Studies in Two Literatures (The Decadent consciousness)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1897. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... SHAKESPEARE ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays, and it is so mainly because the figure of Cleopatra is the most wonderful of Shakespeare's women. And not of Shakespeare's women only, but perhaps the most wonderful of women. The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star of poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and Propertius down to Victor Hugo; and it is not to poets only that her name has come to be synonymous with all that one can conceive of the subtlety of beauty. Before the thought of Cleopatra every man is an Antony, Shakespeare no less than another, though in the play he holds the balance quite steadily. The very name calls up everything that one has read or thought or known of "the world well lost," the giving up of all for love, the supreme surrender into the hands of Lilith, and the inevitable penalty. Probably Shakespeare had had his Cleopatra, though, fortunately for us and for him, he stopped short of the choice of Antony, when Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois II hésita, lachant le monde dans son choix. But unless we adopt the surely untenable theory that the Sonnets, with their passionate sincerity of utterance, the curiously individual note of their complex harmonies, are merely passion according to the Italian Opera, is it not possible that the dark woman, the "woman coloured ill," of whom they show us such significant hints of outline, may have turned his thoughts in the direction of Plutarch's story of Antony and Cleopatra? It is possible; and if so, Shakespeare must have felt a singular satisfaction in putting thus to use an experience bought so sorrowfully, with so much "expense of spirit;" must have felt that he was ...