CHARMIAN                 O, eastern star!

CLEOPATRA               Peace, peace.

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

CHARMIAN O, break! O, break!

CLEOPATRA As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle.

O Antony! Nay, I will take thee too.

[She takes another aspic]

What should I stay—

[She] dies

CHARMIAN                 In this vile world?     (5.2.297-303)

Charmian, too, is caught up in the heady, heavenly, elevated language: o, eastern star! She’s looking beyond clouds and rain to Venus, the morning star, whether calling on it for aid, or simple witness, or identifying Cleopatra herself with the star, the goddess of love—or both. But Cleopatra’s nearly there, looking inwards, rather than up and out: peace, peace. Hush, hush. Sssshhhhhh. Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, that sucks the nurse asleep? You’ll wake my little one, feeding so gently, so greedily, that the nurse, its mother, grows drowsy. The combination of the maternal and the erotic is sensual, intimate; there’s a voyeuristic quality, perhaps, for the audience. (And if we look too close we see—what?—that the snake is fake, or harmlessly snuggling, or making a break for it? Part of what’s at stake here is our desire too, for Cleopatra’s death, the imagined ecstasy of her reunion with Antony.) O, break! O, break! Whether Charmian’s addressing her own heart, or Cleopatra’s, or both, it doesn’t matter. But Cleopatra’s in her own world, blissful, hazy, yet focused—as sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—sensual, again, not unrelated to the vision of her on the river in her burning barge, light and scent and caress, an overload. This is a falling asleep, a gentle letting go: O Antony! She sees him—although there can be agony in that crying out too. Nay, I will take thee too, another little snake, to be sure, and to be swifter, to get to Antony even sooner. Because, after all, what should I stay—? why should I stay here, why should I linger any longer? why should I live a moment longer in this world alone?

And she’s gone, silent, asleep, dead. Charmian, for once, has the last word: yes, why should you stay in this vile world? What’s the point indeed? O, Cleopatra.

The gap, the silence, the incompletion perhaps underscores that Antony’s not there; it creates a space and an absence that vibrates with Cleopatra’s longing. (And I wonder, too, if there’s a little echo of Hotspur, who dies in single combat at the end of 1 Henry IV, cut off mid sentence, his last words supplied, with a kind of bitter reluctance, by Prince Hal: food for—for worms.)