Shakespeare's Cleopatra: Queer Disposition in Character Development

Abstract

William Shakespeare, the greatest World poet and playwright, had an enormous talent for combining and expressing thoughts and emotions, expanding the capacity of language, in the representation of thinking, acting and interpreting. Shakespeare’s art of characterization, his power of creating personality through verbal and non-verbal clues, is exemplary. His tragic play, Antony and Cleopatra depicts the most famous lovers in history, their affair, their war together, their defeat and finally their suicide. The story had been told and retold for centuries in many different ways with many possible interpretations. I attempt to read the character of Cleopatra in the light of Queer Theory, which emerged in the early 1990s as a field of critical theory interested in shifting the boundaries and re-evaluating gender arrangements.