Antony and Cleopatra: Act II

The people love me, and the sea is mine;
My powers are crescent, and my auguring hope
Says it will come to th’ full.

But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy wanned lip!

Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both;
Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts;
Keep his brain fuming.

Epicurean cooks
Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite,
That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honor
Even till a Lethe’d dullness—
How now, Varrius?

Menas, I did not think
This amorous surfeiter would have donned his helm
For such a petty war.

Menas, I did not think
This amorous surfeiter would have donned his helm
For such a petty war.

I know not, Menas,
How lesser enmities may give way to greater.

Good Enobarbus, ’tis a worthy deed,
And shall become you well, to entreat your captain
To soft and gentle speech.

Hark, Ventidius. [They talk aside.]

Noble friends,
That which combined us was most great, and let not
A leaner action rend us.

What’s amiss,
May it be gently heard.

You may be pleased to catch at mine intent
By what did here befall me.

So much uncurbable, her garboils, Caesar,
Made out of her impatience—which not wanted
Shrewdness of policy too—I grieving grant
Did you too much disquiet.

I wrote to you
When rioting in Alexandria; you
Did pocket up my letters, and with taunts
Did gibe my missive out of audience.

I wrote to you
When rioting in Alexandria; you
Did pocket up my letters, and with taunts
Did gibe my missive out of audience.

As nearly as I may
I’ll play the penitent to you.

If it might please you to enforce no further
The griefs between you, to forget them quite
Were to remember that the present need
Speaks to atone you.

You shall have time to
wrangle in when you have nothing else to do.

Yet if I knew
What hoop should hold us staunch, from edge to edge
O’ th’ world I would pursue it.

To hold you in perpetual amity,
To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts
With an unslipping knot, take Antony
Octavia to his wife, whose beauty claims
No worse a husband than the best of men;
Whose virtue and whose general graces speak
That which none else can utter.

Pardon what I have spoke,
For ’tis a studied, not a present thought,
By duty ruminated.

There’s my hand.
A sister I bequeath you whom no brother
Did ever love so dearly.

Yet, ere we put ourselves in arms, dispatch we
The business we have talked of.

The barge she sat in like a burnished throne
Burned on the water.

We shall,
As I conceive the journey, be at the Mount
Before you, Lepidus.

I do not like “But yet.” It does allay
The good precedence. Fie upon “But yet.”
“But yet” is as a jailer to bring forth
Some monstrous malefactor.

I do not like “But yet.” It does allay
The good precedence. Fie upon “But yet.”
“But yet” is as a jailer to bring forth
Some monstrous malefactor.

The most infectious pestilence upon thee!

O, I would thou didst,
So half my Egypt were submerged and made
A cistern for scaled snakes!

And that is it
Hath made me rig my navy, at whose burden
The angered ocean foams, with which I meant
To scourge th’ ingratitude that despiteful Rome
Cast on my noble father.

Aboard my galley I invite you all.

Then shall the sighs of Octavia blow the fire up in
Caesar, and, as I said before, that which is the
strength of their amity shall prove the immediate
author of their variance.

But it raises the greater war between
him and his discretion.

Thus do they, sir: they take the flow o’ th’ Nile
By certain scales i’ th’ Pyramid; they know
By th’ height, the lowness, or the mean if dearth
Or foison follow.

As it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain,
And shortly comes to harvest.

Forbear me till anon.

It lives by that which nourisheth
it, and the elements once out of it, it
transmigrates.

With the health that Pompey gives him, else he is a very epicure.

For this
I’ll never follow thy palled fortunes more.
Who seeks and will not take when once ’tis offered
Shall never find it more.

Our graver business
Frowns at this levity.—Gentle lords, let’s part.