Worse than he is: and we do fear he will

Bring his free nature to b'intrapt by them.

Alexander, who serves as an analogy for Queen Elizabeth, thus complains of him as regards his favours and offices bestowed:

But all he deemeth rather his desarts,
Than the effects of my grace any way
Begins to play most peremptory parts
As fitter to controule than to obey.

Craterus, the accusing courtier, who evidently stands for Cecil, is drawn as a cunning knave, and of his proceedings the Chorus is made to say

See how these great men cloath their private hate
In those faire colours of the publike good;
And to effect their ends, pretend the State,

As if the State by their affections stood.

To divert the force of this attack Daniel lamely said in his Apology, "and Craterus, who so wisely pursued this business, is deemed to have been one of the most honest men that ever followed Alexander in all his actions, and one that was true to him even after his death."

The trial for treason in the play is a bitter satire on the legal procedure of the times. The Persian part of the Chorus say that the method of the Eastern tyrant is more honest, and

"

What need hath Alexander so to strive

By all these shewes of forme, to find this man
Guilty of treason, when he doth contrive

To have him so adjudg'd?

Daniel was unique among the imaginative writers of his day in standing up for the common people. He was a Quaker" in disposition, and what might now be termed a "little Englander," and though he does not write from the standpoint of the populace, he does write as a thoughtful man of the people who is not afraid to criticise the methods of the governing class. These lines from Philotas, spoken by the Chorus, which represents the general public, are for those days, very remarkable:

We, as the Chorus of the vulgar, stand
Spectators here, to see these great men play
Their parts both of obedience and command,
And censure all they do, and all they say.
For though we be esteemed but ignorant,
Yet are we capable of truth and know

Where they do well, and where their actions want

The grace that makes them prove the best in show.

And in another piece, he writes to Lord Henry Howard in a similar strain :

And be it that the vulgar are but grosse,

Yet are they capable of truth, and see,

And sometimes gesse the right, and do conceive

The nature of that text that needs a glosse,

And wholly never can deluded be:

All may a few, few cannot all deceive.

We seem to have heard something very like this from one of our most modern orators, whose statue has lately been set up at Westminster.

If Daniel failed to escape censure for this effort, we may be sure that Shakespeare, who had much more craft, would not have approached the subject of Essex without wrapping it up in an almost impenetrable disguise. We have seen how he did this in a poem. Let us now inquire if he did the same thing in any of his plays.

CHAPTER VIII

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA: CORIOLANUS

In his "Apology," published in 1604, Bacon speaks of the Earl of Essex, as one "whose fortune I cannot remember without much grief," and I have little doubt he was here speaking the truth, all the more as he also speaks of "the wrong which I sustain in common speech, as if I had been false or unthankful to that noble but unfortunate Earl." My view of Bacon is that, in action, he was so far carried away by ambition as to forget personal obligation, but that, in his inner consciousness, there was a constant conflict between ambition and duty, and that when he was writing under the influence of his genius, this found expression in examples handled dramatically. The plays which, in my belief, were produced under the influence of the writer's recollections of Essex, are Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Having dealt with the history, it will not be necessary to do more than indicate very briefly where I think the points of contact are to be found. I will postpone Macbeth for the present, because it belongs more strictly to the "dark period," which I think was due to the culmination of certain events. The other two plays are not tragedy in the same sense, but belong rather to imaginative or feigned" history. Let us take Antony and Cleopatra first. This play is no glorification of the passions. In writing it the author had a purpose as deliberate as that of any preacher or moralist, which he announces at the beginning in the homely language of the age:

"

Phi. Nay, but this dotage of our general's
O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That e'er the files and musters of the war
Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,

Flourish.

The office and devotion of their view

Upon a tawny front; his captain's heart,

Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst

The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,

And is become the bellows and the fan

To cool a gipsy's lust.

Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her Ladies, the Train, with Eunuchs fanning her.

Look, where they come :

Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transform'd

Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see.

It might, in short, be a play written on Bacon's text, "Great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion "1, and the principle finds illustration in Octavius on the one side and Antony on the other; the one cold, selfrestrained, and successful, the other human and impulsive but a failure.

Now it is commonly supposed that Shakespeare conceived this wonderful drama out of a perusal of Plutarch, and that that is the whole matter. But how in this way are we to account for the intense interest which he shows in the characters, and for the many peculiar deviations from Plutarch's story? Is it really credible that these were accidental? What were these Romans to Shakespeare? Nothing, expect figures to represent, for the instruction of his countrymen, character as he had seen it at work in England. When he drew the character of Octavius, my belief is that he saw the analogy of Cecil; of Antony that of Essex; of Cleopatra that of Queen Elizabeth, and of Enobarbus (a creation of his own, merely mentioned in Plutarch) that of himself. Let us follow this in more detail.

In his introduction to the play in the "Arden” edition of Shakespeare, Mr. R. H. Case writes: "To create his Cleopatra, Shakespeare to some extent forsook Plutarch. His Queen of Egypt is a figure of coarser fibre than that which moves in the prose narrative, even allowing for the

strong lights of dialogue; and the arts of irritating perverseness employed in Act 1. Sc. iii., where Cleopatra's conduct is not indicated in Plutarch, are of harder cast than the 'flickering enticements with which, at a later time, the latter shows her seeking to keep Antony from Octavia.” Hearing of the death of Fulvia, Antony had decided to leave Cleopatra and return to Rome. Here is the scene between them :

Cleo.

Ant.

Enter Antony.

I am sick and sullen.

I am sorry to give breathing to my purpose-
Cleo. Help me away, dear Charmian; I shall fall:
It cannot be thus long, the sides of nature

Will not sustain it.

Ant.

Now, my dearest queen,

What's the matter?

Cleo. Pray you, stand farther from me.

Ant.

Cleo. I know, by that same eye, there's some good news.

What says the married woman? You may go :

Would she had never given you leave to come !

Let her not say 'tis I that keep you here:

I have no power upon you; hers you are.

Cleo. Why should I think you can be mine and true,

Though you in swearing shake the throned gods,

Who have been false to Fulvia?

Riotous madness,

To be entangled with those mouth-made vows,

Which break themselves in swearing!

Cleo. Nay, pray you, seek no colour for your going,

But bid farewell, and go; when you sued staying,

Then was the time for words; no going then ;

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor,

But was a race of heaven; they are so still,

Or thou, the greatest soldier of the world,

Art turn'd the greatest liar.

Cleo. I would I had thy inches; thou should'st know There were a heart in Egypt.