Reading Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” through Horace’s Carmina 1.37.

It is impossible to avoid getting caught in the constantly oscillating rhythm of Shakespeare’s

Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7). The playwright at once profits from a backdrop of great
historical change to convey this on the most macro of scales; illustrating the monumental
conflict between the Bellum Siculum and war of Actium. A fragile world is presented, one at the
cusp of the Roman Empire’s genesis, torn between its pillars of East and West, Mark Antony
and Octavius Caesar. Yet the mutability of morals, of impressions, of motives and of true
allegiances perhaps carries the essence of the play’s fluctuating movement throughout as
Shakespeare, as is characteristic, plays with the divergences between word and act, description
and presentation. Whereby the frequency of sprawling soliloquy is repressed and characters are
often described through the assertions of another, with their later actions shown to buffet
against previously allayed expectations. No character is affected more by this than the infinitely
complex Cleopatra. She is the embodiment of paradox for the “infinite variety” (Ant. II. ii 246)
that envelops her very being and often faces the threat of being misunderstood by unitary
judgement. This is at once provoked by Shakespeare’s comparative ‘word versus deed’
structure and exacerbated by a saturation of empirical Roman models of morality. In other
words, Shakespeare creates the impression of structural ‘pivots’ that dictate characterisation
through language. This is entirely reminiscent of Horace’s famous ‘Cleopatra Ode’, Carmina
1.37, which, I believe, similarly structures a nuanced and dynamic characterisation of Cleopatra
around a ‘turning point’. In this essay I will explore a reading of paradox in this Horatian Ode,
which sees structural and linguistic dialectics not in terms of essential discontinuity, but as a
method in which to achieve a complex unity of creative purpose which, in turn, portrays a
‘perfect’ heroine; one that is essentially whole amidst all her perceived ‘incoherencies’.1
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra contains the same germ. This essence is achieved by both authors
through the modulation of economies of dialectic imagery sustained throughout both works.
These happen to maintain a dialogue which similarly clashes what is feigned, fantasy, fancy or
‘art’ with what is natural and ‘real’. Arguably, there could never be such a fitting paradox for the
characterisation of a figure that, throughout history and pseudo-myth, traverses this binary
readily and cannot be limited to restrictive categorisation, be that ontologically or morally.

In his study, William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), T. W. Baldwin

1
I am using the latin etymology of ‘perfect’ (perficere) to mean essentially ‘completely done’, whole,
intrinsic.
provides evidence for Shakespeare’s familiarity with the Odes, yet this is not at all surprising
given that Horace’s works were readily circulated throughout the contemporary school
curriculum that prioritised Latin and rhetoric as two central focuses.2 Even in his earliest play,
Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare displays an expected knowledge of Horace, quoting “Integer
vitae, scelerisque purus,/ Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” from Carmina 1.22.3 While
Plutarch’s Life of Antony is Shakespeare’s primary classical source, which he closely follows in
provision of the play’s narrative, the playwright’s awareness of both Horace’s ‘Cleopatra Ode’
and the Horatian tradition can provide us with a framework with which he shows himself to
creatively build upon the model of Cleopatra that Plutarch provides. In his seminal essay on the
influence of Horace on the play, Westbrook suggests that Shakespeare develops through
Horace’s Carmina 1.37, a sense of tragic heroism that is lacking in her representation by
Plutarch, arguing that it is “royal pride that brings her to self-destruction” rather than “the frenzy
of a desperate mind”.4 While I agree with Westbrook’s premise that Horace can be seen to
inspire some of the polarities embodied in Cleopatra’s character, I would argue that this
influence not only shows itself at the end of her life, but that Shakespeare’s commitment to
antithetical arrangement within the character of Cleopatra throughout is symptomatic of his
engrained reception of the classical poet. In this way, form creates substance in both and
structurally-cemented paradox allows both authors to unravel a complexity in the heroine that is
left latent in Plutarch. To appreciate the subtlety with which Shakespeare adopts a particularly
Horatian brand of antithesis,5 something that later authors such as Marvell would be particularly
keen to adopt in their own work, we must first understand the structural mechanics at work
within Horace’s famous ‘Cleopatra Ode’: 6

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero

pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus
ornare pulvinar deorum
tempus erat dapibus, sodales,
5
antehac nefas depromere Caecubum
cellis avitis, dum Capitolio
regina dementis ruinas
funus et imperio parabat

2
Westbrook, ‘Horace’s Influence on Antony and Cleopatra’, p396. Martindale also assumes that
Shakespeare could have been directed to the Ode ‘by one of his more learned friends’ Martindale,
Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, p186.
3
Titus Andronicus IV. ii. 20-1, taken from Horace’s Odes, 1.22, 1-2.
4
Westbrook, ‘Horace’s Influence on Antony and Cleopatra’, p393.
5
Rudd, “Patterns in Horatian Lyric.”, p379.
6
Marvell, The Complete Poems, p55.
contaminato cum grege turpium
10
morbo virorum, quidlibet impotens
sperare fortunaque dulci
ebria. sed minuit furorem
vix una sospes navis ab ignibus,
mentemque lymphatam Mareotico
15
redegit in veros timores
Caesar ab Italia volantem
remis adurgens, accipiter velut
mollis columbas aut leporem citus
venator in campis nivalis
20
Haemoniae, daret ut catenis
fatale monstrum; quae generosius
perire quaerens nec muliebriter
expavit ensem nec latentis
classe cita reparavit oras;
25
ausa et iacentem visere regiam
vultu sereno, fortis et asperas
tractare serpentis, ut atrum
corpore conbiberet venenum,
deliberata morte ferocior,
30
saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens
privata deduci superbo
non humilis mulier triumpho.7

The radically dialectical Ode 1.37 commences as a rousing drinking song which celebrates
Caesar's thwarting of a lascivious Cleopatra from enslaving Rome, yet after four stanzas ends in
eulogising her magnificent, sobered and masculine spirit that has proved a fair match for her
western adversaries. Historical conflict is weaved into the essential structure. To say this is a
poem about a war that he had lived through, Horace doesn’t show himself to be the typically
Roman; much like Shakespeare’s, his sympathies vacillate throughout his representation of the
conflicts between East and West, Old and New, Cleopatra and Octavian, inebriated fantasy and
sober reality. While Shakespeare can enjoy the creative breathing space that temporal
abstraction permits, he is certainly not the first to portray Egypt’s Queen as both the “serpent of
old Nile” (Ant. I. v. 26) and “a lass unparalleled” (Ant. V. ii. 315) within the same literary exertion,
without either description taking true precedence over the other. The pivot from moral
judgement to sympathetic honouring of Cleopatra seems instantaneous and unencumbered by

7
Rudd, Horace: Odes and Epodes, Ode 1.37, p92-95. Also see Commager, The Odes of Horace, p88-98
and Nisbit & Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace, p411-21.
condition as the year that elapsed between the battle of Actium and the Queen’s suicide is
omitted, alongside any mention of Antony or her attempts to seduce Octavian. This antithetical
pivot is marked formally via the use of caesura in line 21, “fatale monstrum; quae generosius”,
where she transforms from a ‘monster of doom’ to embodying a typically Roman sense of being
‘well-born’.8 Shakespeare too has a recognisable pivot, act 3 scene 11, after Antony’s defeat at
sea Cleopatra’s language appears more restrained and her emotions less sporadic than before.

Her end in Horace is flattering and almost Stoic in fashion, with the poet using the word
‘muliebriter’ (22) in order for her to bare a complimentary air of masculinity in her choice to die at
her own hand rather than at the Romans’ (contrasting with the feminization of her Egyptian
eunuchs, stressed through a use of the ironic ‘virorum’(10)) which speaks to Cleopatra’s line in
Shakespeare “My resolution’s placed and I have nothing/ Of woman in me” (Ant. V. ii. 237) at
the scene of her suicide. This sense is reminiscent of the type of stoic maxim proliferated by the
likes of Seneca who maintains, “[h]e who has learned to die has unlearned slavery.”9 She also
exhibits a stoic tranquillity in the adversity of her defeat, projecting an indifference to the
mutability of fate, in being able to look upon her ruined city with ‘vultu sereno’ (26). Yet in order
to mediate this praise of Cleopatra, there’s a reciprocal attitude present in the language that
suggests that the public and private are elapsed in the ode’s concluding mutual triumph
“superbo non humilis mulier triumpho.”(32) ‘Mulier’ and ‘triumpho’ are logically opposed, and
can be translated as ‘jeering triumph’.10 Cleopatra’s private triumph in death over capture seems
simultaneous with Caesar’s national military win. Yet Cleopatra’s death actively denies the
Romans an absolute victory, as Horace implies a recognition of how a thwarting of Cleopatra’s
private liberty would characterise itself as a national, public triumph for Rome, which is
something that Shakespeare also recognises in the play; “her life in Rome/ Would be eternal in
our triumph.” (Ant. V. i. 65-6) Shakespeare, however, goes further in Antony and Cleopatra and
exacerbates the sense of Cleopatra consciously using her private agency to collapse public,
military ambition through her adoption, and subversion, of the ‘Roman death’. The essential
paradox here, that is expressed readily in Horace also, is that only in her ‘defeat’ does she
become formidable, and only by evading Roman rule is she awarded an esteem close to that
which can be deemed ‘Roman nobility’.

8
Rudd, Odes, p93.
9
From Letters, 26.10. See Martindale, Shakespeare and the uses of Antiquity, p185.
10
Nisbit & Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace, p420.
In order to arrive at this esteem from an initially invective standpoint there is a consciously
constructed architectural web at work made up of contrasts and repetitions that structurally
mediates the characteristic Horatian antithesis or ‘about-turn’. This construction is framed by the
development of drink imagery which is modulated to both positive and negative effects in regard
to our subject and the varying viewpoints thrust upon her. Drinks in ode 1.37 are symbolic and
forced into confrontational dialectics, and what’s elaborately contrasted between their divergent
hermeneutics in this poem is the literal and figurative. Paradoxically, unity is created through
clashes as economies of imagery are continued throughout by being refracted into differently
coloured aspects; this a multiplicity of reflections is then cast onto the Cleopatra figure.

The Romans’ opening festive drink, celebrating their collective liberty, is opposed to that of
Cleopatra’s final, triumphant one, which facilitates her enduring private liberty. This is detailed in
the incredibly dense and expressive lines, “asperas/ tractare serpentis, ut atrum/ corpore
conbiberet venenum”(26-8), whereby Cleopatra seems to unhesitatingly ‘drink in’ the serpent’s
venom with the entirety of her body. The repeated sibilants here are incredibly illustrative of the
snake’s physical presence while ‘conbiberet’ also gives the act a physical immediacy. This
image also contrasts with her earlier fantastical intoxication (implied by ‘dementis’ (7) and
‘furorem’(12)), which is now set in a definitive past temporal space, and separated from her
new, sober reality through the insistent ‘deliberata’(29). Constructions of negation, such as ‘nec
muliebriter’, ‘nec reparavit’ and ‘non humilis’ also mediate and repudiate her past behavioural
flaws. Literal drunkenness, before her sobering by Actium, is directly conveyed in the line
“mentemque lymphatam Mareotico” (15), and formally corroborated in the absence of an
expected caesura or word-break after this fifth syllable of Horace’s alcaic metre, which is often
lengthened by Horace anyway despite tradition.11 This particular case seems intentional as it
leaves a dizzying effect which adds to the unreality of Cleopatra’s former days of carousing.

Intermixed within the literal suggestion of her drunkenness is the sense that she is also drunk on
power in the poem’s first stanzas, in which her mad, destructive and despotism is alluded to in
the lines “quidlibet impotens/ sperare fortunaque dulci /ebria”(10-12). While her first physical
drinks foster her initially clouded vision, her last figurative drink induces her final awareness of
reality. Intoxicated hopes dissipate into mediated drought after the antithesis provoked
(historically) by Actium, and by embracing ‘veros timores’(15) incited by this militant awakening
she transcends the illusions that hamper her magnificence. By rejecting her unnatural, artful,

11
Ibid. pxli.
fantasy-riddled world she becomes a more natural heroine in reality. Other authors,
Shakespeare included,12 have picked up on Cleopatra’s supposed penchant for drunken
debauchery; from the classical world Propertius remarks ‘“non hoc, Roma, fui tanto tibi cive
verenda” dixit et assiduo lingua sepula mero’13. Yet in Horace this cannot be seen simply as
historical anecdote. This image is the fibre of the text itself and thus cannot be extracted from it.
Narrative elements become structure here and structure conveys meaning. Cleopatra’s variety
is woven into the very structure of the ode itself and we are entreated to witness it’s full scope
through the embrace of dialectics. The very same attitude is taken forward by Shakespeare and
woven into the fibre of his play.

Oscillation and fluidity through paradox works on two main linguistic planes to portray
Cleopatra’s character in the play; in terms of contrariness and argumentation and through the
modification of connected and repeated imagery, similarly to Horatian technique. The work thus
dynamically carries its refutation within its own structure, much like Ode 1,37. What’s
additionally significant, as we will see, is that Shakespeare manipulates a resonant self-
confrontational, symbolic economy with Horace in his portrait of Cleopatra; which is, the
divergence between nature and fancy, between what is real and what is feigned.

As mentioned, in Antony and Cleopatra, we are always made aware of potential oppositions and
reversals through the play’s dramatic design. It is notable that the play’s opening words are
“Nay but” (Ant. I.i.1) which embraces a sense of contrariness even before any action unfolds.
Linguistic assertions are often counteracted against later actions - the audience is often told one
thing then subsequently shown another - usually through a structure of one character discussing
another who is off stage. Enobarbus proves himself to be Cleopatra’s spokesman. It is
significant that neither she, nor Antony, are given the liberty of articulating her linguistic
portrayal, which is perhaps brought about by the repression of soliloquies. Both herself and
Antony would undoubtedly over-adorn and thus skew her perception in our eyes, Cleopatra
being prone to performance as she is (as seen in her death scene for example), and Antony,
whose language, in accordance with the mode of his beloved, is essentially hyperbolic. Thus,
from Enobarbus’ detached and moderated perspective we are encouraged to believe that the
paradox that he attaches to her character in his description of her at Cydnus (Ant. II.ii) are to be

12
Ant. V. ii. 280. “now no more/ The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip” Nothing is said in Plutarch
about specifically Egyptian wine. Nisbit & Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace, p415.
13
Commager, The Odes of Horace, p94.
accepted as a fixed and intrinsic reality. The sense that her essential nature is paradox, is
mutability, is paradoxically set as a reliable constant in this moment.

Cleopatra’s characterisation at Cydnus is imbricated in paradox that transcends the human

impulse to logically categorise as it elaborates on nature, ornamenting it to the extent that
probability buffets with fantasy and the organic clashes with seemingly hyperbolic artifice. This
sense is even paradoxical that, as audience members, we are taking this suspense of rationality
in her characterisation, as Enobarbus portrays it, in the place of fact. Through the voice of
Enobarbus, Shakespeare animates to a supernatural extent Plutarch’s entirely believable image
of Cleopatra on her barge in a way that in ‘O’er-picturing’ fancy Cleopatra really does “outwork
nature” to the extent that is almost asserts a mastery over it, by rendering it enamoured of her. 14
Her barge burns on the water, her rich perfumes render the winds “love-sick”, rather than
resisting their motion, the silver oars animate the water, giving it agency to follow the barge,
“amorous of their strokes.”(Ant. II. ii. 200-7) Yet this imagery that renders Cleopatra otherworldly
in her mastery of nature is undercut quickly by the anecdote of the Queen’s revels, which
overwhelmingly grounds her in the human. This is corroborated in the image of her lost for
breath, hopping “forty paces through the public street.” (Ant. II. ii. 237) Her diversity of character
is such that she seems totally harmonious with the world around her yet simultaneously
transcendent from it. She traverses the binaries of nature and artifice, vitality and corruption, at
once embellishing and distorting her environment. She is subversiveness embodied. She
occupies such a nebulous space in regard to the external world that she cannot be placed or
pinpointed and thus by definition cannot be defined.

This particular paradox embodied by Cleopatra lends itself to the notions of overflow, liminality,
flux and liquidity as the bounds of nature and reality are being tested within a single entity. This
directly rubs against the quintessentially ‘Roman’ rhetoric of empiricism, measurement,
moderation and temperance that is imposed as we are constantly faced with the issue of being
entrapped within the process of judgement and estimation because of the play’s structural
effects. Cleopatra recognises this Roman tendency in her vision of her adversaries’ triumph
over Egypt in her description of the “mechanic slaves / With greasy aprons, rules and hammers”
(Ant. V. ii. 208-9) which speaks to the imagery in Antony’s earlier dutiful assertion to Octavia in
Rome “I have not kept my square, but that to come/ Shall all be done by the rule” (Ant. II. iii. 6-7)
whereby he implies that his own self-measurement is by unitary, unbending regulation. If

14
Paraphrasing Ant. II, ii, 208.
‘Romanness’ is representative of measure, then the impending threat of Cleopatra being
ultimately enslaved by Octavian is poignantly symbolic. Comparison here expounds Cleopatra’s
own need for paradox in characterisation; she demands more expressive and expansive modes
of measurement in order for us to make any confident assertions about her character. She
requires a scope of judgement whereby she is not weighted morally by her ‘dubious’ past, from
which has been generated the epithet of her as a ‘triple-turned whore’ (Ant. IV. xii.13), an ageing
ex-mistress of Julius Caesar. Yet as Enobarbus maintains, any ‘darkness’ in her character is
regenerative as “vilest things/ Become themselves in her” and makes “defect perfection” (Ant. II.
ii. 241-9). Paradox is the mode through which Cleopatra evades judgement, as her complexity
requires a flexibility that can only be arrived at with hermeneutic multiplicity, as opposed to
unitary rigidity.

Shakespeare goes one step further into the complexities of antiphonal form to arrive at a similar
tightly linguistic level as Horace in his ‘Cleopatra Ode’ and, again, achieves this through a
manipulation of organic imagery. Cleopatra’s love for Antony is said to be “the fire that quickens
Nilus’ slime” (Ant. I.iii.68, Italics mine). Here these two intertwined images are developed and
modulated throughout key moments of Cleopatra’s characterisation that, in their encompassing
of paradox and change, seek to articulate her innate dynamism and the fluidity of morally-
charged impression that, as a consequence of this technique, cannot decisively act upon her.
Within this economy she thus comes to represent something that is both destructive and
reproductive; she becomes a mixture of burgeoning fertility and decline. This, of course, is a
continuation of the catalytic effect we have formally seen her to have on nature and the debate
that is provoked as to whether this manipulation of it is natural or unnatural. Nevertheless, this
transformative force again allows her to transgress the restrictive, empirical Roman moral
paradigms that threaten her complexity through evasively juxtaposing the realist and symbolic
and appearing both vile and virtuous simultaneously.

This economy is evidently at work when Cleopatra’s allegiance to Antony is questioned after
their fall at Actium. In an attempt at self-redemption, she cries;

“Dissolve my life! The next Caesarion smite,

Till by degrees the memory of my womb,
Together with my brave Egyptians all,
By the discandying of this pelted storm
Lie graveless, till the flies and gnats of the Nile
Have buried them for prey!” (Ant. III. xiii. 167-172)
This complex and dramatic emotive outpouring projects the image of the land of Egypt
overflowing, overabundant with a fertility that stems from its sacred river and predicated on a
continuous decay. The use of ‘discandying’ gives the sense of corrupting sweetness by melting
and ‘dissolve’ looks forward to the following lines which detail the end of the corruptive process
on the bodies of her people, and also looks forward to her own inevitable end.15 Fertility is
interwoven more obviously in ‘the memory of my womb’ in a way that also accounts for the
lingering remnants of her past desires. This sweetness is undercut by the unnaturalness of
apostrophising the death of her firstborn son, Caesarion, fathered by Julius Caesar. The idea of
being buried, being covered by earth, is juxtaposed with the idea of decomposing, becoming
earth itself. This enhances the earnestness of this lyrical outburst by perhaps nuancing a desire
for the collapse of language with the, ever distant, true aspiration for its use. Her Egyptians are
not only saturating themselves in the very image of their defeat, but becoming the very marker
of their descent. Thus, signifier and signified are exploded. This sense is incredibly significant
given that in this moment Cleopatra attempts to recapitulate her (perhaps performed) undying
allegiance to her lover; an anxiety to effectively (and affectively) convey the essence of her
words is present. This more detailed meditation on the image of the Nile’s ‘slime’ suggests an
abortive aspiration of liquidity in a tone that greets dissolution in earnest. Cleopatra is shown to
recognise the paradox that she embodies; that death only brings more life and destruction more
creation. Colouring the notion that ‘kingdoms are clay’ with a new, triumphant resonance she
honourably recognises one’s place in space and time. The sprawling scope of her passion is
awarded a tragic greatness in which weakness and imperfection are both recognised and
minimised, contributing to create an intrinsic unity within her that could not be conveyed in
isolation of her faults.

While, as we have seen, Cleopatra’s character refutes definition, she perhaps comes closest to
it in this final rendering of herself as metaphor before her death; “I am fire and air; my other
elements/ I give to baser life.” (Ant. X, ii. 288-9) Performance is essential to Cleopatra and here
she is projecting herself as metaphor through the assertion of ‘I am’. Paradoxically she self-
defines as being undefinable at the hands of the Romans at this moment of refusal to be
trammelled where she subsequently cuts short her own life. In contrast to former imagery,
there’s an upward motion expressed here in reference to the Aristotelian elements whereby fire
and air are thought to have the special quality of ascent, and thus cannot be contained, while

15
Spevack, Steppat and Munkelt. Antony and Cleopatra, p226.
earth and water naturally descend.16 This is how she envisages that her soul will rise to meet
the late Antony. Imagery of evaporation is opposed to a continuation of the economy of
dissolution and seeks to render complex a moment that is at once a tragedy, and as we have
seen in Horace also, a personal victory over her adversaries. As with the former image of
decomposition, she is at once ennobled by the levelling image of her own, once innately
sensual, royal body being laid waste as the compost of futurity. There’s a multidimensional irony
at play here also in the sense that her physical body is literally being given in to the worm in the
decomposition process, while it is also the so-called ‘worm’ (Ant. V. ii. 241-80) that ends her life.
Additionally, the fatal serpent is described as such for the sake of light relief, taking the form of
Elizabethan innuendo, so there’s also a latent implication of Cleopatra’s sexuality being
implicated in her fall. Yet to combat this, Cleopatra envisages her apotheosis, which denies the
notion of her essential self being subject to dissolution by the Nile. Again, there’s a dialectic
interplay between the symbolic and real and across this modulated economy of paradox, honour
can be continuously found across the entire scope of her oscillating motions; both in her rises
and falls.

In both Horace’s Carmina 1.37 and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra paradox by
modulation of metaphor is a vessel of complex thought. What we have seen exemplified is the
control of ambivalence, constant mediation of change, rather than simply change unbridled. This
technique can be seen to mimic the very preoccupation at the heart of the writers’ sister
economies of paradox; that of nature versus ‘art’. Just as we can never fully distinguish the
machinations of ‘art’ over nature in the play, we are also entreated to recognise that we can
never fully believe nor disbelieve the claims made by poetry; and a poetics so imbricated in
paradox is assuredly the most slippery of all.

In Antony and Cleopatra, how do we read the fact that conscious control mediates a paradox
concerned with the issue of overflow and constant flux embodied within the play’s heroine?
Does Shakespeare, by essentially siding with the Roman impulse of measurement here,
become complicit in his audience's persuasion to make a value judgement? Is Shakespeare,
then, showing himself to be less equivocally Horatian than he superficially appears? Or, as
western readers are we naturally influenced by stoic polarities that continue to assert
themselves in quotidian life? Alternatively, I would maintain that in attempting to structurally
frame the paradox that his heroine embodies Shakespeare is instead imposing an alternative

16
Ibid. p335.
method of judgement upon the innately complex Cleopatra that accounts for more nuanced,
multifaceted responses; assertions and judgements that are coloured in all the ‘infinite variety’ of
his representation of the East, as opposed to that of the monochromati and unitary stoic moral
code of the West that she ultimately transcends.

Bibliography:

Adelman, Janet. The Common Liar : an Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” / Janet Adelman.
New Haven ;: Yale University Press, 1973.

Bradley, A. C. Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London: Macmillan & co. 1920.

Commager, Steele. The Odes of Horace : a Critical Study / by Steele Commager. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1962.

Cunningham, Dolora G. “The Characterization of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.” Shakespeare

Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1955): 9–17.

Davis, Gregson. A Companion to Horace / Edited by Gregson Davis. Chichester: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2010.

Horace., and Niall. Rudd. Odes and Epodes / Horace ; Edited and Translated by Niall Rudd.
Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Kachuck, Aaron J. “Exit Pursued by Horace: Bears, Shakespeare, and the Classical Tradition.”
Classical receptions journal 13, no. 1 (2021): 86–106.

Martindale, Charles., and Michelle Martindale. Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity : an
Introductory Essay / Charles and Michelle Martindale. London: Routledge, 1990.

Marvell, Andrew, and Elizabeth Story Donno. The Complete Poems / Andrew Marvell ; Edited
by Elizabeth Story Donno. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Nisbet, R. G. M. (Robin George Murdoch), and Margaret. Hubbard. A Commentary on Horace :

Odes, Book 1 / by R.G.M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

Plutarch., and Bernadotte. Perrin. Lives / Plutarch ; with an English Translation by Bernadotte
Perrin. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1914.
 Rudd, Niall. “Patterns in Horatian Lyric.” The American Journal of Philology 81, no. 4 (1960):
373–92.

Shapiro, Stephen A. “The Varying Shore of the World Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra.”
Modern language quarterly (Seattle) 27, no. 1 (1966): 18–32.

Shakespeare, William, and John Wilders. Antony and Cleopatra / William Shakespeare ;
Edited by John Wilders. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Shakespeare, William, and Jonathan Bate. Titus Andronicus / Edited by Jonathan Bate. Revised
edition. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018.

Shakespeare, William, Marvin. Spevack, Michael. Steppat, and Marga. Munkelt. Antony and
Cleopatra / Edited by Marvin Spevack ; Associate Editors, Michael Steppat and Marga Munkelt.
New York, N.Y: Modern Language Association of America, 1990.

Traversi, Derek. An Approach to Shakespeare / by Derek Traversi : 3rd Ed. Revised and
Enlarged in 2 Vols Vol.2, “Troilus and Cressida” to “The Tempest”. London: Hollis & Carter,
1969.

Westbrook, Perry D. “Horace’s Influence on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” PMLA 62,
no. 2 (1947): 392–98.