It is not, therefore, the invention of the idea, but the new position in which he introduces it, that shows Shakespeare’s genius. It has no great significance, either in Plutarch or Daniel. In the one, Cleopatra is speaking in compassion of Antony; in the other, she is bespeaking Antony’s compassion for herself. But in Shakespeare, when she scorns life for her love, and prefers honour with the aspic’s bite to safety with shame, she feels that now at last their union has the highest sanction, and that all the dross of her nature is purged away from the pure spirit:
Husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air: my other elements
I give to baser life.
(V. ii. 290.)
Truly their love, which at first seemed to justify Aristophanes against Diotima, just because it is true love, turns out to answer Diotima’s description after all. Or perhaps it rather suggests the conclusion in the Phaedrus: “I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and the highest, and the offspring of the highest; and that he who loves the beautiful, is called a lover, because he partakes of it.” Antony and Cleopatra, with all their errors, are lovers and partake of beauty, which we cannot say of the arid respectability of Octavius. It is well and right that they should perish as they do: but so perishing they have made their full atonement; and we can rejoice that they have at once triumphed over their victor, and left our admiration for them free.
CORIOLANUS
CHAPTER I
POSITION OF THE PLAY BEFORE THE ROMANCES.
ITS POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC ASPECTS
Coriolanus seems to have been first published in the folio of 1623, and is one of the sixteen plays described as not formerly “entered to other men.” In this dearth of information there has naturally been some debate on the date of its composition, yet the opinions of critics with few exceptions agree as to its general position and tend more and more to limit the period of uncertainty to a very few months.