A man who had grown up in the wild companionship of a Curio and a Clodius, who had gone through the high school of debauchery in Greece and Asia, who had shocked everybody in Rome during Caesar’s dictatorship by his vulgar excesses, who had made himself popular among the soldiers by drinking with them and encouraging their low amours, a man upon whom the odium of the proscriptions under the rule of the triumvirate especially fell, who displayed a cannibal pleasure over Cicero’s bloody head and hand, who afterwards renewed in the East the wanton life of his youth, and robbed in grand style to maintain the vilest gang of parasites and jugglers, such a man depicted finally as the prey of an elderly and artful courtesan, could not possibly have been made the object of dramatic interest. It is wonderful how Shakespeare on the one hand preserved the historic features of Antony’s character, so as not to make him unrecognisable, and yet how he contrived on the other to render him an attractive personage.
The array of charges Gervinus compiles from Plutarch is not exaggerated. Indeed it could be enlarged and emphasised. Dishonesty in money matters, jealousy of his subordinates, an occasional lack of generalship that almost becomes inefficiency, might be added to the list. But Plutarch’s picture contains other traits that he does not seek to reconcile with those that repel us, but drops in casually and by the way: and in Shakespeare these are brought to the front. Valour, endurance, generosity, versatility, resourcefulness, self-knowledge, frankness, simplicity after a fashion, width of outlook, power of self-recovery, are all attributed to Antony even by his first biographer, though these qualities are overweighted by the mass of his delinquencies. Shakespeare shows them in relief; while the more offensive characteristics, like his youthful licentiousness, are relegated to his bygone past, or, like his jealousy and vindictiveness, are merely suggested by subordinate strokes, such as the break in Ventidius’ triumphant campaign, or the merciless scourging of Thyreus. It is sometimes said that Shakespeare’s Brutus is historically correct and that his Mark Antony is a new creation. The opposite statement would be nearer the truth. We feel that both the biographer and the dramatist have given a portrait of Cleopatra’s lover, and that both portraits are like; but the one painter has been content with a collection of vivid traits which in their general effect are ignoble and repulsive: the other in a sense has idealised his model, but it is by reading the soul of greatness through the sordid details, and explaining them by the conception of Antony, not perhaps at his best but at his grandest. He is still, though fallen, the Antony who at Caesar’s death could alter the course of history; a dissolute intriguer no doubt, but a man of genius, a man of enthusiasms, one who is equal or all but equal to the highest occasion the world can present, and who, if he fails owing to the lack of steadfast principle and virile will that results from voluptuous indulgence and unscrupulous practisings, yet remains fascinating and magnificent even in his ruin. And by means of this transfiguration, Shakespeare is able to lend absorbing interest to his delineation of this gifted, complex, and faulty soul, and to rouse the deepest sympathy for his fate. Despite his loyalty to the historical record he lifts his argument above the level of the Chronicle History, and makes it a true tragedy. In its deference for facts, Antony and Cleopatra is to be ranked with such pieces as Richard II. and Henry VIII., but in its real essence it claims another position. “The highest praise, or rather the highest form of praise, of this play,” says Coleridge, “is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello.”
In another aspect the more obvious of the minor omissions are in their general tendency not less typical of the way in which Shakespeare deals with his subject. For what are those that strike us at first sight? To begin with, many instances of Octavia’s devotion, constancy and principle are passed over, and she is placed very much in the shade. Then there is no reference to the children that sprang from her union with Antony, indeed their existence is by implication denied, and she seems to be introduced as another Iseult of the White Hands. Antony cries to Cleopatra,
Have I my pillow left unpress’d in Rome,
Forborne the getting of a lawful race,
And by a gem of women, to be abused
By one that looks on feeders?
(III. xiii. 106.)
Further, the tragic stories of Antony’s son Antyllus and of Cleopatra’s son Caesarion are left unused, Antyllus not being mentioned at all, Caesarion only by the way; though Daniel does not scruple to include both accessories within the narrower limits of a Senecan tragedy. More noticeable still, however, is the indifference with which the children of Antony and Cleopatra are dismissed. They are barely alluded to, though the Queen’s anxiety for their preservation, which supplies acceptable matter not only to Daniel but to Jodelle and Garnier, is avouched by Plutarch’s statement and driven home by North’s vigorous phrase. Plutarch describes her distress of body and mind after Antony’s death and her own capture.
She fell into a fever withal: whereof she was very glad, hoping thereby to have good colour to absteine from meate, and that so she might have dyed easely without any trouble.... But Caesar mistrusted the matter, by many conjectures he had, and therefore did put her in feare, and threatned her to put her children to shameful death. With these threats Cleopatra for feare yelded straight, as she would have yelded unto strokes; and afterwards suffred her selfe to be cured and dieted as they listed.