Cleopatra: A Life

As Schiff makes clear in her first chapter, our contemporary world is still rife with representations of Cleopatra, including as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club” (1). As a historical personage, she is ubiquitous, though the multiplicity of representation over such a protracted period has blurred a contemporary understanding of who Cleopatra was. Schiff’s primary goal is to restore clarity to the life Cleopatra lived, freeing her from the preconceptions of centuries of misunderstanding. Throughout the work, however, Schiff does make passing references to famous works of art that have informed the “blurry” (1) contemporary picture of Cleopatra.

Primarily, three cultural touchpoints are used: Elizabeth Taylor, and plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. At least twice, Schiff uses Elizabeth Taylor as shorthand for the glamorous public misconception of Cleopatra as opposed to the reality of her as a person; this misconception springs from Taylor’s performance as the queen in the epic film Cleopatra (1963). Drawing from Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian, the film broadly follows Schiff’s same narrative frame, beginning when Cleopatra meets Caesar in 48 BC and concluding with her death. Shaw’s play, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) presents Cleopatra as a fawning 21-year-old, and suggests that the relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra was driven more by political need than love. It is set during the siege of the Alexandrian palace and charts the events of the Alexandrian war.

Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra (first performed circa 1607, first published in 1623) sets the precedent for all representations that have followed. With its story drawn from Plutarch, Shakespeare’s play focuses on the final years of Cleopatra and Antony’s lives, tracing Antony’s growing antagonism with Octavian and Cleopatra’s struggle to maintain power in the Mediterranean and to sustain the deep love between her and Antony. Cleopatra’s death provides the grand culmination of a play in which her character oscillates between seductress, leader, and tragic hero.

More recently, Cleopatra has been a point of focus after the Netflix docuseries Queen Cleopatra (2023) was condemned internationally for its choice to portray Cleopatra as a Black woman. The issue of Cleopatra’s race has been widely debated and scholars today can offer no concrete proofs of her complexion, but it is highly unlikely that Cleopatra would have been perceived as Black. She springs from a Macedonian Greek dynasty that was closely intermarried, a fact that Schiff traces thoroughly, addressing the issue directly early on: Cleopatra “was not dark-skinned” (39). Thus, even today, Cleopatra remains a highly mythologized and sometimes controversial figure in popular culture.