SOURCE: Darraj, Susan Muaddi. “‘The Sword Phillipan’: Female Power, Maternity, and Genderbending in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Schuylkill: A Creative and Critical Review from Temple University 4, no. 1 (spring 2001): 23-32.

In the following essay, Darraj concentrates on Shakespeare's efforts to fashion Cleopatra into a believable, sympathetic character.

The 19^th century essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt wrote of Cleopatra, “She is voluptuous, ostentatious, conscious, boastful of her charms, haughty, tyrannical, [and] fickle,” which are “great and unpardonable faults” (Hazlitt 2-3). Much of the criticism of Antony and Cleopatra has recycled this judgement, depicting Cleopatra as a villainess uses her eroticism and sexuality to motivate Antony to seek power. Cleopatra is memorable for her propensity for violence as well. While Antony and Cleopatra was written after the death of a violent English queen, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare may have been faced with a dramatic dilemma: how to make a woman seem...