It is finer
than Cleopatra's passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur,
because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial. Antony's headstrong
presumption and infatuated determination to yield to Cleopatra's
wishes to fight by sea instead of land, meet a merited punishment;
and the extravagance of his resolutions, increasing with the
desperateness of his circumstances, is well commented upon by
Enobarbus:
--I see men's judgements are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike.
The repentance of Enobarbus after his treachery to his master is the
most affecting part of the play. He cannot recover from the blow
which Antony's generosity gives him, and he dies broken-hearted 'a
master-leaver and a fugitive'.
Shakespeare's genius has spread over the whole play a richness like
the overflowing of the Nile.
HAMLET
This is that Hamlet the Dane, whom we read of in our youth, and whom
we seem almost to remember in our after-years; he who made that
famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who
thought 'this goodly frame, the earth, a sterile promontory, and
this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapours'; whom 'man delighted not, nor woman neither'; he who talked
with the grave-diggers, and moralized on Yorick's skull; the
schoolfellow of Rosencraus and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the
friend of Horatio; the lover of Ophelia; he that was mad and sent to
England; the slow avenger of his father's death; who lived at the
court of Horwendillus five hundred years before we were born, but
all whose thoughts we seem to know as well as we do our own, because
we have read them in Shakespeare.
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