Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Twentieth-century Studies in Shakespeare's Songs, Sonnets, and Poems
- Songs, Time, and the Rejection of Falstaff
- Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Elizabethan Sonneteers
- Love’s Confined Doom
- Beasts and Gods: Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis
- From Shakespeare’s Venus to Cleopatra’s Cupids
- Venus and the Second Chance
- Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece
- An Anatomy of The Phoenix and The Turtle
- Shakespeare and the Ritualists
- Illustrations of Social Life IV: The Plague
- The Soest Portrait of Shakespeare
- International Notes
- Shakespeare Productions in the United Kingdom: 1960
- S. Franco zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Book Received
- Index
- Plate Section
From Shakespeare’s Venus to Cleopatra’s Cupids
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Twentieth-century Studies in Shakespeare's Songs, Sonnets, and Poems
- Songs, Time, and the Rejection of Falstaff
- Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Elizabethan Sonneteers
- Love’s Confined Doom
- Beasts and Gods: Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis
- From Shakespeare’s Venus to Cleopatra’s Cupids
- Venus and the Second Chance
- Some Observations on The Rape of Lucrece
- An Anatomy of The Phoenix and The Turtle
- Shakespeare and the Ritualists
- Illustrations of Social Life IV: The Plague
- The Soest Portrait of Shakespeare
- International Notes
- Shakespeare Productions in the United Kingdom: 1960
- S. Franco zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Book Received
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
The famous vision of Cleopatra’s barge, which stuck so vividly in Enobarbus’s mind, centres on the image of the Queen that beggars all description—a paragon of majesty and loveliness, a figure so magic in beauty that it out-Venuses Venus:
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature.
(ii, ii, 205–6)Now it looks as if in the following picture Shakespeare's fancy had indeed outworked nature with delicately sophisticated craftsmanship:
on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
(ii, ii, 206-10)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 73 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1962