thing; for the easily aroused emotion soon subsides
after it has done its work and yields to some quite
contrary impulsion. But meanwhile the worst of it
is, that it carries away the eloquent speaker, and
hurries him in directions and to distances that are
not for his good. With Antony's real and permanent
bias, even a temporary reconcilement with Octavius
is a mistake; but what shall we say of his marriage
with Octavia? Yet he jumps at it at once; and
with that convincing air of sincerity that can only
be explained by his really liking it for the moment,
exclaims:
May I never

To this good purpose, that so fairly shows,
Dream of impediment! Let me have thy hand :
Further this act of grace: and from this hour

The heart of brothers govern in our loves
And sway our great designs.

(11. ii. 146.)

And again he realises just what is proper to feel and say to his betrothed, and says it so that we are sure he feels it so long as he is speaking:

My Octavia,

Read not my blemishes in the world's report:

I have not kept my square: but that to come
Shall all be done by the rule.

(11. iii. 4.) Yet she has barely left him, when, at the warning of the soothsayer, and the thought of Octavius' success in games of chance and sport, he resolves to outrage the still uncompleted marriage and return to his Egyptian bondage:

I will to Egypt:

For though I make this marriage for my peace,
I' the East my pleasure lies.

(11. iii. 38.)

But when this is his fixed determination, why make the marriage at all? Does he fail to see that it will bring not peace but a sword? Yet he is so hoodwinked by immediate opportunism that he bears his share in making Pompey harmless to the mighty brother-in-law he is just about to offend. And

inspiration of his soldiership and generalship is giving him a slight superiority, when the panic of Cleopatra withdraws her contingent of sixty ships:

Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,

Whom leprosy o'ertake !-i' the midst o' the fight,
When vantage like a pair of twins appear'd,
Both as the same, or rather ours the elder,
The breese upon her, like a cow in June,
Hoists sail and flies.

(III. X. 10.)

Not all is lost even then. But Antony follows the fugitive, when, if he were true to himself, the day might still be retrieved. This is the view that Shakespeare assigns to Canidius; and while all the previous items he derived from Plutarch, only distributing them among his persons, and adding to their picturesqueness and force, this is an addition of his own to heighten the ignominy of Antony's desertion: Had our general

Been what he knew himself, it had gone well. (111. x. 25.) And the explanation of his "most unnoble swerving," if in one way an excuse, in another is an extra shame to his manhood, and too well justifies Enobarbus' dread of Cleopatra's influence:

Your presence needs must puzzle Antony;

Take from his heart, take from his brain, from's time,
What should not then be spared.

(111. vii. 11.)

The authority for the idea that Antony was in a manner hypnotised by her love, Shakespeare found, like so much else, in the Life, but he enhances the effect immeasurably, first by putting the avowal in Antony's own lips, and again by the more poignant and pitiful turn he gives it. Plutarch says:

There Antonius shewed plainely, that he had not onely lost the corage and hart of an Emperor, but also of a valliant man, and that he was not his owne man: (proving that true which an old man spake in myrth that the soule of a lover lived in

another body, and not in his owne) he was so caried away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had bene glued into her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also.

Antony cries in the play :

O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? . .

Thou knew'st too well

My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after: o'er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me

...

You did know
How much you were my conqueror: and that
My sword, made weak by my affection, would
Obey it on all cause.

(III. X. 51.)

But in Shakespeare's view the final decision was not reached even at the battle of Actium. Despite that disaster and the subsequent desertions, Antony is still able to offer no inconsiderable resistance in Egypt. In direct contradiction of Plutarch's statement, he says, after the reply to Euphronius and the scourging of Thyreus :

Our force by land
Hath nobly held; our sever'd navy too
Have knit again, and fleet, threatening most sea-like.
(III. xiii. 169.)

Whether this be fact or illusion, it shows that in his own eyes at least some hope remains: but in the hour of defeat he was quite unmanned and seemed to give up all thought of prolonging the struggle. When for the first time after his reverse we meet him in Alexandria, he prays his followers to "take the hint which his despair proclaims" (III. xi. 18), and to leave him, with his treasure for their reward. This circumstance Shakespeare obtained from Plutarch, but in Plutarch it is not quite the same. There the dismissal takes place at Taenarus in the Peloponnesus, the first stopping-place at which Antony

touches in his flight, and apparently is dictated by the difficulty of all the fugitives effecting their escape. At any rate he was very far even then from despairing of his cause, for in the revious sentence we read that he "sent unto Canidius, to returne with his army into Asia, by Macedon"; and some time later we find him, still ignorant of the facts, continuing to act on the belief "that his armie by lande, which he left at Actium, was yet whole." Here on the other hand he has succeeded in reaching his lair, and it is as foolish as it is generous to throw away adherents and resources that might be of help to him at the last. But he is too despondent to think even of standing at bay. He tells his friends:

I have myself resolved upon a course
Which has no need of you.

(III. xi. 9.)

That course was to beseech Octavius by his schoolmaster,

(III. xii. 14.)

To let him breathe between the heavens and earth, A private man in Athens. Here he touches the bottom mud of degradation and almost sinks to the level of Lepidus who did obtain permission to live under surveillance at Circeii "till death enlarged his confine." And here too Shakespeare follows Plutarch, but here too with a difference. For in the biography this incident comes after some time has elapsed, and new disappointments and new indulgences have made deeper inroads in Antony's spirit. In one aspect no doubt he is less pitiable in thus being brought to mortification by degrees. In Shakespeare he adopts this course before ever he has seen the Queen, and in so far shows greater weakness of character. Like Richard II. he bows his head at

He learns the truth however before he sends Euphronius as delegate.

once, and without an effort takes "the sweet way to despair." Yet just for that reason he is from another point of view less ignoble. It is the sudden sense of disgrace, the amazement, the consternation at his own poltroonery that turns his knees to water. But the very immediacy and poignancy of his selfdisgust is a guarantee of surviving nobility that needs only an occasion to call it forth. The occasion

comes in the refusal of his own petition and the conditional compliance with Cleopatra's. Antony's answer to this slighting treatment is his second challenge. This too Shakespeare obtained from Plutarch, but of this too he altered the significance and the date. In Plutarch it is sent after Antony's victorious sally, apparently in elation at that trifling success, and is recorded without other remark than Octavius' rejoinder. In Shakespeare it is the retort of Antony's self-consciousness to the depreciation of his rival, and it is the first rebound of his relaxed valour. When the victor counts him as nought he is stung to comparisons, and feels that apart from success and external advantages he is still of greater worth :

Tell him he wears the rose
Of youth upon him; from which the world should note
Something particular: his coin, ships, legions,

May be a coward's; whose ministers would prevail
Under the service of a child as soon

As i' the command of Caesar: I dare him, therefore,
To lay his gay comparisons apart,

And answer me declined, sword against sword,
Ourselves alone.

(III. xiii. 20.)

Of course it is absurd and mad; and the madness and absurdity are brought out, in the play, not in the Life, by the comments of Enobarbus, Octavius and Mecaenas. Indeed at this juncture Antony's valour, or rather his desperation, does not cease to prey on his reason. His insult to Caesar in the Scourging of his messenger is less an excess of