the power and magnificence of North's Plutarch, to select his Coriolanus, his Julius Cæsar, and his Antonius? The answer, I think, must be that in Volumnia, Calpurnia and Portia, and Cleopatra, he found woman in her three-fold relation to man, of mother, wife, and mistress. I have passed over Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar; but I may end by tracing in his Antony the golden tradition he accepted from Amyot and North. It is impossible to do this in detail, for throughout the first three acts all the colour and the incident, throughout the last two all the incident and the passion, are taken by Shakespeare from North, and by North from Amyot. Enobarbus's speech (II. ii. 194), depicting the pageant of Cleopatra's voyage up the Cydnus to meet Antony, is but North's The manner how he fell in love with her was this.' Cleopatra's barge with its poop of gold and purple sails, and its oars of silver, which kept stroke, after the sound of the musicke of flutes'; her own person in her pavilion, cloth of gold of tissue, even as Venus is pictured; her pretty boys on each side of her, like Cupids, with their fans; her gentlewomen like the Nereides, steering the helm and handling the tackle; the 'wonderful passing sweete savor of perfumes that perfumed the wharfe-side'; all down to Antony 'left post alone in the market-place in his Imperiall seate,' are translated bodily from the one book to the other, with but a little added ornament of Elizabethan fancy. Shakespeare, indeed, is saturated with North's language and possessed by his passion. He is haunted by the story as North has told it, so that he even fails to eliminate matters which either are nothing to his purpose or are not susceptible of dramatic presentment: as in I. ii. of the Folios, where you find Lamprias, Plutarch's

grandfather, and his authority for many details of Antony's career, making an otiose entry as Lamprius, among the characters who have something to say. Everywhere are touches whose colour must remain comparatively pale unless they glow again for us as, doubtless, they glowed for Shakespeare, with hues reflected from the passages in North that shone in his memory. For instance, when his Antony says (I. i. 53):

"To-night we 'll wander through the streets and note
The qualities of people,'

you need to know from North that sometime also when he would goe up and downe the citie disguised like a slave in the night, and would peere into poore men's windowes and their shops, and scold and brawl with them within the house; Cleopatra would be also in a chamber-maides array, and amble up and down the streets with him'; for the fantastic rowdyism of this Imperial masquerading is all but lost in Shakespeare's hurried allusion. During his first three Acts Shakespeare merely paints the man and the woman who are to suffer and die in his two others; and for these portraits he has scraped together all his colour from the many such passages as are scattered through the earlier and longer portion of North's Antonius. Antony's Spartan endurance in bygone days, sketched in Cæsar's speech (1. iv. 59)—

"Thou didst drink

The stale of horses and the gilded puddle

Which beasts would cough at thy palate then did deign

The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;

Yea, like a stag when snow the pasture sheets,

The barks of trees thou brousedst. On the Alps

It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,

Which some did die to look on '

6

is thus originated by North: 'It was a wonderful example to the souldiers, to see Antonius that was brought up in all fineness and superfluity, so easily to drink puddle water, and to eate wild fruits and rootes and moreover, it is reported that even as they passed the Alpes, they did eate the barks of trees, and such beasts as never man tasted their flesh before.' For his revels in Alexandria, Shakespeare has taken the eight wild boars roasted whole' (II. ii. 183); for Cleopatra's disports, the diver who did hang a salt fish on his hook' (II. v. 17). In ш. iii. the dialogue with the Soothsayer, with every particular of Antony's Demon overmatched by Cæsar's, and of his ill luck with Cæsar at dice, cocking, and quails; in m. x. the galley's name, Antoniad; and in II. vi. Cæsar's account of the coronation on a tribunal silver'd,' and of Cleopatra's giving audience' in the habiliment of the Goddess Isis, are other such colour patches. And this, which is true of colour, is true also of incident in the first three Acts. The scene near Misenum in II. vi., with the light talk between Pompey and Antony, is hardly intelligible apart from North: Whereupon Antonius asked him (Sextus Pompeius), "And where shall we sup?" There," sayd Pompey; and showed him his admiral galley. that," said he, "is my father's house they have left me. He spake it to taunt Antonius because he had his father's house.' On the galley in the next scene, the offer of Menas, 'Let me cut the cable,' and Pompey's reply 'Ah, this thou shouldst have done and not have spoke on't!' may be read almost textually in North: "Shall I cut the gables of the ankers?" Pompey having paused a while upon it, at length answered him: "thou shouldst have done

66

it and never told it me.' In ш. vii. the old soldier's appeal to Antony not to fight by sea, with all his arguments; in II. xi. Antony's offer to his friends of a ship laden with gold; in III. xii. his request to Cæsar that he may live at Athens; in III. xiii. the whipping of Thyreus, with Cleopatra's announcement, when Antony is pacified, that 'Since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra-'1 all these incidents are compiled from the many earlier pages of North's Antonius. But in the Fourth Act Shakespeare changes his method: he has no more need to gather and arrange. Rather the concentrated passion, born of, and contained in, North's serried narrative, expands in his verse-nay, explodes from it-into those flashes of immortal speech which have given the Fourth Act of Antony and Cleopatra its place apart even in Shakespeare. Of all that may be said of North's Plutarch, this perhaps is of deepest significance: that every dramatic incident in Shakespeare's Fourth Act is contained in two, and in his Fifth Act, in one and a half folio pages of the Antonius. Let me rehearse the incidents. The Fourth Act opens with Antony's renewed challenge to Cæsar, and is somewhat marred by Shakespeare's too faithful following of an error in North's translation.

'Let the old ruffian know

I have many other ways to die'

is taken from North; but North has mistaken Amyot, who correctly renders Plutarch's version of the repartee, that he (Antony) has many other ways to die': ('Cesar luy feit response, qu'il avoit beaucoup d'autre moiens de mourir que celuy là.') In North, 1 One of North's mistranslations: she kept Antony's birthday, not her

own.

this second challenge comes after (1) the sally in which Antony drove Cæsar's horsemen back to their camp (IV. vii.); (2) the passage in which he 'sweetly kissed Cleopatra, armed as he was,' and commended to her a wounded soldier (IV. viii.); (3) the subsequent defection of that soldier, which Shakespeare, harking back to the earlier defection of Domitius, described by North before Actium, develops into Enobarbus's defection and Antony's magnanimity (IV. v.), with Enobarbus's repentance and death (IV. vi. and ix.). In North, hard after the challenge follows the supper at which Antony made his followers weep (IV. ii.) and the mysterious music portending the departure of Hercules (IV. iii.). The latter passage is so full of awe that I cannot choose but quote. 'Furthermore,' says North, the self same night within little of midnight, when all the citie was quiet, full of feare, and sorrowe, thinking what would be the issue and end of this warre: it is said that sodainly they heard a marvelous sweete harmonie of sundrie sortes of instruments of musicke, with the crie of a multitude of people, as they had beene dauncing, and had song as they use in Bacchus feastes, with movinges and turninges after the manner of the satyres, and it seemed that this daunce went through the city unto the gate that opened to the enemies, and that all the troupe that made this noise they heard went out of the city at that gate. Now, such as in reason sought the interpretation of this wonder, thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion to counterfeate and resemble him, that did forsake them.'1 The incident

1 Translated word for word from Amyot. Any one who cares to pursue this tradition of beauty still further towards its sources will find that in the Antonius Amyot was in turn the debtor of Leonardus Aretinus, who did the life into Latin for the editio princeps (1470) of Campani.