Antony and Cleopatra: Character Analysis

When I think of Cleopatra, I think of an incredibly rich and tempting individual. She knows she has the power to sway people's minds and accomplish what she sets out to do. So when I was trying to think of what food she reminded me of, my first thought was an incredibly rich chocolate cake. One where you can barely get down a thin slice of cake before it's too overpowering to eat. For any person, it would be extremely tempting to eat a piece of the cake, even with knowing how quickly you'll be full. And oftentimes it's so delicious that it would still be hard to stop eating when you are already full. A cake like that would be easy to indulge upon. And like that, Cleopatra is also the type of person that others would want to indulge upon.

With Antony, I had trouble narrowing down a particular food that can describe him. His actions described more of a condition of a food than an actual kind of food. Throughout the whole play, Antony kept swaying from being deeply in love with Cleopatra to being all for making sure she got what she deserved (in a cruel, revenge-like way). There was no middle-ground for him. It was either love or hate. As I was reading the play, I became extremely frustrated with him and his indecisiveness. I realize he had a lot on his plate: the duty of being a leader of the Roman Empire and being Cleopatra's lover. Although he desired the responsibility and power that came from being a leader, he also wanted the pleasure he found when he was with Cleopatra, and he struggled throughout the play with which was more important, and how he wanted to be identified. So the condition I thought of? You know how sometimes you make cookies and they come out flat and then other times they come out perfect? Whenever that would happen to me, my dad would have me add more flour depending on how flat they were. I was never able to figure out why my cookies would come out flat one time and then perfectly fine the next. Especially since you put the same amount of flour in each time and they'd still turn out differently. My cookies in that sense could be really temperamental and fluctuating each time I made a batch. Antony fluctuated every time another event occurred in the play, and that is why I was reminded of the whole flour condition with cookies.