ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Shakespeare's famous purple passage in Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Queen is described as sitting in the barge, that "like a burnished throne / Burned on the water", on the exotic river Cydnus, in Asia Minor, in the pose of a seductress. This passage is a prime example of Shakespeare's reliance, in his Roman plays, on what he read in Plutarch's Parallel Lives. The chapter shows that beyond its well-known verbal debt to Plutarch's description of the scene, Shakespeare's treatment also has interesting links with other, visual sources and analogues. Rather than provide a description, Shakespeare chooses to expand on Plutarch's comparison of Cleopatra to a picture of the goddess of love and beauty. Shakespeare's self-conscious adaptation of Plutarch's description alerts people to the ascendency of art over life, to the preference for imitating other works of art rather than imitating life.
