Soit qu’ell’ la vueille joindre au parler de ses doigts,
Ou que des Rois sceptrez recevant les harangues,
Elle vueille respondre à chacun en leurs langues.
The most notable privilege of which the translation makes use is to soften or refine certain expressions that may have seemed too vigorous to the high-bred English lady. This, for example, is her rendering of the lines already quoted in which Antony denounces his voluptuous life:
Careless of uertue, careless of all praise,
Nay, as the fatted swine in filthy mire,
With glutted heart I wallow’d in delights,
All thoughts of honor troden under foote.
Similarly, in Cleopatra’s closing speech, the original expression, “mon ame vomissant,” yields to a gentler and not less poetical equivalent:
A thousand kisses, thousand thousand more