This is very ingenious, and the parallel from Puschkin is very interesting. What makes one doubtful is that from first to last Shakespeare slurs over the motherhood of Cleopatra, to which the other tragedians of the time give great prominence. On the whole he obliterates even those references that Plutarch makes to this aspect of his heroine, and it would therefore be odd if he went out of his way to invent an allusion which does not fit in with the rest of the picture, and which is without consequence and very obscure. If one were forced to conjecture the “missing word,” it would be more plausible to suppose that she both wishes and hesitates to suggest marriage with Antony. At the close, her exclamation:
Husband, I come:
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
(V. ii. 290.)
shows that she recognises the dignity of the sanction. At the outset, she feels the falsity of her position, as we see from her reference to “the married woman”; and in Plutarch Shakespeare had read the complaint of her partisans, that “Cleopatra, being borne a Queene of so many thousands of men, is onely named Antonius Leman.” In Rome the marriage is assumed to be quite probable; and in this very scene Antony, after announcing the removal of the grand impediment by Fulvia’s death, has just professed his unalterable devotion to his Queen. Why should there not be a marriage, unless he regards her merely as a mistress; and why should she not propose it, except that she fears to meet with this rebuff? The “sweating labour” she bears would thus be her unsanctioned love and its disgrace.
This, however, is not put forward as a serious interpretation, but only as a theory quite as possible as Professor Zielinski’s. The most obvious and the most satisfactory way is to suppose, as probably almost every reader does and has done, that she is merely making pretexts to postpone the separation. And there is surely no great difficulty about the phrase: “My oblivion is a very Antony.” Here too the obvious explanation is the most convincing: “My forgetfulness is as great as Antony’s own.”
APPENDIX F
THE “INEXPLICABLE” PASSAGE
IN CORIOLANUS
Coleridge, in his Notes on Shakespeare (1818, Section IV.), calls attention to the difficulty of Aufidius’ speech to his lieutenant:
All places yield to him ere he sits down;