The Starre of Women Sex, Grave Wisdoms store:
Sententious, speaking Tongs in filed phraze,
Profoundly learnd, and perfect in eche Lore,
Her Fame, no Rav’ning Time shall ever Raze
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What should Nymphs, or Goddesses Recount?
Or Ægypt Queenes, or Roman Ladies name?
Sith as Supreme, our Sov’raigne dooth surmount.
In choise of Good, the cheefe of all those same?
For to compare the Great, with simple small,
Is thereby not to praise the Best at all.
All those “nymphs,” “Goddesses,” “Roman ladies” and “Ægypt Queenes” are citations, which help the author establish Elizabeth as comparatively “Supreme.” She “dooth surmount” previous embodiments of feminine excellence, just as Enobarbus claims Cleopatra overpictures “that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature” (2.2.200–201).40 Marguerite Tassi argues that Enobarbus’s famous description “directs his onstage and offstage auditors to imagine . . . a particular painting of Venus in association with Cleopatra”; like other comparisons in Antony and Cleopatra, this one also directs offstage audiences to remember Elizabeth, who cultivated a resemblance to both Venus and Cleopatra.41 In the wake of the Spanish Armada, The Blessedness of Brytayne proposes a specific way in which the English “Starre” eclipses her Egyptian forebear, namely through successful resistance to “cursed Circes” and “Fell Raging Rome.”42 There would be no defeat at Actium for Elizabeth.
The queen encouraged these flattering classical comparisons in other venues as well. At Greenwich, she displayed a bust of Julius Caesar, for example. The royal garden there also included a “tower,” located on “the Venus Hill,” containing tapestries on classical themes and inscribed with a Latin motto, translated by Thomas Platter as “‘When Antonius the eloquent was compelled by war to seek help of the queen, this inscription was made.’” The allusion is to the battle of Actium, but the inscription followed by the dates 1581 and 1585, suggesting a more proximate reference, when another general (Leicester?) had made a similar request for help to another queen.43 Like Cleopatra’s, Elizabeth’s iconography featured snakes, including the embroidered specimen displayed on the sleeve of her magnificent gown in the Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600–1602), where she appears as Cynthia, the “Queen of Love and Beauty.” Roy Strong argues that the snake, which holds a jeweled heart in its mouth, signifies judgment’s successful conquest of passion, another way perhaps that Elizabeth had bested her Egyptian analogue.44 Symbols of wisdom and immortality, snakes had long been associated with the moon goddess Isis, whose persona the historical Cleopatra had adopted, as her Shakespearean counterpart does, and as Elizabeth adopted that of the moon goddess Cynthia.45 Cleopatra’s suicide by asp, which cemented her claims to immortality and her identification with Isis, became a favorite topos of Western literary and historiographical descriptions after Plutarch. Another portrait of Elizabeth dating from the 1580s or 1590s and now housed at the National Portrait Gallery evokes this iconographic tradition more forcefully, by showing the queen grasping a snake with her hand. Although someone eventually painted flowers over the snake, the original recalls Plutarch’s description of “Cleopatra’s image, with an aspic biting of her arm” carried in Octavius Caesar’s triumph, the source for Shakespeare’s tableau of the dying Cleopatra (Plutarch, 293).
Fig. 6. Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1600–1602). By permission of Hatfield House Library and Archives, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England.
In both royal portraits, the snake conveys Elizabeth’s mastery over emblematic animals, a reading substantiated by a piece of fabric still in existence today, which once belonged to Elizabeth and may have come from the Rainbow Portrait’s gown.46 Embroidered with flowers and smaller animals, including birds, a frog, and a bear, the fabric evokes bowers “over-canopied with luscious woodbine, / with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine,” places where “the snake throws her enamell’d skin” and Circean queens do favors to men transformed into “bear or wolf or bull” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.251–55, 180). The snake portraits offer a visual equivalent for the queen’s metamorphic powers over men, another quality Elizabeth shares with Plutarch’s queen of Egypt, and with Shakespeare’s “serpent of old Nile” (1.5.25). Indeed, those who compared Elizabeth to Circe borrowed a tactic of Octavian propaganda; Plutarch, too, makes his Cleopatra a Circe-like enchantress, who uses “charms and amorous poisons” to subject the “effeminate” Antonius to her every whim and plunge him in a “deep sleep” (249, 241, 208). If both queens were ranked among “the daughters of Circe,” it was because both were considered “charming and enchanting,” but not always “safe company” for men.47
Under such circumstances, Plutarch’s Antonius, “subject to a woman’s will” and no longer “master of himself” (248–50), became one of North’s examples from the past that “teacheth us to judge of things present.” Antonius’s character and the contours of his career lent themselves to parallels with a number of Elizabethan courtiers. Although nowadays we may not think about the great Roman general as a favorite, for example, Plutarch presents him as one, claiming Antonius became the “chiefest” man in Rome because he secured Caesar’s favor (182). His position as Caesar’s General of the Horsemen paralleled that of Leicester and Essex, who had both served as Master of the Horse before becoming Elizabeth’s generals.48 The Roman general’s vaunted eloquence, his status as an upstart, and his patronage of plays and players—all aligned him with specific Elizabethan favorites, including Leicester, who was scorned for surrounding himself with players, and Sir Walter Ralegh, who had seduced Elizabeth by the sole means of “a bold and plausible tongue.”49 Like Cleopatra, who had been romantically tied to three great soldiers, Elizabeth I “loved a soldier,” and “her prime favorites” all had “a touch or tincture of Mars in their inclination.”50 That Antonius was the “valiantest man and skillfullest soldier of all those that” Caesar “had about him” (Plutarch, 182) made him a natural point of comparison for Essex, whose biographer describes him as pathologically anxious to “preserve his own status as the indisputable colossus in English military affairs,” and for Leicester, Elizabeth’s general at Tilbury.51 Leicester’s detractors often associated him with classical figures noted for ambition, in fact, explaining that the earl did “tread upon his equales, thinkeinge with Pompie to have no equals nor yet with Cesar to have no rivals.”52 Like the ambitious Leicester, Antonius had inspired love and condemnation in equal measure, and became a favorite subject of gossip because he had devoted himself so absolutely to his queen that others believed “he was not his own man” (Plutarch, 258).
These numerous parallels go a long way in explaining the popularity enjoyed by the classical lovers in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Before Shakespeare took up their cause, Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra had already been the subject of several closet dramas, including Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594), revised early in James’s reign to emphasize the resemblance between Elizabeth and Cleopatra.53 Notably, Daniel dedicated the first edition of his play to Leicester’s niece, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.54 In the aftermath of Leicester’s death in 1588, the classical lovers appear to have held special appeal for members of the earl’s immediate circle. Mary Sidney translated the companion piece to Daniel’s play, Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), in 1590, and Philip Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville wrote a play on the same topic between 1595 and 1600. The Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie focuses on the plight of its hero, whose wife “movd’e [his] queen (ay me!) to jealousie,” who sacrificed his life and “honor” for that queen’s love, and who as a result became “scarse maister” of himself. A “slave” to Cleopatra, Antony describes himself in his final moments as breaking “from the enchanter that him strongly held,” and denounces his beloved in familiar terms, as a �
��Sorceres,” complete with “poisned cuppes.”55 The popularity of Mary Sidney’s translation—it was printed in 1592 and again in 1595—attests to a robust public appetite for her depiction of extreme masculine subjection. Shakespeare turned to it for help with fleshing out his Antony, who worries about the “poisoned hours” that “had bound me up / From mine own knowledge” (2.2.90–91), and finds that “These strong Egyptian fetters I must break” (1.2.117). When Shakespeare transforms Antonius’s story “into a narrative of male masochism” that challenges “conventional notions of heroism and masculinity inherent in the Classical tradition,” he was working with literary and historical precedent.56
Although we no longer have a copy of Greville’s Antonie and Cleopatra, Sidney’s friend left us the best evidence that the classical lovers functioned as an “example” of the queen’s transformative powers over men. A member of Leicester’s and Essex’s factions at court, Greville consigned his Antonie to the fire around the time of Essex’s fall, fearing that the “irregular passions” and “childish wantonesse” on display were “apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors, and government.”57 While scholars assume Antonie posed a problem because it predicted Essex’s disgrace, Greville describes his self-censoring act in a biographical sketch of Elizabeth I, which defends the queen more generally against the charge of favoritism, contrasting her practices in these matters to “the latitudes which some moderne Princes allow to their Favorites.”58 Echoing John Knox on the emasculating effect of female rulers, Greville absolves Elizabeth of the “tyranny” associated with favoritism, the “metamorphosing prospect” of which would “transforme her people into divers shapes of beasts, wherin they must lose freedome, goods, fortune, language, kinde all at once,” making them resemble “Circes guests.”59 More was at stake for Greville than the deceased queen’s reputation. His apotheosis of Sidney as a “true modell of Worth”—a “man fit for Conquest . . . or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest amongst men”—hinges on denying Elizabeth I’s “metamorphosing” powers over men.60 In addition, Greville had himself been a royal favorite, the one who had “the longest lease and the smoothest time without any rubs.”61 Like Hatton and, for most of his adulthood, Leicester, this self-proclaimed “Robin Goodfellow” had deviated from aristocratic norms by choosing the single life to serve the queen.62 Greville’s denials of tyrannous wrongdoing are thus on par with his suppression of his manuscript. By consigning his “Aegyptian, and Roman Tragedy” to a fiery “sepulture,” Greville obscured his own participation in the “irregular passions” at court, laying the groundwork for his revisionist history of an “unmatchable Queen and woman,” who, in contrast to Circe and Cleopatra, allowed her men to remain their own man.63
As we saw already in previous chapters, men in Greville’s circle had in fact granted Elizabeth the rhetorical power to “transforme” them into “into divers shapes of beasts” while she was alive. In one poem, she addresses Walter Ralegh as a “silly Pug,” a diminutive term of endearment “often applied to a plaything, as a doll or pet.”64 Elizabeth had similarly described Leicester as her “lapdog.”65 And she reportedly called the rebellious Essex an “ungovernable beast” who “must be stinted of his provender.”66 The queen’s men echoed her figurative language by combining animal and bondage metaphors to convey their submission; according to Hatton, Elizabeth I “did fishe for men’s souls, and had so sweet a baite, that no one coude escape hir network.”67 When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra contemplates baiting her “bended hook” and drawing up “tawny-finn’d fishes,” imagining each one “an Antony” (2.5.12–14), she recalls a court in which all men agreed to be the queen’s “fishes.” Even Sidney, Greville’s epitome of immutable manhood, reproduces equivalencies between successful courtiers and domesticated animals; in one self-referential sonnet, Stella’s “ambitious” bird, “brother Philip,” creeps into her “favour” by singing “love ditties,” while in another sonnet Astrophil imagines himself competing with a dog for Stella’s favors.68 Rather than being aberrant, the production of what Catherine Bates calls, in reference to Sidney’s lyrics, a “masculinity . . . not masterly but mastered” was a pervasive feature of court culture.69 Men displayed their submission to the queen frequently, publicly, and visibly. A shocked Platter reports that the great aristocrats at court even “play[ed] cards with the queen in kneeling posture.”70 The English treated Elizabeth “not only as their queen, but as their God,” according to Platter, and England seemed a veritable “woman’s paradise” where “the women have more liberty than in other lands, and know just how to make good use of it.”71
If Elizabethans felt compelled to retell Marcus Antonius’s story, it was because the Roman general provided a classical referent for extremes of masculine subjection, as did the gods Mars and Hercules with whom Plutarch associates Antonius. When the star-dazzled Astrophil compares himself to a “prancing” Mars (53.6), inspired by Stella to perform, he draws on a long tradition likening Elizabeth’s powers over her courtiers to Venus’s power over Mars. This tradition dates back at least as far as the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth, where the metamorphosed Deep Desire, a figure for Leicester, assured the queen that “Mars would be your man,” thereby inviting her to take the role of Venus.72 In Endymion, Cynthia mocks the doting Corsites, who “having lived so long in Mars his camp” is now “rocked in Venus’s cradle” (4.3.126–28). According to Adelman, “any woman who managed to disarm any man could be seen as reenacting” Venus’s “victory over the war god.”73 At the Elizabethan court, however, “what Venus did with Mars” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.18) became a shorthand for a male courtier’s metamorphosis by a queen, just as had been the case for Plutarch’s Antonius, and is the case for Shakespeare’s Antony.
Elizabeth I knew her rule hinged on her ability to elicit submissive performances from her powerful male courtiers. The Armada years had taught the queen “just how difficult it was for a woman ruler to assert control over the execution of policy in wartime,” for one thing.74 Isolated in her palaces, far from the scenes of military conflict, Elizabeth operated through male proxies, like Leicester or Ralegh, who fought the Spanish “in [her] stead” in 1588.75 Mary Nyquist finds in Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra as “an epistolary heroine” an attempt to relegate the Egyptian queen to the domestic sphere.76 Anyone who has read a biography of Elizabeth I knows, however, that in crises the queen resorted to a barrage of letters to ensure that her men enacted her will. According to Simon Adams, Leicester’s “‘often sending’ to her when away was expected.”77 Not all of her men responded well to such directives; Essex ignored Elizabeth’s letters, questioned her judgment, and sought to impose his own. When he developed a reputation for being “not rulable,” Francis Bacon advised Essex that instead of flying “the resemblance or imitation of my Lord of Leicester and my Lord Chancellor Hatton,” he should take them as “authors and patterns.” Although Bacon shared Essex’s misgivings about the elder favorites, he knew “no readier mean to make her Majesty think you are in your right way.”78 Years after Leicester and Hatton had died, the queen still considered them “patterns,” and still pressured younger men to act like them.
Elizabeth’s point of view may have more merit than Bacon acknowledges. Leicester, “a lover of stage plays and a notable patron of the theatre,” had orchestrated the speech to the troops at Tilbury, thus engendering the legend of “the Warrior Queen [Elizabeth] had never really been,” as John Guy puts it.79 Few acts of political theater have been more successful in earning a woman a place in history than that one. Although Leicester’s gamble paid off, it was a risky move; and a recurring question in late Elizabethan versions of the “Life of Marcus Antonius” is whether Antony “should . . . then to warre have ledd a Queene?”80 Nothing Leicester did was uncontroversial, of course, so his contemporaries often refused to allow that Elizabeth favored him with “desert or reason.”81 Male biographers have followed suit, categorizing the
earl along with Hatton as “creatures entirely of her private preference rather than her political judgment.”82 In fact, Elizabeth’s preference for her elder favorites shows a canny sense of what constitutes masculine “desert” in a gynocracy. For several decades, Leicester and Hatton had helped Elizabeth appear as “president” of her kingdom. Leicester also helped her defeat “Fell Raging Rome,” as manifested in the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England. When Enobarbus tells Cleopatra that only Antony is at fault for the defeat at Actium, he may be crediting another general with victory for another battle at sea. In these matters, at least, the comparison to Antonius redounds to the Elizabethan general’s credit.
Shakespeare draws on all the theatrical resources at his disposal to strengthen the resemblances between long-dead classical figures and recently deceased Elizabethan ones in Antony and Cleopatra. Other scholars have detailed the ways in which Cleopatra’s behavior appears modeled on Elizabeth’s, from her bouts of bad temper to her treatment of rivals to her preference for transportation by barge.83 Cleopatra also shares Elizabeth’s “pose of sexual availability,” even if she delivers on that pose as Elizabeth never did; watching “Cleopatra sitting on her throne and decked in her royal robes and crown,” Eggert argues, “Shakespeare’s audience might recall their magnificent, if sexually ambiguous, former queen.”84 The gestures that Shakespeare assigns to his boy actor would have abetted this process of remembrance. The Virgin Queen was famously proud of her hands, telling the French Ambassador that “her hands were very long by nature and might, an nescis longas Regibus esse manus.” In a well-rehearsed bid for politically productive intimacy, Elizabeth removed her glove and showed de Maisse her hand, which “was formerly very beautiful, but it is now very thin, although the skin is still most fair.”85 When Cleopatra theatrically proffers her hand for Caesar’s messenger to kiss the “bluest veins,” specifying that this “a hand that kings / Have lipp’d, and trembled kissing” (2.5.29–30), she recalls another queen given to showing her hands as a sign of ancient sovereignty. Hands were associated in the period with agency and judgment, and, in such moments, Cleopatra insists on the primacy of her political identity. Her royal status is briefly eclipsed by Antony’s death, which makes her “No more than e’en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chares” (4.15.73–75). But even here Shakespeare ensures that we do not forget Cleopatra’s majesty by having her borrow a favorite analogy from Elizabeth, who repeatedly likened herself to a milkmaid to highlight the constraints that she operated under by virtue of her political role. A widely circulated anecdote held that when the queen was imprisoned by her sister, for example, she “often declared that nothing would give her greater happiness than to be a milkmaid like those whom she saw out on the field.”86
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