135 items | 16 visits
A list for VCE Literature
Updated on Apr 11, 14
Created on Aug 14, 10
Category: Schools & Education
URL:
" In evoking the trees' "strain," the poem demonstrates the unsuitability of language itself as a greenhouse or container of nature. The speaker is a witness to the trees' exodus, but distances herself from participating in the making of something out of the spectacle, while at the same time, paradoxically, reminding the audience of her role in the making. She "sit[s]" and "writ[es]" but not poems, "long letters," in which she "scarcely mention[s] the departure / of the forest." Even though the speaker addresses an audience, her own "head is full of whispers"-she's an audience as well. We, however, the audience to the poem, is compelled in by the command: "Listen." The speaker reaches across the barrier between poem and audience, a transaction that occurs on a page, and says: Listen, you."
"I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street;
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth. (2.2.237)"
She looks like sleep-the image of her beauty and her irresistible arts, triumphant even in death, is at once brought before us, and one masterly and comprehensive stroke consummates this most wonderful, most dazzling delineation.
As she would catch another Antony
in her strong toil of grace, —
He fishes, drinks, and wastes
The lamps of night in revel; is not more manlike
Than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy
More womanly than he. (i. iv. 4.)
His delights
Were dolphin-like; they show'd his back above
The element they lived in. (v. ii. 88.)
"Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune: the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.
Antony and Cleopatra (5.2), Cleopatra"
Critics over the years have found many ways to read the binary division of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra between the poles of Rome and Egypt.1 Recently, postcolonial theory has informed readings that emphasize the “Otherness” of Egypt: as John Gillies has argued, “the ‘orientalism’ of Cleopatra’s court—with its luxury, decadence, splendour, sensuality, appetite, effeminacy and eunuchs—seems a systematic inversion of the legendary Roman values of temperance, manliness, courage and pietas.”2 However, as these critics usually acknowledge, the contrast between the two blurs upon closer inspection, since, as Gillies again puts it, “It is only from the vantage point of Egypt that Rome actually seems Roman.”3
I want to approach the differences between Rome and Egypt in Shakespeare’s play as, in large part, cognitive differences, based in Shakespeare’s imaginative engagement with changing theories of the relationship between human sense perception and scientific truth.
Suddenly Cleopatra asks, “Will it eat me?” A strange question. This might be seen as a sudden switch in meaning of “worm,” that is: Will the earthworms eat me when I’m dead? The clown gives her a strange reply that seems to reassure her: Of course not, he may be saying, “a woman is a dish for the gods” unless the devil gets hold of her. Perhaps this implies that de Vere recognizes the queen as a favorite of the gods, a queen who is unmarred by the devil and who will be immortal.
135 items | 16 visits
A list for VCE Literature
Updated on Apr 11, 14
Created on Aug 14, 10
Category: Schools & Education
URL: