CLEOPATRA [to Antony] If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
ANTONY There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
CLEOPATRA I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
ANTONY Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. (1.1.14-17)
Despite the train, the women, the eunuchs, and the two censorious Roman soldiers, these two are completely wrapped up in each other (although not averse to an audience), mid flirty quarrel, and presumably one they’ve had many times before. Antony’s apparently been protesting that he loves Cleopatra: so, tell me, she says, if it be love indeed, tell me how much. I want to hear you say it, I want to be told again and again—but Antony picks up on tell as count and says that’s impossible; it’d diminish his love, their love to put a number on it; there’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned, he says, it’d impoverish it. We’re above that, we’re magnificent, we don’t need how much, numbers and words! That’s my call, though, she says: I’ll set the limit, define the terms if I want, tell you exactly how much you love me. I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved, bourn as boundary. (Love as geographical, space and territory; the borders of a country to be defined by love alone. A grown-up development of Juliet’s ecstatic, innocent claim that her ‘bounty is as boundless as the sea’…) And Antony picks it up again, as they dance around each other in this great erotic sparring bout: if that’s the case, if you’re going to try to put a limit on my love, on our love, then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. You’ll have to redefine the world itself to set a limit on how much I love you, he says, you’ll have to go beyond its limits—and in saying so, he’s borrowing the language of Revelation 21, when the vision of the new heaven and the new earth marks the end of time and the end of the world. BIG LOVE, not just to the moon and back (these are not Donne’s ‘dull sublunary lovers’, far from it). Their world is a lovers’ world, entire and of itself, and nothing else matters. To infinity and beyond! So there.