Part 15 (2/2)
It was the galloping of messengers with the news that Macduff, who is to be the cause of his ruin, has fled to England. An echo of the galloping stays in the brain, as though the hoofs of some horse rode the night, carrying away Macbeth's luck for ever.
_Antony and Cleopatra._
_Written._ 1607-8 (?)
_Published_, in the folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The life of Antonius in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's _Lives_.
_The Fable._ Antony, entangled by the wiles of Cleopatra, shakes himself free so that he may attend to the conduct of the world. He makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra, he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills herself.
In this most n.o.ble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession.
”Strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds.”
It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject.
Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriola.n.u.s_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in _Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the princ.i.p.al character is brought about partly by a blindness in a n.o.ble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls.
All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingrat.i.tude under a colourable cloak of human excuse.
The obsession of l.u.s.t is ill.u.s.trated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous ill.u.s.tration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crus.h.i.+ngly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat.
”men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike.”
”when we in our viciousness grow hard, O misery on't--the wise G.o.ds seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut To our confusion.”
The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once, this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and n.o.ble then. Now
”The star is fall'n And time is at his period.”
”The G.o.d Hercules, whom Antony loved,”
has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.
The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--
”We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's n.o.ble, Let's do it after the high Roman fas.h.i.+on, And make Death proud to take us ...
.... we have no friend But resolution and the briefest end,”
begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays.
Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--
”Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark,”
and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--
”O eastern star!
Peace, peace!
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