Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereids (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf’s side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all along the river’s side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market-place, in his imperial seat to give audience.

Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and an appreciative ear. Where the director of a modern musical would tell his designer to build that barge, Shakespeare let his audience fashion the scene in their imagination by turning the prose of Plutarch’s English translator, Sir Thomas North, into richly evocative verse:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that
The winds were lovesick with them: the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
…
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i’th’eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i’th’market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

Our modern conception of genius makes creativity synonymous with originality. In matters artistic, there is no more severe accusation than that of plagiarism. A modern student might therefore be surprised to see how closely Shakespeare followed—stole—the shape of his model. The barge and all its accoutrements, the apparel of Cleopatra herself, her gorgeous attendants, the common people running out of the city to gaze upon the exotic queen, imperial Antony left alone on his throne in the marketplace: each successive detail is lifted straight from the source.

But to the Elizabethans, this procedure would have been admirable, not reprehensible. For them, there was no higher mark of artistic excellence than what they called the “lively turning” of familiar material. This was the art of “copiousness” that they were taught in school: take a piece of received wisdom (a proverb, a phrase, a historical incident, a story out of ancient myth), turn it on the anvil of your inventiveness, and you will give it new life. The art is in the embellishment.

The fluidity of the meter plays as big a part in the animation as the enrichment of the language. Line after line is run on, as Enobarbus becomes carried away by the scene that he is conjuring up. Particular energy comes from the placing of verbs at the end of the line: “made,” “lie,” “see,” “seem,” “cast.” We are carried forward by the desire to discover the object of each verb.

Shakespeare takes the golden poop and the purple sails from North’s Plutarch, but adds “and so perfumèd that / The winds were lovesick with them.” Where the historian has offered mere description, the dramatist adds reaction. He imagines the wind being affected by Cleopatra’s aura. Then the water follows suit: the strokes of the oars and their musical accompaniment are in Plutarch, but in Shakespeare the water falls in love even as it is beaten. That pain and love have something to do with each other is a thought he developed later in the play, when Cleopatra compares the stroke of death to a lover’s pinch “Which hurts and is desired.” In Plutarch, Cleopatra is like a picture of Venus, the goddess of love; in Shakespeare, she out-pictures the best imaginable picture of Venus.

The poet proves his art by transforming the historian’s plain simile into an astonishingly complex effect: a work of art usually imitates nature, whereas the very best work of art seems to “out-work” nature, whereas Cleopatra surpasses even that. So does her allure come from nature or from art? Through the poet’s imagination, Cleopatra can contrive her goddess-like appearance so that the very elements of nature—first the winds and the waves, then the rope of the tackle, then the stone of the wharf, and finally the air itself—fall in love with her. After this, is it surprising that Antony does so too? Soon he will vacate that throne on which he has been left in the empty marketplace, looking rather ridiculous. The image of vacation becomes symbolic of the whole process of the play, whereby politics and power are left behind, so strong is the allure of Cleopatra’s erotic aura. Such is Shakespeare’s quickness of mind and fertility of imagination that, Cleopatra-like, he makes effects of art seem like effusions of nature.

Shakespeare certainly acted in his own early plays, but probably not his later ones. He is unlikely to have written a role for himself in Antony and Cleopatra. But the role of Enobarbus, the admiring yet detached witness who speaks these lines, feels as if it corresponds to his own point of view. Shakespeare is a realist as well as a romantic, a skilled politician as well as a supreme poet; he is equally capable of imagining Antony’s dramatic trajectory as a rise and as a fall. He is perpetually both inside and outside the action, both an emotionally involved participant in the world he creates and a wry commentator upon it. So he invented a new character, the only major player in the story who is absent from the historical source: Enobarbus. His consciousness is vital to the audience because he seems to offer the perspective of an Egyptian in Rome and a Roman in Egypt. Intelligent, funny, at once companionable and guardedly isolated, full of understanding and admiration for women but most comfortable among men (there is a homoerotic frisson to his bond with Menas and his rivalry with Agrippa), clinically analytical in his assessment of others but full of sorrow and shame when his reason overrides his loyalty and leads him to desert his friend and master, Enobarbus is as rewarding a role as any that Shakespeare wrote.