Wine, despair and women's clothing: gender anxieties in screen representations of Marcus Antonius

Abstract

The love affair between Cleopatra and Mark Antony has been the subject of considerable mythological reworking in the 2000 years since their suicides, and the reputations of both have fallen foul to manipulation by Augustan propaganda. As such, Antony is generally represented in popular culture as a deeply flawed character, subject to emotional and physical excesses that are understood in gendered terms as relating to his exhibition of defective or inadequate masculinity.

Covering a period of over seventy years, this thesis analyses textual engagements with the Antony-myth on both the large and small screen in an attempt to sketch the progression, in western, English-speaking popular culture, of the representation of masculinities, both idealized and defective, and to situate the screen Antony as a critical meme in the transmission of hegemonic masculinity. Whilst the cultural function of Cleopatra has been widely interrogated by feminist scholars of a variety of disciplines, in an attempt to recuperate her iconography from Augustan invective, this thesis is the first attempt to effect a similar study of Antony’s mythologization and function within popular culture.

The thesis is divided into six chapters, with a separate Appendix. Chapter1 discusses the roots of the Antony-icon in Roman political invective, whilst Chapter 2 examines two elements of that invective that have been left out of his screen iconography. The third chapter considers Shakespeare’s Antony as a cultural template for Antony-on-screen, and the fourth looks at the iconography of his screen narratives. Chapter 5 begins to unpack Antony’s modern construction by analyzing his masculine performance alongside the other key male figures in his narratives, and the final chapter considers the adaptations made to the legend in the service of making Antony’s deficient performance of masculinity intelligible to twentieth and twenty-first century audiences. The thesis concludes by situating these developments along a continuum of changing cultural conceptions of masculinity

Date of Award	Feb 2012
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department for Employment and Learning (DEL)
Supervisor	Maire Messenger Davies (Supervisor) & Martin McLoone (Supervisor)