THE CROCODILE—SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY. In Antony and Cleopatra, in the drinking scene (Act II, scene 7), while the men are talking about Egypt, Lepidus asks Antony: “What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”
Antony replies:
Antony: It is shap’d, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.” (II, vii, 42-45)
Lepidus: What color is it of?
Antony: Of its own color too.
Lepidus: ‘Tis a strange serpent.
Antony: “Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (III, vii, 46-49)
Until I saw the Hartford Stage Company production, in which a drunken Antony mimed the lines, I had missed the point that—especially given the context that the scene is a drunken carousal,—the speech is one of Shakespeare’s bawdier ones.