"Excellent falsehood": Secrecy and the Politics of Eros in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Marie-Christine Isabelle Munoz (1)

1 IRCL - Institut de recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age Classique, et les Lumières.

In Shakespeare's tragedy of mature love, secrecy may be seen as the central asset of the "earthly Venus." Cleopatra's expert handling of secrecy through her endless shifts of identity, constantly defies the gaze of the spectator onstage or in the audience and denies the possibility of full vision. Relying as she does on the tricks and secrets of her erotic trade, she not only achieves political goals while enmeshing her beloved Antony, but she also blurs the definitions of genre and gender. Cleopatra eludes definition throughout the play thereby eliciting a multiplicity of representations from all the other characters. Playing on secrecy appears to be the quintessential trump card of the multifarious Egyptian queen. This paper will endeavor to explore the complexity of Cleopatra's "excellent falsehood" -- her secret strategies of love, lust and power -- as a significant component of the play's poetics and dramatization against Plutarch's morally upright account.

Mots clés: Shakespeare; tragedy; desire; representation; gender

Mots clés: tragédie; désir; genre

Domaines: Littératures

Marie-Christine Isabelle Munoz. "Excellent falsehood": Secrecy and the Politics of Eros in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. 2011. ⟨halshs-00767129⟩