List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Spelling and List of Abbreviations Introduction: Imagining Cleopatra 1. Sight of that face’: Passion and Politics in Mary Sidney’s Antonius 2. ‘Twixt majestie confuz’d and miserie’: Samuel Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra 3. ‘Will yet this womans stubborne heart be woone?’: Lady Anne Clifford and Daniel’s Cleopatra 4. 'Then thus we have beheld': Staging Daniel's Cleopatra 5. ‘She did make defect perfection’: The Paradox and Variety of Shakespeare's Cleopatra 6. Epilogue and Conclusion: Cleopatra after Shakespeare Appendix: The ‘Cleopatra’ Statue and the Poems at the Vatican Notes Bibliography Index
An examination of the contested and politically-charged response to Cleopatra in early modern England culture and literature.
Yasmin Arshad has a PhD in English and an MA in Shakespeare in History from University College London, UK, where she is an honorary research associate. Her research interests include Renaissance literature; early modern women and their writing; connections between Renaissance portraiture and literature; and the political and literary uses of Taciteanism. In 2013, she produced Samuel Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra, the first such staging of the play in over four hundred years.
Informative, readable, and thought-provoking in its careful
exploration of the manifold implications of rewriting Cleopatra in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama … Adds considerably to our
understanding of the reception of Cleopatra in early modern England
and will become an inescapable reference point for all scholars
interested in the reception of classical antiquity, neo-Senecan
drama, and performance-based research.
*Sixteenth Century Journal*
Yasmin Arshad’s Cleopatra … makes an important contribution filling
a gap her predecessors leave mostly blank. She gives us the early
modern history of English Cleopatras … Arshad’s achievements
re-centering Sidney and Daniel and identifying Anne Clifford as the
portrait’s Cleopatra are major.
*Review of English Studies*
Delivers fresh perspectives on a character who lives in the
imaginations of scholars, students, and audiences … The book is
especially compelling, moreover, when connecting between the works
read and the politics of the time in both the Elizabethan and
Jacobean courts.
*Early Theatre*
Yasmin Arshad’s account of how and why Cleopatra mattered to
Shakespeare’s contemporaries is the finest book on the subject.
Arshad offers a superb guide to the ways in which Cleopatra was
portrayed in the drama of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel and
Shakespeare. And her fascinating account of a Jacobean portrait,
almost surely of Lady Anne Clifford in the guise of Cleopatra, is
itself a major contribution to the field. Imagining Cleopatra is an
impressive study, one that will be of great value to anyone
interested in Elizabethan attitudes towards race, beauty, and the
performance of power.
*James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in
1606*
A riveting account of imaginative responses to the mesmerising
figure of Cleopatra in the Age of Shakespeare. Yasmin Arshad casts
her net widely to encompass Cleopatra’s ‘"infinite variety" and
"strong toil of grace", to borrow Shakespeare’s words, notably in
the Senecan closet dramas of Mary Sidney and Samuel Daniel. The
intellectual detective work that underpins this rich study – for
example in its probing discussion of links between Daniel’s
Cleopatra, Lady Anne Clifford, and a tantalising Cleopatra painting
of the period – constitutes research of the first order. Dr
Arshad’s elegant prose, intellectual acuity and sound scholarship
rise magnificently to the challenges of imagining the most famous
queen in history… In Imagining Cleopatra Yasmin Arshad writes
excitingly about great literature without denting its freshness and
vibrancy.
*René Weis, UCL, UK*
History’s most compelling queen is brought to life in this
ground-breaking interdisciplinary study by Yasmin Arshad.
Shakespeare, the early modern theatre, art history, and gender and
race studies are woven together with a spellbinding deftness which
– much like the allure of the book’s subject – keeps the reader
entranced till the very end. Revitalising Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,
Arshad’s richly researched account changes our view of the Egyptian
queen by giving us a more complete picture of the ways in which her
image was refigured in discourses of women and power, appropriated
for political ends, and mobilised by playwrights, artists,
philosophers and historiographers as they re-imagined England’s
dialogue with the classical past. Imagining Cleopatra will surely
quickly acquire canonical status as one of the most important and
essential works on the controversial and incomparable Queen
Cleopatra.
*Chris Laoutaris, The Shakespeare Institute, University of
Birmingham, UK, author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle
that Gave Birth to the Globe*
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