SOURCE: "Feliciter audax: Antony and Cleopatra, I, i, I-24," in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G.K. Hunter, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 95-109.

In the following excerpt, Hibbard discusses Shakespeare's use of language in Antony and Cleopatra, describing the play's style as "an astonishing union of the hyperbolical with the simple, the downright, and the direct."

              [Enter Demetrius and Philo.]
 Philo. Nay, but this dotage of our general's
      O'erflows the measure. Those his goodly
               eyes,
      That o'er the files and musters of the war
      Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend,
              now turn,

The office and devotion of their view
 Upon a tawny front. His captain's heart,
 Which in the scuffles of great fights haht
        burst
 The buckles on his breast, reneges all
         temper,
 And is become the bellows and the fan
 To cool a gipsy's lust.
 [Flourish Enter...