il
chercha au long de la greve ou il trouva quelque demourant
d’un vieil bateau de pescheur, dont les pieces estoyent bien
vieilles, mais suffisantes pour brusler un pauvre corps nud,
et encore non tout entier. Ainsi comme il les amassoit et
assembloit, il survint un Romain homme d’aage, qui en ses
jeunes ans avoit esté à la guerre soubs Pompeius: si luy
demanda: “Qui est tu, mon amy, qui fais cest apprest pour
les funerailles du grand Pompeius?” Philippus luy respondit
qu’il estoit un sien affranchy. “Ha,” dit le Romain, “tu
n’auras pas tout seul cest honneur, et te prie vueille moy
recevoir pour compagnon en une si saincte et si devote
rencontre, à fin que je n’aye point occasion de me plaindre
en tout et partout de m’estre habitué en païs estranger,
ayant en recompense de plusieurs maulx que j’y ay endurez,
rencontré au moins ceste bonne adventure de pouvoir toucher
avec mes mains, et aider a ensepvelir le plus grand
Capitaine des Romains.”
This is very beautiful, but to English ears, at least, there is
something in North’s version, copy though it be, that is at once more
stately and more moving.
Then having washed his body with salt water, and wrapped it
up in an old shirt of his, because he had no other shift
to lay it in,[128] he sought upon the sands and found at the
length a peece of an old fishers bote, enough to serve to
burne his naked bodie with, but not all fully out.[129] As he
was busie gathering the broken peeces of this bote together,
thither came unto him an old Romane, who in his youth had
served under Pompey, and sayd unto him: “O friend, what art
thou that preparest the funeralls of Pompey the Great.”
Philip answered that he was a bondman of his infranchised.
“Well,” said he, “thou shalt not have all this honor alone,
I pray thee yet let me accompany thee in so devout a deede,
that I may not altogether repent me to have dwelt so long
in a straunge contrie where I have abidden such miserie and
trouble; but that to recompence me withall, I may have this
good happe, with mine owne hands to touche Pompey’s bodie,
and to helpe to bury the only and most famous Captaine of
the Romanes.”[130]
[128] Amyot probably and North certainly has mistaken the sense. After
washing and shrouding the body “ἄλλο δε oὐδὲν ἔχων ἀλλὰ περισκοπῶν”;
but having nothing else to carry out the funeral rites with, such as
pine wood, spices, etc., but looking about on the beach, he found, etc.
[129] A misunderstanding on North’s part where Amyot translates the
Greek quite adequately. The rendering should be “a poor naked body and
moreover an incomplete one,” _i.e._ with the head wanting.
[130] _Pompeius._
On the other hand, while anything but a purist in the diction he
employs, North’s foreign loans lose their foreign look, and become
merely the fitting ornament for his native homespun. It is chiefly on
the extraordinary wealth of his vocabulary, his inexhaustible supply
of expressions, vulgar and dignified, picturesque and penetrating,
colloquial and literary, but all of them, as he uses them, of
indisputable Anglicity—it is chiefly on this that his excellence as
stylist is based, an excellence that makes his version of Plutarch by
far the most attractive that we possess. It is above all through these
resources and the use he makes of them that his book distinguishes
itself from the French; for North treats Amyot very much as Amyot
treats Plutarch; heightening and amplifying; inserting here an emphatic
epithet and there a homely proverb; now substituting a vivid for a
colourless term, now pursuing the idea into pleasant side tracks. Thus
Amyot describes the distress of the animals that were left behind when
the Athenians set out for Salamis, with his average faithfulness.
Et si y avoit ne sçay quoi de pitoyable qui attendrissoit
les cueurs, quand on voyoit les bestes domestiques
et privées, qui couroient ça et là avec hurlemens et
signifiance de regret après leurs maistres et ceulx qui les
avoient nourries, ainsi comme ilz s’embarquoient: entre
lesquelles bestes on compte du chien de Xantippus, père
de Pericles, que ne pouvant supporter le regret d’estre
laissé de son maistre, il se jeta dedans la mer après luy,
et nageant au long de la galère où il estoit, passa jusques
en l’isle de Salamine, là où si tost qu’il fust arrivé,
l’aleine luy faillit, et mourut soudainement.
But this account stirs North’s sympathy, and he puts in little touches
that show his interest and compassion.
There was besides, a certain pittie that made mens harts to
yerne, when they saw the _poore doggs, beasts and cattell_
ronne up and doune, _bleating, mowing, and howling out
aloude_ after their masters in token of sorowe, whan they
did imbarke. Amongst them there goeth a _straunge_ tale of
Xanthippus dogge, who was Pericles father; which, for sorowe
his master had left him behind him, dyd caste him self
after into the sea, and swimming still by the galley’s side
wherein his master was, he held on to the Ile of Salamina,
where so sone as _this poor curre_ landed, his breath fayled
him, and dyed instantly.[131]
[131] _Themistocles._
Similarly, when he recounts the story how the Gauls entered Rome, North
cannot restrain his reverence for Papirius or his delight in his blow,
or his indignation at its requital. Amyot had told of the Gaul:
qui prit la hardiesse de s’approcher de Marcus Papyrius, et
luy passa tout doulcement[132] la main par dessus sa barbe qui
estoit longue. Papyrius luy donna de son baston si grand
coup sur la teste, qu’il la luy blecea; dequoy le barbare
estant irrité, desguaina son espée, et l’occit.
North is not content with such reserve.
One of them went boldely unto M. Papyrius and layed his hand
fayer and softely upon his long beard. But Papyrius gave him
such a _rappe on his pate_ with his staffe, that the _bloude
ran about his eares_. This _barbarous beaste_ was in _such a
rage with the blowe_ that he drue out his sworde and slewe
him.[133]
Or sometimes the picture suggested is so pleasant to North that he
partly recomposes it and adds some gracious touch to enhance its charm.
Thus he found this vignette of the peaceful period that followed Numa:
Les peuples hantoient et trafiquoient les uns avec les
autres sans crainte ni danger, et s’entrevisitoient en toute
cordiale hospitalité, comme si la sapience de Numa eut été
une vive source de toutes bonnes et honnestes choses, de
laquelle plusieurs fleuves se fussent derivés pour arroser
toute l’Italie.
This is how North recasts and embellishes the last sentence:
The people did trafficke and frequent together, without
feare or daunger, and visited one another, making great
cheere: _as if out of the springing fountain of Numa’s
wisdom many pretie brookes and streames of good and honest
life had ronne over all Italie and had watered it_.[134]
[132] Represents πράως. Amyot leaves out ἤψατο τοῦ γενελου, _caught the
chin_: _si grand_, and _estant irrité_, are added.
[133] _Furius Camillus._
[134] _Numa Pompilius._
But illustrations might be multiplied through pages. Enough have been
given to show North’s debts to the French and their limits. With
a few unimportant errors, his rendering is in general wonderfully
faithful and close, so that he copies even the sequence of thought
and modulation of rhythm. He sometimes falls short of his authority
in simplicity, neatness, and precision of structure. On the other
hand he sometimes excels it in animation and force, in volume and
inwardness. But, and this is the last word on his style, even when he
follows Amyot’s French most scrupulously, he always contrives to write
in his own and his native idiom. And hence it came that he once for
all naturalised Plutarch among us. His was the epoch-making deed. His
successors, who were never his supersessors, merely entered into his
labours and adapted Plutarch to the requirements of the Restoration, or
of the eighteenth or of the nineteenth century. But they were adapting
an author whom North had made a national classic.
Plutarch was a Greek, to be sure, and a Greek no doubt he is
still. But as when we think of a Devereux ... we call him an
Englishman and not a Norman, so who among the reading public
troubles himself to reflect that Plutarch wrote Attic prose
of such and such a quality? Scholars know all about it to be
sure, as they know that the turkeys of our farm-yards come
originally from Mexico. Plutarch however is not a scholar’s
author, but is popular everywhere as if he were a native.[135]
[135] _Quarterly Review_, 1861.
But one aspect of this is that North carries further the process which
Amyot had begun of accommodating antiquity to current conceptions. The
atmosphere of North’s diction is so genuinely national that objects
discerned through it take on its hue. Under his strenuous welcome
the noble Grecian and Roman immigrants from France are forced to
make themselves at home, but in learning the ways of the English
market-place they forget something of the Agora and the Forum. Perhaps
this was inevitable, since they were come to stay.
And the consequence of North’s method is that he meets Shakespeare
half way. His copy may blur some of the lines in the original picture,
but they are lines that Shakespeare would not have perceived. He may
present Antiquity in disguise, but it was in this disguise alone
that Shakespeare was able to recognise it. He has in short supplied
Shakespeare with the only Plutarch that Shakespeare could understand.
The highest compliment we can pay his style is, that it had a special
relish for Shakespeare, who retained many of North’s expressions with
little or no alteration. The highest compliment we can pay the contents
is, that, only a little more modernised, they furnished Shakespeare
with his whole conception of antique history.
The influence of North’s Plutarch on Shakespeare is thus of a two-fold
kind. There is the influence of the diction, there is the influence of
the subject-matter; and in the first instance it is more specifically
the influence of North, while in the second it is more specifically the
influence of Plutarch.
It would be as absurd as unfair to deny Shakespeare’s indebtedness
to North not only in individual turns and phrases, but in continuous
discourse. Often the borrower does little more than change the prose
to poetry. But at the lowest he always does that; and there is perhaps
in some quarters a tendency to minimise the marvel of the feat, and
so, if not to exaggerate the obligation, at least to set it in a false
light. He has nowhere followed North so closely through so many lines
as in Volumnia’s great speech to her son before Rome; and, next to
that, in Coriolanus’ great speech to Aufidius in Antium. In these
passages the ideas, the arrangement of the ideas, the presentation
of the ideas are practically the same in the translator and in the
dramatist: yet, with a few almost imperceptible touches, a few changes
in the order of construction, a few substitutions in the wording, the
language of North, without losing any directness or force, gains a
majestic volume and vibration that are only possible in the cadences
of the most perfect verse. These are the cases in which Shakespeare
shows most verbal dependence on his author, but his originality asserts
itself even in them. North’s admirable appeal is not Shakespeare’s,
Shakespeare’s more admirable appeal is not North’s.[136]
Similarly there has been a tendency to overestimate the loans of the
Roman Plays from Plutarch. From this danger even Archbishop Trench has
not altogether escaped in an eloquent and well-known passage which in
many ways comes very near to the truth. After dwelling on the freedom
with which Shakespeare generally treats his sources, for instance the
novels of Bandello or Cinthio, deriving from them at most a hint or
two, cutting and carving, rejecting or expanding their statements at
will, he concludes:
But his relations with Plutarch are very
different—different enough to justify or almost to justify
the words of Jean Paul when in his _Titan_ he calls
Plutarch “der biographische Shakespeare der Weltgeschichte.”
What a testimony we have here to the true artistic sense and
skill which, with all his occasional childish simplicity[137]
the old biographer possesses, in the fact that the mightiest
and completest artist of all times, should be content to
resign himself into his hands and simply to follow where the
other leads.
[136] The relations of the various versions—Greek, Latin, French, and
English—are illustrated by means of this speech in Appendix B.
[137] Childish simplicity does not strike one as a correct description
of Plutarch’s method.
To this it might be answered in the first place that Shakespeare
shows the same sort of fidelity in kind, though not in degree, to the
comparatively inartistic chronicles of his mother country. That is, it
is in part, as we have seen, his tribute not to the historical author
but to the historical subject. Granting, however, the superior claims
of Plutarch, it is yet an overstatement to say that Shakespeare is
content to resign himself into his hands, and simply to follow where
the other leads. Delius, after an elaborate comparison of biography and
drama, sums up his results in the protest that “Shakespeare has much
less to thank Plutarch for than one is generally inclined to suppose.”
Indeed, however much Plutarch would appeal to Shakespeare in virtue
both of his subjects and his methods, it is easy to see that even as
a “grave learned philosopher and historiographer” he is on the hither
side of perfection. He interrupts the story with moral disquisitions,
and is a little apt to preach, and often, through such intrusions and
irrelevancies, or the adherence of the commonplace, his most impressive
touches fail of their utmost possible effect: at least he does not
always seem aware of the full value of his details, of their depth
and suggestiveness when they are set aright. Yet he is more excellent
in details than in the whole: he has little arrangement or artistic
construction; he is not free from contradictions and discrepancies; he
gives the bricks and mortar but not the building, and occasionally some
of the bricks are flawed or the mortar is forgotten. And his stories
have this inorganic character, because he is seldom concerned to pierce
to the meaning that would give them unity and coherence. He moralises,
and only too sententiously, whenever an opportunity offers; but of the
principles that underlie the conflicts and catastrophes which in his
free-and-easy way he describes, he has at best but fragmentary glimpses.
And in all this the difference between the genial moralist and the
inspired tragedian is a vast one—so vast that when once we perceive
it, it is hard to retain a fitting sense of the points of contact. In
Shakespeare, Plutarch’s weaknesses disappear, or rather are replaced
by excellences of precisely the opposite kind. He rejects all that
is otiose or discordant in speech or situation, and adds from other
passages in his author or from his own imagination, the circumstances
that are needed to bring out its full poetic significance. He always
looks to the whole, removes discrepancies, establishes the inner
connection; and at his touch the loose parts take their places as
members of one living organism. And in a sense, “he knows what it is
all about.” In a sense he is more of a philosophic historian than
his teacher. At any rate, while Plutarch takes his responsibilities
lightly in regard both to facts and conclusions, Shakespeare, in so
far as that was possible for an Elizabethan, has a sort of intuition
of the principles that Plutarch’s narrative involves; and while adding
some pigment from his own thought and feeling to give them colour and
visible shape, accepts them as his presuppositions which interpret the
story and which it interprets.
Thus the influences of North’s Plutarch, whether of North’s style or
of Plutarch’s matter, though no doubt very great, are in the last
resort more in the way of suggestion than of control. But they do
not invariably act with equal potency or in the same proportion.
Thus _Antony and Cleopatra_ adheres most closely to the narrative of
the biographer, which is altered mainly by the omission of details
unsuitable for the purpose of the dramatist; but the words, phrases,
constructions, are for the most part conspicuously Shakespeare’s
own. Here there is a maximum of Plutarch and a minimum of North.
In _Coriolanus_, on the other hand, apart from the unconscious
modifications that we have noticed, Shakespeare allows himself more
liberty than elsewhere in chopping and changing the substance; but
lengthy passages and some of the most impressive ones are incorporated
in the drama without further alteration than is implied in the
transfiguration of prose to verse. Here there is the maximum of North
with the minimum of Plutarch. _Julius Caesar_, as in the matter of the
inevitable and unintentional misunderstandings, so again here, occupies
a middle place. Many phrases, and not a few decisive suggestions for
the most important speeches, have passed from the _Lives_ into the
play: one sentence at least it is hard to interpret without reference
to the context; but here as a rule, even when he borrows most,
Shakespeare treats his loans very independently. So, too, though he
seldom wittingly departs from Plutarch, he elaborates the new material
throughout, amplifying and abridging, selecting and rejecting, taking
to pieces and recombining, not from one Life but from three. Here we
have the mean influence both of Plutarch and of North.
In so far therefore _Julius Caesar_ gives the norm of Shakespeare’s
procedure; and with it, for this as well as on chronological grounds,
we begin.
_JULIUS CAESAR_
CHAPTER I
POSITION OF THE PLAY BETWEEN THE HISTORIES AND
THE TRAGEDIES. ATTRACTION OF THE SUBJECT FOR
SHAKESPEARE AND HIS GENERATION. INDEBTEDNESS TO
PLUTARCH
Although _Julius Caesar_ was first published in the Folio of 1623,
seven years after Shakespeare’s death, there is not much doubt about
its approximate date of composition, which is now placed by almost all
scholars near the beginning of the seventeenth century. Some of the
evidence for this is partly external in character.
(1) In a miscellany of poems on the death of Elizabeth, printed in
1603, and entitled _Sorrowes Joy_, the lines occur:
They say a _comet_ woonteth to appeare
When _Princes_ baleful destinie is neare:
So _Julius_ starre was seene with fiery crest,
Before his fall to _blaze_ among the rest.
It looks as though the suggestion for the idea and many of the words
had come from Calpurnia’s remonstrance,
When beggars die there are no _comets seen_:
The heavens themselves _blaze_ forth the death
of _princes_.[138]
(II. ii. 30.)
[138] Pointed out by Mr. Stokes, _Chronological Order, etc._ Might
not some of the expressions come, however, from Virgil’s list of the
portents that accompanied Caesar’s death? Compare especially “nec diri
toties _arsere cometae_” (_G._ i. 488).
Another apparent loan belongs to the same year. In 1603 Drayton rewrote
his poem of _Mortimeriados_ under the title of _The Barons’ Wars_,
altering and adding many passages. One of the insertions runs:
Such one he was, of him we boldely say,
In whose riche soule all soueraigne powres did sute,
In _whome in peace th(e) elements all lay_
_So mixt_ as none could soueraignty impute;
As all did gouerne, yet all did obey.
His liuely temper was so absolute,
That ’t seemde when heauen his modell first began,
In him it _shewd perfection in a man_.
Compare Antony’s verdict on Brutus:
His life was gentle, and _the elements_
_So mix’d_ in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This _was a man_.”
(V. v. 73.)
Some critics have endeavoured to minimise this coincidence on the
ground that it was a common idea that man was compounded of the four
elements. But that would not account for such close identity of phrase.
There must be some connection; and that Drayton, not Shakespeare, was
the copyist, is rendered probable by the circumstance that Drayton, in
1619, _i.e._ after Shakespeare’s death, makes a still closer approach
to Shakespeare’s language.
He was a man, then, boldly dare to say,
In whose rich soul the virtues well did suit;
In whom, _so mix’d the elements all lay_,
That none to one could sovereignty impute;
As all did govern, yet all did obey:
He of a temper was so absolute
As that it seem’d, when Nature him began,
She meant to show _all that might be in man_.[139]
[139] Collier’s Shakespeare.
(2) Apart, however, from these apparent adaptations in 1603, there
is reason to conjecture that the play had been performed by May in
the previous year. At that date, as we know from Henslowe’s _Diary_,
Drayton, Webster and others were engaged on a tragedy on the same
subject called _Caesar’s Fall_. Now it is a well ascertained fact that
when a drama was a success at one theatre, something on a similar
theme commonly followed at another. The entry therefore, that in the
early summer of 1602 Henslowe had several playwrights working at this
material, apparently in a hurry, since so many are sharing in the task,
is in so far presumptive evidence that Shakespeare’s _Julius Caesar_
had been produced in the same year or shortly before.
(3) But these things are chiefly important as confirming the
probability of another allusion, which would throw the date a little
further back still. In Weever’s _Mirror of Martyrs_ there is the
quatrain:
The many headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus speech, that Caesar was ambitious,
When eloquent Mark Antony had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious.[140]
[140] Mr. Halliwell-Phillips’ discovery.
Now this has a much more specific reference to the famous scene in
the Play than to anything in Plutarch, who, for instance, even in the
_Life of Brutus_, which gives the fullest account of Brutus’ dealings
with the citizens, does not mention the substance of his argument and
still less any insistence on Caesar’s ambition, but only says that he
“made an oration unto them to winne the favor of the people, and to
justifie what they had done”; and this passage, which contains the
fullest notice of Brutus’ speeches, like the corresponding one in the
_Life of Caesar_, attributes only moderate success to his appeal in the
market place, while it goes on to describe the popular disapproval as
exploding before the intervention of Antony.[141] Thus it seems fairly
certain that a knowledge of Shakespeare’s play is presupposed by the
_Mirror of Martyrs_, which was printed in 1601.
[141] “Brutus and his confederates came into the market place to speake
unto the people, who gave them such audience, that it seemed they
neither greatly reproved, nor allowed the fact: for by their great
silence they showed that they were sorry for Caesar’s death and also
that they did reverence Brutus.” _Julius Caesar._
“When the people saw him in the pulpit, although they were a multitude
of rakehells of alle sortes, and had a good will to make some sturre,
yet being ashamed to doe it for the reverence they bare unto Brutus,
they kept silence to heare what he would say. When Brutus began to
speak they gave him quiet audience; howbeit immediately after, they
shewed that they were not all contented with the murther. For when
another called Cinna would have spoken and began to accuse Caesar; they
fell into a great uprore among them, and marvelously reviled him.” _M.
Brutus._
On the other hand, it cannot have been much earlier. The absence of
such a typical “tragedy” from Meres’ list in 1598 is nearly proof
positive that it was not then in existence.
After that the _data_ are less definite. _A Warning for Fair Women_,
printed in 1599, contains the lines:
I have given him fifteen wounds,
Which will be fifteen _mouths_ that do accuse me:
In every mouth there is a bloody _tongue_
Which will _speak_, although he holds his peace.
It is difficult not to bring these into connection with Antony’s words:
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy——
Which like dumb _mouths_ do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my _tongue_.
(III. i. 259.)
And again:
I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor, poor dumb _mouths_,
And bid them _speak_ for me: but were I Brutus
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a _tongue_
In every _wound_.
(III. ii. 228.)
But in this Shakespeare may have been the debtor not the creditor:
and other coincidences like the “Et tu, Brute,” in _Acolastus his
Afterwit_[142] (1600) may be due to the use of common or current
authorities. One little detail has been used as an argument that the
play was later than 1600. Cassius says:
[142] By S. Nicholson.
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
(I. ii. 159·)
Here obviously the word we should have expected is _infernal_ not
_eternal_. It has been conjectured[143] that the milder expression
was substituted in deference to the increasing disapproval of profane
language on the stage; and since three plays published in 1600 use
_infernal_, the inference is that _Julius Caesar_ is subsequent to
them. One fails to see, however, why Shakespeare should admit the
substantive and be squeamish about the adjective: in point of fact,
much uglier words than either find free entry into his later plays.
And one has likewise to remember that the _Julius Caesar_ we possess
was published only in 1623, and that such a change might very well
have been made in any of the intervening years, even though it were
written before 1600. The most then that can be established by this set
of inferences, is that it was produced after Meres’ _Palladis Tamia_ in
1598 and before Weever’s _Mirror of Martyrs_ in 1601.
[143] By Mr. Wright, _Clarendon Press Edition_.
The narrowness of the range is fairly satisfactory, and it may be
further reduced. It has been surmised that perhaps Essex’ treason
turned Shakespeare’s thoughts to the story of another conspiracy by
another high-minded man, and that Caesar’s reproach, “Et tu, Brute,”
derived not from the Parallel Lives but from floating literary
tradition, would suggest to an audience of those days the feeling of
Elizabeth in regard to one whom Shakespeare had but recently celebrated
as “the general of our gracious Empress.” At any rate the time seems
suitable. Among Shakespeare’s serious plays _Julius Caesar_ most
resembles in style _Henry V._, written between March and September
1599, as the above allusion to Essex’ expedition shows,[144] and
_Hamlet_, entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1602, as “latelie acted.”
But the connection is a good deal closer with the latter than with
the former, and extends to the parallelism and contrast between the
chief persons, both of them philosophic students called upon to make a
decision for which their temperament and powers do not fit them, and
therefore the one of them deciding wrong and the other hardly deciding
at all. Both pieces contain references to the story of Caesar, but
those in _Hamlet_ accord better with the tone of the tragedy. Thus the
chorus says of Henry’s triumph:
[144] _Henry V._ V. prologue 30.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of the antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth to fetch their conquering Caesar in.
(V. prologue 25.)
Would this passage have been penned if Shakespeare had already
described how the acclamations of the plebs were interrupted by the
tribunes, and how among the senators there were some eager to make away
with the Victor?
But the two chief references in _Hamlet_ merely abridge what is told
more at large in the Play. Polonius says: “I did enact Julius Caesar: I
was killed i’ the Capitol. Brutus killed me” (III. ii. 108), which is
only a bald summary of the central situation. Hamlet says:
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
(I. i. 113.)
This reads like a condensed anthology from the descriptions of Casca,
Cassius and Calpurnia, eked out with a few hints from another passage
in Plutarch that had not hitherto been utilised.[145]
[145] Calpùrnia speaks of the appearance of comets at the death of
princes, but merely in a general way, not as a presage then to be
observed: and there is no mention in the play of disasters in the sun
or eclipses of the moon. Near the end of the _Life of Caesar_, Plutarch
records the first two portents, and his language suggests the idea of
a solar, which, for variety’s sake, might easily be changed to a lunar
eclipse. “The great comet which seven nightes together was seene very
bright after Caesar’s death, the eight night after was never seene
more. Also the _brightnes of the sunne was darkened_, the which all
that yeare through was very pale, and shined not out, whereby it gave
but small heate.”
Even the quatrain:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!
(V. i. 236.)
is in some sort the ironical development of Antony’s thought:
O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?
(III. i. 148.)
But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
(III. ii. 123.)
Owing to Weever’s reference we cannot put _Julius Caesar_ after
_Hamlet_, but it seems to have closer relations with _Hamlet_ than with
_Henry V._ It is not rash to place it between the two, in 1600 or 1601.
This does not however mean that we necessarily have it quite in its
original form. On the contrary, there are indications that it may have
been revised some time after the date of composition.
Thus Ben Jonson in his _Discoveries_ writes of Shakespeare: “His wit
was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so too! Many times
he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he said
in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, ‘Caesar, thou dost me
wrong,’ he replied, ‘Caesar did never wrong but with just cause,’ and
such like; which were ridiculous.” Most people would see in this a very
ordinary example of the figure called Paradox, and some would explain
_wrong_ in such a way that even the paradox disappears: but the alleged
_bêtise_ tickled Ben’s fancy, for he recurs to it to make a point in
the Introduction to the _Staple of News_. One of the persons says: “I
can do that too, if I have cause”; to which the reply is made: “Cry you
mercy; you never did wrong but with just cause.”
Now in the present play there is no such expression. The nearest
analogue occurs in the conclusion of the speech, in which Caesar
refuses the petition for Publius Cimber’s recall,
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.
(III. i. 47.)
It has been suggested[146] that Jonson simply misquoted the passage.
But it is not likely that Ben would consciously or unconsciously
pervert the authentic text by introducing an absurdity, still less
by introducing an absurdity that few people find absurd. In his
criticisms on Shakespeare he does not manufacture the things to which
he objects, but regards them from an unsympathetic point of view. It
seems probable, therefore, that he has preserved an original reading,
that was altered out of deference for strictures like his: and this in
so far supports the theory that the play was corrected after its first
appearance.
[146] By Mr. Verity, _Julius Caesar_, 198.
So, too, with the versification. The consideration of certain
technicalities, such as the weak ending, would place _Julius Caesar_
comparatively early, but there are others that yield a more ambiguous
result. It may have been revived and revised about 1607 when the
subject was again popular.
And perhaps it has survived only in an acting edition. It is unusually
short: and, that Shakespeare’s plays were probably abridged for the
stage, we know from comparison of the Quarto with the Folio _Hamlets_.
The same argument has been used in regard to _Macbeth_.
Still granting the plausibility up to a certain point of this
conjecture, its importance must not be exaggerated. It does not
affect the fact that _Julius Caesar_ belongs essentially to the very
beginning of the century, and that it is an organic whole as it
stands. If abridged, it is still full, compact and unattenuated. If
revised, its style, metre and treatment are still all characteristic
of Shakespeare’s early prime. The easy flow of the verse, the luminous
and pregnant diction, the skilful presentation of the story in a few
suggestive incidents, all point to a time when Shakespeare had attained
complete mastery of his methods and material, and before he was driven
by his daemon to tasks insuperable by another and almost insuperable by
him,
Reaching that heaven might so replenish him
Above and through his art.
It is perhaps another aspect of the perfect and harmonious beauty,
which fulfils the whole play and every part of it, that while there is
none of the speeches “that is in the bad sense declamatory, none that
does not gain by its context nor can be spared from it without some
loss to the dramatic situation,” there are many “which are eminently
adapted for declamation”;[147] that is, for delivery by themselves. In
the later plays, on the other hand, it is far more difficult to extract
any particular jewel from its setting.
[147] The late Mr. H. Sidgwick, “Julius Caesar and Coriolanus,” in
_Essays and Addresses_.
It is pretty certain then that _Julius Caesar_ is the first not only of
the Roman Plays, but of the great series of Tragedies. The flame-tipped
welter of _Titus Andronicus_, the poignant radiance of _Romeo and
Juliet_ belong to Shakespeare’s pupilage and youth. Their place is
apart from each other and the rest in the vestibule and forecourt of
his art. The nearest approach to real Tragedy he had otherwise made was
in the English History of _Richard III._ And now when that period of
his career begins in which he is chiefly occupied with the treatment of
tragic themes, it is again to historical material that he has recourse,
and he chooses from it the episode which was probably of supreme
interest to the Europe of his day. Since Muretus first showed the way,
the fate of Caesar had again and again been dramatised in Latin and in
the vernacular, in French and in English. It was a subject that to a
genius of the second rank might have seemed hackneyed, but a genius of
the highest rank knows that the common is not hackneyed but catholic,
and contains richer possibilities than the recondite. Shakespeare
had already been drawn to it himself. The frequent references in his
earlier dramas show how he too was fascinated by the glamour of Caesar.
In the plays adapted by him, he inserts or retains tributes to Caesar’s
greatness, to the irony or injustice of his fate. Bedford in his
enthusiasm for the spirit of Henry V., as ordained to prosper the realm
and thwart adverse planets, can prefer him to only one rival,
A far more glorious star thy soul will make
Than Julius Caesar.
(_H. VI._ A. I. i. 155.)
Suffolk, in his self-conceit and self-pity, seeks for examples of
other celebrities who have perished by ignoble hands, and compared
with his victim, even Brutus seems on the level of the meanest and most
unscrupulous.
A Roman sworder and banditto slave
Murder’d sweet Tully: Brutus’ bastard hand
Stabb’d Julius Caesar: savage islanders
Pompey the Great: and Suffolk dies by pirates.
(_H. VI._ B. IV. i. 134.)
Margaret, when her boy is slaughtered at Tewkesbury, thinks of Caesar’s
murder as the one deed which can be placed beside it, and which it even
transcends in horror.
They that stabb’d Caesar shed no blood at all,
Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame,
If this foul deed were by to equal it.
(_H. VI._ C. V. v. 53.)
It is the same if we turn to Shakespeare’s indisputably spontaneous
utterances. He sees Caesar’s double merit with pen and sword. Says the
little Prince Edward:
That Julius Caesar was a famous man:
With what his valour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live.
Death makes no conquest of this conquerer:
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.
(_R. III._ III. i. 84.)
Rosalind laughs at the self-consciousness of his prowess as she laughs
at the extravagance of love in Troilus and Leander, but evidently
Shakespeare, just as he was impressed by their stories in Chaucer and
Marlowe, was impressed in Plutarch with what she calls the “thrasonical
brag of ‘I came, saw, and overcame.’” Don Armado is made to quote it
in his role of invincible gallant (L.L.L. IV. i. 68); and Falstaff
parodies it by applying to himself the boast of “the hooked-nosed
fellow of Rome” when Sir John Coleville surrenders (H. IV. B. IV. iii.
45). For to Shakespeare there are no victories like Caesar’s. The
false announcement of Hotspur’s success appeals to them for precedent:
O, such a day
So fought, so follow’d and so fairly won,
Came not till now to dignify the times
Since Caesar’s fortunes.
(_H. IV._ B. I. i. 20.)
We have already noticed the references to his triumphs, his fate, the
ironical contrast between the _was_ and the _is_ in _Henry V._ and
_Hamlet_, the History and the Tragedy that respectively precede and
succeed the play of which he is titular hero. But Shakespeare keeps
recurring to the theme almost to the end. When in _Measure for Measure_
the disreputable Pompey is conveyed to prison, it suggests a ridiculous
parallel with that final triumph of Caesar’s when the tribunes saw far
other
tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels.
“How now, noble Pompey,” says Lucio as the go-between passes by behind
Elbow and the officers, “what, at the wheels of Caesar? art thou led
in triumph?” (III. ii. 46). In _Antony and Cleopatra_, of course the
incumbent presence of “broad-fronted Caesar” is always felt. But in
Cymbeline, too, it haunts us. Now his difficulties in the island, since
there were difficulties even for him, are used as by Posthumus, to
exalt the prowess of the Britons,
When Julius Caesar
Smiled at their lack of skill, but found their courage
Worthy his frowning at:
(II. iv. 21.)
or by the Queen:
A kind of conquest
Caesar made here; but made not here his brag
Of “came” and “saw” and “overcame.”
(III. i. 22.)
But the dominant note is rather of admiration for
Julius Caesar, whose remembrance yet
Lives in men’s eyes, and will to ears and tongues
Be theme and hearing ever.
(III. i. 2.)
Or if the fault that Brutus enforced is brought to view, the very fault
becomes a grandiose and superhuman thing:
Caesar’s ambition,
Which swell’d so much, that it did almost stretch
The sides o’ the world.
(III. i. 49.)
The subject then was one of widespread interest and had an abiding
fascination for Shakespeare himself. After leaving national history
in _Henry V._ he seems to have turned to the history of Rome for the
first Tragedy of his prime in a spirit much like that in which he had
gone to the English Chronicles. And he goes to it much in the same
way. It has been said that in most of the earlier series “Holinshed
is hardly ever out of the poet’s hands.”[148] Substituting Plutarch
for Holinshed the expression is true in this case too. An occasional
phrase like the _Et tu, Brute_, he obtained elsewhere, most probably
from familiar literary usage, but conceivably from the lost Latin play
of Dr. Eedes or Geddes. Stray hints he may have derived from other
authorities; for instance, though this is not certain, a suggestion
or two from Appian’s _Civil Wars_ for Mark Antony’s Oration.[149] It
is even possible that he may have been directed to the conception and
treatment of a few longer passages by his general reading: thus, as we
have seen, it has been maintained not without plausibility that the
first conversation between Brutus and Cassius can be traced to the
corresponding scene in the _Cornélie_.[150] But in Plutarch he found
practically all the stuff and substance for his play, except what was
contributed by his own genius; and any other ingredients are nearly
imperceptible and altogether negligible. Plutarch, however, has given
much. All the persons except Lucius come from him, and Shakespeare
owes to him a number of their characteristics down to the minutest
traits. Cassius’ leanness and Antony’s sleekness, Brutus’ fondness for
his books and cultivation of an artificial style, Caesar’s liability
to the falling sickness and vein of arrogance in his later years, are
all touches that are taken over from the Biographer. So too with the
events and circumstances, and in the main, the sequence in which they
are presented. Plutarch tells of the disapproval with which the triumph
over Pompey’s sons was regarded; of the prophecy of danger on the Ides
of March; of the offer of the crown on the Lupercal; of the punishment
of the Tribunes; of Cassius’ conference with Brutus; of the anonymous
solicitations that are sent to the latter; of the respect in which he
was held; of his relations with his wife, and her demand to share his
confidence; of the enthusiasm of the conspirators, their contempt for
an oath, their rejection of Cicero as confederate, their exemption of
Antony at Brutus’ request; of Ligarius’ disregard of his illness; of
the prodigies and portents that preceded Caesar’s death; of Calpurnia’s
dream, her efforts to stay her husband at home and the counter
arguments of Decius Brutus; of Artemidorus’ intervention, the second
meeting with the soothsayer; of Portia’s paroxysm of anxiety; of all
the details of the assassination scene; of the speeches to the people
by Brutus and Antony; of the effects of Caesar’s funeral; of the murder
of the poet Cinna; of the proscription of the Triumvirate; of the
disagreement of Brutus and Cassius on other matters and with reference
to Pella, and the interruption of the intruder; of the apparition of
the spirit, and the death of Portia; of Brutus’ discussion with Cassius
on suicide; of his imprudence at Philippi; of the double issue and
repetition of the battle; of the death of Cassius and Brutus on their
own swords; of the surrender of Lucilius; of Antony’s eulogy of Brutus.
There is thus hardly a link in the action that was not forged on
Plutarch’s anvil.
[148] Mr. Churton Collins, _Studies in Shakespeare_. See also Mr.
Boswell Stone, _Shakespere’s Holinshed_.
[149] See Appendix C.
[150] See Introduction, pages 60-61, and Appendix A.
And even the words of North have in many cases been almost literally
transcribed. Says Lucilius when brought before Antony:
I dare assure thee, that no enemie hath taken, nor shall
take Marcus Brutus alive; and I beseech God keepe him from
that fortune. For wheresoever he be found, alive or dead; he
will be found like him selfe.
(_Brutus._)
Compare:
I dare assure thee that no enemy
Shall ever take alive the noble Brutus:
The gods defend him from so great a shame!
When you do find him, or alive or dead,
He will be found like Brutus, like himself.
(V. iv. 21.)
Or take the passage—considering its length, the exactest reproduction
of all—in which Portia claims full share in her husband’s secrets. The
sentiment is what we are accustomed to regard as modern; but Plutarch,
who himself viewed marriage as a relation in which there was no Mine
nor Thine,[151] has painted the situation with heartfelt sympathy.
After describing the wound she gives herself to make trial of her
firmness, he proceeds:
[151] See page 98.
Then perceiving her husband was marvelously out of quiet,
and that he coulde take no rest: even in her greatest payne
of all, she spake in this sorte unto him: “I being, O Brutus
(sayed she), the daughter of Cato, was maried unto thee, not
to be thy bedde fellowe and companion at bedde and at borde
onelie, like a harlot; but to be partaker also with thee, of
thy good and evill fortune. Nowe for thy selfe, I can finde
no cause of faulte in thee as touchinge our matche: but for
my parte, howe may I showe my duetie towardes thee, and howe
muche I woulde doe for thy sake, if I cannot constantlie
beare a secret mischaunce or griefe with thee, which
requireth secrecy and fidelity? I confesse, that a woman’s
wit commonly is too weake to keepe a secret safely: but yet,
Brutus, good educacion, and the companie of vertuous men,
have some power to reforme the defect of nature. And for my
selfe, I have this benefit moreover: that I am the daughter
of Cato, and wife of Brutus. This notwithstanding, I did not
trust to any of these things before; untill that now I have
found by experience, that no paine nor griefe whatsoever can
overcome me.’ With those wordes she shewed him her wounde
on her thigh, and told him what she had done to prove her
selfe. Brutus was amazed to heare what she sayd unto him,
and lifting up his handes to heaven, he besought the goddes
to give him grace he might bring his enterprise to so good
passe, that he might be founde a husband, worthie of so
noble a wife as Porcia.”
(_Marcus Brutus._)
It is hardly necessary to point out how closely Shakespeare follows up
the trail.
_Portia._ Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you? Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort or limitation;
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
_Brutus._ You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.
_Portia._ If this were true, then should I know this secret.
I grant I am a woman; but withal,
A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife;
I grant I am a woman; but, withal,
A woman well-reputed, Cato’s daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so father’d and so husbanded?
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose ’em:
I have made strong proof of my constancy,
Giving myself a voluntary wound,
Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience,
And not my husband’s secrets?
_Brutus._ O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife.
(II. i, 280.)
Here we have “the marriage of true souls”; and though the prelude to
this nuptial hymn, a prelude that heralds and enhances its sweetness,
is veriest Shakespeare, when the main theme begins and the climax is
reached, he is content to resign himself to the ancient melody, and
re-echo, even while he varies, the notes.
North’s actual slips or blunders are received into the play. Thus the
account of the assassination runs: “Caesar was driven ... against
the base whereupon Pompey’s image stood, which ranne all of a goare
blood.” The last clause, probably by accident, adds picturesqueness to
Amyot’s simple description, “qui en fust toute ensanglantee,” and is
immortalised in Antony’s bravura:
Even at the base of Pompey’s statua
Which all the while ran blood.
(III. ii. 192.)
More noticeable is the instance of Brutus’ reply to Cassius’ question,
what he will do if he lose the battle at Philippi. Amyot’s translation
is straightforward enough.
Brutus luy respondit: “Estant encore jeune et non assez
experimenté es affaires de ce monde, je feis ne sçay comment
un discours de philosophie, par lequel je reprenois et
blasmois fort Caton d’estre desfait soymesme” etc.
That is:
Brutus answered him: “When I was yet young and not much
experienced in the affairs of this world, I composed,
somehow or other, a philosophic discourse in which I greatly
rebuked and censured Cato for having made away with himself!”
North did not notice where the quotation began; connected _feis_ with
_fier_ in place of _faire_, probably taking it as present not as past;
and interpreted _discours_ as _principle_, which it never meant and
never can mean, instead of _dissertation_. So he translates:
Brutus answered him, _being yet but a young man, and not
over-greatly experienced in the world_: I _trust_ (I know
not how) a certaine rule of Philosophie, by the which I did
greatly blame and reprove Cato for killing of him selfe;
as being no godly or lawful acte, touching the goddes; nor
concerning men, valliant; not to give place and yeld to
divine providence, and not constantly and paciently to take
whatsoever it pleaseth him to send us, but to drawe backe,
and flie: but being nowe in the middest of the daunger, I am
of a contrary mind. For if it be not the will of God, that
this battell fall out fortunate for us: I will looke no more
for hope, neither seeke to make any new supply for warre
againe, but will rid me of this miserable world, and content
me with my fortune. For, I gave up my life for my country in
the Ides of Marche, for the which I shall live in another
more glorious worlde. (_Marcus Brutus._)
It is possible that North used _trust_ in the first sentence as a
preterite equal to _trusted_, just as he uses _lift_ for _lifted_. But
Shakespeare at least took it for a present: so he was struck by the
contradiction which the passage seems to contain. He got over it, and
produced a new effect and one very true to human nature, by making
Brutus’ latter sentiment the sudden response of his heart, in defiance
of his philosophy, to Cassius’ anticipation of what they must expect if
defeated.
_Brutus._ Even by the rule of that philosophy
By which I did blame Cato for the death
Which he did give himself, I know not how,
But I do find it cowardly and vile,
For fear of what might fall, so to prevent
The time of life: arming myself with patience
To stay the providence of some higher powers
That govern us below.
_Cassius._ Then if we lose this battle.
You are contented to be led in triumph
Thorough the streets of Rome?
_Brutus._ No, Cassius, no: think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;
He bears too great a mind. But this same day
Must end that work the ides of March begun;
And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take.
(V. i. 101.)
This last illustration may show us, however, that Shakespeare, even
when he seems to copy most literally, always introduces something that
comes from himself. Despite his wholesale appropriation of territory
that does not in the first instance belong to him, the produce is
emphatically his own. It is like the white man’s occupation of America
and Australasia, and can be justified only on similar grounds. The
lands remain the same under their new as under their old masters, but
they yield undreamed-of wealth to satisfy the needs of man. Never did
any one borrow more, yet borrow less, than Shakespeare. He finds the
clay ready to his hand, but he shapes it and breathes into it the
breath of life, and it becomes a living soul.
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL
The examples given in the previous chapter may serve to show that
from one point of view it is impossible to exaggerate Shakespeare’s
dependence on Plutarch. But this is not the only or the most important
aspect of the case. He alters and adds quite as much as he gets. No
slight modification of the story is implied by its mere reduction
to dramatic shape, at least when the dramatiser is so consummate a
playwright as Shakespeare. And it is very interesting to observe the
instinctive skill with which he throws narrated episodes, like that of
the death of Cassius, into the form of dialogues and scenes. But the
dramatisation involves a great deal more than this. Shakespeare has to
fix on what he regards as the critical points in the continuous story,
to rearrange round them what else he considers of grand importance, and
to bridge in some way the gaps between. These were prime essentials
in all his English historical pieces. The pregnant moments have to be
selected; and become so many ganglia, in which a number of filaments
chronologically distinct are gathered up; yet they have to be exhibited
not in isolation, but as connected with each other, and all belonging
to one system. And in _Julius Caesar_ this is the more noticeable, as
it makes use of more sources than one. The main authority is the _Life
of Brutus_, but the _Life of Caesar_ also is employed very freely, and
the _Life of Antony_ to some extent. The scope and need for insight in
this portion of the task are therefore proportionately great.
Thus the opening scene refers to Caesar’s defeat of the sons of Pompey
in Spain, for which he celebrated his triumph in October, 45 B.C. But
Shakespeare dates it on the 15th February, 44 B.C., at the Lupercalian
Festival.[152] Then, in the account of Caesar’s chagrin at his
reception, he mixes up, as Plutarch himself to some extent does, two
quite distinct episodes, one of which does not belong to the Lupercalia
at all.[153] Lastly, it was only later that the Tribunes were silenced
and deprived of their offices for stripping the images, not of Caesar’s
“trophies,” but of “diadems,”[154] or, more specifically, of the
“laurel crown”[155] Antony had offered him.
[152] Possibly he may have found a suggestion for this in Plutarch’s
expression that at the Lupercalia, Caesar was “apparelled in a
triumphant manner” (_Julius Caesar_); or, more definitely “apparelled
in his triumphing robe” (_Marcus Antonius_).
[153] In the _Julius Caesar_ it is at an interview with the Senate in
the market place that Caesar, in his vexation, bares his neck to the
blow, and afterwards pleads his infirmity in excuse; and nothing of
the kind is recorded in connection with the offer of the crown at the
Lupercalia. In the _Marcus Antonius_ the undignified exhibition, as
Plutarch regards it, is referred to the Lupercalia, and the previous
incident is not mentioned.
[154] _Julius Caesar._
[155] _Marcus Antonius._
The next group of events is clustered round the assassination, and
they begin on the eve of the Ides, the 14th March. But at first we
are not allowed to feel that a month has passed. By various artifices
the flight of time is kept from obtruding itself. The position of the
scene with the storm, which ushers in this part of the story, as the
last of the first act instead of the first of the second, of itself
associates it in our minds with what has gone before. Then there are
several little hints that we involuntarily expand in the same sense.
Thus Cassius has just said:
I will this night,
In several hands, in at his windows throw,
As if they came from several citizens,
Writings all tending to the great opinion
That Rome holds of his name; wherein obscurely
Caesar’s ambition shall be glanced at.
(I. ii. 319.)
And now we hear him say:
Good Cinna, take this paper,
And look you lay it in the praetor’s chair,
Where Brutus may but find it: and throw this
In at his window; set this up with wax
Upon old Brutus’ statue.
(I. iii. 142.)
We seem to see him carrying out the programme that he has announced for
the night of the Lupercalia. Yet there are other hints,—the frequency
with which Brutus has received these instigations (II. i. 49), his
protracted uncertainty since Cassius first sounded him (II. i. 61), the
fact that he himself has had time to approach Ligarius,—which presently
make us realise that the opening scenes of the drama are left a long
way behind.
And in this section, too, Shakespeare has crowded his incidents. The
decisive arrangements of the conspirators, with their rejection of the
oath, are dated the night before the assassination; Plutarch puts them
earlier. Then, according to Plutarch, there was a senate meeting the
morning after Caesar’s murder; and Antony, having escaped in slave’s
apparel, proposed an amnesty for the perpetrators, offered his son as
hostage, and persuaded them to leave the Capitol. On the following
day dignities were distributed among the ringleaders and a public
funeral was decreed to Caesar. Only then did the reading of the will,
the speech of Antony, and the _émeute_ of the people follow, and the
reading of the will preceded the speech. After a while Octavius comes
from Apollonia to see about his inheritance.
In the play, on the other hand, Antony’s seeming agreement with
the assassins is patched up a few minutes after the assassination.
Octavius, summoned by the dead Caesar, is already within seven leagues
of Rome. Antony at once proceeds with the corpse to the market place.
He has hardly made his speech and then read the will, when, as the
citizens rush off in fury, he learns that Octavius has arrived.
A lengthy interval elapses between the end of Act III. and the
beginning of Act IV., occupied, so far as Rome and Italy were
concerned, with the rivalry and intrigues of Antony and Octavius, and
the discomfiture of the former (partly through Cicero’s exertions),
till he wins the army of Lepidus and Octavius finds it expedient to
join forces with him and establish the Triumvirate. But of all this not
a word in Shakespeare. He dismisses it as irrelevant, and creates an
illusion of speed and continuity, where there is none. The servant who
announces the arrival of Octavius, tells Antony:
He and Lepidus are at Caesar’s house.
(III. xi. 269.)
“Bring me to Octavius,” says Antony. And the fourth act opens “at a
house in Rome,” “Antony, Octavius and Lepidus seated at a table,” just
finishing the lists of the proscription. The impression produced is
that their conference is direct sequel to the popular outbreak and the
conspirators’ flight. Yet it is November, 43 B.C., and nineteen or
twenty months have gone by since the Ides of March. And the progress of
time is indicated as well as concealed. Antony announces as a new and
alarming piece of news
And now, Octavius,
Listen great things:—Brutus and Cassius
Are levying powers.
(IV. i. 40.)
This too covers a gap in the history and hurries on the connection.
The suggestion is that they are beginning operations at last, and that
hitherto they have been inactive. Their various intermediate adventures
and wanderings are passed over. We are carried forward to their grand
effort, and are reintroduced to them only when they meet again at
Sardis in the beginning of 42 B.C., just before the final movement to
Philippi, where the battle was fought in October of the same year.
And this scene also is “compounded of many simples.” The dispute which
the poet[156] interrupts, the difference of opinion about Pella, the
appearance of the Spirit, are all located at Sardis by Plutarch, but he
separates them from each other; the news of Portia’s death is undated,
the quarrel about money matters took place at Smyrna, and other traits
are derived from various quarters. Here they are all made
To join like likes, and kiss like native things.
[156] In the _Lives_ Faonius or Phaonius, properly Favonius, a follower
of Cato. (_Marcus Brutus._)
Then at Philippi itself, not only are some of the speeches transferred
from the eve to the day of the engagement; but a whole series of
operations, and two pitched battles, twenty days apart, after the first
of which Cassius, and after the second of which Brutus, committed
suicide, are pressed into a few hours.
It will thus be seen that though the action is spread over a period of
three years, from the triumphal entry of Caesar in October, 45 B.C.,
till the victory of his avengers in October, 42 B.C., Shakespeare
concentrates it into the story of five eventful days, which however
do not correspond to the five separate acts, but by “overlapping” and
other contrivances produce the effect of close sequence, while in
point of fact, historically, they are not consecutive at all.
In the first day there is the exposition, enforcing the predominance of
Caesar and the revulsion against it (Act I. i. and ii.); assigned to
the 15th February, 44 B.C.
In the second day there is the assassination with its immediate
preliminaries and sequels (Act I. iii., Act II., Act III.) all
compressed within the twenty-four hours allowed to a French tragedy,
viz. within the interval between the night before the Ides of March and
the next afternoon or evening.[157]
[157] Cassius says at the end of the long opening scene of the series:
“It is after midnight” (Act I. iii. 163). In the last scene of the
group, Cinna, on his way to Caesar’s funeral, is murdered by the
rioters apparently just after they have left Antony.
In the third day there is the account of the Proscription in November,
43 B.C. (Act IV. i.). In the fourth day the meeting of Brutus and
Cassius, which took place early in 42 B.C., and the apparition of the
boding spirit, are described (Act IV. ii. and iii.). Both these days
are included in one act.
The fifth day is devoted to the final battle and its accessories, and
must be placed in October, 42 B.C. (Act V.).
But the selection, assortment and filiation of the _data_ are not more
conspicuous in the construction of the plot than in the execution of
the details. There will be frequent occasion to touch incidentally on
these and similar processes in the discussion of other matters, but
here it may be well to illustrate them separately, so far as that is
possible when nearly every particular instance shows the influence of
more than one of them.
Thus while Shakespeare’s picture of the very perfect union of Brutus
and Portia is taken almost in its entirety from Plutarch, who was
himself so keenly alive to the beauty of such a wedlock, the charm of
the traits he adopts is heightened by the absence of those he rejects.
Probably indeed he did not know, for Plutarch does not mention it, that
Brutus had been married before, and had got rid of his first wife by
the simple and regular expedient of sending her home to her father.
But he did know that Portia, too, had a first husband, Bibulus, “by
whom she had also a young sonne.” The ideal beauty of their relation is
unbrushed by any hint of their previous alliances.
So, too, he attributes the coolness between Brutus and Cassius at the
beginning of the story merely to Brutus’ inward conflicts, and to
Cassius’ misconstruction of his preoccupation. In point of fact, it had
a more definite and less creditable cause. According to Plutarch, they
had both been strenuous rivals for the position of City Praetor, Brutus
recommended by his “vertue and good name,” Cassius by his “many noble
exploytes” against the Parthians. Caesar, saying “Cassius cause is
juster, but Brutus must be first preferred,” had given Brutus the chief
dignity and Cassius the second: therefore “they grew straunge together
for the sute they had for the praetorshippe.” But it would not answer
Shakespeare’s purpose to show Brutus as moved by personal ambitions, or
either of them as aspiring for honours that Caesar could grant.
There are few better examples of the way in which Shakespeare
rearranges his material than the employment he makes of Plutarch’s
enumeration of the portents that preceded the assassination. It is
given as immediate preface to the catastrophe of the Ides.
Certainly, destenie may easier be foreseene then avoyded;
considering the straunge and wonderfull signes that were
sayd to be seene before Caesars death. For touching the
fires in the element, and spirites running up and downe in
the night, and also these solitarie birdes to be seene at
noone dayes sittinge in the great market place: are not all
these signes perhappes worth the noting in such a wonderfull
chaunce as happened? But Strabo the Philosopher wryteth,
that divers men were seene going up and downe in fire:
and furthermore, that there was a slave of the souldiers,
that did cast a marvelous burning flame out of his hande,
insomuch as they that saw it, thought he had been burnt,
but when the fire was out, it was found he had no hurt.
Caesar selfe also doing sacrifice unto the Goddes, found
that one of the beastes which was sacrificed had no hart:
and that was a straunge thing in nature, how a beast could
live without a hart. Furthermore, there was a certain
soothsayer that had geven Caesar warning long time affore,
to take heede of the day of the Ides of Marche (which is the
fifteenth of the moneth), for on that day he should be in
great daunger. That day being come, Caesar going into the
Senate house, and speaking merily to the Soothsayer, tolde
him, ‘The Ides of Marche be come’: ‘So be they’, softly
aunswered the Soothsayer, ‘but yet are they not past.’ And
the very day before, Caesar supping with Marcus Lepidus,
sealed certaine letters as he was wont to do at the bord:
so talke falling out amongest them, reasoning what death
was best: he preventing their opinions, cried out alowde,
‘Death unlooked for.’ Then going to bedde the same night as
his manner was, and lying with his wife Calpurnia, all the
windowes and dores of his chamber flying open, the noyse
awooke him, and made him affrayed when he saw such light:
but more when he heard his wife Calpurnia, being fast a
sleepe weepe and sigh, and put forth many fumbling and
lamentable speaches. For she dreamed that Caesar was slaine,
and that she had him in her armes.[158]
[158] _Julius Caesar._
It is interesting to note how Shakespeare takes this passage to
pieces and assigns those of them for which he has a place to their
fitting and effective position. Plutarch’s reflections on destiny and
Caesar’s opinions on death he leaves aside. The first warning of the
soothsayer he refers back to the Lupercalia, and the second he shifts
forward to its natural place. Calpurnia’s outcries in her sleep and her
prophetic dream, the apparition of the ghosts mentioned by her among
the other prodigies, the lack of the heart in the sacrificial beast,
are reserved for the scene of her expostulation with Caesar, and are
dramatically distributed between the various speakers, Caesar, the
servant, Calpurnia herself. Shakespeare relies on the fiery heavens
and the fire-girt shapes, the flaming hand and the boding bird for his
grand effect, and puts them in a setting where they gain unspeakably
in supernatural awe. Of course Shakespeare individualises Plutarch’s
hints and adds new touches. But the main terror is due to something
else. We are made to view these portents in the reflex light of Casca’s
panic. He has just witnessed them, or believes that he has done so, and
now breathless, staring, his naked sword in his hand, the storm raging
around, he gasps out his amazement at Cicero’s composure:
Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
_Cicero._ Why, saw you anything more wonderful?
_Casca._ A common slave—you know him well by sight—
Held up his left hand, which did flame and burn
Like twenty torches join’d, and yet his hand,
Not sensible of fire, remain’d unscorch’d.
Besides,—I ha’ not since put up my sword—
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glared upon me, and went surly by,
Without annoying me: and there were drawn
Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,
Transformed with their fear; who swore they saw
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noon-day upon the market place
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
‘These are their reasons: they are natural’:
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
(I. iii. 3.)
Here the superstitious thrill rises to a paroxysm of dread; but the
effect of dispersing the subsidiary presages through so many scenes is
to steep the whole play in an atmosphere of weird presentiment, till
Caesar passes up to the very doors of the Capitol.
But besides selecting and rearranging the separate details, Shakespeare
establishes an inner connection between them even when in Plutarch they
are quite isolated from each other. This is well exemplified by the
manner in which the biography and the drama treat the circumstance that
the conspirators were not sworn to secrecy. Plutarch says:
The onlie name and great calling of Brutus did bring on the
most of them to geve consent to this conspiracie. Who having
never taken othes together, nor taken or geven any caution
or assurance, nor binding them selves one to an other by
any religious othes, they all kept the matter so secret
to them selves, and could so cunninglie handle it, that
notwithstanding the goddes did reveal it by manifeste signes
and tokens from above, and by predictions of sacrifices, yet
all this would not be believed.
(_Marcus Brutus._)
The drama puts it thus:
_Brutus._ Give me your hands all over, one by one.
_Cassius._ And let us swear our resolution.
_Brutus._ No, not an oath: if not the face of men
The suffrance of our souls, the time’s abuse,
If these be motives weak, break off betimes:
(II. i. 112.)
and so on through the rest of his magnificent speech that breathes the
pure spirit of virtue and conviction. The nobility of Brutus that is
reverenced by all, the conspiracy of Romans that is safe-guarded by
no vows, move Plutarch’s admiration, but he does not associate them.
Shakespeare traces the one to the other and views them as cause and
effect.
Shakespeare thus greatly alters the character of Plutarch’s narrative
by his ceaseless activity in sifting it, ordering it afresh, and
reading into it an internal nexus that was often lacking in his
authority. But this last proceeding implies that he also makes
additions, and these are not only numerous and manifold, but frequently
quite explicit and very far-reaching. It is important to note that
Plutarch has furnished nothing more than stray hints, and often
not even so much, for all the longer passages that have impressed
themselves on the popular imagination. Cassius’ description of the
swimming match and of Caesar’s fever, Brutus’ soliloquy, his speech
on the oath, his oration and that of Mark Antony, even, when regarded
closely, his dispute with Cassius, are all virtually the inventions
of Shakespeare. The only exception is the conversation with Portia,
and even in it, though the climax, as we have seen, closely reproduces
both Plutarch’s matter and North’s expression, the fine introduction is
altogether Shakespearian.
But it is not the purple patches alone of which this is true. The more
carefully one examines the finished fabric, the more clearly one sees
that the dramatist has not merely woven and fashioned and embroidered
it, but has provided most of the stuff.
Sometimes the new matter is a possible or plausible inference from the
premises he found in his author.
Thus Plutarch represents the populace as on the whole favourable to
Caesar, but the tribunes as antagonistic. He also records, concerning
the celebration of Caesar’s victory over Pompey’s sons in Spain:
The triumph he made into Rome for the same did as much
offend the Romanes, and more, then anything he had ever
done before; bicause he had not overcome Captaines that
were straungers, nor barbarous kinges, but had destroyed
the sonnes of the noblest man in Rome, whom fortune had
overthrowen. And bicause he had plucked up his race by the
rootes men did not thinke it meete for him to triumphe so
for the calamaties of his contrie.
(_Julius Caesar._)
This is all, but it is enough to give the foundation for the opening
scene, which otherwise, both in dialogue and declamation, is an
entirely free creation.
Sometimes again Shakespeare has realised the situation so vividly
that he puts in some trait from the occurrences as in spirit he has
witnessed them, something of the kind that may very well have happened,
though there is no trace of it in the records. Thus he well knows
what an unreasonable monster a street mob can be, how cruel in its
gambols, how savage in its fun. So in the account of the poet Cinna’s
end, though the gist of the incident, the mistake in identity, the
disregard of the explanation, are all given in Plutarch, Shakespeare’s
rioters wrest their victim’s innocent avowal of celibacy to a flout at
marriage, and meet his unanswerable defence, “I am Cinna the poet,”
with the equally unanswerable retort, “Tear him for his bad verses.”
(III. iii. 23.)
Some of these new touches do more than lend reality to the scene.
Though not incompatible with Plutarch’s account, they give it a turn
that he might disclaim and certainly does not warrant, but that
belongs to Shakespeare’s conception of the case. Thus after describing
the “holy course” of the Lupercal, and the superstition connected
with it, Plutarch mentions that Caesar sat in state to witness the
sport, and that Antony was one of the runners. There is nothing more;
and Calpurnia is not even named. Shakespeare’s introduction of her
is therefore very curious. Whatever else it means, it shows that
he imagined Caesar as desirous, certainly, of having an heir, and,
inferentially, of founding a dynasty.[159]
[159] Genée, _Shakespeare’s Leben und Werke_.
Occasionally, however, the dramatist’s insertions directly contradict
the text of the _Lives_, if a more striking or more significant effect
is to be attained, and if no essential fact is falsified. Thus Plutarch
tells of Ligarius:
[Brutus] went to see him being sicke in his bedde, and sayed
unto him: “O Ligarius, in what a time art thou sicke!”
Ligarius risinge uppe in his bedde and taking him by the
right hande, sayed unto him: “Brutus,” sayed he, “if thou
hast any great enterprise in hande worthie of thy selfe, I
am whole.”
(_Marcus Brutus._)
Shakespeare, keeping the phrases quoted almost literally, emphasises
the effort that Ligarius makes, emphasises too the magnetic influence
of Brutus, by representing the sick man as coming to his friend’s
house, as well as by amplifying his words:
_Lucius._ Here is a sick man that would speak with you....
_Brutus._ O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius,
To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!
_Ligarius._ I am not sick, if Brutus have in hand
Any exploit worthy the name of honour....
By all the gods that Romans bow before
I here discard my sickness! Soul of Rome!
Brave son, derived from honourable loins!
Thou, like an exorcist, hast conjured up
My mortified spirit. Now bid me run,
And I will strive with things impossible;
Yea, get the better of them....
... With a heart new-fired I follow you,
To do I know not what: but it sufficeth
That Brutus leads me on.
(II. i. 310.)
So too Plutarch describes the collapse of Portia in her suspense as
more complete than does the play, and makes Brutus hear of it just
after the critical moment when the conspirators fear that Lena has
discovered their plot:
Nowe in the meane time, there came one of Brutus men post
hast unto him, and tolde him his wife was a dying.... When
Brutus heard these newes, it grieved him, as is to be
presupposed: yet he left not of the care of his contrie and
common wealth, neither went home to his house for any newes
he heard.
In Shakespeare not only is this very effective dramatic touch omitted,
but Portia sends Brutus an encouraging message. As her weakness
increases upon her, she collects herself for a final effort and manages
to give the command:
Run, Lucius, and commend me to my lord:
_Say, I am merry_: come to me again
And bring me word what he doth say to thee.
(II. iv. 44.)
Shakespeare may perhaps have been unwilling to introduce anything into
the assassination scene that might distract attention from the decisive
business on hand, but the alteration is chiefly due to another cause.
These, the last words we hear Portia utter, were no doubt intended to
bring out her forgetfulness of herself and her thought of Brutus even
in the climax of her physical distress.
This, of course, does not affect our general estimate of Portia; but
Shakespeare has no scruple about creating an entirely new character
for a minor personage, and, in the process, disregarding the hints
that he found and asserting quite the reverse. Thus Plutarch has not
much to say about Casca, so Shakespeare feels free to sketch him after
his own fancy as rude, blunt, uncultured, with so little education
that, when Cicero speaks Greek, it is Greek to him. This is a libel on
his up-bringing. Plutarch in one of the few details he spares to him,
mentions that, when he stabbed Caesar, “they both cried out, Caesar in
Latin, ‘O vile traitor, Casca, what doest thou?’ and Casca in Greek to
his brother: ‘Brother, helpe me.’”
But some of Shakespeare’s interpolations are, probably unawares to
himself, of a vital and radical kind, and affect the conception of the
chief characters and the whole idea of the story. Take, for example,
Brutus’ soliloquy, as he rids himself of his hesitations and scruples.
This, from beginning to end, is the handiwork of Shakespeare:
It must be by his death: and, for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, that’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him?—that:—
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway’d
More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face:
But when he once attains the topmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may;
Then lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
(II. i. 10.)
These words are so unlike, or, rather, so opposite to all that we
should have expected, that Coleridge cannot repress his amazement. He
comments:
This speech is singular:—at least, I do not at present
see into Shakespeare’s motive, his _rationale_, or in
what point of view he meant Brutus’ character to appear.
For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant with our
historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to
the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the
tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman
republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to
a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar
but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be.
(_Lectures and Notes of 1818._)
And this in a way is the crucial statement of Brutus’ case. Here he has
tried to get rid of the assumptions that move himself and the rest,
and seeks to find something that will satisfy his reason. It is thus
a more intimate revelation of his deliberate principles, though not
necessarily of his subconscious instincts or his untested opinions,
than other utterances in which he lets feeling or circumstance have
sway. Of these there are two that do not quite coincide with it. One of
them is not very important, and in any case would not bring him nearer
to the antique conception. In his plea for a pure administration of
affairs, he asks Cassius:
What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes?
(IV. iii. 21.)
But this, one feels, is merely an _argumentum ad hominem_, brought
forward very much in afterthought for a particular purpose. At the
time, neither in Brutus’ speeches to himself or others, nor in the
discussions of the conspirators, is Caesar accused of countenancing
peculation, or is this made a handle against him. And if it were, it
would not be incompatible with acquiescence in a royal government.[160]
[160] On this passage Coleridge has the note: “This seemingly strange
assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is
an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the
duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced
only as fiends from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and
was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte in our days.”
On this interpretation Brutus’ charge would come to nothing more than
this, that Caesar had employed large armies. I believe there is a
more definite reference to one passage or possibly two in the _Marcus
Antonius_.
“(_a_) Caesar’s friends that governed under him, were
cause why they hated Caesar’s government ... by reason
of the great insolencies and outragious parts that were
committed: amongst whom Antonius, that was of greatest
power, and that also committed greatest faultes, deserved
most blame. But Caesar, notwithstanding, when he returned
from the warres of Spayne, made no reckoning of the
complaints that were put up against him: but contrarily,
bicause he found him a hardy man, and a valliant Captaine,
he employed him in his chiefest affayres.
“(_b_) Now it greved men much, to see that Caesar
should be out of Italy following of his enemies, to end this
great warre, with such great perill and daunger: and that
others in the meane time abusing his name and authoritie,
should commit such insolent and outragious parts unto their
citizens. This me thinkes was the cause that made the
conspiracie against Caesar increase more and more, and layed
the reynes of the brydle uppon the souldiers neckes, whereby
they durst boldlier commit many extorsions, cruelties, and
robberies.”
Plutarch is speaking of Antony in particular, but surely this is the
sort of thing that was in Shakespeare’s mind.
The other is the exclamation with which he “pieces out” the anonymous
letter that Cassius had left unfinished:
Shall Rome stand under one man’s awe? What, Rome?
(II. i. 52.)
This certainly has somewhat of the republican ring. It breathes the
same spirit as Cassius’ own avowal:
I had as lief not be, as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself;
(I. ii. 95.)
except that Cassius feels Caesar’s predominance to be a personal
affront, while Brutus characteristically extends his view to the whole
community. But here Brutus is speaking under the excitement of Cassius’
“instigation,” and making himself Cassius’ mouthpiece to fill in the
blanks. Assuredly the declaration is not on that account the less
personal to himself; nevertheless in it Brutus, no longer attempting to
square his action with his theory, falls back on the blind impulses of
blood that he shares with the other aristocrats of Rome. And in this,
the most republican and the only republican sentiment that falls from
his lips, which for the rest is so little republican that it might
be echoed by the loyal subject of a limited monarchy, it is only the
negative aspect of the matter and the public _amour propre_ that are
considered. Of the positive essence of republicanism, of enthusiasm for
a state in which all the lawful authority is derived from the whole
body of fully qualified citizens, there is, despite Brutus’ talk of
freemen and slaves and Caesar’s ambition, no trace whatever in any of
his utterances from first to last. It has been said that Plutarch’s
Brutus could live nowhere but in a self-governing commonwealth;
Shakespeare’s Brutus would be quite at home under a constitutional king
and need not have found life intolerable even in Tudor England. This
indeed is an exaggeration. True, in his soliloquy he bases his whole
case on the deterioration of Caesar’s nature that kingship might bring
about; and if it were proved, as it easily could be from instances like
that of Numa, which Shakespeare and therefore Shakespeare’s Brutus
knew, that no such result need follow, his entire sorites would seem
to snap. But though the form of his reflection is hypothetical and
the hypothesis will not hold, the substance is categorical enough.
Brutus has such inbred detestation of the royal power that practically
he assumes it must beyond question be mischievous in its moral
effects. This, however, is no reasoned conviction, though it is the
starting point for what he means to be a dispassionate argument, but
a dogma of traditional passion. And even were it granted it would not
make Brutus a true representative of classic republicanism. Shakespeare
has so little comprehension of the antique point of view that to him a
thoughtful and public-spirited citizen can find a rational apology for
violent measures only by looking at Caesar’s future and not at all by
looking at Caesar’s past. This Elizabethan Brutus sees nothing to blame
in Caesar’s previous career. He has not known “when his affections
(_i.e._ passions) sway’d more than his reason,” and implies that he has
not hitherto disjoined “remorse (_i.e._ scrupulousness) from power.”
Yet as Coleridge pertinently asks, was there nothing “in Caesar’s past
conduct as a man” to call for Brutus’ censure? “Had he not passed
the Rubicon,” and the like? But such incidents receive no attention.
Perhaps Shakespeare thought no more of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon
to suppress Pompey and put an end to the disorders of Rome, than of
Richmond’s crossing the Channel to suppress Richard III., and put end
to the Wars of the Roses. At any rate he makes no mention of these and
similar grounds of offence, though all or most of them were set down in
his authority.[161]
[161] Coleridge’s exact words, in continuation of the passage already
discussed may be quoted. “How too could Brutus say that he found no
personal cause, none in Caesar’s past conduct as a man? Had he not
passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not
placed his Gauls in the Senate?—Shakespeare, it may be said, has not
brought these things forward.—True;—and this is just the cause of my
perplexity. What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”
The verbal answer to this is of course that _personal cause_ refers
not to Caesar but to Brutus, and means that Brutus has no private
grievance; but the substance of Coleridge’s objection remains
unaffected, for Brutus proceeds to take Caesar’s character up to the
present time under his protection.
It may be noted, however, that Plutarch says nothing about the Gauls.
If Shakespeare had known of it, it would probably have seemed to him
no worse than the presence of the Bretons, “those overweening rags of
France,” as Richard III. calls them, in the army of the patriotic and
virtuous Richmond.
Shakespeare’s position may be thus described. He read in Plutarch that
Brutus, the virtuous Roman, killed Caesar, the master-spirit of his own
and perhaps of any age, from a disinterested sense of duty. That was
easy to understand, for Shakespeare would know, and if he did not know
it from his own experience his well-conned translation of Montaigne
would teach him, that the best of men are determined in their feeling
of right by the preconceptions of race, class, education and the like.
But he also read that Brutus was a philosophic student who would not
accept or obey the current code without scrutinising it and fitting it
into his theory. Of the political theory, however, which such an one
would have, Shakespeare had no knowledge or appreciation. So whenever
Brutus tries to harmonise his purpose with his idealist doctrine, he
has to be furnished with new reasons instead of the old and obvious
ones. And these are neither very clear nor very antique. They make one
inclined to quote concerning him the words of Caesar spoken to Cicero
in regard to the historical Brutus:
I knowe not what this young man woulde, but what he woulde
he willeth it vehemently.
(_Marcus Brutus._)
For what is it that he would? The one argument with which he can excuse
to his own heart the projected murder, is that the aspirant to royal
power, though hitherto irreproachable, may or must become corrupted and
misuse his high position. This is as different from the attitude of the
ancient Roman as it well could be. It would never have occurred to the
genuine republican of olden time that any justification was needed for
despatching a man who sought to usurp the sovereign place; and if it
had, this is certainly the last justification that would have entered
his head.
But the introspection, the self-examination, the craving for an inward
moral sanction that will satisfy the conscience, and the choice of the
particular sanction that does so, are as typical of the modern as they
are alien to the classical mind. It is clear that an addition of this
kind is not merely mechanical or superficial. It affects the elements
already given, and produces, as it were, a new chemical combination.
And this particular instance shows how Shakespeare transforms the
whole story. He reanimates Brutus by infusing into his veins a strain
of present feeling that in some ways transmutes his character; and,
transmuting the character in which the chief interest centres, he
cannot leave the other _data_ as they were. He can resuscitate the past
in its persons, its conflicts, its palpitating vitality just because
he endows it with his own life. It was an ancient belief that the
shades of the departed were inarticulate or dumb till they had lapped
a libation of warm blood; then they would speak forth their secrets.
In like manner it is the life-blood of Shakespeare’s own passion and
thought that throbs in the pulses of these unsubstantial dead and gives
them human utterance once more. This, however, has two aspects. It is
the dead who speak; but they speak through the life that Shakespeare
has lent them. The past is resuscitated; but it is a resuscitation,
not the literal existence it had before. Nor in any other way can the
phantoms of history win bodily shape and perceptible motion for the
world of breathing men.
This may be illustrated by comparing Shakespeare’s _Julius Caesar_
with the _Julius Caesar_ of Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl
of Stirling, which seems to have been written a few years later
than its more illustrious namesake. Alexander was an able man and a
considerable poet, from whom Shakespeare himself did not disdain to
borrow hints for Prospero’s famous reflections on the transitoriness
of things. He used virtually the same sources as Shakespeare, like
him making Plutarch his chief authority, and to supplement Plutarch,
betaking himself, as Shakespeare may also have done, to the tradition
set in France by Muretus, Grévin, and Garnier. So they build on much
the same sites and with much the same timber. But their methods are
as different as can well be imagined. Alexander is by far the more
scrupulous in his reproduction of the old-world record. He adopts the
Senecan type of tragedy, exaggerating its indifference to movement and
fondness for lengthy harangues; and this enables him to preserve much
of the narrative in its original form without thorough reduction to the
category of action. This also in large measure exempts him from the
need of reorganising his material: practically a single situation is
given, and whatever else of the story is required, has to be conveyed
in the words of the persons, who can repeat things just as they have
been reported. And proceeding in this way Alexander can include as much
as he pleases of Plutarch’s abundance, a privilege of which he avails
himself to the utmost. Few are the details that he must absolutely
reject, for they can always be put in somebody’s mouth; he is slow to
tamper with Plutarch’s location of them; and he never connects them
more closely than Plutarch has authorised. He does not extract from
his document inferences that have not already been drawn, nor falsify
it with picturesque touches that have not been already supplied, and
he would not dream of contradicting it in small things or great. Even
Brutus’ republicanism is sacred to the author of this “Monarchic
Tragedy,” though he was to be Secretary of State to Charles I. and
noted for his advocacy of Divine Right. He has a convenient theory to
justify Brutus as much as is necessary from his point of view. He makes
him explain:
If Caesar had been born or chused our prince
Then those, who durst attempt to take his life,
The world of treason justly might convince.
Let still the states, which flourish for the time,
By subjects be inviolable thought:
And those (no doubt) commit a monstrous crime,
Who lawfull soveraignty prophane in ought:
And we must think (though now thus brought to bow)
The senate, king; a subject Caesar is:
The soveraignty whom violating now
The world must damne, as having done amisse.
Brutus’ motives, which Shakespeare sophisticates, can thus be left
him. But does this bit of reasoning, which reads like a passage from
the _Leviathan_, and explains why King James called Alexander “My
philosophical poet,” really come nearer the historic truth than the
heart-searching of Shakespeare’s Brutus? And does Alexander, taking
Brutus’ convictions at second hand and manufacturing an apology for
them, do much more to revive the real Brutus, than Shakespeare, whose
fervid imagination drives him to realise Brutus’ inmost heart, and who
just for that reason
seeks into him
For that which is not in him?
Here and generally Alexander gives the exacter, if not the more
faithful transcript, but the main truth, the truth of life, escapes
him; and therefore, too, despite all his painstaking fidelity, he is
apt to miss even the vital touches that Plutarch gives. We have seen
with what reverent accuracy Shakespeare reproduces the conversation
between Brutus and Portia. In a certain way Alexander is more accurate
still. Portia pleads:
I was not (Brutus) match’d with thee to be
A partner onely of thy boord and bed;
Each servile whore in those might equall me,
Who but for pleasure or for wealth did wed.
No, Portia spoused thee minding to remaine
Thy fortunes partner, whether good or ill: ...
If thus thou seek thy sorrows to conceale
Through a distrust, or a mistrust of me,
Then to the world what way can I reveale,
How great a matter I would do for thee?
And though our sexe too talkative be deem’d,
As those whose tongues import our greatest pow’rs,
For secrets still bad treasurers esteem’d,
Of others greedy, prodigall of ours:
“Good education may reforme defects,”
And this may leade me to a vertuous life,
(Whil’st such rare patterns generous worth respects)
I Cato’s daughter am, and Brutus wife.
Yet would I not repose my trust in ought,
Still thinking that thy crosse was great to beare,
Till I my courage to a tryall brought,
Which suffering for thy cause can nothing feare:
For first to try how that I could comport
With sterne afflictions sprit-enfeebling blows,
Ere I would seek to vex thee in this sort,
(To whom my soule a dutious reverence owes);
Loe, here a wound which makes me not to smart,
No, I rejoyce that thus my strength is knowne;
Since thy distresse strikes deeper in my heart,
Thy griefe (lifes joy!) makes me neglect mine owne.
And Brutus answers:
Thou must (deare love!) that which thou sought’st, receive;
Thy heart so high a saile in stormes still beares,
That thy great courage does deserve to have
Our enterprise entrusted to thine eares.
Here, with the rhetorical amplification which was the chief and almost
sole liberty that Alexander allowed himself, Plutarch’s train of
thought is more closely followed than by Shakespeare himself. King
James’s “philosophical poet” does not even suppress the tribute to
education, but rather calls attention to the edifying “sentence” by
the expedient less common west of the Channel than among his French
masters, of placing it within inverted commas. But, besides lowering
the temperature of the whole, he characteristically omits the most
important passage, at least in so far as Brutus is concerned, his
prayer that “he might be founde a husband, worthie of so noble a wife
as Porcia.”
Suppose that a conscientious draughtsman and a painter of genius were
moved to reproduce the impression that a group of antique statuary had
made on them, using the level surface which alone is at their disposal.
The one might choose his station, and set down with all possible
precision in his black and white as much as was given him to see. The
other taking into account the different conditions of the pictorial and
the plastic art, might visualise what seemed to him the inmost meaning
to his own mind in his own way, and represent it, the same yet not the
same, in all the glory of colour. The former would deliver a version
more useful to the historian of sculpture were the original to be lost,
but one in which we should miss many beauties of detail, and from
which the indwelling spirit would have fled. The latter would not give
much help to an antiquarian knowledge of the archetype, but he might
transmit its inspiration, and rouse kindred feelings in an even greater
degree just because they were mingled with others that came from his
own heart.
The analogy is, of course, an imperfect one, for the problem of
rendering the solid on the flat is not on all fours with the problem
of converting Plutarch’s _Lives_ to modern plays. But it applies to
this extent, that in both cases the task is to interpret a subject,
that has received one kind of treatment, by a treatment that is quite
dissimilar. And the difference between William Alexander and William
Shakespeare is very much the difference between the conscientious
draughtsman and the inspired artist.
CHAPTER III
THE TITULAR HERO OF THE PLAY
The modification of Brutus’ character typifies and involves the
modification of the whole story, because the tragic interest is
focussed in his career. This must be remembered, if we would avoid
misconception. It has sometimes been said that the play suffers from
lack of unity, that the titular hero is disposed of when it is half
through, and that thereafter attention is diverted to the murderer.
But this criticism is beside the point. Really, from beginning to
end, Brutus is the prominent figure, and if the prominent figure
should supply the name, then, as Voltaire pointed out, the drama
ought properly to be called _Marcus Brutus_. If we look at it in this
way, there is no lack of unity, though possibly there is a misnomer.
Throughout the piece it is the personality of Brutus that attracts our
chief sympathy and concern. If he is dismissed to a subordinate place,
the result is as absurd as it would be were Hamlet thus treated in the
companion tragedy; while, his position, once recognised, everything
becomes coherent and clear.
But when this is the case, why should Shakespeare not say so? Why,
above all, should he use a false designation to mix the trail?
It has been answered that he was wholly indifferent to labels and
nomenclature, that he gives his plays somewhat irrelevant titles, such
as _Twelfth Night_, or lets people christen them at their fancy, _What
You Will_, or _As You Like It_. Just in the same way, as a shrewd
theatrical manager with his eye on the audience, he may have turned to
account the prevalent curiosity about Caesar, without inquiring too
curiously whether placard and performance tallied in every respect.
And doubtless such considerations were not unknown to him. Shakespeare,
as is shown by the topical allusions in which his works abound, by
no means disdained the maxim that the playwright must appeal to the
current interests of his public, even to those that are adventitious
and superficial. At the same time, it is only his comedies, in which
his whole method is less severe, that have insignificant or arbitrary
titles. There is no instance of a tragedy being misnamed. On the
contrary, the chief person or persons are always indicated, and in this
way Shakespeare has protested in advance against the mistake of viewing
_King Lear_ as a whole with reference to Cordelia, or _Macbeth_ as a
whole with reference to Lady Macbeth.
But in the second place, _Julius Caesar_, both in its chronological
position and in its essential character, comes as near to the
Histories as to the Tragedies; and the Histories are all named after
the sovereign in whose reign most of the events occurred. He may not
have the chief role, which, for example, belongs in _King John_ to
the Bastard, and in _Henry IV._ to Prince Hal. He may even drop out
in the course of the story, which, for example, in the latter play is
continued for an entire act after the King’s death: but he serves,
as it were, for a landmark, to date and localise the action. It is
not improbable that this was the light in which Shakespeare regarded
Caesar. In those days people did not make fine distinctions. He was
generally viewed as first in the regular succession of Emperors, and in
so far could be considered to have held the same sort of position in
Rome, as any of those who had sat on the throne of England.
But this is not all. Though it is manifest that Brutus is the principal
character, the _protagonist_, the chief representative of the action,
the central figure among the living agents, the interest of his career
lies in its mistaken and futile opposition to Julius, to the idea of
Caesarism, to what again and again, in the course of the play, is
called “the spirit of Caesar.” The expression is often repeated. Brutus
declares the purpose of the conspirators:
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar.
(II. i. 167.)
Antony, above the corpse, sees in prophetic anticipation,
Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge.
(III. i. 273.)
The ghost of Caesar proclaims what he is,
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.
(IV. iii. 282.)
And at the close Brutus apostrophises his dead victim:
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
(_V._ iii. 95.)
It is really Caesar’s presence, his genius, his conception that
dominates the story. Brutus is first among the struggling mortals
who obey even while resisting their fate, but the fate itself is the
imperialist inspiration which makes up the significance of Caesar, and
the play therefore is fitly named after him.[162]
[162] See Professor Dowden, _Shakespeare’s Mind and Art_.
This is brought home to us in a variety of ways.
In the first place, Shakespeare makes it abundantly clear that the
rule of the single master-mind is the only admissible solution for the
problem of the time.
Caesar, with his transcendent gifts, was chosen by Providence to
preserve the Roman State from shipwreck, and steer it on its triumphant
course; and even if the helmsman perished, the course was set.
Shakespeare was guided to this view by Plutarch. The celebrant of the
life of ancient Greece was indeed very far from idealising the man who
consolidated the supremacy of Rome. He records impartially and with
appreciation, some of his noble traits, and without extenuation many
that were not admirable. But he “honours his memory” very much “on this
side idolatry,” reserves his chief enthusiasm for Brutus, and never
seems to take a full view of Caesar’s unique greatness in the mass.
None the less, he is now and again forced to admit that he was the man,
and his were the methods that the emergency required. Thus talking of
the bribery and violence that then prevailed in Rome he remarks:
Men of deepe judgement and discression seeing such furie
and madnes of the people, thought them selves happy if
the common wealth were no worse troubled, then with the
absolut state of a Monarchy and soveraine Lord to governe
them. Furthermore, there were many that were not affraid to
speake it openly, that there was no other help to remedy the
troubles of the common wealth, but by the authority of one
man only that should commaund them all.[163]
Again, commenting on the accident by which Brutus did not learn of the
victory that might have averted his final defeat, he has the weighty
reflection;
Howbeit the state of Rome (in my opinion) being now brought
to that passe, that it could no more abide to be governed
by many Lordes, but required one only absolute Governor:
God, to prevent Brutus that it shoulde not come to his
government, kept this victorie from his knowledge.[164]
[163] _Julius Caesar._
[164] _Marcus Brutus._
And in one of those comparisons that Montaigne loved, he is more
emphatic still:
Howbeit Caesars power and government when it came to be
established, did in deede much hurte at his first entrie
and beginning unto those that did resist him: but
afterwardes unto them that being overcome had received his
government, it seemed he had rather the name and opinion[165]
onely of a tyranne, then otherwise that he was so in deed.
For there never followed any tyrannicall nor cruell act, but
contrarilie, it seemed that he was a mercifull Phisition,
whom God had ordeyned of speciall grace to be Governor of
the Empire of Rome, and to set all thinges againe at quiet
stay, the which required the counsell and authoritie of an
absolute Prince.... But the fame of Julius Caesar did set up
his friends againe after his death, and was of such force,
that it raised a young stripling, Octavius Caesar, (that had
no meanes nor power of him selfe) to be one of the greatest
men of Rome.[166]
[165] Reputation.
[166] _The comparison of Dion with Brutus._
On these isolated hints Shakespeare seizes. He amplifies them and works
them out in his conception of the situation.
The vast territory that is subject to Rome, of which we have glimpses
as it stretches north and west to Gaul and Spain, of which we visit the
Macedonian and Asiatic provinces in the east and south, has need of
wise and steady government. But is that to be got from the Romans? The
plebeians are represented as fickle and violent, greedy and irrational,
the dupes of dead tradition, parasites in the living present. They have
shouted for Pompey, they strew flowers for Caesar: they can be tickled
with talk of their ancient liberties, they can be cajoled by the tricks
of shifty rhetoric: they cheer when their favourite refuses the crown,
they wish to crown his “better parts” in his murderer: they will not
hear a word against Brutus, they rush off to fire his house: they tear
a man to pieces on account of his name, and hold Caesar beyond parallel
on account of his bequest.
Nor are things better with the aristocrats. Cassius, the moving
spirit of the opposition, is, at his noblest, actuated by jealousy
of greatness. And he is not always at his noblest. He confesses that
had he been in Caesar’s good graces, he would have been on Caesar’s
side. This strain of servility is more apparent in the flatteries and
officiousness of Decius and Casca. And what is its motive? Cassius
seeks to win Antony by promising him an equal voice in disposing of the
dignities: and he presently uses his position for extortion and the
patronage of corruption. Envy, ambition, cupidity are the governing
principles of the governing classes: and their enthusiasm for freedom
means nothing more than an enthusiasm for prestige and influence,
for the privilege of parcelling out the authority and dividing the
spoils. What case have these against the Man of Destiny, whose genius
has given compass, peace, and security to the Roman world? But their
plea of liberty misleads the unpractical student, the worshipper of
dreams, memories, and ideals, behind whose virtue they shelter their
selfish aims, and whose countenance alone can make their conspiracy
respectable. With his help they achieve a momentary triumph. But of
course it leads not to a renovation of the republic, but to domestic
confusion and to a multiplication of oppressors. So far as the populace
is concerned, the removal of the master means submission to the
unprincipled orator, who, with his fellow triumvirs, cheats it of its
inheritance and sets about a wholesale proscription. So far as the
Empire is concerned, the civil war is renewed, and the provincials are
pillaged by the champions of freedom. Brutus sees too late that it
is vain to strive against the “spirit of Caesar,” which is bound to
prevail, and which, though it may be impeded, cannot be defeated. He is
ruined with the cause he espoused, and confesses fairly vanquished:
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.[167]
(V. iii. 94.)
[167] All this is so obvious that it can hardly be overlooked, yet
overlooked it has been, though it has frequently been pointed out. In
his not very sympathetic discussion of this play, Dr. Brandes makes the
truly astounding statement: “As Shakespeare conceives the situation,
the Republic which Caesar overthrew, might have continued to exist but
for him, and it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.... ‘If
we try to conceive to ourselves’ wrote Mommsen in 1857, ’a London with
the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople,
with the non-industrial character of modern Rome, and agitated by
politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an
approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero
and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.’ Compare with this
picture Shakespeare’s conception of an ambitious Caesar striving to
introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican state” (Brandes,
_William Shakespeare_). Of course Shakespeare had not read Mommsen
or any of Mommsen’s documents, save Plutarch; and if he had, neither
he nor any one else of his age, was capable of Mommsen’s critical
and constructive research. But considering the _data_ that Plutarch
delivered him he shows marvellous power in getting to the gist of the
matter. I think we rise with a clearer idea, after reading him than
after reading Plutarch, of the hopelessness and vanity of opposing the
changes that Caesar represented, of the effeteness of the republican
system (“Let him be Caesar!” cries the citizen in his strange
recognition of Brutus’ achievement), of the chaos that imperialism
alone could reduce to rule. If Shakespeare’s picture of Rome is that
of “a well-ordered republican state,” one wonders what the picture of
a republic in decay would be. And where does Dr. Brandes find that
Shakespeare viewed Caesar’s enterprise as a criminal act?
Again, though it may seem paradoxical to say so, the all-compelling
power of Caesar’s ideal is indicated in the presentation of his own
character. This at first sight is something of a riddle and a surprise.
Shakespeare, as is shown by his many tributes elsewhere, had ample
perception and appreciation of Caesar’s greatness. Yet in the play
called after him it almost seems as though he had a sharper eye for any
of the weaknesses and foibles that Plutarch records of him, and even
went about to exaggerate them and add to them.
Thus great stress is laid on his physical disabilities. When the crown
is offered him, he swoons, as Casca narrates, for, as Brutus remarks,
he is subject to the falling sickness. There is authority for these
statements. But Cassius describes how his strength failed him in the
Tiber and how he shook with fever in Spain, and both these touches are
added by Shakespeare. Nor is it the malcontents alone who signalise
such defects. Caesar himself admits that he is deaf, though of his
deafness history knows nothing.
And not only does Shakespeare accentuate these bodily infirmities; he
introduces them in such a way and in such a connection that they convey
an ironical suggestion and almost make the Emperor ridiculous. At the
great moment when he is putting by the coronet tendered him by Antony
that he may take with the more security and dignity the crown which
the Senate will vote him, precisely then he falls down in a fit. This
indeed is quasi-historical, but the other and more striking instances
are forged in Shakespeare’s smithy. It is just after his overweening
challenge to the swimming-match that he must cry for aid: “Help me,
Cassius, or I sink” (I. ii. 3). In his fever, as Cassius maliciously
notes,
That tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
Alas, it cried ‘Give me some drink, Titinius,’
As a sick girl.
(I. ii. 125.)
A pretty saying to chronicle. He says superbly to Mark Antony, “Always
I am Caesar”; and in the very next line follows the anticlimax:
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf.
(I. ii. 213.)
But if his physical defects, which after all have little to do with the
real greatness of the man save in the eyes of spiteful detractors, are
thus brought into satirical relief, much more is this the case with his
mental and moral failings, which of course concern the heart of his
character.
Already on his first appearance, we see this lord of the world the
credulous believer in magic rites. At the Lupercal he enjoins Calpurnia
to “stand directly in Antonius’ way” and Antony to touch her in
his “holy chase” (I. ii. 3 and 8), and he impresses on Antony the
observance of all the ritual: “Leave no ceremony out” (I. ii. 11). It
was not ever thus. The time has been when he held these things at their
true value, and it is only recently, as watchful eyes take note, that
his attitude has changed.
He is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams and ceremonies.
(II. i. 195.)
And this is no mere invention of the enemy. He does have recourse to
sacrifice, he does inquire of the priests “their opinions of success”
(II. ii. 5); though afterwards, on the news of the portent, he tries to
put his own interpretation on it:
The gods do this in shame of cowardice:
Caesar should be a beast without a heart,
If he should stay at home to-day for fear.
(II. ii. 41.)
He is really impressed by his wife’s cries in her sleep, as appears
from his words to himself, when he has not to keep up appearances
before others, but enters, perturbed, in his nightgown, and seems urged
by his anxiety to consult the oracles. He affects to dismiss the signs
and omens:
These predictions
Are to the world in general as to Caesar;
(II. ii. 28.)
But it is clear that he attaches importance to them, for, when Decius
gives Calpurnia’s dream an auspicious interpretation, he accepts it,
and once again changing his mind, presently resolves to set out:
How foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia!
I am ashamed I did yield to them.
Give me my robe, for I will go.
(II. ii. 105.)
Thus we see a touch of self-deception as well as of superstition in
Caesar, and this self-deception reappears in other more important
matters. He affects an absolute fearlessness:
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear.
(II. ii. 33.)
His courage, of course, is beyond question; but is there not a hint of
the theatrical in this overstrained amazement, in this statement that
fear is the most unaccountable thing in all his experience? One recalls
the story of the young soldier who said that he knew not what it was to
be afraid, and received his commander’s answer: “Then you have never
snuffed a candle with your fingers.” That was the reproof of bravado
by bravery in the mouth of a man so fearless that he could afford
to acknowledge his acquaintance with fear. And surely Caesar could
have afforded to do so too. We see and know that he is the bravest of
the brave, but if anything could make us suspicious, it would be his
constant harping on his flawless valour. So, too, he says of Cassius:
I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius ...
I rather tell thee what is to be fear’d
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
(I. ii. 198, 211.)
Why should he labour the point? If he has not fears, he has at least
misgivings in regard to Cassius, that come very much to the same thing.
His anxiety is obvious, as he calls Antony to his side to catechise him
on his opinions of the danger.
In the same way he prides himself on his inaccessibility to adulation
and blandishments.
These couchings and these lowly courtesies
Might fire the blood of ordinary men,
And turn pre-ordinance and first decree
Into the law of children. Be not fond
To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood,
That will be thaw’d from the true quality
With that which melteth fools; I mean, sweet words,
Low crooked court’sies and base spaniel fawning.
(III. i. 36.)
We may believe that he does indeed stand secure against the grosser
kinds of parasites and their more obvious devices; but that does not
mean that he cannot be hood-winked by meaner men who know how to play
on his self-love. Decius says:
I can o’ersway him: for he loves to hear
That unicorns may be betray’d with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils, and men with flatterers;
But when I tell him he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work.
(II. i. 203.)
And Decius makes his words good.
In like manner he fancies that he possesses an insight that reads
men’s souls at a glance. When he hears the cry: “Beware the Ides of
March,” he gives the command, “Set him before me; let me see his
face.” A moment’s inspection is enough: “He is a dreamer: let us leave
him: pass” (I. ii. 24). Yet he fails to read the treachery of the
conspirators, though they are daily about him, consults with Decius
whom he “loves,” and bids Trebonius be near him.
And then he elects to pose as no less immovable in resolution than
infallible in judgment. When we have been witnesses of all his
vacillation and shilly-shally about attending the senate meeting—now he
would, now he would not, and again he would—it is hard to suppress the
jeer at the high-sounding words:
I could be well moved, if I were as you:
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber’d sparks,
They are all fire, and every one doth shine,
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world: ’tis furnish’d well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion: and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this.
(III. i. 58.)
Now, all these things are wholly or mainly the fabrications of
Shakespeare. In Plutarch Caesar does not direct Calpurnia to put
herself in Antony’s way, nor is there any indication that he attached
importance to the rite. It is in the wife and not in the husband that
Plutarch notes an unexpected strain of credulity, remarking with
reference to her dream: “Capurnia untill that time was never geven
to any feare or supersticion.”[168] Plutarch cites noble sayings
of Caesar’s in regard to fear, for instance that “it was better to
dye once, than alwayes to be affrayed of death:”[169] but he never
attributes to him any pretence of immunity from human frailty, and
makes him explicitly avow the feeling in the very passage where in
Shakespeare he disclaims it. “‘As for those fatte men, with smooth
comed heades,’ quoth he, ‘I never reckon of them: but these pale
visaged and carian leane people, I feare them most.’” The dismissal of
the soothsayer after a contemptuous glance is unwarranted by Plutarch.
There is no authority for his defencelessness among flatterers, or
for his illusion that he is superior to their arts. Yielding in quite
a natural way and without any hesitation to the solicitations of
Calpurnia and the reports of the bad omens, Caesar in Plutarch resolves
to stay at home, but afterwards is induced to change his mind by
Decius’ very plausible arguments. There is no hint of unsteadiness in
his conduct, as there described; nor in the final scene is there any of
the ostentation but only the reality of firmness in his rejection of
Metellus Cimber’s petition.
[168] _Julius Caesar._
[169] _Ibid._
Considering all this it is not difficult to understand the indignation
of the critics who complain that Shakespeare has here given a libel
rather than a portrait of Caesar, and has substituted impertinent
cavil for sympathetic interpretation. And some of Shakespeare’s
apologists have accepted this statement of the case, but have sought
to defend the supposed travesty on the ground that it is prescribed
by the subject and the treatment. Thus Dr. Hudson suggests[170] that
“the policy of the drama may have been to represent Caesar, not as
he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to
make us see him as they saw him; in order that they might have fair
and equal justice at our hands.” With a slight variation this is also
the opinion of Gervinus:[171] “The poet, if he intended to make the
attempt of the conspirators his main theme, could not have ventured to
create too great an interest in Caesar: it was necessary to keep him
in the background, and to present that view of him which gave reason
for the conspiracy.” And alleging, what would be hard to prove, that
in Plutarch, Caesar’s character “altered much for the worse, shortly
before his death,” he continues, in reference to his arrogance: “It is
intended with few words to show him at that point when his behaviour
would excite those free spirits against him.” But this explanation will
hardly bear scrutiny. In the first place: if Shakespeare’s object had
been to provide a relative justification for the assassins, he could
have done so much more naturally and effectively by adhering to the
_data_ of the _Life_. Among them he could have found graver causes of
resentment against Caesar than any of those he invents, which at the
worst are peccadillos and affectations rather than real delinquencies.
And Plutarch does not slur them over: on the contrary the shadows in
his picture are strongly marked, and he lays a long list of offences
to Caesar’s score; culminating in what he calls the “shamefullest
part” that he played, to wit, his support of Clodius. Here was matter
enough for the dramatic _Advocatus Diaboli_. It would have been as
easy to weave some of these damaging stories into the reminiscences
of Cassius, as to concoct harmless fictions about Caesar’s having
a temperature and being thirsty, or his failing to swim a river in
flood. All these bygone scandals, whether domestic or political, would
have immensely strengthened the conspirators’ case, especially with a
precisian like Brutus. But Shakespeare is silent concerning them, and
Brutus, as we have seen, gives Caesar in regard to his antecedents a
clean bill of health. Of course almost all Caesar’s previous history
is taken for granted and left to the imagination, but the dubious
passages are far more persistently kept out of sight than such as tend
to his glory. And that is the bewildering thing, if Shakespeare’s
delineation was meant to explain the attitude of the faction. It is
surely an odd way of winning our good will for a man’s murderers
to keep back notorious charges against him of cruelty, treason and
unscrupulousness, to certify that he has never abused his powers or let
his passion overmaster his reason, and then to trump up stories that he
gives himself airs and is deaf in one ear. It reminds one of Swift’s
description of Arbuthnot: “Our doctor has every quality and virtue that
can make a man amiable or useful; but, alas, he hath a sort of slouch
in his walk.” Swift, however, was not explaining how people might come
to think that Dr. Arbuthnot should be got rid of.
[170] _Shakespeare, His Life, Art and Characters._
[171] _Shakespeare Commentaries._
Again his tendency to parade by no means alters the fact, that he does
possess in an extraordinary degree the intellectual and moral virtues
that he would exaggerate in his own eyes and the eyes of others.
Independence, resolution, courage, insight must have been his in
amplest store or he would never have been able to
Get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone;
(I. ii. 130.)
and there is evidence of them in the play. He is not moved by the
deferential prayers of the senators: he does persist in the banishment
of Publius Cimber; he has in very truth read the heart and taken the
measure of Cassius:
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease,
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves;
(I. ii. 208.)
he neither shrinks nor complains when the fatal moment comes. The
impression he makes on the unsophisticated mind, on average audiences
and the elder school of critics, is undoubtedly an heroic one. It is
only minute analysis that discovers his defects, and though the defects
are certainly present and should be noted, they are far from sufficing
to make the general effect absurd or contemptible. If they do so, we
give them undue importance. It was not so that Shakespeare meant them
to be taken. For he has invented for his Caesar not only these trivial
blemishes, but several conspicuous exhibitions of nobility, which
Plutarch nowhere suggests; and this should give pause to such as find
in Shakespeare’s portrait merely a wilful or wanton caricature. Thus in
regard to the interposition of Artemidorus, Shakespeare read in North:
He marking howe Caesar received all the supplications that
were offered him, and that he gave them straight to his
men that were about him, pressed neerer to him and sayed:
“Caesar, reade this memoriall to your selfe, and that
quickely, for they be matters of great waight and touch you
neerely.” Caesar tooke it of him, _but coulde never reade
it, though he many times attempted it_, for the multitude
of people that did salute him: but holding it still in his
hande, keeping it to him selfe, went on withall into the
Senate house.[172]
[172] _Julius Caesar._
Compare this with the scene in the play:
_Artemidorus._ Hail, Caesar! read this schedule.
_Decius._ Trebonius doth desire you to o’er-read,
At your best leisure, this his humble suit.
_Artemidorus._ O Caesar, read mine first, for mine’s a suit
That touches Caesar nearer: read it, great Caesar.
_Caesar._ What touches us ourself shall be last served.
(III. i. 3.)
Can one say that Shakespeare has defrauded Caesar of his magnanimity?
Or again observe, in the imaginary conclusion to the unrecorded
remonstrances of Calpurnia, how loftily he refuses to avail himself
of the little white untruths that after all pass current as quite
excusable in society. They are beneath his dignity. He turns to Decius:
_Caesar._ You are come in very happy time,
To bear my greeting to the senators
And tell them that I will not come to-day;
Cannot, is false, and that I dare not falser:
I will not come to-day: tell them so, Decius.
_Calpurnia._ Say he is sick.
_Caesar._ Shall Caesar send a lie?
Have I in conquest stretch’d mine arm so far,
To be afeard to tell graybeards the truth?
Decius, go tell them Caesar will not come ...
The cause is in my will: I will not come.
(II. ii. 60.)
But this last instance is not merely an example of Shakespeare’s homage
to Caesar’s grandeur and his eagerness to enhance it with accessories
of his own contrivance. It gives us a clue to the secret of his
additions both favourable and the reverse, and points the way to his
conception of the man. For observe that this refusal of Caesar’s to
make use of a falsehood is an afterthought. A minute before he has,
also in words that Shakespeare puts in his mouth, fully consented to
the proposal that he should feign illness. He pacifies Calpurnia:
Mark Antony shall say I am not well;
And, for thy humour, I will stay at home.
(II. ii. 55.)
This compliance he makes to his wife, but in presence of Decius Brutus
he recovers himself and adopts the stricter standard. What does this
imply? Does it not mean that in a certain sense he is playing a part
and aping the Immortal to be seen of men?
Let us consider the situation. Caesar, a man with the human frailties,
mental and physical, which are incident to men, is nevertheless endowed
by the Higher Powers with genius that has raised him far above his
fellows. By his genius he has conceived and grasped and done much to
realise the sublime idea of the Roman Empire. By his genius he has
raised himself to the headship of that great Empire which his own
thought was creating. Private ambitions may have urged and doubtful
shifts may have helped his career. He himself feels that within his
drapery of grand exploits there is something that will not bear
scrutiny; and hence his mistrust of Cassius:
He is a great observer and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.
(I. ii. 201.)
But these things are behind him and a luminous veil is drawn over
them, beyond which we discern him only as “the foremost man of all
this world,” “the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times,”
devoted to the cause of Rome, fighting and conquering for her; filling
her public treasuries, her general coffers, with gold; sympathising
with her poor to whom it will be found only after his death that he has
left his wealth. The only hints of unrighteous dealing on his part are
given in Artemidorus’ statement to himself: “Thou hast wronged Caius
Ligarius,” and in Brutus’ statement about him that he was slain “but
for supporting robbers.” But it is never suggested that he himself
was guilty of robbery: and the wrong to Ligarius, who was accused
“for taking parte with Pompey,” and “thanked not Caesar so muche for
his discharge, as he was offended with him for that he was brought
in daunger by his tyrannicall power,”[173] hardly deserves the name,
at least in the common acceptation. Besides Shakespeare has a large
tolerance for the practical statesman when dowered with patriotism,
insight, and resolution; and will not lightly condemn him because
he must use sorry tools, and takes some soil from the world, and is
not unmoved by personal interests. Provided that his more selfish
aims coincide with the good of the whole, and that he has veracity
of intellect to understand, with steadiness of will to satisfy the
needs of the time, Shakespeare will vindicate for him his share of
prosperity, honour, and desert. And this seems to be, in glorified
version, his view of Caesar. The only serious charge he brings against
him in the play, the only charge to which he recurs elsewhere, is
that he was ambitious. But ambition is not wholly of sin, and brings
forth good as well as evil fruit. Indeed when a man’s desire for the
first place merges in the desire for the fullest opportunity, and
that again in the desire for the task he feels he can do best, it is
distinguishable from a virtue, if at all, only by the demand that he
shall be the agent. So is it, to compare celebrities of local and of
universal history, with the ambitious strain in the character of Henry
IV.; it is not incompatible with sterling worth that commands solid
success; it spurs him to worthy deeds that redeem the offences it
exacts; and these offences themselves in some sort “tend the profit
of the state.” No doubt with both men their ambition brings its own
Nemesis, the ceaseless care of the one, the premature death of the
other. But that need not prevent recognition of their high qualities,
or their just claims, or their providential mandate. Such men are
ministers of the Divine Purposes, as Plutarch said in regard to Caesar;
and in setting forth the essential meaning of his career, Shakespeare
can scorn the base degrees by which he did ascend. Partly his less
creditable doings were necessary if he was to mount at all; partly
they may have seemed venial to the subject of the Tudor monarchy; at
worst, when compared with the splendour of his achievement, they were
spots in the sun. In any case they were not worth consideration. With
them Shakespeare is not concerned, but with the plenary inspiration of
Caesar’s life, the inspiration that made him an instrument of Heaven
and that was to bring peace and order to the world. So he passes over
the years of effort and preparation, showing their glories but slightly
and their trespasses not at all. He confines himself to the time when
the summit is reached and the dream is fulfilled. Then to his mind
begins the tragedy and the transfiguration.
[173] Marcus Brutus.
He represents Caesar, like every truly great man, as carried away by
his own conception and made a slave to it. What a thing was this idea
of Empire, this “spirit of Caesar,” of which he as one of earth’s
mortal millions was but the vehicle and the organ! He himself as a
human person cannot withhold homage from himself as the incarnate
_Imperium_. Observe how he speaks of himself habitually in the
third person. Not “I do this,” but “Caesar does this,” “Caesar does
that,” alike when talking to the soothsayer, to his wife and to the
senate.[174] It is almost as though he anticipated its later use as
a common noun equivalent to Emperor: for in all these passages he
describes, as it were, what the Emperor’s action and attitude should
be. And that is the secret of the strange impression that he makes.
It is a case, an exaggerated case, of _noblesse oblige_. The Caesar,
the first of those Caesars who were to receive their apotheosis and
be hailed as _Divi Augusti_, must in literal truth answer Hobbes’
description of the State, and be a mortal god. He must be fearless,
omniscient, infallible, without changeableness or shadow of turning:
does he not represent the empire? He has to live up to an impossible
standard, and so he must affect to be what he is not. He is the
martyr of the idea that has made his fortune. He must not listen to
his instincts or his misgivings; there is no room in the Caesar for
timidity or mistake or fickleness. But, alas! he is only a man, and as
a man he constantly gives the lie to the majesty which the spirit of
Caesar enjoins. We feel all the more strongly, since we are forced to
the comparison, the contrast between the shortcomings of the individual
and the splendour of the ideal role he undertakes. And not only that.
In this assumption of the Divine, involving as it does a touch of
unreality and falsehood, he has lost his old surety of vision and
efficiency in act. He tries to rise above himself, and pays the penalty
by falling below himself, and rushing on the ruin which a little vulgar
shrewdness would have avoided. But his mistake is due to his very
greatness, and his greatness encompasses him to the last, when with no
futile and undignified struggle, he wraps his face in his mantle and
accepts the end. Antony does not exaggerate when he says:
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down;
(III. ii. 194.)
for it was the Empire that fell. But to rise again! For the idea of
Caesarism, rid of the defects and limitations of its originator,
becomes only the more invincible, and the spirit of Caesar begins its
free untrammelled course.
[174] Of course the substitution of the third for the second or first
person is very noticeable all through this play, and may have been due
to an idea on Shakespeare’s part that such a mode of utterance suited
the classical and Roman majesty of the theme. But this rather confirms
than refutes the argument of the text, for the usage is exceptionally
conspicuous in regard to Caesar, in whom the majesty of Rome is summed
up.
The greatness of his genius cannot be fully realised unless the story
is carried on to the final triumph at Philippi, instead of breaking
off immediately after his bodily death. It is in part Shakespeare’s
perception of this and not merely his general superiority of power,
that makes his Caesar so much more impressive than the Caesar of
contemporary dramatists that seem to keep closer to their theme.
Not only then is _Julius Caesar_ the right name for the play, in so
far as his imperialist idea dominates the whole, but a very subtle
interpretation of his character is given when, as this implies, he
is viewed as the exponent of Imperialism. None the less Brutus is
the leading personage, if we grant precedence in accordance with the
interest aroused.
CHAPTER IV
THE EXCELLENCES AND ILLUSIONS OF BRUTUS
Thus Shakespeare has his Act of Oblivion for all that might give an
unfavourable impression of Caesar’s past, and presents him very much as
the incarnate principle of Empire, with the splendours but also with
the disabilities that must attend the individual man who feels himself
the vehicle for such an inspiration.
He somewhat similarly screens from view whatever in the career of
Brutus might prejudice his claims to affection and respect: and
carries much further a process of idealization that Plutarch had
already begun. For to Plutarch Brutus is, so to speak, the model
republican, the paragon of private and civic virtue. The promise to
the soldiers before the second battle at Philippi of two cities to
sack, calls forth the comment: “In all Brutus’ life there is but this
only fault to be found”: and even this, as the marginal note remarks,
is “wisely excused”; on the plea, namely, that after Cassius’ death
the difficulties were very great and the best had to be made of a bad
state of things. But no other misconduct is laid to his charge: his
extortionate usury and his abrupt divorce are passed over in silence.
All his doings receive indulgent construction, and the narrative is
often pointed with a formal _éloge_. In the _Comparison_, where
of course such estimates are expected, attention is drawn to his
rectitude, “only referring his frendschippe and enmitie unto the
consideracion of justice and equitie”; to “the marvelous noble minde of
him, that for fear never fainted nor let falle any part of his corage”;
to his influence over his associates so that “by his choyce of them he
made them good men”; to the honour in which he was held by his “verie
enemies.” But already the keynote is struck in the opening page:
This Marcus Brutus ... whose life we presently wryte, having
framed his manners of life by the rules of vertue and
studie of philosophie, and having employed his wit, which
was gentle and constant, in attempting of great things: me
thinkes he was rightly made and framed unto vertue.
And the story often deviates from its course into little backwaters of
commendation, as when after some censure of Cassius, we are told:
Brutus in contrary manner, for his vertue and valliantnes,
was well-beloved of the people and his owne, esteemed of
noble men, and hated of no man, not so much as of his
enemies: bicause he was a marvelous lowly and gentle person,
noble minded, and would never be in any rage, nor caried
away with pleasure and covetousness, but had ever an upright
mind with him, and would never yeeld to any wronge or
injustice, the which was the chiefest cause of his fame, of
his rising, and of the good will that every man bare him:
for they were all perswaded that his intent was good.
This conception Shakespeare adopts and purifies. He leaves out the
shadow of that one fault that Plutarch wisely excused: he leaves out
too the unpleasant circumstance, which Plutarch apparently thought
needed no excuse, that Brutus was applicant for and recipient of
offices at the disposal of the all-powerful dictator. There must
be nothing to mar the graciousness and dignity of the picture.
Shakespeare wishes to portray a patriotic gentleman of the best Roman
or the best English type, such “a gentleman or noble person” as it
was the aim of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_ “to fashion in vertuous and
gentle discipline,” such a gentleman or noble person as Shakespeare’s
generation had seen in Spenser’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney. So
Plutarch’s summaries are expanded and filled in partly with touches
that his narrative supplies, partly with others that the summaries
themselves suggest.
To the latter class belongs the winning courtesy with which Brutus at
his first appearance excuses himself to Cassius for his preoccupation.
His inward trouble might well have stirred him to irritability and
abruptness; but he only feels that it has made him remiss, and that an
explanation is due from him:
Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which give some soil perhaps to my behaviours:
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved—
Among which number, Cassius, be you one—
Nor construe any further my neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.
(I. ii. 39.)
So with his friends. Shakespeare invents the character of Lucius to
show how attentive and considerate Brutus is as master. He apologises
for having blamed his servant without cause.
Bear with me, good boy, I am much forgetful.
(IV. iii. 255.)
He notes compassionately that the lad is drowsy and overwatched (IV.
iii. 241). At one time he dispenses with his services because he is
sleeping sound (II. i. 229). At another he asks a song from him not as
a right but as a favour (IV. iii. 256). And immediately thereafter the
master waits, as it were, on the nodding slave, and removes his harp
lest it should be broken.
But it is to his wife that he shows the full wealth of his
affectionate nature. He would fain keep from her the anxieties that
are distracting his own mind: but when she claims to share them as the
privilege and pledge of wifehood, with his quick sympathy he sees it at
once:
You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.
(II. i. 288.)
And yielding to her claim as a right, he recognises that it is a claim
that comes from an ideally noble and loving soul, and prays to be made
worthy of her. What insight Shakespeare shows even in his omissions!
This is the prayer of Plutarch’s Brutus too, but he lifts up his hands
and beseeches the gods that he may “bring his enterprise to so goode
passe that he mighte be founde a husband worthie of so noble a wife as
Porcia.” Shakespeare’s Brutus does not view his worthiness as connected
with any material success.
And these words are also an evidence of his humble-mindedness. However
aggressive and overbearing he may appear in certain relations, we
never fail to see his essential modesty. If he interferes, as often
enough he does, to bow others to his will, it is not because he is
self-conceited, but because he is convinced that a particular course
is right; and where right is concerned, a man must come forward to
enforce it. But for himself he has no idea of the high estimation in
which his character and parts are held. When Cassius insinuates that
everyone thinks him the man for the emergency, if he would only realise
it, his reply is a disclaimer: he has never supposed, and shrinks from
imagining, that he is fit for such a role. Yet such is his personality
that, as all of the faction feel, his help is absolutely necessary if
the conspiracy is to have a chance of approval. Cinna exhorts Cassius
to win him to the party, Casca bears witness to his popular credit and
to the value of his sanction in recommending the enterprise, Ligarius
is willing to follow any course if Brutus leads, the cynical Cassius
admits his worth and their great need of him.
For his amiable and attractive virtues are saved from all taint of
weakness by an heroic strain, both high-spirited and public-spirited,
both stoical and chivalrous. Challenged by the solicitations of Cassius
he for once breaks through his reticence, and discloses his inward
temper. We may be sure that even then he speaks less than he feels.
If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honour in one eye, and death i’ the other,
And I will look on both indifferently:
For let the gods so speed me, as I love
The name of honour more than I fear death.
(I. ii. 85.)
This elevated way of thinking has been fostered and confirmed by study,
just as in the case of Sidney, and by study of much the same kind.
Plutarch says:
Now touching the Greecian Philosophers, there was no sect
nor Philosopher of them, but he heard and liked it: but
above all the rest, he loved Platoes sect best, and did not
much give himself to the new or meane Academy as they call
it, but altogether to the old Academy.
He has striven to direct his life by right reason, and has pondered
its problems under the guidance of his chosen masters. His utterance,
which Plutarch quotes, on suicide, shows how he has sought Plato’s
aid for a standard by which to judge others and himself.[175] His
utterance, which Shakespeare invents, on the death of Portia, shows how
he has schooled himself to fortitude, and suggests the influence of a
different school.
We must die, Messala:
With meditating that she must die once,
I have the patience to endure it now.
(IV. iii. 190.)
[175] Compare the argument in the _Phaedo_, with its conclusion: “Then
there may be reason in saying that a man should wait and not take his
own life till God summons him.” Jowett’s _Plato_, Vol. I.
He is essentially a thinker, a reader, a student. Plutarch had told
how on the eve of Pharsalia, when his companions were resting, or
forecasting the morrow, Brutus “fell to his booke and wrote all day
long till night, wryting a breviarie of Polybius.” And in his last
campaign:
His heade ever busily occupied to thinke of his affayres,
... after he had slumbered a little after supper, he spent
all the rest of the night in dispatching of his waightiest
causes, and after he had taken order for them, if he had
any leysure left him, he would read some booke till the
third watch of the night, at what tyme the Captaines, pety
Captaines and Colonells, did use to come unto him.
Shakespeare only visualises this description when he makes him find the
book, that in his troubles and griefs he has been “seeking for so,”
in the pocket of his gown, with the leaf turned down where he stopped
reading.
Does then Shakespeare take over Plutarch’s favourite, merely removing
the single stain and accenting all the attractions, to confront him as
the embodiment of republican virtue, with Caesar, against whom too no
evil is remembered, as the embodiment of imperial majesty? Will he show
the inevitable collision between two political principles each worthily
represented in its respective champion?
This has been said, and there are not wanting arguments to support
it. It is clear that the contrast is not perplexed by side issues.
Brutus has no quarrel with Caesar as a man, and no justification is
given for the conspiracy in what Caesar has done. On the contrary, his
murderer stands sponsor for his character, acknowledges his supreme
greatness, and loves him as a dear friend. But neither on the other
hand is anything introduced that might divert our sympathies from
Brutus by representing him as bound by other than the voluntary ties
of affection and respect. And this is the more remarkable that in
Plutarch there are two particulars full of personal pathos which
Shakespeare cannot have failed to note, and which lend themselves
to dramatic purposes, as other dramatists have proved. One of them,
employed by Voltaire, would darken the assassination to parricide.
In explanation of the indulgence with which Caesar treated Brutus,
Plutarch says:
When he was a young man, he had been acquainted with
Servilia, who was extreamelie in love with him. And bicause
Brutus was borne in that time when their love was hottest,
he perswaded him selfe that he begat him.[176]
And then follows what can be alleged in proof. “What of anguish,” says
Mr. Wyndham, “does this not add to the sweep of the gesture wherewith
the hero covered his face from the pedant’s sword!”
This is a mere casual hint; but the other point finds repeated
mention in the _Life_, and is dwelt upon though explained away in the
_Comparison_. It is the circumstance that Brutus had fought on Pompey’s
side, and that thereafter Caesar had spared him, amnestied his friends,
and loaded him with favours.
The greatest reproache they could make against Brutus was:
that Julius Caesar having saved his life, and pardoned all
the prisoners also taken in battell, as many as he made
request for, taking him for his frende, and honoring him
above all his other frends, Brutus notwithstanding had
imbrued his hands in his blood.[177]
[176] Voltaire decorously invents a secret marriage!
[177] _The comparison of Dion with Brutus._
Plutarch indeed instances this as the grand proof of Brutus’
superiority to personal considerations; but it looks bad, and certainly
introduces a new element into the moral problem. At all events, though
it involves in a specially acute form that conflict of duties which
the drama loves, and was so used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, as
early as Muretus and as late as Alexander, Shakespeare dismisses it.
Attention is concentrated on the single fact that Brutus felt it his
duty to take the life of Caesar, and no obligations of kinship or
gratitude are allowed to complicate the one simple case of conscience.
The victim and the sacrificer are thus set before us, each with an
unstained record, and in only those personal relations that arise from
warm and reverent friendship.
Of their mutual attachment we are left in no doubt, nor are we ever
suffered to forget it. Cassius in talk to himself, bears witness that
Caesar “loves Brutus” (I. ii. 317). Antony, in his speech to the
people, appeals to this as a notorious fact:
Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel:
Judge, O you Gods, how dearly Caesar loved him.
(III. ii. 185.)
But the strongest testimony is Caesar’s own cry, the cry of
astonishment and consternation, whether from the betrayed when the
beloved is the traitor, or from the condemned when the beloved is the
judge:
Et tu Brute! Then fall, Caesar!
(III. i. 77.)
Nor is less stress laid on Brutus’ feeling. He avows it in the Forum,
as before he had assured Antony that “he did love Caesar when he struck
him” (III. i. 182). Cassius tells him:
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better
Than ever thou lovedst Cassius.
(IV. iii. 106.)
But here again the most pathetic evidence is to be found in the
assassination scene itself. When Brutus stoops in the guise of
petitioner, we cannot suppose it is merely with treacherous adroitness:
I kiss thy hand, but not in flattery, Caesar.
(III. i. 52.)
Knowing the man, do we not feel that this is the last tender farewell?
But though all this is true it cannot be maintained, in view of the
soliloquy before the conspirators’ meeting, that Shakespeare makes
Brutus the mouthpiece of republicanism, as he makes Caesar the
mouthpiece of imperialism. The opposition of principles is present, but
it is of principles on a different plane.
Caesar, the spirit of Caesar, is indeed the spirit of Empire,
the spirit of practical greatness in the domains of war, policy,
organisation: of this he is the exponent, to this he is the martyr.
Brutus’ spirit is rather the spirit of loyalty to duty, which finds in
him its exponent and martyr too.
He is lavishly endowed by nature with all the inward qualities that go
to make the virtuous man, and these he has improved and disciplined
by every means in his power. His standard is high, but he is so
strenuous and sincere in living up to it, that he is recognised as no
less pre-eminent in the sphere of ethics, than Caesar in the sphere
of politics. Indeed their different ideals dominate and impel both
men in an almost equal degree. And in each case this leads to a kind
of pose. It appears even in their speech. The balanced precision of
the one tells its own tale as clearly as the overstrained loftiness
of the other, and is as closely matched with the part that he needs
must play. Obviously Brutus does not like to confess that he has been
in the wrong. No more in the σώφρων than in the Emperor is there room
for any weakness. After his dispute with Cassius he assumes rather
unjustifiably that he has on the whole been in the right, that he has
been the provoked party, and that at worst he has shown momentary heat.
But even this slight admission, coming from him, fills Cassius with
surprise.
_Brutus._ When I spoke that, I was ill-temper’d too.
_Cassius._ Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.
(IV. iii. 116.)
The Ideal Wise Man must not yield to anger any more than to other
passions, and it costs Brutus something to own that he has done so. But
he minimises his confession by accepting Cassius’ apology for his rash
humour and promising to overlook any future offences, as though none
could be laid to his own door. We like him none the worse for this, his
cult of perfection is so genuine: but sometimes the cult of perfection
becomes the assumption and obtrusion of it. Read the passage where
Messala tells him of Portia’s death.
_Messala._ Had you letters from your wife, my lord?
_Brutus._ No, Messala.
_Messala._ Nor nothing in your letters writ of her?
_Brutus._ Nothing, Messala.
_Messala._ That, methinks, is strange.
_Brutus._ Why ask you? hear you aught of her in yours?
_Messala._ No. my lord.
_Brutus._ Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true.
_Messala._ Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell:
For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.
_Brutus._ Why, farewell, Portia.
(IV. iii. 181.)
Now Brutus had received earlier tidings. He may profess ignorance to
save himself the pain of explanation, though surely it would have been
simpler to say, “I know all.” But the effect is undoubtedly to bring
his self-control into fuller relief in presence of Messala and Titinius
even than in the presence of Cassius a few minutes before; for then he
was announcing what he already knew, here he would seem in the eyes of
his informants to be encountering the first shock. Too much must not
be made of this, for Cassius who is aware of the circumstances, is no
less impressed than the others, and Cassius would have detected any
hollow ring. But at the least it savours of a willingness to give a
demonstration, so to speak, in Clinical Ethics.
A man like this whose desires are set on building up a virtuous
character, but who is not free from the self-consciousness and
self-confidence of the specialist in virtue, is exposed to peculiar
dangers. His interests and equipment are in the first place for the
inward life, and his chief concern is the well-being of his soul. But
precisely such an one knows that he cannot save his own soul alone. It
is not open to him to disregard the claims of his fellows or the needs
of the world, so he is driven to take in hand matters for which he has
no inclination or aptitude. He may be quite aware of his unfitness for
the work and shrink from investing himself with qualities which he
knows he does not possess. All the same, if the call comes, the logic
of his nature will force him to essay the ungrateful and impossible
task; and he will be apt to imagine a call when there is none. So it
is with Brutus. It is true that many of the best respect do look up
to him and designate him as their leader: it is none the less true
that the unsigned instigations which he takes for the voice of Rome,
are the fabrications of a single schemer. He would not be Brutus
if he suspected or shirked the summons. This votary of duty cannot
acknowledge a merely fugitive and cloistered virtue; this platonic
theorist can easily be hood-winked by the practised politician. So
Brutus, who is so at home in his study with his book, who is so
exemplary in all the private relations of friend, master and husband;
predestined, one would say, for the serene labours of philosophic
thought and the gracious offices of domestic affection, sweeps from his
quiet anchorage to face the storms of political strife, which such as
he are not born to master but which they think they must not avoid.
It is a common case; and many have by their very conscientiousness
been hurried into a false position where they could not escape from
committing blunders and incurring guilt. But generally the blunders
are corrigible and the guilt is venial. It is Brutus’ misfortune, that
his very greatness, his moral ascendancy with the prestige it bestows,
gives him the foremost place, and shifts on his shoulders the main
responsibility for all the folly and crime.
For it is inevitable that he should proceed as he does. Yet it is not
easy for him. There is a conflict in this sensitive and finely tuned
spirit, which, with all his acquired fortitude, bewrays itself in his
bearing to Cassius before any foreign suggestion has entered his mind,
which afterwards makes him unlike himself in his behaviour to his wife,
which drives sleep from his eyes for nights together, which so jars
the rare harmony of his nature, in Antony’s view his chief perfection,
that he seems to suffer from an insurrection within himself. And it
is not hard to understand why this should be. Morality is the guiding
principle of Brutus’ character, but what if it should be at variance
with itself? Now two sets of moral forces are at strife in his heart.
There are the more personal sentiments of love and reverence for Caesar
and of detestation for the crime he contemplates. Even after his
decision he feels the full horror of conspiracy with its “monstrous
visage”; how much more must he feel the horror of assassinating a
friend! On the other side are the more traditional ethical obligations
to state, class, and house. It is almost as fatal to this visionary
to be called Brutus, as it is to the poet to be called Cinna. For a
great historic name spares its bearer a narrow margin of liberty. It
should be impossible for a Bourbon to be other than a legitimist; it
would be impossible for a Romanoff to abandon the Orthodox Church; it
is impossible for a Brutus to accept the merest show of royal power.
The memory of his stock is about him. Now Cassius reminds him of his
namesake who would brook the eternal devil in Rome as easily as a
king; now the admonition is affixed with wax upon Old Brutus’ statue;
now he himself recalls the share his ancestors had in expelling the
Tarquin. If such an one acquiesced in the coronation of Caesar, he must
be the basest renegade, or more detached from his antecedents than it
is given a mortal man to be. And in Brutus there is no hint of such
detachment. The temper that makes him so attentive and loyal to the
pieties of life, is the very temper that vibrates to all that is best
in the past, and clings to the spirit of use-and-wont. Let it again be
repeated that Brutus reveals himself to Shakespeare very much in the
form of a cultured and high-souled English nobleman, the heir of great
traditions and their responsibilities, which he fulfils to the smallest
jot and tittle; the heir also of inevitable preconceptions.
But in Brutus there is more than individual morality and inherited
ethos: there is superimposed on these the conscious philosophic theory
with which his actions must be squared. He has to determine his conduct
not by instinct or usage, but by impersonal, unprejudiced reason. It
is to this tribunal that in the last resort he must appeal; and in
that strange soliloquy of his he puts aside all private preferences
on the one hand, all local considerations on the other, and discusses
his difficulty quite as an abstract problem of right and wrong. He
sees that if the personal rule of Caesar is to be averted, half
measures will not suffice. There are no safeguards or impediments
that can prevent the supremacy of so great a man if he is allowed to
live. This is his starting point: “It must be by his death.” But then
the question arises: is the death of such an one permissible? And
in answering it Brutus seems at the first glance to show admirable
intellectual candour. He acquits Caesar of all blame; the quarrel
“will bear no colour for the thing he is.” What could be more
dispassionate and impartial, what more becoming the philosopher? There
is no sophistication of the facts in the interest of his party. But
immediately there follow the incriminating words:
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities.
(II. i. 30.)
There is a sophistication of the inference. Surely this line of
argument is invented to support a foregone conclusion. Already that
hint to his conscience, “Fashion it thus,” betrays the resolve to make
out a case. And does the mere future contingency justify the present
infliction of death? Brutus is appealing to his philosophy: by his
philosophy he is judged: for just about this date he was condemning the
suicide of Cato because he found it
Cowardly and vile,
_For fear of what might fall_, so to prevent
The time of life.
(V. i. 104.)
But the argument is the same in both cases, and if it does not excuse
self-murder, still less does it excuse the murder of others.
The truth is that Brutus, though he personates the philosopher, is less
of one than he thinks. It is not his philosophy but his character that
gives him strength to bear the grief of Portia’s death; as Cassius says:
I have as much of this in art as you,
But yet my nature could not bear it so.
(IV. iii. 194.)
At the end he casts his philosophy to the winds rather than go bound
to Rome: he “bears too great a mind” (V. i. 113). And just as on these
occasions he is independent or regardless of it, so here he tampers
with it to get the verdict that is required. For even in his own eyes
he has to play the part of the ideally wise and virtuous man; and
though the obligations of descent and position, the consideration in
which he is held, the urgings of a malcontent, and (as he believes not
altogether without reason) the expectations formed of him by his fellow
citizens, supply his real motives for the murder, he needs to give it
the form of ideal virtue and wisdom before he can proceed to it.
Now, however, he persuades himself that he has the sanction of reason
and conscience, and he acts on the persuasion. His hesitations are
gone. He can face without wincing the horror of conspiracy. With an
impassioned eloquence, which he nowhere else displays, he can lift the
others to the level of his own views. No doubts or scruples becloud his
enthusiasm now.
If not the face of men,
The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse—
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And every man hence to his idle bed;
So let high-sighted tyranny range on
Till each man drop by lottery.
(II. i. 114.)
His certainty has advanced by leaps and bounds. A few minutes ago there
was no complaint against Caesar as he was or had been, but it could
be alleged that he might or would change: now his tyranny, lighting
by caprice on men, is announced as a positive fact of the future or
even of the present. But by this time Brutus is assured that the plot
is just and that the confederates are the pick of men, both plot and
confederates so noble that for them an ordinary pledge would be an
insult:
Unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt: but do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor the insuppressive metal of our spirits,
To think that or our cause or our performance
Did need an oath.
(II. i. 132.)
He carries them away with him. They abandon the oath; they accept
all his suggestions; we feel that their thoughts are ennobled by
his intervention, that, as Plutarch noted to be the effect of his
fellowship, he has made them better men, at least for the time.
Meanwhile it is a devout imagination, an unconscious sophistry that
lends him his power; and this brings its own Nemesis at its heels. In
the future Brutus will be disillusioned of the merit of the exploit. In
the present, persuading his associates of its unparalleled glory, he
makes them take their measures to suit. He will not hear of the murder
of Antony, for that would be bloody and unnecessary. And his clemency
is based on disparagement of Antony’s abilities and contempt for his
moral character. Of this “limb of Caesar,” as he calls him, “who can do
no more than Caesar’s arm when Caesar’s head is off,” he cries:
Alas, good Cassius, do not think of him:
If he love Caesar, all that he can do
Is to himself, take thought and die for Caesar:
And that were much he should; for he is given
To sports, to wildness and much company.
(II. i. 185.)
It is not so in Plutarch:
Brutus would not agree to it. First for that he sayd it was
not honest: secondly, bicause he told them there was hope of
chaunge in him. For he did not mistrust, but that Antonius
being a noble minded and coragious man (when he should knowe
that Caesar was dead) would willingly helpe his contrie to
recover her libertie, having them an example unto him to
follow their corage and vertue.
In this hope of converting a _rusé_ libertine like Antony, there
is no doubt a hint of idealism, but it is not so marked as in the
high-pitched magnanimity of Shakespeare’s Brutus, who denies a man’s
powers of mischief because his life is loose.
Yet though Antony would always be a source of danger, the conspirators
might find compensation in the reputation for leniency they would gain,
and the danger might be reduced were effective steps taken to render
him innocuous. But this is only the beginning of Brutus’ mistakes.
If indeed they had not begun before. With his masterful influence he
has dissuaded his friends from applying to Cicero, on the ground that
Cicero will not share in any scheme of which he is not the author. It
may be so, but one would think it was at least an experiment well worth
the trying. Apart from the authority of his years and position, there
would have been the spell of his oratory; and of that they were soon
to be sorely in need, again through Brutus’ crotchet that their course
evinced its own virtue, and that virtue was a sufficient defence.
“The first fault that he did,” says Plutarch, “was, when he
would not consent to his fellow conspirators, that Antony
should be slayne: and therefore he was justly accused, that
thereby he had saved a stronge and grievous enemy of their
conspiracy. The second fault was when he agreed that Caesars
funeralls should be as Antony would have them: the which in
deede marred all.”
This hint Shakespeare works out. He sees clearly that this further
blunder marred all, and heightens the folly of it in various ways. For
in Plutarch the question is debated in the Senate, after it has been
determined that the assassins shall be not only pardoned but honoured
and after provinces have been assigned to them, Crete to Brutus, Africa
to Cassius, and the like. Only then, when their victory seems complete
and assured, do they discuss the obsequies.
Antonius thinking good his testament should be red openly,
and also that his body should be honorably buried, and
not in hugger mugger, least the people might thereby take
occasion to be worse offended if they did otherwise: Cassius
stowtly spake against it. But Brutus went with the motion
and agreed unto it.
That is the amount of his error: that when all seemed to be going
well with the faction, Antony, who had shown himself in seeming and
for the time their most influential friend, commended the proposal
on opportunist grounds, and Cassius opposed it, but Brutus supported
it and voted with the majority. In the Play his responsibility is
undivided, and all the explanatory circumstances have disappeared. He
is not one member of an approving Senate, who, when the assassination
seems once for all a _chose jugée_, accepts a suggestion, made
apparently in the interests of peace and quiet, by the man to whom,
more than to anyone else, the settlement of the affair is due. While
the position is still critical, without any evidence of Antony’s good
will, without any pressure of public opinion or any plea of political
expediency, he endows the helpless suppliant with means to undo what
has been done and destroy those who have done it. No wonder that
Cassius when he hears Brutus giving Antony permission to speak in the
market place, interrupts: “Brutus, a word with you,” and continues in
the alarmed aside:
You know not what you do: do not consent
That Antony speak in his funeral:
Know you how much the people may be moved
By that which he will utter?
(III. i. 232.)
But Brutus waves his remonstrance aside. He is now so besotted by his
own sophisms that he will listen to no warning. He thinks all risk will
be averted by his going into the pulpit first to show the “reason” of
Caesar’s death. He has quite forgotten that the one reason that he
could allege to himself was merely a hazardous conclusion from doubtful
premises; and this forsooth is to satisfy the citizens of Rome. But
meanwhile since their deed is so irreproachable and disinterested, the
conspirators must act in accordance, and show their freedom from any
personal motive by giving Caesar all due rites:
It shall advantage more than do us wrong.
The infatuation is almost incredible, and it springs not only from
generosity to Antony and Caesar, but from the fatal assumption of the
justice of his cause, and the Quixotic exaltation the assumption brings
with it.
For were it ever so just, could this be brought home to the Roman
populace? Brutus, who is never an expert in facts, has been misled
by the inventions of Cassius, which he mistakes for the general
voice of Rome. Here, too, Shakespeare departs from his authority to
make the duping of his hero more conspicuous. For in Plutarch these
communications are the quite spontaneous incitements of the public, not
the contrivances of one dissatisfied aristocrat.
But for Brutus, _his frendes and contrie men_, both
by divers procurementes, and sundrie rumors of the citie,
and by many bills also, did openlie call and procure him
to doe that he did. For, under the image of his auncestor
Junius Brutus, that drave the kinges out of Rome, they
wrote: “O, that it had pleased the goddes that thou wert now
alive, Brutus: and againe that thou wert with us nowe.” His
tribunall (or chaire) where he gave audience during the time
he was praetor, was full of such billes: “Brutus, thou art a
sleepe, and art not Brutus in deede.”
All these in Plutarch are worth their face value, but in Shakespeare
they are not: and it is one of the ironies of Brutus’ career that he
takes them as appeals from the people when they are only the juggleries
of Cassius. So far from objecting to Imperialism, the citizens when
most favourable to Brutus call out, “Let him be Caesar!” “Caesar’s
better parts shall be crowned in Brutus” (III. ii. 56). This is the
acme of his success and the prologue to his disillusionment.
But even if the case of the conspirators could be commended to the
populace, Brutus is not the man to do it. It is comic and pathetic to
hear him reassuring Cassius with the promise to speak first as though
he could neutralise in advance the arts of Antony. Compare his oration
with that of his rival. First, in the matter of it, there is no appeal
to the imagination or passions, but an unvarnished series of arguments
addressed exclusively to the logical reason. Such a speech would make
little impression on an assembly of those who are called educated men,
and to convince an audience like the artisans of Rome (for such was
Shakespeare’s conception of the People), it is ridiculously inadequate.
But the style is no less out of place. The diction is as different as
possible from the free and fluent rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare had
read in Plutarch:
They do note in some of his Epistells, that he
counterfeated that briefe compendious maner of speach of
the Lacedaemonians. As when the warre was begonne, he wrote
unto the Pergamenians in this sorte: “I understand you have
geven Dolabella money; if you have done it willingly, you
confesse you have offended me: if against your wills, shewe
it then by geving me willinglie.” An other time againe
unto the Samians: “Your counsels be long, your doinges be
slowe, consider the ende.” And in an other Epistell he
wrote unto[178] the Patareians: “The Xanthians despising
my good wil, have made their contrie a grave of dispaire:
and the Patareians that put them selves into my protection,
have lost no jot of their libertie. And therefore whilest
you have libertie, either choose the judgement of the
Patareians, or the fortune of the Xanthians.”
[178] _i.e._ in reference to.
Thus prompted Shakespeare makes Brutus affect the balanced structure of
Euphuism. Not only in his oration. Read his words to Cassius at their
first interview:
That you do love me, I am nothing jealous;
What you would work me to, I have some aim;
How I have thought of this and of these times,
I shall recount hereafter; for this present,
I would not, so with love I might entreat you,
Be any further moved. What you have said
I will consider: what you have to say
I will with patience hear, and find a time
Both meet to hear and answer such high things.
(I. ii. 161.)
Nothing could be more neat, accurate and artificial than this
Euphuistic arrangement of phrases. It at once suggests the academic
studious quality of Brutus’ expression whenever he gives thought to
it. But it is a style unsuitable to, one might almost say incompatible
with, genuine passion. So it is noteworthy that when he lets himself go
in answer to Cassius and introduces the personal accent, he abandons
his mannerisms. And could the symmetrical clauses of his oration move
the popular heart? It has a noble ring about it, because it is sincere,
with the reticence and sobriety which the sincere man is careful to
observe when he is advocating his own case. But that is not the sort of
thing that the Saviour of his Country, as Brutus thought himself to be,
will find fit to sway a mob. Nevertheless his eloquence was notorious.
Plutarch states that when his mind “was moved to followe any matter, he
used a kind of forcible and vehement perswasion that calmed not till he
had obteyned his desire.” There is a rush of emotion in his words when
he is denouncing the conventional pledge or wanton bloodshed, but if
any personal interest is involved, the springs are dry. In the Forum
it is characteristic that he speaks with far more warmth—a transition
indicated not only by the change of style, but, after Shakespeare’s
wont, by the substitution of verse for prose—when he no longer pleads
for himself but tries to get a hearing for Mark Antony.
And this is the man with his formal dialectic and professorial oratory,
impassioned only on behalf of his enemy, who thinks that by a temperate
statement of the course which he has seduced his reason to approve,
he can prevent the perils of a speech by Caesar’s friend. He does not
even wait to hear it: but if he did, what could he effect against
the sophistries and rhetorical tricks, the fervour and regret, the
gesticulation and tears of Antony’s headlong improvisation?
CHAPTER V
THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF BRUTUS. PORTIA
Brutus had been doubly duped, by his own subtlety and his own
simplicity in league with his conscientiousness; for in this way he
was led to idealise his deed as enjoined both by the inward moral code
and the demands of his country, and such self-deception avenges itself
as surely as any intentional crime. He is soon disabused in regard to
the wishes of Rome and its view of the alleged wrongs it has suffered
from Caesar. His imagination had dwelt on the time when his ancestors
drove out the Tarquin; now he himself must ride “like a madman” through
the gates. It is not only the first of his reverses but a step towards
his enlightenment, for it helps to show that he has been mistaken in
the people. Still, the momentary mood of the populace may not always
recognise its best interests and real needs, and may not coincide with
the true _volonté générale_. There is harder than this in store for
Brutus. By the time we meet him again at Sardis a worse punishment has
overtaken him, and his education in disappointment has advanced, though
he does his utmost to treat the punishment as fate and not to learn the
lessons it enforces.
This scene has won the applause of the most dissimilar minds and
generations. We have seen how Leonard Digges singles it out as
the grand attraction of the play, by which, above all others, it
transcends the laboured excellences of _Catiline_ or _Sejanus_. It
excited the admiration and rivalry of the greatest genius of the
Restoration period. Scott says of the dispute between Antony and
Ventidius in _All for Love_: “Dryden when writing this scene had
unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel between Brutus and
Cassius, which was so justly a favourite in his time, and to which he
had referred as inimitable in his prologue to _Aureng-Zebe_.
But spite of all his pride, a secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name:
Awed, when he hears his godlike Romans rage,
He in a just despair would quit the stage;
And to an age less polished, more unskilled,
Does with disdain the foremost honours yield.”
In the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson, though he finds _Julius
Caesar_ as a whole “somewhat cold and unaffecting,” perhaps because
Shakespeare’s “adherence to the real story and to Roman manners” has
“impeded the natural vigour of his genius,” excepts particular passages
and cites “the contention and reconciliation of Brutus and Cassius”
as universally celebrated. And Coleridge goes beyond himself in his
praise: “I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the
belief of his being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and
Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less
absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him
to create, previously to his function of representing characters.”
Yet it is not merely in the revelation of character that the scene is
unique. More than any other single episode, more than all the rest
together, it lays bare the significance of the story in its tragic
pathos and its tragic irony. And the wonder of it is increased rather
than lessened when we take note that it is a creation not out of
nothing but out of chaos. For there is hardly a suggestion, hardly a
detail, that Shakespeare did not find in Plutarch, but here in confused
mixture, there in inert isolation, and nowhere with more than the
possibilities of being organised. It is Shakespeare, who, to borrow
from Milton’s description of the beginning of his Universe, “founded
and conglobed like things to like, and vital virtue infused and vital
warmth.”
The nucleus of this passage is found just after the account of Brutus’
exploits in Lycia.
About that tyme, Brutus sent to pray Cassius to come to the
citye of Sardis, and so he did. Brutus understanding of
his comming, went out to meete him with all his frendes.
There both their armies being armed, they called them both
Emperors. Nowe, as it commonly hapneth in great affayres
betwene two persons, both of them having many friends,
and so many Captaines under them; there ranne tales and
complaints betwixt them. Therefore, before they fell in
hand with any other matter, they went into a little chamber
together, and bad every man avoyde, and did shut the dores
to them. Then they beganne to powre out their complaints one
to the other, and grew hot and lowde, earnestly accusing one
another, and at length fell both a weeping. Their friends
that were without the chamber hearing them lowde within, and
angry betwene them selves, they were both amased and affrayd
also lest it would grow to further matter: but yet they were
commaunded that no man should come to them. Notwithstanding,
one Marcus Phaonius, that had bene a friend and follower
of Cato while he lived, and tooke upon him to counterfeate
a Philosopher, not with wisedom and discretion, but with a
certaine bedlem and frantick motion: he would needes come
into the chamber, though the men offered to keepe him out.
But it was no boote to let Phaonius, when a mad moode or
toy tooke him in the head: for he was a hot hasty man, and
sodaine in all his doings, and cared for never a Senator of
them all. Now, though he used this bold manner of speeche
after the profession of the Cynick Philosophers (as who
would say, doggs), yet this boldnes did no hurt many times,
bicause they did but laugh at him to see him so mad. This
Phaonius at that time, in despite of the doore keepers, came
into the chamber, and with a certain scoffing and mocking
gesture which he counterfeated of purpose, he rehearsed the
verses which old Nestor sayd in Homer:
My lords, I pray you harken both to mee,
For I have seene moe yeares than suchye three.
Cassius fell a-laughing at him: but Brutus thrust him out of
the chamber, and called him dogge, and counterfeate Cynick.
Howbeit his comming in brake their strife at that time, and
so they left eche other.
Here there seems little enough to tempt the dramatist; the two generals
quarrel, Phaonius bursts in, Cassius laughs at him, Brutus turns him
out, but the interruption temporarily patches up a truce between them.
And this petty incident is made the most pregnant in Shakespeare’s
whole play; and that by apparently such simple means. To get the
meaning out of it, or to read the meaning into it, he does little more,
so far as the mechanical aspects of his treatment are concerned, than
collect a few other notices scattered up and down the pages of his
authority. He had found in an earlier digression Cassius described as
a hot cholerick and cruell man, that would often tymes be
caried away from justice for gayne: it was certainly thought
that he made warre, and put him selfe into sundry daungers,
more to have absolute power and authoritie, than to defend
the liberty of his contrie.
Again after describing Brutus’ success with the Patareians, Plutarch
proceeds:
Cassius, about the selfe same tyme, after he had compelled
the Rhodians every man to deliver all the ready money they
had in gold and silver in their houses, the which being
brought together, amounted to the summe of eyght thousande
talents: yet he condemned the citie besides, to paye the
summe of five hundred talents more. When Brutus in contrary
manner, after he had leavyed of all the contrye of Lycia but
a hundred and fiftye talents onely: he departed thence into
the contrye of Ionia, and did them no more hurt.
Previously with reference to the first meeting of the fugitives after
they collected their armies and before they came to Sardis at all,
Plutarch narrates:
Whilst Brutus and Cassius were together in the citie of
Smyrna: Brutus prayed Cassius to let him have some part
of his money whereof he had great store, bicause all that
he could rappe and rend of his side, he had bestowed it
in making so great a number of shippes, that by meanes of
them they should keepe all the sea at their commaundement.
Cassius’ friendes hindered this request, and earnestly
disswaded him from it: perswading him, that it was no reason
that Brutus should have the money which Cassius had gotten
together by sparing, and leavied with great evil will of
the people their subjects, for him to bestowe liberally
uppon his souldiers, and by this meanes to winne their good
willes, by Cassius charge. This notwithstanding, Cassius
gave him the third part of his totall summe.
Then at Sardis, but not on occasion of the dispute interrupted by
Phaonius, mention is made of the affair with Pella:
The next daye after, Brutus, upon complaynt of the Sardians
did condemne and noted Lucius Pella for a defamed person,
that had been a Praetor of the Romanes, and whome Brutus had
given charge unto: for that he was accused and convicted of
robberie, and pilferie in his office. This judgement much
misliked Cassius; bicause he him selfe had secretly (not
many dayes before) warned two of his friends, attainted
and convicted of the like offences, and openly had cleered
them: but yet he did not therefore leave to employ them in
any manner of service as he did before. And therefore he
greatly reproved Brutus, for that he would shew him selfe
so straight and seveare in such a tyme, as was meeter to
beare a little, then to take thinges at the worst. Brutus in
contrary manner aunswered, that he should remember the Ides
of Marche, at which tyme they slue Julius Caesar: who nether
pilled nor polled the contrye, but onely was a favorer and
suborner of all them that did robbe and spoyle, by his
countenaunce and authoritie. And if there were any occasion
whereby they might honestly sette aside justice and equitie:
they should have had more reason to have suffered Caesar’s
friendes, to have robbed and done what wronge and injurie
they had would, then to beare with their owne men. For then,
sayde he, they could but have sayde they had bene cowards:
“and now they may accuse us of injustice, beside the paynes
we take, and the daunger we put our selves into.”
Lastly at the end of the _Life of Brutus_, Shakespeare would find a
short notice of the death of Portia. No indication is given of the date
at which this took place, except that Plutarch seems on the whole to
discredit the idea that she survived her husband.
And for Porcia, Brutus’ wife: Nicolaus the Philosopher, and
Valerius Maximus doe wryte, that she determining to kill
her selfe (her parents and frendes carefullie looking to
her to kepe her from it) tooke hot burning coles, and cast
them into her mouth, and kept her mouth so close, that she
choked her selfe. There was a letter of Brutus found wrytten
to his frendes, complayning of their negligence, that his
wife being sicke, they would not helpe her, but suffered her
to kill her selfe, choosing to dye rather than to languish
in paine. Thus it appeareth, that Nicolaus knewe not well
that time, sith the letter (at the least if it were Brutus
letter) doth plainly declare the disease and love of this
Lady, as also the maner of her death.
Now in Shakespeare’s scene all these detached jottings find their
predestined place, and together have an accumulated import of which
Plutarch has only the remotest guess. They are so combined as to
bring out at once the ideal aspect of Brutus’ deed, and its folly and
disastrousness in view of the facts. He maintains his manhood under the
most terrible ordeal, which is well; he clings to his illusion in the
face of the clearest proof, which is not so well. He is gathering evil
fruit where he looked for good, but he refuses to admit that the tree
was corrupt; and of the prestige that his clear conscience confers, he
still makes baneful use. He is raised to the heroic by his persistence
in regarding the murder as an act of pure and disinterested justice,
but for that very reason he makes his blunders, and puts himself and
others in the wrong.
Perhaps indeed his loss of temper is to be ascribed to another cause.
He is in a tense, over-wrought state, when the slightest thing will
provoke an outbreak. In Cassius’ view his private and personal sorrow,
the only one Cassius could understand, might quite well, apart from all
the rest, have driven him to greater violence:
How ’scaped I killing when I cross’d you so?
(IV. iii. 150.)
No wonder he uses stinging words to his friend, taxes him most unfairly
with the boast of being a better soldier, and flings aside Cassius’
temperate correction of “elder,” with the contemptuous, “If you did,
I care not.” No wonder he drives out the poet, while Cassius merely
laughs at him. Yet even here, though he is undoubtedly the angrier and
more unreasonable in the quarrel, his moral dignity just before has
saved him from an indiscretion into which Cassius falls. When the other
begins to complain before the soldiers, Brutus checks him:
Cassius, be content;
Speak your griefs softly; I do know you well.
Before the eyes of both our armies here,
Which should perceive nothing but love from us,
Let us not wrangle: Bid them move away;
Then in my tent, Cassius, enlarge your griefs,
And I will give you audience.
(IV. ii. 41.)
In the onset of misfortune Brutus does not forget his weightier
responsibilities, though the strain of resisting it may impair his
suavity. The fine balance of his nature that was overthrown by
suspense, may well be shaken by his afflictions. For they are more
numerous than Cassius knew and more poignant than he could understand.
Portia’s suicide with all its terrible accessories Brutus brings into
relation with himself. It is absence from him, and, as his love tells
him, distress at the growing power of his enemies that caused her
madness. The ruin of that home life which was his native element, the
agony and death of the wife he worshipped, are the direct consequences
of his own act.
And with this private there has come also the public news. The
proscription has already swept away seventy senators; Cicero, despite
his “silver hairs,” his “judgment,” and his “gravity” being one; and
the number given, according to Messala, is an understatement. Brutus
had talked of each man’s dropping by lottery under Caesar’s rule, but
however much Caesar had degenerated, would he have decreed a more
wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter than this? Was there anything
in his career as described by Brutus himself, that foreshadowed a
callousness like that of the Triumvirs in pricking down and damning
their victims, among them the most illustrious members of Brutus’ own
class? And the perpetrators, far from injuring their cause by these
atrocities, are in a position to take the field with a “mighty power.”
So the civil war with all its horrors and miseries will run its full
course.
But even that is not the worst. Brutus has to realise that his
associates were not the men he supposed them. Their hands are not
clean, their hearts are not pure, even his brother Cassius connives
at corruption and has “an itching palm” himself. Even when the _soi
disant_ deliverers wield the power, what are things better than they
would have been under Caesar who was at least personally free from such
reproach and whose greatness entitled him to his place in front? Surely
there are few more pathetic passages even in Shakespeare than the
confession of disillusionment wrung from Brutus by the force of events,
a confession none the less significant that he admits disillusion only
as to the results and still clings to his estimate of the deed itself.
Remember March, the ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touch’d his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a Roman.
(IV. iii. 18.)
It has come to this. In anticipating the effects of Caesar’s rule, he
had said he “had rather be a villager than to repute himself a son
of Rome” in the probable conditions. But his attempt at remedy has
resulted in a situation even more intolerable. He would rather be a dog
than such Romans as the confederates whom he sought to put in Caesar’s
place are disclosing themselves to be.
It says much for his intrinsic force, that when all these things rise
up in judgment against him, he can still maintain to himself and others
the essential nobility of the deed that has brought about all the woe
and wrong; and without any faint-hearted penitence, continue to insist
that their doings must conform to his conception of what has been done:
that if that conception conflicts with the facts, it is the facts that
must give way. Yet on that very account he is quite impracticable and
perverse, as every enthusiast for abstract justice must be, who lets
himself be seduced into crime on the plea of duty, and yet shapes his
course as though he were not a criminal.
Brutus has brought about an upturn of society by assassinating the one
man who could organize that society. His own motives were honourable,
though not so unimpeachable as he assumed, but they could not change
wrong into right and they could not be taken for granted in others than
himself. Now in the confusions that ensue he finds, to his horror,
that revolutions are not made with rose water, that even champions of
virtue have to reckon with base and dirty tools. So he condemns Pella
for bribery. Cassius judges the case better. He sees that Pella is an
efficient and useful officer of whose services he does not wish to be
deprived. He sees that in domestic broils the leaders must not be too
particular about their instruments, that, according to the old proverb,
you must go into the water to catch fish. But Brutus will not go into
the water. He thinks that an assassin should only have Galahads in his
troops. And sometimes his offended virtue becomes even a little absurd.
He is angry with Cassius for not giving him money, but listen to his
speech:
I did send to you
For certain sums of gold, which you denied me:
For I can raise no money by vile means:
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
By any indirection: I did send
To you for gold to pay my legions,
Which you denied me: was that done like Cassius?
Should I have answer’d Caius Cassius so?
When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous
To lock such rascal counters from his friends,
Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
Dash him to pieces!
(IV. iii. 69.)
What does all this come to? That the superfine Brutus will not be
guilty of extortion, but that Cassius may: and then Brutus will demand
to share in the proceeds. All this distress and oppression are his
doing, or at least the consequences of his deed, and he would wash his
hands of these inevitable accompaniments. He would do this by using
Cassius as his _âme damnée_ while yet interfering in Cassius’ necessary
measures with his moral rebukes.[179]
[179] It will be noticed that in this episode Shakespeare has altered
Plutarch’s narrative in two respects. In the first place Cassius did
give money to the amount of “the thirde part of his totall summe.”
This is not very important, as in the play he disclaims having ever
refused it. But in the second place Brutus was neither so scrupulous
nor so unsuccessful in raising supplies, but had used them in a
quite practical way, that Captain Mahan would thoroughly approve, in
developing his sea power: “all that he could rappe and rend ... he had
bestowed it in making so great a number of shippes that by meanes of
them they should keepe all the sea at their commaundement.”
This of course is between Cassius and himself, and if Cassius chooses
to submit, it is his own concern. But Brutus plays the Infallible to
such purpose, that, what with his loftiness of view, his earnestness,
and his marvellous fortitude, he obtains an authority over Cassius’
mind that has disastrous results. Though Cassius is both the better
and the elder soldier, he must needs intermeddle with Cassius’ plan of
campaign. Here, as so often, Shakespeare has no warrant for his most
significant touch. Plutarch had said that Cassius, against his will,
was overruled by Brutus to hazard their fortunes in a single battle.
But that was afterwards, at Philippi. There is no hint that Cassius
was opposed to the movement from Sardis to Philippi, and it is on this
invented circumstance that Shakespeare lays most stress. In the play
Brutus, in the teeth of his fellow generals’ disapproval, insists on
their leaving their vantage ground on the hills, chiefly as it appears
because he dislikes the impositions they are compelled to lay on the
people round about:
They have grudged us contribution;
(IV. iii. 206.)
and because he has a vague belief that this is the nick of time;
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their lives
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
(IV. ii. 218.)
These are the arguments which he opposes to Cassius’ skilled strategy.
He will not even listen to Cassius’ rejoinder:
_Cassius._ Hear me, good brother—
_Brutus._ Under your pardon:
(IV. iii. 212.)
and he runs on. The spiritual dictator carries his point, as he always
does, and as here especially he is bound to do, when their recent trial
of strength has ratified his powers afresh. Cassius is hypnotised into
compliance, “Then, with your will, go on.” But Brutus is wrong. He is
doing the very thing that the Triumvirs would have him do and dare not
hope he will do. Octavius, when he hears of the movement, exclaims:
Now, Antony, our hopes are answered:
You said the enemy would not come down,
But keep the hills and upper regions:
It proves not so.
(V. i. 1.)
The adoption of Brutus’ plan, which he secured in part through the
advantage he had gained in the quarrel, leads directly to the final
catastrophe.
Here then we have the gist of the whole story. The tribulations of
Brutus that ensue on his grand mistake, the wreck of his dearest
affections, the butchery at Rome, the oppression of the provinces,
the appalling discovery that his party is animated by selfish greed
and not by righteous zeal, and that Caesar bore away the palm in
character as well as ability; the dauntless resolution with which
despite his vibrant sensibility he bears up against the rudest blows;
the sustaining consciousness that he himself acted for the best, and
the pathetic imagination even now that the rest must live up to his
standard; the warrant this gives him to complete the outward ruin of
the cause that already is rotten within—all this is brought home to us
in a passage of little more than two hundred lines. It is not merely a
masterpiece in characterisation; it at once garners the harvest of the
past and sows the seeds of the future. Nor is the execution inferior
to the conception; the passion of the verse, the fluctuation of the
dialogue, provide the fit medium for the pregnancy and wealth of the
matter.[180]
[180] Two objections have been made to this scene, or, rather to the
whole act. The first, in Mr. Bradley’s words that it has a “tendency to
drag” (_Shakespearian Tragedy_), is put more uncompromisingly by Mr.
Baker (_Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_); “[Shakespeare]
produced in _Julius Caesar_ a fourth act probably not entirely
successful even in his own day”; and afterwards he refers to it as
“ineffective to-day.” In view of Digges’ testimony, it is difficult
to see how Mr. Baker can say that it was not entirely successful in
Shakespeare’s day. As to the impression it makes now, one must largely
depend on one’s own feeling and experience. Certainly I myself have
never been conscious that it dragged or was ineffective, nor have I
noted that it failed to stir the audience. I have never been present at
a first-rate performance, but I have seen it creditably presented in
Germany, England and Australia; and on every occasion it seemed to me
that the quarrel scene was the most popularly successful in the play.
This statement is, I believe, strictly accurate, for having Digges’
lines in my mind I was on the watch to see whether the taste of the
Elizabethan coincided with the taste of a later generation.
The second criticism is that in the economy of the piece it leads to
nothing, “unless,” as Mr. Bradley says, “we may hold that but for the
quarrel and reconciliation, Cassius would not have allowed Brutus
to overcome his objection to the fatal policy of offering battle at
Philippi.” This is quite true, though the proviso is a most important
one. But it does very manifestly connect with what has gone before,
and gives the essence and net result of the story. We could sooner
dispense with the Fifth Act than the Fourth, for the Fifth may with
less injustice be described as an appendix than the Fourth as an
episode. Not only is it less unique in kind, but for the most part it
works out issues that can easily be foreseen and that to some extent
are clearly indicated here. Of course this is not to say that it could
be rejected without mutilating the play, for it works them out far
more impressively than we could do in our own imaginations, even with
Plutarch to help us.
But the scene is not yet at an end. Even now we are not for a moment
allowed to forget Brutus, the considerate gentleman and cultured
student, in Brutus, the political pedant and the incompetent commander.
We have a momentary glimpse of him with Lucius, unassuming and gentle,
claiming the indulgence, consulting the comfort, tending the needs of
his slave. This moving little passage is, as we have seen, entirely
due to Shakespeare, and it seems to be introduced for the sake partly
of the dramatic contrast with the prevailing trouble and gloom, partly
of the indication it gives that Brutus is still unchanged at heart. In
the stress of his suffering he may be irritable and overbearing with
Cassius, but he has more than a woman’s tenderness for the boy.
His habit of reading at night is mentioned by Plutarch, but when we
consider the circumstances, has it not a deeper meaning here? His love
for Portia we know, but after his brief references to her death, he
seems to banish her from his mind, and never, not even in his dying
words, does her name cross his lips again. Is this an inadvertence
on Shakespeare’s part, or an omission due to the kinship of _Julius
Caesar_ with the Chronicle History? Is it not rather that he conceives
Brutus as one of those who are so bound up in their affections that
they fear to face a thought of their bereavement lest they should
utterly collapse? Is it fanciful to interpret that search for his book
with the leaf turned down, in the light of Macaulay’s confession on
the death of his sister: “Literature has saved my life and my reason;
even now I dare not in the intervals of business remain alone a minute
without a book”?
But this little interlude, which sets Brutus before us with all his
winsome and pathetic charm, leads back to the leading _motif_, the
destruction he has brought on himself by his own error, though he may
face it like a man and keep the beauty of his soul unsoiled. Here, too,
Plutarch points the way, but Shakespeare advances further in it. What
he found was the following bit of hearsay:
One night very late (when all the campe tooke quiet rest) as
he was in his tent with a little light, thinking of waighty
matters, he thought he heard one come in to him, and casting
his eye towards the doore of his tent, that he saw a
wonderfull straunge and monstruous shape of a body comming
towards him, and sayd never a word. So Brutus boldly asked
what he was, a god, or a man, and what cause brought him
thither. The spirit aunswered him, “I am thy evill spirit,
Brutus, and thou shalt see me by the citie of Philippes.”
Brutus beeing no otherwise affrayd, replyed again unto it:
“Well, then, I shall see thee agayne.” The spirit presently
vanished away: and Brutus called his men unto him, who tolde
him that they heard no noyse, nor sawe any thinge at all.
Shakespeare’s Brutus is not at the outset so unconcerned as Plutarch’s.
Instead of “being no otherwise affrayd,” his blood runs cold and his
hair “stares.” On the other hand, he is free from the perturbation that
seizes Plutarch’s Brutus when he reflects, and that drives him to tell
his experience to Cassius, who “did somewhat comfort and quiet him.”
The Brutus of the play breathes no word of the visitation, though it
is repeated at Philippi, till a few minutes before his death, and then
in all composure as a proof that the end is near, not as a horror from
which he seeks deliverance. He needs not the support of another, and
even in the moment of physical panic he has moral courage enough: he
summons up his resolution, and when he has “taken heart” the spectre
vanishes. This means, too, that it has a closer connection with his
nerves, with his subjective fears and misgivings, than the “monstruous
shape” in Plutarch, and similarly, though he alleges that Lucius and
his attendants have cried out in their sleep, they are unaware of any
feeling or cause of fright. And the significance of this is marked
by the greatest change of all. Shakespeare gives a personality to
Plutarch’s nameless phantom: it is individualised as the ghost of
Caesar, and thus Caesar’s spirit has become Brutus’ evil genius, as
Brutus had been Caesar’s angel. The symbolism explains itself, but
is saved from the tameness of allegory by the superstitious dread
with which it is enwrapped. The regrets and forebodings of Brutus
appear before him in outward form. All day the mischievousness of his
intervention has been present to his mind: now his accusing thoughts
take shape in the vision of his murdered friend, and his vague
presentiments of retribution at Philippi leap to consciousness in its
prophetic words. But all this does not abash his soul or shake his
purpose. He only hastens the morning march.
Thus he moves to his doom, and never was he so great. He is stripped
of all adventitious aids. His private affections are wrecked, and the
thought of his wife has become a torture. Facts have given the lie to
his belief that his country has chosen him as her champion. He can no
longer cherish the dream that his course has been of benefit to the
Roman world. He even seems at last to recognise his own guilt, for
not only does he admit the might of Caesar’s spirit in the suicide of
Cassius, but when his own turn comes, his dying words sound like a
proffer of expiation:
Caesar, now be still;
I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.
(V. v. 50.)
The philosophic harness in which he felt so secure, he has already
found useless in the hour of need, and fit only to be cast aside. So he
stands naked to the blows of fate, bereft of his love, his illusions,
his self-confidence, his creed. He has to rely solely on himself, on
his own nature and his own character. Moreover his nature, in so far as
it means temperament, is too delicate and fine for the rough practical
demands on it. Suspense is intolerable to his sensitive and eager soul.
Ere the battle begins, he can hardly endure the uncertainty:
O that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.
(V. i. 123.)
The patience in which he tries to school himself cannot protect him
from a last blunder. He gives the word too soon and his impetuosity
ruins all. No doubt he is not so unsuccessful as Titinius thinks, but
he has committed the unpardonable fault of fighting for his own hand
without considering his partner. Thus his imprudence gives the final
blow to the cause that all through he has thwarted and ennobled.
But in inward and essential matters his character victoriously stands
the test, and meets all the calls that are made upon it. Even when his
life-failure stares him in the face, he does not allow it a wider scope
than its due, or let it disturb his faith in the purity of his motives.
I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I:
Brutus, my country’s friend.
(V. iv. 7.)
Even now he can see himself aright, and be sure of the truth of his
patriotism. Even now he can prefer the glory of this “losing day” to
the “vile conquest” of such men as the authors of the proscription.
And he is not without more personal consolations. When none of his
friends will consent to kill him, their very refusal, since it springs
from love, fills his soul with triumph. It is characteristic that this
satisfaction to his private affections ranks with him as supreme at the
end of all.
Countrymen,
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
(V. v. 33.)
We need not bemoan his fate: he is happy in it: indeed there is nothing
that he could live for in the world of the Triumvirs, and this is what
he himself desires:
My bones would rest,
That have but labour’d to attain this hour.
(V. v. 41.)
At the side of this rare and lofty nature, we see the kindred figure
of his wife, similar in her noble traits, similar in her experiences,
the true mate of his soul. Their relations are sketched in the merest
outline, or, to be more correct, are implied rather than sketched. Only
in some eighty lines of one scene do we see them together and hear them
exchange words. In only one other scene does Portia appear, when we
witness her tremors on the morning of the assassination. And in a third
we hear of her death in detached notices, which, with the comments they
call forth, barely amount to twenty lines. Yet the impression made
is indelible and overpowering, not only of the lady’s own character,
but of the perfect union in which she and Brutus lived. There is no
obtrusion of their love: it does not exhale in direct professions.
On her part, the claim to share his troubles, the solicitude for his
success, the distraction because of his absence and danger; on his,
the acceptance of her claim, two brief outbursts of adoration—and his
reticence at her death. For he is not the man to wear his heart on his
sleeve; and the more his feelings are stirred the less inclined is he
to prate of them. Just as after slaying Caesar though “he loved him
well,” he never alludes to the anguish he must have endured, so after
his “Farewell, Portia,” he turns to the claims of life (“Well, to our
work alive!”), and never even in soliloquy refers to her again. Even
in the first pang of bereavement, the one hint of grief it can extort
from him is the curt retort, “No man bears sorrow better.” We might
fail to recognise all that it meant for him if we did not see his
misery reflected in the sympathy and consternation of other men; in the
hesitating reluctance of Messala, to break, as he thinks, the news; in
the dismay of Cassius and his wonder at Brutus’ self-control. Cassius
indeed cannot but recur to it despite the prohibition, “Speak no more
of her.” When they have sat down to business his thoughts hark back to
the great loss: “Portia, art thou gone?” “No more, I pray you,” repeats
Brutus, who cannot brook the mention of her, and he plunges into the
business of the hour.
And this woman, of whom Brutus felt that he was unworthy, and prayed
to be made worthy, noble and devoted as himself, is involved too in
his misfortunes. On her also a greater load is laid than she can bear.
He is drawn by his political, and she by her domestic ideal into a
position that overstrains the strength of each. She demands, as in
Plutarch, though perhaps with father less of the dignity of the Roman
matron and rather more of the yearning of the affectionate wife, to
share in her husband’s secrets. She does this from no curiosity,
intrusiveness or jealousy, but from her unbounded love and her exalted
conception of the marriage tie. And she is confident that she can bear
her part in her husband’s cares.
She has a great spirit, but it is lodged in a fragile and nervous
frame. Does she make her words good? She gains her point, but her
success is almost too much for her. She can endure pain but not
suspense: like Brutus she is martyr to her sense of what is right. We
presently find her all but ruining the conspiracy by her uncontrollable
agitation. The scene where she waits in the street serves the function
in the main story of heightening our excitement by means of hers, in
expectation of what will presently be enacted at the Capitol; but it is
even more important for the light it throws on her character. She may
well confess: “I have a man’s heart, but a woman’s might.” Her feverish
anxiety quite overmasters her throughout, and makes her do and say
things which do not disclose the plot only because the bystanders are
faithful or unobservant. She sends the boy to the senate house without
telling him his errand. She meaningly bids him
take good note
What Caesar doth, what suitors press about him.
(II. iv. 15.)
She interrupts herself with the fancy that the revolt has begun. She
plies the soothsayer with suspicious questions that culminate in the
most indiscreet one on his wish to help Caesar:
Why, know’st thou any harm’s intended towards him?
(II. iv. 31.)
Then she almost commits herself, and has to extemporise a subterfuge,
before, unable to hold out any longer, she retires on the point of
fainting, though even now her love gives her strength to send a
cheering message to her lord.
For her as for Brutus the burden of a duty, which she assumes by her
own choice, but which one of her nature must assume, is too heavy. And
in the after consequences, for which she is not directly responsible,
but which none the less flow from the deed that she has encouraged and
approved, it is the same inability to bear suspense, along with her
craving for her husband’s presence and success, that drives her through
madness to death.
CHAPTER VI
THE REMAINING CHARACTERS
Far beneath this pair are the other conspirators who rise up against
the supremacy of Caesar.
Among these lower natures, Cassius is undoubtedly the most imposing and
most interesting.
The main lines of his character are given in Caesar’s masterly
delineation, which follows Plutarch in regard to his spareness, but in
the other particulars freely elaborates the impression that Plutarch’s
whole narrative produces.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look:
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous....
He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock’d himself and scorn’d his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
(I. ii. 194 and 201.)
Lean, gaunt, hungry, disinclined to sports and revelry, spending his
time in reading, observation, and reflection—these are the first traits
that we notice in him. He too, like Brutus, has learned the lessons of
philosophy, and he finds in it the rule of life. He chides his friend
for seeming to fail in the practice of it:
Of your philosophy you make no use,
If you give place to accidental evils.
(IV. iii. 145.)
And even when he admits and admires Brutus’ self-mastery, he attributes
it to nature, and claims as good a philosophic discipline for himself.
There is, however, a difference between them even in this point.
Brutus is a Platonist with a Stoic tinge; Cassius is an Epicurean.
That strikes us at first as strange, that the theory which identified
pleasure with virtue should be the creed of this splenetic solitary:
but it is quite in character. Epicureanism appealed to some of the
noblest minds of Rome, not as a cult of enjoyment, but as a doctrine
that freed them from the bonds of superstition and the degrading fear
of death. This was the spirit of Lucretius, the poet of the sect:
Artis
Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo:
and one grand _motif_ of his poem is the thought that this death,
the dread of which makes the meanness of life, is the end of all
consciousness, a refuge rather than an evil: “What ails thee so, O
mortal, to let thyself loose in too feeble grievings? Why weep and wail
at death?... Why not rather make an end of life and labour?” And these
are the reasons that Cassius is an Epicurean. At the end, when his
philosophy breaks down, he says:
You know that I held Epicurus strong
And his opinion: now I change my mind,
And partly credit things that do presage.
(V. i. 77.)
He has hitherto discredited them. And we seem to hear Lucretius in his
noble utterance:
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit:
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
(I. iii. 93.)
Free from all superstitious scruples and all thought of superhuman
interference in the affairs of men, he stands out bold and self-reliant,
confiding in his own powers, his own will, his own management:
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
(I. ii. 139.)
And the same attitude of mind implies that he is rid of all illusions.
He is not deceived by shows. He looks quite through the deeds of men.
He is not taken in by Casca’s affectation of rudeness. He is not misled
by Antony’s apparent frivolity. He is not even dazzled by the glamour
of Brutus’ virtue, but notes its weak side and does not hesitate to
play on it. Still less does Caesar’s prestige subdue his criticism. On
the contrary, with malicious contempt he recalls his want of endurance
in swimming and the complaints of his sick-bed, and he keenly notes
his superstitious lapses. He seldom smiles and when he does it is in
scorn. We only once hear of his laughing. It is at the interposition
of the poet, which rouses Brutus to indignation; but the presumptuous
absurdity of it tickles Cassius’ sardonic humour.
For there is no doubt that he takes pleasure in detecting the
weaknesses of his fellows. He has obvious relish in the thought that
if he were Brutus he would not be thus cajoled, and he finds food for
satisfaction in Caesar’s merely physical defects. Yet there is as
little of self-complacency as of hero-worship in the man. He turns his
remorseless scrutiny on his own nature and his own cause, and neither
maintains that the one is noble or the other honourable, nor denies the
personal alloy in his motives. This is the purport of that strange
soliloquy that at first sight seems to place Cassius in the ranks of
Shakespeare’s villains along with his Iagos and Richards, rather than
of the mixed characters, compact of good and evil, to whom nevertheless
we feel that he is akin.
Well, Brutus, thou art noble: yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is disposed: therefore it is meet
That noble minds keep ever with their likes:
For who so firm that cannot be seduced?
Caesar doth bear me hard: but he loves Brutus:
If I were Brutus now and he were Cassius,
He should not humour me.
(I. ii. 312.)
It frequently happens that cynics view themselves as well as others in
their meaner aspects. Probably Cassius is making the worst of his own
case and is indulging that vein of self-mockery and scorn that Caesar
observed in him.[181] But at any rate the lurking sense of unworthiness
in himself and his purpose will be apt to increase in such a man his
natural impatience of alleged superiority in his fellows. He is jealous
of excellence, seeks to minimise it and will not tolerate it. It is
on this characteristic that Shakespeare lays stress. Plutarch reports
the saying “that Brutus could evill away with the tyrannie and that
Cassius hated the tyranne, making many complayntes for the injuries
he had done him”; and instances Caesar’s appropriation of some lions
that Cassius had intended for the sports, as well as the affair of
the city praetorship. But in the play these specific grievances are
almost effaced in the vague statement, “Caesar doth bear me hard”;
which implies little more than general ill-will. It is now resentment
of pre-eminence that makes Cassius a malcontent. Caesar finds him
“very dangerous” just because of his grudge at greatness; and his
own avowal that he “would as lief not be as live to be in awe” of a
thing like himself, merely puts a fairer colour on the same unamiable
trait. He may represent republican liberty and equality, at least in
the aristocratic acceptation, but it is on their less admirable side.
His disposition is to level down, by repudiating the leader, not to
level up, by learning from him. In the final results this would mean
the triumph of the second best, a dull and uniform mediocrity in art,
thought and politics, unbroken by the predominance of the man of genius
and king of men. And it may be feared that this ideal, translated into
the terms of democracy, is too frequent in our modern communities. But
true freedom is not incompatible with the most loyal acknowledgment of
the master-mind; witness the utterance of Browning’s Pisan republican:
The mass remains—
Keep but the model safe, new men will rise
To take its mould.
[181] This explanation is offered with great diffidence, but it is the
only one I can suggest for what is perhaps the most perplexing passage
in the play, not even excepting the soliloquy of Brutus.
Yet notwithstanding this taint of enviousness and spite, Cassius is
far from being a despicable or even an unattractive character. He may
play the Devil’s Advocate in regard to individuals, but he is capable
of a high enthusiasm for his cause, such as it is. We must share his
calenture of excitement, as he strides about the streets in the tempest
that fills Casca with superstitious dread and Cicero with discomfort
at the nasty weather. His republicanism may be a narrow creed, but at
least he is willing to be a martyr to it; when he hears that Caesar is
to wear the crown, his resolution is prompt and Roman-like:
I know where I will wear this dagger then:
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
(I. iii. 89.)
And surely at the moment of achievement, whatever was mean and sordid
in the man is consumed in his prophetic rapture that fires the soul of
Brutus and prolongs itself in his response.
_Cassius._ How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
_Brutus._ How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport
That now on Pompey’s basis lies along
No worthier than the dust![182]
(III. i. 111.)
[182] What a strange effect these words are apt to produce on auditor
and reader! “How true!” we say, “The prophecy is fulfilled. This is
happening now.” And then the reflection comes that just because that
is the case there is no prophecy and no truth in the scene; the whole
is being enacted, in sport. We experience a kind of vertigo, in which
we cannot distinguish the real and the illusory and yet are conscious
of both in their highest potence. And this is a characteristic of all
poetry, though it is not always brought so clearly before the mind. In
Shakespeare something of the kind is frequent: compare the reference to
the “squeaking Cleopatra” in _Antony and Cleopatra_, which is almost
exactly parallel; compare too his favourite device of the play within
the play, when we see the actors of a few minutes ago, sitting like
ourselves as auditors; and thus, on the one hand their own performance
seems comparatively real, but on the other there is the constant
reminder that we are in their position, and the whole is merely
spectacular. Dr. Brandes has some excellent remarks in this connection
on Tieck’s Dramas in his _Romantic School in Germany_.
And even to individuals if they stand the test of his mordant
criticism, he can pay homage and admiration. The perception that Brutus
may be worked upon is the toll he pays to his self-love, but, that
settled, he can feel deep reverence and affection for Brutus’ more
ideal virtue. Perhaps the best instance of it is the scene of their
dispute. Brutus, as we have seen, is practically, if not theoretically,
in the wrong, and certainly he is much the more violent and bitter; but
Cassius submits to receive his forgiveness and to welcome his assurance
that he will bear with him in future. This implies no little deference
and magnanimity in one who so ill brooks a secondary role. But he does
give the lead to Brutus, and in all things, even against his better
judgment, yields him the primacy.
And then it is impossible not to respect his thorough efficiency. In
whatsoever concerns the management of affairs and of men, he knows the
right thing to do, and, when left to himself, he does it. He sees how
needful Brutus is to the cause and gains him—gains him, in part by a
trickery, which Shakespeare without historical warrant ascribes to him;
but the trickery succeeds because he has gauged Brutus’ nature aright.
He takes the correct measure of the danger from Antony, of his love for
Caesar and his talents, which Brutus so contemptuously underrates. So,
too, after the assassination, when Brutus says,
I know that we shall have him well to friend;
he answers,
I wish we may: but yet I have a mind
That fears him much; and my misgiving still
Falls shrewdly to the purpose.
(III. i. 144.)
Brutus seeks to win Antony with general considerations of right and
justice, Cassius employs a more effective argument:
Your voice shall be as strong as any man’s
In the disposing of new dignities.
(III. i. 177.)
He altogether disapproves of the permission granted to Antony to
pronounce the funeral oration. He grasps the situation when the civil
war breaks out much better than Brutus:
In such a time as this it is not meet
That every nice offence should bear his comment.
(IV. iii. 7.)
His plans of the campaign are better, and he has a much better notion
of conducting the battle.
All such shrewd sagacity is entitled to our respect. Yet even in this
department Cassius is outdone by the unpractical Brutus, so soon as
higher moral qualities are required, and the wisdom of the fox yields
to the wisdom of the man. We have seen that however passionate and
wrong-headed Brutus may be in their contention, he has too much sense
of the becoming to wrangle in public, as Cassius begins to do. Another
more conspicuous example is furnished by the way in which they bear
anxiety. Shakespeare found an illustration of this in Plutarch, which
he has merely dramatised.
When Caesar came out of his litter: Popilius Laena, that
had talked before with Brutus and Cassius, and had prayed
the goddes they might bring this enterprise to passe, went
into Caesar and kept him a long time with a talke. Caesar
gave good eare unto him. Wherefore the conspirators (if so
they should be called) not hearing what he sayd to Caesar,
but conjecturing by that he had told them a little before,
that his talke was none other but the verie discoverie of
their conspiracie: they were affrayed everie man of them,
and one looking in an others face, it was easie to see that
they all were of a minde, that it was no tarying for them
till they were apprehended, but rather that they should kill
them selves with their owne handes. And when Cassius and
certaine other clapped their handes on their swordes under
their gownes to draw them: Brutus marking the countenaunce
and gesture of Laena, and considering that he did use him
selfe rather like an humble and earnest suter, then like
an accuser: he sayd nothing to his companions (bicause
there were amongest them that were not of the conspiracie)
but with a pleasaunt countenaunce encouraged Cassius. And
immediatlie after, Laena went from Caesar, and kissed his
hande; which shewed plainlie that it was for some matter
concerning him selfe, that he had held him so long in talke.
Shakespeare, by rejecting the reason for the dumb show, is able to
present this scene in dialogue, and thus bring out the contrast more
vividly. Cassius believes the worst, loses his head, now hurries on
Casca, now prepares for suicide. But Brutus, the disinterested man, is
less swayed by personal hopes and fears, keeps his composure, urges his
friend to be constant, and can calmly judge of the situation. It is
the same defect of endurance that brings about Cassius’ death. Really
things are shaping well for them, but he misconstrues the signs just
as he has misconstrued the words of Lena, and kills himself owing to a
mistake; as Messala points out:
Mistrust of good success hath done this deed.
(V. iii. 66.)
This want of inward strength explains the ascendancy which Brutus with
his more dutiful and therefore more steadfast nature exercises over
him, though Cassius is in many ways the more capable man of the two.
They both have schooled themselves in the discipline of fortitude,
Brutus in Stoic renunciation, Cassius in Epicurean independence; but
in the great crises where nature asserts herself, Brutus is strong and
Cassius is weak. And as often happens with men, in the supreme trial
their professed creeds no longer satisfy them, and they consciously
abandon them. But while Cassius in his evil fortune falls back on the
superstitions[183] which he had ridiculed Caesar for adopting on his
good fortune, Brutus falls back on his feeling of moral dignity, and
gives himself the death which theoretically he disapproves.
[183] The trait is taken from Plutarch who, after enumerating the
sinister omens before Philippi, adds: “the which beganne somewhat to
alter Cassius minde from Epicurus opinions.”
Yet, when all is said and done, what a fine figure Cassius is, and how
much both of love and respect he can inspire. Plutarch’s story of his
death already bears witness to this, but Shakespeare with a few deeper
strokes marks his own esteem.
Cassius thinking in deede that Titinius was taken of the
enemies, he then spake these wordes: “Desiring too much to
live, I have lived to see one of my best frendes taken,
for my sake, before my face.” After that, he gote into a
tent where no bodie was, and tooke Pyndarus with him, one
of his freed bondmen, whom he reserved ever for suche a
pinche, since the cursed battell of the Parthians, when
Crassus was slaine, though he notwithstanding scaped from
that overthrow; but then casting his cloke over his head,
and holding out his bare neck unto Pindarus, he gave him his
head to be striken of. So the head was found severed from
the bodie: but after that time Pindarus was never seene
more. Whereupon some tooke occasion to say that he had
slaine his master without his commaundement. By and by they
knew the horsemen that came towards them, and might see
Titinius crowned with a garland of triumphe, who came before
with great speede unto Cassius. But when he perceived by the
cries and teares of his frends which tormented them selves
the misfortune that had chaunced to his Captaine Cassius
by mistaking; he drew out his sword, cursing him selfe a
thousand times that he had taried so long, and so slue him
selfe presentlie in the fielde. Brutus in the meane time
came forward still, and understoode also that Cassius had
bene over throwen: but he knew nothing of his death, till he
came verie neere to his campe. So when he was come thither,
after he had lamented the death of Cassius, calling him the
last of all the Romanes, being impossible that Rome should
ever breede againe so noble and valliant man as he: he
caused his bodie to be buried, and sent it to the citie of
Thassos, fearing least his funerals within the campe should
cause great disorder.
In the play Pindarus is not yet enfranchised, and though he gains his
freedom by the fatal stroke, would rather remain a slave than return to
his native wilds at such a price. Titinius places his garland on the
dead man’s brow, and in fond regret slays himself, not with his own but
with Cassius’ sword. Brutus, with hardly a verbal change, repeats the
eulogy that Plutarch puts in his mouth,
The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!
It is impossible that ever Rome
Should breed thy fellow.
But he does not stop here. Flushed with his initial success, he expects
to triumph and to live, and the years to come seem darkened with grief
for his “brother”:
Friends, I owe more tears
To this dead man than you shall see me pay.
I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
(V. iii. 99.)
The minor conspirators, with the adherents of the cause and the humbler
dependents, are of course sketched very slightly, as proportion
requires, but they have all something to individualise them in gait
or pose. Even in the crowded final act, where, as in the chronicle
histories which Shakespeare was leaving behind him, a number of persons
are introduced with whom we are almost or entirely unacquainted, there
is no monotony in the subordinate figures. They are distinguished from
or contrasted with each other in their circumstances, sentiments or
fate. Thus Pindarus and Strato are both described as servants, they are
both attached to their masters, they are both reluctantly compelled
to assist in their masters’ death. Should we have thought it possible
to differentiate them in the compass of the score or so of lines at
the dramatist’s disposal? But Cassius’ slave, who, since his capture,
has been kept like a dog to do whatever his owner might bid him, will
not abide the issue and uses his new liberty to flee beyond the Roman
world. Strato, to whom Brutus characteristically turns because he
is “a fellow of a good respect” with “some snatch of honour” in his
life, claims Brutus’ hand like an equal before he will hold the sword,
confronts the victors with praise of the dead, hints to Messala that
Brutus’ course is the one to follow, and has too much self-respect
to accept employment with Octavius till Messala “prefers,” that is,
recommends him.
So too with the three captains, all on the losing side, all devoted to
their leaders. Titinius, who seems to feel that his love for Cassius
exceeds that of Brutus
(Brutus, come apace,
And see how I regarded Caius Cassius)
will not outlive him. Lucilius is quite ready to die for his general,
but spared by the generosity of Antony, survives to exult that Brutus
has fulfilled his prophecy and been “like himself.” Messala, who
brought word of Portia’s death, must now tell the same tale of Cassius
with the same keen sympathy for Brutus’ grief; and though Strato
seems to censure him for consenting to live “in bondage,” he shows no
bondman’s mind when he grounds his preferment of Strato to Octavius on
the fact of Strato’s having done “the latest service to my master.”
More prominent, but still in the background, are the subaltern members
of the faction in Rome. Ligarius, the best of them, with his fiery
enthusiasm and personal fealty to Brutus, is an excellent counterpart
to the ingratiating and plausible Decius, the least erected spirit of
the group. Between them comes Casca, the only one who may claim a word
or two of comment, partly because he is sketched in some detail, partly
because he is practically an original creation. Plutarch has only two
particulars about him, the one that he was the first to strike Caesar
and struck him from behind; the other that when Caesar cried out and
gripped his hand, he shouted to his brother in Greek. Shakespeare, as
we have seen, summarily rejects his acquaintance with Greek, but the
stab in the back sets his fancy to work, and he constructs for him a
character and life-history to match.
Casca is a man who shares with Cassius the jealousy of greatness—“the
envious Casca,” Antony described him—but is vastly inferior to Cassius
in consistency and manhood. He seems to be one of those alert,
precocious natures, clever at the uptake in their youth and full of
a promise that is not always fulfilled: Brutus recalls that “he was
quick mettle when we went to school” (I. ii. 300). Such sprightly
youngsters, when they fail, often do so from a certain lack of moral
fibre. And so with Casca. He appears before us at first as the most
obsequious henchman of Caesar. When Caesar calls for Calpurnia,
Casca is at his elbow: “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.” When Caesar,
hearing the soothsayer’s shout, cries, “Ha! who calls?” Casca is again
ready: “Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!” Cassius would
never have condescended to that. For Casca resents the supremacy of
Caesar as much as the proudest aristocrat of them all: he is only
waiting an opportunity to throw off the mask. But meanwhile in his
angry bitterness with himself and others he affects a cross-grained
bluntness of speech, “puts on a tardy form,” as Cassius says, plays the
satirist and misanthrope, as many others conscious of double dealing
have done, and treats friend and foe with caustic brutality. But it
is characteristic that he is panic-stricken with the terrors of the
tempestuous night, which he ekes out with superstitious fancies. It
illustrates his want both of inward robustness and of enlightened
culture. We remember that Cicero’s remark in Greek was Greek to him,
and that Greek was as much the language of rationalists then, as
was French of the eighteenth century _Philosophes_. Nor is it less
characteristic that even at the assassination he apparently does not
dare to face his victim. Antony describes his procedure
Damned Casca, like a cur, behind
Struck Caesar on the neck.
(V. i. 43.)
Yet even Casca is not without redeeming qualities. His humour, in the
account he gives of the coronation fiasco, has an undeniable flavour:
its very tartness, as Cassius says, is a “sauce to his good wit.” And
there is a touch of nobility in his avowal:
You speak to Casca, and to such a man
That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold, my hand:
Be factious for redress of all these griefs,
And I will set this foot of mine as far
As who goes farthest.
(I. iii. 116.)
But among those little vignettes, that of Cicero is decidedly the
masterpiece. For this Shakespeare got no assistance from any of the
three Lives on which he drew for the rest of the play. Indeed the one
little hint they contained he did not see fit to adopt. In the _Marcus
Brutus_ Plutarch says of the conspirators:
For this cause they durst not acquaint Cicero with their
conspiracie, although he was a man whome they loved dearlie
and trusted best: for they were affrayed that he being a
coward by nature, and age also having increased his feare,
he would quite turne and alter all their purpose.
In the play their reason for leaving him out is very different:
He will never follow anything
That other men begin.
(II. i. 151.)
It seems to me, however, highly probable that Shakespeare had read
the _Life of Cicero_ and obtained his general impression from it,
though he invents the particular traits. The irritable vanity and
self-consciousness of the man, which Brutus’ objection implies, are,
for example, prominent features in Plutarch’s portrait. So too is his
aversion for Caesar and Caesarism, which makes him view the offer of
the crown, abortive though it has been, as a personal offence: Brutus
observes that he
Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes
As we have seen him in the Capitol
Being cross’d in conference with some senators.
(I. ii. 186.)
But he is very cautious, and even when venting his vexation in one
of those biting gibes to which, by Plutarch’s statement, he was too
prone, he takes care to veil it in the safe obscurity of a foreign
language. “He spoke Greek ... but those that understood him smiled at
one another and shook their heads” (I. ii. 282). This has sometimes
been misinterpreted. Shakespeare has been taxed with the absurdity of
making Cicero deliver a Greek speech in a popular assemblage. Surely
he does nothing of the kind. It is a sally that he intends for his
friends, and he takes the fit means for keeping it to them; much as
St. John might talk French, if he wished to be intelligible only to
those who had made the Grand Tour and so were in a manner of his own
set. Plutarch lays stress on his familiarity with Greek, as also on
his study of the Greek Philosophers. This may have left some trace in
the description of his bearing in contrast to Casca’s, when they meet
in the storm. Cool and sceptical, he cannot guess the cause of Casca’s
alarm. Even when the horrors of earthquake, wind and lightning, are
described in detail, he asks unmoved:
Why, saw you anything more wonderful?
(I. iii. 14.)
And after the enumeration of the portents, he critically replies:
Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
(I. iii. 32.)
And then after a passing reference[184] to current affairs, he bids
Casca good night. To him the moral of the whole tempest is: “This
disturbed sky is not to walk in.” Opinions may differ as to this being
the real Cicero; none will deny that it is a living type.
[184] Trivial to him, to us full of tragic meaning.
Apart from the main group of personages, more or less antagonistic to
Caesar, stands the brilliant figure of his friend and avenger, the
eloquent Mark Antony. Shakespeare conceives him as a man of genius and
feeling but not of principle, resourceful and daring, ambitious of
honour and power, but unscrupulous in his methods and a voluptuary in
his life. Caesar tells him that he is “fond of plays” and “revels long
o’ nights.” Cassius calls him a “masker and a reveller.” Brutus says
that he is given “to sports, to wildness and much company.”
He makes his first appearance as the tool of Caesar. With Asiatic
flattery, as though in the eastern formula, to hear were to obey, he
tells his master:
When Caesar says “do this,” it is perform’d.
(I. ii. 10.)
He perceives his unspoken desires, his innermost wishes, and offers him
the crown. It is no wonder that Brutus should regard him but as a “limb
of Caesar,” or that Trebonius, considering him a mere time-server,
should prophesy that he will “live and laugh” hereafter at Caesar’s
death. But they are wrong. They do not recognise either the genuineness
of the affection that underlies his ingratiating ways, or the real
genius that underlies his frivolity. Here, as everywhere, Cassius’
estimate is the correct one. He fears Antony’s “ingrafted love” for
Caesar, and predicts that they will find in him “a shrewd contriver.”
Of the love indeed there can be no question. It is proved not only by
his public utterances, which might be factitious, nor by his deeds,
which might serve his private purposes, but by his words, when he is
alone with his patron’s corpse.
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
(III. i. 254.)
It is worth noting the grounds that Antony in this solitary outburst
alleges for his love of Caesar. He is moved not by gratitude for
favours past or the expectation of favours to come, but solely by the
supreme nobility of the dead. To the claims of nobility, in truth,
Antony is always responsive and he is ready to acknowledge it in
Brutus too. “This was the noblest Roman of them all”; so he begins his
heartfelt tribute to his vanquished foe. This generous sympathetic
strain in his nature is one of the things that make him dangerous. He
is far from acting a part in his laments for Caesar. He feels the grief
that he proclaims and the greatness he extols. His emotions are easily
stirred, especially by worthy objects, and he has only to give them
free rein to impress other people.
But along with this he has a subtle, scheming intellect; he is as much
a man of policy as a man of sentiment. After the flight of Brutus
and Cassius, we see him planning how he and his colleagues may cut
down Caesar’s bequests, of which in his speech he had made so much;
how he may shift some of the odium of his proceedings on to Lepidus’
back; how they may best arrange to meet the opposition. This mixture
of feeling and diplomacy is especially shown in his words and deeds
after the assassination. He does not shrink from any base compliance.
His servant appears before the murderers, and at his bidding “kneels,”
“falls down,” lies “prostrate” in token of submission, promising that
his master will follow Brutus’ fortunes. But even here it is on the
understanding that Caesar’s death shall be justified; and when he
himself enters he gives his love and grief free scope.
O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.
I know not, gentlemen, what you intend,
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank:
If I myself, there is no hour so fit
As Caesar’s death’s hour, nor no instrument
Of half that worth as those your swords, made rich
With the most noble blood of all this world.
I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard,
Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke,
Fulfil your pleasure. Live a thousand years,
I shall not find myself so apt to die;
No place will please me so, no mean of death,
As here by Caesar, and by you cut off,
The choice and master spirits of this age.
(III. i. 148.)
What could be more loyal on the one hand, or more discreet on the
other? For, as he is well aware, if he comes to terms with the
assassins at all, he is liable to an alternative accusation. Either
his love for Caesar was genuine, and then his reconciliation with the
murderers implies craven fear; or, if he can freely take their part,
his previous homage to Caesar was mere pretence. As he himself says:
My credit now stands on such slippery ground,
That one of two bad ways you must conceit me,
Either a coward or a flatterer.
(III. i. 191.)
And what more dexterous course could he adopt than to assert his
devotion to Caesar without restraint, with undiminished emphasis: and
at the same time to profess his respect for the conspirators, “the
choice and master spirits of this age,” and his readiness to join
them _if_ they prove that Caesar deserved to die. This honourable
and reasonable attitude, which honour and reason would in reality
prescribe, must especially impress Brutus, to whom Antony is careful
chiefly to address himself. He enters a doubtful suppliant; at the end
of the scene not only are his life and credit safe, but he has won from
Brutus’ magnanimity the means to overthrow him.
It is characteristic of Antony that he has no scruple about using the
vantage ground he has thus acquired. He immediately determines to
employ the liberty of speech accorded him against the men who have
granted it. To Octavius’ servant, who enters ere he has well ended his
soliloquy, he says:
Thou shalt not back till I have borne this corse
Into the market place: there shall I try,
In my oration, how the people take
The cruel issue of these bloody men.
(III. i. 291.)
He does not hesitate, though this course will involve in ruin those
who have generously spared him and given him the weapons against
themselves. Not even for his country’s sake will he pause, though,
with his prescient imagination, he sees in all their lurid details the
horrors of the
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
(I. iii. 263.)
that must inevitably ensue.
And he effects his purpose, without any other help, by his wonderful
address to the citizens. Perhaps nowhere else in History or Literature
do we find the procedure of the demagogue of Genius set forth with such
masterly insight. For Antony shows himself a demagogue of the most
profligate description, but as undeniably the very genius of the art of
moving men. Consider the enormous difficulties of his position. He is
speaking under limitation and by permission before a hostile audience
that will barely give him a hearing, and his task is to turn them quite
round, and make them adore what they hated and hate what they adored.
How does he set about it?
He begins with an acknowledgment and compliment to Brutus: “For Brutus’
sake I am beholding to you.” He disclaims the intention of even
praising the dead. He cites the charge of ambition, but not to reply
to it, merely to point out that any ambition has been expiated. But
then he insinuates arguments on the other side: Caesar’s faithfulness
and justice in friendship, the additions not to his private but to
the public wealth that his victories secured, his pitifulness to the
poor, his refusal of the crown. Really these things are no arguments
at all. They have either nothing to do with the case, or are perfectly
compatible with ambition, or may have been its very means or may have
been meant to cloak it. Such indeed we know that in part at least
they were. But that does not signify so far as Antony’s purpose is
concerned. They were all matters well known to the public, fit to call
forth proud and grateful and pleasing reminiscences of Caesar’s career.
The orator has managed to praise Caesar while not professing to do
so: if he does not disprove what Brutus said, yet in speaking what he
does know, he manages to discredit Brutus’ authority. And now these
regretful associations stirred, he can at any rate ask their tears for
their former favourite. Have they lost their reason that they do not
at least mourn for him they once loved? And here with a rhetorical
trick, which, to his facile, emotional nature, may have also been the
suggestion of real feeling, his utterance fails him; he must pause, for
his “heart is in the coffin there with Caesar.”
We may be sure that whatever had happened to his heart his ear was
intent to catch the murmurs of the crowd. They would satisfy him.
Though he has not advanced one real argument, but has only played as it
were on their sensations, their mood has changed. Some think Caesar has
had wrong, some are convinced that he was not ambitious, all are now
thoroughly favourable to Antony.
He begins again. And now he strikes the note of contrast between
Caesar’s greatness yesterday and his impotence to-day. It is such a
tragic fall as in itself might move all hearts to terror and pity.
But what if the catastrophe were undeserved? Antony could prove that
it was, but he will keep faith with the conspirators and refrain.
Nevertheless he has the testament, though he will not read it, which,
read, would show them that Caesar was their best friend.
Compassion, curiosity, selfishness are now enlisted on his side. Cries
of “The will! The will!” arise. He is quick to take advantage of
these. Just as he would not praise Caesar, yet did so all the same; so
he refuses to read the will, for they would rise in mutiny—this is a
little preliminary hint to them—if they heard that Caesar had made them
his heirs.
Renewed insistence on the part of the mob, renewed coyness on the part
of Antony; till at last he steps down from the pulpit, taking care to
have a wide circle round him that as many as possible may see. But he
does not read the will immediately. Partly with his incomparable eye
to effect, partly out of the fullness of his heart (for the substance
of his words is the same as in his private soliloquy), he stands rapt
above the body. Caesar’s mantle recalls proud memories of the glory
of Caesar and of Rome, the victory over the Barbarian.[185] And this
mantle is pierced by the stabs of assassins, of Cassius, of Casca, of
Brutus himself. He has now advanced so far that he can attack the man
who was the idol of the mob but a few minutes before. And he makes
his attack well. The very superiority of Brutus to personal claims,
the very patriotism which none could appreciate better than Antony,
and to which he does large justice when Brutus is no more, this very
disinterestedness he turns against Brutus, and despite all he owes him,
accuses him of black ingratitude. There is so much speciousness in the
charge that it would be hard to rebut before a tribunal of sages: and
when Antony makes his _coup_, withdrawing the mantle and displaying the
mutilated corpse,
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here,
Here is himself, marr’d, as you see, with traitors:
(III. ii. 199.)
the cause of Brutus is doomed. Antony has a right to exult, and he does
so. There is the triumphant pride of the artist in his art, when, on
resuming, he represents Brutus as the rhetorician and himself as the
unpractised speaker. He is no orator as Brutus is, and—with sublime
effrontery—that was probably the reason he was permitted to address
them. But
Were I Brutus
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar, that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
(III. ii. 230.)
Note the last words: for though Antony feels entitled to indulge in
this farcing and enjoys it thoroughly, he does not forget the serious
business. He keeps recurring more and more distinctly to the suggestion
of mutiny, and for mutiny the citizens are now more than fully primed.
All this, moreover, he has achieved without ever playing his trump
card. They have quite forgotten about the will, and indeed it is not
required. But Antony thinks it well to have them beside themselves, so
he calls them back for this last maddening draught.
[185] Plutarch’s account of Caesar’s personal prowess in the battle
with the Nervii, and of the honours decreed him by the Senate, shows
why Shakespeare chose this exploit for special mention: “Had not
Caesar selfe taken his shield on his arme, and flying in amongest the
barbarous people, made a lane through them that fought before him; and
the tenth legion also seeing him in daunger, ronne unto him from the
toppe of the hill, where they stoode in battell,{note} and broken the
ranckes of their enemies; there had not a Romane escaped a live that
day. But taking example of Caesar’s valliantnes, they fought desperatly
beyond their power, and yet could not make the Nervians flie, but they
fought it out to the death, till they were all in manner slaine in
the field.... The Senate understanding it at Rome, ordained that they
shoulde doe sacrifice unto the goddes, and keepe feasts and solemne
processions fifteene dayes together without intermission, having
never made the like ordinaunce at Rome, for any victorie that ever
was obteined. Bicause they saw the daunger had bene marvelous great,
so many nations rising as they did in armes together against him: and
further the love of the people unto him made his victorie much more
famous.”
{note} battle order
And all the while, it will be observed, he has never answered Brutus’
charge on which he rested his whole case, that Caesar was ambitious.
Yet such is the headlong flight of his eloquence, winged by genius, by
passion, by craft, that his audience never perceive this. No wonder: it
is apt to escape even deliberate readers.
Such a man will go fast and far. We next see him practically the ruler
of Rome, swaying the triumvirate, treating Octavius as an admiring
pupil whom he will tutor in the trade, ordering about or ridiculing the
insignificant and imitative Lepidus.[186]
[186] In Plutarch Antony treats Lepidus with studied deference.
But he has the _hybris_ of genius, unaccompanied by character and
undermined by licence. It would be an anomaly if such an one were to
be permanently successful. Shakespeare was by and by, though probably
as yet he knew it not, to devote a whole play to the story of his
downfall; here he contents himself with indicating his impending
deposition and the agent who shall accomplish it. There is something
ominous about the reticence, assurance, and calm self-assertion of the
“stripling or springall of twenty years” as Plutarch calls Octavius.
At the proscription Lepidus and even Antony are represented as
consenting to the death of their kinsfolk: Octavius makes demands but
no concessions. When Lepidus is ordered off on his errand, and Antony,
secure in his superiority, explains his methods, Octavius listens
silent with just a hint of dissent, but we feel that he is learning
his lessons and will apply them in due time at his teacher’s expense.
Already he appropriates the leadership. Before Philippi, Antony assigns
to him the left wing and he calmly answers:
Upon the right hand I, keep thou the left.
_Antony._ Why do you cross me in this exigent?
_Octavius._ I do not cross you: but I will do so.
(V. i. 18.)
All these touches are contributed by Shakespeare, but the last is
especially noticeable, because, though the words and the particular
turn are his own, the incident itself is narrated not of Antony and
Octavius but of their opponents.
Then Brutus prayed Cassius he might have the leading of the
right winge, the whiche men thought was farre meeter for
Cassius: both bicause he was the elder man, and also for that
he had the better experience. But yet Cassius gave it him.
Octavius too has a higher conception of the dignity of his position.
In that strange scene, another of Shakespeare’s additions, when the
adversaries exchange _gabs_, like the heroes of the old Teutonic lays
or the _Chansons de Gestes_, it is Antony who suggests the somewhat
unseemly proceeding and it is Octavius who breaks it off. And at
the close he, as it were, constitutes himself the heir of Brutus’
reputation, and assumes as a matter of course that he has the right
and duty to provide for Brutus’ followers and take order for Brutus’
funeral.
All that served Brutus, I will entertain them ...
According to his virtue let us use him
With all respect and rites of burial
Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie.
(V. v. 60 and 76.)
For the first of these statements there is no warrant in Plutarch, and
the second contradicts the impression his narrative produces; for in
all the mention he makes of the final honours paid to Brutus, he gives
the credit to Antony.
Antonius, having found Brutus bodie, he caused it to be
wrapped up in one of the richest cote armors he had.
Afterwards also, Antonius understanding that this cote armor
was stollen, he put the theefe to death that had stollen
it, and sent the ashes of his bodie to Servilia his mother.
_Marcus Brutus._
And more explicitly in the _Marcus Antonius_:
(Antony) cast his coate armor (which was wonderfull rich
and sumptuous) upon Brutus bodie, and gave commaundement to
one of his slaves infranchised to defray the charge of his
buriall.
By means of these additions and displacements Shakespeare shows the
young Octavius with his tenacity and self-control already superseding
his older and more brilliant colleague. We see in them the beginning as
well as the prophecy of the end.
_ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA_
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.
CHAPTER 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.)
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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.)
CHAPTER VI
CLEOPATRA
To Cleopatra, the lodestar, the temptress, the predestined mate
of Antony, we now turn: and perhaps even Shakespeare has no more
marvellous creation than she, or one in which the nature that inspires
and the genius that reveals, are so fused in the ideal truth. Campbell
says: “He paints her as if the gipsy herself had cast her spell over
him, and given her own witchcraft to his pencil.” The witchcraft
everybody feels. It is almost impossible to look at her steadily, or
keep one’s head to estimate her aright. She is the incarnate poetry
of life without duty, glorified by beauty and grace; of impulse
without principle, ennobled by culture and intellect. But however
it may be with the reader, Shakespeare does not lose his head. He
is not the adept mesmerised, the sorcerer ensorcelled. Such avatars
as the Egyptian Queen have often been described by other poets, but
generally from the point of view either of the servile devotee or of
the unsympathetic censor. Here the artist is a man, experienced and
critical, yet with the fires of his imagination still ready to leap
and glow. He stands in right relation to the laws of life; and his
delineation is all the more impressive and all the more aesthetic, the
more remorselessly he sacrifices the one-sided claims of the conception
in which he delights to the laws of tragic necessity.
Cleopatra is introduced to us as a beauty of a somewhat dusky African
type in the full maturity, or perhaps a little past the maturity, of
her bloom. The first trait is for certain historically wrong.[214] The
line of the Ptolemies was of the purest Grecian breed, with a purity
of which they were proud, and which they sought to preserve by close
intermarriage within their house. But Shakespeare has so impressed his
own idea of Cleopatra on the world that later painters and poets have
followed suit ever since. Tennyson, in the _Dream of Fair Women_ tells
how she summons him:
I, turning, saw throned on a flowery rise
One sitting on a crimson scarf unroll’d,
A Queen with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,
Brow-bound with burning gold.
[214] Wrong; even if on numismatic evidence her features be considered
to fall short of and deviate from the Greek ideal. Professor Ferrero
describes her face as “bouffie.”
Hawthorne in his _Transformation_, describing Story’s statue of
Cleopatra, which here he attributes to Kenyon, goes further:
The face was a marvellous success. The sculptor had
not shunned to give the full Nubian lips and the other
characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy. His courage
and integrity had been abundantly rewarded: for Cleopatra’s
beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond
comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he
had chosen the tame Grecian type.
Hawthorne goes astray through taking Shakespeare’s picture, or rather
another picture which Shakespeare’s suggested to his own fancy, as a
literal portrait; but his very mistake shows how incongruous a fair
Cleopatra would now seem to us.
Not often or obtrusively, but of set purpose and beyond the
possibility of neglect, does Shakespeare refer to her racial
peculiarities. Philo talks of her “tawny front” (I. i. 6), and both he
and Antony call her a gipsy with reference not merely to the wily and
vagabond character with which these landlopers in Shakespeare’s day
were stigmatised, but surely to the darkness of her complexion as well.
But the most explicit and the most significant statement is her own:
Think on me,
That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black.
(I. v. 27.)
This is one of her ironical exaggerations; but does it not suggest
something torrid and tropical, something of the fervours of the East
and South, that burn in the volcanic fires of Othello and the impulsive
splendours of Morocco? Does it not recall the glowing plea of the
latter,
Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun,
To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.
(_M. of V._, II. i. 1.)
The sun has indeed shone on her and into her. She has known the love
and adoration of the greatest.
Broad-fronted Caesar,
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch: and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow;
There would he anchor his aspect and die
With looking on his life.
(I. v. 29.)
Shakespeare magnifies the glories of her conquests, for it was not
Pompey the Great but his son who had been her lover of old. But these
experiences were only the preparation for the grand passion of her
life. She has outgrown them; and if the first freshness is gone, the
intoxication of fragrance, the flavour and lusciousness are enhanced.
However much she believed herself engrossed by these early fancies, now
that she is under the spell of her Antony, her “man of men,” she looks
back on them as of her
salad days
When (she) was green in judgement, cold in blood.
(I. v. 73.)
Talking of her preparations to meet Antony, Plutarch says:
Gessing by the former accesse and credit she had with Julius
Caesar and Cneus Pompey (the sonne of Pompey the Great)
only for her beawtie; she began to have good hope that she
might more easily win Antonius. For Caesar and Pompey knew
her when she was but a young thing, and knew not then what
the world ment: but now she went to Antonius, at the age
when a womans beawtie is at the prime, and she also of best
judgement.
“At the prime” are Plutarch’s words; for in point of fact she was then
twenty-eight years of age. In this Shakespeare follows and goes beyond
his authority; he gives us the impression of her being somewhat older.
Pompey talks of her contemptuously as “Egypt’s widow,” and prays:
All the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip.
(II. i. 20.)
She herself in ironical self-disparagement avows that she is “wrinkled
deep in time” (I. v. 29) and exclaims:
Though age from folly could not give me freedom,
It does from childishness.
(I. iii. 57.)
But what then? Like Helen and Gudrun and the ladies of romance, or
like Ninon de Lenclos in actual life, she never grows old. As even
the cynical Enobarbus proclaims, “age cannot wither her.” She has
only gained skill and experience in the use and embellishment of her
physical charms, and with these the added charms of grace, culture,
expressiveness. She knows how to set off her attractions with all the
aids of art, wealth and effect, as we see from the _mise-en-scène_ at
the Cydnus: and her mobility and address, her wit, her surprises, her
range of interest do the rest. Again Shakespeare has got the clue from
Plutarch:
Now her beawtie (as it is reported) was not so passing,
as unmatchable of other women,[215] nor yet suche, as upon
present viewe did enamor men with her; but so sweete was her
companie and conversacion, that a man could not possiblie
but be taken. And besides her beawtie, the good grace
she had to talke and discourse, her curteous nature that
tempered her words and dedes, was a spurre that pricked
to the quick. Furthermore, besides all these, her voyce
and words were marvelous pleasant; for her tongue was an
instrument of musicke to divers sports and pastimes, the
which she easely turned to any language that pleased her.
In one respect Shakespeare differs from Plutarch; he bestows on her
surpassing and unmatchable beauty, so that she transcends the artist’s
ideal as much as that transcends mortal womanhood; she o’er-pictures
that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature.[216]
(II. ii. 205.)
[215] The sense is: “Her beauty was not so surpassing as to be beyond
comparison with other women’s,” etc. Compare the Greek: “καὶ γὰρ ἦν, ὡς
λέγουσιν, αὐτὸ μὲν καθ’ αὑτὸ, τὸ κάλλος αὐτῆς οὐ πάνυ δυσπαράβλητον,
οὐδ’ οἶον ἐκπλῆξαι τοῦς ἰδόντας.”
[216] Plutarch in the corresponding passage merely says that she was
“apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus commonly drawen in
picture.”
But he agrees with Plutarch in making her beauty the least part of
her spell. Generally speaking it is taken for granted rather than
pointed out; and of its great triumph on the Cydnus we hear only in
the enraptured reminiscences of Enobarbus. Thus it is removed from the
sphere of sense to the sphere of imagination, and is idealised in the
fervour of his delight; but, though this we never forget, it is of her
other charms that we think most when she is present on the scene.
She is all life and movement, and never the same, so that we are
dazzled and bewildered, and too dizzy to measure her by any fixed
standard. Her versatility of intellect, her variety of mood, are
inexhaustible; and she can pass from gravity to gaiety, from fondness
to banter, with a suddenness that baffles conjecture. We can forecast
nothing of her except that any forecast will be vain. At her very first
entrance the languishing gives place in a moment to the exasperating
vein:
If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
(I. i. 14.)
Fulvia perchance is angry; or, who knows
If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent
His powerful mandate to you.
(I. i. 20.)
For she turns to account even the gibe and the jeer, stings her lover
with her venomous punctures, and pursues a policy of pin-pricks not to
repel but to allure. The hint comes from Plutarch.
When Cleopatra found Antonius jeasts and slents to be but
grosse and souldier-like, in plaine manner; she gave it him
finely and without feare taunted him throughly.
And on the other hand she can faint at will, weep and sob beyond
measure.
We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears: they
are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.
(I. ii. 152.)
Here, too, the hint is given by Plutarch, but in a later passage, when
she fears Antony may return to Octavia:
When he went from her, she fell a weeping and blubbering,
looked rufully of the matter, and still found the meanes
that Antonius should often tymes finde her weeping.
In the play, when he announces his departure, she is ready to fall;
her lace must be cut; she plays the seduced innocent; but she mingles
wormwood with her pathos and overwhelms him with all sorts of opposite
reproaches. Since he does not bewail Fulvia, that is proof of
infidelity:
O most false love!
Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill
With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see,
In Fulvia’s death, how mine received shall be.
(I. iii. 62.)
When his distress is not to be confined, she taxes him with mourning
for his wife:
I prithee, turn aside and weep for her;
Then bid adieu to me, and say the tears
Belong to Egypt.
(I. iii. 76.)
When he loses patience, she mocks at him:
_Ant._ You’ll heat my blood: no more.
_Cle._ You can do better yet; but this is meetly.
_Ant._ Now, by my sword,—
_Cle._ And target. Still he mends;
But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian,
How this Herculean Roman does become
The carriage of his chafe.
(I. iii. 80.)
But at the word of his leaving she is at once all wistful tenderness:
Courteous lord, one word.
Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it:
Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it;
That you know well: something it is I would,—
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten.[217]
(I. iii. 86.)
[217] See Appendix E.
But thence again she passes on the instant to grave and quiet dignity:
All the gods go with you! upon your sword
Sit laurel victory! and smooth success
Be strew’d before your feet!
(I. iii. 99.)
It is the unexpectedness of her transitions, the impossibility of
foreseeing what she will say or do, the certainty that whatever she
says or does will be a surprise, that keeps Antony and everyone else
in perpetual agitation.[218] Tranquillity and dullness fly at the
sound of her name. Her love relies on provocation in both senses of
the word, and to a far greater extent in Shakespeare than in Plutarch.
Thus Plutarch tells how Octavius’ expedition in occupying Toryne caused
dismay among Antony’s troops: “But Cleopatra making light of it: ‘And
what daunger, I pray you,’ said she, ‘if Caesar keepe at Toryne?’” On
which North has the long marginal note:
The grace of this tawnt can not properly be expressed in
any other tongue, bicause of the equivocation of this word
Toryne, which signifieth a citie of Albania, and also, a
ladell to scoome the pot with: as if she ment, Caesar sat by
the fire side, scomming of the pot.
Shakespeare makes no attempt to find an equivalent for the
untranslatable jest, but substitutes one of those bitter mocks before
which Antony has so often to wince. When he expresses wonder at his
rival’s dispatch, she strikes in:
Celerity is never more admired
Than by the negligent.
(III. vii. 25.)
[218] The love she inspires and feels is of the kind described by La
Rochefoucauld: “L’amour, aussi bien que le feu, ne peut subsister, sans
un mouvement continuel; et il cesse de vivre dès qu’il cesse d’espérer
ou de craindre.” He has another passage that suggests an explanation
of the secret of Cleopatra’s permanent attraction for the volatile
Antony: “La constance en amour est une inconstance perpétuelle, qui
fait que notre coeur s’attache successivement à toutes les qualités
de la personne que nous aimons, donnant tantôt la préférence à l’une,
tantôt à l’autre; de sorte que cette constance n’est qu’une inconstance
arrêtée et renfermée dans un même sujet.” It is curious how often an
English reader of La Rochefoucauld feels impelled to illustrate the
Reflections on Love and Women by reference to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,
but it is very natural. His friend the Duchess of Longueville and
the other great ladies of the Fronde resembled her in their charm,
their wit, their impulsiveness; and when they engaged in the game of
politics, subordinated it like her to their passions and caprices. So
his own experience would familiarise La Rochefoucauld with the type,
which he has merely generalised, and labelled as the only authentic
one.
And she does this sort of thing on principle. She tells Alexas:
See where he is, who’s with him, what he does:
I did not send you: if you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick.
(I. iii. 2.)
Is it then all artifice? Are all her eddying whims and contradictions
mere stratagems to secure her sway? For a moment Antony seems to
think so. “She is cunning past man’s thought,” he says in reference
to her swooning: and perhaps it is because of her cunning as well as
her sinuous grace that his endearing name for her is his “Serpent of
old Nile” (I. v. 25). Enobarbus’ reply is in effect that her displays
of emotion are too vehement to be the results of art; they are the
quintessence of feeling: “her passions are made of nothing but the
finest part of pure love” (I. ii. 151).
And both these views are correct. It is her deliberate programme to
keep satiety afar by the swiftness and diversity of the changes she
assumes; but it is a programme easy to carry out, for it corresponds to
her own nature. She is a creature of moods. Excitement, restlessness,
curiosity pulse in her life-blood. In Antony’s absence she is as
flighty with herself as ever she was with him. She feeds on memories
and thoughts of him, but they plague rather than soothe her. In little
more than a breathing-space she turns to music, billiards, and fishing;
and abandons them all to revel once in her day-dreams.
When the messenger arrives after Antony’s marriage, she in her
ungovernable eagerness interrupts him and will not let him disclose the
tidings for which she longs. When she hears what they are, she loses
all restraint; she stuns him with threats, curses, blows; she hales
him by the hair and draws a knife upon him. Then, sinking down in a
faint, she suddenly recovers herself with that irrepressible vitality
and inquisitiveness of hers, that are bone of her bone and flesh of her
flesh:
Go to the fellow, good Alexas; bid him
Report the feature of Octavia, her years,
Her inclination, let him not leave out
The colour of her hair.
(II. v. 111.)
And while we are still smiling at the last little touch, comes that
moving outburst of a sensitive and sorely stricken soul:
Pity me, Charmian,
But do not speak to me.
(iI. v. 118.)
Not long, however, is she in despair. Her knowledge of Antony’s
character, her knowledge of her own charms, even her vanity and
self-illusion combine to give her assurance of final triumph; and when
we next meet her, she is once more hopeful and alert. “Why, methinks,”
she sums up at the close of her not very scientific investigation,
“this creature’s no such thing” (III. iii. 43); and she concludes, “All
may be well enough” (III. iii. 50).
The charm and piquancy of this nimble changefulness are obvious, and it
is not without its value as a weapon in the warfare of life. But it is
equally true that such shifting gusts will produce unreliability, and
even shiftiness. It is quite natural that Cleopatra, a queen and the
daughter of kings, should, in her presumptuous mood, insist on being
present in the campaign and on leading to battle her own sixty ships.
It is no less natural that amid the actual horrors of the conflict, the
luxuriously bred lady should be seized with panic and take to flight.
Indeed it is precisely what we might expect. For despite the royalty
of soul she often displays, there is in Cleopatra a strain of physical
timidity, for which Shakespeare has already prepared us. When the
messenger of woe is to give his tidings to Antony, he hesitates and
says:
The nature of bad news infects the teller,
and Antony answers nobly and truly:
When it concerns the fool or coward.
(I. ii. 99.)
We cannot help remembering Antony’s words when Cleopatra visits on the
bearer the fault of the bad news to her:
Hadst thou Narcissus in thy face, to me
Thou wouldst appear most ugly.
(II. v. 96.)
Such a reception according to Antony stamps the fool or the coward.
Cleopatra is no fool, but there is a touch of cowardice in her, that
appears over and over again.
Thus it is perhaps fear, fear blended with worldliness, that gains
a hearing for Thyreus. There is absolutely no indication that she
is playing a part and temporising, out of faithfulness to Antony.
She had already sent her own private petition to Caesar, confessing
his greatness, submitting to his might, and requesting “the circle
of the Ptolemies” for her heirs. This, otherwise than in Plutarch,
she had done without Antony’s knowledge, who tells her, as though
for her information, that he had sent his schoolmaster to bear his
terms; with which Cleopatra’s were not associated. Her whole behaviour
shows that she dreads Octavius’ power, and dreads the loss of her own
wealth and dignities. But, in the scene with Thyreus, is she really
prepared to desert and betray her lover? Antony suspects that she is,
and appearances are indeed against her. Enobarbus believes that she
is, and Enobarbus generally hits on the truth. Yet we have always to
remember the temptation she would feel to try her spells on Thyreus
and his master: and even after Enobarbus’ desertion she remains with
Antony, clings to him, encourages him, arms him, is proud of him. In
any case it would not be cold-blooded perfidy, but one of those flaws
of weakness, of fear, of self-pity, of self-interest, that take her
unawares.[219] For the final treason of the fleet at any rate, of
which Antony imagines her guilty, she seems in no way responsible.
Plutarch mentions Antony’s infuriated suspicion but adds no word in
confirmation, and Shakespeare, who would surely not have left us
without direction on so important a matter, is equally reticent. Such
hints as he gives, point the other way. We may indeed discount the
disclaimers of Mardian and Diomedes who would probably say anything
they were told to say. But when Antony greets Cleopatra, “Ah, thou
spell! avaunt!” her exclamation,
Why is my lord enraged against his love?
(IV. xii. 31.)
[219] “L’on fait plus souvent des trahisons par foiblesse que par un
dessein formé de trahir.”—_La Rochefoucauld._
seems to express genuine amazement rather than assumed innocence. And
in her conversation with her attendants her words, to all appearance,
imply that she cannot understand his rage: to her it is merely
inexplicable frenzy:
Help me, my women! O, he is more mad
Than Telamon for his shield; the boar of Thessaly
Was never so emboss’d.
(IV. xiii. 1.)
Moreover, if she had packed cards with Caesar, it is difficult to see
why she should not claim a price for her treachery, instead of locking
herself up in the Monument as she does, and trying to keep the Romans
out. All the negociations and interviews after Antony’s death seem to
imply that she had no previous understanding with Octavius.
But she recoils from her lover’s desperation, as she always does when
he is deeply moved. She has ever the tact to feel the point at which
her blandishments and vexations are out of place and will no longer
serve her turn. Just as after the disaster of Actium she only sobs:
O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails!
(III. xi. 54.)
and then can urge no plea but “pardon”; just as after her interview
with Thyreus, with no hint of levity, she solemnly imprecates curses on
herself and her offspring if she were false; so now she bows before his
wrath and flees to the monument. Then follows the fiction of her death,
a fiction in which the actress does not forget the _finesses_ of her
art.
Say, that the last I spoke was “Antony,”
And word it, prithee, piteously.
(IV. xiii. 8.)
It is not the most candid nor dignified expedient, but probably it
is the most effective one; for violent ills need violent cures; and
perhaps there was nothing that could allay Antony’s storm of distrust
but as fierce a storm of regret. At any rate it has the result at which
Cleopatra aims; but she knows him well, and presently foresees that the
antidote may have a further working than she intends. Diomedes seems to
state the mere truth when he says that her prophesying fear dispatched
him to proclaim the truth.
But it is too late; and there only remains the lofty parting scene,
when if she still fears to open the gates lest Caesar should enter, she
draws her lover up to the monument, and lightens his last moments no
less with her queenliness than with her love. She feels the fitness and
the pathos in his ending, that none but Antony should conquer Antony:
she not obscurely hints that she will take the same path. When he bids
her:
Of Caesar seek your honour, with your safety;
(IV. xv. 47.)
she answers well, “They do not go together.” Her passionate ejaculation
ere she faints above his corpse, her appeal to her frightened women,
what’s brave, what’s noble,
Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion,
(V. xv. 87.)
have a whole-heartedness and intensity that first reveal the greatness
of her nature.
And yet even now she seems to veer from the prouder course on which she
has set out. We soon find her in appearance paltering with her Roman
decision. She sends submissive messages to Caesar; she delays her death
so long that Proculeius can surprise her in her asylum; she accepts
her conqueror’s condescension; she stoops to hold back and conceal the
greater part of her jewels.
It is a strange riddle that Shakespeare has here offered to the
student, and perhaps no certain solution of it is to be found. In this
play, even more than in most, he resorts to what has been called his
shorthand, to the briefest and most hurried notation of his meaning,
and often it is next to impossible to explain or extend his symbols.
The usual interpretation, which has much to commend it, accepts all
these apparent compliances of Cleopatra for what on the face they
are. They are taken as instances of Shakespeare’s veracious art that
abstains from sophisticating fact for the sake of effect, and attains a
higher effect through this very conscientiousness and self-restraint.
Just as he makes the enthusiastic fidelity of Enobarbus fail to stand
the supreme test, so he detects a flaw in the resolute yearning
of Cleopatra. The body of her dead past weighs her down, and she
cannot advance steadily in the higher altitudes. She wavers in her
determination to die, as is implied by her retention of her treasure,
and “the courtesan’s instincts of venality and falsehood”[220] still
assert their sway. She has too easily taken to heart Antony’s advice,
and is but too ready, despite all her brave words, to grasp at her
safety along with her honour, or what she is pleased to consider her
honour to be. And, just as in the case of Enobarbus, an external
stimulus is needed to urge her to the nobler course. The gods in
their unkindness are kind to her. Dolabella’s disclosures and her own
observations convince her that Caesar spares her only for his own glory
and for her shame; that, as she foreboded, her safety and her honour do
not go together. Then, at the thought of the indignity, all her royal
and aristocratic nature rises in revolt, and she at last chooses as she
ought.
[220] Boas, _Shakespeare and his Predecessors_.
On the other hand it is possible to maintain that all these apparent
lapses are mere subterfuges forced on Cleopatra to ensure the success
of her scheme; and this interpretation receives some support not only
from the text of the play, but from the comparison of it with North,
and a consideration of what in the original narrative Shakespeare takes
for granted, of what he alters, and of what he adds.[221]
After her more or less explicit statements in Antony’s death scene,
her suppliant message from the monument is an interpolation of the
dramatist’s; but so is the very different declaration which she
subsequently makes to her confidantes and in which her purpose of
suicide seems unchanged:
My desolation does begin to make
A better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar;
Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
A minister of her will: and it is great
To do the thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung,[222]
The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.
(V. ii. 1.)
[221] This was first suggested in A. Stahr’s _Cleopatra_. I prefer to
give the arguments in my own way.
[222] So in folio: some modern editions alter unnecessarily to “dug.”
Which of these two utterances gives the true Cleopatra, the one
transmitted at second hand for Octavius’ consumption, or the one
breaking from her in private to her two women who will be true to
her till death? Quite apart from the circumstances in which, and the
persons to whom, they are spoken, there is a marked difference in
tone between the ceremonious official character of the first, and the
spontaneous sincerity of the second.
Then just at this moment Proculeius arrives and engages her in talk. It
is not wonderful that she should look for a moment to the man Antony
had recommended to her; but, though she is deferential to Octavius, her
one request is not for herself but for her son. And when the surprise
is effected, there is no question of the genuineness of her attempt
at self-destruction. Even when she is disarmed, she persists, as with
Plutarch, in her resolution to kill herself if need be by starvation.
In Plutarch she is dissuaded from this by threats against her children;
in Shakespeare events proceed more rapidly, and she has no time to put
such a plan in practice; nor is any serious use made of the maternal
“motif.” From first to last it is, along with grief for Antony,
resentment at the Roman triumph that moves her. And these feelings are
in full activity when immediately afterwards she is left in charge of
Dolabella. This passage also is an addition, and it is noteworthy that
it begins with her deification of Antony, and ends with Dolabella’s
assurance, which in Plutarch only follows later where the play repeats
it, of her future fate.
_Cle._ He’ll lead me, then, in triumph?
_Dol._ Madam, he will; I know’t.
(V. ii. 109.)
It is just then that Caesar is announced; and it is hard to believe
that Cleopatra, with her two master passions excited to the height,
should really contemplate embezzling treasure as provision for a life
which surely, in view of the facts, she could not care to prolong.
Moreover, in Plutarch’s narrative there is a contradiction or ambiguity
which North’s marginal note brings into relief, and which would be
quite enough to set a duller man than Shakespeare thinking about what
it all meant.
At length, she gave him a breefe and memoriall of all the
readie money and treasure she had. But by chaunce there
stoode Seleucus by, one of her Treasorers, who to seeme a
good servant, came straight to Caesar to disprove Cleopatra,
that she had not set in al, but kept many things back of
purpose. Cleopatra was in such a rage with him, that she
flew upon him and tooke him by the heare of the head, and
boxed him wellfavoredly. Caesar fell a-laughing, and parted
the fray. “Alas,” said she, “O Caesar: is not this a great
shame and reproche, that thou having vouchsaved to take the
peines to come unto me, and hast done me this honor, poore
wretche, and caitife creature, brought into this pitiefull
and miserable estate: and that mine owne servaunts should
come now to accuse me, though it may be I have reserved some
juells and trifles meete for women, but not for me (poore
soule) to set out my selfe withall, but meaning to geve some
pretie presents and gifts unto Octavia and Livia, that they
making meanes and intercession for me to thee, thou mightest
yet extend thy favor and mercie upon me?” Caesar was glad
to heare her say so, _perswading him selfe thereby that
she had yet a desire to save her life_. So he made her
answere, that he did not only geve her that to dispose of at
her pleasure, which she had kept backe, but further promised
to use her more honorably and bountifully then she would
thinke for: and so he tooke his leave of her, _supposing
he had deceived her, but in deede he was deceived him
selfe_.
And North underlines the suggestive clauses with his comment:
Cleopatra finely deceiveth Octavius Caesar, as though she
desired to live.
It is not hard therefore to see how the whole episode may be taken
as contrived on her part. It would be a device of the serpent of old
Nile, one of her triumphs of play-acting, by means of which she gets
the better of her conqueror and makes him indeed an ass unpolicied.
And though the suggestion would come from Plutarch, whom Shakespeare
follows in the main very closely throughout this passage, it is pointed
out that some of Shakespeare’s modifications in detail seem to favour
this view.
And to begin with it should be noticed that in all this episode
he passes over what is abject or hysterical or both in Plutarch’s
Cleopatra, and gives her a large measure of royal self-respect and
self-command. This is how Octavius finds her in the original story:
Cleopatra being layed upon a little low bed in poore estate,
when she sawe Caesar come in to her chamber, she sodainly
rose up, naked in her smocke, and fell downe at his feete
marvelously disfigured: both for that she had plucked her
heare from her head, as also for that she had martired all
her face with her nailes, and besides, her voyce was small
and trembling, her eyes sonke into her heade with continuall
blubbering.
Thus, and with other traits that we omit, Plutarch describes her “ougly
and pitiefull state,” when Caesar comes to see and comfort her. We
cannot imagine Shakespeare’s Cleopatra ever so forgetting what was due
to her beauty, her rank, and herself. Then the narrative proceeds:
When Caesar had made her lye downe againe, and sate by her
beddes side; Cleopatra began to cleere and excuse her selfe
for that she had done, laying all to the feare she had of
Antonius. Caesar, in contrarie maner, reproved[223] her in
every poynt.
[223] _i.e._ confuted.
In the play this suggestion is put back to the interview with Thyreus;
and is made, not refuted, on the authority of Octavius.
_Thy._ He knows that you embrace not Antony
As you did love, but as you fear’d him.
_Cle._ O!
_Thy._ The scars upon your honour, therefore, he
Does pity as constrained blemishes,
Not as deserved.
_Cle._ He is a god, and knows
What is most right: mine honour was not yielded,
But conquer’d merely.
(III. xiii. 56.)
But this was before the supreme sorrow had come to quicken in her, her
nobler instincts. Now she has no thought of incriminating Antony and
exculpating herself. She says with quiet dignity:
Sole sir o’ the world,
I cannot project mine own cause so well
To make it clear: but do confess I have
Been laden with like frailties, which before
Have often shamed our sex.
(V. ii. 120.)
Even her wrath at Seleucus is less outrageous than in Plutarch. She
threatens his eyes, but does not proceed to physical violence. She
does not fly upon him and seize him by the hair of the head and box
him well-favouredly. These vivacities Shakespeare had remarked, but
he transfers them to the much earlier scene when she receives news
of Antony’s marriage and strikes the messenger to the ground, and
strikes him again, and drags him up and down. Now she has somewhat more
self-control, and is no longer carried beyond all limits of decency by
her ungovernable moods. Shakespeare, therefore, gives her a new dignity
and strength even in this most equivocal scene; and how could these be
reconciled with a craven hankering for life and a base desire to retain
by swindling a share of its gewgaws?
But a further alteration, we are told, gives a definite though
unobtrusive hint that all the while she is in collusion with Seleucus,
and that the whole affair is a comedy arranged between them to keep
open the door of death. Not only does the treasurer escape unpunished
after his disclosure, but he is invited to make it. In Plutarch he
merely happens to stand by, and intervenes “to seeme a good servant.”
Here Cleopatra calls for him; bids Caesar let him speak on his peril;
and herself orders him, “Speak the truth, Seleucus.”
Moreover his statement and her excuse point to a much more serious
embezzlement than Plutarch suggests, and just in so far would give
Octavius a stronger impression of her desire to live. In the biography
Seleucus confines himself to saying that “she had not set in al,
but kept many things back of purpose”: and she confesses only to
“some juells and trifles meete for women ... meaning to geve some
pretie presents and gifts unto Octavia and Livia.” In the play to her
question: “What have I kept back?” Seleucus answers:
Enough to purchase what you have made known:
(V. ii. 148.)
and she, after the express proviso she makes in advance, that she has
not admitted petty things in the schedule, now acknowledges that she
has reserved not only “lady trifles, immoment toys“—these were already
accounted for—but some “nobler token” for Octavius’ sister and wife.
If these clues are unduly faint, we are reminded that such elliptical
treatment is not without parallel in other incidents of the drama.
Octavius’ policy in regard to Octavia’s marriage, for example, has, in
just the same way, to be gathered from the general drift of events and
the general probabilities of the case, from an unimportant suggestion
in Plutarch, from the opportunity furnished to Agrippa, and his agency
in that transaction, which are not more explicit than the opportunity
furnished to Seleucus, and his agency in this.
These arguments are ingenious and not without their cogency, but they
leave one unconvinced. The difficulties in accepting them are far
greater than in the analogous question of Antony’s marriage. For in
the latter the theory of Octavius’ duplicity does not contradict the
impression of the scene. Nor does it contradict but only supplements
the statement of the historian: the utmost we can say is that it is not
made sufficiently prominent. And, lastly, the doubt that is thus left
possible does not concern a protagonist of the drama, but at most the
chief or one of the chief of the minor characters. But in the present
case the impression produced on the unsophisticated reader is certainly
that Cleopatra is convicted of fraud: and however that impression may
be weakened by a review of the circumstances as a whole, there is no
single phrase or detail that brings the opposite theory home to the
imagination. Besides, the complicity of Seleucus would be a much bolder
fabrication than the complicity of Agrippa: the latter is not recorded,
but the opposite of the former is recorded, and was accepted by all
who dealt with this episode from Jodelle to Daniel, and probably by
all who read Plutarch: the treasurer was present by accident and used
the opportunity to ingratiate himself. So Shakespeare, without giving
adequate guidance himself, would leave people to the presuppositions
they had formed under the guidance of his author. Surely this is a very
severe criticism on his art. But this is not all. The misconstruction
which he did nothing to prevent and everything to produce, would
concern the heroine of the piece, an even more important personage than
the hero, as is shown by her receiving the fifth act to herself, while
Antony is dismissed in the fourth.
These objections, however, only apply to the view that the suppression
and discovery of the treasure were parts of a deliberate stratagem.
They do not affect the arguments that Cleopatra has virtually accepted
death as the only practical solution, and that the rest of her
behaviour at this stage accords ill with mercenary imposture.
In a word both these antagonistic theories approve themselves in so
far as they take into account the facts alleged and the impressions
produced by the drama. If we credit our feelings, it is quite true
that Cleopatra is taken by surprise and put out of countenance, that
she seeks to excuse herself and passionately resents the disloyalty of
Seleucus. And again, if we credit our feelings, it is quite true that
from the time the mortally wounded Antony is brought before her, she
has made up her mind to kill herself, and that she is nobler and more
queenly for her decision than she was before or than Plutarch makes her.
Of course, buoyant and versatile, feeling her life in every limb, and
quick to catch each passing chance, she may even now without really
knowing it, without really believing it, have hoped against hope that
she might still obtain terms she could accept undisgraced. And the hope
of life would bring with it the frailties of life, for clearly it is
only the resolve to die that lifts her above herself. So here we should
only have another instance of the complexity of her strange nature that
can consciously elect the higher path, and yet all the while in its
secret councils provide, if it may be, for following the lower.
But is there not another interpretation possible? What are these “lady
trifles” and “nobler tokens” that together would purchase all the
wealth of money, plate and jewels she has declared. Plutarch, talking
of her magnificence when she obeyed Antony’s first summons, evidently
does not expect to be believed, and adds that it was such “as is
credible enough she might bring from so great a house, and from so
wealthie a realme as Ægypt was.” And now she is “again for Cydnus,”
and needs her “crown and all.” Already to all intents and purposes she
has resolved on her death, as is shown by her frequent assurances. She
has also resolved on the means of it; for scarcely has Caesar left,
than she tells Charmian:
I have spoke already, and it is provided.
(V. ii. 195.)
Will she not also have resolved on the manner of it; and both in the
self-consciousness of her beauty and in memory of her first meeting
with Antony, does she not desire to depart life for the next meeting
with due pomp and state? If we imagine she was keeping back her regalia
for this last display, we can understand why Shakespeare inserted the
“nobler token” in addition to the unconsidered trifles which she was
quite ready to own she had reserved, and of which indeed in Shakespeare
though not in Plutarch she had already made express mention as
uninventoried.[224] We can understand her consternation and resentment
at the disclosure; for just as in regard to the “nobler token” she
could not explain her real motives without ruining her plan. And we can
admire her “cunning past man’s thought” in turning the whole incident
to account as proof that she was willing to live on sufferance as
_protégée_ of Caesar.
[224] It is a rather striking coincidence that Jodelle, too, heightens
Plutarch’s account of the treasures she has retained, and includes
among them the crown jewels and royal robes. Seleucus finishes a
panegyric on her wealth:
Croy, Cesar, croy qu’elle a de tout son or
Et autres biens tout le meilleur caché.
And she says in her defence:
Hé! si j’avois retenu les joyaux
Et quelque part de mes habits royaux,
L’aurois-je fait pour moy, las! malheureuse!
No doubt this suggestion is open to the criticism that it is nowhere
established by a direct statement; but that also applies to the most
probable explanation of some other matters in the play. And meanwhile
I think that it, better than the two previous theories we have
discussed, satisfies the conditions, by conforming with the _data_ of
the play, the treatment of the sources, and the feelings of the reader.
On the one hand it fully admits the reality of Cleopatra’s fraud and of
her indignation at Seleucus. On the other it removes the discrepancy
between her dissimulation, and the loftiness of temper and readiness
for death, which she now generally and but for the usual interpretation
of this incident invariably displays. It tallies with what we may
surmise from Shakespeare’s other omissions and interpolations; and if
it goes beyond Plutarch’s account of Caesar’s deception by Cleopatra,
it does not contradict it, and therefore would not demand so full
and definite a statement as a new story entirely different from the
original.
Be that as it may, there is at least no trace of hesitation or
compliance in the Queen from the moment when she perceives that
Octavius is merely “wording” her. Her self-respect is a stronger or,
at any rate, a more conspicuous motive than her love. Antony, when he
believed her false had said to her:
Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving,
And blemish Caesar’s triumph. Let him take thee,
And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians:
Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot
Of all thy sex; most monster-like be shown
For poor’st diminutives, for doits: and let
Patient Octavia plough thy visage up
With her prepared nails.
(IV. xii. 32.)
These words of wrath have lingered in her memory and she echoes them in
his dying ears:
Not the imperious show
Of the full-fortuned Caesar ever shall
Be brooch’d with me; if knife, drugs, serpents have
Edge, sting, or operation, I am safe:
Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour
Demuring upon me.
(IV. xv. 23.)
The loathsomeness of the prospect grows in her imagination, and
compared with it the most loathsome fate is desirable. She tells
Proculeius:
Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court;
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country’s high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains.
(V. ii. 52.)
And now in the full realisation of the scene, she brings it home to her
women:
_Cle._ Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome, as well as I: mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules and hammers, shall
Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forced to drink their vapour.
_Iras._ The gods forbid!
_Cle._ Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out of tune.
(V. ii. 207.)
Such thoughts expel once for all her mutability and flightiness:
My resolution’s placed and I have nothing
Of woman in me: now from head to foot
I am marble constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.
(V. ii. 238.)
And the scene that follows with the banalities and trivialities of
the clown who supplies the aspics among the figs, brings into relief
the loneliness of a queenly nature and a great sorrow. Yet not merely
the loneliness, but the potency as well. Who would have given the
frivolous waiting-women of the earlier scenes credit for devotion and
heroism? Yet inspired by her example they learn their lesson and are
ready to die as nobly as she. Iras has spoken for them all:
Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
(V. ii. 193.)
Now she brings the robe and crown Cleopatra wore at Cydnus, and then,
like Eros, ushers the way. Charmian stays but to close the eyes and
arrange the diadem of her dead mistress:
Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld
Of eyes again so royal. Your crown’s awry;
I’ll mend it, and then play.
(V. ii. 319.)
Thereupon she too applies the asp and provokes its fang.
O, come apace, dispatch.
(V. ii. 325.)
Even in the last solemn moment there is vanity, artifice, and
voluptuousness in Cleopatra. She is careful of her looks, of her state,
of her splendour, even in death; and doubtless would have smiled if she
could have heard Caesar’s tardy praise:
She looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
(V. ii. 349.)
And she does not depart quite in the high Roman fashion. She has
studied to make her passage easy, and has taken all measures that may
enable her to liken the stroke of death to a lover’s pinch and the
biting of the asp to the suckling of a babe, and to say:
As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle.
(V. ii. 314.)
None the less her exit in its serene grace and dignity is imperial, and
deserves the praise of the dying Charmian and the reluctant Octavius.
CHAPTER VII
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
Hitherto this discussion of _Antony and Cleopatra_ has so far as
possible passed over the most distinctive thing in the history of the
hero and heroine, the fatal passion that binds them together, gives
significance to their lives, and makes their memories famous. Knowing
their environment and their nature we are in a better position to see
in some measure what it meant.
We have noted how in that generation all ties of customary morality
are loosed, how the individual is a law to himself, and how
selfishness runs riot in its quest of gratification, acquisition,
material ambition. Among the children of that day those make the
most sympathetic impression who import into the somewhat casual
and indefinite personal relations that remain—the relation of the
legionary to his commander, of the freedman to his patron, of the
waiting-woman to her mistress—something of universal validity and
worth. But obviously no connection in a period like this at once arises
so naturally from the conditions, and has the possibilities of such
abiding authority, as the love of the sexes. On the one hand it is
the most personal bond of all. Love is free and not to be compelled.
It results from the spontaneous motion of the individual. Were we to
conceive the whole social fabric dissolved, men and women would still
be drawn together by mutual inclination in more or less permanent
unions of pairs. And yet this attraction that seems to be and that is
so completely dictated by choice, that is certainly quite beyond the
domain of external compulsion, is in another aspect quite independent
of the will of the persons concerned, and sways them like a resistless
natural force. It has been said that the highest compliment the lover
can pay the beloved is to say, “I cannot help loving you.” Necessity is
laid upon him, and he is but its instrument. If then the inclination
is so pervasive and imperious that it becomes a master passion,
clearly it will supply the grand effective bond when other social
bonds fail. When nothing else can, it will enable a man and woman to
overleap a few at least of the barriers of their selfishness, and in
some measure to merge their egoism in sympathy. This is what justifies
Antony’s idolatry of Cleopatra to our feelings. The passion is
enthusiastic, and in a way is self-forgetful; and passion, enthusiasm,
self-forgetfulness, whatever their aberrations, always command respect.
They especially do so in this world of greeds and cravings and
calculating self-interest. This infinite devotion that shrinks from no
sacrifice, is at once the greatest thing within Antony’s reach, and
witness to his own greatness in recognising its worth. The greatest
thing within his reach: when we remember what the ambitions of his
fellows and his rivals were, there is truth in the words with which he
postpones all such ambitions to the bliss of the mutual caress:
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: when such a mutual pair (_embracing_)
And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.
(I. i. 33.)
And only one of grand general outlook could feel like this, when he had
tasted the sweets of conquest and power, and when all the kingdoms of
the world were reached to his hand as the alternative for the kingdom
of his love. It takes a hero, with such experiences behind him and
such opportunities before, to make the disastrous choice. Heine tells
us how he read Plutarch at school and how the master “impressed on us
that Antony for this woman spoiled his public career, involved himself
in domestic unpleasantnesses, and at last plunged himself in ruin.
In truth my old master was right, and it is extremely dangerous to
establish intimate relations with a person like Cleopatra. It may be
the destruction of a hero; but only of a hero. Here as everywhere there
is no danger for worthy mediocrity.”
But despite the sympathy with which Shakespeare regards Antony’s
passion both as an object of pursuit and as an indication of nobility,
he is quite aware that it is pernicious and criminal. Relatively it may
be extolled: absolutely it must be condemned. It is rooted in breach
of troth and duty, and it bears within itself the seeds of infidelity
and wrong. It has none of the inviolability and security of a lawful
love. After all, Cleopatra’s gibes about Antony’s relations with “the
married woman” and herself, despite their affectation of petulance,
are only too much to the point, so far as he is concerned; and when
she has yielded to Julius, Pompey, and Antony in turn, what guarantee
has the last favourite that she will not do so again to some later
supplanter? In point of fact each is untrue to the other, Antony by his
marriage with Octavia, Cleopatra by her traffickings with Octavius and
Thyreus.[225] She forfeits in the sequel her right to be angry at his
truancy; he has forfeited in advance the right to be angry at hers. But
it is their penalty that these resentments should come between them;
and at the very time when they most need each other’s support, their
relation, being far from the perfect kind that casts out mistrust, is
vitiated by jealousy on the one side and fear on the other. She flees
to the Monument, shuts herself up from his blind rage in craven panic,
and seeks to save her life by lies. At the sight of the liberties she
has allowed Thyreus to take, he loses himself in mad outbursts which
have but a partial foundation in the facts. Then he jumps to the
conclusion that she has arranged for the desertion of the sailors, and
dooms her to death, when in reality she seems to know nothing about it.
Betray’d I am:
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—
Whose eye beck’d forth my wars and call’d them home;
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,—
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.
(IV. xii. 24.)
These terrors and suspicions are inevitable in such love as theirs.
[225] I take it as certain that with Thyreus she is for the moment at
least “a boggler,” and then she has already sent her private message to
Caesar.
Or is their feeling for each other to be called love at all? The
question has been asked even in regard to Antony. From first to last he
is aware not only of her harmfulness but of her pravity. He is under no
illusions about her cunning, her boggling, her falsity. And can this
insight co-exist with devotion?
Much more frequently it has been asked in regard to Cleopatra. She
frankly avows even in retrospect her policy of making him her prey.
Thus does she mimic fact in her pastime:
Give me mine angle: we’ll to the river; there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and, as I draw them up,
I’ll think them every one an Antony,
And say, “Ah, ha! you’re caught.”
(II. v. 10.)
Moreover, her first capture of him at that banquet where he paid
his heart as ordinary, was a mere business speculation. He has been
useful to her since, for he is the man to piece her opulent throne
with kingdoms. When he seems lost to her, she realises that she can no
longer gratify her caprices as once she did.
_Alex._ Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you
But when you are well pleased.
_Cle._ That Herod’s head
I’ll have: but how, when Antony is gone
Through whom I might command it?
(III. iii. 4.)
Or, if other motives supervene, they belong to wanton whim and splendid
coquetry. Her deliberate allurements, her conscious wiles, her
calculated tenderness, are all employed merely to retain her command
of the serviceable instrument, and at the same time minister to her
vanity, since Antony would accept such a rôle only from her.
If both or either of these theories were adopted, the whole interest
and dignity of the theme would be gone. If Antony were not genuinely
in love, his follies and delinquencies would cast him beyond the pale
of our tolerance. If Cleopatra were not genuinely in love, she would
at best deserve the description of Ten Brink, “a courtesan of genius.”
If the love were not mutual, Antony would be merely the toy of the
courtesan, Cleopatra merely the toy of the sensualist.
But in point of fact, it is mutual and sincere. Antony’s feeling has to
do with much more than the senses. It goes deeper and higher; and even
when he doubts Cleopatra’s affection, he never doubts his own:
(Her) heart I thought I had, for she had mine.
(IV. xiv. 16.)
Cleopatra’s feeling may have originated in self-interest and may make
use of craft. But in catching Antony she has been caught herself; and
though interest and vanity are not expelled, they are swallowed up in
vehement admiration for the man she has ensnared. Her artifices are
successful, because they are the means made use of by a heart that is
deeply engaged; and it is no paradox to say that they are evidence of
her sincerity. So often as she refers to her lover seriously, it is
with something like adoration. After the first separation, he is her
“man of men.” In her first bitterness at his marriage, she cannot let
him go, for
Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,
The other way’s a Mars.
(II. v. 116.)
Even when he is fallen and worsted, she has no doubt how things would
go were it a merely personal contest between him and his rival. When
he returns from his last victory, she greets him: “Lord of lords! O
infinite virtue!” (IV. viii. 16). When he dies, the world seems to her
“no better than a sty” (IV. xv. 62). When she recalls his splendour,
his bounty, his joyousness, it seems not a reality, but a dream, which
yet must be more than a dream.
If there be, nor ever were, one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming: nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony, were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
(V. ii. 96.)
Various interpretations have been given of these lines, but on any
possible interpretation they exalt Antony alike above fact and
fancy.[226] And when we run through the whole gamut of the words and
deeds of the pair, from their squabbles to their death, it seems to
me possible to doubt their love only by isolating some details and
considering them to the exclusion of the rest.
[226] To me the sense seems to be: Supposing the Antony I have depicted
never existed, still the conception is too great to be merely my own.
It must be an imagination of Nature herself, which she may be unable to
embody, but which shames our puny ideals. In other words, Antony is the
“form” or “type” which Nature aims at even if she does not attain. I
see no reason for changing the “nor” of the first line as it is in the
folio to “or.”
But the truth is that the love of Antony and Cleopatra is genuine and
intense; and if it leads to shame as well as to glory, this is to be
explained, apart from the circumstances of the time, apart from the
characters of the lovers, in the nature of the variety to which it
belongs.
Plutarch, whose thoughts when he is discussing such subjects are never
far from Plato’s, has a passage in which he characterises Antony’s
passion by reference to the famous metaphor in the _Phaedrus_.
In the ende, the horse of the minde, as Plato termeth it,
that is so hard of rayne (I meane the unreyned lust of
concupiscence), did put out of Antonius’ heade all honest
and commendable thoughts.
Certainly it is not the milder and more docile steed that takes the
lead in Antony’s affection. But it is perhaps a little surprising
that Plutarch did not rather go for his Platonic illustration to the
_Symposium_, where the disquisitions of Aristophanes and Diotima
explain respectively what Antony’s love is and is not. Aristophanes,
with his myth that men, once four-legged and four-armed, were split
in two because they were too happy, and now are pining to find their
counterparts, gives the exact description of what the love of Antony
and Cleopatra is.
Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man,
having one side only like a flat-fish, and he is always
looking for his other half.... When one of them finds his
other half, ... the pair are lost in an amazement of love
and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the
other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment.[227]
And, on the other hand, Diotima’s opposite theory does not apply to
this particular case, at least, to begin with or superficially:
You hear people say that lovers are seeking for their other
half; but I say that they are seeking neither for the half
of themselves, nor for the whole, unless the half or the
whole be also a good. And they will cut off their own hands
and feet and cast them away, if they are evil.... For there
is nothing which men love but the good.[228]
[227] Jowett’s _Plato_, Vol. II., pages 42-43.
[228] _Ibid_, pages 56-57.
We may put the case in a somewhat more popular and modern fashion. All
love that really deserves the name must base more or less completely
on sympathy, on what Goethe called _Wahlverwandschaft_, or elective
affinity. But such affinity may be of different kinds and degrees,
and according to its range will tend to approximate to one of two
types. It may mean sympathy with what is deepest and highest in us,
our aspiration after the ideal, our bent towards perfection; or it
may mean sympathy with our whole nature and with all our feelings and
tendencies, alike with those that are high and with those that are low.
The former is the more exacting though the more beneficent. It implies
the suppression and abnegation in us of much that is base, of much that
is harmless, of much, even, that may be good, for the sake of the best.
In it we must inure ourselves to effort and sacrifice for the sake of
advance in that supersensible realm where the union took place.
The second is less austere, and, for the time being, more
comprehensive. It is founded on a correspondence in all sorts of
matters, great and small, noble and base, of good or of bad report. If
it lacks the exclusive loftiness of the other, it affords many more
points of contact and a far greater wealth of daily fellowship. And
of this latter variety, the love of Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps
the typical example. At first sight it is evident that they are, as
we say, made for each other. They are both past the first bloom of
youth. Cleopatra, whom at the outset Plutarch makes twenty-eight years
of age, and of whose wrinkles and waned lip Shakespeare, though in
irony and exaggeration, finds it possible to speak, has relatively
reached the same period of life as Antony, whom Plutarch makes at the
outset forty-three or forty-six years of age, and whom Shakespeare
represents as touched with the fall of eld. And they correspond in
their experiences. Neither is a novice in love and pleasure: Cleopatra,
the woman with a history, Antony, the masquer and reveller of Clodius’
set, have both seen life. They are alike in their emotionalism, their
impressibility, their quick wits, their love of splendour, their genial
power, their intellectual scope, their zest for everything. Plutarch
narrates—and it is strange that _à propos_ of this he did not quote
Aristophanes’ saying in the _Symposium_—
She, were it in sport, or in matter of earnest, still
devised sundrie new delights to have Antonius at
commaundement, never leaving him night nor day, nor once
letting him go out of her sight. For she would play at dyce
with him, drinke with him, and hunt commonly with him, and
also be with him when he went to any exercise or activity
of body. And sometime, also, when he would goe up and downe
the citie disguised like a slave in the night, and would
peere into poore men’s windowes and their shops, and scold
and brawle with them within the house: Cleopatra would be
also in a chamber-maides array, and amble up and downe the
streets with him, so that oftentimes Antonius bare away both
mockes and blowes.
Here we have a picture of the completest _camaraderie_ in things
serious and frivolous, athletic and intellectual, decorous and
venturesome, with memories of which the play is saturated. We are
witnesses of Cleopatra’s impatience when he is away for a moment: we
hear of her drinking him to bed before the ninth hour, and of their
outdoor sports. Antony proposes to roam the streets with her and note
the qualities of the people. Perhaps it was some such expedition that
gave Enobarbus material for his description:
I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.
(II. ii. 233.)
It is such doings that raise the gorge of the genteel Octavius, who has
no sense for popular pleasures, whether we call them simple or vulgar.
But the daughter of the Ptolemies is less fastidious, and is as ready
as Antony to escape from the etiquette of the court and take her share
in these unceremonious frolics. Yet it is not only these lighter moods
and moments that draw them together. In the depth of his mistrust,
Antony recalls the “grave charm” of his enchantress; and she, when he
is no more, remembers that
his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres.
(V. ii. 83.)
But what of serious and elevated they have in common gains warmth and
colour by their mutual delight in much that is neither one nor other.
He tells her,
But that your royalty
Holds idleness your subject, I should take you
For idleness itself.
(I. iii. 91.)
And he pays homage to her in every mood:
Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom everything becomes, to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself, in thee, fair and admired!
(I. i. 48.)
It is as genuine and catholic admiration as Florizel’s for Perdita:
What you do
Still betters what is done....
Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,
That all your acts are queens.
(_W.T._ IV. iv. 135.)
But apart from their sincerity and range, how different are the two
tributes: Florizel’s all innocence and simplicity, Antony’s _raffiné_
and sophisticated. We feel from his words that he would endorse
Shakespeare’s ambiguous praise of his own dark lady:
Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?
(_Sonnet_ CL. 5.)
Does not Enobarbus speak in almost exactly the same way of the
Cleopatra that Antony adores?
Vilest things
Become themselves in her; that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
(II. ii. 243.)
Thus the two are alike not only in great and indifferent things,
but in their want of steadfastness, their want of principle, their
compliance with baseness. Hence they encourage each other in what
debilitates and degrades, as well as in what fortifies and exalts. At
its worst their love has something divine about it, but often it seems
a divine orgy rather than a divine inspiration. Not seldom does it
lead to madness and ignominy. That Antony loses the world for it is a
small matter and even proves his grandeur of soul. But for it, besides
“offending reputation,” he profanes his inward honour as well; and
that unmasks it as the Siren and Fury of their lives. Indeed, such
love is self-destructive, and for it the lovers sacrifice the means
of securing it against the hostile power of things. Yet, just because
it is so plenary and permeating, it becomes an inspiration too. When
its prodigal largesse fails, at the hour when it is stripped of its
inessential charms, the lovers are thrown back on itself; and at once
it elevates them both. Antony, believing Cleopatra dead, and not yet
undeceived as to the part that he fancies she played at the last,
thinks only of following her to entreat and obtain a reconciliation.
I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and
Weep for my pardon.
(IV. xiv. 44.)
When he learns that she still lives, no reproach crosses his lips for
the deceit; his only wish as the blood flows from his breast is to be
borne “where Cleopatra bides” to take a last farewell. He wrestles with
death till he receives the final embrace:
I am dying, Egypt, dying: only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
(IV. xv. 18.)
Thereafter he has no thought of himself but only of her, counselling
her in complete self-abnegation to seek of Caesar her honour with her
safety, and recommending her to trust only Proculeius—one who, as we
soon learn, would be eager to preserve her life.
And her love, too, though perhaps more fitfully, yet all the more
strikingly, is deepened and solemnised by trial. After Actium it
quite loses its element of mockery and petulance. Her flout at
Antony’s negligence before the battle is the last we hear her utter.
Henceforth, whether she protests her faith, or speeds him to the fight,
or welcomes him on his return, her words have a new seriousness
and weight.[229] Her feeling seems to become simpler and sincerer
as her fortunes cloud, and at her lover’s death it is nature alone
that triumphs. In the first shock of bereavement Iras, attempting
consolation, addresses her as “Royal Egypt, Empress”; and she replies:
No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares.
(IV. xv. 72.)
[229] Le plus grand miracle de l’amour, c’est de guérir de la
coquetterie.—_La Rochefoucauld._
Her grief for her great loss, a grief, perhaps, hardly anticipated by
herself, is in her own eyes her teacher, and “begins to make a better
life.” Even now she may falter, if the usual interpretation of her
fraud with the treasure is correct. Even now, at all events, she has to
be urged by the natural and royal but not quite unimpeachable motive,
the dread of external disgrace. Cleopatra is very human to the last.
Her weaknesses do not disappear, but they are but as fuel to the flames
of her love by which they are bred and which they help to feed. It is
still as the “curled Antony” she pictures her dead lover, and it is in
“crown and robe” that she will receive that kiss which it is her heaven
to have. But even in this there is a striking similarity to Antony’s
expectation of the land where “souls do couch on flowers,” and where
they will be the cynosure of the gazing ghosts. Their oneness of heart
and feeling is indeed now complete, and their love is transfigured. It
is at his call she comes, and his name is the last word she utters,
before she lays the second asp on her arm. The most wonderful touch of
all is that now she feels her right to be considered his wife. This, of
course, is due to Shakespeare, but it is not altogether new. It occurs
in Daniel’s tragedy, when she calls on Antony’s spirit to pray the gods
on her behalf:
O if in life we could not severd be,
Shall death divide our bodies now asunder?
Must thine in Egypt, mine in Italy,
Be kept the Monuments of Fortune’s wonder?
If any powres be there whereas thou art
(Sith our country gods betray our case),
O worke they may their gracious helpe impart
To save thy wofull _wife_ from such disgrace.
It also occurs twice in Plutarch, from whom Daniel probably obtained
it. In the _Comparison of Demetrius and Marcus Antonius_, he
writes:[230]
Antonius first of all married two wives together, the which
never Romane durst doe before, but him self.
[230] Cleopatra was actually married to Antony, as has been proved by
Professor Ferrero. But Plutarch nowhere else mentions the circumstance,
and it contradicts the whole tenor of his narrative.
In the biography, when Cleopatra has lifted him to the Monument, we are
told:
Then she dryed up his blood that had berayed his face, and
called him her Lord, _her husband_, and Emperour, forgetting
her owne miserie and calamity for the pitie and compassion
she tooke of him.
It is not, therefore, the invention of the idea, but the new position
in which he introduces it, that shows Shakespeare’s genius. It has no
great significance, either in Plutarch or Daniel. In the one, Cleopatra
is speaking in compassion of Antony; in the other, she is bespeaking
Antony’s compassion for herself. But in Shakespeare, when she scorns
life for her love, and prefers honour with the aspic’s bite to safety
with shame, she feels that now at last their union has the highest
sanction, and that all the dross of her nature is purged away from the
pure spirit:
Husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air: my other elements
I give to baser life.
(V. ii. 290.)
Truly their love, which at first seemed to justify Aristophanes against
Diotima, just because it is true love, turns out to answer Diotima’s
description after all. Or perhaps it rather suggests the conclusion
in the _Phaedrus_: “I have shown this of all inspirations to be the
noblest and the highest, and the offspring of the highest; and that he
who loves the beautiful, is called a lover, because he partakes of it.”
Antony and Cleopatra, with all their errors, are lovers and partake of
beauty, which we cannot say of the arid respectability of Octavius. It
is well and right that they should perish as they do: but so perishing
they have made their full atonement; and we can rejoice that they have
at once triumphed over their victor, and left our admiration for them
free.
_CORIOLANUS_
CHAPTER I
POSITION OF THE PLAY BEFORE THE ROMANCES. ITS POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC
ASPECTS
_Coriolanus_ seems to have been first published in the folio of 1623,
and is one of the sixteen plays described as not formerly “entered to
other men.” In this dearth of information there has naturally been some
debate on the date of its composition, yet the opinions of critics with
few exceptions agree as to its general position and tend more and more
to limit the period of uncertainty to a very few months.
This comparative unanimity is due to the evidence of style,
versification, and treatment rather than of reminiscences and
allusions. Though a fair number of the latter have been discovered
or invented, some of them are vague and doubtful, some inapposite or
untenable, hardly any are of value from their inherent likelihood.
Of these, one which has been considered to give the _terminus a quo_
in dating the play was pointed out by Malone in the fable of Menenius.
Plutarch’s account is somewhat bald:
On a time all the members of mans bodie, dyd rebell against
the bellie, complaining of it, that it only remained in the
middest of the bodie, without doing any thing, neither dyd
beare any labour to the maintenaunce of the rest: whereas
all other partes and members dyd labour paynefully, and was
very carefull to satisfie the appetites and desiers of the
bodie. And so the bellie, all this notwithstanding, laughed
at their follie, and sayed: “It is true, I first receyve all
meates that norishe mans bodie: but afterwardes I send it
againe to the norishement of other partes of the same. Even
so (quoth he) O you, my masters, and cittizens of Rome: the
reason is a like betwene the Senate, and you. For matters
being well digested, and their counsells throughly examined,
touching the benefit of the common wealth; the Senatours are
cause of the common commoditie that commeth unto every one
of you.”
This is meagre compared with Shakespeare’s full-blooded and
dramatic narrative, and though in any case the chief credit for the
transformation would be due to the poet, who certainly contributes most
of the picturesque and humorous details and all of the interruptions
and rejoinders, it has been thought that he owes something to the
expanded version in Camden’s _Remaines concerning Britaine_, which
appeared in 1605.
All the members of the body conspired against the stomacke,
as against the swallowing gulfe of all their labors; for
whereas the eies beheld, the eares heard, the handes
labored, the feete traveled, the tongue spake, and all
partes performed their functions, onely the stomacke lay
idle and consumed all. Here uppon they ioyntly agreed al
to forbeare their labors, and to pine away their lasie and
publike enemy. One day passed over, the second followed very
tedious, but the third day was so grievous to them all, that
they called a common Counsel; the eyes waxed dimme, the
feete could not support the bodie, the armes waxed lasie,
the tongue faltered, and could not lay open the matter;
therefore they all with one accord desired the advise of the
Heart. Then Reason layd open before them that hee against
whome they had proclaimed warres, was the cause of all this
their misery: For he as their common steward, when his
allowances were withdrawne of necessitie withdrew theirs
fro them, as not receiving that he might allow. Therefore
it were a farre better course to supply him, than that the
limbs should faint with hunger. So by the perswasion of
Reason, the stomacke was served, the limbes comforted, and
peace re-established. Even so it fareth with the bodies of
Common weale; for albeit the Princes gather much, yet not so
much for themselves, as for others: So that if they want,
they cannot supply the want of others; therefore do not
repine at Princes heerein, but respect the common good of
the whole publike estate.
It has been pointed out,[231] in criticism of Malone’s suggestion,
that in some respects Shakespeare’s version agrees with Plutarch’s and
disagrees with Camden’s. Thus in Camden it is the stomach and not the
belly that is denounced, the members do not confine themselves to words
but proceed to deeds, it is not the belly but Reason from its seat in
the heart that sets forth the moral. This is quite true, but no one
doubted that Shakespeare got from Plutarch his general scheme; the only
question is whether he fitted into it details from another source. It
has also been objected that Shakespeare was quite capable of making the
additions for himself; and this also is quite true as the other and
more vivid additions prove, if it needed to be proved. Nevertheless,
when we find Shakespeare’s expansions in the play following some of the
lines laid down by Camden in the _Remaines_, occasionally with verbal
coincidence, it seems not unlikely that the _Remaines_ were known to
him. Thus he does not treat the members like Plutarch in the mass,
but like Camden enumerates them and their functions; the stomach in
Camden like the belly in Shakespeare is called a gulf, a term that is
very appropriate but that would not occur to everyone; the heart where
Reason dwells and to which Camden’s mutineers appeal for advice, is
the counsellor heart in Shakespeare’s list.[232] Moreover, it has been
shown by
[231] _E.g._, by Delius. _Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in seinem
Verhältness zum Coriolanus des Plutarch_ (_Jahrbuch der D.-Sh.
Gesellschaft_, xi. 1876).
[232] In some respects Shakespeare’s details remind me more of Livy
than either of Plutarch or Camden; _e.g., “Inde apparuisse ventris
quoque haud segne ministerium esse, nec magis ali quam alere eum,
reddentem in omnis corporis partes hunc, quo vivimus vigemusque,
divisum pariter in venas maturum confecto cibo sanguinem_.” (II. 32.)
Cf.
I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; ...
... but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood, ...
And through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live.
(I. i. 135 seq.)
This certainly is liker Livy than Plutarch; and besides the chances of
Shakespeare having read Livy in the original, we have to bear in mind
that in 1600 Philemon Holland published the _Romane Historie written by
Titus Livius of Padua_. His version, as it is difficult to procure, may
be quoted in full:
Whilome (quoth he) when as in mans bodie, all the parts
thereof agreed not, as now they do in one, but each member
had a several interest and meaning, yea, and a speech by it
selfe; so it befel, that all other parts besides the belly,
thought much and repined that by their carefulness, labor,
and ministerie, all was gotten, and yet all little enough to
serve it: and the bellie it selfe lying still in the mids of
them, did nothing else but enjoy the delightsome pleasures
brought unto her. Wherupon they mutinied and conspired
altogether in this wise, That neither the hands should reach
and convey food to the mouth, nor the mouth receive it as
it came, ne yet the teeth grind and chew the same. In this
mood and fit, whiles they were minded to famish the poore
bellie, behold the other lims, yea and the whole bodie
besides, pined, wasted, and fel into an extreme consumption.
Then was it wel seen, that even the very belly also did no
smal service, but fed the other parts, as it received food
it selfe: seeing that by working and concocting the meat
throughlie, it digesteth and distributeth by the veines into
all parts, that fresh and perfect blood whereby we live, we
like, and have our full strength. Comparing herewith, and
making his application, to wit, how like this intestine,
and inward sedition of the bodie, was to the full stomacke
of the Commons, which they had taken and borne against the
Senatours, he turned quite the peoples hearts.
Mr. Sidney Lee that there were friendly relations between the two men.
So it is a conjecture no less probable than pleasing that Shakespeare
owed a few hints to the great and patriotic scholar whom Ben Jonson
hailed as “most reverend head.”
It is clear, however, that if the debt to Camden was more certain than
it is, this would only give us the year before which _Coriolanus_ could
not have been written, and it would not of itself establish a date
shortly after the publication of the _Remaines_. Such a date has been
suggested, but the reference to Camden has been made merely auxiliary
to the argument of a connection between the play and the general
circumstances of the time. This surmise, for it can hardly be called
more, will presently be noticed, and meanwhile it may be said that the
internal evidence is all against it.
On the other hand, an excessively late date has been proposed for
_Coriolanus_ on the ground of its alleged indebtedness to the fourth
edition of North, of which it is sometimes maintained that Shakespeare
possessed a copy. Till 1612, Volumnia says in her great appeal:
Think now with thy selfe, how much more _unfortunatly_,
then all the women livinge we are come hether;
but in the fourth edition this becomes _unfortunate_, and so
Shakespeare has it:
Think with thyself
How more unfortunate than all living women
Are we come hither.
(V. iii. 96.)
But the employment of the adjectival for the adverbial form is a
very insignificant change, and is, besides, suggested by the rhythm.
Moreover, such importance as it might have, is neutralised by a counter
argument on similar lines, which would go to prove that one of the
first two editions was used. In them Coriolanus tells Aufidius:
If I had feared death, I would not have come hither to have
put my life in hazard: but prickt forward with _spite_ and
desire I have to be revenged of them that thus have banished
me, etc.
In 1603, this suffers the curtailment, “pricked forward with desire to
be revenged, etc.” But Shakespeare says:
If
I had fear’d death, of all men i’ the world
I would have ’voided thee, but in mere _spite_,
To be full quit of those my banishers,
Stand I before thee here.
(IV. v. 86.)
This argument is no doubt of the same precarious kind as the other;
still in degree it is stronger, for the persistence of _spite_ is much
more distinctive than the disappearance of a suffix.
In any case this verbal detail is a very narrow foundation to build
a theory upon, which there is nothing else to support, except one of
those alluring and hazardous guesses that would account for the play in
the conditions of the time. This, too, as in the previous case, may be
reserved for future discussion. Meanwhile the dating of _Coriolanus_,
subsequently to 1612, is not only opposed to internal evidences of
versification and style, but would separate it from Shakespeare’s
tragedies and introduce it among the romantic plays of his final period.
If, however, we turn to the supposed allusions that make for the
intermediate date of 1608 or 1609, we do not find them much more
satisfactory.
Thus it has been argued that the severe cold in January, 1608, when
even the Thames was frozen over, furnished the simile:
You are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice.
(I. i. 176.)
But surely there must have been many opportunities for such things to
present themselves to Shakespeare’s observation or imagination, by the
time that he was forty-four years old.
Again Malone found a reference to James’s proclamation in favour of
breeding silk-worms and the importation of young mulberry trees during
1609, in the expression:
Now humble as the ripest mulberry
That will not hold the handling.
(III. ii. 79.)
But even in _Venus and Adonis_ Shakespeare had told how, in admiration
of the youth’s beauty, the birds
Would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries; (1103.)
and in _Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, Titania orders the fairies to feed
Bottom
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.
(_III._ i. 170.)
A third of these surmises is even more gratuitous. Chalmers calls
attention to the repeated references in the play to famine and dearth,
and supposes they were suggested by the scarcity which prevailed in
England during the years 1608 and 1609. But the lack of corn among the
people is one of the presuppositions of the story, to which Plutarch
also recurs.
There is only one allusion that has strength to stand by itself,
though even it is doubtful; and it belongs to a different class, for,
if authentic, it is suggested not to Shakespeare by contemporary
events, but to a contemporary writer by Shakespeare. Malone noticed the
coincidence between the line, “He lurch’d all swords of the garland”
(II. ii. 105), and a remark in _Epicoene_: “You have lurched your
friends of the better half of the garland” (V. i.); and considered
that here, as not infrequently, Ben Jonson was girding at Shakespeare.
Afterwards he withdrew his conjecture because he found a similar
expression in one of Nashe’s pamphlets, and concluded that it was
proverbial; but it has been pointed out in answer to this[233] that
Nashe has only the _lurch_ and not the supplementary words, _of the
garland_, while it is to the phrase as a whole, not to the component
parts, that the individual character belongs. This, if not absolutely
beyond challenge, is at least very cogent, and probably few will deny
that _Coriolanus_ must have been in existence before _Epicoene_ was
acted in January 1609, old style.
[233] Introduction to the Clarendon Press Edition.
How long before? And did it succeed or precede _Antony and Cleopatra_?
Attempts have been made to find in that play immediate anticipations
of the mental attitude and of particular thoughts that appear in
_Coriolanus_. Thus Octavia’s dilemma in her petition has been quoted:
A more unhappy lady,
If this division chance, ne’er stood between,
Praying for both parts:
The good gods will mock me presently,
When I shall pray, “O, bless my lord and husband!”
Undo that prayer, by crying out as loud,
“O, bless my brother!” Husband win, win brother,
Prays, and destroys the prayer; no midway
’Twixt these extremes at all.
(III. iv. 12.)
And this has been taken as a link with Volumnia’s perplexity:
And to poor we
Thine enmity’s most capital: thou barr’st us
Our prayers to the gods, which is a comfort
That all but we enjoy: for how can we,
Alas, how can we for our country pray,
Whereto we are bound, together with thy victory,
Whereto we are bound? Alack, or we must lose
The country, our dear nurse, or else thy person,
Our comfort in the country. We must find
An evident calamity, though we had
Our wish, which side should win.
(V. iii. 103.)
But then the same sort of conflict puzzles the Lady Blanch in _King
John_:
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They whirl asunder and dismember me.
Husband, I cannot pray that thou mayst win;
Uncle, I needs must pray that thou mayst lose;
Father, I may not wish the fortune thine;
Grandam, I will not wish thy wishes thrive:
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose
Assured loss before the match be play’d.
(III. i. 327.)
Could not this style of argument be used to prove that _Coriolanus_ and
_Antony and Cleopatra_ immediately followed _King John_?
Or again the contemptuous descriptions of the people by Octavius,
Cleopatra and Antony himself have been treated as preludes to the
more savage vituperations in _Coriolanus_. But _Julius Caesar_ gives
an equally unflattering account of mob law, and some of Casca’s gibes
would quite fit the mouth of Coriolanus or Menenius. On these lines we
should be as much entitled to make this play the direct successor of
the first as of the second of its companions, a theory that would meet
with scant acceptance. The truth is that whenever Shakespeare deals
with the populace, he finds some one to disparage it in the mass.
Still there is little doubt that _Coriolanus_ does occupy the position
these arguments would assign to it, but the real evidence is of another
kind. To begin with there is what Coleridge describes in _Antony and
Cleopatra_ as the “happy valiancy of style,” which first becomes marked
in that play, which is continued in this, and which henceforth in a
greater or less degree characterises all Shakespeare’s work. Then
even more conclusive are the peculiarities of metre, and especially
the increase in the total of weak and light endings together with the
decrease of the light by themselves. Finally, there is the conduct of
the story to a conclusion that proposes no enigma and inflicts no pang,
but even more than in the case of _Macbeth_ satisfies, and even more
than in the case of _Antony and Cleopatra_ uplifts the heart, without
troublesome questionings on the part of the reader. “As we close
the book,” says Mr. Bradley, “we feel more as we do at the close of
_Cymbeline_ than as we do at the close of _Othello_.” We cannot be far
wrong in placing it in the last months of 1608 or the first months of
1609.
Attempts have been made to find suggestions of a personal kind for
Shakespeare’s choice of the subject. The extreme ease with which they
have been discovered for the various dates proposed may well teach us
caution. Thus Professor Brandl who assigns it an earlier position than
most critics and discusses it before _Lear_ sees in it the outcome of
events that occurred in the first years of the century.
The material for _Coriolanus_ was perhaps put in
Shakespeare’s way by a contemporary tragedy which keenly
excited the Londoners, and especially the courtly and
literary circles, about 1603 and 1604. Sir Walter Raleigh
had been one of the most splendid gentlemen at the court
of Elizabeth, was a friend of Spenser and Ben Jonson, had
himself tried his hand at lyric poetry, and in addition as
adventurous officer had discovered Virginia and annexed
Guiana. He was the most highly considered but also the best
hated man in England: for his behaviour was domineering,
in the consciousness of his innate efficiency he showed
without disguise his contempt for the multitude, the
farm of wine-licenses granted him by the Queen had made
him objectionable to the pothouse politicians, and his
opposition in parliament to a bill for cheapening corn had
recently drawn on him new unpopularity. He, therefore,
shortly after the accession of James succumbed to the
charge, that he, the scarred veteran of the Spanish wars,
the zealous advocate of new expeditions against Spain, had
involved himself in treasonous transactions with this, the
hereditary foe of England. In November 1603 the man who had
won treasure-fleets and vast regions for his country, almost
fell a victim to popular rage as he was being transferred
from one prison to another.[234] A month later he was
condemned to death on wretched evidence: he was not yet
executed however but locked up in the Tower, so that men
were in suspense as to his fate for many years. To depict
his character his biographer Edwards involuntarily hit on
some lines of Shakespeare’s _Coriolanus_. The figure of
the Roman, who had deserved well but incurred hatred, of
the patriot whom his aristocratic convictions drive to the
enemy, was already familiar to the dramatist from North’s
translation of Plutarch; and Camden’s _Remaines concerning
Britaine_, which had newly appeared in 1605 contributed a
more detailed version of the fable of the belly and the
members, first set forth by Livy. From this mood and about
this time _Coriolanus_, for the dating of which only the
very relative evidence of metre and style is available, may
most probably have proceeded.[235]
[234] Strictly speaking, from the Tower to Winchester for trial.
[235] _Shakespeare_, in the _Führende Geister_ Series.
In this passage, Professor Brandl has brought out some of the
considerations that would lend the case of Raleigh a peculiar interest
in the eyes of men like Shakespeare, and has made the most of the
parallels between his story and the story of Coriolanus.[236] It is
necessary of course to look away from almost all the points except
those enumerated, for when we remember Sir Walter’s robust adulation
of Elizabeth, and tortuous policy at court, it is difficult to pair
him with the Roman who “would not flatter Neptune for his trident,”
and of whom it was said, “his heart’s his mouth.” Still the analogies
in career and character are there, so far as they go; but they are
insufficient to prove that the actual suggested the poetical tragedy,
still less to override the internal evidence, relative though that
be; for they could linger and germinate in the poet’s mind to bring
forth fruit long afterwards: as for example the treason and execution
of Biron in 1602 inspired Chapman to write _The Conspiracie_ and _The
Tragedie_ which were acted in 1608.
Again, in connection with what seems to be the actual date, an attempt
has been made to explain one prominent characteristic of the play
from a domestic experience through which Shakespeare had just passed.
His mother died in September 1608, and her memory is supposed to be
enshrined in the picture of Volumnia. As Dr. Brandes puts it:[237]
The death of a mother is always a mournfully irreparable
loss, often the saddest a man can sustain. We can realise
how deeply it would go to Shakespeare’s heart when we remember
the capacity for profound and passionate feeling with which
nature had blessed and cursed him. We know little of his
mother; but judging from that affinity which generally
exists between famous sons and their mothers, we may suppose
she was no ordinary woman. Mary Arden, who belonged to
an old and honourable family, which traced its descent
(perhaps justly) back to the days of Edward the Confessor,
represented the haughty patrician element in the Shakespeare
family. Her ancestors had borne their coat of arms for
centuries, and the son would be proud of his mother for this
among other reasons, just as the mother would be proud of
her son. In the midst of the prevailing gloom and bitterness
of his spirits,[238] this fresh blow fell upon him, and out of
his weariness of life as his surroundings and experiences
showed it to him, recalled this one mainstay to him—his
mother. He remembered all she had been to him for forty-four
years, and the thoughts of the man and the dreams of the
poet were thus led to dwell upon the significance in a
man’s life of this unique form, comparable to no other—his
mother. Thus it was that, although his genius must follow
the path it had entered upon and pursue it to the end, we
find, in the midst of all that was low and base in his next
work, this one sublime mother-form, the proudest and most
highly-wrought that he has drawn, Volumnia.
[236] Rather more than the most. It is special pleading to interpret
Raleigh’s arguments against the _Act for sewing Hemp_ and the _Statute
of Tillage_ in 1601, as directed against cheap corn. His point was
rather that coercive legislation in regard to agriculture hindered
production and was oppressive to poor men. Nor am I aware that his
speeches on these occasions increased his unpopularity,—which, no
doubt, was already great.
[237] _William Shakespeare, a critical study._
[238] In point of fact “gloom and bitterness” can be less justly
attributed to _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_ than to any of
the later tragedies, and less justly to _Coriolanus_ than to _Antony
and Cleopatra_; but Dr. Brandes treats _Troilus and Cressida_ as coming
between them, and if that position could be vindicated for it, the
phrase would be defensible.
Thus Shakespeare, in a mood of pessimism, and in the desolation of
bereavement, turned to a subject that he treated on its seamy side,
but redeemed from its meanness by exalting the idea of the mother in
obedience to his own pious regrets. Even, however, if we grant the
assumptions in regard to Mary Arden’s pedigree and her aristocratic
family pride, and the unique support she gave to her son, does this
statement give a true account of the impression the play produces?
Is it the fact that, apart from the figure of Volumnia, the story
is “low and base,” and is it not rather the record of grand though
perverted heroism? Is it the fact that Volumnia stands out as a
study of motherhood, such as the first heartache at a mother’s death
would inspire? The most sympathetic traits in her portrait are drawn
by Plutarch. Shakespeare’s many touches supply the harshness, the
ambition, the prejudice. If these additions are due to Shakespeare’s
wistful broodings on his own mother, a woman with a son of genius may
well hope that he will never brood on her.
Then, especially by those who advocate a later date for the play, a
political motive for it has been discovered. Mr. Whitelaw, who would
assign it to 1610, when James’s first parliament was dissolved,
conjectures that “in _Coriolanus_ Shakespeare intended a two-fold
warning, to the pride of James, and to the gathering resistance of the
Commons.”[239] Mr. Garnett,[240] on the other hand, maintains that
“Coriolanus, to our apprehension, manifestly reflects the feelings of a
conservative observer of the contests between James and his refractory
parliaments,” and placing it after the _Tempest_, would connect it
with the dissolution of the Addled Parliament in 1614. But since the
friction between King and Commons, though it intensified with the
years, was seldom entirely absent, this theory adapts itself pretty
well to any date, and Dr. Brandes, while refusing to trace the spirit
of the play to any “momentary political situation,” adopts the general
principle as quite compatible with the state of affairs in 1608. He
puts the case as follows:
Was it Shakespeare’s intention to allude to the strained
relations existing between James and his parliament? Does
Coriolanus represent an aristocratically-minded poet’s
side-glance at the political situation in England? I fancy
it does. Heaven knows there was little resemblance between
the amazingly craven and vacillating James and the haughty,
resolute hero of Roman tradition, who fought a whole
garrison single-handed. Nor was it personal resemblance
which suggested the comparison, but a general conception
of the situation as between a beneficent power on the one
hand, and the people on the other. He regarded the latter
wholly as mob, and looked upon their struggle for freedom as
mutiny, pure and simple.
[239] _Coriolanus._ Rugby Edition.
[240] In the conclusion of his essay on the _Date and Occasion of the
Tempest_. _Universal Review, 1889._
This theory, however, in all its varieties seems to attribute too
definite an influence to the controversies of the hour, and to
turn Shakespeare too much into the politician prepense. Certainly
_Coriolanus_ is not meant to be a constitutional manifesto; probably
it does not, even at unawares, idealise a contemporary dispute; it is
hardly likely that Shakespeare so much as intrudes conscious allusions
to the questions then at issue. And this on account not only of the
particular opinions attributed to him, but, much more, of his usual
practice in poetic creation. Do any of these alleged incentives in
the circumstances, public or private, of his life go far to explain
his attraction to a story and selection of it, its power over him and
his power over it? Doubtless in realising the subject that took his
fancy, he would draw on the stores of his experience as well as his
imagination. In dealing with the tragedy of a proud and unpopular
hero of antiquity, very possibly he would be helped by what he knew
of the tragedy of a proud and unpopular worthy of his own time. In
dealing with the influence of a mother and the reverence of a son, very
probably the memories of his own home would hover before his mind. In
dealing with the plebeians and patricians of Rome, he would inevitably
fill in the details from his knowledge of the burgesses and nobles of
England, and he might get hints for his picture of the bygone struggle,
from the struggle that he himself could watch. But it is the story of
Coriolanus that comes first and that absorbs all such material into
itself, just as the seed in its growth assimilates nourishment from
the earth and sunshine and rain. These things are not the seed. The
experiences are utilised in the interest of the play; the play is not
utilised in the interest of the experiences.
It is particularly important to emphasise this in view of the
circumstance that _Coriolanus_ has often been regarded as a drama of
principles rather than of character, even by those who refrain from
reading into it any particular reference. But Shakespeare’s supreme
preoccupation is always with his fable, which explains, and is
explained by, human nature in action. He does not set out to commend or
censure or examine a precept or a theory or a doctrine. Of course the
life of men is concerned with such matters, and he could not exclude
them without being untrue to his aim. Thus, to take the most obvious
example, it is impossible to treat of character with a total omission
of ethical considerations, since character is connected with conduct,
and conduct has its ethical aspect; and, indeed, success in getting to
the truth of character depends very much on the keenness of the moral
insight. It is very largely Shakespeare’s moral insight that gives him
his unrivalled position among the interpreters of men; and we may, if
we like, derive any number of improving lessons from his works. But he
is an artist, not a moralist; and he wrote for the story, not for the
moral. Just in the same way an architect seeks to design a beautiful or
convenient building, not to illustrate mechanical laws. Nevertheless,
in proportion as these are neglected, the building will not rise or
will not last; and if they are obeyed, however unconsciously, the
illustration of them will be provided. In Charlotte Brontë’s _Shirley_,
when Caroline gives Robert Moore this very play to read, he asks, “Is
it to operate like a sermon?” And she answers: “It is to stir you; to
give you new sensations. _It is to make you feel life strongly_”—(that
is the main thing, and then comes the indirect consequence)—“not only
your virtues but your vicious perverse points.”
Now just as in all Shakespeare’s dramas, though or rather because they
are personal, the ethical considerations cannot be excluded; so in a
drama that moves through a constitutional crisis, though or rather
because it, too, is personal, political considerations cannot be
excluded. They are there, though it is on the second plane. And just
as his general delineation of character would be unsatisfactory if
his moral insight were at fault, so his delineation of the characters
that play their part in this history would be unsatisfactory if his
political insight were at fault. He is not necessarily bound to
appreciate correctly the conditions that prevailed in reality or by
report: that is required only for historical accuracy or fidelity to
tradition. But he is bound to appreciate the conditions as he imagines
them, and not to violate in his treatment of them the principles that
underlie all political society.
Yet this he has been accused of doing. He has been charged with a
hatred of the people that is incompatible even with a benevolent
tyranny, and with a glorification of the protagonist’s ruthless
disregard of popular claims. Thus Dr. Brandes, in the greater part
of a chapter, dwells upon Shakespeare’s “physical aversion for the
atmosphere of the people,” and “the absence of any humane consideration
for the oppressed condition of the poor”; and, on the other hand,
upon his “hero-worship” for Marcius, whom he glorifies as a demi-god.
Though admitting the dramatist’s detestation of the crime of treason,
this critic sees no implicit censure of what preceded it. To him
Shakespeare’s impression of life as conveyed in the play is that “there
must of necessity be formed round the solitary great ones of the earth,
a conspiracy of envy and hatred raised by the small and mean.”
It is no doubt true that this and many other Shakespearian plays
abound in hostile or scornful vituperation of the people; and not only
of their moral and mental demerits; their sweaty clothes, their rank
breaths, their grossness and uncleanness are held up to derision and
execration. But are we to attribute these sentiments to Shakespeare?
Such utterances are _ex hypothesi_ dramatic, and show us merely
the attitude of the speakers, who are without exception men of the
opposite camp or unfriendly critics. Only once does Shakespeare give
his personal, or rather, impersonal estimate. It is in the _Induction_
to the second part of _Henry IV._, when Rumour, whose words, in this
respect at least, cannot be influenced by individual bias, speaks of
the blunt monster of uncounted heads,
The still-discordant, wavering multitude. (line 18.)
That is, the populace as a whole is stupid, disunited, fickle.
And this is how, apart from the exaggerations of their opponents,
Shakespeare invariably treats crowds of citizens, whether in the
ancient or modern world. He therefore with perfect consistency regards
them as quite unfit for rule, and when they have it or aspire to it,
they cover themselves with ridicule or involve themselves in crime.
But this is by no means to hate them. On the contrary he is kindly
enough to individual representatives, and he certainly believes in
the sacred obligation of governing them for their good. Where then
are the governors to be found? Shakespeare answers: in the royal and
aristocratic classes. It is the privilege and duty of those born in
high position to conduct the whole community aright. Shakespeare can
do justice to the Venetian oligarchy and the English monarchy. But
while to him the rule of the populace is impossible, he also recognises
that nobles and kings may be unequal to their task. The majority of
his kings indeed are more or less failures; his nobles—and in this
play, the patricians—often cut a rather sorry figure. In short, popular
government must be wrong, but royal or aristocratic government need not
be right.
And this was exactly what historical experience at the time seemed to
prove. The Jacqueries, the Peasants’ Wars, the Wat Tyler or Jack Cade
Insurrections, were not calculated to commend democratic experiments;
and, on the other hand, the authority of king and nobles had often,
though not always, secured the welfare of the state.
Now, holding these opinions, would Shakespeare be likely to glorify
Coriolanus? Of course, in a sense he does. There is a _Lues
Boswelliana_ to which the dramatist like the biographer should and must
succumb. He must have a fellow-feeling for his hero and understand from
within all that can be urged on his behalf. So Shakespeare glorifies
Coriolanus in the same way that he glorifies Hamlet or Brutus or
Antony. That is, he appreciates their greatness and explains their
offences so that we sympathise with them and do not regard them as
unaccountable aberrations; but offences they remain and they are not
extenuated. On the contrary they receive all due prominence and are
shown to bring about the tragic catastrophe. This is even more the case
with Coriolanus than with some of the others. So much stress is laid on
his violence and asperities that to many he is antipathetic, and the
antipathy is reflected on the cause that he champions. Gervinus says
very truly:
It will be allowed that from the example of Brutus many more
would be won over to the cause of the people, than would be
won over to aristocratic principles by Coriolanus.
Quite apart from the final apostasy he strikes the unprejudiced reader
as an example to eschew rather than to imitate. Charlotte Brontë, not a
Shakespearian scholar but a woman of no less common sense than genius,
gives the natural interpretation of his career in the passage I have
already referred to. After Caroline and Moore have finished the play,
she makes the former ask concerning the hero:
“Was he not faulty as well as great?”
Moore nodded.
“And what was his fault? What made him hated by the citizens?
What caused him to be banished by his countrymen?”
She answers her own question by quoting Aufidius’ estimate, and
proceeds:
“And you must not be proud to your work people; you must not
neglect the chance of soothing them; and you must not be of
an inflexible nature, uttering a request as austerely as if
it were a command.”
That, so far as it goes, is a quite legitimate “moral” to draw from the
story; and it is the obvious one.
How then does Shakespeare conceive the political situation? On the
one side there is a despised and famished populace, driven by its
misery to demand powers in the state that it cannot wisely use, and
trusting to leaders that are worse than itself. On the other side
there is a prejudiced aristocracy, numbering competent men in its
ranks, but disorganised and, to some extent, demoralised by plebeian
encroachments, so that it can no longer act with its old efficiency
and consistency. And there is one great aristocrat, pre-eminently
consistent and efficient, but whose greatness becomes mischievous
to himself and others, partly because it is out of harmony with the
times, partly because it is corrupted by his inordinate pride. And
to all these persons, or groups of persons, Shakespeare’s attitude,
as we shall see, is at once critical and sympathetic. Admitting the
conditions, we can only agree with Coleridge’s verdict: “This play
illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare’s
politics.[241] And there is no reason why the conditions should not
be admitted. It is easy to imagine a society in which the masses are
not yet ripe for self-government, and in which the classes are no
longer able to steer the state, while a gifted and bigoted champion of
tradition only makes matters worse. Indeed, something similar has been
exemplified in history oftener than once or twice. Whether in point
of fact Shakespeare’s conception is correct for the particular set of
circumstances he describes is quite another question, that concerns
neither the excellence of _Coriolanus_ as a drama nor the fairness of
its political views, but solely its fidelity to antiquarian truth and
the accuracy of its antiquarian _data_.”
[241] _Notes on Plays of Shakespere_, 1818.
Clearly it was impossible for Shakespeare to revive the spirit of
the times in _Coriolanus_, even to the extent that he had done so in
_Julius Caesar_ or _Antony and Cleopatra_, for the simple reason that
in them, with whatever trespasses into fiction on the part of himself
or his authority, he was following the record of what had actually
taken place, while now he was dealing with a legend that seems to have
the less foundation in fact the more it is examined. The tribunate,
with the establishment of which the whole action begins, the opposition
to which by Marcius is his main offence, and the occupants of which
play so important a part in the proceedings, is now generally held to
be of much later origin than the supposed date of the story. There
is no agreement as to the names of the chief persons; Coriolanus
is Cneius or Caius, his mother is Veturia or Volumnia, his wife is
Volumnia or Vergilia, the Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius or Amfidius
or Attius Tullius. Even the appellation Coriolanus rouses suspicion,
for the bestowal of such titles seems to have been unknown till long
afterwards, and, in the view of some, points not to conquest but to
origin; and there are contradictory accounts of the hero’s end. It has
been conjectured[242] that the whole story arose in connection with
religious observances and contains a large mythological admixture; and
we may remember how at the end it is associated with the erection of
the temple to _Fortuna Muliebris_.
[242] By Ettore Pais. _Storia di Roma._ Vol. I.
This much at least is beyond doubt, that the account given by Plutarch,
from whom Shakespeare took his material, and even by Livy, whom he may
have read, has much less matter-of-fact reality than characterises the
later Roman lives. There are many discrepancies and contradictions,
especially in Plutarch’s description. Now he gives what we may consider
an idealised picture of the plebs, attributing to it extraordinary
self-control and sagacity, and again it is to him merely the rascal
vulgar. Now he seems to approve the pliancy which the Senate showed on
the advice of the older and wiser men, and again he seems to blame it
as undignified. And the mixture of bravado and pusillanimity during
the siege is almost unintelligible. Now the city sends the humblest
embassages to the rebel, now it haughtily refuses to treat till he has
withdrawn from Roman soil, and again it despatches what North calls “a
goodly rabble of superstition and priestes” with new supplications.
From a narrative that teemed with incongruities like the above,
Shakespeare was entitled to select the alternatives that would combine
to a harmonious whole, and he rightly chose those that were nearest
to his own comprehension and experience, though perhaps in doing so
he failed to make the most of such elements of historic truth as the
tradition may contain, and certainly effaced some of the antique
colouring.
But if Plutarch’s _Coriolanus_ has less foundation in fact than some
of the later Lives, it is not without compensating advantages. The
circumstance that it is in so large measure a legend, implies that
the popular imagination has been busy working it up, and it already
falls into great scenic crises which lend themselves of their own
accord to the dramatist’s art. It is rather remarkable in view of
this that it had received so little attention from the tragedians of
the time. Perhaps its two-fold remoteness, from worldwide historical
issues on the one hand, and from specifically romantic feeling on the
other, may have told against it. The stories of Lucretia and Virginia
had as primitive and circumscribed a setting, and were nevertheless
popular enough: but they have an emotional interest that appeals to
the general taste. The story of Julius Caesar lacks the sentimental
lure, but concerns such mighty issues that it was the best beloved of
all. And next comes the story of Antony and Cleopatra, which in a high
degree unites both attractions. But _Coriolanus_, even as treated by
Shakespeare, is unsympathetic to many, and the legend is of so little
historic significance that it is often omitted from modern handbooks of
Roman history; so, for these reasons, despite its pre-eminent fitness
for the stage, it was generally passed over.
Not universally, however. It seems already to have engaged the
attention of one important dramatist in France, the prolific and gifted
Alexandre Hardy. Hardy began to publish his works only in 1623, and the
volume containing his _Coriolan_ appeared only in 1625; so there is
hardly any possibility of Shakespeare’s having utilised this play. And,
on the other hand, it was certainly written before 1608, probably in
the last years of the sixteenth century, but in any case by 1607, so
there is even less possibility of its being influenced by Shakespeare’s
treatment. All the more interesting is it to observe the coincidences
that exist between them, and that are due to their having selected a
great many of the same _motifs_ from Plutarch’s story. It shows that
in that story Plutarch met the playwright half way, and justifies the
statement of Hardy in his argument that “few subjects are to be found
in Roman history which are worthier of the stage.”[243] The number of
subsequent French dramas with Coriolanus as hero proves that he was
right, though in England, as so frequently, Shakespeare’s name put a
veto on new experiments.
Hardy’s tragedy in style and structure follows the Senecan manner of
Jodelle and Garnier, but he compromised with mediaeval fashions in so
far as to adopt the peculiar modification of the “simultaneous” or
“complex” decoration which is usual in his other plays. In accordance
with that, several scenes were presented at the same time on the stage,
and actors made their first speeches from the area appropriated to that
one of them which the particular phase of the action required. There
was thus considerable latitude in regard to the unity of place, and
even more in regard to the unity of time; but the freedom was not so
great as in the Elizabethan theatre, for after all there was space only
for a limited number of scenes, or “mansions” as they would formerly
have been called. Generally there were five, two at each side and one
at the back. In the _Coriolan_ there were six, and there is as well a
seventh place indicated in the play without scenical decoration.[244]
Even so they are few, compared with the two and twenty[245] that
Shakespeare employs; and though no doubt that number might be
considerably reduced without injury to the effect, by running together
localities that approximate in character and position, one street with
another street, the forum with a public place and the like, still it
would in any case exceed what Hardy allows himself. This may account
for some of his omissions as compared with Shakespeare.
[243] See _Théâtre d’Alexandre Hardy_, ed. Stengel.
[244] See M. Rigal’s admirable treatise on _Hardy_.
[245] Of course these scenes are not marked in the folio, but on the
whole there are good grounds for the division that has been adopted by
modern editors.
His scenarium includes the house of Coriolanus and the forum at Rome,
the house of Coriolanus and the house of Amfidius at Antium, the
Volscian camp near Rome, the council-hall at Antium, and in addition
to these an indeterminate spot where Coriolanus soliloquises after his
expulsion.[246] There is no room for Corioli, and this may be why Hardy
begins somewhat later than Shakespeare with the collision between the
hero and the people, and gets as far as the banishment by the end of
the first act. In the second, Marcius leaves Rome, presents himself
to Amfidius, and obtains the leadership of the Volscians. The third
portrays the panic of the Romans and the reception of their embassage
by Coriolanus. In the fourth, the Roman ladies make ready to accompany
Volumnia on her mission, Amfidius schemes to use all Coriolanus’
faults for his destruction, Volumnia arrives in the camp and makes her
petition, which her son at length grants though he foresees the result.
The fifth is occupied with his murder in the Senate House at Antium,
and concludes with his mother’s reception of the news.
[246] See footnote 2 on previous page.
Thus the sequence and selection of episodes are much the same in the
two tragedies, except that Hardy, perhaps, as I have said, owing to the
exigencies of his decorative system, does not begin till the exploit
at Corioli is over, and adds, as he could do so by using once more
Coriolanus’ house in Rome, the final scene with Volumnia. Otherwise
the scaffolding of the plays is very similar, and it is because
both follow closely the excellent guidance of Plutarch. But it is
interesting also to note that some of their additions are similar, for
when they were independently made, it shows how readily Plutarch’s
narrative suggested such supplements. Thus, as in Shakespeare, but not
as in Plutarch, Volumnia counsels her son to bow his pride before the
people, and he, though in the end consenting, at first refuses.
_Volomnie._ Voicy le jour fatal qui te donne (mon fils)
Par une humilité tes hayneurs deconfits;
Tu vaincras, endurant, la fiere ingratitude
Et le rancoeur malin de ceste multitude.
Tu charmes son courroux d’une submission;
Helas! ne vueille donc croire à ta passion.
Cede pour un moment, et la voila contente,
Et tu accoiseras une horrible tourmente,
Que Rome divisée ébranle à ton sujet:
La pieté ne peut avoir plus bel objet,
Et faire mieux paroistre à l’endroit d’une mere,
A l’endroit du païs, qu’escoutant ma priere.
_Coriolan._ Madame, on me verroit mille morts endurer,
Plustôt que suppliant sa grace procurer,
Plustôt qu’un peuple vil à bon tiltre se vante
D’avoir en mon courage imprimé l’épouvante,
Que ceux qui me devroient recognoistre seigneur,
Se prévallent sur moy du plus petit honneur:
Moy, fléchir le genoüil devant une commune!
Non, je ne le veux faire, et ne crains sa rancune.
Thus Coriolanus, again as in Shakespeare but not as in Plutarch,
accepts his banishment as a calamity to those that inflict it.
Je luy obeirai, ouy ouy, je mettrai soin
De quitter ces ingrats plustost qu’ils n’ont besoin.
Thus the machinations of Amfidius before the final cause of offence
are amplified far beyond the limits of Plutarch, and these are in
part excused by his previous rivalry with Coriolanus which, as in
Shakespeare, is made ever so much more personal and graphic.
Un esperon d’honneur cent fois nous a conduits,
Aveugles de fureur, à ces termes reduits
De sentre-deffier[247] au front de chaque armée,
Vouloir mourir, ou seul vaincre de renommée.
In short, though Hardy’s drama, as compared with Shakespeare’s, is a
work of talent as compared with a work of genius, it shows that the
_Life_ had in it the material for a tragedy already rough-dressed,
with indications, obvious to a practised playwright, of some of the
processes that still were needed.
Shakespeare, then, was now dealing with a much more tractable theme
than in his previous Roman plays, and this is evident in the finished
product. Technically and artistically it is a more perfect achievement
than either of them. In _Julius Caesar_ the early disappearance of
the titular hero does not indeed affect the essential unity of the
piece, but it does, when all is said and done, involve, to the feelings
of most readers, a certain break in the interest. In _Antony and
Cleopatra_ the scattering of the action through so many short scenes
does not interfere with the main conception, but it does make the
execution a little spasmodic. In both instances Shakespeare had to
suit his treatment to the material. But that material in the case of
_Coriolanus_ offered less difficulty. It lay ready to the dramatist’s
hand and took the shape that he imposed, almost of itself. The result
is a masterpiece that, as an organic work of art, has been placed on
the level of Shakespeare’s most independent tragedies.[248]
[247] S’entre-défier.
[248] _E.g._ by Viehoff, in his interesting essay, _Shakespeare’s
Coriolan_ (_Jahrbuch der D.-Sh. Gesellschaft_, Bd. iv. 1869), which has
been used in the following paragraphs.
Thus it is easy to see how the personality of the hero dominates the
complex story, as the heart transmits the life-blood through the body
and its members, and receives it back again; how his character contains
in itself the seeds of his offence and its reparation; how the other
figures are related to him in parallel and contrast; how the two grand
interests, the conflict between Coriolanus and Aufidius, the conflict
between Coriolanus and the people, intertwine, but always so that the
latter remains the principal strand; how the language is suited to the
persons, the circumstances, and the prevailing tone. In short, whatever
the relations in which we consider the play, they seem, like the radii
of a circle, to depart from and meet in one centre.
Hardly less admirable are the balance and composition of the whole,
which yet in no wise impair the interest of the individual scenes.
Dr. Johnson indeed makes the criticism: “There is perhaps too much
bustle in the first act and too little in the last.” This possibly is
more noticeable when the play is acted than when it is read; but it is
fitting that from the noise and hubbub of the struggle there should be
a transition to the outward quietude of the close that harmonises with
the inward acquiescence in the mind of reader or spectator. Nor is the
element of tumult entirely lacking at the last. To the uproar in the
street of Rome, where the life of Marcius is threatened, corresponds
the uproar in the public place of Antium where it is actually taken.
But Dr. Johnson was probably thinking of those battle scenes beloved by
Elizabethan audiences and generally wearisome to modern taste. There
are no fewer than five of them in the first act, a somewhat plentiful
allowance. But they are written by no means exclusively in the
drum-and-trumpet style. On the contrary they are rich in psychological
interest, and bring home to us many characteristics of the hero that
we have to realise. Not only are we witnesses of his prowess, but his
pride in Rome, his contempt of baseness, his rivalry with Aufidius,
his power of rousing enthusiasm in the field, are all shown in relief.
Such things lift these concessions to temporary fashion above the level
of outworn crudities.
And the construction is very perfect too. Perhaps the crisis,
understood as the acme of Coriolanus’ success, when he is voted to
the consulship in the middle of the third scene of the second act
comes a little early. But crisis may bear another meaning. It may
denote the decisive point of the conflict, and this is only reached
in the centre of the play. To the supreme tension of the scenes that
describe Coriolanus’ denunciation of the Tribunes, the consultations
in his house, his final condemnation, all that goes before gradually
leads up, and from that all that follows after gradually declines. In
the first act we are introduced to the circumstances, the opposition
between the Romans and the Volsces, the Senate and the Plebs, and to
all the leading characters, as well as Coriolanus and his friends
and opponents, in an exposition that is not merely declaratory but
is full of action and life: and we see that the situation is fraught
with danger. In the second act we are shown more definitely how the
grand disaster will come from the collision of Coriolanus with the
people, and the cloud gathers even in the instant of his success. In
the third the storm breaks, and, despite a momentary lull, in the end
sweeps away all wonted landmarks. The fourth presents the change that
follows in the whole condition of things: the rival of Aufidius has
recourse to his generosity, the champion of Rome becomes her foe, and
the people, after its heedless triumph, is plunged into dismay. In the
fifth we proceed by carefully considered ways to the catastrophe: the
deliverance of Rome from material and the hero from moral perdition,
the expiation of his passion in death and the fruitless triumph of his
rival.
But through this symmetrical rise and fall of the excitement, there is
no abatement of the interest. Attention and suspense are always kept on
the alert. They are secured partly by the diversity of the details and
the swiftness of the fluctuations. Dr. Johnson says:
The Tragedy of _Coriolanus_ is one of the most amusing
of our author’s performances. The old man’s merriment in
Menenius, the lofty lady’s dignity in Volumnia, the bridal
modesty in Virgilia, the patrician and military haughtiness
in Coriolanus, the plebeian malignity and tribunitian
insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and
interesting variety; and the various revolutions of the
hero’s fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity.
This is so because, while the agitation culminates in the third act,
the emotion is neither overtaxed in the two that precede nor allowed
to subside in the two that follow. For though this movement, first of
intensification, then of relaxation, is discernible in the play as a
whole, it is not uniform or uninterrupted. There is throughout a throb
and pulse, an ebb and flow. The quieter scenes alternate with the more
vehement: Coriolanus’ fortune by turns advances and retires. Only when
we reflect do we become aware that we have risen so high out of our
daily experience, and have returned “with new acquist” of wisdom to a
spot whence we can step back to it once more.
But to produce so consummate a masterpiece from the material of
history, no matter how dramatic that material was, Shakespeare was
bound to reshape it more freely than he was wont to do when dealing
with historical themes. We have seen from Hardy’s example what stores
of half-wrought treasure Plutarch’s narrative offered to a dramatist
who knew his business. Still it was only half-wrought, and in working
it up Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously allowed himself more
liberties than in his other Roman plays. His loans indeed are none
the fewer or the less on that account; nowhere has he borrowed more
numerous or so lengthy passages. But it almost seems as though with the
tact of genius he had the feeling that he was at work, not on fact, but
on legend. Though he is far from recasting the Roman tradition as he
recast the pseudo-historic traditions of his own island in _Lear_ and
_Macbeth_, yet he gives a new colouring to the picture as he hardly
does to genuine histories like _Richard II._ or _Antony and Cleopatra_.
This will appear from a comparison of the play with the _Life_.