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Hybrid Spaces in Antony and Cleopatra

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Shakespeare and Space

Part of the book series: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies ((PASHST))

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Abstract

Bronfen reads Antony and Cleopatra as a tragedy of hybrid spaces. Emphasizing the carnivalesque way in which Cleopatra embodies Egypt, Bronfen explores how cross-dressing and gendered masquerade blend with the concept of the king’s two bodies expressed in the duality of body natural and body politic, particularly resonant during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Exploiting and confusing this duality, Cleopatra throws open a theatrical space wherever she goes, and conversely, her embodiment on stage, and the dramatic connection between the Egyptian and the English queen, opens up a hybrid space that is both historical and mythical, including, and at the same time going beyond the geopolitical dimension. Finally, Cleopatra’s ‘self-designed apotheosis’ introduces a final moment of hybridity, creating a space of textual regeneration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a discussion of the carnivalesque as both dramatic form and a form of political subversion, see Stallybrass and White (1986). For a conceptualization of Egypt as a site that both contests and reflects Rome, with its imperial politics, see also Foucault’s discussion of heterotopia as a real emplacement which contests, reflects, refers to and reverses what is posited as the central, ordinary place in ‘Different Spaces’ (Foucault 1998, 175–86).

  2. 2.

    Adelman ascribes the rhetorical function of paradox to Cleopatra, in contrast to the hyperbole performed by Mark Antony (Adelman 1994, 56–77). Belsey also foregrounds the way Cleopatra’s erotic power allows her to escape definition, inhabiting a ‘space outside moral and civil law’ in that she moves beyond both regal and feminine propriety (Belsey 1996, 41–6).

  3. 3.

    See Belsey’s ‘Cleopatra’s Seduction’ (Belsey 1996) and also Bronfen’s ‘Cleopatra’s Venus’ (Bronfen 2003, 137–50).

  4. 4.

    This is one of the first critical essays to draw attention to the parallel. See also Weber’s ‘Intimations of Dido and Cleopatra in Some Contemporary Portrayals of Elizabeth I’, who sees this relation as one of antithesis (Weber 1999, 127–43).

  5. 5.

    See also Garber’s Shakespeare After All, which further suggests that the Jacobean audience of the play would have ‘been mindful both of James I’s complicated relations with powerful and seductive regal women—his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth—and also of the strongly held views among many political and religious thinkers of the time that women should not rule over men’ (Garber 2004, 738).

  6. 6.

    ‘Wenn dann im Tode der Geist auf Geisterweise frei wird, so kommt auch nun der Körper erst zu seinem höchsten Recht. Denn von selbst versteht sich: die Allegorisierung der Physis kann nur an der Leiche sich energisch durchsetzen. Und die Personen des Trauerspiels sterben, weil sie nur so, als Leichen, in die allegorische Heimat eingehen. Nicht um der Unsterblichkeit willen, um der Leiche willen gehn sie zu Grunde’ (Benjamin 1978, 193–4).

  7. 7.

    See also Over Her Dead Body (Bronfen 1992).

  8. 8.

    See also ‘Auf der Suche nach Kleopatra’ (Bronfen 2013, 9–23).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. English Department, Univerity of Zurich, Zurich, UK

    Elisabeth Bronfen

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  1. Elisabeth Bronfen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Ina Habermann

  2. University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Michelle Witen

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© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

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Bronfen, E. (2016). Hybrid Spaces in Antony and Cleopatra . In: Habermann, I., Witen, M. (eds) Shakespeare and Space. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51835-4_6

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