Cleopatra Critics Flashcards
(12 cards)
Schlegel
‘an ambiguous being made up of royal pride, female vanity, luxury, inconstancy, and true attachment’
Coleridge
‘the sense of criminality in her passion…springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature’
Hazlitt
‘triumph of the voluptuous, of the love of pleasure and the power of giving it’
‘the character of Cleopatra is a masterpiece’
‘voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, fickle’
‘she had great and unpardonable faults, but the grandeur of her death almost redeems them’
‘she tastes a luxury in death’
AC Bradley
‘she [Cleopatra] destroys him [Antony]’
‘the exercise of sexual attraction is the element of her life’
‘an enchantress’
‘her spirit is made of wind and fire’
LT Fitz
‘critics apply a clear double standard: what is praiseworthy in Antony is damnable in Cleopatra’
Callaghan
‘can Cleopatra function as anything other than an exotic, racially marked heroine who is yet another manifestation of Orientalism’
‘Western masculinity…fantasied her into existence’
Alderman
‘in predictably patriarchal style, Cleopatra is portrayed as capricious and self-contradictory, undoing all coherence in her exasperating inconsistency’
Simpson
‘the play…might have been called Cleopatra as appropriately as Hamlet is called Hamlet or Othello Othello’
Wilders
‘Roman attitudes and principles, expressed mainly by Octavius Caesar, are placed in opposition to the Egyptian, represented chiefly by Cleopatra’
‘our sense of Cleopatra’s uniqueness…is created as much by what the other characters…say about her as by what she herself says and does’
‘self-dramatisation’
‘display herself’
Shapiro
the play expresses a ‘sentiment of nostalgia’ for the reign of Elizabeth I through its rich descriptions of Cleopatra
Mack
she is for everyone an ‘enchantress,’ a ‘fairy,’ a ‘witch,’ a ‘charm,’ a ‘spell,’ and she moves in an ambience of suggestion that seems to give these terms a reach beyond gallantry and erotic praise
Neill
‘Shakespeare accords her the structural privilege conventionally granted to the male protagonist’
