"Age cannot wither nor custom stale Her infinite variety."
Cleopatra asks for songs and music, that she may melt into that sea of melody, which heightens pleasure:
"Give me some music; music, moody food Of us that trade in love!"
She knows how to toy with men, keeping their interest alive by her denials:
"If you find him sad, Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick."
Her words express sensual fascination in its most terrible form:
"There is gold, and here My bluest veins to kiss; a hand that kings Have lipped, and trembled kissing."
All around her dance to the same tune and imitate the rhythmic folly of her life. Note the scene of the two waiting women, who are joking about their loves, their future marriages, and the manner of their deaths, with the soothsayer. Listen to the first words of Carminia, so mirthful and caressing in her playful coquetry: "Lord Alexas, sweet Alexas, most anything Alexas, almost most absolute Alexas, where's the soothsayer that you praised so to the queen? O, that I knew this husband, which, you say, must charge his horns with garlands!" ...
Anthony is seized and dragged into this vertiginous course of pungent pleasures, as soon as he appears. In his inebriation the rest of the world, all the active, real world, seems heavy, prosaic, contemptible and displeasing. The very name of Rome has no longer any power over him.
"Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay: one dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man."
As he folds Cleopatra in his arms, he feels that they form a pair who make life more noble, and that in them alone it assumes real significance.
This feeling is not love: we have already called it by its proper name: voluptuousness. Cleopatra loves pleasure and caprice, and the dominion, which both of them afford her; she also loves Anthony, because he is, and in so far as he is, part of her pleasures and caprices, and serves her as an instrument of dominion. She busies herself with keeping him bound to her, struggles to retain him when he removes himself from her, but she always has an eye to other things, which are equally necessary for her, even more so than he, and in order to retain them, she would be ready if necessary to give Anthony in exchange. Anthony too, does not love her; he clearly sees her for what she is, imprecates against her, and enfolds her in his embrace without forgiveness.