CHARMIAN O, quietness, lady!
IRAS She’s dead, too, our sovereign.
CHARMIAN Lady!
IRAS Madam!
CHARMIAN O, madam, madam, madam!
IRAS Royal Egypt, Empress!
CHARMIAN Peace, peace, Iras!
CLEOPATRA No more but e’en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chores. (4.16.71-77)
As with the uncertainty as to when Antony actually dies, editors have to supply directions here: Cleopatra evidently faints, swoons, collapses, and Iras and Charmian think that she’s dead too. For a moment they panic, aghast: O, quietness, lady! rest for a moment, calm yourself, is Charmian’s first response (she knows what Cleopatra needs) but Iras is more sceptical, and also perhaps more alert, albeit naive. She’s dead, too, our sovereign! The Queen is dead! (Still near enough to the death of Elizabeth I for a frisson to run through the audience of 1606, especially if Cleopatra recalled her at all in dress, mannerisms—wig.) Frantic, they try to rouse her—one imagines fanning, patting her hands, loosening her bodice, even. And they try all possible forms of address: Madam! Lady! and the most formal, Royal Egypt, Empress! Now it’s Iras who’s losing it a bit, and so Charmian must calm her, peace, peace, Iras—and besides, Cleopatra stirs, revives, or seems to, and Charmian needs above all to attend to her, and to be able to hear what she’s saying. They must huddle together, Antony’s lifeless body no longer the centre of attention, but Cleopatra’s. Her first words indicate that she’s heard Iras’s calling to her, as Royal Egypt, as Empress, at least, and she now rejects those titles: in this moment, she is no more than e’en a woman. I’m just a woman, an ordinary woman, in my grief. And that was just a faint, an ordinary faint. Pathetic; so weak. This empress, this queen, admits that she is commanded by such poor passion, the same universal emotion, the self-same sorrow and grief, and the weakness, that are shared by the maid that milks and does the meanest chores. She’s utterly reduced by her loss; in grief, Cleopatra is everywoman. Without Antony, she’s not special any more. There’s a bleak inversion here of a trope familiar from stories of Elizabeth I’s life, one that also appears in letters exchanged with Mary Queen of Scots: wouldn’t it be nice to be not a queen but a milkmaid, singing as she goes about her work on a spring morning, without a care in the world? Unlike her real-life avatars, however, Cleopatra is all too aware that lowly status, like high, is no shield against great grief, terrible loss and suffering. (And Elizabeth I and her cousin surely knew that too.)