Antony and Cleopatra - Cleopatra Flashcards
If you find him sad…
Say I am dancing
Give me mine angle;
We’ll to the river […] my bended hook shall pierce […] as I draw them up
I have seen her…
Die twenty times upon far poorer moment
I little thought /
You should have followed
He is a god…
And knows / what is most right
No more but e’en…
A woman, and commanded / by such a poor passion as the maid that milks […] if it were for me / to throw my sceptre at the injurious gods […]
Patience is sottish, …
And impatience does / become a dog that’s mad
Sole sir…
O’th’world
Mine will now be yours, /
[…] yours would be mine
If she first meet…
The curled Antony,/ he’ll make demand of her
The gold I give thee…
Well I melt and pour/ down thy ill-uttering throat
Thou shalt be whipped…
With wire, and stewed in brine
By sea,
What else?
If knife, …
Drugs, serpents, have/edge, sting, or operation, I am safe
Fortune break…
Her wheel,/provoked by my offence
I shall show…
The cinders of my spirits/through th’ashes of my chance
Mechanical slaves/
With greasy aprons, […] in their thick breaths,/rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded/and forced to drink their vapour
The quick comedians/
Extemporally will stage us and present/our Alexandrian revels […] I shall see/some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/i’th’posture of a whore
Now from head to foot /
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon / no planet is of mine
Give me my robe.
Put on my crown. I have/immortal longings in me
Eternity was…
In our lips and eyes
O, my oblivion…
Is a very Antony / and I am all forgotten
But I might sleep out…
This great gap of time
My salad days…
When I was green in judgement
Though he be painted…
One way like a Gorgon,/the other way’s a Mars
Dull of…
Tongue, and dwarfish
If I be so, /
From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,/and poison it in the source, and the first stone/drop in my neck; as it determines, so/dissolve my life!
RSC version: cleo is gentle
Globe: cleo is angry
Thou art /
The armourer of my heart
Oh Sun,/
Burn the great sphere thou I mov’st in; darkling stand/the varying shore o’th’world
The crown o’th’earth…
Doth melt. My lord! / o, withered is the garland of the war; / the soldier’s pole is fall’n!
His face was…
As the heav’ns, and therein struck / The sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted / the little O, the earth
O, couldst thou speak,/
That I might hear thee call Caesar ass/ unpolicied
Cleopatra is:
A “consistent inconsistency” - Anna Brownell Jameson
“What deconstructs…
Political order in the play is desire, and the figure for this is Cleopatra. In predictably patriarchal style, Cleopatra is portrayed as capricious and self-contradictory, undoing all coherence in her exasperating inconsistency.”
Terry Eagleton
Linda Fitz on Cleo
She “learns and grows as Antony does not […] Shakespeare has taken pains to let Cleopatra explain her contrary behaviour […] cleopatra’s variety is,at last, finite”
Katharine Ott on Octavia v Cleo
“Octavia exemplifies Rome itself […] Highlighting Cleopatra’s foreign nature and her sexuality, which the Romans find unattractive and unacceptable”.
