SOURCE: Kalmey, Robert P. “Shakespeare's Octavius and Elizabethan Roman History.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 18, no. 2 (spring 1978): 275-87.

[In the following essay, Kalmey examines the Elizabethan conception of Octavius Caesar, and finds that Elizabethans praised Caesar as an ideal prince only after he was crowned emperor. Prior to this event, Kalmey maintains, Caesar was condemned by Elizabethans who saw him as a tyrant who fueled the fires of civil war to further his own ambitions.]

Few readers of Antony and Cleopatra have overlooked the contempt with which Cleopatra condemns as mere hollow words the paltry machinations of Octavius Caesar to take her captive. “He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself” (V.ii.190-191: Arden Shakespeare, ed. M. R. Ridley). Nor have readers neglected the irony Cleopatra articulates that Octavius, who has conquered Brutus, Sextus Pompey, Lepidus, Lucius Antonius, and Marc Antony, should so easily and deftly be humiliated by the personal will of a defeated queen. Speaking to the asp at her breast, Cleopatra defines her final contemptuous image of Octavius: “O, couldst thou speak, that I might hear thee call great Caesar ass, / Unpolicied!” (V.ii.305-307).

In spite of Cleopatra's final scathing assessment of the character of Octavius, it is a persistent commonplace in modern criticism to place Octavius in the role of an ideal prince who stands as the moral superior of the dissolute Antony, and who therefore deserves to accede to the governance of Rome because of his political rectitude and moral superiority. J. E. Phillips was the first of the modern critics to emphasize an honorific character for Octavius in his study of the state and the governor in the Roman plays.¹ More recently, Maurice Charney and J. Leeds Barroll, apparently accepting and following Phillips' assertions, perpetuate the critical assessment of Octavius as the ideal prince. Charney claims “that in Elizabethan histories and comparable works, the reputation of Octavius was very high; he was seen as the ideal Roman emperor. …”² The commonplace of the character of Octavius as ideal prince persists into contemporary criticism as Julian Markels in his study of the theme of order in Antony and Cleopatra, The Pillar of the World, observes that “Octavius is no villain but, like King Henry V, whom he so resembles in character, the agent of political order renewing itself.”³ It is easier for critics to think of Octavius, who plots bloody civil war in Julius Caesar and betrayal in Antony and Cleopatra, as “no villain” in politics if they may find resonance for this value judgment from other critics who value Octavius' moral rectitude highly. Roy Battenhouse, for instance, finds Octavius morally temperate and prudent—a man of Roman virtue whose “achievement” Shakespeare respects, however limited to pragmatic values Octavius may be.⁴ According to this view, Octavius governs himself with rectitude and asceticism in order to achieve his goal of Emperorship. Battenhouse then contrasts the temperate Octavius to the intemperate Antony and Cleopatra. According to Battenhouse, in a critical view highly popular with many readers of otherwise diverse critical persuasions, conscientious Octavius wins the world from dissolute Antony and distracted Cleopatra, who win a merely “ironic” bliss of eroticism.⁵ Although A. P. Riemer finds that Octavius “does not have the play's full endorsement” and that Octavius is “ambivalent,” he does affirm Octavius as “magnanimous … noble, well-intentioned, and generally just.”⁶ Riemer, like Battenhouse, finds any sense of transcendence of the world for Antony and Cleopatra ambiguous and contradicted by their sheer worldly lust.⁷ Even Honor Matthews, who does not share Phillips', Battenhouse's, and Riemer's reservations about the absolute transcendent value of Antony and Cleopatra's love, asserts that Octavius' “place in history was … a peculiarly honourable one, to the Elizabethan imagination.”⁸

But if we accept the above assessments of Octavius' character in the play, we find ourselves holding up as an avowed Elizabethan ideal prince and moral man one whose final and definitive character is fixed in the play as “ass, / Unpolicied!” Furthermore, with whom do our sympathies reside in Antony and Cleopatra? Surely not with the cold and passive virtue of Octavia or with the equally cold, though active, calculations and betrayals of her aggressive brother, Octavius. For this reason, an alternative critical nexus has won more adherents than the co-existing one described above. Many modern critics have identified Octavius not as a temperate and moral apogee in Antony and Cleopatra, but as its moral perigee. He is seen in this view as the evil and impelling force of the material and base world against the increasingly transcendent love of Antony and Cleopatra. The clearest assessment of Octavius' character as it functions in opposition to the drama of transcendence in the play may be found in the criticism of Maynard Mack, Thomas McFarland, Sigurd Burckhardt, and Matthew Proser, where we find, amid some inevitable variation not important here, a valuational dialectic between, on the one hand, the world of plotting Octavius in which fortunes rise and fall in mutability and death, and on the other hand, the world of “immortal longings” (V.ii.280) from which Antony calls and to which Cleopatra, responding, aspires.⁹ The valuational dialectic leads to an ontological distinction that these critics recognize: the world of Octavius is the repository for Cleopatra's “baser” elements, water and earth (V.ii.288-289); her refined elements of “fire, and air” transcend Octavius' world, and have their being in immortality and eternity.¹⁰

My purpose now is not to explore in detail these two main strands of criticism on Antony and Cleopatra; rather, I hope to suggest that each of the two recurrent but different kinds of assessment of Antony and Cleopatra builds support upon mutually exclusive judgments of the character and function of Octavius. I seek instead to offer evidence of a pervasive Elizabethan concept of Octavius that has two distinct parts to it: the distinction made in the Elizabethan histories of Rome, to be analyzed below, holds that Octavius is to be honored as positive example of the ideal prince only after he is crowned Emperor in Rome after the defeat of Antony; before this precise occasion, the same Elizabethan histories of Rome characterize Octavius as a vicious tyrant who foments bloody civil war and a reign of terror solely for his personal gain. In their condemnation of rebellious, unbridled ambition which breeds civil war, the Elizabethan historians of Rome follow the main stream of Tudor historiography so thoroughly documented by E. M. W. Tillyard, Lily Campbell, and Irving Ribner.¹¹

The distinction made by Elizabethan historians of Rome between the early ambitious tyrant Octavius and the later Emperor Augustus is entirely consistent with Shakespeare's dramatization of Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra, and in Julius Caesar as well, strictly and wholly within the time prior to his becoming Emperor of Rome. This precise limitation within the two plays, and within Antony and Cleopatra in particular, suggests a clear circumference of definition about the character of Octavius contained within the historical pattern when he functions as immoral tyrant—not in any sense an honorific character in contrast with which pejorative judgments may be delivered against the love of Antony and Cleopatra. If we can become aware of the common distinction between early tyrant and later Emperor in Octavius' life repeatedly made for literate Elizabethans by their contemporary historians of ancient Rome, we may find that the precise historical place Octavius held in “the Elizabethan imagination” serves to support those critics who assess Antony and Cleopatra as a drama of transcendent love and being over a world subjugated to the bloody lust of ambition and power.

As a triumvir, then, Octavius is revealed in Elizabethan histories of Rome as a pernicious demagogue; as a crowned emperor, he is presented as an ideal prince—like the reigning Tudor monarch. In both cases the Elizabethan historians emphasize moral lessons to be observed by their readers: early in his rise to power, Octavius exemplifies the horrors attendant on the demagogic subversion of the commonweal; later, as emperor, Octavius exemplifies the great Tudor image of the ideal prince, an analogue of Queen Elizabeth. In both Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Octavius appears only as a triumvir in the process of accumulating power; he has not yet become emperor even at the end of Antony and Cleopatra. It is an unnecessary hypothesis to posit that Shakespeare deliberately followed the distinction between the demagogue Octavius and the emperor Octavius Caesar Augustus. It is enough to observe that his plays dramatize only the demagogue Octavius, and to be familiar ourselves as critics with the distinction in the Elizabethan histories of Rome merely as a precedent, nothing more, for the distinction between immoral triumvir and ideal prince in the Elizabethan understanding of the character of Octavius.

When the Elizabethan historians of Rome judged an historical character, they examined him within a framework of moral instruction advocated for an individual who would conduct himself properly, as the historians so often exhort, within the commonweal. Octavius Caesar Augustus was one of the more significant figures upon whom the Elizabethan historians of Rome directed moral judgment.

Specifically, in his analysis of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, J. E. Phillips places great importance on a concept of Elizabethan political theorists and propagandists that establishes Octavius as “a great ruler.”¹² Phillips places Shakespeare within the tradition of those influenced by the “great ruler” concept of Octavius. Phillips cites three prime authorities for his concept of Octavius as “great ruler”: George More, Chelidonius, and Thomas Elyot. He quotes from the latter, who cites Suetonius in support of the “great ruler” concept of Octavius. Although much in Suetonius' life of Octavius Caesar Augustus illustrates the rule of a great monarch whose dominions included most of the civilized world, much also in Suetonius characterizes Octavius as a vicious tyrant determined to satisfy his own lust for power regardless of the cost for others. Phillips neglects to mention that the tyrant Octavius appears not only in Suetonius, but in literally hundreds of pages of Elizabethan Roman history as well. We turn now to the Elizabethan histories of Rome to document the widespread characterization of Octavius Caesar as an ambitious and overreaching tyrant.

When we consider the great praise traditionally accorded to Octavius, as Augustus Caesar, for his fruitful rule as emperor, at first it appears strange that some final judgments of him should be so reserved. In Augustus, H. Seile completes his essay with an enigmatic opinion: “It had beene an ineffable benefit to the Commonwealth of Rome, if eyther he had never dyed, or never beene borne.”¹³ The empire of Augustus was established at great cost to the Roman commonweal. Writing of the murder of Julius Caesar, William Fulbecke judges that Rome could have returned to the most peaceful and fruitful years of the Republic except for the personal ambition of Caesar's heir, Octavius: “the common-weale did seeme to have rolled herselfe into the state of her pristinate libertie, and it had returned unto the same, if either Pompey had not left sonnes, or Caesar had not made an heire.”¹⁴ Seile also develops a similar conclusion: “the Commonwealth might have recovered Liberty, if … Caesar had left no heire.”¹⁵ Fulbecke questions the right of Octavius to “succeed” to the imperial position of Julius Caesar, because the privilege and honours were given to Caesar alone, not to his lineage. The hasty crime of Brutus and Cassius permitted Octavius to fashion a just cause for aspiring to Caesar's position of power: “But if Caesar's death had bene attended, till naturall dissolution, or just proceeding had caused it, his nephews entrie into the monarchie might well have bene barred and intercepted: because these honors were annexed and appropriated to Caesars person. And if patience might have managed their wisdomes, though there had bene a Caesar, yet should there never have bene an Augustus.”¹⁶

What were the sources of the reluctance and regret which permeate the adverse opinions of Octavius? It was popular among the Elizabethan historians of Rome (probably following Suetonius) to credit Octavius with creating most of the discords with Antony. Octavius sought only to satisfy his personal ambition. Rome had been the victim of several civil wars, and never could benefit from more. Sir Thomas North recounts Octavius' plottings: after Antony had repulsed his attempts to become consul, he began to work the Senate against Antony and to subvert the commonweal to his own gain.¹⁷ He delivered speeches against Antony;¹⁸ he spread throughout the city rumor and dissension.¹⁹ His most treacherous and irresponsible plot is revealed by Suetonius: “by the advice and persuasion of some he set certaine persons privily in hand to murder Antonius.”²⁰ Although the murder plot was discovered before effected, Octavius was successful in his campaign to blacken the image of Antony. Cicero assisted Octavius by helping to turn the Senate against Antony,²¹ and, according to North, civil war followed as a direct result.²²

Even after a peace had been devised between Antony and Octavius, the young Caesar used his rival's absence from Rome as an opportunity for sowing more civil dissension.²³ In this situation, Octavius willfully destroyed a peace established specifically to avoid the upheavals caused by his earlier dissensions.²⁴ Octavius' unscrupulous scheming aroused the disapproval of the Senate on one notable occasion. Suetonius writes that in assembly with the Senate Octavius read Antony's will, “the better to proove and make good that he had degenerated.”²⁵ Appian, too, describes the incident and the Senate reaction: “So he [Octavius] went, and tooke it [the will] away, and first by himselfe redde it, and noted what might be sayde agaynst it. Then he called the Senate, and redde it openly, whereat many were grieved, thinking it not reasonable that a mans minde for his death, shoulde bee scanned whylest he was alive.”²⁶

Octavius' willingness to sacrifice the well-being of others in order to achieve his personal goals extended to his own sister, Octavia. In Mexia, Octavius advises her to join Antony so that she might have “occasion to fall out with him (as Plutarch recounteth in the life of Antony) if she were not well entertained.”²⁷ In Seile's Augustus, Octavius is seen to be still more devious, for he outwardly affects concern for Octavia's welfare as he hopes her noble demeanor in the face of Antony's scorn will move the Romans to despise Antony.²⁸ Appian, too, clearly indicates Octavius' sacrifice of his sister's welfare to his own political ambitions.²⁹ Octavius thus used his sister as bait to lead Rome into civil war with Antony. After Octavia's rejection at the hands of Antony, Octavius takes advantage of the disrespect which his rival incurs: “Octavian began openly to complaine of Marcus Antonius, and to shew himselfe his enemie.”³⁰ In these ways, Octavius deliberately drew Rome closer to civil war.

Fulbecke defines with characteristic Tudor dread the macrocosmic upheavals involved in the tempest of a state at civil war: “And, as in the yearely conversion of the heavens, it commeth to passe, that the starres jogged together do murmure and threaten tempest, so with the alteration of the Romane state, before Octavius founded his Monarchie, the whole globe of the earth with civill and forraine warre, with fight on sea and land was terribly shaken.”³¹ The young Caesar exploits the world in order to establish his power firmly and exclusively. Suetonius lists five major civil wars Octavius engaged in: Mutina, Philippi, Perusium, Sicily, and Actium.³² Appian's whole history is concerned with the Roman civil wars previous to Octavius' monarchy—An Auncient Historie and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres (1578). The wars of Octavius occupy over two hundred pages alone.³³ He and Antony march on Rome to demand favors by the force of arms, creating a panic in the city.³⁴ Octavius extorts the consulship from Rome, and proceeds to incite another civil war. Mexia, too, records the originator of the struggle with Pompey: “Octavian remaining in Rome, grew mightie, and in great estimation; so likewise he became covetous: and as the companie and neighborhood of Sextus Pompeius in Sicilia was displeasing unto him, so would he have been glad to have any occasion to warre against him: and so hee determined, and prepared a great fleete for the purpose.”³⁵ The battles between Octavius and Pompey were many, but the final one “without doubt was one of the most cruell in the world.”³⁶

In order to explain why Octavius brought such catastrophe to Rome, the Elizabethan historians of Rome often explored his motives for the several plots and civil wars. Fulbecke exposes the speciousness of Octavius' role as avenger for the murder of Julius Caesar: “no common-weale can be without men of aspiring humours, and when such a murder is wrought they find present occasion to tumultuate, knowing that Anarchie breedeth confusion, & that it is best fishing in a troubled streame: making a glorius pretece to revenge the death of a Prince, though in heart & in truth, they beare greater affection to the monarchie remaining, then to the Monarcke who is taken away.”³⁷ Octavius seeks to stir Rome into a great civil tumult out of which he may emerge supreme in power.

The early dispute with Antony offers a significant example of Octavius' ability to create discord, and to use the subsequent upheaval to further his ambition to become sole ruler of Rome. Octavius maneuvers the Senate into opposition with Antony and his army. The Senate has no army to oppose him, but Octavius does. The Senate therefore must grant Octavius great military and civil powers in order to protect itself from Antony's army. Thus Octavius gains power by stabilizing the discord he created.³⁸ In Seile's Augustus, Octavius schemes to have the army that will challenge Antony led by Hirtius and Pansa, the ruling consuls, so that he will stand to gain most with least risk to himself.³⁹ Octavius, then, ensures his own succession to power by killing personally the two consuls.⁴⁰

Later, when Octavius and Antony make war as allies, North testifies to their rapacity: “when they had driven all the natural Italians out of Italy, they gave their soldiers their lands and towns, to which they had no right: and moreover the only mark they shot at in all this war they made, was but to overcome and reign.”⁴¹ They did nothing to avoid the misery brought to all Italy by their wars.⁴² In a similar manner, Mexia accounts for their neglect of the commonweal: “But the truth is, they both desired to bee Lords of the whole, and in my opinion, vainglorie, ambition, covetousnes, and envie, moved them thereto, each of them putting his determination in effect, calling and levying forces and aides; so as the whole world in a manner, either of the one side or other, was moved and troubled therewith.”⁴³ Mexia cites “principally Octavian,” whose greed and ambition overwhelms all other motives in the quest for world domination.⁴⁴

The offences of Octavius against the commonweal were many, but none so corrupt, none so destructive, nor none so cruel as the proscription by the Triumvirate. Upon the announcement of proscription, Appian recounts, the city suffered violent and unnatural omens that reflect the cruelty of Octavius.⁴⁵ The Triumvirate, supposedly conceived to preserve the peace, became an instrument by which to fulfill personal ambition. Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, according to North, “could hardly agree whom they would put to death: for every one of them would kill their enemies, and save their kinsmen and friends. Yet at length, giving place to their greedy desire to be revenged of their enemies, they spurned all reverence of blood and holiness of friendship at their feet.”⁴⁶ Mexia, also, stresses the perverted standards of friendship displayed by the Triumvirs: “In this proscription and league which they made … they concluded also each of them to kill his enemies, and the one delivering them into the others hands, having more respect and care to be revenged of an enemie, then to the saving of a friend: and so was made the most cruell and most inhumane proscription and butcherie that ever was seene or heard of, giving and exchaunging friends and kinsmen, for enemies and adversaries.”⁴⁷ Appian, too, notes that not only the commonweal was sacrificed in order to achieve personal power, but friends readily were murdered.⁴⁸ Among the dead were 300 Senators and 2000 noble Romans, “so great power had ambition and hatred in the hearts of these three men.”⁴⁹ The irony of the Triumvirate's action compared with the purpose of its existence is clear in Appian: “It seemed wonderful to them to consider, that other Cities being undone by sedition, have bin preserved againe by agreement. This Cittie, the devision of the rulers hadde consumed, and their agreement, broughte it to desolation.”⁵⁰ Octavius' rule is compared to the sacking of a city, and his care of the commonweal likened to sedition. Octavius is clearly condemned as a tyrant in Seile's Augustus: “The poor Romans had not changed the Tyranny [of Julius Caesar], but the Tyrants. Yea they had three for one into the bargaine.”⁵¹

The time of the proscriptons was, Seile assures us, “a lamentable and ruthful time, good and bad, rich and poore, being alike subject to the slaughter.”⁵² Mexia dramatizes the discord and sorrow which seized Rome and Italy under the rule of the Triumvirs: “And presently those which by them were condemned and proscript, were by their commandement put to death, being sought out in al parts & places, ransacking their houses, and confisking their goods: In the execution whereof there was so great confusion, sorrow and heaviness in the citie of Rome, and almost in al Italie, as the like was never seene nor heard of therein by man.”⁵³ So neglected was morality, Appian observes, that murder was rewarded by the Triumvirs: “there was greate suddayne slaughter, and diverse kyndes of murders, and cuttings off of heads to be shewed for rewardes sake. … The condemned persons heads were brought before the seats in the common place, that they that had brought them, might receive their goods.”⁵⁴ Values were inverted by the proscriptions so that the trust people had for one another was destroyed. Because this trust formed the basis for social order, the loss of it meant social chaos. So extensive was the destruction of society that families were torn apart by murders and betrayals.⁵⁵

Even Eutropius, who sees Octavius as the great monarch, admits that his paragon of princes did willfully “detayne the weale publique, by force of armes.”⁵⁶ North allows that Octavius at first opposed the idea of proscription, but he admits that “when the sword was once drawn, he was no less cruel than the other two.”⁵⁷ Suetonius attributes to him the same initial reluctance followed by an excess of vigorous cruelty,⁵⁸ and affirms that his motive in carrying out the proscription was to gain personal power: Octavius “professed openly, That hee had determined no other end of the saide proscription, but that hee might have liberty still to proceede in all things as he would.”⁵⁹ Octavius, according to Mexia's figurative emphasis, “plotting the Triumvirat … shed so much bloud and such execution, that there was not any streete in Rome, but was stained with civill bloud.”⁶⁰

North's final word on the proscriptions presents a fit conclusion to the abundant catalogue of historical opinion damning Octavius: “In my opinion there was never a more horrible, unnatural, and crueller change than this was. For thus changing murther for murther, they did as well kill those whom they did forsake and leave unto others, as those also which others left unto them to kill: but so much more was their wickedness and cruelty great unto their friends, for that they put them to death being innocents, and having no cause to hate them.”⁶¹

In other events under his direction, Octavius appears barbarous and savage. Suetonius, for example, mentions his cruelty to the prisoners at Philippi,⁶² his mass execution at Perusia,⁶³ and his plucking out of Gallius' eyes.⁶⁴

The significance of the common indictment against Octavius' tyranny by the several historians is that nearly all the acts condemned were committed before Octavius became emperor. Most of the historians damn Octavius' neglect of the commonweal while he strove to attain absolute power; most praise him for his care after he had obtained it. He is both the ambitious and ruthless tyrant, and the benevolent monarch. Mexia comprehends the complexity of Octavius: “he happened wisely and uprightly to governe that, which by force and cunning he had gotten.”⁶⁵ As the ambitious and cruel triumvir, Octavius violates constituted civil order (always an evil act in Tudor histories) in his desire to accumulate all power to himself.

Awareness of the sharp distinction maintained by so many Elizabethan historians between Octavius the ambitious tyrant and Octavius the great ruler may lead us, in turn by analogy, to be more sharply aware that Shakespeare has presented only a calculating and cruel tyrant Octavius in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleapatra. He has not yet become emperor at the end of Antony and Cleopatra, and Cleopatra, like the Elizabethan historians of Rome, holds his bloody civil war victories in abhorrent contempt.

Notes

1. J. E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940), pp. 198-200.

2. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 91; J. Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare and Roman History,” MLR, 53 (1958), 327-343; also cited by Charney, p. 229, n. 9. In a later article, Professor Barroll makes a broad claim about how in Elizabethan times Octavius Caesar “was considered an eminently impressive historical figure” (“The Characterization of Octavius,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 [1972], p. 252 and nn. 26, 44). Others share Professor Barroll's view: see Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1956), pp. 165, 179, where Octavius Caesar appears in “a choric function” against a diminished Antony and Cleopatra; and Daniel Stempel, “The Transmigration of the Crocodile,” SQ, 7 (1956), 63-66.

3. Julian Markels, The Pillar of the World (Columbus, Ohio, 1968), p. 126.

4. Roy W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy (Bloomington, Indiana, 1969), pp. 172-173.

5. Battenhouse, pp. 174-183.

6. A. P. Riemer, A Reading of Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra” (Sydney, 1968), pp. 12, 38-39.

7. Riemer, pp. 76, 81. Riemer offers a helpful survey of Antony and Cleopatra in his first and third chapters, and points out how Virgil K. Whitaker, The Mirror up to Nature (San Marino, 1965) and Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1956), especially, support his own assessment of the play's irresolute conclusion in the alleged contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies generated by the lovers' self-interest and lust.

8. Honor Matthews, Character and Symbol in Shakespeare's Plays (New York, 1969; copyright 1962), p. 66. See pp. 206-207 for affirmation of Antony and Cleopatra's transcendent love.

9. Maynard Mack, “Introduction” to his Pelican edition of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 21-23; and in “Antony and Cleopatra: The Stillness and the Dance” in Shakespeare's Art: Seven Essays, ed. Milton Crane (Chicago, 1973), p. 91, Professor Mack observes that “Nothing seems to be granted finality in Antony and Cleopatra, perhaps not even death”; Thomas McFarland, Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare (New York, 1966), pp. 98-100, 120-26; Sigurd Burckhardt, “The King's Language: Shakespeare's Drama as Social Discovery,” Antioch Review, 21 (1961), 386, quoted in Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton, 1965), p. 174; Proser's distinction between the world of Octavius and the world of Antony and Cleopatra comes to most succinct focus on p. 176. Drawing on Professor Mack's criticism, Janet Adelman affirms the transcendence of Antony and Cleopatra in The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven, 1973), pp. 156-157, 196 n. 20. Northrop Frye identifies “a superhuman vitality” that Cleopatra draws out of Antony leading them together into the discovery of a transcendence in “the appearance of another world that endures no master” (Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy [Toronto, 1967], pp. 73-74). Harold Fisch finds transcendence in the mythological archetypes of Mars and Venus, Osiris and Isis, Cupid and Psyche in “‘Antony and Cleopatra:’ The Limits of Mythology,” Shakespeare Survey, 23 (1970), 59-67. Professor Fisch cites work by Raymond B. Waddington, “Antony and Cleopatra: What Venus Did with Mars,” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 210-227, and sees Cleopatra's death as “ritual apotheosis,” “deserved punishment” by providence for sins, and transcending marriage ceremony leading to “her strong toil of grace” as a “heavenly and transcendent virtue” (pp. 66-67). For a sampling of other critics who define transcendence in Antony and Cleopatra, see Joseph A. Bryant, Hippolyta's View (Lexington, Ky., 1961), pp. 179-180, 183-188, and pp. 177-179, 188, for a pejorative view of Octavius; S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, 1944), pp. 166, 168; David Kaula, “The Time Sense of Antony and Cleopatra,” SQ, 15 (1964), 223; J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville, 1973), pp. 15, 163; Robert Ornstein, “The Ethic of the Imagination: Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra” in The Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), pp. 31-46, for transcendence by means of art; and Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), p. 174.

10. Proser, p. 229. The drama of transcendence is not missed by all those critics who find high values in the character of Octavius: see Markels, p. 150, for “transformation” and “apotheosis” in death; and Matthews, pp. 206-207, for transcendence of the material world (cf. n. 8, above).

11. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), passim, esp. pp. 64-70; Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1958; copyright 1947); see also her Tudor Conceptions of History and Tragedy in “A Mirror for Magistrates” (Berkeley, 1936), and “The Use of Historical Patterns in the Reign of Elizabeth,” HLQ 1 (1938); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957). See also Leonard F. Dean, “Tudor Theories of History Writing,” University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 1 (1941), 1-24; Herbert Weisinger, “Ideas of History during the Renaissance,” JHI, 6 (1945), 415-435; and W. R. Trimble, “Early Tudor Historiography, 1485-1548,” JHI, 11 (1950), 30-41.

12. Phillips, p. 199.

13. H. Seile, Augustus: or, an essay (London, 1632), p. 227.

14. William Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions of the Romans and Italians (London, 1601), p. 17.

15. Augustus, p. 27.

16. Fulbecke, p. 171.

17. Shakespeare's Plutarch: Being a Selection From The Lives in North's Plutarch, ed. W. W. Skeat (London, 1904), p. 166. (Hereafter cited as North.)

18. Augustus, pp. 31-32.

19. Appian, An Auncient Historie and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, trans. W. B. (London, 1578), p. 181.

20. Suetonius, The History of the Twelve Caesars, trans. P. Holland (1606) in The Tudor Translations, XXI (London, 1899), p. 187.

21. Pedro Mexia, The Historie of all the Romane Emperors, Englished by W. T. (London, 1604), p. 29.

22. North, p. 167.

23. Augustus, p. 52. See also Mexia, p. 42.

24. North, p. 202.

25. Suetonius, pp. 92-93.

26. Appian, p. 383.

27. Mexia, p. 41. See also North, p. 199.

28. Augustus, pp. 55-56.

29. Appian, pp. 380-381.

30. Mexia, p. 41.

31. Fulbecke, p. 18.

32. Suetonius, pp. 86-87.

33. See Books 3 and 4.

34. Appian, p. 189. See also Mexia, p. 30.

35. Mexia, p. 36.

36. Mexia, p. 39.

37. Fulbecke, p. 172.

38. Appian, pp. 181-197.

39. Augustus, pp. 33-35.

40. Suetonius, p. 88.

41. North, pp. 145-146.

42. Appian, pp. 311-312.

43. Mexia, p. 42.

44. Mexia, p. 41.

45. Appian, p. 230.

46. North, p. 169.

47. Mexia, p. 31. See also Augustus, pp. 41-42.

48. See Appian, pp. 230-231.

49. Mexia, p. 31.

50. Appian, pp. 236-237. See also p. 231.

51. Augustus, pp. 43-43.

52. Augustus, p. 42.

53. Mexia, p. 31.

54. Appian, pp. 235-237.

55. Appian, p. 236.

56. Eutropius, A Briefe Chronicle, where in are described shortlye the Originall, and the successive estate of the Romaine weale publique, trans. N. Howard (London, 1564), fol. 69v. Richard Reynoldes, A Chronicle of all the noble Emperours of the Romaines (London, 1571), also praises the emperor Augustus, not the aspiring Octavius.

57. North, p. 236.

58. Suetonius, p. 101-102.

59. Suetonius, p. 102.

60. Mexia, p. 27.

61. North, p. 169.

62. Suetonius, p. 89.

63. Suetonius, p. 90.

64. Suetonius, pp. 102-103.

65. Mexia, p. 51.