deed, the style of the play is so superlatively idiomatic, and abounds in such splendid audacities of diction and imagery, that it might well be very puzzling to any transcriber or printer or proof-reader, unless the author's hand-writing were much plainer than it appears to have been.

The historic material of the play was all drawn from Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius as set forth in the translation of Sir Thomas North. And here the drawings from history, though perhaps not larger in the whole than we find in some other plays, are however more minute and circumstantial. In this instance, the Poet seems to have picked and sifted out from Plutarch, with the most scrupulous particularity, every fact, every embellishment, and every line and hint of character, that could be wrought coherently into the structure and process of the work. Notwithstanding, his genius is as free as ever from seeming at all encumbered with help, or anywise cramped or shackled by the restraints of history on the contrary, his creative faculties move so freely and play so spontaneously under and through the Plutarchian matter, that the borrowings seem no less original than what he created, and the inventions no less historical than what he borrowed. I say inventions; for, closely as he here works to the record, there is no one of his dramas wherein he shows a more fertile and pregnant inventiveness; many of the scenes being perfectly original, and at the same time truer to the history in effect than the history is to itself. For it is not too much to say that he had the art to express what was in his persons far better than they knew how to express it themselves.

:

Soon after the overthrow of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, which occurred in the Fall of the year B.C. 42, the Triumvirs, Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, partitioned the Roman world among themselves, Antony taking the Eastern provinces as hist share. The next year, while on his way with an army against the Parthians, he summoned Cleopatra to meet him in Cilicia, and give an account of her doings in aid of Brutus and Cassius. She responded in the celebrated adventure in which she caught the amorous Triumvir, and “pursed up his heart upon the river of Cydnus." In his account of this conquest the Poet does little more than translate the delectable narrative of old Plutarch into

dialogue. The result of the affair was, that Cleopatra led Antony captive to Alexandria, where he lost himself in the prodigious revelries and sensualities of the Egyptian Court. Thereupon his ferocious wife, Fulvia, together with his brother Lucius, who was then Consul, raised a war in Italy against Octavius; her purpose being, it was said, to disenchant her husband, and draw him back to Rome. In the Spring, however, of the year B.C. 40, Fulvia died; from which event dates the opening of the play.

In the course of the same year Antony was married to Octavia ; by which marriage the difficulties of the two Triumvirs were expected to be permanently healed; though, as the issue proved, "the band that seemed to tie their friendship together was the very strangler of their amity." This was followed, the next year, by the treaty with Sextus Pompey at Misenum. For some four years, Antony, in form at least, kept his faith with Octavia, who bore him two children. But, with all her beauty and wisdom and illustrious virtues, she could make no abiding impression upon him his thoughts kept flying back to Egypt. In the year B.C. 36 he set forth on another expedition against the Parthians, and sent an invitation to Cleopatra to join him; and, on her doing so, he fell more hopelessly than ever under her enchantments, lavishing realms and cities upon her as if the whole world were his, and he valued it only that he might give it to her.

66

Once again at the Egyptian capital, Antony sank forthwith into a full-blown voluptuary. The accounts of his gigantic profligacy are indeed almost incredible, and would be thoroughly so, but for the support they derive from the well-known customs of "the gorgeous East." Still, however, Antony, as a Roman thought struck him," varied his debaucheries from time to time with fits of spasmodic heroism in the camp and the field; though ever returning from these to plunge still deeper into the turbid stream of Oriental voluptuousness. In these fierce bacchanalian orgies, the Queen was always at hand; pampering his grosser appetites with rank and furious indulgences, and stimulating his flagging zest in them by cunning surprises. At length, she wound up the climax of extravagance by arraying herself in the garb and claiming the prerogatives of the goddess Isis, at the same time inducing Antony to usurp the titles and attributes of

the god Osiris. The notion that a man might rise to union with deity had gradually hardened into a custom of admitting the royal right of apotheosis. Some years before, Antony had assumed the character and style of Bacchus at Athens. He now came forth as the Nile-god, or fructifying power of the Coptic mythology, to claim the religious veneration of the Egyptian people.

All these mad doings were closely watched by the cold-blooded and astute Octavius, who worked them with terrible effect against his rival at Rome. The quarrel thus engendered came to a head in the great battle of Actium, which took place in September of the year B.C. 31. Stripped of fleet and army, and covered with foul dishonour, Antony returned to Egypt to brood sullenly over the past. The next year, Octavius followed with an army, and his work there was finished by the death of Cleopatra in August. So that the events of the play cover a period of a little more than ten years; the scene shifting to various parts of the Empire, Alexandria, Rome, Misenum, Athens, the plains of Syria, and several fields of battle.

"Of all Shakespeare's historical plays," says Coleridge, "Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much; perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether this play is not, in all the exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. If you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakespeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's All for Love."

Judging from my own experience, Antony and Cleopatra is the last of Shakespeare's plays that one grows to appreciate. This seems partly owing to the excellences of the work, and partly not. For it is marked beyond any other by a superabundance of

external animation, as well as by a surpassing fineness of workmanship, such as needs oft-repeated and most careful perusal to bring out full upon the mind's eye. The great number and variety of events crowded together in it, the rapidity with which they pass before us, and, consequently, the frequent changes of scene, hold curiosity on the stretch, and somewhat overfill the mind with sensuous effect, so as for a long time to distract and divert the thoughts from those subtilties of characterization and delicacies of poetry which everywhere accompany them. I am by no means sure but the two things naturally go together, yet I have to confess it has long seemed to me that, by selecting fewer incidents, or by condensing the import and spirit of them into larger masses, what is now a serious fault in the drama might have been avoided. And my own view herein has been not a little confirmed on finding a similar one expressed by Gervinus; who, after remarking that the drama is "a masterwork full of deep thought, from which every writer of history may learn how to extract the spirit out of chronicles," adds the following: whether larger dramatic groups might not have been cut out of the complete history, which would have better satisfied the Aristotelian requirement of being easily surveyed as a whole; whether some of the inferior characters might not have been omitted, and all the acting personages thus concentrated upon the main point of the piece, as Shakespeare has accustomed us; - this remains a subject of doubt much easier indeed for us to express than it could have been for the poet to remove."

"But