Antony and Cleopatra (Vol. 47) | Jyotsna Singh (essay date 1989)
Jyotsna Singh (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra," in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XX, 1990, pp. 99-121.
[In the essay that follows, Singh examines the parallels between Antony and Cleopatra and the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century polemical attacks on women and the theater as deceitful and subversive entities. Singh notes that the play both celebrates theatricality, primarily through the figure of Cleopatra, and dramatizes, through the Romans, the objections to and fear of theatricality.]
Audiences and readers of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra generally remember Cleopatra in terms of her varied histrionic moments. In wooing Antony, she displays contrary and shifting moods: "If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick" (1.3.3-5).1 In ruling her subjects, she commands distant...
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