Word: heroic
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...Renaissance feared violence. Heroic passion obscured rather than clarified life. Brilliant energy became disordering passion. What was meant by the ancients was the perfect unification of the mental and physical being, the realms of heaven and earth. As man's thinking became more moral, the longing of the heart and striving of the mind were reduced to the mockery of hot blood, and the madness of proud discourse. The separation of the physical and mental, or earth and heaven, has continued linearly to this day, with one exception- the English Romantics. These poets, and their German inspirations, were the true...
...Renaissance viewed the history of Antony and Cleopatra as a story of a great man's degradation due to the "Unreined lust of concupiscence," as North put it in his translation of Plutarch. But Shakespeare recognized that enormous passion is the essence of heroic drama. If Antony's blood batters down his mind in Shakespeare's source, in the play Antony's heart struggles toward reconciliation with his will. Antony and Cleopatra includes the traditional Renaissance argument of noble mind and temperate valor, but does not accept its sagacity...
ANTONY'S death seen is especially complex because he acts in the fire of heroic pride as well as the fire of self-dissolving love. He commits suicide as an act of love- self-love and love for Cleopatra. The fact that she is dissimulating shows that, as at Actium, she cannot comprehend manly honor until it demands the man's death. She will require the sad spectacle of Antony's expiration to realize her implication in his fate, his in hers, and their common destiny as honorable lovers. Antony, at death, finally associates honor with the divine nobility...
...positively regains the self-command which makes possible pure heroic action. The two suicides- as triumphs over Caesar- represent the greatest heroic acts possible in the world. Suicide is the last act to make life comprehensible. It is purified of self-contempt and vain resignation by the capture, through the suffering of shame, of that internal fire which burns the will clear. It is exonerated from the deeper vanity of despair, or storic contemptus mundi, by the perfect fusion of hand and heart. Decretas dispels all ambiguity...
...ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA is neither more nor less Christian than King Lear. The grace of God has become the grace of heroic love. Redemption is impossible so long as Antony thinks only of reputation, and Cleopatra only of pleasure and safety. The Christian sinner cannot be saved who thinks despairingly of God's vengeance, or who boasts arrogantly of his exemption from divine activity. In each case vanity is present. The grace of love dissolves the vain strife of pride, fear, rancor, yearning, and the desolation of insufficient man. Antony's love will not let him be worldly; his honor...