William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra

ACT II. 2. SCENE II. Rome. A Room in the House of LEPIDUS. (continued)

ENOBARBUS.
Or, if you borrow one another's love for the instant, you may,
when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again: you shall
have time to wrangle in when you have nothing else to do.

ANTONY.
Thou art a soldier only: speak no more.

ENOBARBUS.
That truth should be silent I had almost forgot.

ANTONY.
You wrong this presence; therefore speak no more.

ENOBARBUS.
Go to, then; your considerate stone!

CAESAR.
I do not much dislike the matter, but
The manner of his speech; for't cannot be
We shall remain in friendship, our conditions
So differing in their acts. Yet if I knew
What hoop should hold us stanch, from edge to edge
O' the world, I would pursue it.

AGRIPPA.
Give me leave, Caesar,--

CAESAR.
Speak, Agrippa.

AGRIPPA.
Thou hast a sister by the mother's side,
Admir'd Octavia: great Mark Antony
Is now a widower.

CAESAR.
Say not so, Agrippa:
If Cleopatra heard you, your reproof
Were well deserv'd of rashness.

ANTONY.
I am not married, Caesar: let me hear
Agrippa further speak.

AGRIPPA.
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. By this marriage
All little jealousies, which now seem great,
And all great fears, which now import their dangers,
Would then be nothing: truths would be tales,
Where now half tales be truths: her love to both
Would each to other, and all loves to both,
Draw after her. Pardon what I have spoke;
For 'tis a studied, not a present thought,
By duty ruminated.

ANTONY.
Will Caesar speak?