It will be seen from this sketch that no incidents of political importance are added, few are altered, and very few omitted by Shakespeare. Of course the dramatic form necessitates a certain concentration, and this of itself, even were there no farther motive, would account for the occasional synchronising of separate episodes. Thus the news of Fulvia’s death and Sextus Pompeius’ aggression is run together with the news of the wars of Fulvia and Lucius and the advance of the Parthians. Thus between the second marriage and the final breach it was convenient to condense matters, and, in doing this, to omit Antony’s flying visit to Italy, blend Octavia’s first and second attempts at mediation, and represent her as taking leave of her husband at Athens. In the same way the months between the battle of Actium and the death of Antony, and the days between the death of Antony and that of Cleopatra might easily be compressed without any hurt to the sentiment of the story. But even of this artistic license Shakespeare avails himself far less systematically than in Julius Caesar. There, as we saw, the action is crowded into five days, though with considerable intervals between some of them. There is no such arrangement in Antony and Cleopatra. Superficially this play is one of the most invertebrate in structure that Shakespeare ever wrote. It gives one the impression of an anxious desire to avoid tampering with the facts and their relations even when history does not furnish ready-made the material that bests fits the drama.
And in the main this impression is correct. Shakespeare supplies a panorama of some ten eventful years in which he can not only cite his chapter and verse for most of the official data, but reproduces, with amazing fidelity, the general contour of the historical landscape, in so far as it was visible from his point of view. And yet his allegiance to the letter has often been exaggerated and is to a great extent illusory. This does not mean merely that his picture fails to approve itself as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when tested by the investigations of modern scholars. His position and circumstances were not theirs. He took Plutarch’s Marcus Antonius as his chief and almost sole authority, resorting possibly for suggestions of situation and phrase to the Senecan tragedies on the same theme, probably for the descriptions of Egypt to Holland’s translation of Pliny or Cory’s translation of Leo, and almost certainly for many details about Sextus Pompeius[200] to the 1578 version of Appian; but always treating the Life not only as his inexhaustible storehouse, but as sufficient guarantee for any statement that it contained. In short he could give the history of the time, not as it was but as Plutarch represented it, and as Plutarch’s representation explained itself to an Elizabethan. It is hardly to his discredit if he underestimates Cleopatra’s political astuteness, and has no guess of the political projects that recent criticism has ascribed to Antony, for of these things his author has little to say. It is hardly to his credit, if, on Appian’s hint, he realises the importance of Sextus Pompeius’ insular position and naval power, for he lived in the days of Hawkins and Drake.
But he is not slavishly literal even in his adherence to Plutarch. He adopts his essential and many of his subsidiary facts: he follows his lead in the broad course of events; he does not alter the main lines of the story. But it is surprising to find how persistently he rearranges and regroups the minor details, and how by this means he gives them a new significance. The portions of the play where he has made the narrative more compact are also, roughly speaking, those in which he has taken most liberties in dislocating the sequence, and the result is not merely greater conciseness but an original interpretation. Yet on the other hand we must not either misconstrue the meaning or overstate the importance of this procedure. In the first place it affects not so much the history of events as the portraiture of the persons. In the second place, even in the characterisation it generally adds vividness and depth to the presentation rather than alters the fundamental traits. Thus in Plutarch the soothsayer’s warning to Antony follows, in Shakespeare it precedes, the composition with Pompey. From the chronicler’s point of view this transposition is abundantly unimportant, but it does make a difference in our estimate of Antony: his consequent decision shows more levity and rashness in the play than in the biography. Yet in both his whole behaviour at this juncture is distinctly fickle and indiscreet; so the net result of the displacement is to sharpen the lines that Plutarch has already drawn. And this is true in a greater or less degree of most of the cases in which Shakespeare reshuffles Plutarch’s notes. On the whole, despite dramatic parallax and changed perspective, Antony and Cleopatra is astonishingly faithful to the facts as they were supposed to be. Shakespeare could hardly have done more in getting to the heart of Plutarch’s account, and in reconstructing it with all its vital and essential characteristics disentangled and combined afresh in their rational connection. And since after all Plutarch “meant right” this implies that Shakespeare is not only true to Plutarch, but virtually true to what is still considered the spirit of his subject.[201]
Indeed his most far-reaching modifications concern in the main the manner in which the persons appeal to our sympathies, and in which he wishes us to envisage their story; and these perhaps in a preliminary view can better be indicated by what he has suppressed than by what he has added or recast. There is one conspicuous omission that shows how he deals with character; there are several minor ones that in their sum show how he prescribes the outlook.
To begin with the former, it is impossible not to be struck by the complete deletion of the Parthian fiasco, which in Plutarch occupies nearly a fifth of the whole Life, or a fourth of the part with which Shakespeare deals in this play. It thus bulks large in Antony’s career, and though in the main it may be unsuitable for dramatic purposes, it is nevertheless connected in its beginning, conduct and close, with the story of his love for Cleopatra. Yet we have only one far off and euphemistic reference to it in the words of Eros, when Antony bids him strike.
The gods withhold me!
Shall I do that which all the Parthian darts,
Though enemy, lost aim, and could not?
(IV. xiv. 69.)
Why this reticence in regard to one of the most ambitious enterprises with which the name of Antony was associated? The truth is that the whole management of the campaign detracts grievously from the glamour of “absolute soldiership” with which the dramatist surrounds his hero and through which he wishes us to view him. His silence in regard to it is thus a hint of one far-reaching and momentous change Shakespeare has made in the impression the story conveys, and that is in the character of Antony himself. In the biography he is by no means so grandiose a figure, so opulent and magnificent a nature, as he appears in the play. Gervinus sums up the salient features of Plutarch’s Antony in the following sentence: