When Antony leaves for Rome in Act I of Shakespeare's play, Cleopatra is left alone to indulge in a vision of him on his horse. She asks Charmian,

Two things stand out in Cleopatra's daydream: first, its unmistakable eroticism, and second, its preoccupation with Antony's whereabouts. Its eroticism lies in Cleopatra's desire not simply to observe Antony on his horse but to become the ‘happy horse’ he mounts, to ‘bear the weight of Antony’ (20) herself. Of course, much later in the play, Cleopatra must cope with the arduous physical reality of overcoming Antony's weight when she and her women hoist his body into her monument. But here, in Act I, she takes pleasure in her fantasy of Antony's body bearing down on hers and in the reciprocating prospect of supporting his weight from beneath him. If Cleopatra's fantasy is palpably erotic – perhaps sodomitical, or submissive, or bestial, or idolatrous – it is also manifestly placial.

Cleopatra would have it that she can both be Antony's place and place him: that is, fix him in time and space (‘Ah, ha! You’re caught!’ [II, v, 16], she later dreams). Cleopatra's playfulness competes with her longing; it becomes clear that erotic self-indulgence is in contention with a compulsion to locate her lover. Her ‘Where think’st thou he is now?’ is just one among many iterations of what we might call interrogative place deixis. At her second entrance, Cleopatra asks, ‘Saw you my lord?’ and ‘Was he not here?’ (I, ii, 79). ‘Where is he?’ (I, iii, 1) are her first words in the following scene, then ‘See where he is’ (I, iii, 2). Even in her dream, Cleopatra imputes to Antony an answering version of her recurring compulsion: ‘Where's my serpent of old Nile?’ (I, v, 25, emphasis added). So compelling is the question of ‘where’ for Cleopatra that she voices it in her fantasy of her lover's private murmurs.