Abstract
What happens when we follow Cleopatra’s direction in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’s amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.27–29)? In the play, the color or Antony’s “crocodile,” Cleopatra, is at the heart of the struggle for power and cultural identity staged by the play. According to theater historian Richard Madelaine, on the Jacobean stage at least, Cleopatra was most likely performed by a young man with a “tawny front”—that is, in brownface.1 Even if we initially read Cleopatra’s self-description of her own blackness as figurative, an expression of her exotic sexuality, by the end of the play this blackness is more clearly material, the mark of otherness that also will mark the children that Antony has with her, what Caesar calls their “unlawful issue” (3.6.7), produced by adulterous lust. Like Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra stages the social repercussions of miscegenation. Antony’s Roman identity is put to question because he is the lover of a “gypsy” and the begetter of Egyptian children. As we see in Titus Andronicus, blackness is dangerous because it has the power to convert “self” into “other,” especially through sexual contact.
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Notes
Richard Madelaine, ed., Shakespeare in Production: Antony and Cleopatra. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. See Madelaine’s introduction for an extremely useful treatment of the play’s stage history. In these productions,’ “Egyptianness” was designated by a combination of tawny skin color, costume and exotic attendants like eunichs (11–12). The use of attendants and the racial coding of them, often making them darker than Cleopatra, is a tradition that continues through the twenti eth century on stage and eventually on screen. See Carol Chillington Rutter’s insightful discussion of the use of black messengers in modern stage productions in her chapter “Shadowing Cleopatra: Making Whiteness Strange” in her book-length study Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (New York: Routledge. 2001), 57–103.I also discuss the limited casting of black actors in Antony and Cleopatra productions in chapter 6. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once women actors were permitted to play Cleopatra, she was conventionally performed as white and in contemporary dress. Louisa Anne Phillips, in an 1833 production directed by William Charles Macready, was the first woman actress to wear brown or tawny makeup as Cleopatra on stage (Madelaine, 41). Along with tawny makeup, actors like Isabella Glyn used orientalist body movements to create a sense of Cleopatra’s bodily difference from the Romans (Madelaine, 54). In the twentieth century, there has been the tendency to use red hair rather than brown skin to mark Cleopatra as sensual and voluptuous, especially in British productions. Twentieth-century English actresses, “with surprisingly few exceptions, have represented Cleopatra in terms of highly Anglicized notions of wantonness: pale-skinned, frequently red-haired and often clingingly or scantily clad” (Madelaine, 81–82; see “Ghosting Cleopatra on the Shakespeare Stage” in chapter 4 herein). Among these pale, red-headed Cleopatras are Vivien Leigh (1951), Dame Peggy Ashcroft (1953), and Margaret Whiting (1957). To play Cleopatra as a pale redhead was so much the convention that when South African actress Janet Suzman played her browned up in the 1972 production, it was considered a dramatic change in convention (Madelaine, 106).
Arthur Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 148–149.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 7.
Christopher Miller, Blank. Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8.
Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Women, “Race” and Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Margo Hen-dricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47–48.
In Kim F. Hall’s critique of Boose’s essay in her epilogue to Things of Darkness, she warns that at the same time that we as critics argue that race is an unstable category for early modern England, we must not let the analysis end here. While she agrees with Boose that the concept of a “pure” notion of race is a fantasy, so too is the desire to access a version of the past devoid of race: “I am not sure why, in a field so influenced by feminism and the new historidsm—both of which insist on a recognition that we as critics are embedded in our own historical moment and therefore do not have access to a pure history—we call for such purity when it comes to race. Rather than engaging with the ramifications of this ‘pervasive ambiguity,’ Boose undermines the politics of her project by collapsing a gesture toward ontological purity into her legitimate con-cern for historical accuracy,” Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni versity Press, 1995), 259.
Marvin Spevak, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 62.
Harley Granvllle-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946)
George Kittredge’s edition of Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, 1961). In Prefaces to Shakespeare, Harley Granville-Barker calls Cleopatra “a debauched Eastern queen” (Granville-Barker, 369); “a passionate woman” with “a child’s desires and a child’s fears, an animal’s wary distrust” (Granville-Barker, 443). He says that Cleopatra reacts to Octavius Caesar’s capture of her as would a “trapped animal … cringing and whining” (Granville-Barker, 445). Kittredge identifies Cleopatra as a “gypsy,” “trickster” and “charmer” but does not develop the racial ramifications (Kittredge, xi). I suspect that both men keep their terms of Cleopatra’s racial identity imprecise to avoid racial questions that are too close for comfort. As Gypsy or Oriental temptress, she may remain romanticized, distanced from the issues of racial equality of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the racial tensions of the Renaissance.
Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 86.
Eldred Jones, “Racial Terms for Africans in Elizabethan Usage,” Review of National Literature 3 (1971), 52–61.
Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 188.
John D’Amico, The Moor in English Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991)
Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference and the Epic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 262–263.
Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially 124–127; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness, 178–186
Arthur Little Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape and Sacrifice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 143–176
Joyce Green MacDonald, “Sex, Race, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Literature and History 5.1 (Spring 1996), 60–77.
E. Ellis Cashmore, Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994), 214.
For a discussion of the Africanization of the Ham myth in western thought, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period,” William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (January 1997), 103–142
Benjamin Braude, “Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Topography of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism,” in Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, 1492–1763, ed. Gary Taylor and Philip Beidler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, expected in 2003) and Braude’s forthcoming book, Sex, Slavery and Racism: The Secret History of Noah and His Sons (New York: Alfred J. Knopf). Ham’s transgression occurs in Genesis 10.20–26
John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 52.
As Jeffrey Knapp writes in An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), the idea of England as a world within a world was primary to its paradoxical policies of insularity, exploration and colonization of other lands: “By making the case for empire within the very terms of isolationist rhetoric, otherworldly imperialism proved especially adept at idealizing the colonial failures that kept England insular” (12). For more on Britain’s view of itself as a microcosm, and the influence of this view on its explorations of other lands, see Josephine Waters Bennett, “Britain Among the Fortunate Isles,” Studies in Philology 53 (1956), 114–140.
Elliot Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982), 11.
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Voyages, Trafiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. Laurence Irving (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), vol. 7: 262–263.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 22.
Michael Neill, “Broken English, Broken Irish: Nation, Language and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (Spring 1994), 4.
G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London: Oxford University Press, 1931, 1951, 1961) 224.
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© 2003 Francesca T. Royster
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Royster, F.T. (2003). African Dreams, Egyptian Nightmares: Cleopatra and Becoming England. In: Becoming Cleopatra. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07417-1_2
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