Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare's Globe, 1999. Mark Rylance as Cleopatra.

The ultimate rejection of the image of Cleopatra as a delectably feminine seductress may lie in having her played (however sympathetically) by a middle-aged man - though some scholars assert the part to be beyond the Jacobean boy actor that Cleopatra herself specifies (5.2.220). Unfortunately for such doubts, Kynaston was good looking and made a convincing woman: at a public performance, Samuel Pepys called him "the prettiest woman in the whole house" and even went further to call him "the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life" after seeing him in a Restoration production of John Fletcher's The Loyal Subject at the Cockpit-in-Court. (Diary, 18 August 1660) Block/Tiramani,http://ahds.ac.uk/performing arts