[In the following essay, Jankowski identifies the similarities and differences between Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare's Cleopatra, and notes that although both women used their bodies for political purposes, Cleopatra should not be viewed as a direct allegorization of Elizabeth. Jankowski also claims that the parity between the two women reveals Shakespeare's interest in the difficulties Elizabeth faced as a woman attempting to be an effective ruler in patriarchal England.]

In his 1558 pamphlet, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox argued that no woman could be a sovereign ruler because

the immutable decree of God … hath subiected her to one membre of the congregation, that is to her husband. … So that woman by the lawe of God … is vtterly forbidden to occupie the place of God in the offices aforesaid, which he hath assigned to man, whome he hath appointed and ordeined his lieutenant in earth.¹

That dour Protestant directed these words primarily against the two reigning Catholic monarchs, Mary Tudor of England and Mary Stuart of Scotland. The pamphlet, however, appeared after the Protestant Elizabeth Tudor replaced her sister Mary on the throne of England. Yet despite the irony of Knox's “blasting” the monarch who would come to be known as a champion of the Protestant cause, his negative reactions to a female sovereign notably echoed those of many of his fellow subjects.

The extreme patriarchalism of Renaissance society made it virtually impossible for a woman to attain power in any sphere, especially politics.² Renaissance works of political theory nearly always focused on how a male ruler could secure, enjoy, or extend his power within a society that was most definitely patriarchal and, therefore, used to being ruled by a man.³ Even if heredity decreed that a woman should rule, society provided her with no patterns of behavior to follow. Male monarchs, in contrast, were products of a society whose major components—civil, ecclesiastical, familial—consisted of a ruling father figure who groomed chosen “sons” to take over his role. Even the formula for proclaiming a new ruler—“the king is dead, long live the king”—reinforces, as Jean Wilson reminds us, the Renaissance assumption that all rulers were male.⁴

Elizabeth I was aware of her anomalousness from the beginning of her reign but, unlike her sister, Mary, used it to insure her position on the throne. One particular strategy she used was to play on the notion of the monarch's two bodies, a notion which for her had to have a somewhat different meaning than for male monarchs. This notion was devised to deal with the paradox that kings died but the crown endured. Marie Axton very clearly defines the concept in terms of Elizabeth:

For the purposes of law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. … The body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic they referred to a specific quality: the essence of corporate perpetuity. The Queen's natural body was subject to infancy, infirmity, error and old age; her body politic, created out of a combination of faith, ingenuity and practical expediency, was held to be immortal.⁵

Given this concept of dualities, Elizabeth's anomalousness could be glossed over. Her body natural may have been female, but her subjects could easily accept, as she did herself in her Tilbury speech (1588), her body politic as male.

But the mere existence of the queen's two bodies did not resolve the sometimes rival claims of these bodies. Elizabeth had to make some very definite choices regarding these two bodies to insure the success of her reign. What she did was to make her body natural serve her body politic. She opted to remain a virgin and to forgo the roles of wife and mother. She made this decision part of her political theory by claiming either that she was married to England or her subjects, or that the English people were her children. This decision had two very specific positive results: first, her position as virgin queen harked back to the Mariolatry of medieval England and implied that Elizabeth as virgin was essentially a deity; second, her decision to remain a virgin eliminated the possibility (and fear) that a consort could usurp her power over the throne of England.

Recently, critics have been exploring some of the various strategies the queen used for dealing with the complexity of her gender position within a patriarchal society. Leah Marcus has argued that Elizabeth developed a political rhetoric which successfully supported the legal fiction of herself as “king.” While she often used “queen,” Elizabeth habitually referred to herself as “prince,” a term which in the sixteenth century clearly referred to a male ruler. Gradually she adopted more sexually ambiguous formulas: “the Queen's majesty,” “the Queen's most excellent majesty in her princely nature considering,” or “Monarch and prince sovereign.” As Marcus rightly observes, “subtly, perhaps not always consciously, [the queen] constructed a vocabulary of rule which was predominantly male.”⁶

These legal and rhetorical ploys became the underpinnings of the political fictions Elizabeth used to contain her threatening anomaly. It is important to remember, as Louis Adrian Montrose cogently argues, that the reign of a woman sovereign was threatening to the strictly patriarchal society she ruled, for: “as the female ruler of what was, at least in theory, a patriarchal society, Elizabeth incarnated a contradiction at the very center of the Elizabethan sex gender system. … [She] was a cultural anomaly: and this anomalousness—at once divine and monstrous—made her powerful and dangerous.”⁷ Elizabeth's royal fictions, then, were of necessity paradoxical. They had to present her as a powerful sovereign who was capable of successfully ruling England, yet, at the same time, they had to assure her populace that her reign posed them no threat. She managed to accomplish this dual purpose, as Jonathan Goldberg indicates, by offering her subjects a “show of love.” So successful was she that her “loving behaviour preconceived in the People's heades upon these considerations was then thoroughly confirmed, and indeede emplanted a wonderfull hope in them touchyinge her woorthy Governement in the reste of her Reyne.”⁸ In offering these shows of love, the queen was essentially wooing her people to her. She was aware that a woman was not thought of as a ruler and so could not assume the loyalty of her subjects. She had to win it.

In contrast, the entrance of Elizabeth's successor, James I, into London reinforced the innate power any male monarch could draw upon in a patriarchal society. Goldberg maintains that “sexual domination is implied in James's ravishing entrance” (p. 30) to the city, for the king arrived “like a bridegroom entering the bride” (p. 31). Since James could rely upon the existing metaphors and formulas of a patriarchal society, his fictions were not essential for establishing his power. Elizabeth had no such social tropes to draw upon. She was forced to become a consummate fiction-maker creating an elaborate political icon partially out of whole cloth, partially out of a symbolic list of strong women who were not necessarily rulers.⁹

Louis Montrose's recent work examines the ways in which Elizabeth secures her position on the throne through the uses of consciously iconographic fictions.¹⁰ He quotes Elizabeth as telling Leicester: “I will have here but one Mistress and no Master” (“Shaping,” 78). Montrose's statement—“to be her own mistress, her own master, the Queen had to be everyone's mistress and no one's” (78)—ties in very closely with both the concept of the queen's two bodies and the most powerful of Elizabeth's fictions, the virgin queen. The queen who adopted a virgin existence for political reasons could be—and often was—the “mistress” of everyone. She was the “mistress” of all her people as well as those courtiers and foreign princes she favored. Yet, given the social attitudes of the time, the queen could only support her political status as “multimistress” by being, in effect, actually a virgin. Thus, Elizabeth, to be successful in the fictions she created, had to make her body natural subordinate to her body politic by agreeing to give up a life of female sexuality in her body natural. Only two sexual options were open to her as a Renaissance woman: actual mistress to all men, or whore; “mistress” to only one, or wife. The former option would have violated accepted patriarchal religious and social custom, thus causing the queen to lose credibility as a monarch. The latter, while allowing her to retain credibility, would have effectively reduced her power by making her a wife, by definition in the Renaissance, a creature subservient to a husband/consort.

Once Elizabeth had made the decision to fuse her political and natural bodies into the image of the perpetual virgin, a strategy for successful rule presented itself. By becoming an official virgin, Elizabeth effectively removed herself from being seen as a “normal” woman—a powerless creature in the Renaissance political scheme. By redefining herself as a virgin—a woman who is “different” in very fundamental ways from other women, namely in her non-dependence on men to define her existence—Elizabeth defined herself as a powerful creature in Renaissance terms and assumed the power usually reserved exclusively for Renaissance men.

As the virginal “mistress of all,” Elizabeth was able to use the Petrarchan conventions of courtship to suit her own purposes. Traditionally, the male lover courted the often distant beloved. Elizabeth turned the convention around so that she became the Petrarchan lover who courted not a mistress, but a consort. Her skill in such courtship is obvious in her negotiations for a French husband. Elizabeth initially entered into marriage negotiations with the French in 1570 for two reasons. First, an heir of her body would insure and solidify her dynasty—thus blunting Mary Stuart's claims to the throne of England—as well as rendering assassination of the English sovereign an ineffectual political ploy. Second, the end of the third civil war in France meant that country would be free once again to annoy England. Thus, a marriage between Elizabeth and a French prince could eliminate both the fear of Elizabeth dying childless and the fear of French intervention in English affairs. Various difficulties intervened to prevent the marriage, but in April of 1572 the queen signed the Treaty of Blois with France against Spain. As Elizabeth's biographer, J. E. Neale, indicates, the queen's alliance with France “against the ruler of the Netherlands … ended her dangerous isolation and paralysed French interference in her dealings with Mary and Scotland” without requiring her to marry.¹¹ In fact, she managed to gain all of the political advantages a marriage with a French prince would have provided without having to sacrifice any of her sovereignty at home.

By 1578, a changed political situation made it again necessary to consider strengthening the English alliance with France. But popular opposition to a French Catholic husband caused Elizabeth to slow down negotiations until 1580 when a Spanish-papal alliance made it even more necessary for Elizabeth to ally with France. When the Duc d'Alençon finally arrived in England in October of 1581, he signed not a marriage contract, but an agreement for Elizabeth to finance his campaign in the Netherlands. But this agreement also bound Alençon to support the anti-Guise faction in France, a move which effectually prevented his brother, Henry III, from siding with Elizabeth's Guise enemies. With this agreement, Elizabeth achieved a mighty diplomatic victory: “She had outwitted Henry III and Catherine de'Medici, got the substance of an alliance with France—and was still unmarried.”¹² Elizabeth continued to make promises to marry Alençon—promises that strengthened his credit on the money markets—but by February of 1582 he was out of England. The courtship, according to Neale, “had served her purpose, for she had succeeded in keeping out of the Netherlands, and had frightened Philip with the prospect of an Anglo-French alliance” (p. 259). These incidents show to what extent Elizabeth used courtship—and the consequent promise of marriage—as a political strategy. Her courtships were not designed to be physically consummated in marriage, for that would have violated her position as virgin queen, but to be politically consummated in treaty or formal agreement. By thus retaining control of her sexuality, Elizabeth retained her power on the throne and redefined the concept of the female body politic. It became—through her uniting of her natural and political bodies—a powerful political tool.

In his queen of Egypt, Shakespeare created a female character who also used her body as a political tool. However, in direct contrast to Queen Elizabeth, Cleopatra is represented as uniting her body natural and her body politic by literally “using” her blatant sexuality to insure her power on the throne.¹³ Shakespeare is definitely aware of the anomalousness of the female sovereign's position and his creation of Cleopatra can be seen as a reflection upon the problems Elizabeth faced in trying to rule successfully in patriarchal Renaissance England.¹⁴ By displacing the situation of Antony and Cleopatra to Egypt, Shakespeare was able to explore these questions of the nature of female rule free from the possibility of court censure. For, although Shakespeare clearly does not use Cleopatra as an allegory for Queen Elizabeth, he does endow her with Elizabeth's talent for using fictions in order to reinforce her power on the throne. As we have seen, Elizabeth's major fiction of virgin queen united her body natural and body politic to serve her political ends, which were to insure her place on the throne and prevent her marriage to a consort who could potentially wrest power from her. Like Elizabeth, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is shown to have developed a successful strategy for rule that is based on uniting her body natural and her body politic. Unlike Elizabeth, she does this by making her political adversaries—the representatives of Rome—her lovers and binding them to her by bearing them children. In the Egypt Shakespeare has devised—an Egypt where “the holy priests / Bless [Cleopatra], when she is riggish”¹⁵—the granting of sexual favors becomes his character's main tool for obtaining and securing power. Shakespeare has demonstrated that Cleopatra has been using this technique long before she encountered Mark Antony. Pompey, in Act II, scene vi, calls to mind the story of Cleopatra's earlier connection with Julius Caesar. Caesar supported Cleopatra's claims to the throne of Egypt after she had appeared to him as a hoyden rolled up in a mattress (II, vi, 70). As Caesar's lover and the mother of his child, Cleopatra was able to secure her power on the throne. That she may have used the same technique to secure her power over Gnaeus Pompey may be deduced from Antony's calling attention to this previous liason (III, xiii, 117).

Cleopatra is similarly shown to use her sexuality to serve her political ends when she appears to Antony as Venus on the Cydnus (II, ii). In this scene, described by Enobarbus, we are presented with her most well-known fiction for securing power. This elaborate fiction of herself as a love/fertility goddess seems designed solely to seduce Antony to her table and her bed. But the seduction is not simply sexual. Before Cleopatra's arrival, Antony had been “Enthron'd i' the market-place” (II, ii, 215). But once she does arrive, he suddenly finds himself “alone, / Whistling to the air” (215-16) for all the inhabitants of the city find themselves drawn to Cleopatra. Would it not cause a defect in nature, we are told, the air itself would have left Antony to gaze upon the queen of Egypt. The authority of Antony's rulership—symbolized by his enthronement—seems quite dubious given Cleopatra's power to call the people to her even while Antony is holding court. Given this context, we can see Antony's submission to Cleopatra as political as well as sexual. This dual submission is reinforced by Agrippa's recalling her similar effect on Julius Caesar: “Royal wench! / She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; / He plough'd her, and she cropp'd” (226-28). The reference to both Antony and Caesar in such a few lines reinforces the similarity of the representation of Cleopatra's conquest of them. Her appealing to them both on a purely sexual level and bearing them children results in their “laying their swords to bed.” This image is, of course, sexual, but it is also symbolic of both men giving up their masculine power of rulership—symbolized by the sword—wholly to Cleopatra.¹⁶ That Mark Antony follows a pattern Caesar has established is further reinforced in act II, scene v, line 23, where Cleopatra reminds her waiting women that she has worn Antony's sword. Thus we can clearly see that Cleopatra is represented as using her sexual power to first conquer the sexual and then the political power of both Caesar and Antony. The swords can, of course, be seen as phallic images of male sexual and gender power, but they are also symbols of military and political power. Only defeated kings and generals take off or give up their swords to their conquerors.

Although Cleopatra has been ruling Egypt successfully, she is shown as finding herself in the odd position of having to validate—or to seem to have Rome validate—her position on the throne. As with all her major “policy statements,” Cleopatra is represented as making this one with a regal presentation of herself, her consort, and her heirs:

I' the market-place, on a tribunal silver'd,
Cleopatra and himself in chairs of gold
Were publicly enthron'd: at the feet sat
Caesarion, whom they call my father's son,
And all the unlawful issue that their lust
Since then hath made between them. Unto her
He gave the stablishment of Egypt, made her
Of lower Syria, Cyprus, Lydia,
Absolute queen.

(III, vi, 3-11)

Clearly this scene is problematical. It is described by Octavius “as 'tis reported” (19) and we have no evidence as to the trustworthiness or the point of view of the reporter.¹⁷ As a result, the character Octavius perceives Antony, his antagonist, to be the creator of it. He cannot conceive that a mere female ruler could mount such a celebration of power. Antony is the representative of the only real power Octavius acknowledges—Roman power—so he must be the instigator of the scene, the bestower of power.¹⁸ Yet Shakespeare has shown us that while Antony has no talent for regal spectacles, Cleopatra stages and uses them constantly—on the Cydnus (II, ii), for example, and in her Pyramid (V, ii). The queen of Egypt also appears here “In the habiliments of the goddess Isis” (17) with no indication that Antony appears in similar regal or divine garb. He is merely seated in a golden chair. Also, as I have indicated in my discussion of act II, scene ii, the fact that Antony may set himself up in a marketplace does not necessarily mean that the Egyptian people—or Cleopatra—accept him as a ruler. It is clear to me, therefore, that this enthronement is simply the visual representation of Cleopatra's conquering Antony and her setting him up as her consort. The fact that both Caesar's and Antony's children are part of this presentation indicates that the scene is, indeed, Cleopatra's. Further, Cleopatra's only reference to Antony as “Emperor” occurs in act V, scene ii, line 76 when he is dead and no longer a threat to her political sovereignty.

Unconsciously or not, Shakespeare has created a female figure within whose seemingly gratuitous voluptuousness lies a clever strategy for successful rule. Uniting her body natural and her body politic has allowed Cleopatra to use her body natural's sexuality as a means by which she can gain power in her body politic. She is represented as having ruled successfully in Egypt for many years by coopting the power of those sent to conquer her by “conquering” them sexually and making them her lovers. She has also secured the continuance of her dynasty through the production of various heirs who are destined to succeed her, and not their Roman fathers.

One way to understand the significance of Cleopatra's strategy of rule is to see that she makes of her body a different “text” than Renaissance patriarchal constructions of woman allowed.¹⁹ Typically, the male body was represented as an integrated, complete, male body in which the reason of the “head” controls the emotion/will of the “body” itself. Reason—that quality that separates man from the beasts—should control emotion to such a degree, in fact, that man should attain the Aristotelian “mean.” The hierarchical arrangement of head over body is reinforced by the hierarchical positioning of man as the rational “head” over woman as the emotion-bound “body.” This idea of the socially accepted complete and integrated male body in opposition to the socially unacceptable female body is present in Antony and Cleopatra. Octavius Caesar, the representative of Rome and, therefore, the character who determines Roman values in the play, is just such a complete and integrated male figure. In terms of the play, Octavius can only be defined by his position as Roman ruler. His complete devotion to the mean—as well as to an integrated, unitary selfhood—causes him to be seen as somewhat two-dimensional when compared to Antony. In fact, Octavius's refusal to take part in the celebrations on Pompey's galley reinforces his desire to retain a singular and immutable selfhood:

ANTONY.
Be a child o' the time.
OCTAVIUS.
Possess it, I'll make answer:
But I had rather fast from all, four days,
Than drink so much in one.

(II, vii, 98-101)

This belief that the body should be one (male) thing representing that patriarchal society it belongs to is one of the major reasons why the character Octavius cannot accept the changes Antony has undergone in Egypt. For most readers of the play, Antony can be seen as general and soldier, lover and politician, triumvir and emperor. His fullness is both his nature and his strength. For Octavius, however, Antony's fullness is his weakness. For Octavius, Antony should be only the man whose retreat from Modena “Was borne so like a soldier, that [his] cheek / So much as lank'd not” (I, iv, 70-71). The soldier's body is a strong and important image in the Roman empire.²⁰ As the man who gallantly survived the disastrous retreat from Modena with no ill effects, Antony becomes the image of an accepted male role in Roman society. Antony's soldier's reason managed to keep his body so under control that he maintained his “mean” and did not seem to suffer the excess that one would expect of someone on a starvation march. Thus, what Octavius, and Rome in the person of Enobarbus, admire about Antony is his ability to have a body which can be seen as a “text” for one specific ideal of Roman behavior. So strongly is Antony identified with his “soldier's body” that he is denigrated by Romans of all classes—from Octavius to Scarus—when he seems to act in any way that appears contrary to this sense of himself. Enobarbus, in fact, so completely accepts this singular view of Antony that he deserts him when he feels that his general has ceased to be a soldier.

Octavius is shown to turn against Antony once the soldier's body has changed, has become something else, has become something perhaps created by Cleopatra or tainted by her sexuality. Like Enobarbus and Scarus, Octavius can identify with the soldier who retreated from Modena. He fears the man who returns from Egypt to negotiate with him because that man has ceased to be the symbol of inflexible, immutable, male selfhood with whom Octavius can identify. No longer simply a Roman soldier, Antony has learned some of the values of the fluid and mutable Egyptian life. Later, once he finally returns to Egypt, he scorns the “boy Caesar” (III, xiii, 17), and is not completely unwilling to call attention to the “grizzled head” (17) he bears as both Cleopatra's lover and her general. Even though his Roman suicide shows how Antony is represented as retaining much of his Roman attitude toward his body, his speech to the clouds (IV, xiv, 2-14) shows how far he has moved from that rigid Roman selfhood to a willingness to accept the variability of life that Cleopatra and her realm promise him.

Octavius's fear of Cleopatra is based on the fact that he is the representative of a society that has very clearly defined gender roles which are based on how the body is perceived. This society, like that of Renaissance England, has created as its norm an image of an integrated male body ruled by the “head.” In contrast, it has created an image of a female body that is the opposite of the male body and is controlled by emotion rather than reason. In order to deal with the essential cultural fear of woman and woman's sexual power over man, this society has attempted to control female power by strategies that involve dismemberment and/or silence.

Francis Barker indicates that the effect of patriarchal power “in one of its more spectacular forms” can be seen in “the delight to be had in dismembering a woman's body” (p. 86). The ultimate aim of this symbolic dismemberment is to grant power to a man through destruction of an adversary/woman. Barker analyzes this theory in terms of Andrew Marvell's poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the poet never speaks to or of his mistress as a “complete” woman, but rather as a collection of discrete pieces: “Thine Eyes,” “thy Forehead,” “each Breast,” “every part,” “the rest.” The ultimate effect of this dismemberment of the female body—“uttered within a syntax more reminiscent of taxonomy than of the expectations of love poetry” (p. 89)—is its silence. As her body is torn apart, the mistress's ability to speak is also dismembered and in place of lover and mistress are two very different people: “the inexorable male voice which utters the poem” and “an empty place” (p. 91).

Nancy J. Vickers also speaks of the strategy of dismemberment as a way of silencing women. She examines the male fear of women in the context of the Diana-Actaeon myth as it appears in certain of Petrarch's poems. Petrarch's Actaeon-like speaker attempts to prevent his Diana from dismembering him by focusing only upon individual aspects of her body—her hair, hand, foot, and eyes—rather than upon the whole woman. Vickers thus shows a clear connection between the male fear of female power and the Renaissance insistence upon female silence. Speech becomes power; to deny a woman speech is to effectively deny her power.²¹

The effects of this “dismembered” view of women can be seen in Antony and Cleopatra in the characters of Octavia and Fulvia, two women who use more traditional means to try to gain power or exist within the patriarchal power structure of Rome. Octavia is shown as accepting the traditional woman's position as subservient to her brother Octavius for she is, as Caesar says, “a great part of myself” (III, ii, 24). She is virtually his object to use as he will and allows herself to become a political wife to Antony as a result of “The power of Caesar, and / His power unto Octavia” (II, ii, 143-44).²² Octavia has the potential to be an ideal wife since she “is of a holy, cold, and still conversation” (II, vi, 119-20). She is shown to deny herself so readily, in fact, that she effectively loses the power of public speech, communicating almost exclusively in whispers to Octavius (III, ii). In this she becomes as voiceless as Marvell's mistress or Petrarch's Diana, as described by Barker and Vickers. In direct contrast to the “statue” Octavia (III, iii, 21), Cleopatra never loses her power of speech. With her speech she controls Octavia, like Caesar, by devising an entirely new “creature” to suit her own view of what she feels Octavia should be (II, iii). As Catherine Belsey indicates, speech is symbolic of power in patriarchal society: “To speak is to possess meaning, to have access to the language which defines, delimits and locates power. To speak is to become a subject. But for women to speak is to threaten the system of differences which gives meaning to patriarchy.”²³ This is so for Cleopatra. Like the women of the romances, she remains “in command,” as Inga-Stina Ewbank points out, because she maintains control of her rhetoric, of the resources of language.²⁴ Abandoned by Antony, Octavia's only place is as a silent shadow behind her brother in Rome. “Chaste, silent, and obedient”—to use Suzanne Hull's phrase—Octavia represents the ideal Renaissance woman.²⁵

If Octavia can be seen as accepting the ideal silent, dismembered female body of the patriarchy, Fulvia can be seen as refusing this identification. By contrast, she is shown as trying to assume the role—and by extension the “body”—of a man and gain power by leading her armies against Rome.²⁶ This is a dangerous stance. Fulvia does not realize that her Amazonian role—essentially a direct usurpation of male military means to power—allows her to be viewed as a direct threat to male authority. Her death underlines her unsuccessful attempts to use specifically male means to power. Cleopatra is represented as adopting neither the “morally correct” behavior of Octavia, nor the military power of Fulvia.

In direct contrast to these women characters, Cleopatra is never shown as silenced or dismembered and is thus like a male body, though committed to mutability in a way very different from the marble-constant Romans. Cleopatra is shown neither as a part of anyone, like Octavia, nor as a part of herself—eyes, mouth, genitals, etc. She is always presented as a complete body, but not one that is rigid and immutable. Her body is highly eroticized and desirable, yet at the same time it is the body of a goddess (II, ii; III, vi; V, ii) or a mother (V, ii). It becomes “wrinkled deep in time” (I, v, 24) as she passes from her “salad days” (I, v, 73) to her current age and it can be burnt by the sun (I, v, 28) or blown to abhorring by water flies (V, ii, 59-60). In its ability to be complete and mutable, therefore, it is quite different both from the accepted female body that is silent, dismembered, or a male plaything, and from the accepted male body that is fixed and immutable. Thus, Shakespeare has represented Cleopatra's body as being something vitally different from existing Renaissance stereotypes of male and female bodies.

Given the change Shakespeare makes in the nature of Cleopatra's body, he still has to have her deal—as Queen Elizabeth dealt—with the male fear of female power as well as the seemingly paradoxical patriarchal belief that “female power” is a contradiction in terms. One strategy Elizabeth used to deal with the male fear of female power was to present herself as androgynous. She often used male rhetoric—as Leah Marcus has indicated—to refer to herself in official documents or pronouncements, such as her speech at Tilbury where she affirmed that the heart and stomach that resided in her weak and feeble female body was, indeed, kingly, that is, male. Elizabeth consciously tried to deal with the Renaissance perception of the inadequacy of female power by implying that her androgynous power was greater than the sum of its male and female parts. Although willing to appear in armor as defender of her realm, the queen deliberately shunned comparison with Amazons who were perceived as threats to male social systems.²⁷ Elizabeth's androgyny allowed her to avoid the destructive extremes of both male and female power and locate a middle ground where she could positively unite the qualities of each sort of power.

Cleopatra's androgyny is implied in act II, scene v, lines 22-23, where she puts her “tires and mantles” upon Antony and wears “his sword Philippan.” However, unlike Elizabeth at Tilbury, this vision of the verbally adept Cleopatra complete with Antony's surrogate penis comes dangerously close to the type of destructive female as outlined by Vickers²⁸ and dangerously close to the Renaissance image of the Amazon as female destructive power set up in opposition to patriarchal society. But by claiming power through a symbolic dismemberment and its accompanying marginalization, Cleopatra uses the very techniques Barker and Vickers describe male poets as using to marginalize women. The men Cleopatra is shown to marginalize are her political opponents. Though she does not dismember Octavius, she marginalizes him by referring to him as a child—“scarce-bearded Caesar” (I, i, 21). Antony is reduced to a surrogate penis. While he is alive, Cleopatra takes his sword to wear leaving him the symbolic trappings of a marginalized femininity, as Octavius indicates: [Antony] is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (I, iv, 5-7), Antony's death is lamented in the phallic line “The soldier's pole is fall'n” (IV, xv, 65). But, unlike Petrarch's Laura, Cleopatra is never punished for a behavior that is consciously threatening to male beliefs. While I agree that her wearing Antony's sword is an attempt to show her taking control of a power that can only be called male, Shakespeare rewards her for her audacity by allowing her to become a powerful and successful ruler. Shakespeare manages to accomplish this by showing that Cleopatra's power is different from that of the Amazon who simply mimics the destructive power of patriarchy. Shakespeare shows us that Cleopatra uses power in a more creative and generative way, as indicated by Peter Erickson:

The play invites us to reconsider the traditional definition of masculinity as an identity founded on military success. … Antony and Cleopatra engage in a gender-role exchange that enlarges but does not erase the original and primary sexual identity of each. … Instead, what is involved is a crossing back and forth over a boundary no longer seen as a rigid barrier dividing the two sexes into two absolutely separate groups.²⁹

Erickson sees act II, scene v as an attempt by Antony and Cleopatra to share—rather than simply to exchange—power in a sort of “heterosexual androgyny” (p. 133). Yet Cleopatra is not depicted as making androgyny as important a part of her political strategy as Elizabeth did, and so uses it rarely. Nevertheless, Cleopatra can be seen as revolutionary not only because she is a woman who holds regal power, but because she creates a new and much broader kind of female power out of existing, if limiting, strategies of male power.

Although Shakespeare has shown Cleopatra throughout the play to be as successful a ruler in Egypt as Elizabeth is in England, at the end she seems to abandon her own theory of rule. While she bargains as well as she can with Proculeius (V, ii), there is a sense that her dealings with him are merely superficial. What is even more curious is that she does not attempt to use her sexuality to control Octavius. In her one brief encounter with him Cleopatra does not act the temptress, or indeed any of her other favored roles. Instead, she treats Octavius as her conqueror:

                                                                      Sir, the gods
Will have it thus, my master and my lord
I must obey. …
                              … … … … …
                                                                                Sole sir o'the world,
                              … … … … …
                                        I have
Been laden with like frailties, which before
Have often sham'd our sex.
                              … … … … …
My Master, and my lord!

(V, ii, 114-16; 119; 121-23; 189)

Although Cleopatra is fully aware of Caesar's plot against her—“He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself” (V, ii, 190-91)—she never tries to bring him under her sway. That she creates an elaborate final image of herself as dead queen of Egypt and eternal Isis to counter Octavius's plan to parade her in triumph through Rome does not eliminate the fact that this is not her traditional way of dealing with a political adversary. Octavius has not been turned into a lover, as Julius Caesar and Antony had been; Cleopatra has merely allowed him to witness her last role.

I see Cleopatra as being forced to abandon her previously successful strategies for rule because of her relationship to Antony. Cleopatra's political tactics are based on sexual use of her body natural to serve her political purposes. Her love for Antony and her devotion to him—“Husband, I come” (V, ii, 286)—cause her to refrain from using her body natural in a political manner. Since she has given her heart to Antony, she has, essentially, given away her body natural and removed it from service to her body politic. Thus, she is at a disadvantage when meeting Octavius, for she is without the major component of her political bargaining strategy. She has to rely on her wits alone, without her sexuality, to subdue Octavius. This partial power is not sufficient. Cleopatra is forced to destroy both her bodies in a final fiction that manages to satisfy them both. Her magnificent death scene convinces Octavius that Cleopatra died as a queen: “Bravest at the last, / She levell'd at our purposes, and being royal / Took her own way” (V, ii, 333-35), yet also as a lover: “but she looks like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace” (V, ii, 344-46). Cleopatra may be defeated, but a paradoxical sense of triumph surrounds her at her end so that we wonder whether she has really won or lost.

Ultimately, it is difficult not to see Cleopatra's triumph as that of a woman ruler who manages to rule successfully despite overwhelming social pressures. Like Elizabeth I—whom Shakespeare seems to have had in mind when he created her—Cleopatra is shown to work against existing patriarchal stereotypes to create a strategy for rule that works within the conditions of her society. She is represented as actively using her body natural's sexuality to support her body politic's place on the throne. Also like Elizabeth, Cleopatra manages to counter the threats caused by the fear of female power by creating a more positive, more androgynous kind of power. Shakespeare even manages to go beyond this examination of women in positions of power to consider the dilemma of those women in patriarchal society—as represented by Octavia and Fulvia—who are not able to create successful strategies for dealing with the restrictive social conditions and social fears that control their existence.

By reading Cleopatra through the text of Queen Elizabeth I's strategies for rule, a figure somewhat different from the “traditional” one appears. This reading is a direct result of my persistent exasperation with what can be called the “traditional” reading of Cleopatra's character, namely that which sees her as the whore who ruined a great triumvir but, at the end, was conquered by love and took her life in remorse.³⁰ What annoys me most about this reading is its proponents' willingness to be blinded by Dryden's “all for love” romanticism and their unwillingness to examine the political space in which Cleopatra's character is figured. My own reading of Antony and Cleopatra is informed by the new work in historicist criticism and the feminist readings it has produced.³¹ Historicist criticism, as Louis Montrose sees it, is a critical practice which strives

to resituate canonical literary texts among the multiple forms of writing, and in relation to the non-discursive practices and institutions, of the social formation in which those texts have been produced—while, at the same time, recognizing that this project of historical resituation is necessarily the textual construction of critics who are themselves historical subjects.

(p. 6)

Thus, in an attempt to examine just how Shakespeare explores questions of female rule in his creation of Cleopatra, I have examined the strategies Queen Elizabeth I used to both create and employ a specific kind of female power in a world which was hostile to the thought of female power in any form. My historicist method of analysis—a method that uses literary and nonliterary materials to examine how the question of female political power is represented and managed in the Renaissance—is somewhat at odds with feminist criticism which has not traditionally concerned itself with an examination of female political power. However, my reading is clearly feminist in intent. Therefore, I term my particular reading of Cleopatra “historicist-feminist.”

As a female ruler who took power and controlled the various aspects of her rule, Elizabeth challenged and subverted in an essential way the established Renaissance ideology of patriarchal rule. Yet to subvert this major ideology in such an essential way was highly dangerous. There was no telling how long Elizabeth could survive as queen—given her society's views of ruling women as expressed by John Knox—if she consistently subverted the major ideology to such a degree. So she contained her subversion within the accepted female paradigm of a contained female sexuality—virginity. Her genius lay in maintaining the tension between the power of her subversion and the fiction of her submission within her containment, thus enabling her to retain her power on the throne while reducing the threat of her female sexuality.

In Antony and Cleopatra, one can examine just this question of the subversion of ideology through the character Cleopatra. The difference between Cleopatra and Elizabeth is that Shakespeare has allowed Cleopatra to subvert the ruling Roman (English) ideology to an even greater degree than Elizabeth by living as a sexually fulfilled woman. Elizabeth sacrificed her sexuality to contain her subversion; Shakespeare allows Cleopatra literally to use her sexuality to gain her power and to create the subversive ideology of her reign. In this way, her power is enormous and shown to be a major threat to the established patriarchal ideology of Rome. Cleopatra is not shown to take steps, as Elizabeth had done, to contain her power. Shakespeare takes these steps. His depiction of Cleopatra's refusal to use her sexuality to dominate Octavius and his representation of her acceptance of death become the means by which her subversion is contained.

Instead of the simple tale of the great general ruined, Antony and Cleopatra becomes an important examination of the nature of power, the differences between various types of powers, and the means by which dominant ideologies are displayed and subverted. Further, Shakespeare's representation of Cleopatra becomes an examination of the means by which a female monarch can secure regal power even within a society whose basic tenets have denied her, as a woman, virtually all power. Antony and Cleopatra, then, becomes a text of female political theory which owes its creation, I maintain, to the earlier text written by Queen Elizabeth I herself.

Notes

1. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1972), pp. 16-17. Spelling modernized as regards tildas and long s.

2. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 591, 623.

3. Specifically, such works as: Niccolò Machiavelli, II Principe (1513), Thomas More, Utopia (1515-16), Desiderius Erasmus, Institutio princips christiani (1516), Baldesar Castiglione, II Cortegiano (1528), and Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour Devised by Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight (1531).

4. Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer and Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980), p. 3.

5. Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 12. Axton's work, as the title indicates, focuses on drama of the Elizabethan period that was concerned with urging the queen to marry and produce an heir, thus insuring the succession. Axton bases her generalizations on Edmund Plowden's reference to the monarch's two bodies in 1561, as reported by F. W. Maitland in “The Crown as Corporation,” in Collected Papers, ed. H. A. L. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), and on Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). Axton feels that Kantorowicz “did not explore the Elizabethan setting in any depth” (p. 15). Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983), 61-94, esp. 77, also mentions the concept of the queen's two bodies.

6. Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare's Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 135-53.

7. Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies,’” 77, 78.

8. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 30. Goldberg is quoting a contemporary reaction to Elizabeth's first procession through London in 1558/9.

9. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 153-82.

10. Louis Montrose, “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELH 10 (1980), 153-82.

11. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (1934; rpt. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1960), p. 226.

12. Ibid., p. 257.

13. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Miola observes that, “threatened on all sides by hostile forces, both Dido and Cleopatra ensnare important Roman soldiers in nets of luxury and concupiscence” (p. 123).

14. Helen Morris, “Queen Elizabeth I ‘Shadowed’ in Cleopatra,” Huntington Library Quarterly 32 (1969), 271-78, and Keith Rinehart, “Shakespeare's Cleopatra and England's Elizabeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972), 81-86. Morris maintains that the Cleopatra in North's Plutarch “must” have reminded Shakespeare of Queen Elizabeth and “this resemblance was at the back of his mind while he was writing the play.” Rinehart indicates that parallels exist between Elizabeth and Cleopatra because “both were queens regnant, both used courtship as a mainstay of their statecraft, and both attained apotheosis of a sort as female deities.” Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), points out that Antony's reference to Cleopatra as “this great fairy” (IV, viii, 12) can be read as a reference to Elizabeth I as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene (p. 65).

15. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), II, ii, 239-40. All further references to the play will be to this edition.

16. “Agrippa associates Cleopatra's sexuality with the fecundity of nature [in II, ii, 227-28]. … The wordplay makes the point very tidily: the sword is unmistakably both a sexual and a military weapon; and the military must be put aside (or laid to bed) before the sexual can be literally laid to bed, or put to use. In the image, the sword has been beaten into a plowshare: there are suggestions of that great generative sympathy in nature which occurs only when Mars succumbs to Venus and lays his sword to bed” (Adelman, The Common Liar, p. 95). Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), argues that Cleopatra uses Antony “to advance her political schemes for the resurgence of Alexander's empire” (p. 159).

17. Janet Adelman, in The Common Liar, points out many times that “in Antony and Cleopatra, information of all kinds is unreliable” and “we frequently find that we can make no judgment at all” regarding the reliability of any evidence that is reported, Roman or Egyptian (pp. 34, 29).

18. Richard S. Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) believes that, in this scene, “Cleopatra … herself has been bewitched by the new political stature Antony has given her” (p. 112). Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation, indicates that “Cleopatra is politically astute and wins from Antony a promise to ‘piece / Her opulent throne with kingdoms’ (I, v, 45-46). This local Egyptian naturalistic interpretation culminates in their ritual coronation at Alexandria, where Cleopatra ‘In the habiliments of the goddess Isis’ watches Antony proclaim her and their children rulers of the East (III, vi, 17). But this coronation of the earthly Isis and her Bacchic consort provokes full-scale Roman opposition” (p. 207). Bono forgets that Julius Caesar's child figures in this enthronement as well as Antony's children and that Shakespeare did not tell us that Antony appeared in the guise of Bacchus.

19. Francis Barker, “Into the Vault,” in The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, ed. Francis Barker (London: Methuen, 1984); Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265-79; and Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985).

20. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome, points out that Caesar and Antony share “a common heritage: the Roman tradition of military honor” (p. 129).

21. Vickers, “Diana Described,” 273, 278-79.

22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), observes that men in patriarchal society often “consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females” (p. 38).

23. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 191.

24. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Shakespeare's Portrayal of Women: A 1970's View,” in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 222-29, esp. p. 224.

25. Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books For Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982). Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985) sees Octavia as “victimized” by Antony and Octavius (p. 144).

26. Phyllis Rackin, “Anti-Historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories,” Theater Journal 37 (1985), 329-44, indicates that Margaret of Anjou is, in some ways, like Fulvia. Margaret is “a virago who defies her husband [and] leads armies into battle … [and] has a ‘tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide’” (p. 336).

27. Celeste Turner Wright, “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” SP 73 (1940), 433-56, esp. pp. 433, 449, 456, and Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth Century Drama (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), p. 14.

28. Indeed, Adelman, The Common Liar, observes that a clothing exchange “inevitably suggests a disastrous exchange of sexual authority and consequently a violation of the proper hierarchical relation between man and woman. This disturbance in sexual hierarchy can be seen morally as a violation of the proper hierarchical relation between reason and will” (p. 91).

29. Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 131, 133. Miola speaks of the “vision of sexual passion as emasculating and antithetical to the male business of war” (p. 139). He also suggests that Egypt is “a reign of transshifting shapes and forms where men behave like women, women behave like men, and both act like gods” (p. 129).

30. Michael Steppat, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra” From 1607 to 1905 (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1980), analyzes historical attitudes toward Cleopatra. Robert E. Fitch, “No Greater Crack?” Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (1968), 3-17, provides a limited, but helpful, survey. A more detailed compendium of critical attitudes toward the queen of Egypt can be found in L. T. Fitz, “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977), 297-316. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar, also examines much of the critical history of attitudes toward Cleopatra in her various notes.

31. I refer specifically to the works by Barker, Belsey, Bristol, Erickson, Marcus, Montrose, Rackin, Sedgwick, and Vickers mentioned above, but additionally to those by Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982); Louis Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 5-12; Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 13-43; and Marilyn L. Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), which deal with theoretical and practical aspects of historicist criticism.