Cleopatra 4: Cleopatra on the Page
5/21/202654 min
Mary and Charlotte talk to Lucy Hughes-Hallett, acclaimed biographer and author of ‘Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions’, about Cleopatra’s afterlife on the page. Lucy begins by observing that “the people who write about her aren't interested in describing her as a real person. They use her as a kind of mirror onto which they can project their own prejudices and anxieties and often erotic fantasies.” In the 14th Century, Boccaccio mined the old evil temptress angle. Geoffrey Chaucer, however, went the other way: she was a martyr to love, choosing to kill herself rather than consider life without Antony. For Shakespeare, she provided the perfect character to study the effects of unbridled passion. After Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, Cleopatra was orientalised - her skin and hair became darker in pictures and she indulged in decadent acts of cruelty. In recent decades, she has been framed as nationalist freedom fighter and feminist hero, but it feels like - even two thousand years on - there is more to explore in this most elusive of historical queens. Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading: The new edition of Lucy’s book is just out: Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (Fourth Estate, pb, 2026). It has discussion of all the texts we mentioned, and more (plus further bibliography). In the modern Egyptian tradition, the best known representation of Cleopatra, the freedom fighter is Ahmed Shawqi’s play, The Death of Cleopatra (there is a recent English translation by Jeanette Wahba Sourial Atiya, though not easy to get hold of). Cleopatra in modern painting and sculpture is the subject of a useful illustrated essay online” https://artuk.org/discover/stories/cleopatras-legacy-in-art-famous-pharaoh-and-femme-fatale @instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube @insta_classics for X email: instantclassicspod@gmail.com Instant Classics handmade by Vespucci Producer: Jonty Claypole Video Editor: Jak Ford Theme music: Casey Gibson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies That is, of course, William Shakespeare's unforgettable description of Cleopatra in his Antony and Cleopatra, the most famous literary Cleopatra, but only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of Cleopatras on the page who have been launched into the world onto their shimmering barges by authors writing in the millennia after her death from the medieval period onwards. Today, we are very lucky to be welcoming author Lucy Hughes-Hallett to Instant Classics to guide us through the dazzling array of Cleopatras who appeared in literature beyond classical Rome. We will mostly, not entirely, be talking about English literature here, but even these literary inventions, based closely or distantly on Roman sources,