Jacques Ferrand’s On Lovesickness: Love and Medicine

Abstract

In Plutarch’s Life of Antony, when Antony first meets Cleopatra, she appears seated on a golden barge with purple sails. The oars are made of silver, flutes play, boys and girls dressed like Cupids and Nymphs attend her, and “perfumes diffused themselves from the vessels to the shore.”1 When Shakespeare adapted the passage for Enobarbus’s magnificent reminiscence of the meeting in Antony and Cleopatra, he significantly increased the erotic charge of the description: He also infused the passage with ominous suggestions of disaster. The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throneBurn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold;Purple the sails, and so perfumed thatThe winds were love-sick with them. (2.2.196–200)2