Was never so emboss’d.
(iV. xiii. 1.)
Moreover, if she had packed cards with Caesar, it is difficult to see why she should not claim a price for her treachery, instead of locking herself up in the Monument as she does, and trying to keep the Romans out. All the negociations and interviews after Antony’s death seem to imply that she had no previous understanding with Octavius.
But she recoils from her lover’s desperation, as she always does when he is deeply moved. She has ever the tact to feel the point at which her blandishments and vexations are out of place and will no longer serve her turn. Just as after the disaster of Actium she only sobs:
O my lord, my lord,
Forgive my fearful sails!
(iII. xi. 54.)
and then can urge no plea but “pardon”; just as after her interview with Thyreus, with no hint of levity, she solemnly imprecates curses on herself and her offspring if she were false; so now she bows before his wrath and flees to the monument. Then follows the fiction of her death, a fiction in which the actress does not forget the finesses of her art.
Say, that the last I spoke was “Antony,”
And word it, prithee, piteously.