INTRODUCTION. All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, was Dryden's title to his version, written in 1678, of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. This title implied an absolute reversal of Shakespeare's meaning in the play, a mistake which might have appeared reasonable to the apprehension of playgoers in the time of Charles the Second, but in which there would have been no reason to the mind of an Elizabethan. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra might more truly have been called All for Lust; or, The World Ill Lost. It was intended to show how, as Plutarch said, "the last and extremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love of Cleopatra) lighted on Antony, who did waken and stir up many vices yet hidden in him, and were never seen to any; and if any spark of goodness or hope of rising were left him, Cleopatra quenched it straight and made it worse than before." It is the old, old warning to avoid the house of the strange woman, "for her house in clineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead. None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the paths of life." The play was, of course, written after Julius Caesar, from which it carries on the sequence of historical events. In Julius Cæsar Antony first appears as "for the course," and his love of pleasure is indicated at the outset. Cassius. Will you go see the order of the course? Brutus. I am not gamesome: I do lack some part -of that quick spirit that is in Antony." In Julius Cæsar the higher use of that quick spirit is chiefly dwelt upon, and the soul of the story is found in a truth of life that has no relation with that shown to be at the heart of the tale of Antony's final ruin, through the overgrowth of his desire towards what William Wordsworth has described in the young as "simple pleasure foraging for death." In the two plays there is a continuous tale in two parts, each part shaped for enforcement of that first principle which its problem of life especially illustrates. Each play therefore, as to its central thought, is entirely distinct from the other; and in this respect the sequence in Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra differs from the sequence of King Richard II., the two parts of King Henry IV., and King Henry V., in which plays there is a continuation, not only of the setting forth of one series of historical events, but also of the setting forth of one poetical conception. The writing of Antony and Cleopatra may possibly have followed some years after the writing of Julius Cæsar. It was entered at Stationers' Hall on the 20th May, 1608, to Edward Blunt, "for his copie vnder thandes of Sir George Buck, knight, and Master Warden Seton. A booke called 'The booke of Pericles prynce of Tyre.' Also to his copye by the lyke Aucthoritie. A booke called 'Anthony and Cleopatra."" There were two quartos of Pericles in 1609, but of Antony and Cleopatra no quarto is known. It seems to have been first printed in the folio of 1623. This play has a certain relation in its motive to the trilogy on Henry IV. and Henry V. In the trilogy we see a generous nature tempted by the pleasures of the world, through the same quick spirit that was in Antony-" most subject is the fattest soil to weeds"-but Prince Harry was not hopelessly entangled in the net. He rose again |