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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Antony and Cleopatra :: William Shakespeare Plays Literature Essays

Antony and Cleopatra The legend of Cleopatra has percolated in the world consciousness for the chivalric 2000 years. By the time Shakespeare wrote the tragedy Antony and Cleopatra the alluring reputation of the male monarch had existed originally as a biased representation of a foreign young-bearing(prenominal) who insinuated herself into the roman print power structure. Shakespeares role in perpetuating the allure of the snuff it of the Ptolemaic rulers was the result of synthesizing the existing biases and distilling the dichotomy between the woman and the queen. Consequently, Shakespeare portrayed her not wholly as an alluring woman who was thought of as a wanton corrupter of Roman ideals, but as a queen who tried to do what was best for her country, and a woman who tried to do what was best for herself. Shakespeare brought all of these aspects together and molded a character that Joseph Summers describes as the transcendent image of beauty and nobility (135 ), and firmly entrenched Cleopatra into the embodied consciousness. As suggested in the introduction to Nortons Antony and Cleopatra, the play presupposes familiarity not only with pointts dramatized in that play Julius Caesar but also with earlier Roman conflicts (Cohen 847) and, I would add, the reputation of various characters. Interestingly, there is no mention of Cleopatra in Julius Caesar even though she is the mother of Caesars son.1 This relationship obviously infuriated the Roman leaders and as a consequence her role with Caesar is effectively diminished and her reputation is vilified. Cicero, the great Roman orator, described Cleopatra as unacceptably magnificent and arrogant (Higgs 229), while Octavian refers to her as the wanton daughter of the Ptolomies (Hamer 311). Northrop Frye contends that propaganda was necessary because she was virtuoso person the Romans were really afraid of (Frye 123). The propaganda, as Christopher Pelling alludes, was a resul t of Octavian working seduously on Italian misogyny and xenophobia (Pelling 294). Octavians promulgations evoked suspicion and hostility towards Cleopatra, and their main intent was to mitigate the idea that Cleopatra was becoming a legend for Romans too (Pelling 294). in that respect is no way they would have described her as a woman who grieved the loss of Antony so passionately that she beat her

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