Female Power, Maternity and Genderbending in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Female Power, Maternity and Genderbending in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

The 19th century essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt wrote of Cleopatra, "She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, [and] fickle," which are "great and unpardonable faults" (Hazlitt 2-3). Much of the criticism of Antony and Cleopatra has recycled this judgement, depicting Cleopatra as a villainess uses her eroticism and sexuality to motivate Antony to seek power. Cleopatra is memorable for her propensity for violence as well. While Antony and Cleopatra was written after the death of a violent English queen, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare may have been faced with a dramatic dilemma: how to make a woman seem believably violent and intimidating on the stage. Coppélia Kahn notes that Cleopatra was "Rome's most dangerous enemy" (111),i but how does one make the Queen of the Nile seem like such a threat during a time when women had little social and political power. Shakespeare does several things to accomplish this task: 1) he locates Cleopatra's power in a foreign or supernatural realm; 2) he inverts her gender role with that of Antony; 3) he suppresses her maternal qualities; and 4) he allows her to be redeemed only in death. Indeed, it is the only way to handle a difficult woman on the Jacobean stage.

Locating Codes of Female Power

In Antony and Cleopatra, the Roman values of honor and bravery embody masculinity, while Egypt and the Orient symbolize feminine weakness and fragility. Caesar and Agrippa are depicted as reasonable, logical, and practical, especially in matters of strategy and war. Cleopatra and her servants and eunuchs are consistently referred to in terms of laziness, let...

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...ication of her superior intelligence. She understands that, should she live, she will be taken to Rome and will suffer the humiliation of seeing "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' th' posture of a whore" (V, ii, 216-217).

iv In addition, Cleopatra has demonstrated her readiness in the past to ruin Egypt for Antony's sake. Without blinking, she considers "unpeopling" her country in order to send a new messenger to Antony in Rome every day. To mirror Antony's "Let Rome in Tiber sink," Cleopatra says, "Let Egypt in Nile melt."

v Of course, her actions indicate that, as a Roman wife, her entire existence must center on Antony only, which means a rejection of anything else, including her earthly children ("What should I stay--"). The point is to emphasize her selfishness and her absolute focus on Antony, a constant of the queen's personality.