When Cleopatra contemplates the thoughts and situation of her absent lover Antony, the audience is gifted a glimpse of an imagination deeply human and fallible. For Cleopatra’s imagination transports her into Antony’s head, even into his language, where she seems to uncover the immediacy of Antony’s predicament, as she supports her need to have him still besotted by her.
She creates a story to live by. Cleopatra is imaginatively and linguistically RESOURCEFUL!
‘ How fine to make Cleopatra have this consciousness of her own character, and to make her feel that it is for this for which Antony is in love with her!’ ( Hazlitt)
It feels as if Cleopatra is within her lover’s head as well as his skin, looking outwards back at herself!.
Cleopatra’s language truly seems to have a body-visceral to the point of pleasure?
Consummate artistry and sexually charged mental acrobatics on Cleopatra’s part!
This moment in the play shows Cleopatra as a mistress of ventriloquism and such a gift emanates from her deeply erotic connection with Antony; which is all consuming and dangerously mixed up with the desire for political as well as romantic control and power.
Hazlitt explores the imaginative gift of Shakespeare who can so convincingly explore the resourcefulness of Cleopatra: ‘as in our dreams we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence’ . This engenders natural seeming speech, as if Shakespeare is merely repeating what he has ‘overheard’ in passing, rather than it being ‘fiction’ at all.
We are in world where words are profoundly erogenous-and perhaps as this extract reveals, unhealthily obsessive and self referential to the point of narcissism. Cleopatra does not want to be forgotten, she almost commands her mind’s imagination to create a scenario where she is not forgotten, in fact she is teasingly mocked as a ‘serpent’ by herself, for herself, with all the sexual connotations involved!
This is truly a language of self pleasure!
Hardly surprising that the famous, destructive love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor should have resonances of their ‘originals’ too. Here Burton in his Dairy confesses about Taylor that: ‘After seven, or is it eight years, I still miss her if she goes to the bathroom.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2234235/Richard-Burton-Liz-Taylor-relationship-laid-bare-passion-intimacy.html#ixzz2vFxToqkh
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The hectic, breathless questioning, the idiosyncratic fixing upon the good luck of Antony’s horse to be so physically near him: even her intuitive ability to seemingly eavesdrop upon Antony’s reflections, conjure up Mark Antony before us; as if we too share Cleopatra’s passion for him; even laughing at her apparent knowingness of his ambivalent feelings about her, when she imagines him murmuring like a delicious incantation or promise, ‘Where’s my serpent of the old Nile?’
This question reminds us that Cleopatra can ironise her own condition and relation to Antony. The exoticism of Egypt is sexually charged and even a trap for the rationality of Rome and the ‘weight’ of Antony’s nobility has been compromised by the ‘poison’ of Egypt, even and especially in terms of its power to induce erotic fever and forgetting. He craves that which will destroy him.
This preoccupation with control is drenched with sexual yearning as the horse’s bodily closeness to Antony feeds Cleopatra’s yearning and sexual longing at the point of this imaginative ‘event’ in her busy head. It’ feels almost like an erotic joke, where Cleopatra is teasing herself into frenzy by her verbalising her preoccupation with Antony. What she cannot bear is any forgetting and this scene reveals the way in which her mind affects her emotional composure and stability.
In other words that Cleopatra builds a scenario here which preserves her desire for erotic control and connection. She is addicted to the ‘poison’ of erotic power!
Even if we are not Cleopatra , we may all to readily appreciate the delirium of the ‘best’ scenario, poised as it may be on the precipice of the worst scenario; forgetting or sexual usurpation.
Highly charged indeed.
This speech, with it’s highly erotic language, reads like a poem. Apart from Anthony, the object of her passion, she reveals her obsession with him in that age old way of lovers by imagining him imagining her. The serpent, symbol of desire, also foreshadows Cleopatra’s as well as Anthony’s death, Memento Mori.