Cleopatra. Sexy, sultry, political, and racially ambiguous. Moving fluidly from Shakespeare's England to contemporary LA, Francesca Royster looks at the performance of race and sexuality in a wide range of portrayals of that icon of dangerous female sexuality, Cleopatra. Royster begins with Shakespeare's original appropriation of Plutarch, and then moves on to analyze performances of the Cleopatra icon by Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Taylor, Pam Grier (Cleopatra Jones) and Queen Latifah (in Set It Off ). Royster argues that Cleopatra highlights a larger cultural anxiety about women, sexuality, and race.
Cleopatra. Sexy, sultry, political, and racially ambiguous. Moving fluidly from Shakespeare's England to contemporary LA, Francesca Royster looks at the performance of race and sexuality in a wide range of portrayals of that icon of dangerous female sexuality, Cleopatra. Royster begins with Shakespeare's original appropriation of Plutarch, and then moves on to analyze performances of the Cleopatra icon by Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Taylor, Pam Grier (Cleopatra Jones) and Queen Latifah (in Set It Off ). Royster argues that Cleopatra highlights a larger cultural anxiety about women, sexuality, and race.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and -- after his murder -- three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, 12-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become Queen of Egypt some day.
This collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater.
The first book of three in a richly imagined ancient world where the course of history is altered by one battle. In this world, Antony and Cleopatra triumph at the Battle of Actium, and Cleopatra emerges as a queen, stateswoman, and politician. Those around her come to life as the reader returns to those days to live them with her.
Is William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra a sequel to the earlier Julius Caesar? If this question raises issues of authorship and reception, it also interrogates the construction of dramatic sequels: how does a playtext ultimately become the follow-up of another text? This book explores how dramatic works written before and after Shakespeare's time have encouraged us to view Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra as strongly interconnected plays, encouraging their sequelization in the theater and paving the way toward the filmic conflations of the twentieth century. Uniquely blending theories of literary and filmic intertextuality with issues of race and gender, and written by an experienced author trained both in early modern and film studies, this book can easily find its place in any syllabus in Shakespeare or in media studies, as well as in a wide range of cultural and literary courses.
In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture. This culture best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.
