ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA,
an essay by William Hazlitt
An essay by William Hazlitt, on Shakespeare’s characters in
“Antony and Cleopatra,” From the book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays By William Hazlitt,
This is a very noble play. Though not in the first class of
Shakespeare's productions, it stands next to them, and is, we think,
the finest of his historical plays, that is, of those in which he
made poetry the organ of history, and assumed a certain tone of
character and sentiment, in conformity to known facts, instead of
trusting to his observations of general nature or to the unlimited
indulgence of his own fancy. What he has added to the history, is
upon a par with it. His genius was, as it were, a match for history
as well as nature, and could grapple at will with either. This play
is full of that pervading comprehensive power by which the poet
could always make himself master of time and circumstances. It
presents a fine picture of Roman pride and Eastern magnificence: and
in the struggle between the two, the empire of the world seems
suspended, 'like the swan's down-feather:
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.'
The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakespeare does not stand
reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once
BECOMES them, and speaks and acts for them. He does not present us
with groups of stage-puppets or poetical machines making set
speeches on human life, and acting from a calculation of ostensible
motives, but he brings living men and women on the scene, who speak
and act from real feelings, according to the ebbs and flows of
passion, without the least tincture of the pedantry of logic or
rhetoric. Nothing is made out by inference and analogy, by climax
and antithesis, but everything takes place just as it would have
done in reality, according to the occasion.--The character of
Cleopatra is a masterpiece. What an extreme contrast it affords to
Imogen! One would think it almost impossible for the same person to
have drawn both. She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious,
boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle. The luxurious
pomp and gorgeous extravagance of the Egyptian queen are displayed
in all their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of
the soul of Mark Antony. Take only the first four lines that they
speak as an example of the regal style of love-making.
Cleopatra. If it be love, indeed, tell me how much?
Cleopatra. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd.
The rich and poetical description of her person, beginning:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick--
seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subsequent
infatuation of
battle, and 'like a doting mallard' follows her flying sails.
Few things in Shakespeare (and we know of nothing in any other
author like them) have more of that local truth of imagination and
character than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented
conjecturing what were the employments of
'He's speaking now, or murmuring--WHERE'S MY SERPENT OF OLD NILE?'
Or again, when she says to
his summoning up resolution to risk another fight--'It is my
birthday; I had thought to have held it poor; but since my lord is
is
surprises the messenger of Caesar kissing her hand:
To let a fellow that will take rewards,
And say, God quit you, be familiar with
My play-fellow, your hand; this kingly seal,
And plighter of high hearts.
It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped; but his low
condition is not the true reason: there is another feeling which
lies deeper, though
by his rage; he suspects the fellow to be Caesar's proxy.
Cleopatra's whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, of the
love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every other
consideration. Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia a shrew and
shrill-tongued. What a picture do those lines give of her:
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.
What a spirit and fire in her conversation with
who brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage with Octavia! How
all the pride of beauty and of high rank breaks out in her promised
reward to him:
--There's gold, and here
My bluest veins to kiss!
She had great and unpardonable faults, but the beauty of her death
almost redeems them. She learns from the depth of despair the
strength of her affections. She keeps her queen-like state in the
last disgrace, and her sense of the pleasurable in the last moments
of her life. She tastes a luxury in death. After applying the asp,
she says with fondness:
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle.
Oh
It is worth while to observe that Shakespeare has contrasted the
extreme magnificence of the descriptions in this play with pictures
of extreme suffering and physical horror, not less striking--partly
perhaps to excuse the effeminacy of Mark Antony to whom they are
related as having happened, but more to preserve a certain balance
of feeling in the mind. Caesar says, hearing of his conduct at the
court of Cleopatra:
--
Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Wert beaten from Mutina, 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 did'st drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beast 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
It is reported, thou did'st 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.
The passage after
say:
Yes, yes; he at
His sword e'en like a dancer; while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and 'twas I
That the mad Brutus ended,
is one of those fine retrospections which show us the winding and
eventful march of human life. The jealous attention which has been
paid to the unities both of time and place has taken away the
principle of perspective in the drama, and all the interest which
objects derive from distance, from contrast, from privation, from
change of fortune, from long-cherished passion; and contracts our
view of life from a strange and romantic dream, long, obscure, and
infinite, into a smartly contested, three hours' inaugural
disputation on its merits by the different candidates for theatrical
applause.
The latter scenes of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA are full of the changes of
accident and passion. Success and defeat follow one another with
startling rapidity. For-tune sits upon her wheel more blind and
giddy than usual. This precarious state and the approaching
dissolution of his greatness are strikingly displayed in the
dialogue between
Eros. Ay, noble lord.
A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,
They are black vesper's pageants.
Eros. Ay, my lord.
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
Eros. It does, my lord.
Even such a body, &c.
This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in
Shakespeare. The splendour of the imagery, the semblance of reality,
the lofty range of picturesque objects hanging over the world, their
evanescent nature, the total uncertainty of what is left behind, are
' just like the mouldering schemes of human greatness. It is finer
than Cleopatra's passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur,
because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial.
presumption and infatuated determination to yield to Cleopatra's
wishes to fight by sea instead of land, meet a merited punishment;
and the extravagance of his resolutions, increasing with the
desperateness of his circumstances, is well commented upon by
Enobarbus:
--I see men's judgements are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike.
The repentance of Enobarbus after his treachery to his master is the
most affecting part of the play. He cannot recover from the blow
which
master-leaver and a fugitive'.
Shakespeare's genius has spread over the whole play a richness like
the overflowing of the
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An article on Shakespeare's History Plays
as created on film by Kenneth Branagh:
Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Hamlet by
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/06-1/hatchbra.htm
from the journal Early Modern Studies
hosted online at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/hatchbra.htm
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