Brow-bound with burning gold.
Hawthorne in his Transformation, describing Story’s statue of Cleopatra, which here he attributes to Kenyon, goes further:
The face was a marvellous success. The sculptor had not shunned to give the full Nubian lips and the other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy. His courage and integrity had been abundantly rewarded: for Cleopatra’s beauty shone out richer, warmer, more triumphantly beyond comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen the tame Grecian type.
Hawthorne goes astray through taking Shakespeare’s picture, or rather another picture which Shakespeare’s suggested to his own fancy, as a literal portrait; but his very mistake shows how incongruous a fair Cleopatra would now seem to us.
Not often or obtrusively, but of set purpose and beyond the possibility of neglect, does Shakespeare refer to her racial peculiarities. Philo talks of her “tawny front” (i. i. 6), and both he and Antony call her a gipsy with reference not merely to the wily and vagabond character with which these landlopers in Shakespeare’s day were stigmatised, but surely to the darkness of her complexion as well. But the most explicit and the most significant statement is her own:
Think on me,
That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black.
(i. v. 27.)
This is one of her ironical exaggerations; but does it not suggest something torrid and tropical, something of the fervours of the East and South, that burn in the volcanic fires of Othello and the impulsive splendours of Morocco? Does it not recall the glowing plea of the latter,
Mislike me not for my complexion,