In The Professor's House, after talking with Robert Crane about the suit he is bringing against Tom Outland's estate, St. Peter reflects, "If Outland were here to-night, he might say with Mark Antony, My fortunes have corrupted honest men" (IV. v. 16-17).
In an 1894 Journal article Cather describes actress Maggie Mitchell as "old and shrunken and 'wrinkled deep in time'"; the line is from Antony and Cleopatra, I.v.
In an 1895 Courier article, Cather did a review of Lillian Lewis as Shakespeare's Cleopatra: "I wish it had been Sardou's Cleopatra that Miss Lewis played, for, compared to Shakespeare's it is cheap and tawdry, it has less beauty to mar, less dignity to lose. There have been innumerable attempts to dramatize that greatest love story of the ages. They began with Virgil, who tried to do it in that dramatic fourth book of the Aeneid in the person of the infelix Dido. Since then poets and dramatists and novelists galore have struggled with it. But among them all the great William is the only man who has made a possible character of the Egyptian queen."