Cleopatra at Yale

• Published in: Raritan 2019-09, Vol.39 (2), p.143-176
• Main Author: Brombert, Victor
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; Death & dying; Murders & murder attempts; Politics; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Theater; Theater studies
• ISSN: 0275-1607

[...]if the performance was successful, we have been so moved by the autumnal beauty of the ultimate scene of act 4-the love scene in the symbolic monument-so carried away by the golden moment, by the final words of dying Antony and the courageously smiling Cleopatra (smiling, as it were, at grief) that for us also there seems to be nothing remarkable left beneath the visiting moon. Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, savors murder as a sexual ritual, comparing herself to a garden fertilized by her husband's gushing blood as by springtime showers. [...]in King Lear, violence and lechery inform a bestial natural world where flies and horses go to it pell-mell, where copulation thrives, and sex seems altogether repulsive. "O happy horse to bear the weight of Antony," exclaims Cleopatra in a longing mood. For this "strumpet's fool" (as he is described in the opening moments of the play), who is later seen as having given up an empire for a foreign seductress, this heroic figure who was once, though daintily brought up, a tough soldier capable under duress of drinking the urine of horses, is now seemingly undermined by voluptuary Egypt and the aphrodisiac charms of its lascivious queen. The political satire is brought to a head in the masterful scene on Pompey's galley with its caricature of worldly power in the form of the triumvirs' drunken dance and song-a satire that helps discredit those very Roman values that lead to a Roman victory.