the tragedy comes about through a fatal discordance between the claims
of love and of the world; in both the action passes in the age of Roman
greatness, and vast imperial issues are intertwined with individual
destinies. Of Shakespeare's drama it is hardly necessary to speak.
Nowhere else, perhaps, has that universal genius displayed more
completely the extraordinary fertility of his mind. The play is crammed
full and running over with the multifarious activities of human
existence. 'What is there in the whole of life, in all the experience of
the world,' one is inclined to ask after a perusal of it, 'that is not
to be found somewhere or other among these amazing pages?' This
tremendous effect has been produced, in the first place, by means of the
immense variety of the characters; persons of every rank and every
occupation--generals and waiting-women, princesses and pirates,
diplomatists and peasants, eunuchs and emperors--all these we have, and
a hundred more; and, of course, as the grand consummation of all, we
have the dazzling complexity of Cleopatra. But this mass of character
could never have been presented to us without a corresponding variety of
incident; and, indeed, the tragedy is packed with an endless succession
of incidents--battles, intrigues, marriages, divorces, treacheries,
reconciliations, deaths. The complicated action stretches over a long
period of time and over a huge tract of space. The scene constantly
shifts from Alexandria to Rome, from Athens to Messina, from Pompey's
galley to the plains of Actium. Some commentators have been puzzled by
the multitude of these changes, and when, for a scene of a few moments,
Shakespeare shows us a Roman army marching through Syria, they have been
able to see in it nothing more than a wanton violation of the rule of
the unity of place; they have not understood that it is precisely by
such touches as these that Shakespeare has succeeded in bringing before
our minds a sense of universal agitation and the enormous dissolution of
empires.