the world. He
makes a pact with the young Caesar, by marrying Caesar's sister
Octavia. Soon afterwards, being tempted from his wife by Cleopatra,
he falls into wars with Caesar. Being unhappy in his fortune and
deserted by his friends, he kills himself. Cleopatra having lost
her lover, and fearing to be led in triumph by Caesar, also kills
herself.

In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his
constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some
obsession.

"Strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds."

It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this
period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other
play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for
the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played
out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the
poetry answer the greatness of the subject.

Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and
this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is
not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in
_Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and
generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays
the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a
blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute,
astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund,
the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls.
All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the
mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from
human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a
colourable cloak of human excuse.

The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's
plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that
obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is
drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke
in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a
way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return
to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his
country. His intoxication with the woman degrades hi