Page:Antony and Cleopatra (1921) Yale.djvu/155



Shakespeare took the story of Antony and Cleopatra, much of the characterization, and not a little of the language from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Compared Together, as translated by Sir Thomas North (1st ed. 1579). This most notable among biographies is first of all a study of character and hence lent itself here, as in the case of Julius Cæsar, to the purpose of the dramatist.

The story of Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare tells it is much abridged from Plutarch. The events between Antony's marriage with Octavia in 40 B. C. and the battle of Actium in 31 B. C. contain little of dramatic interest. Antony's unsuccessful Parthian campaign would have only hindered the narrative; and Shakespeare wisely omits and condenses. Even so, the mosaic of little scenes in the third and fourth acts represents the dramatist's difficulty with a sweep of history so extensive. Shakespeare invents no action of importance; he regarded his source as history, and was faithful to it; but it was not the Roman empire and its fate which interested him. Indeed, his view of the Roman world and the problems of a vast international organization is quite without comprehension, as one would expect from an inhabitant of a self-contained England just emerging from medievalism. Rather he viewed these adventures of Rome in the East as a romantic setting merely for a great and human story of a lover who loved not wisely, but too well.

In language, as in plot, Shakespeare displays here his accustomed economy. Wherever North's expressive prose may be raised into poetry, he does so with