SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry," in PMLA, Vol. 87, No. 2, March, 1972, pp. 201-12.

In the following essay, Rackin examines the significance of a widely discussed speech by Cleopatra (V.ii. 215-20).

                       The quick comedians
 Extemporally will stage us, and present
 Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
 Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
 Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
 I' the posture of a whore.

In these lines, Shakespeare's Cleopatra describes for her women the treatment they will receive in the theater if they allow themselves to be taken to Rome. The speech was troublesome to Shakespeare's nineteenth-century editors, who were reluctant to read boy as a verb. Schmidt suggested that "Cleopatra-Boy" be read as a compound. Sprenger advised that boy be emended to bow. Most modern editors accept the passage without comment, and those critics who do discuss it...