(IV. xv. 18.)
Thereafter he has no thought of himself but only of her, counselling her in complete self-abnegation to seek of Caesar her honour with her safety, and recommending her to trust only Proculeius—one who, as we soon learn, would be eager to preserve her life.
And her love, too, though perhaps more fitfully, yet all the more strikingly, is deepened and solemnised by trial. After Actium it quite loses its element of mockery and petulance. Her flout at Antony’s negligence before the battle is the last we hear her utter. Henceforth, whether she protests her faith, or speeds him to the fight, or welcomes him on his return, her words have a new seriousness and weight.[229] Her feeling seems to become simpler and sincerer as her fortunes cloud, and at her lover’s death it is nature alone that triumphs. In the first shock of bereavement Iras, attempting consolation, addresses her as “Royal Egypt, Empress”; and she replies:
No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares.
(IV. xv. 72.)
Her grief for her great loss, a grief, perhaps, hardly anticipated by herself, is in her own eyes her teacher, and “begins to make a better life.” Even now she may falter, if the usual interpretation of her fraud with the treasure is correct. Even now, at all events, she has to be urged by the natural and royal but not quite unimpeachable motive, the dread of external disgrace. Cleopatra is very human to the last. Her weaknesses do not disappear, but they are but as fuel to the flames of her love by which they are bred and which they help to feed. It is still as the “curled Antony” she pictures her dead lover, and it is in “crown and robe” that she will receive that kiss which it is her heaven to have. But even in this there is a striking similarity to Antony’s expectation of the land where “souls do couch on flowers,” and where they will be the cynosure of the gazing ghosts. Their oneness of heart and feeling is indeed now complete, and their love is transfigured. It is at his call she comes, and his name is the last word she utters, before she lays the second asp on her arm. The most wonderful touch of all is that now she feels her right to be considered his wife. This, of course, is due to Shakespeare, but it is not altogether new. It occurs in Daniel’s tragedy, when she calls on Antony’s spirit to pray the gods on her behalf:
O if in life we could not severd be,
Shall death divide our bodies now asunder?