Written only a few years after Othello, Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7) looks at the intersection of racial difference, colonial expansion, and gender from a very different angle. In this play, Shakespeare reaches back to events which had occurred in the first century bc, and which had been repeatedly narrated by Roman and other storytellers from that time to his own. By taking as his central figure a foreign queen who was already a symbol of wanton sexuality and political seduction in European culture, Shakespeare comments on a long tradition of writing in which sexual passion expresses, but also ultimately sabotages, imperial ambition. Shakespeare harnesses a long history and wide geography to early modern English anxieties about women's power, foreigners, and empire. This chapter will highlight this layering of past and present, suggesting that racial ideologies fuse ideas received from different historical periods, and from both literate and popular cultures.

In an introduction to the play, Michael Neill contrasts ‘Cleopatra's playful sense of herself as “with Phoebus's amorous pinches black”’ (1.5.28) with ‘Othello's anguished “Haply for I am black”’ (3.3.267) in order to argue that ‘the issue of racial difference’ in this play is ‘relatively insignificant’.¹ Cleopatra's attitude to her own skin colour might indicate that she does not think of it as a sign of inferiority, but it does not tell us that her colour is unimportant in Roman constructions of her as an Egyptian wanton, as the very antithesis of a chaste Roman wife. And Cleopatra is far from indifferent to what the Romans think of her, although one of her strategies is to play up to, and exaggerate, their images of her. Even if she were indifferent, of course, that would not be evidence for a lack of racial tension in the play as a whole. Although skin colour is not the only marker of such tension, it is a good place to start examining different aspects of the history and myth of Cleopatra.

Although Cleopatra calls herself ‘black’, and Philo calls her ‘tawny’ (1.1.6), none of the repeated, hyperbolic, and contradictory descriptions of her in the play tells us much about her physically. She is the ‘wrangling queen, / Whom everything becomes’ (1.2.50-1); she is both ‘Rare Egyptian’ (2.2.224) and ‘foul Egyptian’ (4.13.10); she is a ‘triple-turned whore’ (4.13.13), ‘a right gipsy’ (4.13.28), and a ‘vile lady’ (4.15.22). Enobarbus' lyrical account of her on the barge describes the boat, the pavilion, the attendants, the perfume, the effect Cleopatra has on others—everything but her appearance: ‘For her own person, / It beggared all description’ (2.2.204-5). As with Othello, critics have sometimes suggested that Cleopatra is ‘tawny’ rather than black, and some Renaissance texts indeed registered the difference—Heylyn's Microcosmus says that Egyptians are ‘not black, but tawny and brown’.² Shakespeare uses both terms in relation to Cleopatra, and many of his contemporaries used them interchangeably, referring to the ‘tawny colour’ of the ‘Blackamoor’. Moreover, ‘tawny’ skin was not necessarily viewed as less offensive than black—Portia's suitor Morocco is called ‘tawny’ and yet she says he has the ‘complexion of a devil’.³

We know that the historical Cleopatra, like the rest of the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt, was of Greek descent, although the ethnicity of her grandmother is not known, and has led to some speculation about whether or not Cleopatra was of mixed race, or of dark colour. To complicate matters, ancient Greece was culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse. Africa, especially Egypt, deeply influenced Greek society. This was acknowledged by the Roman writer Plutarch, whose Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, in Sir Thomas North's English translation, was a source for Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The Egyptians themselves were also a highly diverse people; Herodotus described them as having black skins and woolly hair, but both black and white persons are depicted on Egyptian vases and artifacts of the time. However, there was a distance between the Greek rulers of Egypt and its citizens—the rulers did not integrate with the common people or speak their language, although they identified strongly with the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis.

In spite of this gap between Egyptian rulers and the populace, Roman historians identified Cleopatra as Egyptian; Cleopatra herself laid the ground for this by being the only Ptolemy to learn Egyptian, and to control popular unrest. Roman accounts of her as a luxurious wanton, given only to pleasure, deliberately ignore the fact that she was an astute political leader (retrospectively some Egyptian histories even cast her as a nationalist).⁴ Like Ptolemaic queens before her, she encouraged identification of herself with Egyptian goddesses. Whereas they had used a single or a double ‘uraeus’ or cobra head as their symbol, Cleopatra used three cobras, perhaps in order to indicate her control over Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt as well as the additional territories which Antony gifted her. For the Romans, an identification between Cleopatra and Egypt was strategically necessary in order to highlight an absolute division between Rome and Egypt.

In Shakespeare's play too, Cleopatra is repeatedly identified with Egypt. She is called ‘Egypt’ by Antony (1.5.42; 3.11.51 and 56; 4.13.25; 4.16.19), by herself (1.3.41), and by her followers (4.16.74); she is ‘Egypt's widow’ (2.1.37), an ‘Egyptian dish’ (2.6.126), a ‘serpent of Egypt’ (2.7.26), a ‘serpent of Old Nile’ (1.5.25); her charms are, for Antony, ‘these strong Egyptian fetters’ (1.2.109) which he must break free from. In early modern Europe, Egyptians were widely grouped with other dark-skinned people of Africa and Asia as the descendants of Ham. Africanus repeats this belief that ‘the Egyptians … fetch their original from Mesraim the son of Chus, the son of Cham, the son of Noe [Noah]’ (857). Thus, despite only two explicit references to it, Cleopatra's darkness is reinforced by suggestions that Cleopatra embodies Egypt.

But which Egypt does she embody? In early modern England, Egypt was known as a land of ancient religion, philosophy, and learning. There was an interest in Egyptian antiquity, and a flourishing trade in mummies, which were sold in vast quantities because they were used in various medicines—an English merchant, John Sanderson, recorded that over 600 pounds of mummy were exported at the end of the sixteenth century.⁵ But Egypt was also increasingly identified as a Turkish dominion. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1516; Leo Africanus, in his influential History of Africa, claimed that he had been in the city of Rasid when ‘Selim the great Turke returned this way from Alexandria’.⁶ According to Africanus, Egypt was now devoid of ‘any true Egyptians’ because the majority of the population, ‘embracing the Mahumetan religion, have mingled themselves among the Arabians and Moores’ (856). Henry Blount's A Voyage into the Levant confirmed that ‘the light’ of the ancient glory of Egypt was now ‘almost quite extinct’:

Now as for the Justice and Government, it is perfectly Turkish … only it exceeds all other parts of Turkey for rigor, and extortion; the reason is because the Turk well knows the Egyptian nature, above all other Nations, to be malicious, treacherous and effeminate, and therefore dangerous, not fit for Arms, or any other trust; nor capable of being ruled by a sweet hand.⁷

Blount sees Turkish cruelty as justified by the effeminate and malicious ‘nature’ of Egyptians, but Africanus suggests that they have become mixed with their Muslim masters. In similar vein, Cesare Vecellio's costume book depicted a lady of Cairo as heavily veiled in the Islamic fashion. …

The view that Egypt no longer contained pure Egyptians was reinforced by the confusion between Egyptians and the gypsies who had arrived in England from Scotland in 1500. Although historical research now traces their roots to Northern India, in early modern England gypsies were supposed to have originated in Egypt. Andrew Borde's First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1542) connects their migration to England with the absence of ‘real Egyptians’ in Egypt itself: ‘The people of the country be swart and doth go disguised in their apparel, contrary to other nations they be light fingered and … have little manner. … There be few or none of the Egyptians that doth dwell in Egypt for Egypt is repleted now with the infidel aliens.’⁸ Thus, Egypt has been overtaken by ‘infidel aliens’ or Turks, just as England has been invaded with ‘swart’ Egyptians. In Shakespeare's time, then, ‘Egypt’ and ‘Egyptian’ did not indicate any one ‘race’ but conjured up images of various peoples, all of whom were regarded as dark-skinned and associated with ‘Moors’. The effect of this confusion was to resurrect a central division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ which had been a feature of classical Roman and Greek literatures. Shakespeare's play refers to Cleopatra as both Egyptian and a gypsy, but it also identifies Egypt as the ‘East’; more importantly, it plays upon a dichotomy between Rome and Egypt in which each is defined by its difference from the other.

HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND EMPIRE

Imperial conquest is routinely demonstrated through the sexual possession of conquered women. Julius Caesar had an affair not just with Cleopatra but with Eunoë, wife of King Bogudes the Moor. Alexander, whom Antony tried to emulate, married Roxana, daughter of a Persian king he conquered. But neither Alexander nor Caesar allowed their sexual liaisons to distract them from their imperial enterprise, and both returned home to conduct other missions of conquest. Antony's association with Cleopatra, by contrast, reversed the dynamics of sexual possession and signified not his victory but hers. Roman writers were alarmed that Antony ‘forgot his nation, his name, the toga, the axes of power and degenerated wholly into the style of that monster [Cleopatra], in mind, in dress, in all manner of life’.⁹ This is the fear we see animated in Antony and Cleopatra.

The historical Octavius (who went on to reign as the Emperor Augustus) represented his battle against Antony and Cleopatra as a patriotic war to save Rome. The opposition between a masculine Rome and a feminine ‘East’ animates Virgil's epic, The Aeneid, which was written to celebrate Augustus' reign. The epic narrates the story of another famous African queen, Dido, who was loved but abandoned by the Roman voyager Aeneas. Aeneas' shield is decorated with a depiction of the battle of Actium in which Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavius. On one side stands lofty Augustus; on the other

                                                                                                              Antony,
Egypt and all the East; Antony, victor
Over all the lands of dawn and the Red Sea,
Marshals the foes of Rome, himself a Roman,
With—horror!—an Egyptian wife.(10)

Aeneas' resolve to leave Dido and return to his Roman duty implicitly criticizes Antony's capitulation to Cleopatra and celebrates the victory of Octavius/Augustus over the pair. Shakespeare's play returns to this victory, but infuses the event with loss and tragedy.

Edward Said's Orientalism suggests that such an opposition between ‘the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’ has animated ‘European imaginative geography’ from Greek times till the present.¹¹ This suggestion has been criticized for being ahistorical—how could the same binary opposition be so important to different periods and cultures? Said, his critics say, is attributing a colonial vision of the East to pre-colonial times. As already discussed, the ‘East’ could hardly be regarded as Europe's ‘other’ during the Renaissance. Europeans desired to enter the powerful economic networks of the Mediterranean, Levant, North Africa, and Asia, feared the military might of the Turks, and were dazzled by the wealth and sophistication of many Eastern kingdoms. In fact recent scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Europe was really on the periphery of powerful economic networks whose centre was in the East, and that European global domination did not begin till the eighteenth century.¹² Moreover, there were interactions, cross-overs, and mixing between East and West which are overlooked by the suggestion of a binary opposition.

However, while we need to ‘de-centre’ Europe by historicizing its global dominance rather than assuming it was always in place, there are two central questions that we still have to contend with. One: if early modern Europe was peripheral to other powerful global economies, what explains the tilting of balance in its favour in the eighteenth century? A partial answer is that, though in the seventeenth century neither colonialism nor capitalism were fully formed, their wheels had been set in motion. Europeans may not have been able to colonize every part of the globe in the seventeenth century but certainly their position in the New World or in parts of the old (such as the Moluccas, or Goa) cannot be described as ‘peripheral’. And two: even before colonialism, European (including English) writings do rehearse and repeat certain ideas about cultural and geographic difference. The Roman Empire may not have established Europe's global mastery, indeed the very idea of Europe did not exist at that time, but Roman imperial conquests did spawn negative images that were appropriated by later writers, especially because countries such as England looked towards Rome to establish their own genealogy as an imperial nation.

To acknowledge these repetitions is not necessarily to suggest a static unchanging discourse, or to misunderstand the actual power relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in different periods. Often, literary texts as well as historical documents reach back to previously established motifs in order to make them serve entirely new purposes, including that of establishing or asserting a superiority that does not exist. Shakespeare drew from Plutarch's tales about Cleopatra, but also infused them with other literary and cultural myths, as well as more contemporary materials, not because England was already an empire but because empire was one of the subjects of his play. Thus the older idea of a division between East and West, and specifically Egypt and Rome, energizes his play, although, as we will see, it is not as if England stands in for Rome in any straightforward way.

To some extent, all early modern European writings about non-European lands rehearse older accounts. For example, the Greek writer Herodotus had initiated the myth of Egypt as a land of inversion:

The Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay as home and do the weaving … men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women pass water standing up, men sitting down.¹³

Johannes Boemus's The Fardle of Facions (1555) repeats this idea almost verbatim, but also infuses a specifically English imagery into it by commenting that Egyptian women ‘revelled at the Tavern and kept lusty cheer: And the men sat at home spinning, and working of lace and such other things women are wont’.¹⁴

Picking up on this, Richard Knolles writes that Egyptian women always choose their own husbands. Similarly, Leo Africanus informs readers that the women of Cairo ‘are so ambitious and proud, that all of them disdain either to spin or to play the cooks: wherefore their husbands are constrained to buy victuals ready dressed at the cooks' shops …’ (883). In repeating the idea of gender reversal, each of these reports also infuses it with contemporary references. Henry Blount even attributed it to Turkish occupation of Egypt, arguing that because Egyptians were a ‘false and dangerous people’, the Turkish Sultan Selim decided not to employ them as soldiers but use them to produce food for all his own people, ‘whereby, without scandal, the Nation is made effeminate and disarmed’ (54).

However, this is not to suggest that as time went on, there was a greater attempt to rationalize the idea of gender reversal. Often the opposite was true—as late as 1653, Bulwer's Anthropometamorphoses claimed that Egyptian men have breasts large enough to suckle their babies, while the women have ‘small and manlike Breasts’.¹⁵ Thus, what older texts regard as inversion of custom, Bulwer transforms into biological difference.

‘MANKIND’ WOMEN

Gender reversal is also central to the world of Antony and Cleopatra. Early in the play, Caesar comments that Antony's revelry in Egypt has effeminized him; Antony is now

                                                                                          not more manlike
Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he.

(1.4.5-7)

Whereas in the writings mentioned earlier, gender reversal is contained within Egypt, in this play, it becomes an aspect of Egypt's relationship with Rome. By effeminizing Antony, Cleopatra threatens the hierarchy between imperial Rome and its dominion, Egypt:

I laughed him out of patience, and that night
I laughed him into patience, and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed,
Then put my tires and mantles on him whilst
I wore his sword Phillipan.

(2.5.19-23)

Such cross-dressing is not just bedroom play but manifests a larger reversal of gender roles. Cleopatra persuades Antony that they should fight the Romans by sea rather than land, a decision that is seen to unman not just Antony but all his Roman soldiers. Enobarbus pleads with Antony: ‘Transform us not to women’ (4.2.36) and Camidius laments: ‘So our leader's led / And we are women's men’ (3.7.68-9).

In Shakespeare's England too, debates about appropriate clothing were actually battles about status and identity. Authorities legislated the kind of clothing appropriate to people of different genders and classes. A proclamation of 1588 seeking to enforce ‘the Statutes and Orders for Apparel’ frowned against the ‘inordinate excess in apparel’ embraced by many of the queen's subjects, and claimed that such excess led to both a ‘confusion of degrees of all estates’ (i.e. a blurring of differences in social rank) as well as to the import of ‘superfluity of foreign and unnecessary commodities’.¹⁶ The proclamation suggests that to transgress the dress code is both to challenge existing social hierarchies and to endanger the ‘natural merchandise of the realm’ by relying on alien goods.

A popular pamphlet against female cross-dressing could spot transgressive women everywhere:

Since the days of Adam women were never so masculine: masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the mother to the youngest daughter; masculine in number, from one to multitudes; masculine in case, even from the head to the foot; masculine in mood, from bold speech to impudent action; and masculine in tense, for without redress they were, are, will be still most masculine, most mankind, most monstrous.¹⁷

Antony and Cleopatra speaks to these gender debates; for many, an Egypt where women are granted too much freedom and gender roles are reversed would have offered an uncomfortable parallel with contemporary England.

In Shakespeare's England, several people could spot parallels between Cleopatra's seduction of a great soldier, and Elizabeth's affair with her favourite, Essex, who ultimately betrayed her and was executed in 1601. Apart from the fact that both queens encouraged identifications of themselves with goddess figures (Elizabeth with the Virgin, Cleopatra with Isis), the crucial parallel between the English queen and the Egyptian legend was that as women, they both held onto political power against many odds. But, rather than simply evoking Elizabeth in any singular sense, Shakespeare's Cleopatra plays upon widespread cultural fears and fantasies about powerful, emasculating, and cross-dressing women, which are expressed in plays, pamphlets, sermons, laws, and conduct-books during both Elizabeth's rule and that of her successor, James I.

In Shakespearian plays, and in Shakespeare's day, intense liaisons with all women were regarded as potentially effeminizing. In Antony and Cleopatra, the danger posed by women is fused with that of foreign lands. Earlier we discussed how such fusion was also central to the myth of the Amazons, who were ‘foreign’ women evoked in order to contain female unruliness at home. The French essayist Montaigne writes:

For the queen of the Amazons replied to the Scythian who was inviting her to make love: ‘The lame man does it best!’ In that feminine commonwealth, to escape the domination of the males, they crippled them from childhood—arms, legs, and other parts that gave men an advantage over them—and made use of them only for the purpose for which we make of use of women over here.¹⁸

Stories of Amazonian cruelty to men, Montaigne suggests, are projections of the real crippling of women in patriarchal Europe, a crippling that is necessary in order to produce compliant sexual partners. No wonder, then, that figures of Amazons abound in the debates about the proper place of women in England from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. John Knox's ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’ (1558), which was directed at Mary Tudor but appeared after Elizabeth had become queen, describes an England ruled by a queen as ‘a world … transformed into Amazons’.¹⁹

COLOUR AND CONVERSION

Antony and Cleopatra maps such concerns about powerful, foreign women onto an imperial theme. As it contemplated its place in the world, England looked back in conflicted ways to the legacy of imperial Rome. Rome was both a model for the English to emulate and a reminder that the English had themselves been colonized in the past. The literature and mythology of imperial Rome, and especially of Virgil's Aeneid, were freely appropriated by English monarchs, but often by editing the meanings of the original stories. For example, when Elizabeth was identified as Dido, the African queen's chastity and heroism in founding Carthage provided the basis of the comparison, which could only be sustained by disregarding her abandonment by Aeneas. James I also disregarded this feature of the original story in order to encourage identifications of himself with Aeneas.²⁰ James was also often identified as the new Augustus in official entertainments.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, the classical literary tradition was not the only one to represent an encounter between a feminine ‘East’ and a masculine ‘West’. The biblical tale of the Queen of Sheba and the wise King Solomon also played upon this theme, and became a widespread cultural motif, as did stories of the Saracen princess who converts to Christianity and marries a European man. Leo Africanus had reported that Sheba was the queen of Ethiopia and had ‘brought unto Salomon an hundred and twenty talents of gold, which amount to 720,000 golden ducats of Hungary, that is, seven tons of gold, and 20,000 Hungarian ducats besides …’ (1032). Sheba gave all this wealth to Solomon after Solomon demonstrated his ‘wisdom’ to her; their contact resulted in a child called David who ensured that Ethiopia became a Christian land. The Sheba story sexualized the exchange of wealth and religion—an exchange that became a regular feature of the Renaissance stage. James encouraged identifications of himself with Solomon, and several English masques, pageants, and plays depicted foreign women gifting their wealth, beauty, and respect to Western monarchs, traders, and colonists. The homage-paying stranger or wild man of medieval court entertainments mutates into an ‘Indian’ king or queen in the London civic pageants, which were sponsored by various Livery Companies of London. Middleton's The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), for example, depicts ‘a black personage representing India, called, for her odours and riches, the Queen of Merchandise’. She asks the viewer to observe her ‘with an intellectual eye’ and to see beyond her native blackness and to perceive her inner goodness, which has been made possible by her conversion to Christianity. ‘Blest commerce’ has brought English traders to her land, and made possible a wonderful trade between them—her wealth for their religion. All ‘the riches and the sweetness of the East’, she thinks, are fair exchange for the ‘celestial knowledge’ that is now hers (43-61).

The Sheba story was also collapsed into that of the ‘black and beautiful’ woman and her fair male lover in the biblical Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon. As discussed in Chapter 2, medieval and Renaissance interpretations of the Song which suggested that the black woman was emblematic of the physical body in need of being blessed and whitened by the power of Christ incriminated the sexuality of real black women, as when the medieval divine Abelard compared such a body to ‘the flesh of black women [which] is all the softer to touch though it is less attractive to look at’.²¹ The beauty of black women increasingly began to represent the paradox of sexual desire, its power as well as its shame, and the connections between such desire and particular exotic, dangerous, or promising territories of the world.

The stories of Sheba and Solomon, and of the Shulamite in the Song of Songs, are collapsed into one another and also retold with renewed vigour during the Renaissance because these stories offer a framework which can enclose the attractions as well as the anxieties of colonial and mercantile contact. Kim Hall suggests that Solomon provided ‘two models for relations between Western males and “Other” females’. In the first the ‘white male refashion(s) and whiten(s) the dark foreign female into an object of transcendent wedded love’ and in the second, ‘Solomon (is) too much given to pleasures of the flesh, which are associated with the allures of a foreign female’.²² I would like to suggest that both these models simultaneously shape the English theatricals which stage the encounter between foreign women and European men. The foreign woman is alluring, dangerous, and powerful, which makes her ultimate capitulation all the more meaningful. Thus the possibility of a European ‘turning Turk’ is averted by the conversion, assimilation (or in some cases death and destruction) of the alien woman.

This theme was revisited by many plays of the period. In Fletcher's The Island Princess, a Moluccan princess Quisara asks her Portuguese lover to convert to her religion. It ends with her own conversion to Christianity as the wife of another Portuguese suitor. In Philip Massinger's play The Renegado, Donusa, a niece of the Turkish Sultan, tries to convert her Italian lover Vitelli but finally converts to Christianity and escapes to Europe as Vitelli's wife. We find stories of Muslim and other foreign women's desire for white men not just in literary texts but also in some of the travelogues, although in the latter, such desire is often just speculation on the part of the European traveller and does not end in conversion or marriage. Stories about the Amazons also play upon a similar pattern, featuring the containment of an alien, seductive, and powerful woman, and in story after story, Amazonian queens are subdued and often married by Greek heroes like Theseus. The defeat and marriage of the Gothic empress Tamora in Titus Andronicus, we saw in Chapter 3, can also be situated within this scenario.

But there is a crucial difference between these plays and Antony and Cleopatra. These Amazonian figures and converted Muslim princesses are extremely fair, and their skin colour facilitates their assimilation into their new families. Dark-skinned women are allowed to pay homage to white men, but in English drama, they cannot be whitened, and cannot be invited to join the Christian family. The dark skin of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, the fact that she revels in it, and that Antony is ensnared by it, is thus especially striking. Earlier writers had visualized Cleopatra as black in order to indicate that inner virtue is more important than outer beauty, as in George Pettie's A Petite Pallace: ‘Did not Antonius (that lusty gallant of this city) prefer Cleopatra that black Egyptian, for her incomparable courtesy, before all the blazing stars of this city? … Whereby you see that bounty before beauty is always to be preferred.’²³ Or else to suggest the blindness of love: Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor, or Tullie's Love (1589) asks ‘Is not Antony enamoured of the black Egyptian Cleopatra: Doth not Caesar envy in his love. … Affection is oft blind and deemeth not rightly, the blackest ebony is brighter than ivory.’²⁴ For the most part, however, in a culture that increasingly associated ideal femininity with whiteness, Cleopatra's fabled beauty was visualized as white, as in Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women which depicted her as ‘fair as is the rose in May’.

In Shakespeare's play, Cleopatra's darkness is part of her intractability and her stubbornly Egyptian identity. The recurrent food imagery suggests her sexual availability and desirability: ‘salt Cleopatra’ is a tasty tidbit; she is Antony's ‘Egyptian dish’ (2.6.126), a ‘morsel’ that he found left on Caesar's plate (3.13.117). But Cleopatra does not remain a delicious treat for Roman men, making ‘hungry where most she satisfies’; instead she threatens to devour them. She gleefully compares Antony to the fish she intends to catch:

                                        My bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up
I'll think them every one an Antony,
And say ‘Ah ha, you're caught!’

(2.5.12-15)

Such passages resonate with the Roman view of her as a predator, but they also remind us that Cleopatra is not Antony's Egyptian conquest. The role reversal complicates the pattern of representing the colonized land as a sexually available female.

Unlike the figures of Eastern royalty that were brought onto London streets in the mayoral shows, Cleopatra does not leave the shores of her native land and goes to great lengths to maintain her power within it. Like Quisara in The Island Princess and Donusia in The Renegado, Cleopatra is in love with a white man, but unlike them, she is sovereign as well as royal, and she does not surrender her sovereignty easily. She refuses to think of her relationship with Antony in matrimonial terms until he is dead, and is willing to negotiate with Caesar even while Antony is alive. After Antony's death, Cleopatra continues to resist being incorporated into Rome, although she now addresses Antony as ‘husband’. Her suicide is double-edged: it outwits her would-be captors, but it also marks her adoption of ‘the high Roman manner’—a trademark of Antony's culture. Antony and Cleopatra ends with the picture of the ‘serpent of the old Nile’ outwitting her adversaries by holding a snake to her breast, translating her defeat ‘in this vile world’ into ‘immortal longings’ (5.2.308, 276). Instead of a European converting an Eastern queen, in this play it is that queen who tempts him to ‘flee himself’. Given the precariousness of the English toe-hold in Eastern lands at this period, we can appreciate the meaning of the recurrent image of a converted and compliant queen for audiences at home. A slippery Cleopatra, ‘cunning beyond men's thought’, takes on a special resonance here, playing upon the pattern, altering it.

Antony's predicament echoes Othello's—both are soldiers who have given themselves excessively to women who anchor them to a new but fraught cultural identity, but also lay them open to charges of unmanliness. Antony's passion makes him oscillate between his Roman martial self and a newly acquired ‘Egyptian’ identity, which appears incompatible with military valour. Cleopatra's followers are either women or eunuchs, and an ‘unmanned’ Antony joins their fawning assembly. Eunuchs were prominent symbols of the luxury and decadence of the Eastern empires, as well as of the potential of these empires to ‘unman’ Christians. Moreover, conversion to Islam entailed circumcision, which Christians viewed as a sort of castration. The theatre featured the threat of both to English identity—in The Renegado, the Turkish damsel Donusia is attended by Carazie, an English-born eunuch. In Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Gazet, a foolish English servant, hopes to gain wealth by converting to Islam but instead finds that he has been castrated. William Daborne's play A Christian Turn'd Turk depicted a conversion ceremony complete with circumcision; its hero Ward is circumcized and also ‘unmanned’ by his Turkish wife. Antony and Cleopatra pre-dates these other plays, but we can appreciate the contemporary significance of Antony's supposed loss of manhood in Egypt. The story of Antony and Cleopatra had always been a cautionary tale, a story that warned aspiring imperialists of the dangers of the East. We can understand why during Shakespeare's time, when the powerful markets of Asia and North Africa were both intensely desired and feared to lure Christians to Islam, this story acquired a new urgency.

GYPSY LUST

The dangers of Antony's conversion are announced in the opening lines of the play by his comrade Philo who tells the audience that Antony's ‘captain's heart’ seems to have ‘become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy's lust’ (1.1.9-10). The slippage between ‘Egyptian’ and ‘gypsy’ reinforces the dangers of conversion in the play, and brings them closer home to England.²⁵ Samuel Daniel had previously associated Cleopatra with gypsies, as had Shakespeare himself in Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio says ‘Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench … Cleopatra a gypsy’ (2.3.37-9). In early modern England, the confusion between Egyptians and gypsies was not limited to popular usage, but became part of English legal vocabulary. John Cowell's dictionary of legal terms, The Interpreter (1607) explained that English statutes defined Egyptians as

a counterfeit kind of rogues, that being English or Welch people, accompany themselves together, disguising themselves in strange robes, blacking their faces and bodies, and framing to themselves an unknown language, wander up and down, and under pretence of telling of fortunes, curing diseases, and such like, abuse the common people, by stealing all that is not too hot or heavy for their carriage … These are very like to those, whom the Italian call Cingari …²⁶

Cowell suggests that English gypsies are fake rogues who only pretend to be gypsies by blackening their faces and appropriating a strange language. But ‘real’ gypsies were also regarded as inauthentic—John Florio's Italian-English dictionary defines the Cingari as ‘the roguing Giptians that go filching about the countries’ and Montaigne refers to gypsy women as ‘Counterfeit Egyptian women who have shown up in our midst’.²⁷

Gypsies were widely compared to Jews and Muslims, both of whom were also popularly associated with disguise, trickery, and conversion. Thomas Dekker writes:

They are a people more scattered than the Jews, and more hated. Beggarly in apparel, barbarous in condition, beastly in behavior and bloody if they meet advantage. A man that sees them would swear they had all the yellow jaundice, or that they were tawny Moors' bastards, for no Red-ochre man carries a face of a more filthy complexion. Yet are they not born so; neither has the sun burnt them so, but they are painted so. … If they be Egyptians, sure I am they never descended from the tribes of any of those people that came out of the land of Egypt.²⁸

The defining feature of gypsies is their artifice; their darkness is not natural, and yet not less threatening for being artificial. Dekker pursues the idea of artifice further, comparing gypsies to ‘Morris-dancers, with bells’ and to actors (‘like one that plays the Rogue on a Stage’ (244)). It was often supposed that actors imitated ‘Moorish’ dances that Christians had become familiar with during the Crusades. The remark that gypsies look like ‘tawny Moors' bastards’ picks up on associations between Moors and gypsies that were rife since at least the mid-fifteenth century, when a Scottish laird who obliged the king by killing the captain of the gypsies adopted a Moor's head as his crest.²⁹ Early gypsies were also referred to as Saracens.

The confusion between gypsies and Egyptians only strengthened the association of each with Moors, since, as we've noted earlier, contemporary Egypt was understood to be overrun by the ‘infidel’ Moors and Turks. It also underlined their supposed propensity for artifice: in early modern sermons, travelogues, and histories, the prophet Mohammed is repeatedly called a ‘juggler’ and trickster. Thus Cleopatra's ‘false soul’, her theatricality, and her cross-dressing pick up a complex web of connections between gypsies, stage actors, Moors, as well as local tricksters. Antony claims that Cleopatra

Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.

(4.12.28-9)

‘Fast and loose’ was one of the games with which gypsies were supposed to cheat the public. In his Art of Juggling (1612), Samuel Rid suggests that Egypt is the origin of such tricks:

Certain Egyptians banished (from) their country … arrived here in England, who being excellent in quaint tricks and devises, not known here at that time among us, were esteemed and had in admiration … insomuch that many of our English loiterers joined with them, and in time learned their craft and cozening. The speech which they used was the right Egyptian language, with whom our Englishmen conversing with, at last learned their language.³⁰

Cleopatra as the ‘enchanting queen’ brings together magic associated with non-Western cultures, the sorcery associated with witches and enchantresses, domestic and alien, as well as the trickery associated with petty crime at home.

Royal acts of 1559 forbade the use of ‘charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations, circles, witchcrafts, soothsaying or any like crafts or imaginations invented by the Devil’; a statute of 1604 reinforced the prohibition.³¹ Other legislation attempted to curb the tricks of gypsies and those who impersonated them. From 1530 onwards, the English authorities repeatedly banished gypsies from the realm and proclaimed harsh punishments for English people who associated with gypsies. In 1562, ‘An Act for further punishment of vagabonds, calling themselves Egyptians’ warned that anyone found

in any company or fellowship of vagabonds, commonly called or calling themselves Egyptians, or counterfeiting, transforming or disguising themselves by their apparel, speech or other behaviour, like unto such vagabonds … shall therefore suffer pains of death, loss of lands and goods, as in the cases of felony by the order of the common laws of this realm’.³²

The legislation concerning gypsies reveals a fear of contamination that might pass from ‘real’ to ‘false’ gypsies and spread among the local populace; at the same time the laws suggest that all gypsies are ‘counterfeit’. In April 1577, eight people were hanged for associating with gypsies; in May 1596, 106 men and women were condemned to death for ‘having wandered in diverse parts of this realm in this country of York, some of them feigning themselves to have knowledge in palmistry, physiognomy, and other abused sciences, using certain disguised apparel and forged speech, contrary to diverse statutes and laws of this realm …’.³³ Eventually most of these people were deported back to their place of birth but nine of them were hanged because they were found to be ‘strangers, aliens born in foreign parts across the seas, and none of the Queen Majesty natural born subjects’. English-born gypsies were treated differently to those considered ‘foreign’, and the laws sought to reinforce the distinction between the two, and to prevent any association between them.

‘Egyptians’ were regularly sentenced to death in England under these laws, but several contemporary commentators felt that legislation was not very effective, and Samuel Rid noted that even though Queen Elizabeth endeavoured

by all means possible to root out this pestiferous people, but nothing could be done, you see until this day: they wander up and down in the name of Egyptians, colouring their faces and fashioning their attire and garment like unto them, yet if you ask what they are, they dare no otherwise then say, they are Englishmen, and of such a shire, and so are forced to say contrary to that they pretend.

(B2^r-v)

Rid points out that gypsies can only make a living by pretending to be what they are not, and yet, given the laws of the land, they can never openly admit to the impersonation.

Gypsies were especially disliked by the authorities because they were not simply ungovernable individuals but formed tight communities with their own hierarchies and forms of governance; Rid mentions a Giles Hather and Kit Calot who ‘style themselves the King and Queen of Egypt’. Analogously, Cleopatra is threatening to Rome because she is not just Antony's ‘Egyptian wife’ but a sovereign who resists Egypt's incorporation into the Roman Empire. Caesar is threatened because Antony gifts her entire kingdoms and territories which, in his view, belong to his empire. While English gypsies can hardly be read as embodying a similar threat of alternative governance and insurgency, stories of their theatrical and stubborn communities add another dimension to Shakespeare's depiction of the conflict between Rome and Egypt. Above all, the theme of Antony ‘going native’ or becoming an Egyptian by associating with Cleopatra and her train, brings together the fears of conversion generated by both the ‘infidels’ and imposters associated with Eastern empires, and the lowly gypsies. Gypsies, as well as Saracens and Muslims, are commonly spoken of in terms of a disease, a pestilence, an infection, that can threaten the health of the English body, and yet both are enormously seductive to Englishmen. The powerful Muslim empires hold out the promise of trade, luxury, and sensuality for the middle-class and noble adventurer, while the gypsies are similarly attractive to vagabonds and poor English wanderers.

Finally, it is the combination of uncontrollability and changeability in the gypsy lore that can be seen to inflect Shakespeare's picture of Cleopatra. Rid opens his book on juggling with the tale of the Moon asking her mother for a garment, ‘comely and fit for her body: how can that be sweet daughter (quoth the mother) sith that your body never keeps itself at one stage, nor at one certain estate, but changeth every day in the month, nay every hour?’ The gypsies were also called ‘moon-men’; their slippery nature is also Cleopatra's. She is ‘cunning past man's thought’, a person of various moods and disguises. At the end of the play she claims to have become ‘marble-constant’ and renounces the moon as her governing deity: ‘Now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine’ (5.2.236-7). However, even this gesture can be read as supreme theatricality, an attempt to outmanoeuvre Caesar and prevent him from displacing her from Egypt:

                                                  Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be a gentle grave unto me …

(5.2.54-7)

THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE

Roman emperors had displayed their captives in the official triumphs, and during Shakespeare's time, European monarchs imitated this practice by recreating extravagant processions which showcased captured slaves, animals, and goods, and also displayed personifications of the territories they traded with or colonized. Given her own propensity for cross-dressing and for theatrical display, it is significant that Cleopatra is averse to the idea of being displayed by Caesar, and especially to the possibility that a Roman actor may impersonate her, or ‘boy my greatness / I'th' posture of a whore’ (5.2.216-17). The remark draws attention to the fact that throughout the play, the audience has been watching a white male actor, not an Egyptian woman or a gypsy, play the queen.

Do the racial and cultural metamorphoses that we see on the Renaissance stage, as well as in the plays, suggest a flexibility with regard to ideologies of skin colour and race in early modern culture? We need to be cautious while jumping to that conclusion. Antony and Cleopatra's focus on performance and theatricality does not suggest that all identities are simply, or equivalently performative. Rather, it draws attention to the politics of performance—who is allowed to perform? Who is allowed to represent and appropriate others? Whose performance is effective? The answers, within the play, and in the culture at large, depend upon who has social and political power.³⁴ Whereas the poor vagabonds of England were persecuted for impersonating ‘Egyptians’, the upper classes flaunted such impersonations. In 1515 two ladies attended court with their heads rolled in gauze, tippers ‘like the Egyptians, embroidered with gold’ and their faces, necks, arms, and hands covered with black ‘pleasance’ so that they appeared to be ‘negroes or black Mores’. In 1520 eight ladies appeared at a state banquet dressed also like Egyptians.³⁵ Among royalty and upper classes, the wearing of foreign clothes suggested their social and economic power rather than a collapse of their identity. Queen Elizabeth received Thomas Platter dressed in a white gown ‘gold-embroidered, with a whole bird of Paradise for panache, set forward on her head studded with costly jewels’.³⁶ The rare bird was found only in the East, and England had recently staked its claim in the Moluccas. All over Europe, the upper classes borrowed Asian fabrics, designs, and patterns, and court fashions reflected the contact between Europe and these other worlds. To mention one example here, the exposing of breasts among European court ladies may have been inspired by the transparent smocks (‘bajus’) that were worn in Goa by wives and mistresses of the Portuguese.³⁷

Court entertainments went a step further—nobility and royalty impersonated gypsies, the Irish, Asians, and Africans, but the disguises were often dismantled at the end. Jonson's masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed in which several noblemen shed their disguises as gypsies was a favourite with King James. We have already mentioned The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty in which Queen Anne and her ladies blacked up as ‘Mores’ but were magically transformed to whiteness at the end. Such impersonations and cross-dressing, by controlling the terms and direction in which identities were ‘exchanged’, were reassuring in the context of pervasive fears that Englishmen would go ‘native’ or lose their identities overseas. The Masque of Gypsies was published in 1621; the very next year, Lord Keeper Williams asked the Justices of Berkshire to enforce the laws against the ‘whole troupe of rogues, beggars, Egyptians and idle persons’ in that county.³⁸ An ideology which does not pathologize racial difference may be less pernicious than one which does, but that does not necessarily make the former either benign or ideologically flexible. The supposed fluidity of dark-skin colour that we see in the court masques works to reinforce the ultimate power of whiteness over it. Moreover, these theatrical scenarios of assimilation do not reflect an actual openness in the culture at large. Official legislation throwing out Jews, gypsies, and blacks reflects a fear of contamination; at a more popular level too there is a distrust of foreigners and outsiders. The contemporary diatribes against cross-dressing, against actors, as well as against Englishmen ‘turning Turk’, show that at least one section of the population feared, rather than embraced or celebrated, fluidity.

In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony's fatal attraction to Cleopatra speaks to contemporary English fears about the erosion of racial identity and masculinity. But the play offers no reassuring scenario of a foreign queen's assimilation. Cleopatra's love for Antony does not mean that she will submit to Rome. She plays with different personas to control Antony as well as to negotiate with Casear; in the end, she becomes both the goddess Isis, with an asp at her breast, as well as Antony's Roman wife. These images are contradictory, but Cleopatra inhabits them both. Cleopatra's ‘Egyptian’ self is constructed both by her and by the Romans; it is an essential aspect of the political struggle between the imperial power and its would-be colony. Cleopatra plays the Egyptian flamboyantly, thus appropriating, and flaunting the difference that Rome assigns to her. She knows that performance is a sign of power—she must impersonate whom she wants but no one else must be allowed to represent her. Once she has lost political power, and knows she will no longer be able to control the terms of the performance, she stages her suicide, the last performance she can script. Similarly, the extent to which Antony ‘goes native’ or remains a ‘Roman’ is determined by his need to gain a foothold in Egypt, a place from which he can assert himself against Caesar. His oscillations are controlled by Cleopatra on the one hand, and Caesar on the other because his position in Egypt depends upon the former, and in Rome upon the latter.

Thus the play suggests that to be an Egyptian or a Roman is to play certain roles which are defined by their difference from one another. But this does not mean that these roles can just be chosen at will, put on and discarded when one likes. Rather, they are shaped by long histories as well as political and cultural antagonisms. Individuals give these roles their particular meanings and force, but do not entirely control them. By showing us how identities which we call ethnic, or cultural or racial are fluid and yet not, for that reason, easy to manipulate, Antony and Cleopatra captures the contradiction that lies at the heart of race.

Notes

1. ‘Introduction’, in Michael Neill (ed.), Antony and Cleopatra (Oxford, 1994), 87.

2. Peter Heylyn, Microcosmus or A little description of the whole world (Oxford, 1621), 387.

3. See G. K. Hunter, ‘Elizabethans and Foreigners’, in Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge, 2000), 62-3 n. 101.

4. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, Histories, Dreams, Distortions (London, 1990), 15, 99-100.

5. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Egypt and Egyptians in the Renaissance’, Studies in the Renaissance, 6 (1959), 7-27, 2-21.

6. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, ed. Robert Brown (New York, 1906), 856.

7. Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London 1638), 51-2. See also Geraldo U. de Sousa, Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters (London, 1999), 131.

8. Quoted James A. McPeek, The Black Book of Knaves and Unthrifts (Storres, Conn., 1969), 255.

9. Florus, quoted by Christopher Pelling, ‘“Anything truth can do, we can do better”: the Cleopatra legend’, in Susan Walker and Peter Higgs (eds.), Cleopatra of Egypt, from History to Myth (London, 2001), 300.

10. The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1987), 202.

11. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), 43, 57.

12. Andre Gunder Frank, Re-Orient, Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998).

13. Herodotus: the Histories is quoted and its influence on subsequent representations of Egypt is discussed by de Sousa, Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters, 130-1.

14. Joannes Boemus, The Fardle of Facions (1555) (Amsterdam, 1970), chap. B C7^v.

15. John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphoses, Man Transformed: or the Artificial Changeling (London, 1653), 317-18.

16. ‘Enforcing Statutes and orders for Apparel’, in P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds.), Tudor Royal Proclamations, iii (New Haven, 1969), 3.

17. Hic Mulier; or the Man-Woman, in Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. Mcmanus (eds.), Half Humankind (Urbana, Ill., 1985), 265.

18. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif., 1965), 791; second emphasis added.

19. John Knox, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women (Geneva, 1558), 13^r.

20. See Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge, 1997), 18-20.

21. See pp. 61-2.

22. Kim Hall, ‘Sexual Politics and Cultural identity in The Masque of Blackness’, in Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (eds.), The Performance of Power (Iowa City, 1991), 14-15.

23. George Pettie, A Petite Pallace (London, 1590), 61.

24. Robert Greene, Ciceronis Amor (London, 1589), 26-7.

25. I am indebted to various critics who have commented on the connection between gypsies and Egyptians, particularly McPeek, The Black Book, 252-86; Charles Whitney, ‘Charmian's Laughter: Women, Gypsies and Festive Ambivalence in Antony and Cleopatra’, The Upstart Crow, 14 (1994), 67-88, and de Sousa, Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters, ch. 5.

26. John Cowell, The Interpreter, or Book Containing the Signification of Words (Cambridge, 1607) Bb1^r-v, also quoted de Sousa, Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters, 143.

27. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598); The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 40.

28. Thomas Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.) Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars (Amherst, Mass., 1990), 243.

29. H. T. Crofton, ‘Early Annals of the Gypsies in England’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1: 1 (July 1889), 6.

30. Samuel Rid, The Art of Juggling (Amsterdam and Norwood, NJ, 1974), B2^r.

31. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, quoted by McPeek, The Black Book, 275.

32. 5 Elizabeth C.20 (1652), in Danby Pickering (ed.), The Statutes at Large (Cambridge, 1763), 211.

33. The official report of the Yorkshire Quarter Sessions is quoted by McPeek, The Black Book, 264.

34. See also Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women, Repesenting Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London, 2000).

35. Edward Hall, Chronicles, quoted by McPeek, The Black Book, 257.

36. Thomas Platter's Travels in England (London, 1937), 192.

37. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe vol. ii, bk. 1 (Chicago, 1970), 102.

38. Crofton, ‘Early Annals’, 23.