Antony and Cleopatra.—It is not Antony’s passion for Cleopatra which ruins him. He has not the cohesion which obtains success. He is loose-bonded. Cæsar is his complete foil and contrast. Cæsar exists dramatically to explain Antony. Antony’s challenge to single combat and the speeches he makes to his servants are characteristic. The marriage to Octavia, more than his Egyptian slavery, shows his weakness. There is a line in Plutarch which I wish Shakespeare had used. ‘But it was in the nature of Antonius to show his best qualities in difficulties, and in his misfortune he was as like as may be to a good man.’
Scenes 6 and 7, Act ii., the interview with Pompey, are in Plutarch, but it is not evident why they are in the drama. They do not advance the action. Shakespeare preserves also Antony’s message to Octavius that if he was dissatisfied with the treatment of Thyreus he might hang or torture Antony’s freedman Hipparchus—a detestable piece of brutality which might well have been omitted.
Cleopatra is quite apart from Shakespeare’s other women. She is a most complicated and difficult study. Shakespeare takes over from Plutarch her wandering disguised through the streets at night with Antony; the voyage down the Cydnus; the hanging of the salt fish on Antony’s hook; the flight at Actium; the fact that she was mistress of Julius Cæsar and Cnæus Pompey; the second betrayal of the fleet; her petition to Octavius for her son; and her attempt to cheat Octavius in the account of her treasures. In addition Shakespeare makes her ‘hop forty paces through the public street.’ What could have induced him to invent this story? She threatens Charmian with bloody teeth; lets Thyreus kiss her hand, arousing thereby Antony’s rage. Thyreus tells her that Cæsar knows she did not embrace Antony from love but from fear, and she replies:
‘He is a god, and knows
What is most right: mine honour was not yielded,
But conquer’d merely.’
This may be mockery, but after she has let Thyreus kiss her she goes on:
‘Your Cæsar’s father oft,
When he hath mus’d of taking kingdoms in,
Bestow’d his lips on that unworthy place,
As it rain’d kisses.’
She reminds herself of this, fresh from Antony, who had just told her of Octavius’s offer to protect her if she would give up the ‘grizled head’ of her lover.
After Antony’s death she finds
‘nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.’
She tells Proculeius before he surprises her that she would gladly look Cæsar in the face, but she tries to stab herself, for,
‘Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court;
Nor once be chastis’d 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!’
She asks Dolabella what Cæsar means to do with her, and when she learns that she is to be taken to Rome she recurs to the horror of the triumph.
‘Now, Iras, what think’st thou?
Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shalt be shown
In Rome, as well as I: mechanick 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!
Cleopatra. Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’ tune; the quick comedians,
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’ the posture of a whore.’
This was a motive for death, but it was not all. She reproves herself because she let Iras die first, because Antony will
‘make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have’;
and Antony is her last word.
Charmian declares her to be ‘a lass unparallel’d,’ of ‘royal eyes.’
It is impossible to shut this woman up within the limits of what we call a character, but why should we attempt it? Why cannot we be content with what we have before us? Shakespeare never defined his people to himself. In Cleopatra we have a new combination of the simple, eternal elements, a combination subtle, and beyond analysis. What celestial lights begin to play over this passion as the drama goes on!
Coriolanus.—We cannot help being sorry that Shakespeare should have gone out of his way to select such a subject. It leaves a disagreeable taste in the mouth. The aristocrat is overdone. No true aristocrat would talk such rant as Coriolanus talks in Act i. Sc. I. Shakespeare omits Plutarch’s account of the oppression of the plebeians, or only slightly alludes to it. Volumnia’s contempt for the people is worse than that of Coriolanus. To her they are not human, and she does not consider that common truthfulness is binding in her intercourse with them.
‘It lies you on to speak
To the people, not by your own instruction,
Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you,
But with such words that are but rooted in
Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables
Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth.’
Reading such passages as these we understand Whitman when he says that although Shakespeare is ‘of astral genius,’ he is ‘entirely fit for feudalism . . . is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism,’ and contains much which is ‘ever offensive to democracy.’
Winter’s Tale.—Coleridge is perhaps super-subtle in his discrimination between the jealousy of Leontes and that of Othello, which Coleridge will not call jealousy. But the difference is not greater than that between the two men. The passion of Leontes is roused simply by Hermione’s giving her hand to Polixenes. This common courtesy is ‘paddling palms.’ There is something contemptible in his transports: not so in the case of Othello. Leontes cursing Hermione in the presence of his lords is unendurable.
Leontes in his passion disbelieves the oracle.
‘There is no truth at all i’ the oracle:
The sessions shall proceed: this is mere falsehood.’
But he is reversed, suddenly, completely, when he is told his son is dead.
‘Apollo’s angry; and the heavens themselves
Do strike at my injustice.’
Perdita is brought up by a shepherd and talks like a well-educated patrician’s daughter. ‘O Proserpina,’ etc. Polixenes says to Camillo:
‘This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever
Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does or seems
But smacks of something greater than herself,
Too noble for this place.’
Here again the emphasis on descent is exaggerated and we resent it.
Leontes after the statue is unveiled—
‘But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.’
Who can read this without choking? Like Exeter in Henry V.:
‘I had not so much of man in me,
And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.’
Could I have continued to live when that music sounded and she descended? I think not. I should have sought pardon and death.
‘Now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?’
Who can—I will not say express, but dream a tenderness deeper than that? Sixteen years she had waited, and then she embraces him! It is difficult to divine Shakespeare, the man, in his plays and poems, but in this passage and one or two others resembling it he seems to be revealed.
Pericles.—The last act of Pericles, and especially the first scene, is Shakespeare at his highest.
‘O Helicanus, strike me, honour’d sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O’erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.’
What can equal in purifying, regenerative power the fact that one human being can be so much to another? No theology, morality, or philosophy can bring a man so near to God.
Tempest.—Prospero’s pardon for those who had conspired against him proceeds from ‘our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
The Tempest is called a comedy, but it suggests a tragedy in Prospero’s return to Milan and the months or years he spent there till he died. For twelve years he had been on the island with Miranda, ‘a thrid of his own life,’ ‘that for which he lived,’ ‘the cherubin that did preserve him’ during his voyage, who raised in him
‘An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.’
He hears her, smitten with Ferdinand almost in a moment, declare to him:
‘I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you,
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of’;
and she leaves her father and goes far away to Naples with her husband.
Ariel, whom Prospero had freed from his miserable enchantment, had never ceased to thirst for liberty and returns to the winds. Dearly had Prospero loved his delicate Ariel.
‘Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.’
Caliban he had tried to reclaim, had taught him speech and to name the big and lesser light, but all his pains were ‘lost, quite lost,’ and the ‘born devil’ rewarded them by an attempt on Miranda’s chastity. He is left behind, master of the island again, to take up his abode in the cell which Prospero and Miranda had inhabited, and with the added experience of Stephano’s drink, which he probably soon learned to imitate.
Antonio, the usurping brother, is said to have been penitent, but his penitence was not profound. He offered no apology, and the first words he is recorded to have uttered after his guilt was discovered were a joke upon ‘the plain fish,’ Caliban. He was forgiven, and most likely once more became malignant.
There is nothing to show us that the citizens of Milan were in much trouble when Prospero was deposed, or that they rejoiced when he was restored. They, doubtless, regretted Antonio, who
‘Set all hearts i’ the state
To what tune pleased his ear.’
The lord of the spirits, of the elves who chased the ebbing Neptune, he who had given fire to the dread rattling thunder, broke his staff and drowned his book and went back to his lonely palace. Did he never long for his island, for Ariel’s music, for his daughter’s daily presence, replaced by infrequent letters with news of the Court, her children, and Ferdinand? He may have reflected that she was happy, but nevertheless every third thought was his grave.
Merchant of Venice.—Jessica is hateful from the beginning; the disguise in boy’s clothes, the robbery of her father, and the exchange for a monkey of the jewel which belonged to her mother. I am afraid Shakespeare intended we should like her. But she is only a part of the perplexity of the play. That Shakespeare should have used the casket story is inexplicable. Not only is it, as Johnson says, ‘wildly improbable,’ it confuses Portia’s character: it is an irritating absurdity.
‘But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis.’
We have no proof that Antonio did this. He may have done it. He was the kind of person who might like popularity. If he was really guilty of ‘low simplicity,’ I sympathise with Shylock’s hatred of him. But if he was not, I understand it. Shylock was not bound to be generous. It would have been ridiculous in him, an alien in blood and religion, persecuted, spat upon.
The interest of the play departs with Shylock.
Shakespeare’s plays are organic, one character cannot be understood without the other; Hamlet without Ophelia; Romeo without Juliet. Each is in, by, and of the other; particularised by the other. I do not find this quality, at least in anything like the same degree, in Beaumont and Fletcher.
Note the way in which Shakespeare’s characters—Macbeth, for example—unfold themselves by new circumstances, what unconjecturable development takes place.
When a serious defect presents itself in a living friend it seems to obtrude itself, press upon us, and affect our judgment more than if we see it in a play of Shakespeare’s. In the play the background of counterbalancing virtue is not obscured and forgotten. In actual life we lose sight of it.
FINIS
‘He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice, or excite our sympathy, we should remember that we likewise are lost in the same throng; that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear, is to fill a vacant hour with prattle, and be forgotten.’—The Rambler, No 159.
FOOTNOTES
[148] On the 24th April 1885 a fire broke out in an oil-monger’s house in the Borough. The inmates were the oil-monger, his wife, four children, and Alice, the servant-of-all-work. She came to the window as soon as the alarm was raised and shouted for help. Before the fire brigade arrived the whole building was in flames. The people in the street called to her to jump and held out clothes to break her fall, but she went back and presently reappeared dragging a feather bed with her, which she pushed out. It was instantly extended below, and Alice fetched one of the children and threw it most carefully down. It was saved, and two other children also were saved by her in the same way. By this time it was evident that the suffocating fumes were beginning to affect her, for her aim with the last two was not steady. The crowd implored her to leap, but it was too late. She could not make a proper spring and fell on the ground. Five minutes afterwards the engines and fire-escape appeared. She was picked up and died in Guy’s Hospital. I begged her portrait from her brother. It is not remarkable. That, perhaps, is the best thing that can be said about it. It is a pleasant, brave face—a face that you might see a dozen times on a Sunday afternoon.—M. R.
[205] The references are to the first edition, that of 1793.
[250] Even this word disappears in the Revised Version, where the Greek is translated ‘reviling Him.’
[254] The vulgar is the wiser, because it is but as wise as it must needes.—(Florio’s translation.)