Abstract
Cleopatra in William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is the second most speaking female character in all Shakespeare's plays in terms of the number of lines. The eponymous heroine represents a complex female character who has two roles in the play: a lover and a ruler. These two roles seem mostly mutually incompatible and Cleopatra struggles with reconciling them until Antony's death.
The topic of this paper addresses the character of Cleopatra in both of her roles. However, as most research on Cleopatra focuses on how she fits in the narrative as a female - be it her suitability and emotionality as a female ruler, how her femininity and exoticization contrast the masculine, sterile Roman values, or her seemingly inconsistent characterisation as a sensible ruler but a hysterical lover - I focus on her character disregarding her gender; following the methodologies of poststructuralist feminism, as introduced by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva and elaborated on by Chris Weedon. Irigaray refuses to define "a woman" and Kristeva argues that there are as many femininities as there are women.
Building on that, I argue that Cleopatra has been analysed in certain ways - most strikingly resulting in conclusions that the inconsistency of her character mars the quality of the whole play - which tend to overstate her gender at the expense of her actual utterances and behaviour throughout the play. I suggest that Cleopatra embodies a realistic ruler and a mature lover, not unlike Shakespeare's Henry V, and that such a conclusion can be reached if presupposed conclusions based on her gender are excluded from the analysis.