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“A Gap in Nature”: Rewriting Cleopatra Through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology

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The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens

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Abstract

This chapter investigates Shakespeare’s rewriting of Plutarch’s Cleopatra as crucial in his deconstruction and re-creation of her character. He uncovers the infinitely varied power that constituted her queenship, devising a new archetype of femininity, while liberating her from the need to be measured in relation to a male counterpart or the Roman gaze. The creation of two parallel images of the queen—the one that takes the stage and the imaginative one—generates the “gap in nature” that propels the action forward, engendering the tension between two dimensions—the frail one of mortals and the timeless one of legends. This tension stretches toward infinity (as defined by Levinas) and allows Cleopatra to script her own ending, consigning her vibrant agency to history’s subconscious.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an analysis of the construction of feminine power and femininity through a male glance in Shakespeare’s time (and in relation to Elizabeth), see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power (New York: Routledge, 1989); Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Nadia Fusini, Lo Specchio di Elisabetta (Milan: Mondadori, 2001).

  2. 2.

    For my understanding of the historical Cleopatra, I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Helen Pope’s “Day of Studies on Cleopatra” held at St. Stephen School’s Cultural Center, Rome, in April 2014.

  3. 3.

    The theatrical conception of a form—the framework created to contain and propel the dramatic unravelling of a story—is crucial. The shape of a play defines the playwright’s cosmology. It positions the characters within a spacetime continuum, while beckoning the audience to relinquish their own and venture within.

  4. 4.

    See James Shapiro, 1606: William Shakespeare the Year of Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 2015) and Agostino Lombardo, Il Fuoco e L’Aria: Quattro Saggi su Antonio e Cleopatra (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995).

  5. 5.

    Berry, Of Chastity, 9–37.

  6. 6.

    John Wilders, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 52.

  7. 7.

    Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin, 2000), 217.

  8. 8.

    A.C. Bradley, The Tragedie of Antony and Cleopatra (Quarterly Review, April 1906), 350.

  9. 9.

    Janet Adelman, The Common Liar (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 170.

  10. 10.

    Adelman, Common Liar, 219.

  11. 11.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher: Notes and Lectures. (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1874), 97.

  12. 12.

    William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Dent, 1817), 75.

  13. 13.

    Shapiro, 1606, 289; Lombardo, Il Fuoco, 83.

  14. 14.

    Shapiro, 1606, 273. As Wilders investigates in detail in his introduction to the third Arden edition, the Folio version of the play did not contain divisions into acts and scenes. These were instead added later by Rowe.

  15. 15.

    William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1.1.2, 4, 9.

  16. 16.

    The connotation of the word in Shakespeare’s time indicated a prostitute.

  17. 17.

    Berry, Of Chastity, 16–30.

  18. 18.

    This is the first time Antony and Cleopatra meet as adults. Cleopatra probably first met Antony while she was staying in Rome as Caesar’s concubine in ad 40. See Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (London: Random House, 2010), 160.

  19. 19.

    Liz Oakley Brown, Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 32.

  20. 20.

    In Seminar XIII (1965), Jacques Lacan defines Autre or Other as the locus of symbolic order, where language originates and therefore where the gaps between words can be filled. He also defines it as the “locus of the unconscious.” See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 7, 189, 412.

  21. 21.

    Jennifer Bates, “Phenomenology and Life: Hegel’s Inverted World, Cleopatra, and the Logic of the Crocodile,” Criticism 54.3 (2012): 436.

  22. 22.

    Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 49.

  23. 23.

    Levinas, Totality, 50.

  24. 24.

    Levinas, Totality, 50.

  25. 25.

    See Schiff, Cleopatra; Joyce Tyldesley, Cleopatra. Last Queen of Egypt (London: Profile, 2009).

  26. 26.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters of North’s Plutarch (London: Trubner & Co, 1955), 980.

  27. 27.

    Schiff, Cleopatra, 161.

  28. 28.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 994.

  29. 29.

    William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. R. Weis, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury 2012), 1.3.1503.

  30. 30.

    William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1.3.181; King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 1.1.87.

  31. 31.

    Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 79.

  32. 32.

    Bradley, The Tragedie, 48.

  33. 33.

    For an analysis of the play centered on the words of command, see Paul Yachin, “Shakespeare’s Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 33 (1993): 343–63.

  34. 34.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 995.

  35. 35.

    This is historically accurate. Octavia raised all of Antony’s children after his death, including the ones he had with Cleopatra. See Schiff, Cleopatra, 191, 237.

  36. 36.

    This is also the moment of transition from mimesis to meta-drama.

  37. 37.

    This event is cited in Plutarch, where he also comments on the immensity of the banquet she offered Antony. Plutarch, Four Chapters, 980.

  38. 38.

    On the absence of soliloquies in Antony and Cleopatra see also, Shapiro, 1606, 274.

  39. 39.

    Interestingly recalling Eliot’s objections to Hamlet.

  40. 40.

    Shapiro, 1606, 308.

  41. 41.

    On the cult of Elizabeth see also Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On the parallel between Elizabeth and Cleopatra, see also Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  42. 42.

    Keith Rinehart, “Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and England’s Elizabeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23.1 (1972): 81, 83.

  43. 43.

    Theodora Jankowski, Women in Power in Early Modern Drama (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 147, 189.

  44. 44.

    Berry, Of Chastity, 3.

  45. 45.

    Fusini, Lo Specchio, 112.

  46. 46.

    Schiff, Cleopatra, 134.

  47. 47.

    Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (London: Norton, 2004), 300–7.

  48. 48.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 983.

  49. 49.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1004.

  50. 50.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1004.

  51. 51.

    She also had children with Antony, who are not included in the play. See Schiff, Cleopatra, 191.

  52. 52.

    Shapiro, 1606, 274.

  53. 53.

    Economically, Cleopatra is much stronger than both Octavian and Antony; she is also better educated and the descendant of a stronger dynasty. For an accurate account of Cleopatra’s fortune, see Schiff, Cleopatra, 18–19.

  54. 54.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1004.

  55. 55.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1004.

  56. 56.

    Greenblatt, Will, 43.

  57. 57.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1004.

  58. 58.

    David Read, “Disappearing Act: The Role of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in Philology 110.3 (2013): 568.

  59. 59.

    Adelman, Common, 131.

  60. 60.

    Here Shakespeare’s character acquires the dark, farcical undertones worthy of a Beckettian character.

  61. 61.

    Plutarch, Four Chapters, 1005–6.

  62. 62.

    Here Antony absorbs the Ptolemaic tradition of tracing the King’s ancestry to the gods. In this light, see Schiff, Cleopatra, 135–6; and Plutarch, Four Chapters, 997.

  63. 63.

    Shakespeare seems to uncover the ethical conundrum that strangles modernity and plagues all contemporary literature.

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  1. Independent scholar, Rome, Italy

    Livia Sacchetti

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  1. Independent Scholar, Manchester, NH, USA

    Kavita Mudan Finn

  2. Independent Scholar, Beaver Falls, PA, USA

    Valerie Schutte

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Sacchetti, L. (2018). “A Gap in Nature”: Rewriting Cleopatra Through Antony and Cleopatra’s Cosmology. In: Finn, K., Schutte, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_22

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