Shakespeare Club meets, talks Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Ukraine, and the African Slave Trade
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, addresses Members of Parliament from Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament in August. President Zelensky quoted Hamlet in a speech to Parliament weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion, “The question for us now is: To be or not to be?” Photo by Simon Dawson/Creative Commons.
submitted by Joan Gaughan, Shakespeare Club
Most of what we … and Shakespeare … knew of Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra VII (reigned 51–30 B.C.) has come from Roman sources who viewed her as a temptress who lured Mark Antony into opposition against Octavian, the man destined by Fate to become Rome’s great emperor, Augustus. At the Shakespeare Club’s meeting on April 11, Franci van der Schalie used recent research to give us a different picture of a complex woman who was also a formidable politician and ruler. A direct descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s favored generals, Ptolemy Soter, Cleopatra ruled from Alexandria, which was then the cultural and artistic center of the ancient world and whose opulence far outshone anything Rome had to offer. Having defeated her brother and sister to become pharoah, Cleopatra brought twenty years of peace to Egypt. Fluent in eight or nine languages and highly intelligent, she was also a skilled diplomat who looked for, and usually got, a win-win solution to fractious problems. Although, between Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, she bore a total of four children, the Ptolemaic dynasty died with Cleopatra, and with Octavian’s defeat of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s forces in 31 B.C., Egypt then came under Roman rule.
At the next meeting on April 25, Rosemary Whelan turned the focus to Shakespeare himself, but from two very different angles. The first was a Ukrainian woman, Professor Nataliya Torkut, who, as head of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre in Zaporizhzhia in southwest Ukraine, argues that Shakespeare is vitally important because, in addition to food, shelter, water, and homes, we also need the kind of beauty that Shakespeare provides. Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be” has particular relevance for Ukraine because that nation has decided in the midst of the Russian invasion “to be.” Professor Turkot also finds an obvious parallel between Shakespeare’s unruly Prince Hal, who becomes the heroic Henry V, and the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has become Ukraine’s hero.
Rosemary’s second angle focused on the connection between Shakespeare and the African slave trade. Shakespeare was not crowned as England’s national bard until the third quarter of the eighteenth century at the height of the slave trade. The First Folio, which contains about half of Shakespeare’s plays, originally sold for the price of £1, but by the late eighteenth century, slavery, which prime-pumped the Industrial Revolution, had created a wealthy elite who were willing to pay extravagant prices for luxury goods. And that included valuable books; thus the connection between enslaved people and the increasing status of Shakespeare.
A sad irony when one considers that one of Shakespeare’s most enduring heroes is the “blackamoor,” Othello.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login