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Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations.
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This is a place with a past
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that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com VisitScotland Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.
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That is, of course, William Shakespeare's unforgettable description of Cleopatra in his Anthony and Cleopatra, the most famous literary Cleopatra, but only one of hundreds, if not thousands of Cleopatras on the page who have been launched into the world onto their shimmering barges by authors writing in the millennia after her death from the medieval period onwards.
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A
Today, we are very lucky to be welcoming author Lucy Hughes Hallett to Instant Classics to guide us through the dazzling array of Cleopatras who appeared in literature beyond classical Rome. We will mostly not entirely be talking about English literature here, but even these literary inventions, based closely or distantly on Roman sources, vary wildly from models of virtue and bravery to femme fatale who kill you as soon as they sleep with you. In the end, they may end up telling us more about their authors fantasies and preconceptions than about the historical reality of the Egyptian queen, but they're no less interesting for that.
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Lucy is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including a biography of the Italian poet and politician Gabriele d' Annunzio the Pike, which won multiple prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Now Bailey Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, pipping one of my books to the Post that year, and was named the Biography of the Decade in the Sunday Times. Her most recent book is the the Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, about James I's favorite absolutely wonderful. But her first book, published in 1990, was a biography of Cleopatra, and it's both a biography of the Egyptian queen's life and also about her afterlife in in the Imagination of Writers and Artists from the Medieval Period right up to the present day. And it's just been republished in a revised edition and with a new, dazzling cover, I should say, of Vivien Leigh in all her pomp. And it's out right now.
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This is Instant Classics, the podcast uncovering the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Bearded.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now this episode, Cleopatra on The page.
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Lucy, thank you so much for being with us. Welcome to our podcast. How are you doing?
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D
Thank you very much for inviting me to join you. It's an honour.
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C
Well, we're so pleased to have you. Honor for us. Absolutely. Lucy, can I start by plunging in and asking you about the medieval Cleopatras? Because, you know, already in the Middle Ages or the. We have. Or the Renaissance, let's say we have Boccaccio in Italy and Chaucer in England doing super different things with Cleopatra. Boccaccio, he's a sort of byword for greed and cruelty and lustfulness. And then very, very quickly afterwards, in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, she is a model of virtue. So, you know, what is going on here? How come Cleopatra springs into sort of European literature in these wildly differing ways?
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D
Well, I think Mary put it very well. Cleopatra, on the whole, since her death, and actually in her lifetime too, to a large extent, is not so much a real person, or rather, the people who write about her aren't interested in describing her as a real person. What they want to use her as is a kind of mirror onto which they can project their own prejudices and anxieties and often erotic fantasies. And so, yeah, as you say, Boccaccio in the 1360s describes her as being known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty and lustfulness. In other words, she's a sort of personification of two or three of the seven deadly sins. And then only a decade or so later, Chaucer makes her the kind of the lead woman for one of his least enjoyable works, which is the Legend of Good Women. And the Legend of Good Women is this ghastly catalogue of women who've killed themselves for love because once their man is dead, their life has become totally meaningless and they perform a kind of satie and, you know, they kill themselves rather than survive. And it turns out that, I mean, I read around this a bit rather surprised by this view that Chaucer was taking, that the most interesting thing ever to have been done by this extremely competent and for a long time successful ruler was to kill herself. And it turns out that a lot of medieval authors were male. Medieval authors were very, very anxious about widows because widows at that period were the only female people who were able to own their own property. They had a kind of independence, they. That no unmarried woman or married woman could have. And what bothered the men was thinking that after they. The husbands were dead, their widows might marry someone else just for pleasure and have a happy time without them. And so this idealization of the women who killed themselves for love because they didn't want to outlive their men was a way of saying these women, they include Dido killing herself because she can't be with Aeneas anymore. Thisbe, you know, Pyramus and Thisbe from Midsummer Night's Dream. But number one is Cleopatra. So you have this. And the moral of the legend for good women is that the only good woman is a dead one.
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C
Oh, God, here we go.
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A
It is just extraordinary how these women flip, you know, because in Dante, Cleopatra is in the second circle of hell, along with, you know, her companion Dido. And we were. We were talking in the last episode about how the Roman version of Dido has kind of Cleopatra bubbling under the surface. And it, you know, it's great to see or very interesting to see how these medieval authors also are putting these. This pair together, whether you think that they're put together as being good or as being worthy of being in one of the very worst places in the. In the underworld. Yeah.
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D
And then we get into a very complicated business of the kind of. The ethics of suicide. Because for Chaucer, a woman proves her virtue by killing herself because that means she's not, you know, lusting after a second husband. But of course, suicide was a sin from the Christian point of view. So that, you know, this all gets very tricky. And you find a lot of complicated attempts to somehow tie these mutually contradictory sets of ethics into some kind of consistent whole. And one way of doing that is to say that Cleopatra is a martyr. She's a martyr to love. And there are extraordinary representations of her and Anthony in medieval illuminated manuscripts, posed with, in Anthony's case, a sword which he's trying to thrust into his bosom. And in Cleopatra's case, with a snake or a wonderful picture, she has two snakes, one for each breast. And they're standing there displaying the instruments of their deaths in exactly the way that the martyrs do on the wall paintings in medieval churches.
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C
So it becomes a kind of martyrology. In the way we actually talked about with Perpetua in a previous episode. But not quite a Christian martyr in this case.
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A
Presumably, in part, it's the fact that moral judgment is so difficult. You know, good, bad, committing the sin of suicide or rightly killing herself in order to stop the dangers of widowhood. It's that kind of on the fence difficulty about her that partly drives so many of these representations. You know, she's exciting and interesting because she isn't quite as easy to categorise as you might think.
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D
And one of the reasons that she is so difficult to categorize is that. I mean, I'm now hopping forward a bit into the period after Sir Thomas North's translations of Plutarch appeared. Is that most subsequent versions of Cleopatra's story are based on Plutarch's account. And Plutarch is so brilliant because he mixes together the hostile Roman propaganda with the more positive vision of Cleopatra, which he was getting from other sources.
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C
So, just to pick up there, Lucy, what we're talking about here is Plutarch, who we have talked about in previous episodes of this series on Cleopatra. Plutarch, the biographer of famous figures, including Mark Antony. And in the biography of Mark Antony, there's a lot of Cleopatra energy. And this big text written in Greek, is finally translated into English in, I think, 1579 by Thomas North. And has an immediate, I think, and kind of huge impact on English literature. Because suddenly this material is freely available. You know, if you can afford it, it's printed, it's out there. So how. Tell us, tell us more. Because clearly, Thomas north is a huge influence for Shakespeare, but also a whole bunch of other people, I think. Right. That you talk about in the book. There's innumerable people that I've never heard of working with North.
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D
Absolutely. So, you know, Shakespeare's version is the one that we all know. But there were over a dozen tragedies of Anthony and Cleopatra written between the publication of North's Plutarch and then Shakespeare getting down to the job in Italian, in French, and in this country as well. And one of the things that Shakespeare takes from it. And obviously, each of those playwrights has a different focus. You know, they're bringing a different moral to the story, as it were. But I think that one of the reasons why Shakespeare's version has proved so enduring, apart from the fact that Shakespeare, of course, is a genius, which is, you know, reason number one. But reason number two is that he focuses on the. The dangers of passion. And we tend, you know, since the Romantic era, we tend to see love as being a route to happiness. And, you know, everybody loves a lover, everybody wants to be a lover. But that wasn't really the case in Shakespeare's lifetime. And the particular danger that is stressed a lot in Shakespeare's tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra is the much to be feared way in which a man falling in love with a woman begins to lose tight hold of his virility. He becomes feminized because he and this beloved woman are merging. And there's a lot of talk in that play about, I mean, Cleopatra boasts about how she's dressed Anthony in her clothes, she's put her tires and mantles on him and she's wearing his sword, Philippi, you know, the great reckon that he was wearing at the battle of Philippi. And so they're getting a bit scarily gender fluid here, which, you know, was not desirable to people at that period.
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A
Interestingly, that gender fluidity would have been even more kind of mixed up on the Shakespearean stage because the Cleopatra would have been being played by a man,
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D
by her squeaking goy, as she says, herself.
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C
Yes, yes.
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So you've got all the kind of hints about gender fluidity that you get in Plutarch then get wonderfully represented, enlarged and made much more kind of meaningful when you get to how Shakespeare does it and helped by the gender fluidity of the Elizabethan stage or the Jacobean stage.
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D
And of course the gist of this is that Anthony, in becoming feminized in having gone to Egypt and Egypt is a very suspect place from the sexual political point of view because, hey, it's governed by a woman. How shocking is that? And indeed you've probably talked about this, but in your previous episodes, but the legal position of women in Egypt was a great deal better than the legal position of women in Rome. And so Octavius in Shakespeare's play is able to say that, you know, Anthony is not more man like than Cleopatra and the Queen of Ptolemy is more womanly than he. So it's that there is a sense that they are losing. They're losing themselves in each other and Anthony is losing his manhood in doing so.
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C
How fascinating. And what about Cleopatra herself? Because in terms of. I guess I was, I, I did that. I looked up what was the biggest female role in Shakespeare, and as I thought it is Rosalind in As yous like it. But actually Cleopatra. Cleopatra, it seems to me, is the sort of grandest. I mean, she's the second biggest part for a woman in Shakespeare, but she's Definitely the grandest and the most imposing and the most tragic. What is Shakespeare's Cleopatra herself? You know, aside from the way she infects and affects the virility of the great Roman. I mean, I suppose the play is specifically, it's Anthony and Cleopatra, isn't it? In the sense that, you know, it could have been Anthony. And indeed, Plutarch's biography is Anthony. But this is a relational.
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D
Yes, and she's very inconsistent in the play and that the people talk about her as though she's something tremendous. And, you know, the attendant lords discuss, you know, the wonderful love that exists between the two of them. And they talk about Anthony as a kind of colossus, and they talk about Cleopatra as, you know, the wonderful speech that Mary quoted earlier about, you know, age cannot wither. Her customs tell her infinite variety. And the infinite variety is the key phrase, because she is. You can't pin her down. It's interesting that when we see her on stage, when she's actually there before our very eyes speaking, she's very often bullying the servants, acting rather shrewishly, being jealous, you know, or she's bored to tears because she can't think of anything more interesting to do than sit around sort of misting Anthony as though she hasn't got a kingdom to manage. You know, she isn't this great figure when we see her, but the peripheral characters keep informing us how irresistible and how wonderful she is. And I think that sort of disjunction between her as described and her as we actually perceive her is one of the things that makes that character so fascinating because basically, because it doesn't add up. So every director, every great actress who's tackled the role, you know, has a huge problem to solve, and it only really comes together at the moment of her death, when she does become truly
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A
grand Viking as an unreconstructed classicist here. I mean, what I think is amazing about this is that one life of Plutarch, Plutarch's life of Anthony remains throughout the rest of history. What you have to grapple with if you want to talk about Cleopatra. I mean, when we were doing our earlier episodes on what we could say about the historical Cleopatra, you can't avoid going back to Plutarch when you come to fictionalize her and recreate her later. There is, you know, it's always Plutarch that. That you have to put in your sights. I think his influences on how we see Cleopatra, even in how we reinterpret her, is in some ways, as you say, it is a. How do you come to terms with Plutarch and then rewrite her?
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D
Absolutely. And if Plutarch and Shakespeare had been alive at the same time and Plutarch had brought a case for plagiarism against Shakespeare, Plutarch would have won.
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C
I want to move us forward a bit because in the next century we get a very different kind of Cleopatra via John Dryden, the playwright John Dryden, Lucy, don't we? And he writes a play which again, I mean, this is my. Again, as another unreconstructed classicist, my knowledge of the complete range of English literature is sadly lacking. So I do not know Dryden's 1677 play all for Love, but I understand that it sort of was the preferred Cleopatra story on the stage, on London stages, on British stages for an entire century between, you know, 1700 and just after 1800, when Anthony and Cleopatra didn't really get a look in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra and everyone wanted to watch all for Love by John Dryden. Please, please tell us what all for Love by John Dryden had going for it.
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D
Well, there has been this huge shift. So in the 17th century, all of a sudden the topic of marriage becomes important. And the difference between a virtuous wife and a harlot or a mistress, and I mean, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is she's very jealous of Anthony's Roman wife, but she's not at all concerned about the fact that she and Anthony have not been properly married. But in the 17th century that becomes a big issue. And it's partly to do with the kind of post Reformation Protestant valorization of marriage as an institution. And the idea that a marriage might actually be a proper companionship between two people rather than just, you know, a kind of institution for the generation of offspring or in the case of the upper classes, a dowry producing transaction. So all of a sudden being a wife becomes something that's honorable and to be respected and admired in itself. And Dryden's Cleopatra is very, very upset about the fact that she's not properly married to Anthony. And she comes on the stage, she makes her first appearance, sort of wringing her hands and saying, nature intended me a wife. A silly, harmless household dove, which is not quite the way we normally think of Cleopatra, but so a silly, harmless household dove is what a woman was supposed to be. Tough on Cleopatra that she'd failed to achieve that status. But the fact that she was sad about it and wished she could be properly married to Anthony sort of restores her to virtue because it Shows that she'd like to be good if she could. And this version of the story coincides with a great shift also in the visual images of Cleopatra. There've been lots of paintings of her going right back to her, to the early Christian era of Cleopatra's death, or Cleopatra as a sort of sex object reclining on a sort of a settee of some kind. Whereas now we start getting paintings of Cleopatra doing good wifely things like hanging garlands on Anthony's tomb or weeping over his dead body. Or in one by the really successful Austrian painter Anton Mengs, there's a painting of Cleopatra on her knees before Octavius submitting to him. I mean, you know, this never took place. Octavius didn't come to Egypt to receive Cleopatra's surrender, but the idea of her doing the proper womanly thing of bowing down before a male conqueror was very appealing to people at the time. So she.
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C
And very unfair because as we know from Horace's poem that we discussed last episode, Non Hummelis Muliad, she was not a humbled woman. She did not. She very specifically, I feel rather. I feel rather loyal to Cleopatra and rather outraged on her behalf because the one thing she didn't do was surrender. She took her life rather than bend the knee. To linking Octavian Exactly.
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A
I am beginning to feel, despite my claims about the absolute centrality of Plutarch in all this, I'm beginning to feel that Plutarch is a little bit further away from Dryden than he is from Shakespeare.
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C
I mean, after the break, Lucy, I'm really looking forward to hearing about what happens to Cleopatra next because she is going on a pretty rollicking ride through English and European literature at this point. She has, she has. She's done a lot and I think, as predicted, she has. She's already telling us more about the people who've rewritten her and the age in which she has been rewritten than. Than about ancient Egyptian or Roman history.
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A
Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
- [26:14]
C
We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.
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A
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
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C
okay, Lucy, again, I want to rush us forward to the end now of the, of the 18th century to, to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria that started in 1798. This is another key moment right in the, in the reinvention and the rethinking of, of Cleopatra. These wars reverberate hugely in Western Europe, not just as kind of military and political events, but as a sort of seismic cultural shock.
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D
Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, it was a military invasion, but it was also an extraordinary exercise in what we would now call cultural appropriation. And he took scholars with him, he took artists to sketch the pyramids and so forth. And what he wanted to do was to sort of gobble up all the ancient culture of Egypt with the result that Egypt became very, very fashionable in France particularly, but also spreading across Europe. And so, you know, every hostess had to have a little obelisk on her mantelpiece or a chair with sphinxes, heads, sort of handles. And the result of this was that an, in terms of, you know, the Cleopatra story is that all of a sudden, for the first time really ever, all since her lifetime, the fact that Cleopatra was a foreigner became of pressing interest to everyone who tried to tell her story. And one indication of this is that her appearance changes drastically. So for many centuries, Cleopatra was blonde because she was known as a, an alluring, irresistibly alluring tentress, a great beauty. And therefore, obviously to Northern European, she had to be blonde, because beauty is a blonde, aren't they? And so the medieval poets write about her as having eyes as blue as the sky, hair like spun gold, and breasts like ivory billiard balls. But all of that changes.
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C
Who's the ivory billiard? Who's the culprit for the ivory billiard ball?
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D
He's called Jacques Belliard. It's a very attractive little poem and artists take that very seriously. So right up to the end of the 18th century, we get tiepolo very late in this period, showing Cleopatra as a sort of strawberry blonde, Pale, pale, pale. But then Napoleon goes off to Egypt. Egypt becomes a topic of interest within European culture. And it's foreign, it's exotic, it's alluring, it's sexy. And all of a sudden we have Delacroix painting Cleopatra with dark hair and dark eyes, looking as though she might conceivably have come from Egypt.
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C
Right. So it sort of becomes a pla. I mean, it's. Two things perhaps are happening. One is this kind of colonial, actually completely rapacious clearing out of Egypt, which is combined with, you know, scholarly curiosity. Egypt as this extraordinary, in the eyes of Western Europe, exotic and alluring place. But at the same time, it is sort of coming slightly into focus as a place in the sense that it has occurred to people in Western Europe that those who live in North Africa may have darker skin. I mean, you know, may look a bit different from. From ideals of beauty forged in Renaissance Italy and, you know, the Netherlands and. And Britain. So she becomes. She. She starts. Does she start to look. She starts to sort of look a bit like she comes from North Africa in a way. Or is it still a kind of fantasy vision of the dark. Of the beautiful, dark woman?
- [30:48]
D
Very often actually, she looks like someone from an Ottoman sultan's harem. And, you know, there's a lot of. In the minds of the French and indeed English Orientalists, the Orient is just one big place, you know, and timeless. So the fact that Cleopatra probably didn't dress in quite the same way as a Turkish dancing girl would have done is not taken account of by the French Orientalist paintings of the 19th century. But of course, this transformation has a political dimension because Cleopatra, she comes from Egypt, which is conveniently on the corner of the mysterious Orient and darkest Africa, to use, you know, the kind of racist tropes of this period. And those are the territories which the rapacious European powers are looking at as they begin to think about grabbing an empire for themselves. And so the story of Cleopatra and actually Mary, at this point, we do deviate from Plutarch's story quite a lot because it becomes a story. Although this is a theme which is also present in some of the Roman sources. But it becomes a story about an ancient civilization. Egypt is venerable. It's old. It has this sort of wisdom going back into the mists of time, but partly because it's so old, it's exhausted. And it's very interesting to notice how often that the 19th century Cleopatras are either painted or Appear on stage lying on chaise longue because they're so exhausted, they're so decadent, they simply haven't got the strength to stand on their own two feet. And they need a white conqueror from the north to come in and shake them up and run their country for them.
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A
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, because it's decadence in its kind of etymological sense, you know, not just over the top kind of decadence, but it's decadence which is literally falling down, you know, that this culture is finished unless it can be rescued. Unless it can be rescued by some, by a bloke, you know, a European white bloke.
- [33:15]
C
And they're very. I mean it sort of does conveniently map onto the virile Roman comes to and sorts out Egypt. Although of course the discourse is really quite. Is really quite different in some ways. So there's a kind of convenient. There's a convenient template there. So Pushkin is writing in this period and he becomes super Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet. So what does he do with Cleopatra?
- [33:47]
D
Well, he's very interested in Cleopatra and he does three different versions of story. And the one called Egyptian Knights, which is an extended short story which became the kind of the dominant Cleopatra plot throughout most of the 19th century for playwrights in particular. And the story is like this. Cleopatra is lolling around on a chaise log as usual, and Antony's absent, so she's bored, she's got nothing to do do, she's got no one to sleep with. So she announces as she sits at her feast, because she spends every evening feasting, and she announces that she's decided that she needs to take a new man to her bed and she's asking for volunteers. And there's just one, you know, obviously anyone would snap it up, except that there is a condition which might give unpause, which is that the chosen man will be put to death at dawn the next day. And lots of people step forward rather surprisingly given that condition. And she chooses a beautiful young boy, she takes him off to her bedchamber, hours of rapture ensue and at dawn he's executed. And 19th century romantic readers loved this story and it really, throughout the the middle of the 19th century, the old story about Anthony and the battle of Actium and the asp, you know, that gets completely forgotten. A play commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt, based on the Astoria Pushkin's that Sarah Bernhardt played Cleopatra in repeatedly. She was still playing Cleopatra when she was 70 and people adored it. And there's a line for. From Pushkin's story, One Night at the Price of a Life, which is quoted actually in Dostoevsky as the idiot. It becomes a sort of catchphrase of the kind of, I don't know, the decadent Romantics of the late 19th century. And it's obviously felt to be some kind of a truism that a sublime pleasure is good enough to just trade the whole of the rest of your life for.
- [36:10]
A
I find this a quite a difficult message. You know, The whole idea that it would be worth giving your life for one night with Cleopatra seems, you know, seems to me kind of an implausible line to pluck.
- [36:32]
C
You think. I mean, this whole story so far has been a parade of deep misogyny and racism. I mean, this is. Reflects incredibly badly on male writers of every century so far, I should say.
- [36:49]
D
I'm afraid it does. It does, yeah.
- [36:52]
C
Poor Cleopatra.
- [36:53]
A
The idea of sort of this sort of male victimhood. I mean, you know, I just find it very hard to imagine the audience at one of these Sarah Bernhardt performances, you know, I wonder what they said
- [37:06]
D
when they went out.
- [37:07]
C
But, Mary, it's the Lucy. Is it not the case that at least apocryphally, it was a Sarah Bernhardt performance in this play that caused someone in the audience to say, how. How unlike. How very unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.
- [37:25]
D
It's a great story that, isn't it?
- [37:27]
C
Queen Victoria?
- [37:29]
D
Whether anyone ever actually said it, I'm not sure, but we love it. And I've. I also very much like. There's a chapter in Charlotte Bronte's best novel, I think, Villette, when Lucy Snow, the heroine of Villette, goes to the theatre and she sees a famous actress playing. Actually, no, she's seen a famous actress, but then separately she goes. Monsieur Poul, her love interest, takes her to an art gallery and shows her a painting of Cleopatra. And Lucy Snow, who's a very sensible woman, unhappy but sensible, is absolutely appalled by this image of Cleopatra lying around voluptuously, sort of, as it were, completely passive, but waiting to be assaulted, basically by any passing man who might feel so inclined. So there were always women who were ready to kind of speak out against this rather deeply misogynist tradition that's so interesting.
- [38:37]
C
So Charlotte Bronte, thinking about someone looking at an image of Cleopatra. So, hurrah, we have a woman writer. It just made me think of also George Eliot's Middlemarch, where Dorothea. When Dorothea goes to Rome, she is seen, I think, I'm going from old memory here. She's in the same room as the famous sculpture of Ariadne. But George Eliot is very keen to remind us that that sculpture had been thought originally to be. Thought to be of Cleopatra. So there's a kind of wonderful moment where Dorothea, one of the heroines, probably the heroine of Middlemarch, is in Rome, lost in contemplation next to this recumbent statue that's known as a statue of the mythical heroine Ariadne, but until fairly recently, had been thought to be Cleopatra. And then she is observed by Will Ladislaw. And it's an incredibly gorgeous and sexy scene. But I just. I just wanted to throw that in because. Because oddly, in a sense, I mean, is it oddly or not, it feels like we have a lot of men getting very, very hot and bothered about Cleopatra in one way or another over these centuries. And not so much. Not so much reclamation of her so far by women authors. Female authors. I don't know, Lucy.
- [40:08]
D
No, I mean, there are. There are a few female voices. There's an excellent historical novel by Sarah Fielding, a sister of the more famous Henry, creator of Tom Jones, and in which there's a nice little scene in that novel where Sarah Fielding imagines Cleopatra meeting Anthony at Tarsus, as she normally does. And as they sort of step up to greet each other, she pretends to stumble down a step and he steps forward and sort of catches her by the elbow and, you know, helps her down. And she says something sort of polite about, you know, this is such a good omen because, you know, your strength, Anthony, will support me, and this is the beginning of our great partnership. But she says, aside, little did he imagine that by tricks and deceit, I should rule Antony for the remainder of his life. So this is a Cleopatra whose weakness is purely pretended.
- [41:16]
C
Okay, well, it's good to see Cleopatra has some sort of nous on her in some versions. But if we flip forward again, I think things get even worse, in a way, in the hands of George Bernard Shaw.
- [41:28]
D
Yes, I mean, Bernard Shaw's Cleopatra is a silly child. And of course, I mean, it's very funny, his play.
- [41:37]
C
But this is roughly. When are we speaking? We're post First World War here.
- [41:41]
D
Yes, we are. And so his version of the Cleopatra story has Caesar being very witty and funny and unromantic and unimpressed by Cleopatra, who is basically, you know, she should still be in the nursery. She's just a foolish child. Very, very attractive. And of course, you know, wonderful film. I know you're going to talk about films in another episode so I won't dwell on it. But goodness, Vivien Leigh is beautiful in the park.
- [42:14]
C
I mean not so long after that Cleopatra. We actually, I'm so happy to say that we get to my personal favorite Cleopatra in literature. I mean, okay, I'm leaving aside Shakespeare because you have to leave aside Shakespeare. But there is this beautiful funny, ridiculous novella or very long short story by someone called Lord Berners. Gerald Berners, Right. Who was. He was a friend of Stravinsky. He was a composer, he worked with Diaghilev. He was an English aristocrat. He was friends with Nancy Mitford. He is the model for Lord Merlyn in Nancy Mitford's fabulous novel the Pursuit of Love. He really did dye his doves beautiful colours as we see him in that great and great fun novel. But he also wrote and his writing isn't particularly well known. I mean and in a way it's kind of, you know his, his book about Cleopatra is a comic novella called the Romance of the Nose. And it's predicated on the fact that Cleopatra has an enormous nose. And then it's how she deals with that and becomes, you know, emerges from being a kind of child locked in this very young woman locked in sort of sibling arguments with her horrible little brothers to emerge as the kind of fabulous grand Cleopatra that is. It's. But she is to me, Lucy. She's witty, she's clever, she's funny, she outsmarts everybody. But she is absolutely a 1920s hostess. I mean she's not exactly. There's nothing especially authentic about this Cleopatra. She's very much a kind of society lady from Gerald Berners own circle I would say with some nice Egyptian trappings and Greek Ptolemaic trappings.
- [44:18]
D
Yes. And in the 20th century, from the First World War onwards. I mean I think what you need is a world war to get rid of fantasies of femme fatale. Because when people have been killed all over the place anyway nobody's really sort of fantasizing about wouldn't it be fun to get killed. And so then you start getting these wonderfully cynical and sophisticated kind of send ups of the Cleopatra legend. And I agree with you, I love Lord Bernice's. I love the way she says she finds the pyramids very, very vulgar. You know, she's. And I'm also very fond of this excellent novel by the lesbian author Mary butts writing in 1935 which is fantastically sexy but not in a kind of, you know, sultry romantic do me Femme fatale kind of way. But Mary Butz's Cleopatra is simply, you know, a good time girl. She's looking for pleasure and the pleasure is described with sort of wonderful voluptuousness. And Anatole France remarks that, you know, Cleopatra is very cosmopolitan. And he imagines her arriving in Rome from Alexandria, where, you know, everything is much more gorgeous, and thinking that the Romans are frightfully sort of boorish and their thrones are rather small and uncomfortable. So this kind of the comic take on Cleopatra accelerates in the 20th century and gets rid of a lot of the foolish fantasies.
- [46:03]
A
I think as we draw to the end, I think we have to say these are all Western Cleopatras. What we've been looking at is absolutely fascinating is Cleopatra as the figment of Western European imagination. Now, that kind of sense of the takeover of Cleopatra by the west has been a theme when people have been looking up the historical Cleopatra about how do you reinsert her back into Egypt? How can you stop her just becoming part of the mainstream of Western history? If we go to Egyptian writers rather than Western and Northern European writers, they don't. This is predictable, isn't it? They don't go along with the femme fatale version of Cleopatra. And poor Mark Anthony kind of dragged to his. Well, ultimately to his death, but certainly his decadent decline by this temptress. What kind of writing is there about Cleopatra if you take an Egyptian perspective?
- [47:28]
D
Well, if you go sort of right back to kind of the few centuries after her death, there is a tradition, people writing in Alexandria or actually a bit later in Byzantium, where you get historians writing about her as a philosopher, as a scholar, and you don't. This tradition isn't necessarily any more close to historical reality than the hostile European tradition. And there's one Byzantine historian from, I think, the sixth century who says that Cleopatra built the great lighthouse in Alexandria, which was actually built 200 years before she was born. But so there is always this other view and it's harder to excavate it, but it's there. And then coming back into the 20th century as the last queen of Egypt, I mean, you know, after Cleopatra, Egypt is annexed to the Roman Empire and then it's conquered by the Arabs and it becomes part of the Ottoman Empire, and then the British get there. So it hasn't been independent for most of the 2,000 years that separate us from Cleopatra. And then in the early 20th century, an Egyptian nationalist movement began to claim Cleopatra as a kind of figurehead, as the last leader of an independent Egypt. She could become a heroine for this nationalist movement. And there is a play by Ahmad Schorki in which she appears as, you know, speaking out boldly in a way that, you know, I don't think the historical Cleopatra would even have had these concepts in her mind really about putting the case for nationalism and the self determination of former colonies of the European empires. And so yes, there is that tradition.
- [49:32]
A
The only one of these that I know at all is Ahmet Schalke's play the Death of Cleopatra. Egyptian writer and playwright from the 1920s, where it really does look as if he's got, he's got the European tradition in his sights and he's trying to pull the rug from underneath it so that he's de eroticizing Cleopatra, he's de exoticizing Egypt and he's making Cleopatra a fighter against imperial occupation. But you kind of think that the imperial occupation that we're seeing is actually the British control of Egypt, not the Roman control of Egypt. And Cleopatra is the quasi democratic leader of her people against the oppression of the imperial powers. And becomes very, very famous I think in Egypt as a manifesto really for saying Cleopatra's ours guys, not your femme fatale. You know, in some ways I have to say that after all these different western variants and some of them I love and I think are extremely funny and gripping in some ways when you look at some of the Egyptian literature, it comes as a bit of a relief that, well, look what we've got here is we've got a Cleopatra that has nothing to do with Plutarch at all really that she is the nationalist sensible. There's still occasional traces, it must be said, of that sort of luxury and sex. But really she is the leader of her people. And I don't think Plutarch ever thought
- [51:32]
C
that Cleopatra, who can do politics rather than just having a good time, a good romp with some interesting blokes. But putting the politics back into Cleopatra and the ability to do some actual statecraft seems to me to be. Thank you you Egypt, for bringing that back into the picture because my goodness, it fell away for a lot of Western European writers. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social medianstantclassicspod pod.
- [52:19]
D
Bye bye.
- [52:27]
B
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