ABSTRACT
Recent responses to Antony and Cleopatra make post-structuralist assumptions about the instability of gender and cultural binaries in the play, often under the influence of the materialist, post-colonial and feminist approaches associated with Jonathan Dollimore, Ania Loomba and John Drakakis. Heather James interprets Octavius's account of the market-place enthronement as a recognition that Antony is acting with 'political forcefulness', challenging the centrality of Rome by acknowledging his de facto marriage to Cleopatra and giving away kingdoms that are Rome's. John Michael Archer's 'Antiquity and Degeneration in Antony and Cleopatra' emphasizes the cultural significance of Cleopatra's race as well as gender, in the context of a survey of Renaissance attitudes to Egypt. Carol Cook escapes from an eighteenth-century authority to more recent ones, Sigurd Burckhardt and Helene Cixous, who both identify Cleopatra with the subversive effects of poetry. Cleopatra seduces audiences with her self-construction as spectacle, but is 'located just beyond the reach of rhetoric', her image deflected through third-person accounts.
