Imagining Cleopatra

Informative, readable, and thought-provoking in its careful exploration of the manifold implications of rewriting Cleopatra in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama … Adds considerably to our understanding of the reception of Cleopatra in early modern England and will become an inescapable reference point for all scholars interested in the reception of classical antiquity, neo-Senecan drama, and performance-based research. * Sixteenth Century Journal *
Yasmin Arshad’s Cleopatra … makes an important contribution filling a gap her predecessors leave mostly blank. She gives us the early modern history of English Cleopatras … Arshad’s achievements re-centering Sidney and Daniel and identifying Anne Clifford as the portrait’s Cleopatra are major. * Review of English Studies *
Delivers fresh perspectives on a character who lives in the imaginations of scholars, students, and audiences … The book is especially compelling, moreover, when connecting between the works read and the politics of the time in both the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. * Early Theatre *
Yasmin Arshad’s account of how and why Cleopatra mattered to Shakespeare’s contemporaries is the finest book on the subject. Arshad offers a superb guide to the ways in which Cleopatra was portrayed in the drama of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel and Shakespeare. And her fascinating account of a Jacobean portrait, almost surely of Lady Anne Clifford in the guise of Cleopatra, is itself a major contribution to the field. Imagining Cleopatra is an impressive study, one that will be of great value to anyone interested in Elizabethan attitudes towards race, beauty, and the performance of power. -- James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
A riveting account of imaginative responses to the mesmerising figure of Cleopatra in the Age of Shakespeare. Yasmin Arshad casts her net widely to encompass Cleopatra’s ‘"infinite variety" and "strong toil of grace", to borrow Shakespeare’s words, notably in the Senecan closet dramas of Mary Sidney and Samuel Daniel. The intellectual detective work that underpins this rich study – for example in its probing discussion of links between Daniel’s Cleopatra, Lady Anne Clifford, and a tantalising Cleopatra painting of the period – constitutes research of the first order. Dr Arshad’s elegant prose, intellectual acuity and sound scholarship rise magnificently to the challenges of imagining the most famous queen in history… In Imagining Cleopatra Yasmin Arshad writes excitingly about great literature without denting its freshness and vibrancy. -- René Weis, UCL, UK
History’s most compelling queen is brought to life in this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study by Yasmin Arshad. Shakespeare, the early modern theatre, art history, and gender and race studies are woven together with a spellbinding deftness which – much like the allure of the book’s subject – keeps the reader entranced till the very end. Revitalising Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Arshad’s richly researched account changes our view of the Egyptian queen by giving us a more complete picture of the ways in which her image was refigured in discourses of women and power, appropriated for political ends, and mobilised by playwrights, artists, philosophers and historiographers as they re-imagined England’s dialogue with the classical past. Imagining Cleopatra will surely quickly acquire canonical status as one of the most important and essential works on the controversial and incomparable Queen Cleopatra. -- Chris Laoutaris, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK, author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe