Cleopatra’s whole character is the triumph of the voluptuous, of the love of pleasure and the power of giving it, over every other consideration.  Octavia is a dull foil to her, and Fulvia a shrew and shrill-tongued.  What a picture do those lines give of her: 

     Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
     Her infinite variety.  Other women cloy
     The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
     Where most she satisfies.

What a spirit and fire in her conversation with Antony’s messenger who brings her the unwelcome news of his marriage with Octavia!  How all the pride of beauty and of high rank breaks out in her promised reward to him: 

     —­There’s gold, and here
     My bluest veins to kiss!

She had great and unpardonable faults, but the beauty of her death almost redeems them.  She learns from the depth of despair the strength of her affections.  She keeps her queen-like state in the last disgrace, and her sense of the pleasurable in the last moments of her life.  She tastes a luxury in death.  After applying the asp, she says with fondness: 

     Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
     That sucks the nurse asleep? 
     As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle. 
     Oh Antony!

It is worth while to observe that Shakespeare has contrasted the extreme magnificence of the descriptions in this play with pictures of extreme suffering and physical horror, not less striking—­partly perhaps to excuse the effeminacy of Mark Antony to whom they are related as having happened, but more to preserve a certain balance of feeling in the mind.  Caesar says, hearing of his conduct at the court of Cleopatra: 

     —­Antony,
     Leave thy lascivious wassails.  When thou once
     Wert beaten from Mutina, where thou slew’st
     Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
     Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against,
     Though daintily brought up, with patience more
     Than savages could suffer.  Thou did’st drink
     The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
     Which beast would cough at.  Thy palate then did deign
     The roughest berry on the rudest hedge,
     Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
     The barks of trees thou browsed’st.  On the Alps,
     It is reported, thou did’st eat strange flesh,
     Which some did die to look on:  and all this,
     It wounds thine honour, that I speak it now,
     Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
     So much as lank’d not.

The passage after Antony’s defeat by Augustus where he is made to say: 

     Yes, yes; he at Philippi kept
     His sword e’en like a dancer; while I struck
     The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and ’twas I
     That the mad Brutus ended,