SOURCE: Archer, John Michael. “Antiquity and Degeneration: The Representation of Egypt and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.” Genre 27, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1994): 1-27.

In the following essay, Archer addresses racial and gender issues in Antony and Cleopatra in the context of classical and early modern writers' representations of Egypt as both a principal origin of European civilization and a prototype of cultural degeneration. As he discusses these themes, the critic evaluates the significance of the play's associations of the protagonists with mythological figures and the question of Cleopatra's racial ambiguity; Archer also asserts that the play does not represent Rome and Egypt as antithetical.

In the first volume of Black Athena, Martin Bernal persuasively demonstrates that before the eighteenth-century Egyptian learning and its antiquity were venerated by Europeans (1:151-64). What he calls the “Ancient Model” of Egyptian colonization in Greece remained untouched by the “Aryan Model” of subsequent centuries; the...