Six Cleopatras

THAT the life and character of Cleopatra are among the most exciting and instructive in all history, and afford admirable material for dramatic writing, sounds like stiff commonplace. Yet purposing to compare in this paper some of the more important plays founded on that story, I cannot “ want the thought” that the serious crisis at which the last queen of Egypt appeared, and the extraordinary influence she exerted, are but half understood by many to whom the incidents are familiar.

The Land of Egypt has always exercised a fascination on other nations. Everything about it is marvellous to the point of contradiction. Historically among the oldest of lands, it is geologically one of the newest; exuberant in fertility, it has never a drop of rain. Its one river has had its course celebrated for ages on ages, and its source only known for a few decades. Its buildings combine the extreme of material stubbornness with the extreme of artistic labor; its inscriptions are as conspicuous and as mystical as the Nile. Its native kings, dynasty upon dynasty, now appear as fixing the pillars of their conquest in far distant lands, and now as driven far up the valley by invading shepherds. Its teeming population, forced by their rulers to construct works of matchless magnificence and durability, seem to count in the scale of being for much less than cats or crocodiles. Its religion is a medley of animal worship more degraded than anything in Hindostan, and lofty views of death and judgment worthy of Plato. Above all, the united energy of kings, priests, and people seems to have been given to exalt the dead above the living. Fascinating to the inhabitants of every western nation, Egypt is doubly so to all who accept the Hebrew Scriptures as part of their religion.

And this land of marvels, after holding itself high among the nations for centuries on centuries, suddenly sank with scarcely an effort under the dominion of Persia. A despot as wanton as Caligula or Rufus brought Egypt to her knees with scarcely a blow struck in her defence. For nearly two hundred years she remained a part of the Persian Empire, though a few bold patriots maintained with the help of Athens a fairly successful revolt in the marshes. But in 332 B. C. Alexander stepped across the line of Asia and Africa, and Egypt experienced the strangest change of dynasty in all her annals.

There is a fashion among some historians nowadays to depreciate the genius and fame of Alexander the Great, setting him as a soldier below Hannibal, and as an organizer far below Ciesar. Considering that he never was defeated by any enemy, domestic or foreign, in campaigns extending over thirteen years, and ranging from Thrace to the Punjab, that the kingdoms founded by his generals, and organized on his principles, were not all finally extinguished for two centuries and a half, that his name is still attached to cities of every degree of importance from Egypt to India, and that one of them has maintained unbroken life and importance as a first-class commercial port for over twenty - two centuries, we may think twice before consigning to any second rank the author of such works. Egypt was assigned to his most cautious and judicious general, and at once rose to a more commanding place than she had held for centuries, under a dynasty whose country had been pronounced by Demosthenes not fit to breed a decent slave. But that dynasty, though exhibiting wonderful foresight and enlightenment in the person of many monarchs, sank ultimately from a strange and revolting cause; one which, carried to a much less repulsive point, has in recent centuries sapped the strength of the Portuguese monarchy. The Ptolemies, to maintain the integrity of their race, had married their own sisters in generation after generation. This unnatural conjunction produced its inevitable result in mental degeneration, though, as seems to be the rule in like cases, the women maintained the spirit and energy of the stock far longer than the men.

But the end was bound to come. The arms and policy of Rome steadily crowded closer and closer on Egypt, and forced her from a position equal to that of any independent nation into submission verging dangerously on vassalage. The kindred monarchies, which like hers had sprung from the seed of empire sown by Alexander, had one after another been absorbed. The eleventh Ptolemy, a mere boy, was governed by counsellors who felt an uneasy consciousness of their country’s subjection, and a feeble longing for independence, but were destitute of every kind of manhood. When at last the inevitable struggle between Caesar and Pompey burst into warfare, their nerveless and faithless counsels were divided. Ptolemy owed the very existence of his kingdom to Pompey, and after the rout of Pharsalus Egypt was the point to which Pompey turned for merited protection. He was enticed from his ship into an open boat, stabbed in the back and beheaded in sight of his wife, his body left unburied on the shore, and his head exhibited to the victor Caesar on his arrival, to his utter disgust.

Egypt was now at the feet of Rome and Rome’s dictator; and what might have been her fate at that dictator’s hands is beyond conjecture; for at that moment Cleopatra, the sister and wife of the king, once his colleague, now an exile in Syria, gathering forces to recover her share of the throne, suddenly threw into the scale the weight of her irresistible fascination. She came to Alexandria; she obtained admission to the presence of Csesar by stratagem; and at the age of twenty-one, she conquered the conqueror of Gaul and Pompey, who was at least fifty-two, and probably fifty-five. He took up her cause against her brother’s, at the risk of his fortunes and his life; made her his companion till his return to Rome and then till his death; would have made her his wife, had there not been a point beyond which even Roman submission could not go. On his death she returned to Egypt, and there maintained the state of a queen against the world for years.

Plutarch has told us, and Shakespeare has told us after him, how that work was done. It is best read in their pages. By the mere force of personal charm this woman succeeded in holding one of the masters of the world — a man of undoubted craft and courage, a man who had the making of a hero in him — the slave of her caprices; in thwarting all the influences of one wife after another, of soldiers, of colleagues, of friends, of enemies, in drawing him to destruction at the very crisis of fate, and then when, faithless at the last moment, she had compassed his death without accomplishing her own deliverance, taking her own life rather than be less than a queen. No woman who ever filled or aspired to a throne has exercised such dominion by her unaided personal resources, — not Mary of Scotland, nor Catherine of Russia. She held the Roman arms at bay for thirteen years like Hannibal himself.

The moment her death was announced at Rome, the genius of Horace broke forth into a song of triumph which refutes all feeble criticisms of him as unoriginal and unreal; but in this splendid burst of patriotic exultation, which does justice even in its hatred to the majesty of the Macedonian, so far beyond her contemptible court, there is no mention of the Roman whom she won to his ruin.

The intensely dramatic nature of her career, the high-strung emotions, the deep intrigue, the conflict of passion, the rapid changes of fortune, seem to mark it out at once as a fit subject of tragedy, and it is my intention in this paper to compare the dramas of some writers of the first eminence, who have put their hands to it.

Of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra it is difficult to speak in terms of moderation. We do not usually hear it ranked among his best plays; yet in what dramatic excellence is it lacking? It is taken incident for incident, almost word for word, from Plutarch’s biography; yet it has all the effect of a purely original composition, neither the biography nor the drama detracting a whit from each other’s interest and value. It may seem to a hasty reader a mere string of scattered adventures and unconnected characters, hurrying him from Alexandria to Rome and back again, then to Misenuim then to Syria, and returning at last almost “spent with the journey.” We cannot help being fascinated with the characters, amused with the wit, thrilled by the passion, and touched by the catastrophe. But it requires a second reading to discern the unity and proportion of the whole. It will then appear that from the very first lines, where Philo says, —

a single controlling purpose runs through the entire work. Every incident, every speech, every personage, even the most apparently insignificant, bears its definite part in working out the grand theme, — the reduction of an all but heroic soul to the slavery of an all but superhuman sorceress , who is forced herself to break down as the result of victory. All the characters, from the triumvirs who rule the Roman world to the clown who brings the aspic, and the guard who comes too late for anything but the last words of Charmian,— priests, soldiers, courtiers, pirates, Cleopatra’s majestic rival Octavia, whom all the haughty traits of a Roman matron cannot help against the enchantress, the frivolous waiting women, whom their mistress’s despairing courage elevates into kindred dignity, — are tools in the hand of a mysterious Fate, working out the ruin of two mighty souls. Every lofty motive combines to draw Antony out of the snare. Ambition, interest, patriotism, friendship, domestic honor, jealousy of his competitors, are united to no purpose. He resists, he struggles, he breaks away, — and he is drawn back by an influence like the loadstone mountain, which pulls all the iron from his blood. According to all the elaborate traditions of the French stage he is unworthy to be a hero of tragedy; he is too weak, too vacillating, too little under the sway of a great principle, to win our sympathies. To all which scholastic criticism the answer is —he wins them. History represents him to us as the most unprincipled of men; — Shakespeare takes the narrative as history gives it, — and we rise from his drama with an indulgence for Antony, amounting to affection, which the stern principle of Brutus or Coriolanus never can secure.

And Cleopatra, — the same charm which brought Caesar and Antony to her feet breathes from the page that repeats the story of nineteen centuries old. It is best described in the oft quoted lines,

A captive to her very prisoner; a victor over her very conqueror. We hang on every word of her lips as we cannot on the wit of Beatrice, or the passion of Juliet, or the loyalty of Imogen. In no play has Shakespeare poured out more lavishly the treasures of his pen. From the wit which just touches the line of buffoonery, through every rush of passion and every turn of policy, till at last the devotion has almost the elevation of prophecy, there is no chord untouched, no taste unsatisfied. It is a theme which might be dwelt on without end; to quote all the striking passages would be to copy out the play. But before passing to other dramas, let us note a touch of contemporary gossip to which the Baconians are welcome, if it will do them any good. The enquiry of Cleopatra into Octavia’s beauty and her comment on the information bear a marvellous resemblance to Queen Elizabeth’s dialogue with Sir James Melville with reference to the looks of Mary Queen of Scots.

Shakespeare has had no equal nor second in the handling of this story. But the work of several of his successors deserves notice.

In the collection of plays usually named “Beaumont and Fletcher,” appears one on the story of Cleopatra, entitled the False One, Its prologue distinctly calls it the work of two authors; but from other indications it would seem that Fletcher produced it after the death of Beaumont, with Massinger for his coadjutor. The prologue further has evident allusions to Shakespeare’s plays of Julius Ccesar and Antony and Cleopatra, with which the authors express their unwillingness to compete, preferring to deal with both Csesar and Cleopatra at an earlier period, when those two great spirits encountered each other.

The False One is a good specimen of the free and vigorous spirit and method of those who took up the torch of dramatic poetry from Shakespeare’s hands. There is a frank and manly breath about it all; not quite the wanton, almost buccaneering temper of Marlowe or Greene; there is more self-restraint, and even of convention; but the whole has a solid and sincere reality, as of poets who lived in the open air, among true men and women. It is the writing of workmen, men who pursued the drama for their daily bread, under pressure from managers and audience; a new subject must be seized on at short notice, and cast into dramatic shape to meet the demand of the hour, when playhouses were attended in real earnest by spectators who had no nonsense about them, and expected authors and actors to have none either. Yet it is the work of poets and artists; of men who knew good literature and loved it; who wrote for the balcony as well as the pit; who meant that their plays should be read as well as acted; obliged, as all playwrights must be, to court the popular taste,yet doing all they could to guide and elevate that taste, by good poetry, good sentiment, and good action. It was a time when all classes from the highest to the lowest loved the stage; and such men as Fletcher met this love in a generous, straightforward spirit never surpassed. They made it a truly national institution; and though their themes are mostly foreign, their language is never such. No clearer, nobler, livelier English has ever been written. It speaks to us through eight generations as if they were no more than three; and we cannot help feeling that Chaucer might have enjoyed it as we do.

The plot is drawn from classical authorities, but not so exclusively from Plutarch as are Shakespeare’s Roman plays. The play opens with the speculations of the boy king and his courtiers as to the civil war; one of Pompey’s lieutenants arrives wounded to announce his rout at Pharsalus and flight to Egypt. Achoreus, the priest of Osiris, advises Ptolemy to receive Pompey, to whom he owes his kingdom, in a spirit of gratitude. Photinus the Eunuch advises that he be murdered, and his head delivered to Ctesar who is known to be in hot pursuit; this advice is seconded by the soldier Achillas (who is represented — contrary to history — as having some touch of gallantry), and is adopted unreservedly by Ptolemy. Meanwhile Cleopatra is planning with her sister and attendants how she may assert her right to share in the kingdom, and hearing that Caesar has prevailed, declares she will escape from the imprisonment in which her brother holds her and plead her cause before him.

Caesar appears, and is horrorstruck at the sight of Pompey’s head, but treats the king and his advisers better than they deserve; but before their fate is settled Cleopatra makes her way into his tent, and overcomes him completely, in spite of the remonstrances of his bravest soldier. The rest of the play, strictly following history, shows how Ptolemy, a mere degenerate, is persuaded to rise against Caesar as easily as he had been to fall before him; how Caesar, in spite of all threats and persuasions, adheres to Cleopatra, though blockaded in the palace by all the forces of the Egyptians, and separated from his fleet; how he bursts away by a prodigy of daring, regains his ships, conquers and slays the wretched king, and prepares to return to Rome with Cleopatra as his queen.

The adherence to history gives a connection and unity to all the incidents too often wanting in Fletcher’s plays, where plot and underplot are often alternated with as little connection as if they were two plays on two stages. Of the characters, what Dyce says of Cleopatra is not inapplicable to all: —

“Cleopatra is not, indeed, delineated with those exquisitely subtle touches of character which Shakespeare gave her, and which he alone could give, but still ‘with her great mind expressed to the height,’ and in all respects fit to captivate the conqueror of the world.” The personages are all bold and large; eminently real, and not, like some of Jonson’s men and women, mere “humours; ” but at the same time with a certain simplicity and absence of light and shade which is effective on the stage, but too positive to the reader. The only person who does not alw-ays act out the simple nature with which we first see him is Ptoleitiy, — but vacillation and unreality are his character, or rather his nocharacter. There is plenty of force and richness, — but, as Dyce says, a lack of subtlety. The False One, from which the play derives its name, is Septimius, the hired murderer of Pompey; who, having “filed his mind” for royal bribes and favor, finds himself detested and despised by every one, from the penniless Roman soldier, to whom in vain he offers a share of his wages, to the very conspirator who has bought him, and dies as wretched a death as that he had inflicted on his benefactor. It is a spirited character, well fit to raise tears and shuddering in the audiences of the day, or of any day, — but when one thinks of Iachimo and Parolles, to say nothing of Iago or Falstaff!

The verse, though, like all Fletcher’s, sometimes wildly irregular, is full of nervous and sonorous poetry. The authors could draw, as Shakespeare could not, from Lucan; and some of his fiery rhetoric is adapted to very grand declamation. The following bits will well repay reading aloud: —

On seeing Pompey’s head, Caesar exclaims, after his first burst of horror,—

Septimius, when he finds his employers walk off with the rewards and leave him only the discredit of his villainy, tells us:

When Cleopatra’s sister, in consternation at the revolt, says,—

She replies, —

In 1641, rather more than twenty years after the probable date of the FolseOne, Corneille produced the Mort de Pompee, with a dedication to Cardinal Richelieu. The first part of this play so precisely follows the lines of Fletcher’s that one is strongly disposed to believe the impossible, and think that the False One had somehow drifted over to the court of Louis XIII. Corneille was now at the height of his glory. The Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte had forced themselves upon the favor of court, cardinal, and city. It would have been difficult for their author to maintain his reputation, and in fact he never did. His admirers say as little about the Death of Pompey as they can. The opening discussion, derived, like Fletcher’s, from Lucan, is fine; and much praise is given to the character of Cornelia, the widow of Pompey, a person forced in against all history as well as probability, who defies Caesar, her husband’s virtual murderer, to open combat, but disdains to strike bands with the faithless King of Egypt, and reveals to her greatest enemy the plot against his life. But Cleopatra herself has no particular force or charm, and Csesar is reduced to a mere “lover, sighing like furnace.” The proprieties of the French stage considered the actual production of Pompey’s head too revolting, and the entrance of Cleopatra into Caesar’s tent, wrapped up in a roll of carpeting, too comic, and only suited to the barbarous taste of the English stage, — if, indeed, Corneille knew that Fletcher had employed them. As it is, the critics fall foul of Corneille without mercy for several expressions which they deem bourgeois and undignified. A very few lines may serve to show Corneille’s Cleopatra at her best, where, after recognizing all the risks that attend her acceptance of her rightful crown from Caesar’s grace, she goes on: —

In 1679, not quite two generations from the appearance of the False One, John Dryden presented the story of Cleopatra in his play of All for Lave, or the World Well Lost. He has given us in clear, vigorous prose a full account of his purpose in writing this play, —it was to imitate Shakespeare. Under the Commonwealth, the players had been silenced; at the Restoration, Charles II had brought with him from the Continent the French theory of tragedy, with its rhymes, its unities, its stilted heroes and heroines above humanity in passion and will, its confidantes, its long declamations and jejune action. Dryden, conscious of an original genius far above the common, yet pressed to the ground by the needs of daily life, had yielded to the times, and done his utmost to put life and truth into such monsters as the Indian Emperor and Almanzor. Yet he knew all the time, he could not help knowing, that the old dramatists had been right, and his contemporaries wrong. He never misses an opportunity to praise the Elizabethan dramatists of whom he says,—

Of Shakespeare he speaks with an admiration amounting to idolatry, as “the man, who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” Therefore, after giving all the best years of his life to a style of writing he despised, he started at the age of forty-eight to recall the unpopular and almost forgotten temper of the older English stage, and to write a play in avowed imitation of Shakespeare “to please himself.” The result is All for love.

It seems strange that if Dryden desired to write a play under the inspiration of Shakespeare, he should not have taken some plot not handled by his master, or, at least, recast one of the inferior plays, instead of one of the grandest. Having selected a tragedy where competition was of the hardest, he deliberately subjects Shakespeare to those very rules of the French stage under whose weight he had been chafing, and which, as Professor Lounsbury seems to have proved, Shakespeare had known and refused to obey,— the unities of time and place; absurd conventions attributed without warrant to Aristotle, as supplementary to his rule of Unity of Action. Dryden cuts down the story of Antony and Cleopatra to the events following the retreat of the queen from Actium and the triumvir’s pursuit of her, and the entire action goes on in the city of Alexandria. On this sacrifice to the ghosts of the Unities Sir Walter Scott has the following amazing remarks: “Dryden, who was well aware of the advantage to be derived from a simplicity and concentration of the plot, has laid every scene in the city of Alexandria. By this he guarded the audience from the vague and provoking distraction which must necessarily attend a violent change of place. It is a mistake to suppose that the argument in favor of the Unities depends upon preserving the deception of the scene; they are necessarily connected with the intelligibility of the piece. It may be true that no spectator supposes that the stage before him is actually the court of Alexandria; yet when he has once made up his mind to let it pass as such during the representation, it is a cruel tax, not merely on his imagination, but on his powers of comprehension, if the scene be suddenly transferred to a distant country,” and more to the same purport.

What Sir Walter Scott could have been thinking of when he wrote this is hard to say. He was, all his life, from his very childhood, an ardent lover of the theatre; he was a devoted admirer of the old dramatists; and that he ever felt his love for them shocked or cooled by the frequent changes of scene is hard to believe. When the physical scene was never changed at all; when a placard hung out from the balcony was the only indication that the action had passed from Venice to Belmont, or from the “blasted heath” to the court of Edward the Confessor, there might be some momentary confusion in a dull spectator’s mind; but how after the introduction of movable scenery any one could be confused by a change from the colonnades of Alexandria to those of Rome is incredible.

One may regret that Dryden, after deliberately seeking to recall the ancient freedom of the English drama, should have sought to confine it by so many selfimposed barriers. But when all is urged that can be against his method, the result is a very grand and moving tragedy. It is as if Shakespeare and Dryden had both been present at Alexandria, seeing and describing many things in common, but each seeing and describing something which his rival overlooked or forgot.

In Dryden’s Antony we have a character more susceptible to influence, and with less support from within than Shakespeare’s: he is swayed hither and thither by the appeals of Cleopatra and of Ventidius, his most trusted and loyal soldier. This personage is the chief addition which Dryden has made to Shakespeare’s list of characters, from which he has struck out so many. The name just appears in Antony and Cleopatra, but his real prototype is in the False One, where the blunt and brave veteran Scaeva is the only force which even tries to withstand the charms of Cleopatra. By Fletcher the character is drawn with life and vigor, but with Dryden he rises to the first rank. In Antony’s utter debasement after Actium Ventidius approaches him, rouses him, encounters his sad and ferocious mood, argues with him, now sternly and now affectionately, in a dialogue which Dryden tells us was directly modelled on the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, and, though somewhat prolix, is well worthy to rank as its parallel. Throughout the play this fearless and faithful counsellor is at Antony’s side as his good angel, and all but saves him in his own despite.

On the other hand, the character of Dolabella, Antony’s youthful friend, whom he employs as a mediator in a moment of estrangement from Cleopatra, is scarcely as successful: but as history tells us nothing of Dolabella but what is feeble and contemptible, it might have proved hard for any poet to give dignity to the character. A still more doubtful device is bringing Octavia to Alexandria, for the sake of an encounter with Cleopatra face to face, and two scenes of remonstrance with Antony, which only illustrate the corruption which the court of Charles II had cast upon the greatest souls. History tells us, and Shakespeare had to follow it, that the mistress prevailed to steal Antony away from his wife. But we feel that his Octavia is a noble woman wronged, and she keeps our sympathies even when, like Antony, we yield to the superhuman charms of Cleopatra. Dryden did his best to produce the same effect; but the Restoration atmosphere is too strong for him; and after hearing all that Octavia has to plead, we do not wonder that Antony left her. For Dryden’s Cleopatra need not fear comparison with Shakespeare’s, and has far more charm than Fletcher’s. She does not appear as prominently as Antony; in the first act not at all; and in much of the play she is rather felt behind the scenes than presented to us. But when we do see her, she is a worthy replica of her original; a woman who determines that if Antony will lose the world for her sake, he shall never regret the loss, even though it be fatal to both.

Dryden has compressed much, which Shakespeare has given us in full, especially the last scene of all; but there is seen throughout the play the extraordinary fascination of his unique command of English; less free, less joyous, less spontaneous than Fletcher or Massinger; but the work of a master forcing our noble tongue to yield him treasures from its oldest mines, that none of his predecessors ever extracted.

Among the striking passages is one which Sir Walter Scott has justly extracted for commendation, — the vision of the priest of Isis: —

When Ventidius has brought Antony over to his duty, and urges him to stand firm, even against Cleopatra, he listens for some time, gradually finds his resolution melt, and at length bursts out in a splendid lover’s hyperbole. — Ventidius asks,—

When Cleopatra has dismissed Iras and Charmian for her crown and robes, and is alone with Antony’s body: —

In many cases Dryden has taken groups of lines solid from one or other of Shakespeare’s plays; in others he has taken his master’s words as a hint for exquisite glosses. When Ventidius has killed himself before him: —

There is something truly touching in this labor of Dryden’s to return to the right path. One can see it is a struggle; his sublimity touches hard on bombast; his ease on vulgarity. But it is noble to think how, at the age when Shakespeare finally retired from the stage, Dryden all alone, with no one but young Otway, so early lost, to help him, made his mighty effort to bring back into the sickly, foul atmosphere of the Restoration court, the free healthy air in which laughed and wept the long company of the great men of old from Marlowe to Shirley. He is glorious John, after all!

Some French dramatists of the eighteenth century undertook the story of Cleopatra; but they were inferior men, whose names and work are alike forgotten. The only one who has any rank in literature is Marmontel, whose Cleopatre failed on its first representation in 1750, and being recast by the author and reproduced in 1784, was received with even less favor. The author thought his play was too simple to be appreciated by any but a few literary men. The comment in the Biographie Universelle is this: “ Strange illusion of self - conceit! The veritable cause of this indifference exists in the faulty nature {vice) of the subject; Cleopatra with her artifices cannot inspire interest; the blind and contemptible Antony is not more worthy of it; Octavia. by her virtuous resignation, degrades these two personages still further. In vain does the poet supply them with elevated sentiments, in order to ennoble them; a story so well known does not admit of complete alteration.” So thinks a French writer in 1820 of what is a fit theme for tragedy!

The next Cleopatra is of particular interest because it. is the first tragic essay of a mighty genius, who has himself told the history of its composition, and estimated its value with as severe criticism as his bilterest enemy could wish. Vittorio Alfieri, after a stormy boyhood and youth, having rushed through nearly all the countries of western Europe without learning to speak accurately a single language, even his own, had paused for a while — we can hardly call it settling — in his native capital of Turin, where his profuse expenditure and intense nature had gathered round him a set of companions of very moderate culture, but, like himself, inspired with a restless eagerness to do something. He had a smattering of French, Italian, and Latin literature, and had seen something of the French tragic stage. He had been drawn into an absorbing love affair, which kept him almost constantly in his own house, or that of his charmer opposite, except when he gave way to one of his chief ruling passions, the possession and exercise of fine horses. Eager to win some literary fame, but scarcely knowing how to set about it, he tells us precisely how he came to handle the story of Cleopatra. Sitting unoccupied in the saloon of his lady love, whose health required long periods of retirement and silence, he took up half-adozen leaves of paper that lay at hand, and sketched upon them two or three scenes of dialogue, naming the principal speaker Cleopatra. This name was suggested by the story woven on the tapestries of the apartment, otherwise he says he might just as well have called his heroine Berenice or Zenobia. When his paper was exhausted, he thrust the leaves under the cushion of a sofa, and there they remained for over a year, during which he visited Rome, and went through other experiences wholly alien to composition. Finding his passion exercising a baleful influence on his life, he determined to break it off, and in one of his last visits to the lady’s house, he withdrew from under the cushion his attempt at a drama, and proceeded to recast it, still with no very definite plan. Having shut himself up a good deal after breaking off his love affair, he again attacked his Cleopatra; remodelled it a second time; studied, thought, worked to make something of it, and finally,

completed five acts, which were performed by an amateur company at Turin in 1775 more successfully than the author had dared to hope.

As he has condemned his own performance as feeble dramatically, and uncouth poetically, in no measured terms, a foreign critic is not required to be enthusiastic. It is difficult for such a one to see the painful ignorance of pure Tuscan to which Alfieri declared he was a slave at this time. What one must recognize is the weakness of construction, which, departing widely from history, offers no adequate substitute. Augustus appears at Alexandria in wrangling declamation with Antony and Cleopatra. The two Romans both show Roman nobility, and Antony some genuine passion. But Alfieri has succeeded in depriving Cleopatra of all charm. Her share in the plot is to cajole Antony till she has made peace with Augustus, and when both prove too lofty for her, she tries unsuccessfully to assassinate her lover, and stabs herself at last with not a sign of that grace, dignity, and tenderness so rich in Shakespeare and in Dryden. Perhaps the lines where Antony refuses to accept Augustus’s clemency if it is to be coupled with Cleopatra’s humiliation, are worth translating closely: —

It would be hard to guess that from the halting pen that wrote these lines would come Philip and Don Garcia, Myrrha and Saul.

The last, effort to dramatize the story of the Queen of Egypt comes from a very different hand; a lady addressed herself to the task of bringing on the French stage the greatest lady of history. Madame Émile de Girardin,— Delphine Gay,— who has deserved so well of literature not in France only, but all over the world, wrote for Rachel a tragedy by the name of Cléopatre, first exhibited in Paris in 1847.

The play is written with great force and beauty of expression, and deserves no inferior place among those we are discussing. It could hardly help being superior to Alfieri’s boyish effort, —but it has more dignity than the False One, with less appearance of being hurried for the stage; the scope and field is wider than All for Love, and le grand, Corneille must confess his brilliant countrywoman excels him in manliness. Madame de Girardin does not, as might be expected from a French writer, fetter herself by the Unities of place and time; the action covers a considerable, though undefined period, and the scene is once moved to Tarentum, where Octavia not only deprecates her brother’s wrath against her faithless husband, but is visited by Cleopatra, who has come over from Alexandria, disguised as a Greek slave, to see for herself the beauty of which in Shakespeare and, indeed, in Dryden she is informed by hearsay.

The action is made to turn on a conspiracy between Ventidius and one of Cleopatra’s courtiers, each believing it is for the interest of his own country to separate the triumvir and the queen; this is to be done by means of a personage of the author’s invention, or rather adaptation. Madame de Girardin’s great friend and admirer, Theophile Gautier, wrote and published in 1838 a story called Une Nuit de Cleopatre, where an Egyptian of the humblest rank is inflamed by love for Cleopatra, and freely offers to die if he can possess her for a single night. The intriguers in the play are represented as restoring him in the very death agony, to bear witness to Antony of his lady’s unworthy love. The formation of the intrigue, with the poisoning and the revival of the slave, occupies the whole of the first act, during which neither Cleopatra nor Antony appears, which seems a strange fault of dramatic construction. In the second and third acts the author handles the story in her own way; but the two last show unmistakably that while we can hardly suppose her ignorant of Shakespeare, she had certainly read All for Love. More than one incident, more than one expression, seem exactly reproduced from Dryden. The hyperbole quoted in our discussion of All for Love appears in the line of which this is the exact translation : —

As by Dryden, Octavia is brought to Alexandria; but she is introduced immediately after Antony’s death. Like Dryden, Madame de Girardin, exerting all her skill to win our sympathies for Octavia, cannot succeed in winning our hearts any more than Octavia could Antony’s. The catastrophe with the asp, and the coronation before it, is compressed into a very few sentences, as it is in All for Love, instead of being drawn out into the intensely poetic and intensely dramatic beauty of Shakespeare.

The aspic is brought to Cleopatra by the slave, who, when he discovers that he is to be a tool of the conspirators, attaches himself like a dog to Cleopatra, follows her everywhere, warns her of her danger, and proves himself her only efficient friend. He assures her of Antony’s undying love by what he knows of his own in these passionate lines: —

Now these lines irresistibly suggest the exquisitely amusing passage in Lord Lytton’s Lucile, which I only hint, that the reader may have the pleasure of looking it up in the original.

And the resemblance seems to force one
into a version hardly conformed to the spirit of the play: —

The character of Cleopatra herself is handled by the gifted author with great originality and beauty. Her devotion to Antony, her jealousy of Octavia, her resistless charm over all who encounter her, and the touching sway she holds over Charmian and Iras, are exhibited as Plutarch leads, and Shakespeare and Dryden follow. But there is added the new and very subtle touch that Cleopatra’s restless, fiery, eager spirit is sick of the monotony and deadness of Egypt, and longs for the stir and life of Europe. She had hoped to be Caesar’s queen, and reign in Rome; she longs just so to share Antony’s empire and escape from the soulchilling dreariness of the Delta. This thought is expressed in a fine soliloquy, of which some lines follow: —

The radical defect, to Saxon taste, is the spirit of declamation that dominates situation and poetry. Ventidius, Diomedes, the slave, Antony, Caesar, Octavius, Cleopatra, all have to develop their feelings i n long tirades — le recit de Theramene. One does not question that Rachel and her coadjutors could have given them with immense spirit and feeling; one feels that the point and wit of the French language is here elevated to a dignity worthy of Bossuet. and Vergniaud. But in Antony and Cleopatra there is not a single speech twenty lines long; the rhetoric which, in Coriolanus, in Julius Ccesar, in Henry V, in Henry VIII, unless that is Fletcher’s, throws all Corneille and Racine into the shade, is laid aside for fear it should mar the dramatic perfection of the character and incidents. We may freely accord the laurel of noble language and of profound feeling to Delphine Gay, as to John Fletcher and John Dryden, —but the Antony and Cleopatra that hold our hearts are still the creations of the one master.