Note 14 — ACT I
Reading edition
“The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke.... For her own person, It beggar’d 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 diverse-color’d fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.... Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i’ the 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.” —[Antony and Cleopatra: II, 2. Shakespeare.]
The charm and splendor of this description applies here only to the beauty of the barge and those it bears: otherwise Cleopatra and her attendants are, in their appearance, distraught and fearful, and the barge shows signs of recent perilous escape from the scene of Antony’s sea-battle with Octavius Cæsar.
Being here conceived as a plastic vision in the mind of Prospero, this Inner Scene—an excerpt from Act III, Scene XI, of Shakespeare’s play—has, by dramatic license appropriate to this masque, been laid in a scene suggested by the above description of the barge.