Shakespeare makes no use of this save in the warning of Octavius:
If you seek
To lay on me a cruelty, by taking
Antony’s course, you shall bereave yourself
Of my good purposes, and put your children
To that destruction which I’ll guard them from,
If thereon you rely.
(V. ii. 128.)
But here the threat is significant of Octavius’ character, not of Cleopatra’s, who makes no reply to it, and remains absolutely unaffected by it. Indeed she shows more sense of motherhood in her dying reference to the asp as “her baby at her breast,” than in all the previous play.
It cannot be doubted that the effect of all these omissions is to concentrate the attention on the purely personal relations of the lovers. And the prominence assigned to them also appears if we compare the Life and the drama as a whole.