SOURCE: “Transmigrations: Crossing Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, edited by Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, University of Illinois Press, 1999, pp. 73-96.

[In the following essay, Floyd-Wilson observes the correspondence between geography and gender that is often examined in the play (for example, the association of Egypt with femininity and Rome with masculinity), and explores the way in which Renaissance climate theory adds another dimension to these relationships. Specifically, the critic demonstrates how Cleopatra's association with gypsies suggests that she possesses an “indecipherable” quality that may migrate over time and space.]

Much of the critical commentary on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra sees a parallel between the perceived “masculinity” and “femininity” of its title characters and the dialectical opposition of Rome and Egypt.¹ While an earlier generation of criticism has suggested that Cleopatra and Antony embody universal gender roles, adumbrating a world-stage polarity of a feminine East versus a masculine West, feminist and postcolonial critics have argued that the play presents the instability of gender binaries and the West's construction of itself and the “Orient.”² Regardless of the theoretical perspective, it is widely accepted that there are direct correspondences between geography and gender in Antony and Cleopatra; Cleopatra, in particular, is perceived to be “one with her feminized kingdom as though it were her body.”³ In a subtle reading of Antony's dissolution and Cleopatra's regenerative powers, Janet Adelman cites the play's “affiliation of ‘masculine’ Rome with the solid and bounded, ‘feminine’ Egypt with the fluid”; according to “the Roman point of view, the melting of the boundaries of the self is necessarily its effeminization, its pull back toward that matrix.”⁴ Gail Kern Paster has expanded our understanding of early modern gender distinctions by locating the “boundaries of the self” within the historicized specificities of humoral discourse and the hierarchy of Mikhail Bakhtin's bodily canons. For the most part, woman is conceived to be “naturally grotesque—which is to say, open, permeable, effluent, leaky. Man is naturally whole, closed, opaque, self-contained”; moreover, within this paradigm the “male body … can assume the shameful attributes of the incontinent female body.”⁵ In obvious ways, Paster's work provides further support for reading Cleopatra as quintessentially female and “as abundant, leaky, and changeable as the Nile.”⁶

However, early seventeenth-century natural philosophy also suggests that varying degrees of a body's internal liquidity and temperature determine what modern readers would classify as “racial” characteristics.⁷ Renaissance climate theory avers that a region's atmospheric temperature, moisture level, soil, and topography help fix an inhabitant's humoral complexion, coloration, and temperament.⁸ Consider, for example, Titus Andronicus, which associates Aaron the Moor's complexion and “fleece of woolly hair” with his native climate and “cloudy melancholy” (2.3.34, 33).⁹ Popular accounts of climate theory establish that parallel physiological processes take place in northern, southern, and temperate regions;¹⁰ the heat of the sun not only darkens the skin of the Egyptians but also dries the body's humors; conversely, cold northern air seals up the body's moisture, producing white skin and “gross,” thick humors. Further complicating these distinctions in early modern texts is an inherited contradiction within classical climatic discourse itself. The Aristotelian tradition holds that external temperature has a counteractive effect on the body. Hot climates draw out internal heat, producing cold complexions, while the inverse takes place in the north. The Hippocratic theory maintains a correspondent relation between external temperatures and the body; cold climates, for example, produce cold complexions.¹¹ What remains stable throughout the discourse is the distribution of moisture: hot regions dry the body's humors, while cold climes preserve internal moisture. Since it is derived from Mediterranean sources, classical humoral discourse presupposes a temperate climate, and climate theory explicitly locates temperance in the middle regions. Yet even within temperate regions, certain “differences of style of life, climate and diet” produce puzzling questions about the body, such as whether the “hottest female is colder than the coldest male.”¹² Once translated to less temperate regions, conflicts in the discourse are exacerbated. Just as distinctions in rank intersect with and confound the body's boundaries (the lower orders proving “leakier” than chaste ladies, for example), extreme climates further disrupt gender categories.

In fact, climate theory draws on and complicates the schematic opposition between the spirit and the flesh implicit in the antithesis of the classical male body and the grotesque female body.¹³ Since extreme cold and heat produce disparate effects, it is widely held in early modern climatic discourse that the “body and the mind are swayed in opposite directions,” so that “southerners excel in intellect, [and northerners] in body.”¹⁴ Northerners “have a greater abundance of blood and humor [and] with more difficulty separate themselves from these earthly dregs,” while the southerners' relatively dry complexion gives them an unearthly “power of contemplation, … meditation,” and wisdom.¹⁵ Moreover, the gendered connotations of these differences are commingled. The powerful spirit of the south proves masculine in its strength, yet feminine in its subtlety, while the northern flesh is feminine in its excess, yet masculine in its strength. In general terms, only the middle regions readily produce temperate men, balanced in mind and body, while the extreme northern and southern climates generate intemperance, which translates easily to effeminacy.

Not only does most early modern climate theory assume a tripartite structure, it also identifies England as a septentrional nation.¹⁶ And not surprisingly, there is some anxiety regarding climate theory in the discourse itself, stemming in part from an inability to reconcile regional determinations of a body's solidity and fluidity with accepted gender distinctions. On a local level, Englishmen are distinguished from Englishwomen as the dryer and more self-contained sex, with the supposition that “men have marble, [and] women waxen minds,”¹⁷ but on the world stage the English find themselves characterized as soft-fleshed, inconstant, and permeable as the result of a northern climate which produces excessively moist complexions. As northern and southern regions, marginalized from the temperate zone, England and Egypt actually share a certain peripheral status. While Antony and Cleopatra's construction of Egyptian and Roman identities and values depends explicitly on an East/West binary, it has been taken for granted that Jacobean England would “see Cleopatra [and Egypt] through Western eyes.”¹⁸ Certainly early modern Britain's perspective on Cleopatra entails a complex identification with western, masculine Rome.¹⁹ And Jacobean nationalism is informed by Britain's invocation of mythological Roman origins, which subsumed the paradigm of a westward movement of empire.²⁰ Implicitly underscoring the East/West binary, Leonard Tennenhouse has argued that Cleopatra “embodies everything that is not English according to … British nationalism,”²¹ but I would contend that England's opposition to Egypt could disrupt as well as secure its western, masculine perspective. In fact, as a northern nation, England's latitudinal relationship to southern Egypt and temperate Rome upsets the purportedly archetypal binaries of East/West, Female/Male.

It is not coincidental that Antony and Cleopatra focuses consistently on regional differences and the instability of gender roles. Antony's melting effeminacy is attributable not only to his lovesick “dotage” but also to the influence of the Egyptian climate on his relatively “northern” body. Contrasted sharply with Antony's leaky vulnerability and unguarded passions is the opaque surface of Cleopatra's body. Although both characters possess passionate temperaments, we can easily discern Antony's vacillating allegiances; yet we are never certain of the sincerity or depth of Cleopatra's affections. In significant ways, Cleopatra's climatically determined “racial” status challenges the northern construction of gender differences;²² as a woman, her complexion should be soft and impressionable, but as an Egyptian she proves elusive and resistant to interpretation. The paradox of Cleopatra's ambiguous allure is not only that she represents the threatening excesses of Egyptian effeminacy, particularly exemplified by her seeming deceptions, but that those same qualities, if appropriated, would help remedy northern deficiencies.

Both Antony and Cleopatra derive their greatness (and their ruin) from their particular excesses; while the “vilest things / Become themselves” in Cleopatra (2.2.239-40), Antony's “faults, in him, seem as the spots of heaven” (1.4.12). However, their excesses move in opposing directions; to a certain extent Cleopatra's strengths are represented as transcending the body, while Antony's best qualities remain rooted in his corporeality. Explicitly identified as “hereditary / Rather than purchased,” Antony's natural complexion inclines him toward a kind of fleshly bounty or surfeit, a virtue or vice, depending on one's perspective (1.4.13-14).²³ Arguably, Antony is more “northern” than Roman in his constitution; in fact, Jean Bodin cites Marc Antony's reputed fleshiness as analogous to the northerner's “heavy” body, and certainly his demise in Shakespeare's play recalls the commonplace notion that northern bodies are predisposed to melt in southern climates.²⁴ Paradoxically, Antony's greatest weakness also marks him as exceptional; in Cleopatra's vision, his internal bounty raises him above the elements in which he lives. By rejecting Roman restraint in favor of Antony's liberal excesses, the play seems to rewrite “heroic masculinity” in northern terms.²⁵

Rather than equating Cleopatra's body with the Nile, we need to consider how the invocation of climate theory establishes a more complex relationship between the queen's complexion and Egypt. In climatic-humoral terms, Cleopatra's blackness and elusiveness are the natural effects of her environment: “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black” (1.5.27-28). And in various ways, these qualities make her motives inaccessible both to Shakespeare's Romans and Jacobean England. Yet the play's sly metadrama and anachronistic references to gypsies may have reminded Shakespeare's audience that Egypt is a world that is irrevocably lost. And while the mysteries of Egypt remain impenetrable, Cleopatra's characteristic subtlety, whether “infinite variety” or “cunning,” becomes a quality that can “transmigrate” over time and place. Cleopatra's mystery can never be unraveled, yet the play suggests that it can be appropriated and represented through artifice and performance.²⁶ While northern virtues prove inherent and inimitable, the southerner's natural gifts metamorphose into qualities that can be acquired and enacted.

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In ascribing particular characteristics to the peoples of various climates, Renaissance authors drew on a long history of classical geography which contrasted wise Egyptians with barbaric Scythians in the descriptions of remote borders beyond the ideal temperate zone.²⁷ Furthermore, as Karl Dannenfeldt suggests, the “revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism in the Renaissance enhanced the role of Egypt as the original land of theologians and philosophers.”²⁸ Egypt's warm climate plays a crucial, yet rarely acknowledged, role in its history as a land associated with the origins of wisdom. The Hermetic texts, which Marsilio Ficino translated and which helped form the basis of his Neoplatonist philosophy, explain that “Egyptians are particularly favored. … In Stobaeus XXIV, II, Horus asks his mother Isis, ‘By what cause, Mother, do men who live outside our most holy place lack our quickness of apprehension?’” Indeed, Stobaeus establishes that as a result of planetary aspects and a favorable climate, Egyptians are “exceptionally intelligent and wise.”²⁹

While modern scholars readily concede that Renaissance authors traced the origins of sagacity to Egypt, few have explored the corresponding links they made between black bile, black skin, and wisdom.³⁰ Yet the interrelatedness of climate theory and humoralism makes these links quite apparent. Bodin not only assigns the origins of “blackness” to the concoction of humors by environmental heat but also notes that “the southern people, through continued zeal for contemplation, befitting black bile, have been promoters and leaders of the highest learning.”³¹ Juan Huarte, in The Examination of Men's Wits (1594), sees direct correspondences between the Egyptian climate, coloration, and wit: the “Aegyptians … haue not forlorne that their delicacie of wit and promptnesse, nor yet that rosted colour which their auncestors brought with them from Aegypt.”³² In the early modern period, their characteristically dry complexion links the southerners' blackness to wisdom. According to Huarte, “in this region [Egypt], the sunne yeeldeth a feruent heat: and therefore the inhabitants haue their brain dried, and choler adust, … the much heat of the countrey rosteth the substance of these members and wrieth them, as it draweth togither a peece of leather set by the fire; and for the same cause, their haire curleth, and themselves also are wily.”³³ Hence, the Egyptian climate not only darkens the skin but also produces a natural wisdom or cunning. Given the ambiguous status of Cleopatra's coloration in the classical sources, it seems likely that the conspicuous blackness of Shakespeare's queen is intended to invoke both the myth of Egypt and the climatic-humoral discourse that underscores that myth.

Traditionally set in opposition to the ancient Egyptians are the northern Scythians, whose hearty bodies, inactive minds, and pale skin are attributed to their cold environment. In “Air, Waters, and Places,” the earliest Greek tract to establish a connection between region and humoral physiology, Hippocrates sees a direct correspondence between the Scythians' fleshy bodies and sluggish temperaments, and their climatic conditions. This northern race has “ruddy complexions on account of the cold, for the sun does not burn fiercely there. But the cold causes their fair skins to be burnt and reddened.”³⁴ In addition, “The body cannot become hardened where there are such small variations in climate; the mind, too, becomes sluggish … their bodies are heavy and fleshy, … they are watery and relaxed. The cavities of their bodies are extremely moist, … under such climatic conditions, the bowels cannot be dry.”³⁵ Significantly, the softness of their flesh blurs physical distinctions between Scythian men and women: “All the men are fat and hairless and likewise all the women, and the two sexes resemble one another.”³⁶ Hippocrates concludes that as a result of their excessively moist complexion, these northerners are the “most effeminate race of all mankind.”³⁷ As “Scythian” becomes shorthand for “northern” in the early modern period, the English find themselves commonly bracketed with the Scythians in continental texts.³⁸

As modern scholars have noted, Renaissance physiology readily links soft complexions, mental sluggishness, and effeminacy. Huarte, for example, draws on Aristotle, Hippocrates, and others to argue that while the supposedly tender flesh of women denotes excess moisture, those men whose predominant humors are phlegm and blood also possess tender flesh and prove “simple & dullards.”³⁹ Huarte applies this same rubric of humoral differences geographically, associating closed, dry bodies with southern regions while characterizing northerners as fleshy, moist, and slow: “the Flemmish, Dutch, English, and French, … their wits are like those of drunkards: … & this is occasioned by the much moisture, wherewith their brain is replenished, and the other parts of the bodie: the which is knowen by the whitenesse of the face … and aboue this they are generally great, and of tall stature, through the much moisture, which breedeth encrease of flesh.”⁴⁰

For a positive portrait of northern attributes, early modern writers turn to Tacitus, who describes the Saxons as morally superior to the degenerate Romans.⁴¹ Citing the influence of a cold climate, Tacitus observes the ancient Germans' penchant for drinking and carousing: “[n]o nation indulges more freely in feasting and entertaining than the German.”⁴² The Germans' excesses, however, serve to fortify their virtues—they are generous and bounteous to others, counting it “a sin to turn any man away from [their] door.”⁴³ Moreover, their liberal-hearted natures make Germans incapable of cunning or political craft, for they are barely “sophisticated enough to refrain from blurting out their inmost thoughts … every man's soul is laid completely bare”; their hearts are “open to sincere feelings or … quick to warm to noble sentiments.”⁴⁴ In the late sixteenth century, Fynes Moryson insists that “the Nature of the English is very singular aboue other Nations in liberality and bounty … if it be not rather prodegality or folly.”⁴⁵ It is during the early seventeenth century that English writers begin to push the “question of a common ancestry” with the Germans, striving to see themselves in Tacitus's laudatory commentary.⁴⁶

Despite the positive slant which Tacitus provides, the early modern English continue to struggle with the perceived disadvantages of their northern complexion. A treatise published in England in 1591 urges northerners to purge the “grosse humour ingendred in them, by reason of the grossnes, and coldnes of the aier wherin they live.”⁴⁷ And as late as 1649 John Milton expresses anxiety concerning the “natural political deficiencies” that the English climate produces, and urges his countrymen to temper their northern excesses by “import[ing] civil virtues from the ‘best ages’ and those situated in more favorable climates.”⁴⁸ Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind in General (1604) directly addresses the presumed correspondence between regional complexion and political acumen.⁴⁹ Of particular interest to Wright is how a “certain natural complexion and constitution of the body, … inclineth and bendeth them of hotter Countries more unto craftiness and warinesse than them of colder Climates” (84). Conceding that “these Northerne Climates are accounted” to produce “simple and unwise” citizens, he notes that Englishmen in particular tend to “reveal and disclose themselves very familiarly and easily” (82, 84). To remedy this weakness, Wright encourages his English readers to learn how to discover other men's passions, as well as how to govern their own. For Wright, skin color in particular signifies and promotes a person's simplicity or subtlety: “The very blushing also of [English] people showeth a better ground whereupon Virtue may build than certain brazen faces, who never change themselves, although they commit, yea, and be deprehended in enormous crimes” (82). Despite this defense of his countrymen's northern complexion, Wright concludes that the English are exceedingly open and vulnerable to foreign interpretation. Urging his nation to “be directed” in presenting a “prudent carriage,” he suggests that they adopt a temperate measure of southern wariness (85). As Wright anxiously reveals, Englishmen in the early seventeenth century fear that their natural complexion may predispose them to a passive and effeminate role on the world stage, especially in the play of politics.⁵⁰

Throughout the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, climate theory remains a popular and viable explanation for differences in coloration and national disposition. However, as England's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade escalates, natural philosophy begins to shift its focus away from diversity in complexions toward what is increasingly seen as the peculiarity of blackness. One example of this trend in the mid-seventeenth century is a posited link between the origins of blackness and artifice. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne describes certain “Artificial Negroes, or Gypsies [who] acquire their complexion by anointing their bodies with Bacon and fat substances, and so exposing them to the Sun”; moreover, he suggests that this counterfeit practice might plausibly be the source of all seemingly “natural” black complexions.⁵¹ In Anthropometamorphosis (1650) John Bulwer contends that man may have become “black by an advenient and artificial way of denigration, which at first was a meer affectation arising from some conceit they might have of the beauty of blacknesse, and an Apish desire which might move them to change the complexion of their bodies into a new and more fashionable hue. … And so from this artifice the Moores might possibly become Negroes, receiving atramentitious impression by the power and efficacy of imagination … which were continued by Climes, whose constitution advantaged the artificial into a natural impression.”⁵²

It is significant that both Browne and Bulwer continue to invoke the efficacy of “climes” to maintain color, yet insist on the artificial origins of that color.⁵³ This deviation in natural philosophy strives to collapse the tripartite framework, which embraces a spectrum of complexions, into a binary of normative white and aberrant black, effectively erasing the association between blackness and natural wisdom.

Well before these natural philosophers traced the origins of blackness to “Apish desire[s],” however, seventeenth-century Englishmen saw the natural vulnerabilities of their complexion inversely reflected in the southerner's darker countenance. In its consideration of geography and complexion, Antony and Cleopatra not only typifies the traditional associations of early modern climatic-humoral discourse but also anticipates England's impulse to link southern origins with artifice. Although Cleopatra's complexion is attributed to Egypt's clime, her mystery is recast as theatricality. The play sustains Cleopatra's “infinite variety” by obscuring her “true” motives with endless playing;⁵⁴ however, the play's allusion to a non-Egyptian boy actor as the agent of Cleopatra's playing reworks the north's relationship to the south. In this metadramatic moment, the southerner's cunning becomes effeminate artifice, while the northern male is stabilized, slyly revealing his own subtlety.

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Antony and Cleopatra's opening scene establishes that from a Roman perspective it is Antony who resembles the Nile, “[o]'erflow[ing] the measure” (1.1.2), a comparison which points up the effect of the Egyptian environment on his body. Traditionally, critics have argued that Cleopatra's presence, Egypt's luxury, and love-sick dotage effeminize the Roman, but it is also true that Antony's relatively northern constitution is especially vulnerable to the southern climate and its excesses. After losing battles and loyal followers, Antony's loss of control is further represented as watery dissolution. Eventually his thoughts grow “indistinct / As water is in water,” and the boundaries of his identity seem to melt until he “cannot hold this visible shape” (4.14.10-11, 14).⁵⁵

We soon discover that while Caesar condemns Antony's indulgent ways in Egypt, he readily praises Antony's previous success as a soldier who endured severe environmental conditions. Although Egypt weakens Antony, a more northern climate seems to enhance his natural strengths. In his nostalgic recollection of Antony's mettle, Caesar describes Antony as a soldier, fighting famine

(Though daintily brought up) with patience more
Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink
The stale of horses and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.
Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on. And all this
.....Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek
So much as lanked not.

(1.4.60-71)

It is no accident that Octavius's memory locates Antony-as-ideal-soldier in a northern environment—a cold region, barren of natural resources apart from the “roughest berry,” the “barks of trees,” and the presence of strange flesh. According to commonplace Renaissance notions of military science, northern climates produce the fiercest soldiers: they are men who bear cold patiently and wage war easily in the winter.⁵⁶ In his commentary on the military prowess of northern nations, Bodin notes that “when hunger comes upon the Scythians, they cut the veins of horses under the ears, suck the blood, and feast on the flesh, as tradition reports about the army of Tamerlane.”⁵⁷ While Octavius concedes that Antony's Roman background is contrastively “dainty,” Antony proves himself to be as hearty and robust as the “savages” apparently acclimated to such conditions. Octavius praises the command Antony wields over his body in the face of such a harsh environment, yet Antony behaves as if he were a native, his bodily strength and military powers seemingly enhanced by the brutal circumstances.⁵⁸ Arguably, Antony's fleshiness helps him to survive this harsh environment so well that his “cheek … / lanked not.” However, when a northerner moves southward, his military strength is challenged: “bring a Scithian from his natiue habitation to the South,” writes Bodin, “and you shall find him presently to droop, and fall away with sweat and faintnesse,” for “the armies that come out of the North, grow weake and languish, the more they goe towards the South … [the more they become] molten with sweat, and languished with heat.”⁵⁹ Moreover, hot climates will exacerbate the northerner's natural inclination to feasting and drinking.⁶⁰

The abstemious Caesar censures Antony's present voluptuousness, characterizing him as the “abstract of all faults” (1.4.9). Despite Caesar's sweeping criticism, it is clear that Antony's faults are not the sum of all vices, but particularly carnal ones; he possesses an appetite for mirth, drinking, and sport (1.4.4-7, 16-21). As Lepidus notes, Antony's temperament predisposes him to these weaknesses, his faults being “what he cannot change,” rather “[t]han what he chooses” (1.4.14-15). While Caesar scoffs at Antony's “composure,” which “must be rare indeed / Whom these things cannot blemish,” it is the same “rare” composure that earned Caesar's respect in the Alps (22-23). Although the Romans mock Antony's intemperance in Egypt, there is some recognition that a heart that “burst[s] / The buckles on his breast” in the “scuffles of great fights” necessarily “reneges all temper” (1.1.6-8). Antony's excesses mark him as conspicuously un-Roman, yet they also “seem as the spots of heaven” (1.4.12).

Peter Erickson contends that Cleopatra's final dream “endows [Antony] with the quality of ‘bounty,’” and that the “image of … unending profusion replaces Octavius's preferred version of his [Antony's] heroic deprivation.”⁶¹ While it is true that Cleopatra and Caesar recollect Antony differently, Antony's natural characteristics remain constant in both visions; it is his body's interaction with the environment that varies. While Antony's internal plenitude easily counters Caesar's landscape of deprivation, it inevitably surfeits in Cleopatra's fertile Egypt. To attribute Antony's liberality solely to Cleopatra's imagination underestimates the import of Enobarbus's acknowledgment of his master's bounty. As a Roman, Enobarbus feels compelled to leave a master who proves “so leaky” (3.13.63). But when Antony answers this desertion with the return of Enobarbus's treasure, together with his own “bounty overplus” (4.6.22-23), Enobarbus's heart begins to break in the face of such splendid generosity:

                                                                                                                        O Antony,
Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid
My better service, when my turpitude
Thou dost so crown with gold!

(4.6.31-34)

Although Enobarbus recognizes that by overflowing the measure Antony displays a lack of policy, he concedes that this excess shows a nobility that outstrips more temperate actions.

Rather than simply endowing Antony with bounty, Cleopatra's vision celebrates the possibility of a world defined by Antony's generous rule:

                                                                                For his bounty,
There was no winter in't, an Anthony it was
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above
The element they lived in.

(5.2.86-90)⁶²

In contrast to Caesar's place-specific recollection, Cleopatra's fancy first locates Antony everywhere and then in water, insisting that his best attributes rise above the “element they lived in.” While Caesar imagines that Antony fills a “vacancy with his voluptuousness” (1.4.26), Cleopatra suggests that Antony's bounty flows from his natural constitution and that his defining quality is infinite renewal. Cleopatra's vision of Antony prizes the same attributes that northerners claim as virtues.

While the south's exceptional climate and fertile luxury exaggerate Antony's innate qualities, Cleopatra's complexion is engendered by Egypt. And in contrast to the play's representation of Antony's melting boundaries, the Egyptians' associations with melting and overflow are much more equivocal. Cleopatra most often invokes melting imagery as a curse or threat of destruction, as if willing the Nile to rise at her command. In declaring her devotion to Antony, she swears that if she proves disloyal, her own body will overturn the drying effects of Egypt's climate. Her hypothetical scenario of disaster is predicated on her possessing a cold heart:

                                                            If I be [cold-hearted],
From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,
And poison it in the source, and the first stone
Drop in my neck: as it determines, so
Dissolve my life!

(3.13.158-62)

As the storm “discandies,” all of Cleopatra's progeny and all Egyptians will lie dead and graveless from the melting ice. The discandying that Cleopatra envisions appears to mirror Antony's own dissolving state, with the exception that her melting is an imagined punishment for betrayal, couched in an invocation that preserves her authority. Antony, in contrast, when his followers desert him, associates “discandying” with the ultimate surrender of one's self to another, lamenting that

                                                                                                                        The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar.

(4.12.20-23)

Cleopatra's repeated ties to the serpent of the Nile further define her relationship to the environment. As with the crocodile's impenetrability, Cleopatra's temperament, complexion, and, arguably, her “cunning” are created by the “operation of [the] sun” (2.7.27). In the early modern period, the crocodile is noted for its dry, impervious skin; if Egypt is submerged in water, the opaque boundaries of the scaled serpent's body would certainly remain intact.⁶³ In response to Lepidus's questioning, Antony describes the crocodile as a creature that is bred by its environment; however, in a mysterious metamorphosis, it seems to transcend that which produces it: “It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates” (2.7.41-44).⁶⁴ The most specific detail Antony offers about the crocodile is that “the tears of it are wet” (2.7.48). Certainly, Antony plays on the proverbial sense that a crocodile's tears signify craft; however, it is not until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that this idea gains proverbial status.⁶⁵ Antony's equivocal statement conveys a less definitive response, suggesting that Roman knowledge proves impotent in the face of natural Egyptian mysteries.

Antony's jesting tone with Lepidus recalls Enobarbus's teasing of him on the interpretation of Cleopatra's tears. As with the crocodile's ambiguous yet patently “wet” teardrops, the mystery of Cleopatra's passions captures a transition in early modern distinctions between the natural and the artificial. While Antony contends that Cleopatra is “cunning past man's thought” (1.2.142), Enobarbus counters him with a playful inversion of the correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm: “her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears: they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report. This cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove” (1.2.143-48). On one hand, Enobarbus suggests that Antony should simply appreciate the “performance” of Cleopatra's passions. But despite Enobarbus's apparent cynicism, the slipperiness of his statement indicates that we cannot ultimately know whether Cleopatra's affections are dissimulation. Intriguingly enough, contemporary mutations of the word “cunning” duplicate the period's changing perception of southerners. In its original sense, “cunning” denotes a natural ability or capacity for learning and wisdom, as in a predisposition determined by one's natural complexion; according to the OED it is not until 1583 that the word comes to mean craft, deceit, or a disposition to artifice. Although Antony observes that “every passion fully strives / To make itself, in [Cleopatra], fair and admired” (1.1.50-51), we remain unsure as to whether Cleopatra filters her emotions through an awareness of audience, or whether her “passions” possess an agency that defies Roman notions of true and false expression.

Although Enobarbus conveys some ambivalence in his response to Cleopatra's sighs and tears, he customarily views weeping as policy or effeminacy. When Agrippa remarks that Antony purportedly wept at Julius Caesar's and Brutus's slayings, Enobarbus intervenes with his version of events: “That year indeed he was troubled with a rheum. / What willingly he did confound, he wailed. / Believe't, till I weep too” (3.2.57-59).⁶⁶ Enobarbus does not simply cast doubt on the rumor that Antony wept; he undercuts any possible emotional tenor that those alleged tears may convey. For Enobarbus, weeping is a loss of manhood (“Transform us not into women” [4.2.36]), and artifice itself (“I am onion-eyed” [35]). In conspicuous contrast to Enobarbus's Roman thoughts, Antony sees a regenerative bounty in weeping: “Grace grow where those drops fall” (4.2.38). Antony's sentiments anticipate a Christian view of transformation, and, advantageously for the north, they imply that those who are prone to melt with heartfelt tears are especially open to grace. From a Roman perspective, Antony's bounty and overflow of tears mark him as effeminate, yet a revisionist, northern view would recast these qualities as masculine virtues.

As the boundaries of Antony's body melt, the play suggests that Cleopatra's complexion has changed over time. In her “salad days” she was both “green in judgment, [and] cold in blood” (1.5.73-74), but as she has aged, she seems to have grown dryer and hotter.⁶⁷ As a description of the young Cleopatra's humoral complexion, this verdant imagery connotes a typically effeminate impressionability. While she was colder and moister, Cleopatra, it seems, played a more passive role in her liaisons: with Caesar, she was “a morsel for a monarch,” while Pompey could “make his eyes grow in [her] brow; / … anchor[ing] his aspect” there (1.5.31-33).⁶⁸ If we believe her claim that she has changed, then it would appear that Cleopatra has grown less impressionable, in humoral terms, and, according to northern constructions, less “feminine.”

Jonathan Harris observes that “[f]or all of Cleopatra's undeniable corporeality, her body has an odd habit of disappearing altogether at precisely those moments when it seems most overwhelmingly present.”⁶⁹ The incorporeal aspect of Cleopatra's allure is connected to her “racial alterity”⁷⁰ and to the complex interaction between her body and the elements. When Cleopatra describes her body plainly in climatological terms—“Think on me, / That am with Phoebus's amorous pinches black / And wrinkled deep in time” (1.5.27-29)—she alludes to the drying effect of the sun's heat on the body's humors.⁷¹ Commenting on the paradox of Cleopatra's age, Adelman notes that she is associated “with an antiquity outside the range of time altogether, certainly outside the range of Caesar's time.”⁷² Cleopatra's ageless antiquity has its basis in contemporary climatic discourse, which classifies southerners as descendants of the oldest civilizations and correlates their natural qualities with those of the elderly.⁷³ Within the framework of climatic discourse, northerners resemble fleshy youths, and middle climates produce temperate men at their fittest, while southerners are analogous with the old—their bodies are weak and dry, but their minds possess sublime wisdom. At the same time, dry complexions prove less vulnerable to decay or physical change. In The Masque of Blackness, Ben Jonson contends that neither “cares, [nor] age can change” the Ethiopians' complexion—“Death her self … / Can never alter their most faithful hue.”⁷⁴ In a similar vein, Enobarbus captures the timeless quality of Cleopatra's appearance: “Age cannot wither her” (2.2.236). Cleopatra's complexion represents the antiquity of Egypt and its impenetrable mysteries.

Not only is Cleopatra's “corporeality” quite ambiguous; she also seems to resist the customary correlations made between the female and flesh.⁷⁵ Her curious appeal is often presented in vaporous terms; she does not “cloy” or surfeit the appetite like “other women” (2.2.237, 238). Indeed, the material connotation of “cloying” suggests a weighing-down of the flesh typically associated with the grotesque body; contemporary usage of the term indicates that a soul may be cloyed by the “heavy bondage of the flesh” (OED). Instead Cleopatra seems to lack a real substance, “mak[ing] hungry / Where most she satisfies” (2.2.238-39). Agrippa's exclamation of “Rare Egyptian!” (219) in response to Enobarbus's famed report of the queen whose “own person, / … beggared all description” (2.2.198-99) catches her exceptional status, while also implying that she may be as subtle as the air that “[h]ad gone to gaze” on her (218). (“Rare” can imply the subtlety of one's temperament or constitution, as in Caesar's ironic use of the word in reference to Antony's indulgent ways.)

In the play's closing scenes Cleopatra repeatedly rejects any ties to gross corporeality. To be commanded by “poor passion” is equivalent in her mind to being “the maid that milks / And does the meanest chares” (4.15.77-78); in its associations with a loss of control, maternity, fluidity, and the lower orders, this image of the milkmaid represents the grotesque body that Cleopatra renounces.⁷⁶ Traditionally critics have stressed Cleopatra's identification with the milkmaid, a reading corroborated by the standard emendation to this line: it is established practice for editors of the play to substitute “No more but e'en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks” for the Folio's “No more but in a woman.”⁷⁷ The change may appear inconsequential, yet if considered precisely, the Folio implies Cleopatra's critical detachment from the blubbering milkmaid. In the moment following Antony's death, Cleopatra acknowledges her grief only by critiquing it. She condemns “poor passion” and in the next breath seeks resolution. When expressing her dread of being staged in Rome, she seems most repulsed by the coarse physicality of the Roman people:

                                                                                mechanic slaves
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall
Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forced to drink their vapor.

(5.2.209-13)

As she prepares for her suicide, she separates herself further from “earthly dregs” while relegating the Romans to the mundane. The circularity of physical life and the materiality of the feminine are equated in Cleopatra's picture of Caesar, who, like the lowest beggar, is nursed by “dung” (5.2.7-8). Whether one interprets the text as “dug” or “dung,” either sense preserves Cleopatra's renunciation of physicality, while likening Caesar to the body held captive by fleshly needs. Embracing death, she claims to “have nothing / Of woman in [her]”; she is “marble-constant” (5.2.238-40). As with the crocodile, Cleopatra's regional identity predisposes her to this transformation: she becomes “fire, and air,” giving her “other elements … / to baser life” (5.2.288-89).

Although often interpreted as evidence of her leaky body, Cleopatra's death is an ironic reversal of maternal imagery; she does place herself in the role of the nurse, and the asp becomes the “baby at [her] breast” (5.2.308), but rather than nourishing this baby, she is feeding herself “[w]ith most delicious poison” (1.5.27). Cleopatra's death is the direct antithesis of Antony's messy demise.⁷⁸ Antony literally grows heavier while he is dying, and at the moment of his death Cleopatra laments, the “crown o' th' earth doth melt” (4.15.63). In contrast, Cleopatra's corpse shows neither “external swelling” nor blood; as Caesar observes, “she looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (5.2.344-46). Even in death her body maintains its opacity.

Neither the Romans nor the play's audience ascertain the truth of Cleopatra's loyalties. Although we have certain evidence of her manipulations and endless playing, we never gain absolute proof of betrayal. When politic Caesar attempts to read the queen, it is Cleopatra who triumphs, leaving “great Caesar [an] ass / Unpolicied” (5.2.306-7). When Caesar and Cleopatra finally confront one another, their scene is notable for its insistent focus on the prospect of unfolding Cleopatra's motives, without ever making them clear. Caesar discovers that Cleopatra has reserved portions of her property, and praising her for the “wisdom in [her] deede” (5.2.150), he entreats her not to blush. Whether she is blushing or she soon will blush, her thoughts remain concealed. She explains away her withheld property as “some lady trifles” intended to induce the “mediation” of Livia and Octavia once she lives among the Romans (5.2.165-70); however, as Adelman notes, this explication may be a “cunningly staged device to convince Octavius that she has no desire to die.”⁷⁹ Railing against her betrayer, Seleucus, Cleopatra suggests that her passions are nearly transparent, and that soon she may “show the cinders of [her] spirits / Through th' ashes of [her] chance” (5.2.173-74). In the early eighteenth-century editions of the play “chance” was glossed as “cheeks,” augmenting the physiological reference in these lines and indicating that Cleopatra threatens to display heated spirits through her burnt cheeks; yet, even without this emendation, the lines suggest that what is produced as a result of external heat is accidental, and naturally obscures whatever burns within.⁸⁰

Antony and Cleopatra repeatedly teases its audience with the possibility that Cleopatra's “true” mind and affections will be revealed, while it fosters the Egyptian paradox that her unreadability is natural. Roman accusations of betrayal and cunning presume that a familiar fixed self lurks beneath Cleopatra's playing. Since Egypt's climate produces her ineffable subtlety, drawing out her baser elements, Cleopatra's mysterious essence defies Roman definitions of truth and artifice. However, while the play sustains Cleopatra's ancient mystery, it also forecasts the disintegration of Egyptian culture and the loss of southern greatness.

Egypt's ruin is neatly captured by the Romans' anachronistic references to Cleopatra as “gypsy.” The gypsy figure, as represented in a wide range of early modern texts, conflates England's rapidly shifting responses to blackness and natural Egyptian wisdom and anticipates the issues raised in the writings of Browne and Bulwer.⁸¹ In 1547, Andrew Borde described Egyptians as displaced nomads, identified by their “swarte” skin and an inherent falseness, for unlike other nations they “go disgisyd in theyr apparel. … [and] Ther be few or none of the Egipcions that doth dwel in Egipt.”⁸² Later texts not only associate gypsy figures with craftiness and lost origins, but also emphasize the artifice of their complexion. In Lanthorne and Candle-Light (1609), Thomas Dekker finds it particularly disturbing that one might perceive the gypsy's complexion to be “natural”: “A man that sees them would sweare they had all the yellow Iawndis, or that they were Tawny Moores bastardes, for no Red-oaker man caries a face of a more filthy complexion; yet are they not borne so, neither has the Sunne burnt them so, but they are painted so.”⁸³ Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English law makes frequent mention of these troubling vagabonds; more significantly, it insists that “gypsies” are not southerners darkened by a foreign climate but Englishmen or “counterfeit” Egyptians wearing “black-face.”

When these vagabonds are portrayed in later works such as Jonson's masque Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) and the plays The Spanish Gipsy (Middleton and Rowley, 1623), More Dissemblers Besides Women (Middleton, 1623), and The Lost Lady (William Berkeley, 1637), their presence seems to necessitate an unmasking scene.⁸⁴ Quite simply, the gypsy's unmasking reworks the cultural associations of ancient Egyptian blackness derived from climatic-humoral theory. Rather than portraying blackness as powerfully unreadable, the dramatization of the gypsy-washed-white neatly equates blackness with artifice and establishes the revealed whiteness as the true and “natural” complexion. Unmasking the false gypsy both denies the mysterious agency attributed to blackness in climatic-humoral discourse and precipitates the erasure of a Renaissance reverence for southern civilizations.

Shakespeare's play anticipates these unmasking scenes most specifically in Cleopatra's metadramatic reference to the “quick comedians” who will stage her “Alexandrian revels”:

                                                                                                                        Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.

(5.2.218-21)

At first glance, Cleopatra's allusion to the boy actor simply validates the “reality” of a male English body beneath the costuming of the Egyptian queen. At the same time, the play's privileging of climatological associations has established Cleopatra's seemingly performative qualities as natural and resistant to imitation. Cleopatra insists that in representation, her greatness will be “boyed” or reduced to the mere “posture” of a woman defined by carnality; in other words, the spirit of Cleopatra's greatness, which encompasses her unreadability and “infinite variety,” will necessarily be lost in the translation of Egyptian culture.

Yet the reductive representation of Cleopatra's powers proves to be a cultural victory for the north, encapsulating the triumph of youthful barbarism over an ancient civilization.⁸⁵ Since ancient Egypt is gone, representations of Cleopatra inevitably reinvent her power as performativity. Paralleling the movement in English natural philosophy, the scene's metadrama dissociates Cleopatra's southern characteristics from her natural body, diminishing the status of her Egyptian “greatness”; at the same time, by equating Egyptian “greatness” with artifice, the English gain access to its mysterious agency by mere imitation. While Antony and Cleopatra suggests that Cleopatra's agency originates with her southern complexion and challenges northern constructions of the gendered body, the play's metadramatic reference to the boy player stages Cleopatra's power as northern artifice—as a performance which succeeds in armoring and reifying the white male body.

As with her emblematic creature, the crocodile, the ancient Egyptian queen is naturally opaque and unreadable. However, by linking her mystery to the conscious and definitive artifice of gypsies and players, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra suggests that Cleopatra's indecipherable quality can transmigrate over time and place, to be appropriated by the impolitic northerner. While ancient Egypt threatens the fixity of western distinctions (masculine/feminine; truth/artifice) the wandering, painted gypsies of the early modern period effeminize blackness as ornament and stabilize the northern male complexion as naturally virtuous. From a seventeenth-century English perspective, Egypt has degenerated, Rome has fallen, and Cleopatra's vision of Antony's natural bounty looks toward the northern horizon.

Notes

1. See A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Marvin Spevack (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), esp. 646-47, 652-53, and 63-84. For an essay that challenges binary views of the play see Jonathan Gil Harris, “‘Narcissus in Thy Face’: Roman Desire and the Difference It Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (Winter 1994): 408-25.

2. See John Drakakis's introduction to New Casebooks: Antony and Cleopatra (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 4-5. For a postcolonial perspective, see Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 78-79 and 124-30.

3. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (London: Routledge, 1992), 191.

4. Ibid., 187.

5. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 92.

6. Harris, “‘Narcissus in Thy Face,’” 409.

7. It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace the role of early modern natural philosophy in the eventual construction of “race.” As an explanation of blackness, climate theory comes under scrutiny in the seventeenth century; however, it remains the dominant explanation of color difference and continues, in various forms, well into the eighteenth century. For a history of environmental theory, see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). For a recent consideration of the role natural philosophy plays in English characterizations of American Indians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Joyce Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 229-52. As England's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade grows, English authors increasingly cite the Hametic curse to estrange and “explain” blackness, but in the early seventeenth century the curse of Ham is “denied more often than affirmed” (see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968], 19). We should recognize that the escalating prominence of the legend of Ham during the seventeenth century works in tandem with ideological erasures taking place in the discourse of natural philosophy. Changing socioeconomic factors shift the focus in early European “science” from theories of human diversity, drawn from ancient physiology, to the “mystery” of blackness—and religious discourse responds with a scriptural explanation of that mystery.

8. “Complexion” can refer to “psychological and social as well as physiological characteristics” (see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 103).

9. All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking Press, 1977). The nurse in Titus invokes climate theory when she contrasts Aaron's black child with “the fair-faced breeders of our clime” (4.2.68).

10. Early modern references to climate theory appear in a variety of sources, cited throughout this essay, including historiography (Jean Bodin, William Harrison), medical texts (Thomas Walkington), and treatises on education (Juan Huarte) and psychology (Thomas Wright). Within this discourse, latitudinal divisions prove arbitrary, shifting with the author's regional perspective, but for the most part regions classified themselves and others according to a tripartite scheme of northern, middle, and southern regions well into the late seventeenth century.

11. On the counteractive process, see Pseudo-Aristotle's Problemata, problem 14, “The Effect of Locality on Temperament,” The Works of Aristotle, trans. E. S. Forster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). See also my discussion of Hippocrates below. Early modern writers appeal to both traditions; for example, Batman uppon Bartholome (London, 1582) draws on the theory of counteraction (19.391), whereas William Harrison's conclusions are derived from Hippocrates (“Description of Britain,” in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. [London, 1807-8], 1:193).

12. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 34.

13. For an illuminating consideration of gender in relation to the spirit and the flesh, see Phyllis Rackin, “Historical Difference/Sexual Difference,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 23 (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993): 48-51.

14. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1583), trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 98.

15. Ibid., 113-14. For similar statements see Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (London, n.d. [before 1612]; reprint, Amsterdam: Scholars Facsimiles, 1971), 168.

16. See, for example, William Harrison, “Description of Britain” (193), and Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors, (1631; reprint, New York: Scholars Facsimiles, 1981), 31.

17. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, l. 1240.

18. Jack D'Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), 153 (emphasis added). The tripartite division of the world eventually loses ground, helping to consolidate England's more secure position in the Occident-Orient binary.

19. In her discussion of Cleopatra's racial identity, Joyce Green MacDonald writes: “To speak meaningfully about Cleopatra's race is to include in one's use of the term an account of the ideological work race did (and does), work which was often enabled by and proceeded in tandem with the writing of other kinds of difference from a subject who is conceived of in this case as not only white, but also Roman (or English), not only male but also a heterosexual dominant male” (“Sex, Race, and Empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” Literature and History 5, no. 1 [1996]: 60-77). As MacDonald indicates, the issue of Cleopatra's race may give rise to the conflation of Roman and English identities. Of course Shakespeare's depiction of Rome and its people is far from univocal and is, at times, disparaging. On Shakespeare's Rome, see Charles Martindale and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London: Routledge, 1990); Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare's Roman Worlds (London: Routledge, 1989); Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); and M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (London: Macmillan, 1910).

20. On British nationalism and the translatio imperii, see Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 189-207. In “Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra,” H. Neville Davies discusses the play in relation to James I's association with Augustus (reprinted in New Casebooks: Antony and Cleopatra, 126-65).

21. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), 144.

22. For recent discussions of Cleopatra's racial status, see MacDonald, “Sex, Race, and Empire,” 60-62; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 153-60; and Mary Nyquist, “‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24, nos. 1-2 (1994): 85-130. Nyquist points out that despite the ambiguity concerning Cleopatra's color outside of the play, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is clearly black (100).

23. My understanding of Antony's “bounty” owes a general debt to discussions in Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, and Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 123-47.

24. Bodin, Method, 99. Bodin also notes that Antony's fleshiness marks him as trustworthy, in contrast to lean Cassius, who resembles a southerner. In Julius Caesar, Caesar also notes the differences between them, swearing he would trust Cassius more if he were fatter (1.2.198).

25. On the play's construction of “heroic masculinity” see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 190.

26. John Gillies considers this issue from a different perspective, asserting that in staging her death, “Cleopatra counters one form of theatre with another, and preserves her mystery from translation” (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 122).

27. On this tradition see Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 50-51.

28. Karl Dannenfeldt, “Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities in the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 6 (1959): 10.

29. Quoted in Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 229. Although it is not the focus of this essay, Cleopatra's association with Isis further complicates her relationship to the myth of Egypt and its climate.

30. Martin Bernal notes that there “appears to have been a relation between blackness and Egyptian wisdom. Many medieval and Renaissance paintings portray one of the magi—presumably an Egyptian—as a Black” (Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987], 242). For a general discussion of black bile and genial melancholy in the early modern period, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951).

31. Bodin, Method, 111.

32. Juan Huarte, The Examination of Men's Wits, trans. Richard Carew (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959), 199.

33. Ibid., 188. “Choler adust” is a form of melancholy (see Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 33-34).

34. Hippocratic Writings, trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (London: Penguin, 1978), 165.

35. Ibid., 164.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 166.

38. See Bodin, Method; see also Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness (1623), ed. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 246, who refers to the English, “the Scythians, the Muscovites, and the Poles” as similar types.

39. Huarte, Examination of Men's Wits, 80.

40. Ibid., 116.

41. See Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 43.

42. The Agricola and the Germania, trans. H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford (Middlesex: Penguin, 1970), 104, 119.

43. Ibid., 119.

44. Ibid., 120. It is a commonplace in climatic discourse to identify northerners as heavy drinkers and great feasters, and the southerners' dry complexion as easily sated by a few delicacies. See Charron, Of Wisdome, 164; and Bodin, Method, 128.

45. Quoted in Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare's Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, ed. Charles Hughes (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1903), 478.

46. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History, 44, 46-47.

47. Quoted in Z. S. Fink, “Milton and the Theory of Climatic Influence,” Modern Language Quarterly 2 (1941): 69.

48. Ibid., 76.

49. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland, 1986); all subsequent references are to this edition.

50. Although Wright insists that the “readability” of his countrymen's complexion actually affirms their virtue, he later identifies this quality as effeminate, attributing the “tenderness of [a woman's] complexion” to her “lack of heat, and … native shamefastness,” and citing her readability, slow wit, and inconstancy as typically feminine qualities (ibid., 119, 110).

51. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964): 467-68.

52. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform'd; Or, The Artificial Changeling (London, 1650), 254-55.

53. For another perspective on the issue of race and cosmetics, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 86-92.

54. I am not suggesting that Cleopatra has “true” motives to discover, but that her mystery depends on the promise and denial of revelation.

55. For a recent discussion of Antony's dissolution see Cynthia Marshall, “Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Winter 1993): 385-408.

56. See Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (1606), trans. Richard Knolles, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 563. See also Bodin, Method, 97; and Charron, Of Wisdome, 165. My understanding of the relationship between military science and environmental theory in the early modern period is derived in part from Ian MacInnes, “Decocting Cold Blood: Climate Theory and Military Science in Henry V” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Chicago, Mar. 1995).

57. Bodin, Method, 128. See Gillies's discussion of this passage as an exemplification of Stoicism (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 118).

58. See Adelman's reading of this landscape as constructing a defensive masculinity defined by “male scarcity” and a “denial of … the female” (Suffocating Mothers, 176).

59. Bodin, Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 551, 549.

60. Henry Peacham, in The Complete Gentleman (1622), for example, notes that “there is not any nation in the world more subject unto surfeits than our English” when they have traveled to “hotter climates” (ed. Virgil B. Heltzel [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962], 161-62).

61. Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama, 141-42.

62. I have adopted the Folio reading of “Anthony it was” rather than “autumn 'twas,” which is an eighteenth-century emendation; the Folio text supports the impression that Antony's bounty is constant (not seasonal) and inherent. See Spevack on the editorial history of this line (New Variorum Edition, 315-16).

63. For a survey of Renaissance notions about the crocodile, see Robert Ralston Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 52-63; in particular, Cawley notes that writers marveled at the creature's “impervious” skin and apparent invulnerability (56-57).

64. See Gillies's discussion of this description as “essentially untranslatable into the Roman code and hence unknowable” (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 121); Cleopatra, not unlike the crocodile, is “unsearchable in her difference. She is ancient, black, sun-burned, reptilian” (122).

65. Cawley finds that “[c]ontrary to common belief, the Ancients knew nothing” of the notion of a weeping crocodile (Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, 53); however, sixteenth-century texts abound with references to it. Although Cawley claims that the medieval treatise of Bartholomaeus Anglicus contains the earliest reference to a weeping crocodile, he refers us to the sixteenth-century English translation Batman uppon Bartholome; Batman's translation has incorporated Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa, a text that was not available until the sixteenth century. The OED cites Mandeville as the earliest mention of the crocodile's deceitful tears; however, Mandeville merely notes that crocodiles “slay and eat men weeping” (Mandeville's Travels [London: Hakluyt Society, 1953], 1:202).

66. I have incorporated the Folio text's “weep” instead of “wept.”

67. Aging is expected to affect an individual's humoral complexion; however, English humoral discourse indicates that it causes one to grow colder and dryer (see Ruth Leila Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays [New York: Russell and Russell, 1966], 55).

68. Cleopatra's younger impressionability accommodates Pompey, much in the way that Isabella in Measure for Measure implicates women: “For we are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints” (2.4.129-30). For the argument that Cleopatra reflects what the Romans project see Harris, “‘Narcissus in Thy Face.’”

69. Ibid., 417.

70. Ibid., 424.

71. Of course this imagery also establishes a sexual relationship between the queen and Phoebus; Jonson uses similar language in The Masque of Blackness, wherein the sun “draws / Signs of his fervent'st love” in the Ethiopian dames' “firm hues” (Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969], 52).

72. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 138.

73. See Charron, Of Wisdome, 167.

74. Jonson, Masque of Blackness, 52.

75. In “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment,” John Danby argues that “Caesar impersonates the World, [and Cleopatra] of course, incarnates the Flesh” (in New Casebooks: Antony and Cleopatra, 49).

76. See Paster for a provocative reading of Cleopatra's “antinursing” (Body Embarrassed, 239-44).

77. Danby cites this line as evidence of Cleopatra's association with the flesh and the “female principle” (“Antony and Cleopatra,” 49). For a summary discussion of the line's editorial history, see Spevack, New Variorum Edition, 305-6.

78. Citing Paster's commentary on blood as a “trope of gender,” Marshall notes that “[w]ounded, bleeding, and lacking agency, Antony takes on a typically feminine position” in death (“Man of Steel Done Got the Blues,” 403).

79. This is posed as a question in Adelman, Common Liar, 15; see also Adelman's discussion of the various interpretations of this scene (191-92, n. 8, and 202, n. 17).

80. On the emendation, see Spevack, New Variorum Edition, 360.

81. In act 1, scene 1 Philo claims that Antony's heart “is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy's lust” (9-10); Antony refers to Cleopatra as a gypsy in act 4, scene 12: “Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose / Beguiled me to the very heart of loss” (28-29). For background on the English gypsy, see Dale B. J. Randall, Jonson's Gypsies Unmasked: Background and Theme of “The Gypsies Metamorphos'd” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975).

82. Andrew Borde, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1548; reprint, London: Early English Text Society, 1870), 217.

83. The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1884-86; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1:259.

84. In The Lost Lady the character is actually a lady disguised as an “Egyptian” rather than a gypsy; John Webster's The Devil's Law-Case (1617-21) and Richard Brome's The English Moor (1637) also stage unmasking scenes, but the characters are identified as Moors rather than gypsies.

85. Cleopatra's reference to a “boy” impersonating her greatness recalls the play's earlier references to Octavius as the “young Roman boy” (4.12.48) as well as the “greatness he has got” from Cleopatra (5.2.30).

I would like to thank Reid Barbour, Lanis Wilson, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice on revising this essay.