Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth : The Representation of Motherhood in Suicide

クレオパトラとエリザベス　：　母性表象と自殺を巡って

Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth : The Representation of Motherhood in Suicide

Creators Miura Yoshika

In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra never appears on the stage with her children. The audience only hears a report or lines in which Cleopatra is depicted as a mother. When Caesar recollects the scene where Antony and Cleopatra communicated with their children, his lines describe this family as rulers and their subjects. The lines make Shakespeare’s Cleopatra approximate to Elizabeth I in terms of the representation of their motherhood, because Queen Elizabeth was also a figurative mother of her subjects but never bore her heir. When Cleopatra calls an asp “my baby” before she commits suicide by it, she represents suicide (which is not seen as a sin in the play) as controlled by her figurative motherhood. This depiction of her death controlled by herself reflects the trend that some people felt nostalgia for the Elizabethan era after the death of Queen Elizabeth was politically marginalized when James I acceded to the throne.

[ISSN]1884-2216