“Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language—Antony and Cleopatra—had shriveled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revelead to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same.” (Woolf 134).
Antony and Cleopatra, a play by William Shakespeare, is the story of Mark Antony, a ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and his illicit relationship with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. They are happy, and in love, until Antony’s wife dies and Pompeii begin to rebel. Antony remarries, and Cleopatra becomes jealous, thus leading to the characters’ downfalls. This play carries a theme of ignorance as bliss, and innocence and love and youth as happiness. Septimus Smith here bemoans the loss of this innocence, and the discovery of the evilness of human nature. Dante Alighieri, who wrote the Inferno and awful descriptions of hell, according to Septimus, had the same view of humanity and showed it in his writing, as did Aeschylus, an ancient Greek playwright known as the “Father of Tragedy.”
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