"I Am Marble-Constant": Cleopatra's Monumental End

Abstract

Where did Shakespeare get his description of Cleopatra's suicide? What were his sources, and what effect was this staged action supposed to have upon the first audience of Antony and Cleopatra? North's Plutarch says only that a countryman arrived with some figs and that later the guards founde Cleopatra starke dead, layed upon a bed of gold, attired and araied in her royal robes.' While the historian made clear that no one knew the exact manner of the Queen's death, the playwright obviously found this dramatic void intolerable. Working from an imagination steeped in native lore concerning monumental tombs and deaths of royal ladies, Shakespeare invented two discrete episodes the interlude with the Clown and the suicide itself (V, ii, 207-318) which derive some important measure of their inspiration from the funereal surroundings and, in close sequence with one another, inform the mood and meaning of the tragedy during its final catastrophe. In his tribute prefacing the Second Folio of 1632, John Milton betrays a notion of pyramids no less peculiar than the recipient of this homage: