Like many children, I once wanted to be an astronaut. When that ambition quietly evaporated, I decided I would become a painter instead. Unfortunately, I lacked the ability to get what was in my head onto canvas, which led me to photography: a way of controlling light, colour, and composition without quite so much embarrassment.
And now, here we are: using AI to illustrate what my mind sees.
One commenter last week dismissed a recent Richard III image as “AI slop”. I’ll survive. These images take a lot longer to create than you might imagine – I even obsess about the expressions the onlookers are wearing, and their body language. But ultimately, they’re simply a way of illustrating the film running in my head when I read Shakespeare. Or any piece of text, really. My personal film really is this detailed.
To this great scene from Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07), then.
If you know the play, you’ll recognise that this is very much the calm before the storm. If you don’t know the plan, spoilers, ahoy!
Antony has been dragged away from Cleopatra by politics, duty, and the death of his wife Fulvia. What Cleopatra does not yet know is that Antony has remarried: Octavian has offered his sister Octavia as a diplomatic solution to their growing rivalry.
Shakespeare sets up a striking contrast between Egypt and Rome. One which I’m always interrogating with students when we look at the play.
Cleopatra’s court feels languid, theatrical, almost indulgent. Rome (especially under Octavian) runs on discipline, hierarchy, and control.
In the image, Cleopatra treats the messenger with an intimacy that would feel almost scandalous in Rome. She touches his face as he kneels before her. It’s an extraordinary gesture of familiarity between queen and servant. It is almost as if the messenger becomes a temporary proxy for the absent Antony.
The contrast with what follows in the play is delicious. When Cleopatra learns that Antony has married Octavia, the mood shifts instantly. She explodes into a storm of rage, striking the unfortunate messenger and even reaching for a knife before eventually realising the indignity of her own behaviour:
These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
A meaner than myself.1
And that brings us neatly to this week’s theme.
Cleopatra invites the messenger to kiss her hand, saying:
‘My bluest veins to kiss; a hand that kings
Have lipp’d, and trembled kissing.’
Why draw attention to her blue veins?
The answer lies in early modern ideas about class and status. The term ‘blue-blooded’ has long been used to describe aristocratic lineage.2 The logic behind it is surprisingly literal.
Blue veins are easiest to see beneath very pale skin. In early modern Europe, pale skin was not simply a beauty ideal – it was a social signal. The less tanned you were, the less time you spent working outdoors.
Society operated on visible clues about rank. England’s Sumptuary Laws (particularly the Statutes of Apparel issued under Elizabeth I in 1574) attempted to regulate clothing and appearance so that people’s social position could be recognised instantly, before even making eye contact.3
Skin colour formed part of the same visual language. Translucent, unblemished skin suggested leisure, wealth, and status. A darker complexion implied outdoor labour.
Shakespeare even jokes about this cultural assumption in Sonnet 130:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.4
The implication is – of course – that they are constantly exposed to daylight. And people say Shakespeare’s boring!
Readers sometimes forget that the modern obsession with tanning is relatively recent. Until the early twentieth century, the effort went in the opposite direction. People covered their skin carefully when outdoors, and the cosmetics industry flourished around products designed to maintain an artificially pale complexion.
In extreme cases this could be dangerous. Elizabeth I herself famously used ceruse, a white lead-based cosmetic that slowly poisoned many of its users.5
The whole business even links back to Shakespeare’s own family. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove maker in Stratford-upon-Avon. Gloves were not merely fashionable accessories; they protected the hands from scars, callouses, and sun-darkening, all of which might quietly betray your place in the social hierarchy.
Which means Cleopatra’s invitation to kiss her ‘bluest veins’ is not only intimate.
It is aristocratic theatre.
Footnotes and Further Reading
Title: Electric Six, ‘She’s White’, from Fire (2003)
- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995) ↩︎
- https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/why-people-noble-called-blue-blooded/ ↩︎
- Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). ↩︎
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45108/sonnet-130-my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-like-the-sun ↩︎
- https://www.culturenlmuseums.co.uk/story/in-pursuit-of-beauty-skin-deep ↩︎
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