CLEOPATRA   Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors

Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers

Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’ posture of a whore.       (5.2.210-217)

Cleopatra’s picturing the scene ever more vividly, painting a compelling image of humiliation for Iras—and for herself. Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. This is definitely what will happen if we go with Caesar, no question. Saucy lictors will catch at us like strumpets—Cleopatra imagines Roman officials, court officers, as being like the beadles who whipped prostitutes in London (and whom Shakespeare elsewhere imagines as enjoying their work rather too much, also the suggestion here in saucy)—we’ll be humiliated like common whores—and, even more, scald rhymers will ballad us out of tune. They’ll make up and sing scurrilous, filthy songs about us, and they won’t even sing them well. As if that weren’t enough, the quick comedians extemporally will stage us, and present our Alexandrian revels. They’ll be making up plays about us: actors will mock us with obscene parodies of what they think we got up to at our parties in Egypt. We’ll be the subject of stand-up and sketch shows and improv; we’ll be reduced to material! Antony shall be brought drunken forth; they’ll portray him as a sozzled reprobate. And I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness i’th’ posture of a whore. I’ll have to watch as some spotty teenager puts on a funny voice, trying to sound like a sexy woman, and travesties me, my majesty, my beauty—as if I were no more than a slut. They’ll make Antony look pathetic and contemptible; they’ll make me look ridiculous, grotesque—sad.

It’s one of Shakespeare’s great gestures of supreme confidence in his own writing, and in his actors, because Cleopatra is herself being played by that teenage boy, imagining and disparagingly exposing the inadequacies of another teenage boy—and so, also, perhaps, contemplating the end of his own career as Cleopatra, his own finite life as Egypt’s spectacular queen. Perhaps he knows that the boy playing Iras will soon be his own successor.