"These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage."
We saw that one element of Shakespeare's artist-nature was of use to him in his modelling of the figure of Antony. He himself had ultimately broken his fetters, or rather life had broken them for him; but as he wrote this great drama, he lived through again those years in which he himself had felt and spoken as he now made Antony feel and speak:
"A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another's neck, do witness bear,
Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place."
—(Sonnet cxxxi.)
Day after day that woman now stood before him as his model who had been his life's Cleopatra—she to whom he had written of "lust in action":
"Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof,—and prov'd, a very woe."
—(Sonnet cxxix.)
He had seen in her an irresistible and degrading Delilah, the Delilah whom De Vigny centuries later anathematised in a famous couplet.[1] He had bewailed, as Antony does now, that his beloved had belonged to many:
"If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks,
Be anchor'd in the bay where all men ride,
. . . . . .
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?''
—(Sonnet cxxxvii.)
He had, like Antony, suffered agonies from the coquetry she would lavish on any one she wanted to win. He had then burst forth in complaint, as Antony in the drama breaks out into frenzy:
"Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside:
What need'st thou wound with cunning, when thy might
Is more than my o'er-pressed defence can 'bide?"
—(Sonnet cxxxix.)
Now he no longer upbraided her; now he crowned her with a queenly diadem, and placed her, living, breathing, and in the largest sense true to nature, on that stage which was his world.