The characters breathe, move, and live.  Shakespeare does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once becomes them, and speaks and acts for them.  He does not present us with groups of stage-puppets or poetical machines making set speeches on human life, and acting from a calculation of ostensible motives, but he brings living men and women on the scene, who speak and act from real feelings, according to the ebbs and flows of passion, without the least tincture of the pedantry of logic or rhetoric.  Nothing is made out by inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis, but everything takes place just as it would have done in reality, according to the occasion.—­The character of Cleopatra is a masterpiece.  What an extreme contrast it affords to Imogen!  One would think it almost impossible for the same person to have drawn both.  She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle.  The luxurious pomp and gorgeous extravagance of the Egyptian queen are displayed in all their force and lustre, as well as the irregular grandeur of the soul of Mark Antony.  Take only the first four lines that they speak as an example of the regal style of love-making.

   Cleopatra.  If it be love, indeed, tell me how much?

   Antony.  There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

   Cleopatra.  I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

   Antony.  Then must thou needs find out new heav’n, new earth.

The rich and poetical description of her person, beginning: 

     The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
     Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
     Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
     The winds were love-sick—­

seems to prepare the way for, and almost to justify the subsequent infatuation of Antony when in the sea-fight at Actium, he leaves the battle, and ‘like a doting mallard’ follows her flying sails.

Few things in Shakespeare (and we know of nothing in any other author like them) have more of that local truth of imagination and character than the passage in which Cleopatra is represented conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence.  ‘He’s speaking now, or murmuring—­where’s my serpent of old Nile?’ Or again, when she says to Antony, after the defeat at Actium, and his summoning up resolution to risk another fight—­’It is my birthday; I had thought to have held it poor; but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.’  Perhaps the finest burst of all is Antony’s rage after his final defeat when he comes in, and surprises the messenger of Caesar kissing her hand: 

     To let a fellow that will take rewards,
     And say, God quit you, be familiar with
     My play-fellow, your hand; this kingly seal,
     And plighter of high hearts.

It is no wonder that he orders him to be whipped; but his low condition is not the true reason:  there is another feeling which lies deeper, though Antony’s pride would not let him show it, except by his rage; he suspects the fellow to be Caesar’s proxy.