Antony and Cleopatra

Although it is a perspective alien to our own, it remains the case that, from the point of view of
Elizabethan and Jacobean hierarchy, Shakespeare’s greatest achievement may have been the
social status that his success in the theatre enabled rather than his means of achieving it. Having
struggled to achieve a coat of arms on behalf of his father, as we saw in Chapter 4, Shakespeare
had personal experience not only of the financial cost but also the cultural qualifica¬tions that
were required by gentry status described in Henry Peacham’s, The Compleat Gentleman (1622),
a guide to everything a well-educated gentleman ought to know. Among them is one cultural
test that we know Shakespeare passed with flying colors, namely the ability to recognize a
representation of Cleopatra “by a viper,” that is, the asp by means of which she committed
suicide.

Interestingly, Peacham offers no parallel instructions about how Antony might be identified.
This is because among the noble Romans of classical antiquity whose lives are recorded in
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by Thomas North in 1579),
Shakespeare’s source for Antony and Cleopatra, even a life as remarkable as Antony’s has
nothing to render it so conspicuously symbolic as that of the Egyptian queen. Cleopatra was
visibly distinct and readily identifiable. One might say she has an image, or rather that she
possesses an inherent propensity to become one. Indeed, one of the most famous passages
from Shakespeare’s play, taken directly from North’s translation, renders Cleopatra not with the
specificity of individual description - for example, we do not know the color of her hair or eyes -
but rather as a glittering image of sovereignty whose beauty exceeds even that of the most
imaginatively idealized renditions of Venus in art:

For her own person,

It beggared all description: she did lie In

her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

O’erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy

outwork nature . . . (2.2.207-11)1