CHARMIAN     [to Soothsayer] Nay, come, tell Iras hers.

ALEXAS           We’ll know all our fortunes.

ENOBARBUS  Mine, and most of our fortunes, tonight shall be drunk to bed.

IRAS    [showing her hand to Soothsayer] There’s a palm presages chastity, if nothing else.

CHARMIAN     E’en as the o’erflowing Nilus presageth famine.

IRAS    Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay.

CHARMIAN     Nay, if an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear. [To Soothsayer] Prithee, tell her but a workaday fortune.    (1.2.35-42)

Go on, then, tell Iras her fortune, says Charmian, tiring of teasing the Soothsayer directly. We’ll all know our fortunes, Alexas intervenes; Enobarbus is as cynical (but also as truthful) as Charmian, when he observes that mine, and most of our fortunes, tonight shall be drunk to bed, suggesting that this is what happens most nights, at least to Enobarbus. Iras suggests—perhaps ironically—that her palm presages chastity, if nothing else; an early modern audience would understand this to mean that her hand is cold and dry, as opposed to hot and sweaty. Er, I don’t think so, interjects Charmian: if your hand is a sign of chastity then the overflowing of the Nile foretells famine. (Its annual flooding made Egypt’s fields fertile.) Chaste! You! Go away, you wild bedfellow (well, you’d know, and you can talk) says Iras in response, you’re no fortune-teller. Oh I can do this sort of thing, it’s simple, is Charmian’s comeback: if an oily palm, a moist hand, be not a fruitful prognostication, a sign of fertility (and a lustful nature) I can’t scratch my ear, I’m no kind of woman—avid for gossip and the latest news—at all. Prithee, tell her but a workaday fortune. Don’t let Iras have more to look forward to than me in the way of excitement (and sexual fulfilment); make her fortune dull and everyday.