An Unlawful Race: Shakespeare's Cleopatra and the Crimes of early modern Gypsies. (3rd July 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: LaPerle, Carol Mejia
• Is Part Of: Shakespeare. Volume 13:Number 3(2017)
• Page Start: 226
• Page End: 238
• Publication Date: 2017-07-03
• Subjects: Antony and Cleopatra; foreignness -- idleness -- labour -- law; Periodicals; 822.33
• DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2016.1175500
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1745-0918

Abstract

ABSTRACT: By evoking the implications of an "unlawful race", this article draws attention to Cleopatra's association with a marginalised, volatile, and criminalised group: early modern gypsies. What do anxieties about the group's seditiousness – sexual and social – reveal about references to Cleopatra as a gypsy? What social appraisals and economic motives underpin early modern critiques of gypsies, informing Antony's remorse that "a right gypsy hath at fast and loose / Beguiled me to the very heart of loss" (4.13.28–29)? The condemnation of gypsies, codified in social documents and royal edicts circulating in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, signals a local experience of the alien within one's borders. As such, Shakespeare's depiction of the Egyptian queen uniquely represents Cleopatra as a racialised figure of transnational and local significance. In developing the ways gypsies inform Shakespeare's construction of Cleopatra's foreignness, I also investigate the cultural representations mitigating the status and assessment of gypsies in early modern England. Ultimately, Shakespeare's Cleopatra manifests gypsies' refusal to heed, and performs the ways they threaten, industrious occupations. Far from simply decrying a vagrant population as a social nuisance, England's preoccupation with gypsies turns into a racially marked discourse, villainising an alternative way of life that resists the state's absorption of the surplus value of legitimate labour and rejects the social obligations essential to reproducing the principles and priorities of the commonwealth.