FIRST GUARD O, Caesar,
This Charmian lived but now; she stood and spoke.
I found her trimming up the diadem
On her dead mistress; tremblingly she stood,
And on the sudden dropped.
CAESAR O, noble weakness!
If they had swallowed poison, ’twould appear
By external swelling; but she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace. (5.2.329-337)
The first guard is the last in this play’s large assortment of fabulous ‘minor’ characters; he’s been as moved by (and as taken with) Charmian as Dolabella (and Proculeius) by Cleopatra, it seems. (In performance, he might end up being conflated with one of the other Romans—Agrippa, say.) O, Caesar, this Charmian lived but now; she stood and spoke. She was alive until just a moment ago! This is an anonymous soldier, and yet he seems disconcerted, shaken even, by the fact of death, how someone can be there and then—not. I found her trimming up the diadem on her dead mistress, adjusting Cleopatra’s crown, just as she promised; tremblingly she stood, and on the sudden dropped. It’s more than just a stage direction for the actor playing Charmian (delicate crown adjustment; shiver, shake, fall), it’s an articulation of what it is to bear witness, and to be an audience, to the mysteries of death. With Charmian’s death, Cleopatra’s death has no living witnesses save the audience, and so the first guard’s account of Charmian’s demise becomes a kind of surrogate for the reporting of Cleopatra’s death too. O, noble weakness! is Caesar’s response; he can admire Charmian too, it seems. But then he’s back to playing detective, getting across the details: if they had swallowed poison, ’twould appear by external swelling. There would be some physical signs if they’d poisoned themselves, surely, so it’s probably not that. Even forensically minded Caesar, though, is moved by the sight of Cleopatra, and she is his main focus. (Although he cannot and he will not speak her name.) She looks like sleep (and not swollen, or disfigured)—as she would catch another Antony in her strong toil of grace. She looks as though she’s asleep—and she looks beautiful, entirely capable of ensnaring another man—or Antony, all over again—with her charms. (But toil is work and effort as well as a trap or net and grace is more than charm, more than beauty; it has a touch of transcendence and of the divine. Even Caesar recognises Cleopatra’s death as a kind of willed apotheosis.)