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Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England by Yasmin Arshad

2021; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ths.2021.0021

2166-9953

William David Green,

Law in Society and Culture

Reviewed by: Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England by Yasmin Arshad William David Green Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England. By Yasmin Arshad. New York: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2019. Pp. 337. $110.00, hardcover. Queen Cleopatra VII (69–30 BC), the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, has held a prominent position in popular culture for centuries. From serious representations such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1963) to more lighthearted send-ups like Gerald Thomas's Carry On Cleo (1964), Cleopatra has become one of the most recognizable figures from ancient history. As Yasmin Arshad's groundbreaking study reveals, similar sentiments are also true of Cleopatra's legacy in early modern England. However, while acknowledging that "the image that dominates popular culture now derives mainly from Shakespeare and is that of the sultry siren of the East lounging on a burnished golden barge" (1), Arshad's important monograph, through its in-depth examinations of three literary works from the period, reveals a far more controversial and contentious figure than present-day readers might expect to find. Introducing Imagining Cleopatra, Arshad states that it is her intention to "look back beyond Shakespeare's Cleopatra to understand the sources and cultural contexts that produced her" (2). Arshad examines three noteworthy texts [End Page 223] from the period: Mary Sidney's 1590 work Antonius (her translation of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine); Samuel Daniel's 1594 closet drama The Tragedie of Cleopatra; and, finally, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1607). In this beneficial approach, readers are encouraged to consider Shakespeare's play as a product of a lengthy period of Elizabethan/Jacobean popular fascination with Cleopatra rather than, as a comparatively narrower and more familiar study might offer, in a wider early modern context. Each of Arshad's five chapters provides a fascinating account of how its key text addressed the subject of Cleopatra in its particular immediate context, with chapter 5's analysis of Antony and Cleopatra serving to demonstrate how Shakespeare's tragedy, although often viewed as a definitive portrayal of the character, was in fact heavily inspired by the dramatic works that had come before it. Chapter 1 considers how Sidney appropriated Garnier's work for the purposes of topical commentary in 1590, reading this "first dramatization of the Cleopatra story in English" through the lens of Sidney's personal and political history (29). Chapter 2 similarly reads Daniel's Cleopatra topically, examining both the original 1594 version, a work noteworthy for its sympathetic portrayal of Cleopatra's elegance and suffering in defeat, and the revised 1607 version, which Arshad emphasizes was heavily influenced by the accession of James I in 1603 and the nostalgia for Elizabeth that this event widely generated. Chapter 4 follows these revelations in delivering an account of the effectiveness of Daniel's closet drama in modern performance, first at Goodenough College, London (March 2013), and later at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon (November 2013) and the Great Hall of Knole House in Kent (June 2014). Two of the most fascinating aspects of Arshad's monograph deserve to be singled out for special recognition. The first of these is in chapter 3, where Arshad examines an undated portrait of a Jacobean lady that she convincingly identifies as Lady Anne Clifford posing in character as Cleopatra. The quality of Arshad's stringent detective work and accomplished literary analysis in reaching this conclusion is impressive, not least in her discovery that the painting's inscription is "excerpted from different parts of Cleopatra's final speech" from Daniel's play (112). As Arshad concludes, "the painting furnishes possible evidence of a performance of Cleopatra, and even stronger evidence of a Jacobean lady wanting to role-play as Daniel's Cleopatra" (142). Arshad's revelations in this chapter make for valuable insights into a particular individual's experience of Cleopatra in early modern England and for our received perception of the essential "unperformability" of Renaissance closet drama. Second, the book's inclusion of eighteen black-and-white images allows for an unexpected level of insight into the wider history of the reception of Cleopatra, [End Page 224] taking the...