Bias in representing the Roman-Egyptian conflict in Antony and Cleopatra and American racial cultures

Racial Stereotyping in "Anthony and Cleopatra"

Unlike "Romeo and Juliet," a play that is structured upon two star-crossed but ultimately compatible lovers, "Anthony and Cleopatra" is a play structured upon opposites -- Rome and Egypt, male and female, even sea and land. The dichotomies offered by the play in terms of personality and locale are seen, despite the protagonist's passion for one another, as fundamentally incompatible rather than having any possibility of reconciliation. The blame is not only in politics and society, but also in the two individual's inability to be 'like' one another, as one is racially a black sensuous woman and the other a white, male leader.

Even when military and political issues come to the fore, they have a sexual resonance. For instance, Cleopatra's importuning Anthony to fight at sea becomes indicative, at this juncture of the play, of how the great general has been impinged upon in terms of his military judgment. He agrees to her plan and fails as a result Cleopatra likewise is paired in her sensuality against Octavia, the sister of Augustus Caesar whom Anthony betrays after he is forced to marry into the Roman imperial family. Octavia represents a wise political alignment, but she lacks passion when compared to the Egyptian queen.

The incompatible nature of the Egyptian Cleopatra with Roman values is clear from the beginning of the play. In the first speech of "Anthony and Cleopatra" it becomes clear in the voice of a common soldier named who never speaks again that the serpent of old Nile, or so she calls herself in the voice of Anthony, will prove Anthony's undoing: Nay, but this dotage of our general's/O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,/That o'er the files and musters of the war/Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,/the office and devotion of their view / Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,/Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst/the buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,/and is become the bellows and the fan/to cool a gipsy's lust. (I.1)

This soldier Philo's language is undeniably racial in its intent -- Cleopatra represents all that is bad about Egypt, and what is bad is her gypsy appearance, her tawny and bronzed skin. Although Cleopatra is described as once being beautiful, her racial identity as an Egyptian and her representation of darkness and a darker form of sensuality is unmistakable. The queen admits this herself, even validating the blackness as ugliness stereotyping -- "Think on me,/That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black,/and wrinkled deep in time?" (I.5)

But although the North African woman may be more desirable than Octavia in her form and in her height and in the shape of her forehead, any beauty she has is drugging and sedating like the drug she asks for from her castrated eunuch, rather than sustaining to Anthony. Her use of eunuchs, of course, underlines what she makes of the once-great leader Anthony -- a mere plaything of a strong woman. However, this characterization of black women in leadership positions and sexual positions in relation to white is hardly particular to Shakespeare.