moment both betraying Antony and loving him so passionately as to be able to die with him. Of such contradictions is the heart of woman capable. There are few passages in all literature so impressive as those closing scenes in which, turning away from her traitorous bargaining for her own life, she at last realises what is the real state of her heart, and learns that she is No more but e'en a woman, and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks All the greatness of Antony comes back on her; and she declares that, he being gone, "there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon". The officers of Octavius, who intend to adorn his triumph by exhibiting her to the gaze of Rome, have hemmed her in; but she eludes their vigilance and gets a number of asps conveyed into the tower in which she is confined, by a countryman carrying a basket of grapes. That is a wonderful scene, when she tells her women to array her once more in all the splendour of her royal robes and, thus attired, applies the reptile to her breast, bidding it be angry and dispatch, and with its sharp teeth the "knot intrinsicate of life untie". The murderous bite she declares to be "as sweet as balm, as soft as air"; and, smiling in reply to a pitying exclamation of her attendant, she says: Peace, peace, Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep? When all is over, the waiting-woman adjusts on the dead queen's head the crown, which has fallen a little awry, and then, applying to her own breast another of the reptiles, follows her mistress into the unknown.1 1 Heine, who knew this kind of woman too well, has a chapter on Cleopatra, in his Shakspeare's Maidens and Women, which makes the reader shiver with its realism and unearthly cleverness. LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST THE COMEDY OF ERRORS Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING AS YOU LIKE IT TWELFTH NIGHT OR WHAT YOU WILL CHAPTER III. THE GAYER COMEDIES SHAKSPEARE made himself by the historical plays, and these form the true gateway into the world of his thought. But even earlier than the working of this enriching vein the composition of his earliest Comedies had begun; and, during the first half of his life as an author, the writing of historical plays and the making of comedies went on side by side. Indeed, the composition of comedies went on during his entire life as a dramatist; and the Comedies number nearly half of all his plays. The audience in a theatre wants primarily to be amused, and the dramatist has to give what the public asks. The Comedies formed part of the day's work which Shakspeare had to perform, although there is far less of the man himself in them than in the historical plays. It is generally allowed that there is a marked contrast between the comedies of Shakspeare's earlier and those of his later life. The former are gayer, the latter graver; and the date fixed upon as the watershed is the year 1600. Up to this date he wrote ten comedies, the names of which are printed on the opposite page, and these form the theme of the present chapter. |