Date of Award
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Myhill, Nova
Keywords
Antony and Cleopatra, Politics, Gender
Area of Concentration
Literature
Abstract
This thesis examines the ways in which five English plays use the historical story of Antony and Cleopatra to deal with the anxieties surrounding the political power of female rulership and influence. Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Life of Antony established this historical story as an ethical case study about a leader who was too heavily influenced by a controlling foreign queen, a story fit to be adapted and imitated to fit an English sense of values. During the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras, Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare translated or wrote plays which attempted to construct how this enslaving female power worked, as well as answer the question of how, and whether, a queen could be noble while still wielding this power. The later Restoration plays of John Dryden and Charles Sedley comment on female power most by displacing it, relegating the danger instead to the excess of passion bringing both rulers to their downfall.
Recommended Citation
Rose, Sherri, "THE ANGLICIZED CLEOPATRA: REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE POLITICAL POWER IN ENGLISH DRAMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF THE STORY OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA" (2015). Theses & ETDs. 6468.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/6468