Word: cleopatras
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...Cleopatra's last scenes owe a great deal to the death of Dido. Vergil showed how both love and duty are a calling on the soul. Aeneas provides the greatest example of self-mastery through moderation. He is great for leaving Dido; Antony for joining Cleopatra. In Vergil love is the divine demoniacal; in Shakespeare what is best is demonic and divine. For Cleopatra, as for Dido, rule and passionate love prove irreconcilable, as Charmian's farewell line "Your crown's awry" beautifully explains. Death for both women brings no diminution of majesty but its highest pitch. Cleopatra, like Dido...
...Since Cleopatra died...
...wish to be a noble wife, her recognition that her honor and her safety do not go together, tell us that glory is the visible brilliance of the inner fire of self-love. Hyperbolic self-esteem will lead to bitterness, as with Achilles, but in Antony and Cleopatra it visits grace. Antony is already asleep upon flowers while Caesar prosecutes war. Theirs is not perfect Christian love without touch of vanity; it is the love of heroes who appropriate the energy of heaven and earth, with only the god of internal fire both gentle and monumental...
...ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA is neither more nor less Christian than King Lear. The grace of God has become the grace of heroic love. Redemption is impossible so long as Antony thinks only of reputation, and Cleopatra only of pleasure and safety. The Christian sinner cannot be saved who thinks despairingly of God's vengeance, or who boasts arrogantly of his exemption from divine activity. In each case vanity is present. The grace of love dissolves the vain strife of pride, fear, rancor, yearning, and the desolation of insufficient man. Antony's love will not let him be worldly; his honor...
...very last Cleopatra is wife and soldier. She has by the light of her will somehow articulated the world, at the very moment she no longer desires the world underfoot. Sorrow is unexpungeable but joy is possible. In this play alone it seems that the heroes have succeeded in attaining their vision, and their souls, in uncompromised cloquence. This grief is crowned with consolation. It is a dream only to those who cannot feel the extraordinary conclusive beauty of Charmian's farewell to dead Cleopatra, "Ah, Soldier !" Heroic redemption demanded love to be gentle the violence of war, to give...