THE QUEST FOR CULTURAL SURVIVAL IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA (original) (raw)
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Orientalism and Unfavourable Positioning in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
With the rise of multiculturalism, of racial, ethnic, cultural, and national awareness in literary and historical criticism, literary and historical research on attitudes towards multiculturalism, non-English or non-European characters in literary works and their moral, ethnic, religious, cultural and national values, also gained a critical momentum. Moree than any other playwright it is Shakespearean texts that have got their share of such a criticalk point of view. Historical and cultural approaches to Shakespeare’s plays make this relatively new critical perspective crucial because race, ethnicity and oppression are said to be some of the central themes to almost all of his plays. Considering the role of discourse theory which suggests that language and language use not only communicate people’s social, cultural and mental realities but also create them, the study deals with the concepts of Orientalism and positioning in Antony and Cleopatra. The study argues that through an oriental discourse and unfavourable positioning Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra contains racial and cultural profiles, and perceptions created by these profiles and manipulation of these perceptions.
Cosmopolitanism, Mobility and Hybridity in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
IDEAS: Journal of Literary Studies, 2021
Detecting divergence in a play that is set in a different country than the one from whose culture its text is nourished, and in a different time that qualifies the text as a piece of historical fiction is a challenge even in the eyes of the playwright's contemporaries. In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, every example of divergence is defined with the norm it transgresses and the norms have various sources. Elizabethan conventions of drama make the setting of the play a domain for a political discussion stretching over centuries. Yet, a more socially reflective source of conventional notions is the Elizabethan era itself. The play is set in Alexandria and Rome, foreign destinations to veil the political allegory that exists between the fictional characters and real political figures. Italy and Egypt, therefore, serve to make the audience alien to the physical sphere of the discussion and blur the most direct of these allegories. This essay aims to discuss ways in which Rome and the West are portrayed as opposed to Egypt and the East and to explore how the West and the East consider each other on a mutual basis and how they interact with one another in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Along with representations of the West and the East, the paper aims to explore political references integrated into the play through the use of concepts like cosmopolitanism, mobility, and hybridity.
Mediterranean Empires, Mobility, and Multiculturalism in Shakespeare's Plays
This study is an exploration of multicultural exchanges in Shakespeare’s plays within their Mediterranean context. It analyses the Mediterranean empires and their multiculturalism which are enabled by the mobility of people, information, and cultures in Shakespeare. The primary sources used in this thesis are Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest. The study argues that the mobility in the Mediterranean brings distortive and transformative impacts on individuals and societies in these six texts. It looks at how the people who frequently travel across the Mediterranean lose their identity and the empires which incorporate ‘others’ through territorial expansion are threatened by degeneration. This study argues that Shakespeare problematizes the mobility and multiculturalism in the Mediterranean that are analysed in his past, contemporary and future empires. Therefore, the thesis points out that Shakespeare’s exploration of the dangerous intercultural exchanges in ancient and early modern Mediterranean empires functions as a historical foreshadowing for the newly emerging British Empire in his present time.
What role did identification play in the motives, processes, and products of select post-colonial authors who "wrote back" to William Shakespeare and colonialism? How did post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre function to make select post-colonial adaptations creative and critical texts? In answer to these questions, this dissertation proposes that counter-discursive metatheatre resituates post-colonial plays as criticism of Shakespeare's plays. As particular post-colonial authors identify with marginalized Shakespearean characters and aim to amplify their conflicts from the perspective of a dominated culture, they interpret themes of race, gender, and colonialism in 'Othello' (1604), 'Antony and Cleopatra' (1608), and 'The Tempest' (1611) as explicit problems. This dissertation combines post-colonial theory and other literary theory, particularly by Kenneth Burke, to propose a rhetoric of motives for post-colonial authors who "write back" to Shakespeare through the use of counter-discursive metatheatre. This dissertation, therefore, describes and analyzes how and why the plays of Murray Carlin, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott function both creatively and critically, adapting Shakespeare's plays, and foregrounding post-colonial criticism of his plays. Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin's motivations for adapting Othello and using the framing narrative of 'Not Now, Sweet Desdemona' (1967) to explicitly critique the conflicts of race, gender, and colonialism in 'Othello.' Chapter Two treats why and how Aimé Césaire adapts 'The Tempest' in 1969, illustrating his explicit critique of Prospero and Caliban as the colonizer and the colonized, exposing Prospero's insistence on controlling the sexuality of his subjects, and, therefore, arguing that race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in the play. Chapter Three analyzes 'A Branch of the Blue Nile' (1983) as both a critique and an adaptation of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' demonstrating how Walcott's framing narrative critiques the notion of a universal "Cleopatra," even one of an "infinite variety," and also evaluates Antony as a character who is marginalized by his Roman culture. The conclusion of this dissertation avers that in "writing back" to Shakespeare, these authors foreground and reframe post-colonial criticism, successfully dismantling the colonial structures that have kept their interpretations, and the subjects of their interpretations, marginalized.
2013
The question of race is one of the many points of contention in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. In Elizabethan England the word ‘race’ did not carry the overwhelming connotation of colour. Rather, issues of religion, commerce, gender and complexion were all interlinked. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare reinforces racial stereotypes. Aaron’s blackness is associated with evil, maliciousness and barbarity. The emerging anxiety in the Renaissance imagination about power structures outside Europe is seen in the figure of Tamora- queen of the Goths. Othello, the title character of Shakespeare’s celebrated play, reverses the trend to some extent. He is a black-skinned moor; yet his military skill takes him to the helm of Venetian society. Though he kills Desdemona at the end of the play, the moor manages to retain our sympathy to a large extent. The ‘triple turn’d whore’ of popular imagination, Cleopatra, in Shakespeare’s play, overturns some of the lasciviousness associated with her character. The ...
The Image of Both Theaters: Empire and Revelation in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare Quarterly , 2015
This essay juxtaposes two models of theater in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and elucidates the temporality and politics specific to each. The essay builds on recent work on empire and sovereignty in the later plays while engaging the topics of time, temporality, and religion that have become central to Shakespeare scholarship over the past decade. The first part of the essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra tracks the emergence of Caesar Augustus' imperium from the practice of triumphal procession that imperium both extends and displaces. The play interprets this development in terms of Caesar's ambition to "possess" time as well as space—an ambition which determines, and would be fulfilled within, the theater Caesar envisions but is denied. Shakespeare's reconstruction of Caesar's theater of empire leads, in turn, to his imagining an alternative theatrical model. The second part of the essay turns to this model as embodied in Cleopatra's suicide, which she performs as the dramatization of her earlier appearance at Cydnus, "[w]hen she first met Mark Antony" (2.2.196). The theater of Cleopatra orients itself in relation to the biblical apocalypse and the theological conceptualizations of memory, time, and action enabled by it. Its dramaturgy unfolds as a theatrical analogue to Walter Benjamin's meditations on history, which draw similarly upon the prophetic messianism of the Hebrew Scriptures. The unlikely constellation formed by these two figures helps us to recognize Cleopatra's performance as the culmination of Antony and Cleopatra's dalliance with the language and imagery of the Book of Revelation.