SOURCE: Loomba, Ania. “The Imperial Romance of Antony and Cleopatra.” In Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, pp. 112-34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Loomba evaluates the play's dichotomies between East and West, Egypt and Rome, and Cleopatra and Octavius in terms of early modern English culture. The critic finds many reflections in Antony and Cleopatra of the English fear of foreigners and outsiders—particularly those whose skin color is darker than theirs—and anxieties about the power of alien women to emasculate men or divert them from their commitment to political domination.

Written only a few years after Othello, Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7) looks at the intersection of racial difference, colonial expansion, and gender from a very different angle. In this play, Shakespeare reaches back to events which had occurred in the first century bc, and which had been repeatedly narrated by Roman and other storytellers...