shown her what she herself must do. The subjugation of two Roman Titans, the annexation of kingdoms, the birth of children-all these experiences have not touched the Shakespearean Cleopatra. Essentially they have left her unaffected. She has reveled in them all, for they have ministered to her own sense of her wonderful witchery. But none of them has reached down to her roots. It has needed the shock of finding that great Antony actually is dead, the realization that now his going from her has become irrevocable, to bring her up short at the last. For the first time she is face to face with the seriousness of life and its dread issues.

Only a little while before she had begun to negotiate with Caesar. Now it is he who is lavish in promises to her; for he wants to have her alive to figure in his triumphs. But she, who so recently expected mercy from him, is not now to be deceived. She foresees that in Rome

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels; Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.

"Squeaking Cleopatra" and "boy my greatness"-again the titanic vigor and vehemence from the mouth of a frail woman. Notice the clause "Antony shall be brought drunken forth" with its four n's, "Antony", "drunken"; its two rolled r's, "brought", “drunken", and then the word "forth" with another r; the long vowels in "brought" and "forth". Notice, too, the word "drunken" in "Antony shall be brought drunken forth": it brings the whole scene imagined in Cleopatra's mind before the eye of auditor or reader. Notice finally the marvelous conversational fluency of the verse, the clauses running on from one line to another, without any sacrifice of metric poetic effect. It is verse which, as it impinges on our sensibility, fills us with emotion for a falling queen preoccupied with the prospect of her humiliation-with the prospective torture of her own feelings. Thus Cleopatra is wrought up to the pitch at which she can follow Antony out of the world.

Methinks I hear

Antony call; I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give man
To excuse their after wrath.

The last words rescue her imaginings from the theatrical. And thereupon the rising seriousness, the increasing gravity of tension, clamp the auditor to his chair. What makes this seriousness and tension infectious and at this juncture pierces him to the quick is of course, to an important extent, the acting, but above all it is the verse. And nothing but verse-poetry-can do this; and, it may be added, nothing but a particular kind of verse, the blank verse of the poetically mature Shakespeare.

Notice at his hands what an instrument this verse becomes. Cleopatra is about to take leave of life, and she says: Husband, I come:

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I quote only a line and a half, but how much there is in that line and a half! It is the first time Cleopatra has called Antony "husband". In Plutarch also she uses the name once only. But there she does so at a moment when Antony is no doubt dying, but yet is still alive and conscious. She does so when Antony, with the terrible sword wound in his entrails, has been hoisted, weak and bleeding but with his arms stretched out to her, into her monument, and she, in a paroxysm of grief and despair, is disfiguring her face and tearing at her breasts. But in the play it is after Antony is dead, after her desolation has begun to make a better life, when she too is about to die by her own hand, that Cleopatra says "Husband", "Husband, I come". The comparison gives us an insight into the purely dramatic resources of a master playwright at the same time as it helps us to realize the vital contribution of the noble verse to the solemnity of our emotion. Uttered now instead of earlier, the word "husband" tells us that the death of Antony has magnified Cleopatra, that this death, in enabling her suddenly to measure the wealth of Antony's immense devotion, has also brought her at last to apprehend life in its dread seriousness.

So, undiminished in cunning, she contrives to cheat Octavius of her appearance in his triumph, and instead follows great An

tony into the shades. An asp is at her breast, draining her blood. As she is dying, she murmurs:

Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast

That sucks the nurse asleep?

The death of Antony has been stoical, and therefore to some extent a posturing in the presence of death. He says:

Unarm, Eros, the long day's task is done,
And we must sleep.

The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot keep

The battery from my heart. O, cleave, my sides!
Heart, once be stronger than thy continent,
Crack thy frail case!-Apace, Eros, apace.-
No more a soldier: bruised pieces, go;
You have been nobly borne.

The Renaissance had brought Stoicism into fashion, and more than one Elizabethan dramatic character dies thus, stoically, masking both death and himself, and playing a part. But the death of Cleopatra is no such typical death: it is entirely her own; it is womanly, but it is also unique. After a life of love, of extravagance, of intrigue, of betrayal, Cleopatra undergoes, with the removal of Antony, a kind of conversion. It is as if, for the first time, she were fully alive. She has suddenly grown aware of what life is. And it is in the midst of this new awareness that she takes leave of life. And appropriately her death is her peace.

Her peace! Notice another extraordinary power of great verse. Throughout, till now, the play has rushed along, all stress and tumult. Suddenly, the utterance of no more than two lines of poetry is enough to transform the pace, to slow down the play, to slow it down without the slightest jolt, and to set it coming to a close, its action resolved, in quiet and dignity. It is in quiet and dignity that dead Cleopatra lies when Octavius finds her: She looks like sleep,

As she would catch another Antony

In her strong toil of grace.

The scene provides the perfect ending to this great poetic drama.

I hope I have succeeded in giving some hint of the great place that plays in verse occupy in our literature. Of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's masterpiece, I have been able to pick out no more than a few cardinal features. But I shall have said enough about it if we now go to the play itself, there to see for ourselves how, as I have said, the drama sets off the poetic element, and this in turn confers on the drama its fullest value. Both elements are indispensable if we are to be moved by an exhibition of the depths of life. And it is their mutual interaction in poetic drama that I have wanted to bring out, and an insight into the working of the interaction that I would like us to bear away. We shall then be keyed to the consideration of poetry alone.

A LIST OF THE PLAYS NAMED IN THE
ABOVE CHAPTER

Ben Jonson, Epicoene or The Silent Women; Volpone or The Fox Sophocles, Electra

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II; The
Jew of Malta

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie
Thomas Middleton, The Changeling

John Webster, The Dutchesse of Malfy

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Twelfth Night; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Henry IV, Part II; Richard III; Antony and Cleopatra

NOTE

For the tragedies of Sophocles in English, the translation recommended is that by Sir Richard Jebb.

8

POETRY

i

IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT IN THE SUMMER OF 1933 THE REPORT of a lecture which A. E. Housman, Latin scholar and English poet, delivered in England and which he entitled, On the Name and Nature of Poetry, should have stirred and excited literary people. The lecture contained a number of unexpected statements, and some of them were provocative. Even years after the stir and excitement have been forgotten, it may be instructive to subject one of the statements to scrutiny. Housman said that the eighteenth century gave England only four poets. These poets he went on to name. They were, he said, William Collins, Christopher Smart, William Cowper, and William Blake. As we shall see in a moment, that is a challenging pronouncement. It might even seem perverse. There is accordingly the more reason why it should be understood. I propose here to take it as, so to speak, my text.

We have been considering how poetic drama exerts its peculiar power over its auditors and readers. We saw that the secret of the power lies in the verse, and yet at the same time that the verse would fail in its effect if it were not for the drama. It is because poetic drama is in verse that the audience of its performance is able to experience emotion in the face of what is exhibited. As I have said, poetry is evocative of the internal reality in ourselves. The reality, the depths, are emotional, and poetry is the evocator of its hearer's emotion. But in poetic drama, if the depths come to be exhibited, it is owing to the