Preserving Cleopatra's Variety in Antony and Cleopatra cess involving the melting of sugar to form a hardened, "candied" shell. And yet the term that describes such a powerful and accessible imagediscandying-is unique to Shakespeare and unique to the play.2 The question is, why might Shakespeare have used discandying only in Antony and Cleopatra? And why does it appear twice in a play about Egypt? Recent postcolonial readings of Antony and Cleopatra's depiction of Egypt have emphasized the "'Otherness' of Egypt."3 Readings of otherness have tended to view the play as a warning about the exotic as excess even while acknowledging the blurring of the proposed Rome/ Egypt dichotomy. Gluttonous surfeiting, lavish banquets, and feasting, as in the feast described by Enobarbus, are all depicted as a quality of Egypt's exoticism-the "'orientalism' of Cleopatra's court-with its luxury, decadence, splendour, sensuality, [and] appetite," which John Gillies sees as a "systematic inversion of the legendary Roman values of temperance, manliness, courage, and pietas."4 Mary Thomas Crane notes how this is also reflected in the "cognitive orientation" of the Romans in the play, who perceive their world as "composed largely of hard, opaque, human-fashioned materials" and divided into "almost obsessively named-and conquered-cities and nations."5 This speaks to what I see as a tradition of privileging monumentalism in the history of the West, drawing from classical tropes of memorial and permanence that figure into what I have argued elsewhere are the masculinely coded and externally directed "markers of identity" that were 2 The most recent entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists in the definition that future uses of the term are "Freq. with allusion to Shakespeare's use" (OED Online, s.v.