cold heart, a

A dispassionate, unaffectionate individual. This term already meant lack of love in Shakespeare’s time. In his Antony and Cleopatra (3:13) Antony asks the queen if she now prefers Caesar to him, saying, “Cold- hearted toward me?” and she, denying it, replies, “Ah! dear, if I be so, from my cold heart let heaven engender hail, and poison it in the source; and the first drop in my neck.”