Antony and Cleopatra on the prairie

By chance it came to pass that when Annatoo's first virgin bloom had departed, leaving nothing but a lusty frame and a lustier soul, Samoa, the Navigator, had fallen desperately in love with her. And thinking the lady to his mind, being brave like himself, and doubtless well adapted to the vicissitudes of matrimony at sea, he meditated suicide—I would have said, wedlock—and the twain became one. And some time after, in capacity of wife, Annatoo the dame, accompanied in the brigantine, Samoa her lord. Now, as Antony flew to the refuse embraces of Caesar, so Samoa solaced himself in the arms of this discarded fair one. And the sequel was the same. For not harder the life Cleopatra led my fine frank friend, poor Mark, than Queen Annatoo did lead this captive of her bow and her spear. But all in good time.  (Mardi)

Ha! In Mardi Melville called Mark Antony "my fine frank friend"; in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons quotes extensively from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in dialogue with his imaginary friend, Frank. So-named for the first time ("here comes Frank again") a bit later in this same August 1852 episode.

C. " ... But our quiet discussion of trout and buffalo steak, was a good introduction to repose and a pipe.

"How beautifully those light clouds float along from the east, wafted by the gentle airs that just give music to the leaves over head. Ye far wanderers! are ye messengers from that busy world? If so, pass on; and those white summits—those representatives of Nature's simplicity, will receive you quite unmoved!

"What is the world to us? Not much more than we to them!

'Let the wide arch of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.'" 

F. Ah! but Anthony thus spoke under the excitement of a powerful passion."

C. "Most sapient, true; for does he not soon add,

'Now for the love of Love, and her soft hours,
Let's not confound the time with conference harsh:
There's not a minute of our lives should stretch
Without some pleasure now.' 

"I rather think there is nothing worth living for beside Love, Music and War."

F. —"And a pipe! for what content, you heathen, does it not appear to give you. And the beauty of this sparkling, but calm morning is something to live for, and gratefully too."

(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, August 1852; and Scenes and Adventures, with interesting changes including deletion of "Anthony" and "sapient" and demotion of "Frank" to anonymous "Friend.")

Antony's enamored surrender to Love at the start of Antony and Cleopatra is not checked or otherwise marked in Melville's Shakespeare set, although Cleopatra's preceding line ("Antony will be himself") is. Melville knew this play well, as the markings make clear. In a chapter on "The Legacy of Britain," Robin Grey points out:

Scholars have noted the frequency of Melville’s “borrowings” from an array of dramas. Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear were most heavily marked.  (A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley)

Melville's Marginalia Online shows the markings and annotations in Melville's set of Shakespeare, including the marginalia in volume 6 with Antony and Cleopatra.

Another of Melville's references to Antony and Cleopatra:

Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked he is. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck.
(Moby-Dick)