I. THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY.

Antony and Cleopatra was first printed in the folio of 1623, where it occupies pages 340-368 in the division of "Tragedies;" but it was probably written in 1607 or very

early in 1608. There can be little doubt that it is the "Anthony and Cleopatra " which was entered on the Stationers' Registers, May 20th, 1608, by Edward Blount, one of the publishers of the folio. As no edition was brought out, it was re-entered by Blount in 1623 as one of the plays in the folio "not formerly entered to other men."

It was formerly supposed that this play was written soon after Julius Cæsar, with which it is connected historically in the person of its hero; but we now know that Julius Cæsar (see our ed. p. 8) was produced some seven years earlier. As Dowden* has well shown, the "ethical" relations of Antony and Cleopatra connect it with Macbeth on the one hand, and with Coriolanus on the other. He remarks: "The events of Roman history connect Antony and Cleopatra immediately with Julius Cæsar; yet Shakspere allowed a number of years to pass, during which he was actively engaged as author, before he seems to have thought of his second Roman play. What is the significance of this fact? Does it not mean that the historical connection was now a connection too external and too material to carry Shakspere on from subject to subject, as it had sufficed to do while he was engaged upon his series of English historical plays? The profoundest concerns of the individual soul were now pressing upon the imagination of the poet. Dramas now written upon subjects taken from history became not chronicles, but tragedies. The moral interest was supreme. The spiritual material dealt with by Shakspere's imagination in the play of Julius Cæsar lay wide apart from that which forms the centre of the Antony and Cleopatra. Therefore the poet was not carried directly forward from one to the other.

"But having in Macbeth (about 1606) studied the ruin of a nature which gave fair promise in men's eyes of greatness and nobility, Shakspere, it may be, proceeded directly to a *Shakspere: His Mind and Art, American ed. p. 247 fol.

similar study in the case of Antony.

In the nature of An

tony, as in the nature of Macbeth, there is a moral fault or flaw, which circumstances discover, and which in the end works his destruction. In each play the pathos is of the same kind-it lies in the gradual severing of a man, through the lust of power or through the lust of pleasure, from his better self. By the side of Antony, as by Macbeth's side, there stood a terrible force, in the form of a woman, whose function it was to realize and ripen the unorganized and undeveloped evil of his soul. Antony's sin was an inordinate passion for enjoyment at the expense of Roman virtue and manly energy; a prodigality of heart, a superb egoism of pleasure. After a brief interval, Shakspere went on to apply his imagination to the investigating of another form of egoism-not the egoism of self-diffusion, but of self-concentration. As Antony betrays himself and his cause through his sin of indulgence and laxity, so Coriolanus does violence to his own soul and to his country through his sin of haughtiness, rigidity, and inordinate pride. Thus an ethical tendency connects these two plays, which are also connected in point of time; while Antony and Cleopatra, although historically a continuation of Julius Cæsar, stands separated from it, both in the chronological order of Shakspere's plays and in the logical order assigned by successive developments of the conscience, the intellect, and the imagination of the dramatist."

Antony and Cleopatra is well printed in the folio, and the textual difficulties are comparatively few and slight.

II. THE HISTORICAL SOURCES OF THE PLOT.

For this, as for the other Roman plays (cf. Julius Cæsar, p. 9, and Coriolanus, p. 10) the poet drew his materials from Sir Thomas North's translation of Amyot's Plutarch. How closely he followed his authority the illustrative extracts from North in the Notes will show. To earlier plays on the sub