Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England

10. Shakespeare's Queen Cleopatra: An Act of Translation

10 Shakespeare’s Queen Cleopatra An Act of Translation richardine woodall In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra undergoes a Shakespearean translation from a contemptible whore at the beginning of the play to a noble queen at the end. This translation is, arguably, the crux of Shakespeare’s vision of her. The word translation connotes the act of rendering a text from one language to another. In translating from one language to another, a translation can be faithful to the original text, or alternatively, a translation can treat the original text in a loose manner. A translator must first “understand” the text in the original language; after the translator understands the text, he or she “interprets” the text; language emerges when the original text is “translated” into the language of the translator. Shakespeare is not translating his Greek or Latin sources in the conventional sense; he is not translating them into English. Yet his interpretation of Cleopatra is so ambivalent that translation best conveys the problematic nature of his depiction of her. Shakespeare’s interpretation is such that in the early stages of the play, Cleopatra is portrayed as a woman of vice, and as her life is drawing to an end, this shifts completely. Is Shakespeare intimating that even at ฀188 richardine woodall her most immodest moments, Cleopatra’s nobility was latent, or is he equating vice and virtue? That is, is he suggesting that sexual immorality is noble in the acquisition of power? In this analysis of Antony and Cleopatra, my use of translation is threefold: classical Roman and Greek writers translated Cleopatra; that is, the original or historical Cleopatra was transformed to serve the ideological, political, and imperial desires of the Romans.1 Second , the play itself manifests from Shakespeare’s translation of the conventional representations of Cleopatra found in his sources.2 And finally, we witness Cleopatra’s self-translations. Cleopatra translates herself from a slut into a queen. Antony and Cleopatra covers the entire spectrum of the lovers’ relationship, from their first meeting to their deaths. In particular, Cleopatra is viewed as a fickle, promiscuous whore by a chorus of Roman characters. And when in the closing acts, the text shifts to Alexandria after the military defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, the ground is prepared for the sympathetic representation of her. In acts four and five, Cleopatra translates herself into a faithful and loving wife, and a courageous queen who dies to protect Antony’s posthumous reputation. This Shakespearean translation endangers the authority of his text to be a conduit of the “real truth” of Antony and Cleopatra. The play leaves the reader unable to decide on any single truth that would make Cleopatra knowable. Our inability to penetrate fully this translation might well be at the center of Shakespeare ’s vision of Cleopatra, in that Cleopatra herself is enigmatic and protean, and Shakespeare finds her so such that her mystery is our inheritance. Earlier commentators often read Shakespeare’s play in one of two alternative ways. In one reading, the Roman perspective, which dominates in the first three acts, is offered as the meaning of the play. In the other reading, the meaning of the play is found in the 189 shakespeare’s queen cleopatra final two acts in which Antony and Cleopatra are portrayed as transcendental lovers. Both interpretations advance a “transparent” or unified reading. In the last thirty or so years, however, critics have argued that contradiction and indeterminacy are central to the play’s meaning. Contradictions in the play implicitly undermine any fixed or transparent meaning of Cleopatra, because the text ambiguously privileges neither the Roman perspective nor the alternative vision of her redemption and transcendence. Indeed it juxtaposes both perspectives without reducing or minimizing their contrariness. For example, Janet Adelman refuses to ignore the inherent difficulties and paradoxes in the play. She recognizes that the power of the poetry can “dazzle our moral sense and undo the structure of criticism in the play” as well as “transform our sympathies toward the lovers, in spite of the evidence of our reason and our senses.”3 The grandeur of the poetry, she continues, “takes unfair advantage of us by befuddling our clear moral judgment. It is that doubtless delightful but nonetheless dubious means by which the lovers are rescued from our condemnation at the last moment” (58). Cleopatra seems to elude interpretation. R. H. Case asks, “Did Shakespeare intend to...