SOOTHSAYER You shall be more beloving than beloved.
CHARMIAN I had rather heat my liver with drinking.
ALEXAS Nay, hear him.
CHARMIAN Good now, some excellent fortune! Let me be married to three kings in a forenoon and widow them all. Let me have a child at fifty to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage. Find me to marry me with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my mistress.
SOOTHSAYER You shall outlive the lady whom you serve.
CHARMIAN O, excellent! I love long life better than figs. (1.2.18-26)
You shall be more beloving than beloved, love more than you yourself are loved, says the Soothsayer; I’m having none of that, says Charmian (boys are dumb, love is for idiots; sex, however…)—but I had rather heat my liver with drinking (like love, thought to inflame the liver, seat of the passions). Nay, hear him, persists Alexas. So Charmian asks for some excellent fortune, something ridiculous and extreme and out of the question, beyond her wildest imaginings: let me be married to three kings in a forenoon, that’s right, before lunch, and widow them all. Let me have a child at fifty (after spending my youth in pleasure and childless; clearly an impossibility) to whom Herod of Jewry, byword for savage, infant-slaughtering tyrannical power, may do homage (another impossibility). (There’s a cheerful current of blasphemy here, the three kings, the miraculous birth, King Herod.) No, no, even more ridiculous: find me to marry with Octavius Caesar, so recently mocked as the priggish boy-leader—but many in an early modern audience would also recognise that he was better known in later life as the Emperor Augustus, in whose reign Christ was born. And so companion me with my mistress, make me Cleopatra’s equal, in that she’s got Antony and I’d have that beardless boy who’s snapping at his heels. You shall outlive the lady whom you serve, responds the Soothsayer, undaunted, serious, and even admonitory. But Charmian refuses to take it seriously, to consider what this might imply: excellent, I love long life better than figs. Both of these statements are ironic if one already knows the ending of the play, but figs are erotic—or obscene—a common conceit for the male genitals, and so Charmian is merrily carrying on, characterising herself as insatiable in her desires, pleasure-seeking and wholly unserious. And by extension and analogy, she’s establishing Cleopatra’s character too. Perhaps.