ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra has passed into legend for the variety and evocativeness of the descriptions applied to her by the other characters in the play, but it has been widely overlooked that the first term used to describe her is “gypsy,”1 when Philo says of Antony that,
His captain’s heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gypsy’s lust. (1.1.5-10)
Later, Antony himself laments,
O this false soul of Egypt! This grave charm, Whose eye becked forth my wars, and called them home, Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end, Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose Beguiled me to the very heart of loss. (4.12.25-29)
As Charles Whitney points out,
Fast and loose was a gypsy game first described as involving disappearing knots in a handkerchief, but in fact all of Antony’s characterizations of Cleopatra between the final defeat in battle and the report of Cleopatra’s suicide to him . . . could be said by one claiming to be the victim of an English gypsy. (83)
Equally suggestive of a gypsy identity for Cleopatra is the way in which the soothsayer accurately predicts the future during the fortune-telling scene in
1.2, while the revelation by Cleopatra’s steward that she has kept back more than half her treasure suggests that she has in effect done a gypsy switch (5.2.165ff.).
