Repudiating the Shakespearean Script: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's The Bride of the Nile as Re-visioning of Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

Abstract Notes 1 Reference to Antony and Cleopatra is from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). 2 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Bride of the Nile. A Political Extravaganza in Three Acts of Rhymed Verse (n.p.: n. pub., 1907), Act 3, p. 39. All reference is hereafter to that edition. 3 See The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). There the point is made, at p. 55: “It is almost a truism of current considerations of Orientalism that ‘the Orient’, ‘the Other’, and ‘the feminine’ are inextricably tied up with each other, and that the Orient itself plays the feminine role of the exploring of the to-be-penetrated object to the Occident's masculine role of the exploring and subduing subject”. 4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially at pp. 1–5, 67, 104, 109, 334. See also: Claudia Moscovici, Double Dialectics: Between Universalism and Relativism in Enlightenment and Postmodern Thought (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 134; Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso, 2002), esp. pp. 224–248. 5 On Shakespeare's evocation, in his non-dramatic verse, of the multiplicity of Venus, see A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 19–28. On Venus Victrix, see in particular Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd rev. edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 81–96. There is of course widespread discussion of allusions to Venus in Antony and Cleopatra but no close account of the mythography of Venus in that play. For an introductory account of Venus in Shakespeare's play, see Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 733–737. 6 For a stimulating history of Cleopatra as both historical figure and literary archetype, see Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London: Bloomsbury, 1990). See also, Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 194–229. 7 Isis was sometimes identified with Venus, in the classical world – but she was also identified with many other goddesses. 8 When Alexis tries to become physically intimate with Belkis, at the beginning of Act 2, she chides him – pointing out that he, as a white coloniser, cannot really find her ethnic differences from him attractive. She says, “[M]y hand is brown” (p. 21), and then, as Alexis persists in his attentions declares: “You are really too absurd. I am a native girl,/ With a natural fuzz-head. I cannot keep from curl, / And you a white sub-prefect. Faugh. Ridiculous!” (p. 22). 9 It would be quite wrong to see Blunt's characterisation of Jael as making her an honorary British girl. It is rather that Blunt shows the Egyptian girl as every bit a modest, emotionally intense, vulnerable young young woman as could be any of her British counterparts.