Characters

...Katherina is the old-style caveman's fantasy, desirable once she has been beaten around a little; then she will admire the beater and fawn. Meryl Streep put up a good, mocking performance, not submitting so much as picking up the rules of a game to be played with husband as master director. She became the image of men's fantasy, but in a role play which women well understand....

...Beatrice was not a misandrist; she was a young woman with a fixation on Benedick, presumably determined not to be as vulnerable as she had been when she gave him her heart in the past. Her concern about marriage she made vivid: Beatrice: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none. (II.i.55-58) The matrimonial power of all men made it imperative to look carefully at men and note what was desirable about them, or what was impossible. Much of Beatrice's wit was evaluative, judging men to be a potential oppression. Her contribution was that young women should be able to say "Father, as it please me" in the selecting of a husband, a change which Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream would have endorsed. Unlike Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, Beatrice was a not a displaced woman who was trapped in an unhappy shrewishness if she did not marry. The matchmaking brought about by the tribal elders was for continuity and happiness, and any taming consisted of the self-taming realisations which were brought home to Beatrice and Benedick through overheard descriptions of themselves....

...By twentieth-century standards the financial expertise of the principals in The Merchant of Venice was inadequate. Ships wreck, caskets mock with mirrors, daughters run away, and life is a hazard no matter how greatly investments are diversified. Contrary to the twentieth century's rationalisation that attention to money is the root of all social stability, the financiers in Venice lacked the economic rationalists' focus on lucre as an end in itself, and one and all mixed decisions affecting investing enterprises with their emotional lives. Money existed to further relationships. Antonio and Bassanio discussed two interests in the same breath: a lady and his debts. Antonio, in the warmest and most open terms, made an offer, his "extremest means / Lie all unlock'd to your occasions". This, to a man who had just said that he had disabled his own estate and was in debt. To increase our suspicion that these were not competent financiers for the top end of the Rialto, Bassanio drew his analogy of finding one lost arrow by shooting another, a dubious investment principle, however well it might work in archery. If Portia's father had devised a test on how to retain and amass money, Bassanio would not be chosen; the casket test was designed to separate metallic value from human value, so that money would serve people, and a gambler won. When fond Antonio, who had said that he was not worrying about his fortune because he had various ventures spread out, offered to borrow, any good theatre-goer could sense the extension into potential bankruptcy and hazard in the venture....

...As did Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra came down to us as a quintessential type within womanhood, in this case as the essence of seductiveness, supremely theatrical. That each woman was originally an historical person was not allowed to blur the dramatic vividness of the character. Cleopatra was the more fortunate of the two Queens, figuring as second half of her play's title and dying onstage. Shown as emotionally infused with passion for love, she appeared to consume first her realm and then herself after the death of her Roman power figure. Yet we must wonder how long the original would have survived had she been an emotionally driven person, in the competition to rule Egypt. It was her first co-ruler and brother-husband Ptolemy XIII who was killed, not Cleopatra; it was her second co-ruler and brother-husband Ptolemy XIV who was killed, not Cleopatra. She survived Pompey's death, then life in Rome as Julius Caesar's mistress and his death. After Mark Antony's death, Egypt was being overpowered by Rome, her military and diplomatic resources vulnerable. Perhaps she was the first one to script the reasons for her decline from power, and for her suicide. 'I gave up all for him' would be more palatable to leave behind for raconteurs than 'I got past it at thirty-eight after four children by the emperors I could distract'. Love could be envisioned as lasting, whereas seductiveness became a less reliable resource. Whether Cleopatra was "cunning past man's thought" was dependent on the men involved. Possibly.

More than ten years before he wrote Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare wrote sonnets in which he accused himself of being irresistibly attracted to a dark lady. He was probably in his late twenties, married with children but living in London and exploring the illusions and tensions of being drawn against his will. His sensations may have been those of an Antony conscious of his inability to resist forbidden fascinations. The dark lady operated in the sonnets to tease with her distances, creating little torments for her lover. Wherever Shakespeare found his education, while Cleopatra may have seemed "cunning past man's thought" to the Antony who spoke the line, the playwright who gave him the line had much more than mysteriousness in mind for developing his portrayal of Cleopatra....