Female Power, Maternity and Genderbending in...

Female Power, Maternity and Genderbending in Shakespeares 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†¦show more content†¦The binary oppositions of masculine and feminine are thus personified by Caesar and Cleopatra, not by Antony, whose men often regard him as the pawn of the deceptive queen and thus not a real man. On the contrary, Robert Miola says, Caesars sense of purpose and public responsibility directly opposes Cleopatras l ove of idleness and luxury (129), a conclusion supported by the fact that it is Caesar who, after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, provides some closure to the political chaos that has dominated the play. Such an assertion--that the danger of Cleopatras sexuality lies in her Egyptian surroundings--requires further detail here. The Orient represented a strange, but terrifyingly fascinating world to the Elizabethans. While it was decidedly inferior and politically weak, the Orient also held a dangerous mystique. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett attests, poets, playwrights, historians and artists have found the idea of Cleopatras foreignness, or otherness, a suitable method by which to explain away her dangerous sexuality. In other words, the fact that Cleopatra effectively seduced and influenced two powerful Roman men baffled Western thinkers who could only explain it by attributing it to her foreignness or otherness. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare succumbs to a similar artistic temptation. In the first ten lines of the play, the surrender of Roman dignity to Egyptian passion is made clear. Philo regretfully tells Demetrius how Those his