All the unsigned footnotes in this volume are by the writer of the article to which they are appended. The interpretation of the initials signed to the others is: I. G.

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= Israel Gollancz, M.A.; H. N. H. Henry Norman Hudson, A.M.; C. H. H. C. H. Herford, Litt.D.

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PREFACE

By ISRAEL GOLLANCZ, M.A.

THE FIRST EDITION

Antony and Cleopatra was first printed in the First Folio. It is mentioned among the plays entered by Blount in 1623 on the Stationers' Registers as "not formerly entered to other men.' 99 A play on the same subject was registered by the same publisher on May 20, 1608; it was probably the present drama, but for some reason or other no Quarto was issued.

The text of the play, as printed in the First Folio, was probably derived from a carefully written manuscript copy, and is on the whole most satisfactory.

THE DATE OF COMPOSITION

There is almost unanimity among scholars in assigning Antony and Cleopatra to 1607-1608, i. e. during the year preceding the entry referred to above. This date is corroborated by internal and external evidence. Particularly striking are the results arrived at from the application of the metrical tests. In Antony and Cleopatra the poet seems for the first time to have allowed himself the freedom of using the unemphatic weak monosyllables at the end of his lines a characteristic peculiar to the plays of the Fourth Period.1 The rhyme-test and the feminine ending test similarly stamp the play as belonging to the same

1 Antony and Cleopatra numbers 28 "weak endings"; Coriolanus 44, Cymbeline 52, Winter's Tale 43, Tempest 25, while Macbeth contains but 2 instances, Hamlet none; no play before Antony has more than 2; most of them have none at all.

late period.1 So far as "date" of composition is concerned, Antony and Cleopatra links itself, therefore, with Coriolanus rather than with Julius Cæsar, with Macbeth rather than with Hamlet. The same is true of its "ethical" relations to these plays.2

THE SOURCE OF THE PLOT

Antony and Cleopatra was directly derived from Sir Thomas North's famous version of Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans," the book to which Shakespeare was indebted also for his Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and, to some extent, for Timon of Athens. In the present play the dramatist follows the historian closely, but not to the same extent as in the former productions; the glamor of the play is all the poet's; the prose Life does not dazzle the reader; the facts of Cleopatra's history are those Shakespeare found in his original; the superb portraiture of the "enchanting queen" is among the great triumphs of the poet's matured genius; "he paints her," wrote Campbell, "as if the gipsy herself had cast her spell over him, and given her own witchcraft to his pencil."

PLAYS ON THE SUBJECT OF "ANTONY" AND "CLEOPATRA"

Cleopatra has been among the most popular of subjects for the modern drama, and some thirty plays are extant, in Latin, French, Italian, and English, dealing with her fascinating story; the French dramatists contribute no less

1 Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus have each 42 rhymes. 2 "The spiritual material dealt with by Shakespeare's imagination in the play of Julius Cæsar lay wide apart from that which forms the center of the Antony and Cleopatra. Therefore the poet was not carried directly forward from one to the other. But having in Macbeth studied the ruin of a nature which gave fair promise in men's eyes of greatness and nobility, Shakespeare, it may be, proceeded directly to a similar study in the case of Antony.

3 A detailed analysis of the relation of Antony and Cleopatra to Plutarch's Life of Antony is to be found in Vol. XXI. of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, contributed by Dr. Fritz Adler.