“Introduction.” In Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Three Books of Duties. De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, and Topica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. “Fame, Eternity, and Shakespeare’s Romans.” In Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics. “Enobarbus’ Description of Cleopatra.” Texas Studies in English 37 (1958): 61–78.īatman, Stephen. “News of the Roman Empire: Hearsay, Soothsay, Myth, and History in Antony and Cleopatra.” In Reclamations of Shakespeare. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944.īarfoot, C. William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. London: 1584 STC 978.īaldwin, Thomas Whitfield. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019.Īverell, W. Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Apprehending the discrepancy between their immortal longings and their posthumous images, the spectator realizes that the protagonists reside less in the audience’s memory than in its imagination-a cognitive state brought about by the vulgarization of the exemplum through the commercialization of the stage and press. Shakespeare’s implementation of exemplarity throughout the play, however, generates dramatic irony at the expense of Antony and Cleopatra, who do not know that they are already dead-that they are actively being conjured by posterity. The student’s treasure-house of memory thus becomes the resting place of the posthumous image. Humanism had revived Cicero’s use of exempla to commemorate and model the honorable behavior of civic leaders for pupils aspiring to follow in their footsteps.
If Antony and Cleopatra’s images have survived down through the ages, it is not because of any grandiose architecture but on account of the device of the exemplum, another kind of Roman monument, well known to Shakespeare and his audience members schooled in humanist rhetoric. My chapter argues that Shakespeare is interested less in physical memorials than in rhetorical ones, such as Cleopatra’s blazonic eulogy of Antony.
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