Come away;

We'll bury him; and then what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make Death proud to take us.
This case of that huge spirit now is cold.
Ah, women, women! come, we have no friend

But resolution and the briefest end.

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
Our equalness to this.

Cleo. My desolation does begin to make
A better life; 'tis paltry to be Cæsar:
Not being fortune, he's but fortune's knave,
A minister of her will, and it is great

To do that thing that ends all other deeds;
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change;
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung;
The beggar's nurse, and Cæsar's.

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,
Do Casar what he can.

She

says to Dolabella:

Nature wants stuff

To vie strange forms with fancy, yet t' imagine
An Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

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 see 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,
And we are for the dark.

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:

She

Madam, as thereto sworn, by your command,
Which my love makes religion to obey.

says of the Clown who brings her the asp:

Let him come in. What poor an instrument
May do a noble deed!-He brings me liberty.
My resolution's plac'd, and I have nothing
Of woman in me; now from head to foot
I'm marble constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.

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
Immortal longings in me. Now no more

The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call, I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act. I hear him mock
The luck of Cæsar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come;
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life. So- —have you done?
Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
Farewell, kind Charmian. Iras, long farewell.
Have I the aspic in my lips? dost fall?
If thou and nature can so gently part,

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,

Which hurts, and is desir'd. Dost thou lie still?
If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world,

It is not worth leave-taking.

[Iras falls.

Char. Dissolve, thick cloud, and rain, that I may say,
The gods themselves do weep.

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,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate

Of life at once untie; poor venomous fool,

Be angry, and dispatch. Oh, coulds't thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Cæsar ass,
Unpolicied!

Char. O eastern star !

Cleo.

Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

Char. O break! O break!

Cleo. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle,
O Antony !-Nay, I will take thee too.-

What, should I stay

[Dies.

Char. In this wild world? so, fare thee well.
Now, boast thee, Death; in thy possession lies
A lass unparallel'd. Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld

Of eyes again so royal! Your crown's awry;
I'll mend it, and then play———

Yet it is language which, with some alteration, might be put in the mouth of a Christian, in the certainty of salvation. This makes it worse, when Antony is to awake from death in heaven to praise her suicide-when the gods are reproached as only giving good to purchase the enjoyment of evil. Her suicide is to prove her right to entitle Antony her husband. What a qualification for the favours of heaven. Thus was to be decided the question in the Scriptures to whom belonged the man who had died, having had seven wives. The concluding words were according to the popular idea of all times, that the invisible was not material, that air and fire parted from matter, where spiritual immortality might dwell.

As usual, Shakspere spreads the repast of death more than he has a warrant for: six have died in this play by suicide. If precept is taught by example, Antony and Cleopatra must have been written in eulogy of self-slaughter. The last surviving victim, on summing up the catastrophe with her own death, cries 'It is well done.' And Cæsar says, as Malcolm did of Cawdor, Bravest at the last;' and hearing of Charmian's suicide, says-' O noble weakness.' We cannot help thinking, therefore, that Shakspere, in this play, did solve his own question, and thought it nobler not to be than to be. He speaks with an energy and a repetition which betrays himself.