Drama Queens: Cleopatra in Elizabethan England

3 units

Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, has become famous for her romantic liaisons, political maneuvering, and her death by snake bite. Yet Cleopatra was also a formidable military strategist, a powerful leader who studied medicine and spoke nearly a dozen languages. Most importantly, Cleopatra was the prototype for depicting strong women on the throne. This course will explore how Early Modern playwrights re-imagined Cleopatra in the Renaissance, a time which saw another strong queen, Elizabeth I, rise to power. We will pay special attention how these dramatists used Cleopatra to engage with issues of race, globalization, gender, history, and politics. Finally, we will think about how Shakespeare and his contemporaries analogized the exotic and sometimes scandalous Cleopatra with the virginal Queen Elizabeth, two women who mobilized the power of performance to assert female authority in their male-dominated societies.