Shakespeare wrote many plays about heroes, but only Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are distinguished by heroic appeals that are exclusively and definitively aristocratic. Coriolanus and Cleopatra make strange bedfellows; yet despite their different life styles they share an unyielding horror of being scrutinized and judged by a vulgar audience. When the Queen of Egypt contemplates her dishonor at the hands of Octavius, her most terrifying thought is the vulgarization of her nobility in a dramatic representation for a popular Roman audience:

Cleopatra dazzlingly holds up a mirror to the world of the Globe playhouse. Her speculation about a Roman play reflects the actual dramatic event of Shakespeare's Roman play: the Roman populace looks exactly like the London populace crowded around her open stage; Cleopatra is in fact being boyed by some incredible young master and often, no doubt, in the exaggerated posture of a whore; the Alexandrian revels have already generated the laughter to encloud the Globe with the vapor of garlic.