I have led you oft, carry me now, good friends; And have my thanks for all. Cleo. O thou sun, Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in !— darkling stand It will not be necessary to continue quoting their alternate speeches on love and suicide. Sufficient to say, their religion, their fate is a kiss; as it was their all in all at the be ginning, so it is their only comfort at the last sad end. Was their religion a fact, she says, it should be accomplished in lifting him up to heaven; but this is the hope and faith of fools; the only certainty is to die in the joy of life, what was life to him, a kiss. If it could restore the ebbing life, or dead give him another life, and if her religion promised such a regeneration, or such a resurrection-then would she devote her lips to his continual service. Nor does Shakspere forget to make her rail at the powers, though she knows her invectives to be as inefficacious as her prayers. Antony dies, proclaiming the nobler part to act is suicide-that it is base and cowardly to die in any other way than by self-destruction. All commentators have agreed in the pains Shakspere has taken in making Antony the hero of the play; we do not think, therefore, that he would have given him reiterated sentiments contrary to his own, but rather that he studied to make them pass with his audience, when their more simple enunciation might not have recommended him in his hero to a Christian world. Iras. Royal Egypt! Empress! Char. Peace, peace, Iras. Cleo. No more but in a woman, and commanded To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods : To rush into the secret house of death, Ere death dare come to us? how do you, women? What, what? Good cheer! Why, how now, Charmian? Our lamp is spent, 'tis out-Good sirs, take heart, Come away; We'll bury him; and then what's brave, what's noble, The above elaborate defence of suicide is put into the mouth of Cleopatra. The audience are asked, as it were, to excuse a deed which might be repugnant to their principles, but which she gives argument to opinion in favour of, not without philosophical reflection on her equality with all mankind, even in the strength of her passions, and not without some impiety towards heaven. Whatever she was above a woman in possessing Antony, she is now no more-her life, her religion, her hope, her faith, are taken away in him. This produces the reflection that she was not only superior to everything on earth, but to everything offered to man, here and hereafter, on the part of heaven. The general conclusion is, 'all's but naught'-the nothing of Macbeth-and the consequence that, without hope, patience is sottish, and impatience is becoming those who are deprived of their reason; they have cause to stay in this world who have lost all hope, and whose patience can only result from stupidity, bereft of their senses in another way. This heathen woman has none of the fears of after death-death must come, we have to face it and its dreads, whether we meet it or it meets us. In the spirit of poetry, Cleopatra represents it, not as a sin, but making the person, or god, whose office it is to give death, proud in being deprived of it by a woman after so noble a fashion. The want of which resolution was the characteristic of Hamlet, and turned him from his, but not Cleopatra from her enterprise. The same praise is accorded to suicide in Dercetas's account to Cæsar of Antony's death. Cæsar is made to think that evidence of pity would meet with the rebuke of the gods, as if vengeance only, and not mercy, was their attribute. Agrippa says nature compels us, though he thinks it extraordinary, as we are the authors of what we lament. Agrippa, too, pays Antony the compliment we mentioned before, almost equal to the praise of Brutus. Augustus appeals to necessity-either himself or Antony must have fallen. He laments That our stars, Unreconcileable, should have divided Clco. My desolation does begin to make To do that thing that ends all other deeds; The same conclusion as in the Duke's speech to Claudionot the desolation which makes us repentant, seeking a better life in reformation of the old one, or in a future state of existence. 'Tis paltry to be great, because we are not ourselves;' we cannot be, we are not masters of ourselves, we have not free-will, we are not fortune herself, we are her tool and fool, as we have been told of other causes-we are ministers of other wills, we have no will of our own. We are all equally ignoble, as the Duke said, because nursed by the same baseness. Nothing can be more necessitarian and material, while again suicide is glorified. She tells the messenger from Cæsar she is his fortune's vassal.' Prevented stabbing herself by Proculeius, who tells her she is relieved, she says: What, of death too, that rids our dogs of languish ? Where art thou, death? Come hither, come: oh come, and take a Queen Worth many babes and beggars. Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir; If idle talk will once be necessary, I'll not sleep neither. This mortal house I'll ruin, She says to Dolabella : Nature wants stuff To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t' imagine Shadows are the fancy of material things, as imagination is of humanity, which, as Macbeth said, was the shadow of matter. In all the above of Cleopatra we can only sec a mixture of impiety and materialism. She speaks of her fallen condition as the 'ashes of my chance.' Cleo. He words me, girls, he words me, That I should not be noble to myself. But hark thee, Charmian. Iras. Finish, good lady. The bright day is done, Again it is delivered in the question of to be or not to be that it is nobler not to be. It may be said that Hamlet was perpetually wording himself from his enterprises, actions, and resolutions. Not so Cleopatra and her girls. Cleopatra is a sort of Mary Queen of Scots, who makes not only powers, but their servants, faithless to their trusts. Dolabella informs her of the intentions of Cæsar, that she may make the best use of her time : Madam, as thereto sworn, by your command, She says of the Clown who brings her the asp: Let him come in. What poor an instrument When Cleopatra asks him of the asp, Will it eat me?'— Clown. You must not think me so simple, but I know the devil himself will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for in every ten that they make, the devils mar five. The idea is that the devils would not damn a woman, out of courtesy they would save her that both gods and devils are subjects to sensual affection that the gods would get hold of the women, if the devils did not anticipate them. The truth that, though the gods make women for their own uses, the devils share half, is the impiety usually given to every clown. It cannot be said, in excuse, that such was the pagan superstition concerning the gods. Shakspere, by introducing the devils, has made it modern religion; he has, from Scripture and the version of the age, seen afterwards in Milton, shown that the good and the evil powers were perpetually in conflict, disturbing the creation, and marring its results. The objects of dispute, as they were to the sons of God, he has supposed to be the daughters of men. Cleopatra prepares to die, not with any humility, but in her robe and crown, as she met Antony on the Cydnus, when she represented the Queen of Love. She did not think Venus would be jealous of her, but was going to the gods and goddesses in heaven as superior to them, to dispossess them. This is not religion, but the mockery of it. Is not the belief Shakspere's? It cannot be said to have been Antony's or Cleopatra's. It is fine poetry in Shakspere, and pride of heart in Cleopatra, which, conscious of the reality of its fall, of its own impotence, bears itself up against earth and heaven, gods and men, life and death. Cleo. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. To praise my noble act. I hear him mock I give to baser life. So- -have you done? The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, Which hurts, and is desir'd. Dost thou lie still? It is not worth leave-taking. [Iras falls. Char. Dissolve, thick cloud, and rain, that I may say, Cleo. This proves me base : If she first meets the curled Antony, He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss, Which is my heav'n to have. Come, mortal wretch, Of life at once untie; poor venomous fool, |