ABSTRACT
In “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature and the Golden World of Poetry,” Phyllis Rackin observes that Cleopatra’s power as a Shakespearean character resides in her careful self-scripting, in her ability to control her reception, in her performative mastery. “Cleopatra’s incredible parade of shifting moods and stratagems, together with Shakespeare’s notorious reticence about her motives,” she writes, “has led even her admirers to conclude that her one salient quality is, paradoxically, her lack of one—the magnificent inconstancy that Enobarbus calls ‘infinite variety.’” 1 By the end of the seventeenth century, Cleopatra had abandoned this “magnificent inconstancy.” Between Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c.1606) and Dryden’s All for Love (1677), Cleopatra was transformed from an exotic representative of the dangers of female deception and desire to a character firmly anchored to the domestic virtues of love, honesty, and even chastity. This powerful figure, once evocative of the dangers of female love and rule, was reduced to “A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove” (IV.92). 2 If Shakespeare’s Cleopatra had an inscrutable “way with her,” her 1677 counterpart, “Fond without art, and kind without deceit … unfurnished / Of falsehood to be happy,” was completely divested of her impenetrable self-scripting (IV.93–96). Cleopatra restored was motivated “all for love,” a love for which the world was “well lost.”
