Imagining Cleopatra

Yasmin Arshad has a PhD in English and an MA in Shakespeare in History from University College London, UK, where she is an honorary research associate. Her research interests include Renaissance literature; early modern women and their writing; connections between Renaissance portraiture and literature; and the political and literary uses of Taciteanism. In 2013, she produced Samuel Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra, the first such staging of the play in over four hundred years.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsNote on Spelling and List of Abbreviations Introduction: Imagining Cleopatra 1. Sight of that face’: Passion and Politics in Mary Sidney’s Antonius 2. ‘Twixt majestie confuz’d and miserie’: Samuel Daniel’s Tragedie of Cleopatra 3. ‘Will yet this womans stubborne heart be woone?’: Lady Anne Clifford and Daniel’s Cleopatra 4. 'Then thus we have beheld': Staging Daniel's Cleopatra 5. ‘She did make defect perfection’: The Paradox and Variety of Shakespeare's Cleopatra6. Epilogue and Conclusion: Cleopatra after ShakespeareAppendix: The ‘Cleopatra’ Statue and the Poems at the Vatican NotesBibliographyIndex

Informative, readable, and thought-provoking in its careful exploration of the manifold implications of rewriting Cleopatra in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama … Adds considerably to our understanding of the reception of Cleopatra in early modern England and will become an inescapable reference point for all scholars interested in the reception of classical antiquity, neo-Senecan drama, and performance-based research.