Cleopatra the Femme Fatale

The Fatal Cleopatra

• The fact that Cleopatra was fatal to Antony was a commonplace even in the Augustan period. Octavian declared war on Cleopatra and his propaganda portrayed Antony as helplessly under the Queen's spell.

• As we go forward in time, we have seen portrayals like Dryden's in which Cleopatra is the cause of "The World Well Lost."

• Cleopatra was always acknowledged as being fatal to others as well. The tradition that she tested poisons on condemned prisoners goes back to antiquity.

Reception

• It is in the Romantic period that Cleopatra's cruelty and sexuality merge. The prime period for killer Cleopatras was from the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of WWI, a time of peace in which, as Freud notes "life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked." This idea perhaps explains to some extent the fascination with the vicarious danger offered by stories of the fatal Cleopatra.

Pushkin• In 1825, Alexander Pushkin revived a neglected

story that Cleopatra demanded a man's life as the price for a night in her bed (and all of the killer Cleopatras derive from this one ancient source, the 4th c. AD historian Sextus Aurelius Victor who includes this brief anecdote: "she was so lustful that she often prostituted herself, and so beautiful that many men paid with their lives for a night with her."

• The story may have been canonical invective. Diodorus says the same thing about Semiramis.

Alexander Pushkin, Egyptian Nights, “Cleopatra”

Murderous Cleopatra• Others even adapt the ancient tradition: in 1775 the

Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri has Cleopatra kill Antony so that she may more easily seduce Octavian, demonstrating the ultimate cold and calculating pursuit of self-preservation (or in another version she deliberately causes the defeat at Actium to insure Antony's allegiance).

• Alexandre Soumet in his Tragedie de Cleopatre (1824) invents an episode in which Cleopatra murders Octavia and terrorizes her son. This descent into general mayhem not only departs from the ancient sources but also radically changes the characterization of Cleopatra, making her more of a villain than a powerful individual pressed by extreme circumstances.

Cleopatra’s male victims

• These blatantly villainous Cleopatras tend to be the exception. More often in the Romantic period, Cleopatra's male victims long for their own ruin.

• This idea, however, is no less shaped by misogyny (although it is an oversimplification to say that the femme fatale is simply a projection of misogyny; rather it seems that undercurrents of misogyny shape and more importantly give these portrayals credence with the audience).

Cleopatra as a character• The word character has 2 senses: in the dramatic

sense, a character in a play; in the moral sense, to have character, to be moral

• We tend to assume that a character will have consistency. As we saw with Shakespeare, this does not necessarily apply to Cleopatra: she defies definition; she is not one character but many; she is a gendered figure who gives the lie to gender or at least to the outmoded notions of gender adhered to by the other characters in the play.

Character analysis• These fatal Cleopatras often are linked to

contemporary notions of and prejudices about female roles. Heinrich Heine in 1891 in “Shakespeare's Maidens and Women”:– “It is a mistake to think that women when they betray

us have ceased to love. They only follow their inborn nature: and if they will not empty the forbidden cup, they like at least a sip from it, or lick the brim just to see what poison tastes like. ... Yes, this Cleopatra is a woman in the blessedest and cursedest sense of the word! ... [Cleopatra was one of those wives who] torment and bless their titular spouses with love.”

The female perspective• Contemporary society however has another influence on how

Cleopatra is seen: the growing feminist movement provides a model for Cleopatra in the woman who asserts her independence by refusing to marry. A biographical dictionary (1844) betrays this anxiety:– “[Cleopatra's worst failing was that] she never learnt to see her

own glory in that of the object of her choice; she persisted in placing herself first, before her beloved, and that, in a woman, is a serious fault.”

• In a novel by Rider Haggard, Cleopatra calls marriage "the iron link of enforced, unchanging union" and exclaims "Marriage! I to marry! I to forget freedom and court the worst slavery of our sex!"– This is quite a departure from the Cleopatra's we have seen in

Dryden and Shakespeare who may say that they do not want the status of wife but in fact long for it.

Cleopatra and gender• Despite sexist readings, the fatal Cleopatra is more

complex. She is an ambiguous image, as much desired as she is feared.

• Gautier describes Cleopatra thus as she has each lover killed after a night of passion: "Sublime cruelty! ... Great sensualist, how well you knew human nature, and what profound wisdom there is in this barbarous act!”

• A Freudian interpretation suggests further gender-bending: perhaps the men in these relationships, given their masochistic desires are placed in a "female" situation of desiring to be the passive partner.

• Generally, however, the fatal Cleopatra is loved despite (and indeed because of) her antisocial qualities, loved by the characters who play opposite her and by the authors and artists who portray her.

Swinburne, “Cleopatra” (1866)

Swinburne, “Cleopatra” (1866)

Swinburne, “Cleopatra” (1866)

Swinburne, “Cleopatra” (1866)

Frederick Sandys, “Cleopatra” (1866)

Swinburne on Michelangelo’s drawing of Cleopatra

• “The subtle and sublime idea which transforms her death by the aspic's bite into a meeting of serpents which recognize and embrace, an encounter between the woman and the worm of the Nile, almost as though this match for death were a monstrous love-match ... so closely do the snake and the queen of snakes caress and cling. ... For what indeed is lovelier or more luxuriously loving than a strong and graceful snake of the nobler kind?” Michelangelo, “Cleopatra” (1553-1554)

Killer Cleopatras: Conclusions• As for the character of these killer-Cleopatras: they are untamed and animal-like in that

they seem to rely on natural instincts, however taboo, and to be incapable of emotions such as tenderness and pity. These Cleopatras often condemn their victims to death and then disregard the sacrifice, in some accounts being to busy to watch the execution or, as in the Cabanel painting, watching but remaining aloof. There, she seems consumed by boredom and not even the drama of life and death can stimulate her senses. Ironically, she represents for her victims what she cannot attain for herself.

• We have seen the Cleopatra in the Middle Ages who became great when she killed herself. In the Romantic period Cleopatra offered men the opportunity to prove their own greatness by allowing themselves to be killed by her.

Cabanel, “Cleopatra”(1887)

Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra

Shaw’s Prologue• Spoken by the god Ra

– Subject: old Rome and new Rome• Pompey the soldier represents old Rome: military achievement is the way to

virtue• Caesar represents the new Rome: "any man with wit enough could become

what he would"; Caesar was a politician• Caesar broke the law of old Rome and Pompey upheld it: civil war resulted• Oppositions:

– Old rome/new rome– Mankind/gods– Pompey/Caesar– Old england/New England

• Moral: beware if you are the type who would like to be Pompey• Ra mocks the audience and frustrates their expectations: if they have come for

a tale of an unchaste woman they will be disappointed because Cleopatra is still a child and the play will tell them the story of Caesar for the good of their souls.– What kind of comment on Shakespeare is this dismissive treatment of Cleopatra?– What about the characterization of Cleopatra? Will she grow up to be

Shakespeare's Cleopatra?

Shaw: Background• b. 1856 Dublin• Shaw became a socialist disciple: he was the

force behind the Fabian Society founded in 1884 (a middle class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through "permeation" [Sidney Webb's tem] of the nation's intellectual and political life).

• Permeation: attempting to push through Fabian policies by converting persons of power and influence irrespective of their political affiliations

• Through the Fabians Shaw assisted in the birth of the Labour Party in 1893

• Labour Party: major democratic socialist party in Britain since early in the 20th c. Historical links with trade unions led it to promote an active role for the state in the creation of economic prosperity and the provision of social services.

George Bernard Shaw

Shaw as literary and cultural critic• He also carried on a campaign to displace the artificialities and

hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theater of vital ideas. It required the unmasking of "Bardolatry" as Shaw described the pompous and reverential portrayal of Shakespeare whom he admired beyond all other dramatists but whose words he insisted were not holy writ but only lines for players to speak. It required a contemporary drama of wit and substance to replace the melodramas and farces which were the staple of the commercial theater but other than the comedies of Wilde and the dramas of Ibsen there was little around which Shaw could rally.

• To the outside world he was ruthless as a critic, devastating in wit, irreverent about people, careless of feelings, impudent toward convention, iconoclastic toward institutions, hyperbolic for effect, cold-blooded about politics

• Perhaps we can see in Shaw 2 new Englands--the one that was emerging (British empire) and the vision Shaw championed (socialist)

Caesar and Cleopatra• Written 1898; performed 1901• Shaw's first attempt at a play of Shakespearean scope for a heroic

actor• By choosing a 16 year old Cleopatra rather than the 38 year old

temptress of Antony and a Caesar in Egypt who has not yet been enticed into the domestic demagoguery against which Brutus reacts, Shaw seemingly evades the "better than Shakespear?" challenge of his preface

• His feline Cleopatra however is a logical precursor to Shakespeare's voluptuous one and Shaw's aging Caesar (as much philosopher as soldier in this mentor-disciple play) is meant to be a study in credible magnanimity and original morality rather than a superhuman hero on a stage pedestal: in Shaw's words a hero "in whom we can recognize our own humanity"

• Caesar and Cleopatra is a serio-comic chronicle play which rises to prose-poetic eloquence and wisdom; it may be the best theatrical work written in English in the 19th c.

Other ways of seeing the play• Caesar and Cleopatra can also be seen as a military

melodrama that asks us to think about violence and justice• Also a religious allegory dramatizing the conflict between

Old Testament and New Testament morality• Even the exotic setting is part of the pattern: where

unpleasant plays conjure the gloom of city slums and pleasant plays conjure the sunshine of parks, the plays for puritans take place on remote imperial frontiers where what passes for civilization clashes with what is conventionally regarded as barbarism

• Egypt under Roman occupation becomes a proving ground for the conflict between the subhuman and superhuman elements in man's nature

Shaw and heroism• We see Shaw attempting to define his idea of heroism• The popular view of Caesar in Anglo-Saxon countries is

a hostile one: Caesar as a usurping tyrant who seized political power for selfish ends (Plutarch and Shakespeare, Lucan too)

• But there is a heroic view also (Dante has Brutus share with Judas a place in the jaws of Satan)

• Plutarch: Caesar as a great subversive who plotted to overthrow the Roman Republic but Plutarch makes him a great man

• Shakespeare's Julius Caesar however is a petty self-glorifier while Brutus is exalted

Shaw and Politics• Shaw saw himself as a Republican in that he preferred the American and

French systems of government to the feudalism of prewar Russia, Germany and Austria

• Caesar's remark: "were Rome a True republic then were Caesar the first of republicans"

• Shaw's admiration of Caesar is not at odds with his democratic socialism• Caesar's championing of the populace against the patricians in the class war

made him anathema to Lucan, Suetonius, and Shakespeare but the 19th c. historiographers reacting against the aristocratic feudalism hailed Caesar as the long overdue reformer of an outmoded constitution

• Hence the admiration of Caesar in Goethe, Hegel, Mommsen• Shaw's play is permeated with Mommsen's anti-aristocratic and anti-

constitutional point of view• The soldier's prologue ridicules the snobbish pretensions of the royal guard

whose class prejudices and chivalric code limit their effectiveness as fighters• The Ra prologue in its devastating judgment of Pompey echoes the scorn

Mommsen pours on the legalism and political myopia of pomp• Shaw further extends the criticism to Egypt's rulers

Caesar’s Rome and Imperialist England

• For Roman historian Warde Fowler, Julius Caesar and the foundation of the Roman imperial system show how Roman capitalism had by Caesar's day spread from Italy to the whole Mediterranean world

• For Fowler, Caesar's greatest achievement was the replacement of a self seeking city oligarchy by a genuine imperial system providing the foundation for modern civilization

• This idea lies behind the Ra prologue• The Egyptian god represents the zeitgeist or spirit of

the time and castigates modern Britain for following way of Rome at home and abroad and hails Caesar as one man who has risen above the level of exploiters to grasp the necessity for change.

Shaw’s Caesar and Evolution• Shaw's Caesar is not a reformer of codes but a man who

has outgrown them; he stands for evolutionary progress (cf. Darwin reference in Caesar description at end of play)

• Shaw on Caesar's writings in “Notes” – "they reveal some of his qualities just as the voyage of a

naturalist round the world reveals some of Darwin's without expressing his private personality.”

• Caesar wrote books of travel and campaign histories in a style so impersonal that he refers to himself in the third person. They reveal some of his qualities just as the Voyage of a Naturalist Round the World reveals some of Darwin's, without expressing his private personality.

• Doing what he wants to do he serves humanity or as Shaw puts it "having virtue he has no need of goodness"

Caesar: Good or Bad?• We could see Shaw's Caesar as a plunderer, destroyer of

national freedom, tyrant, condoner of incest, reveler, hypocrite, dandy, and in the library burning episode a soldier callously indifferent to literature and history, a type of anti-Christ

• But: it would be equally easy on the basis of his paternal kindness, freedom from resentment, horror of treachery, devotion to followers, and paraphrase of the sermon on the mount to make him a type of Christ

• Shaw is not trying to establish one or the other as the true Caesar but to show that this kind of moralizing is childish name calling whose categories any clever writer can invert at will

• But Caesar is like Nietzsche's great man: he has a loneliness in his heart neither praise nor blame can reach, courage even for unholy means

• Loneliness expressed in Caesar's opening soliloquy

Rome vs. Egypt

• In Shaw's play Caesar stands for humanity in its highest development and Cleopatra for untamed natural passion

• Aggressive and greedy Romans are likened to monsters, bulls and dogs

• Feminine and treacherous Egyptians are catlike and snakelike

Cleopatra on Egyptians…• CLEOPATRA: My great-

grandmother's great-grandmother was a black kitten of the sacred white cat; and the river Nile made her his seventh wife. That is why my hair is so wavy. And I always want to be let do as I like, no matter whether it is the will of the gods or not: that is because my blood is made with Nile water. “Caesar and Cleopatra” (1945) starring Vivien Leigh

And Claude Rains

…And Romans• CLEOPATRA: Oh, they would

eat us if they caught us. They are barbarians. Their chief is called Julius Caesar. His father was a tiger and his mother a burning mountain; and his nose is like an elephant's trunk. [Caesar involuntarily rubs his nose]. They all have long noses, and ivory tusks, and little tails, and seven arms with a hundred arrows in each; and they live on human flesh.

Caesar’s Character• Caesar is kind to Romans and Egyptians but it is the sort of kindness

you show another species• Shaw's and Shakespeare's Caesar are simply 2 different men though

their Cleopatras are recognizably the same woman• Shaw's point: Cleopatra's temperament was formed at early age

since it is a kind of arrested development• Shaw goes beyond Shakespeare in emphasizing Cleopatra's

murderous and sadistic side because of Shaw's attempt to present what might be called the dynastic view of Cleopatra

• Historically Ptolemaic kings and queens showed brutality in disposing of relatives close to the throne and Shaw seems to have thought Cleopatra a typical Ptolemy in this respect

• After Caesar influences her she changes only her external manner. In a deeper sense he has not influenced her and she remains ambivalent towards him wanting his fatherly approval but also longing to be free of his paternal surveillance

Shaw’s Caesar• In Shaw, Egypt is real and Rome a

fantasy world, refuting Shakespeare's portrayal of Alexandria as a fantasy world

• And Caesar is a species unto himself

• CAESAR: Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another: have I not been conscious of you and of this place since I was born? Rome is a madman's dream: this is my Reality. These starry lamps of yours I have seen from afar in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain, in Thessaly, signaling great secrets to some eternal sentinel below, whose post I never could find.

What is Caesar?• So if he isn't Roman, Egyptian, even man at all, or

accessible through his words, what is he?• Something entirely new: like Shakespeare's Antony, Shaw's

Caesar doesn't fit in at Rome or Egypt• Old and new apply to Rome and Egypt and to England as

well and also align with the Old and New Testaments

• CAESAR: Can Rome do less that slay these slayers, too, to shew the world how Rome avenges her sons and her honor. And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

Uniqueness of Shaw’s Caesar• How is Shaw's Caesar different from those we have seen?• Politically• In Caesar and Cleopatra Shaw is preoccupied with

questions of just and good leadership• Influenced by Shaw's own politics• He believed that the human species had not evolved

perceptively within historic time and that civilization had reached the point at which empires have always broken down; the British empire was showing signs of breaking down because the management of the empire overtaxed the political capacity of it's human units

• The remedy: a new sort of man (can be taken as an argument for eugenics)

Shaw vs. Shakespeare• Caesar and Cleopatra was one of "three puritan plays" • Shaw objected to making sexual infatuation a tragic theme and to the

glorification of immoral behavior• A major motive for the play: the feeling of the inadequacy of

Shakespeare's dramatization of Julius Caesar and at the same time Caesar and Cleopatra was penned as a protest vs. Antony and Cleopatra.

• From the preface:– Shakespear's Antony and Cleopatra must needs be as intolerable to the true

Puritan as it is vaguely distressing to the ordinary healthy citizen because after giving a faithful picture of the soldier broken down by debauchery and the typical wanton in whose arms such men perish, Shakespear finally strains all his huge command of rhetoric and stage pathos to give a theatrical sublimity to the wretched end of the business, and to persuade foolish spectators that the world was well lost by the twain.

• Of course it was Dryden who said the world was well lost but Shaw takes issue with Shakespeare's foregrounding of romantic love by not showing a specifically sexual relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra and ignoring Caesar's reputation as a womanizer, Cleopatra's visit to Rome, and Caesarion

Shaw and Reception• Shaw was aware of his own status as a receiver of the tale of

Cleopatra, that his perspective was shaped by his own historical context

• From the preface: "and the playgoer may reasonably ask to have historical events and persons presented to him in the light of his own time, even though Homer and Shakespear have already shewn them in the light of their time. For example, Homer presented Achilles and Ajax as heroes to the world in the Iliad. In due time came Shakespear, who said, virtually: I really cannot accept this spoilt child and this brawny fool as great men merely because Homer flattered them in playing to the Greek gallery. Consequently we have in Troilus and Cressida the verdict of Shakespear's epoch…on the pair. This did not in the least involve any pretense on Shakespear's part to be a greater poet than Homer."

Shakes vs. Shav (1949)• Shaw even wrote script for a

puppet play to go with puppets of himself and Shakespeare sent to him by the greatest puppet master of the time.

• The 2 playwrights confront each other and gently challenge the greatness of each other's works. Shaw reaffirms his evolutionary optimism in the face of Shakespeare's alleged pessimism. They even debate each other's lines as in Aristophanes' Frogs

• There are specific echoes of Antony and Cleopatra throughout Caesar and Cleopatra