Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: everywhere accompany them. In the redundancy of incidental interest and excitement, one cannot without long familiarity so possess his faculties as to pause and take time for such recondite and protean efficacies to work their proper effect. I am by no means sure but the two things naturally go together; yet I have to confess it has long seemed to me, that by selecting fewer incidents, or by condensing the import and spirit of them into larger masses, what is now a serious fault in the drama might have been avoided. Bating this defect, if indeed it be a defect, there is none of Shakespeare's plays which, after many years of study, leaves a profounder impression of his greatness. In quantity and variety of characterization, it is equalled by few, and hardly surpassed by any, of his dramas. Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius, Octavia, Lepidus, Pompey, Enobarbus, not to mention divers others of still less presence on the scene, are perfectly discriminated and sustained to the last; all being wrought out in such distinct, self-centred, and self- rounded individuality, that we contract and keep up a sort of personal acquaintance with each and every one of them. In respect of style and diction, too, the best qualities of the Poet's best period are here concentrated in special force. The play abounds, more than any other, in those sharp, instantaneous jets of poetic rapture, a kind of vital ecstasy, which keep the experienced reader's mind all aglow with animation and inward delight. The compressed and flashing energy, striking in new light from the very hardness of that which resists; the stern and solid ground-work of thought, with fresh images, or suggestions of images, shooting up from it ever and anon, kindling the imagination with all the force of surprise, and setting their path on fi...