SOURCE: “Blessed When They Were Riggish: Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Christianity's Penitent Prostitutes,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 429-49.

In the following essay, King suggests that Shakespeare portrays competing images of the “penitent prostitute” in the characterization of Cleopatra, who resembles prostitute-saints of the Middle Ages. Like these women, Cleopatra is associated with both sexual incontinence and supernatural power.

All eroticism has a sacramental character. 

—Georges Bataille, Erotism¹

Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. 

—Luke 7:47

Among the extraordinary claims Enobarbus makes for Cleopatra in the second act of Antony and Cleopatra is that “the holy priests / Bless her, when she is riggish” (2.2.239-40).² Concluding one of Shakespeare's most paradoxical passages, this final paradox alienates Cleopatra utterly from ecclesiastically sanctioned sexual values of early seventeenth-century England, at the same time linking her to the sacred eroticism of ancient...