Cosmopolitanism, Mobility and Hybridity in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (original) (raw)

THE QUEST FOR CULTURAL SURVIVAL IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 2021

In Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare highlights the cultures of the East and the West. The play reveals the quest for cultural survival between the East and the West as a major factor that stirs cultural complexities. The unrighteous representation of the Eastern culture shows the complex nature of multiculturalism the canonical writers strove to represent in their writings. This study seeks to substantiate the challenges that confront cultural expressions in the multicultural atmosphere Shakespeare highlights in Antony and Cleopatra, as well as how the minority culture shapes this context of cultural plurality. Similarly, a comparative analysis of Cultural Studies, cultural history, cultural identity, cultural 'contents,' and the literary work Antony and Cleopatra will be the subject matter in this study. Moreover, the goal of this study is to examine how Shakespeare promotes Western culture through the adoringly and adorningly illustrated West with a blemished and contemptuous portrayal of the East in his play. Comparatively, we examine how Shakespeare evinces the triumvirs as the powerful three (Antony, Caesar and Lepidus) and, on the other hand, how he associates Cleopatra with the East.

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.

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.

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.

“Cleopatra a Gipsy”: Performing the Nomadic Subject in Shakespeare’s Alexandria, Rome and London

2017

At the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra the Egyptian queen is referred to as a ‘gypsy’. This term had different negative meanings in early modern English, from nomad to Egyptian to whore. The epithet evokes, among other things, the persecution of ‘Egyptians’, or gypsies, in Tudor and Stuart England, as well as the anti-vagrancy legislation and literature. This paper explores the ‘Egyptian’ qualities attributed to Cleopatra, especially her supposed nomadism, both in Shakespeare’s tragedy and in cultural history. Keywords : Cleopatra, Gypsies, Vagrancy laws, Nomadism, Cultural history

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as Meta-Theatrical Monarch

2018

Antony and Cleopatra constantly emphasizes the protagonists’ performativity. Cleopatra’s theatrical virtuosity and mutability are mediated by critical spectators, whose desires and prejudices affect how they view her performances. Simultaneously “Egypt’s Queen,” “gypsy,” and “strumpet,” she is reflexively aware of her performative power and its limitations, deploying the one while seeking to navigate the other. This play, as Linda Charnes argues (Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare), uses “Cleopatra and her multiplicitous and marginal domain as representatives of the place and players of the Renaissance stage.” It also, inevitably, analogizes Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth I—and arguably any queen who experienced early modern patriarchy. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, as individual character and theatrical construct, meta-theatrically illustrates the fascinating—and ever-troubling—power of the actor and the queen.

Shakespeare's Othello: A Representation of the Clash between the Orient and the Occident

2011

This paper attempts to trace how Shakespeare's Othello reflects the deeprooted Eurocentric ideology of the Elizabethan people and show how such views created distinctions like self vs. other, master vs. slave, civilized vs. savage, white vs. black, good vs. evil, strong vs. weak, occident vs. orient. These views had such a deep impact that many writers have portrayed the Europeans as superior and the ‗self' as belonging to the ‗centre' or ‗Occident,' whereas people in faraway lands are shown as inferior and the ‗other' belonging to the ‗margin' or ‗Orient'. In Elizabethan England, African men were regarded as illiterate, barbaric, lustful womanizers who were the white man's property and apt to be used as servants. These views have been handed down century after century. However, in the play Othello Shakespeare breaks away from these beliefs and introduces an African man who disregards such stereotypical views and thus shocking his audience with this deviation from the norm. He presents a reality that African men are indeed polite, educated, loyal and faithful husbands. Shakespeare even makes Othello more prejudiced against his own culture than against another race.