SOURCE: “Sex, Race, and Empire in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” in Literature & History, 3rd Series, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 60-77.

In the following essay, MacDonald explores the implications of a black Cleopatra who uses her sexuality to thwart Roman imperial power.

In Act I of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, sweetly torturing herself with thoughts of her absent lover, implores Antony to

Thinke on me, That am with Phoebus amorous pinches blacke, And wrinkled deepe in time.(1) 

Along with Philo's disgusted observation as the play opens that Antony's formerly martial eyes ‘now turne / The Office and Devotion of their view / Upon a Tawny Front’ (I.1.6-8), Cleopatra's self-definition as ‘blacke’ assigns a clear racial difference from the Romans to the Egyptian queen.² Except for an appendix in Janet Adelman's 1973 study of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, however, sustained critical attention to the question of his Cleopatra's...