“Being Unseminared”: Pleasure, Instruction, and Playing the Queen in Anthony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Andrew Brown argues that in Anthony and Cleopatra Shakespeare draws upon humoral psychophysiology to present characters who are defined by radically expansive and generative forms of conscious experience. Perhaps more than any other play, Anthony and Cleopatra embeds its characters in networks of dramatic practice to problematize the distinction between inward reflection and the physical world. Brown illustrates this embeddedness by focusing on Mardian the eunuch and the boy actor who must have played him. Starting with the image of the eunuch’s mutilated body, he parallels the training of boy actors in the early modern professional theater with the actor’s need to assume identity and ties both to the somatic embodiment of consciousness and the distributed cognition required by early modern theatrical practice.