Anthony (criticism)
R. C. Trench
“ The Antony of history, of Plutarch himself, would have been no subject for poetry. Splendidly endowed by nature as he was, it would yet have been impossible to claim or create a sympathy for one so cruel, dyed so deeply in the noblest blood of Rome, the wholesale plunderer of peaceful cities and provinces that he might squander their spoils on the vilest ministers of his pleasures; himself of orgies so shameless, sunken in such a mire of sin; in whom met the ugliest features, and what one would have counted beforehand as the irreconcilable contradictions, of an Oriental despot and a Roman gladiator. And yet, transformed, we may say transfigured by the marvellous touch, the Antony of Shakespeare, if not the veritable Antony of history, has not so broken with him as not to be recognizable still. For the rest, what was coarse is refined, what would take no colour of goodness is ignored, what had any fair side on which it could be shown is shown on that side alone. He appears from the first as not himself, but as under the spells of that potent Eastern enchantress who had once held by these spells a Cæsar himself. There are followers who cleave to him in his lowest estate, even as there are fitful gleams and glimpses of generosity about him which explain this fidelity of theirs; and when at the last we behold him standing amid the wreck of fortunes and the waste of gifts, all wrecked and wasted by himself, penetrated through and through with the infinite shame and sadness of such a close to such a life, the whole range of poetry offers no more tragical figure than he is, few that arouse a deeper pity; while yet, ideal as this Antony of Shakespeare is, he is connected by innumerable subtle bands and finest touches with the real historical Antony, at once another and the same.
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