Take from his heart, take from his brain, from’s time,
What should not then be spared.
(III. vii. 11.)
The authority for the idea that Antony was in a manner hypnotised by her love, Shakespeare found, like so much else, in the Life, but he enhances the effect immeasurably, first by putting the avowal in Antony’s own lips, and again by the more poignant and pitiful turn he gives it. Plutarch says:
There Antonius shewed plainely, that he had not onely lost the corage and hart of an Emperor, but also of a valliant man, and that he was not his owne man: (proving that true which an old man spake in myrth that the soule of a lover lived in another body, and not in his owne) he was so caried away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had bene glued into her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also.
Antony cries in the play:
O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?...
Thou knew’st too well
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after: o’er my spirit