CLEOPATRA               He’s speaking now,

Or murmuring ‘Where’s my serpent of old Nile?’—

For so he calls me. Now I feed myself

With most delicious poison. Think on me,

That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black,

And wrinkled deep in time. Broad-fronted Caesar,

When thou wast here above the ground I was

A morsel for a monarch, and great Pompey

Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow.

There would he anchor his aspect, and die

With looking on his life.        (1.5.24-34)

Antony on horseback is public (despite the intimate imagining that Cleopatra briefly entertains) and so perhaps is the suggestion that he’s speaking now—but then he murmurs, as if just to her, for her, ‘Where’s my serpent of old Nile?’, a lover’s endearment, a sinuous, exotic epithet, the tempter of Egypt. For so he calls me, she adds, probably unnecessarily, but it’s another reminder that it’s the two of them, with in-jokes, old habits and ways of relating to each other. This remembering, this evocation of their daily intimacies is most delicious poison, bittersweet, pleasurable and painful—the serpent stinging herself, a kind of fatal ecstasy. Think on me—she says to Antony—remember me, think about me in the same lingering way I’m thinking about you—me, that am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, and wrinkled deep in time. The first of those at least is perhaps another echo of Antony’s own words, describing her skin, her beauty darkened by the sun as if by the caresses of a lover (although with that little pleasure-pain twist, pinches, not just caresses, the surprising bruises left by fierce and inventive love-making even)—and wrinkled deep in time. I am old, she says: it’s a challenge, as if this is what she regularly says to Antony, so that he can deny it, say that it doesn’t matter, that she’s beautiful, and not just to him. Underpinning this passage, perhaps, an echo as well as the larger context of the great erotic biblical text of the Song of Solomon: ‘I am black, but comely’ (1.5, in the Authorised Version). Whatever her complexion, whether Cleopatra is Black or tanned, she asserts that her beauty does not conform to the pink and white roses and lilies ‘standard’ beauty of the blazon or of early modern portraiture—and that Antony loves her just the way she is, and she loves herself too.

But not just Antony: she reminds him—in her imagination—and her listeners and the audience too that others have found her equally fascinating, above all broad-fronted, wide-browed (and so brainy?) Julius Caesar, now dead (no longer above the ground, as she points out; she may be old(er) but she’s outlived him), to whom she was a morsel for a monarch, a dainty fit for a king. And also great Pompey: here it might suggest actual Pompey the Great, father of the Pompey currently causing all the trouble (Sextus), although historically Cleopatra’s lover was Gnaeus Pompey, Sextus’s big brother. Keep up! Pompey would just gaze on her, making his eyes grow in her brow; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. There would he anchor his aspect, stare and stare, and die with looking on his life. He couldn’t get enough of me; he languished, ecstatically, in my presence, as if I were the centre of his world. The point is, this is another version of the geopolitical tensions in which Antony’s currently embroiled; to Cleopatra, Caesar and Pompey were lovers, not rivals or allies, and they were both her conquests. And she’s got a sexual past, about which she is frank and utterly unashamed. Antony may be her obsession and her greatest love and lover, but he’s far from being her one and only.