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Cleopatra is one of the most dazzling and complex female characters ever to have graced the Shakespearean stage. This legendary queen stands as an emblem of Egyptian values, which broadly center on matters of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The Egypt of Cleopatra is a land characterized primarily by its appetites, both for food and drink as well as for art, poetry, and drama. With a past that extends back millennia, Egypt also signifies the infinite boundlessness of history. Cleopatra embodies all these values. She is strangely ageless—at once “wrinkled deep in time” and yet predisposed to mercurial emotions and girlish antics (1.5.34). Her sexual allure is intimately linked to her complex and sometimes contradictory personality. Indeed, she is as excessive as the overflowing Nile, which is the symbolic heart of Egypt. Cleopatra’s magnificent excess is at once the lure that draws Antony in and the snare that contributes to his downfall. Though Cleopatra frequently likens Antony to legendary heroes and mythical demigods, he is ultimately just a man and cannot equal her outsized magnificence. Cleopatra, however, ends the play by passing out of life and into immortality, becoming as “marble-constant” as an ancient Egyptian relic (5.2.294).
Read about another powerful queen portrayed as a seducing foil, Dido from Virgil’s The Aeneid.
Though for the audience Cleopatra’s legendary reputation precedes her, the other characters in the play are divided in their perceptions of the Egyptian queen. From the very beginning, it’s clear that the Romans see Cleopatra as an exotic witch who casts a powerful—and powerfully emasculating—sexual spell. Indeed, many see her as an enchantress who has made Antony “the noble ruin of her magic” (3.10.23). The slurs accumulate throughout the play: “gypsy” (1.1.10), “wrangling queen” (1.1.56), “slave” (1.4.18), “Egyptian dish” (2.6.156), and “whore” (3.6.77). In contrast to this flattening and derogatory view, we also get the perspective of characters like Enobarbus, who, though skeptical of Cleopatra, also admires her. Indeed, it is Enobarbus who delivers the justly famous description of Cleopatra drifting down the Cydnus River:
The barge she sat in like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. . . .
For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion—cloth-of-gold, of tissue—
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. (2.2.227–38)
Enobarbus can’t help but compare Cleopatra to Venus, the goddess of love, whom in fact the Egyptian “o’erpictur[es]” in her majesty. It is this picture of herself as a resplendent and indomitable queen that Cleopatra ensures as her legacy when she flouts Octavius’s attempt to keep her as a trophy and embraces the asp’s fatal yet “immortal” bite (5.2.301).
