Antony and Cleopatra, Mankiewicz and The: Sublime Object

Adaptation Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.
66–107
doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apq014
Advance Access publication 29 October 2010
Antony and Cleopatra, Mankiewicz and the

Sublime Object
SIMON J. RYLE*
Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Texas at San Antonio on July 2, 2015

Abstract The absence of Cleopatra from Enobarbus’ poetic depiction of diegetic place in Antony
and Cleopatra offers concise exemplification of the problems a conventional, photographically
realistic film faces in screening Shakespeare’s narrative spaces. This essay uses Cleopatra’s
rupturing absence as entry point into the problematic relation of film space and Shakespeare’s
poetic images to investigate desire and narrative space in Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph
Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963). What happens to desire when film intervenes into the scene of
Shakespeare’s ruptured space? And, of central importance to this essay, how do Hollywood’s
phallocentric conventions of visual pleasure accommodate and transform the sublime female at
the heart of Shakespeare’s play? This article investigates the relation of its primary texts to
Jacques Lacan’s topography of desire, both in film theory, in Stephen Heath’s delineation of
suture as the alienating imaginary closure of the wound of cinematic signification that would sub-
limate spectatorial desire to the screen image, and in Slavoj Žižek’s notion of interspace as the
structural distance necessary to facilitate perception of the sublime object. This article is centrally
focussed on the complicated question of how film remediation activates in reinscriptive represen-
tation an afterlife of new meanings in, and from, Shakespeare’s verse, an area surprisingly under-
investigated by Shakespeare film scholarship. Via investigation of desire and narrative space in
Antony and Cleopatra and Cleopatra, it is with the question of how such research might proceed
that this essay concerns itself.
Keywords Shakespeare, Mankiewicz, Antony and Cleopatra, narrative space, desire, sublime
object.
INTRODUCTION
An eroticized hyperbole structures Enobarbus’ verbal sketch, in Antony and Cleopatra, of
Cleopatra’s barge on the Cydnus. The winds are ‘love-sick’ with the purple sails, and
the water is ‘amorous’ of the silver oars; yet vitally, Cleopatra herself ‘beggar’d all
description’ (2.2.223–33).1 An emptiness at the centre of an eroticized space, this absence
of Cleopatra from the poetic depiction of diegetic place offers concise exemplification of the
problems a conventional, photographically realistic film faces in screening Shakespeare’s
poetic images. Cleopatra as absent object of desire serves as my entry point into the
question of desire in film Shakespeare, particularly with regard to how film space relates
to Shakespeare’s language. Focussing on the camerawork used to construct and depict
*English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Split, Croatia. E-mail: simon.ryle@ffst.hr
© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press.

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Antony and Cleopatra, Mankiewicz and the Sublime Object 67
narrative space in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963), I approach film desire in terms
of the male gaze of feminist film theory. For Laura Mulvey, the male gaze centres on the
alignment of the spectator with the protagonists’ play of phallocentric looks within the
narrative space. By reading closely Mankiewicz’s affectively loaded shot/reverse-shot
sequences alongside the desire effects of Shakespeare’s language, I investigate how
Cleopatra is used by Shakespeare to position, and complicate, the female body as site of
spatial and representational desire.
On the relation between Shakespeare’s language and film as representational media,

I consider the desire centred on Cleopatra’s absence from the poetic image via Siegfried
Kracauer’s notion that film ‘insists on rendering visible’ (58). This understanding of
film is also to be found in Grigori Kozintsev’s claim that in Shakespeare film, ‘[t]he
aural has to be made visual’ (quoted in Jorgens 20). If, as in these conventional argu-
ments, film is fundamentally structured in terms of scopic desire, this essay asks how
film adaptation might approach the desire generated in Cleopatra’s absence from the
poetic image. What strategies can the Hollywood historical epic employ, when con-
fronted by the need for its Cleopatra, in Enobarbus’ neologism, to ‘o’er-picture’? And
how do Hollywood’s phallocentric conventions of visual pleasure accommodate and
transform the sublime female at the heart of Shakespeare’s play?
To address these questions, I investigate the relation of Shakespeare and Mankiewicz
to Jacques Lacan’s topographically figured model of desire. I pay attention to the
expression of Lacan’s topography in literary theory by Catherine Belsey, in her notion
of desire as an effect of the signifier that ‘inhabits the flesh’ (34). I also consider Lacan’s
place in film theory, in Stephen Heath’s delineation of the mechanism of suture as an
alienating, imaginary closure of the wound of cinematic signification that would bind
spectatorial desire to the screen image. Developing my argument concerning feminist
film theory’s take up of Lacan, and Shakespeare’s deployment of abjection, in the
second half of this article my argument turns to the jouissance beyond pleasure aimed at
by Lacan’s drive. I argue that the sublime Cleopatra marks the point at which represen-
tation breaks down in a burst of jouissance. As such, this essay exemplifies how adapta-
tion studies might productively theorize its investigations. Lacan provides the critical
language to recognize the alternative sublimities of Shakespeare and Mankiewicz’s
Cleopatras and describe the teletechnological transposition that her jouissance under-
goes in adaptation.
By interweaving the Lacanian topography of desire into my discussion of film and
poetry, I ask what Mankiewicz’s filmic transformations of spectatorial desire tell us
about the desire invested in Shakespeare’s poetic images. Reading forward, I ask how
Shakespeare’s language of desire speaks spatially to Mankiewicz’s screen Cleopatra.
Central in organizing these various Lacanian topographies is Slavoj Žižek’s notion of
interspace as the structural distance necessary to facilitate perception of the sublime object.
I argue Cleopatra is figured in Antony and Cleopatra in terms that tellingly parallel Žižek’s
sublime object: at once as performative artifice and excess beyond representation.
Particularly important, then, is the fantasmatic topography of the interspace, which
for Žižek transforms ‘an ordinary vulgar object’ (Sublime Object 170) into the sublime
object. Žižek’s sublime object offers a theoretical route into the relation between
Cleopatra’s erotically evocative absence from Enobarbus’ description alongside her
68 SIMON RYLE
own later conception of herself represented as ‘squeaking . . . whore’ (5.2.60–61) on the
Roman stage. I argue, via Žižek, that the transposition to film space of Cleopatra’s con-
junction of absence and reflexivity by Mankiewicz’s camerawork facilitates critical
recognition of the mechanisms that, in Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, sustain her sub-
limity. Via Mankiewicz, I use Lacan’s differentiation of pleasure and its radical other,
jouissance, to argue that with the sublime Cleopatra Shakespeare traces an affective
path to the very heart of subjectivity.
As I develop in the second half of this article, with regard to Laura Mulvey’s analysis

of the cinematic male gaze, a failure point of the symbolic is sustained in cinema by the
fantasy that is projected onto the female figure (487). In Mulvey’s reading of cinema,
desire is bound to representation, and the gap in the real where the symbol speaks is
fetishistically filled, or evaded, by the invocation of the woman as fantasmatic object of
desire. Turning my analysis of Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra back onto Shakespeare, I investi-
gate how Cleopatra’s role as object of desire for Antony and Cleopatra’s Romans is com-
plicated by Shakespeare’s sublimity effect. I argue Mankiewicz deploys cinematic
technique—and particularly reflexive, affectively loaded shot/reverse-shot sequences—
to recreate her disarmingly paradoxical excess/absence by disrupting phallocentric
Hollywood codes.
The question of film and poetry as alternative scriptographic media is key to my
analysis of Mankiewicz’s replication of Shakespeare’s stylistic effects. This article thus
opposes Noël Carroll’s disinterest in the channel of representation, the question of me-
dium in favour of ‘the purpose of an art form, a style or genre [emphasis added]’ (44). To
Carroll’s claim (which uses the example of the relation of film to novel) that ‘film and
the novel both excel in narration’ (86), this article asks: but just how do they narrate?
Does each medium present narrative itself in a neutral or pure form (as Carroll seems to
claim), or is it that the precise relation of the narrational object (film/poetry) to the re-
ceiver of narrative (the spectator/reader)—and the affective engagement and mean-
ings therein generated—is importantly determined by the medium in which narrative
is delivered? As Andre Bazin was long ago aware, concerning the cinematic adaptation
of theatrical texts, ‘[t]he dramatic primacy of the word is thrown off center by the add-
itional dramatization that the camera gives to the setting’ (86). An anthropological ac-
count of narrative consumption might more simply problematize Carroll’s account by
considering the particular socioeconomic significances and exclusions determined by the
differing media apparatus; the particular social diffusion of the semiotic codes neces-
sary to use, attend, comprehend, or enjoy a particular medium of representation; and
the cultural expectations, behaviours, and mores surrounding the use and spectatorial
consumption of differing media forms in different eras and geographic locations.
Instead, this article employs a materialist notion of aesthetics to pursue Bazin’s insight.
It considers the spectatorial desire invested in narrative spaces of Shakespeare and
Mankiewicz to investigate, and theorize, the aesthetic and affective relation of poetry to
screen.
As such, my choice of the distant yet structurally significant intertextual relation
between Antony and Cleopatra and Cleopatra as focus of analysis is strategically aimed at
facilitating an alternative model to the categorizing critical approach in adaptation
studies. As a recent example of the categorizing approach one might consider Margaret
Kidnie’s desire to rejuvenate the term work to refer to the total cultural field of editorial
and performance productions of each Shakespeare play, ‘that takes shape as a conse-
quence of production’ (7). The problem here is the implicit constant requirement of a
critical policing of the precise borderlines that divide production, adaptation, and a
somewhat lesser relation to the source text, such as in Kidnie’s concern with ‘the line
separating adaptation from “genuine” production’ (8).2 There is frequently the danger
of sterility in this type of categorizing critical engagement, a focus on classificatory
borderlines at the expense of the aesthetic object itself, the semiological return of reme-

diated Shakespearean structures. I argue that Shakespeare film scholarship needs, more
vitally, to engage with the questions of transhistorical repetition, cultural memory,
technologies of writing, and the figuration of desire as they are foregrounded by the
complex techno-semantic interventions into Shakespeare’s poetry by the teletechno-
logical media at our culture’s disposal.
It is certainly the case, as Kidnie suggests, that for local economic, aesthetic, political,
or other less easily determinable reasons some performance texts innovate or resonate
for their times, or with future times, or with an affective or structural dynamic of some
kind in Shakespeare’s words. These performance inscriptions become central to the
intertextual field, and demand that other, future, texts speak to, or of, their innovations,
and in so doing are incorporated as performative accretion into the mainstream per-
formance doxa, or a certain strand of it, for an epistème, or more locally for a certain
fashionable period. However, as is demonstrated in this article’s strategic consideration
of Cleopatra—a film with only a distant intertextual relation to Antony and Cleopatra yet
with a very clear structural significance to the play—the totalizing entirety that Kidnie
invokes in her use of ‘work’ does not easily assimilate the vertiginously varied relations
that connect or disjoin a particular Shakespeare text to the multiplicity of that text’s
performance afterlives.3
It is here necessary to briefly further situate my article’s primary concern with the
relation of filmic and poetic writing, a question that thus far has been insufficiently ad-
dressed by Shakespeare film criticism, despite being self-evidently central to the media
relations that concern adaptation studies. Despite the breadth and increasing theoret-
ical sophistication of Shakespeare film studies as critical field, the key cultural questions
raised by the negotiation of tradition (in the form of canonical poetic writing) by con-
temporary media teletechnology are remarkably under-investigated by scholarship. As
example of this, Kidnie’s near total non-engagement with the complex, reflexive con-
sideration that Shakespeare’s poetry makes of representation is typical of Shakespeare
film scholarship’s strangely recurring disinterest in Shakespeare’s language. Critical
work in Shakespeare film studies can be divided into three major phases. In the late
1970s to the early 1980s, critics such as Anthony Davies and Robert Shaughnessy were
largely concerned with the question of the film medium: of genre, diegetic space, and
directorial adaptation strategies. In the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, a new wave of crit-
ics emerged, scholars such as Douglas Lanier, Peter Donaldson, Deborah Cartmell,
Michael Anderegg, and Barbara Hodgdon, for whom the question of film as a cultural
product, and frequently the body of the actor therein represented, was paramount.
More recently, in the field’s post-2000 incarnation, Shakespeare film critics such as Lisa
S. Starks, Courtney Lehmann, Kathy Howlet, and Mark Thornton Burnett have
70 SIMON RYLE
pursued a diversifying range of increasingly sophisticated feminist, historicist, materi-

alist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist theoretical approaches to the filmic per-
formance. Ramona Wray, in her 2007 survey of Shakespeare film criticism (the very
existence of which indicates the degree of self-consciousness the field has reached),
writes of the manner in which Starks and Lehmann’s work, as representative of a re-
cent trend in Shakespeare film scholarship, ‘moves confidently among and between
pedagogical arguments, political critique and theories of subjectivity’ (272). However,
Wray does not note the abiding absence of Shakespeare’s poetry from their two essay

collections from 2002, Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema and The
Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory.
Arguably, theorized Shakespeare film criticism reached its zenith with Wray’s own
edited essay collection, published with Mark Thornton Burnett, Shakespeare, Film, Fin
de Siècle, though again at the expense of Shakespeare’s language. In their introduction,
Burnett and Wray promise to range over (via Shakespeare film) ‘‘some of the most
pressing concerns of the present, apocalyptic condition, familial crisis, social es-
trangement, urban blight, cultural hybridity, literary authority, the role of reading
and writing, the impact of technology and the end of history’’ (4). Though there is
much that is laudable in this, my own concern is that the desire for cultural relevance
can miss complicated questions of the manner by which our notion of the contem-
porary is informed, and indeed melded, by Shakespeare’s complex poetic investiga-
tions. In this respect, the deployment of theory in Shakespeare film criticism has
differed entirely from that of recent Shakespeare scholarship, which has found
Shakespeare in French Theory (Richard Wilson), Shakespeare in the Present (Terence
Hawkes), and even considered “Shakespeare and the Future” (Kiernan Ryan).
Precisely, the inattention of Shakespeare film criticism to Shakespeare’s language
has kept it from the observation, in Joel Fineman’s words, that ‘theory is very
Shakespearean’ (112–13). By moving between theory, film and Shakespeare’s language,
this article uses Lacan to position adaptation studies as pivotal to the investigation
of Shakespeare’s language. Drawing together traditions of Lacanian psychoanalysis
central to Shakespeare criticism, film scholarship, and aesthetics, this article argues
that Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra’s elusive essence is staked
self-consciously on her endlessly iterable impossibility, and the questions she therein
puts to representational media. Her sublimity thus broaches the questions of trans-
historical repetition, cultural memory, and technologies of writing at the heart of
adaptation studies.
In so doing, this article goes against the current of the most recent Shakespeare film
criticism. As exemplified in two important book-length studies of Shakespeare film, by
Judith Buchanan and Anthony Guneratne, both published in 2008, scholarship since
Wray’s article moves away from concerns with the contemporaneous. Buchanan and
Guneratne employ methodologies of historical film scholarship, and thereby make
great advances into delineating the cultural and technological contexts of the produc-
tion and distribution of some of the major Shakespeare films of the past 100 years. And
yet, as with each successive generation of Shakespeare film criticism, Guneratne and
Buchanan have very little to say about the complicated question of how these remedia-
tions activate in reinscriptive representation an afterlife of new meanings in, and from,
Shakespeare’s language. Via investigation of desire and narrative space in Antony and
Cleopatra and Cleopatra, it is to the question of how such research might proceed that this
article concerns itself.
O’ER-PICTURING
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature [. . .] (2.2.223-33)
Writing as film and theatre director, Peter Brook states of the difficulties faced by film
Shakespeare: ‘if you could extract the mental impression made by the Shakespearean
strategy of images, you would get a piece of pop collage’ (quoted in Jorgens 21). If the
anthropomorphized natural elements of Enobarbus’ verbal sketch, the love-sick winds
and amorous waves, foreground a distinct problem in adapting Shakespeare’s images to
the photographic realism of film space, still more so does the absence of Cleopatra
from the picture. Though perhaps Enobarbus’ failure of language serves merely as
rhetorical device, an exoticized othering made for the benefit of Roman desire, vitally
it is an absence framed by an impressive outpouring of verbally structured space. Rhetorically
or not, the impossible presence of Cleopatra’s body punctuates the very fabric of the
narrative topography.
Cleopatra as failure point of representation, the topographic feature that elicits
Roman desire, is frequently overlooked in ekphrastically minded Antony and Cleopatra
scholarship. J. R. Mulryne finds this verbal sketch to be ‘Shakespeare’s mannerist portrait
of Cleopatra’ (245), citing as potential source the tableaux vivants of Florentine entertain-
ments of the 1580s, whose effects were recreated in works such as “Argonautica” (1608)
by Remigio Cantagallina after Giulio Parigi. Alternatively, David Bevington, quoting
Linthicum, offers as potential source ‘a famous picture by Appelles, “Venus Anadyo-
mene”, or Venus Rising from the Sea’ (2.2.209 n.), a subject famously depicted by
Botticelli, and repeated by lesser artists and tapestry makers, some of whom were probably
familiar to Shakespeare. Though of contextualizing value, to stress the ekphrastic re-
figuration involved in Enobarbus’ verbal sketch is to downplay or obscure the rupturing
significance of Cleopatra’s absence, which is specifically defined in Enobarbus’ neolo-
gism ‘o’-erpicturing’ as that which visual art cannot do. This is significant because,
despite the fact that the majority of Enobarbus’ verbal sketch is lifted directly from
Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives (a detail that seems to press heavily
upon the ekphrastic claims made by Bevington and Mulryne), Cleopatra’s absence is
Shakespeare’s addition.4
72 SIMON RYLE
The question arises of precisely how Enobarbus’ verbal representation fails. Invoking
the rhetorical form of paragon, the championing of a particular artistic form of
representation so reflexively emphasized in Venus and Adonis and Timon of Athens, and
later in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare centralizes the inter-media relations that concern
adaptation studies. In glossing his failure, Enobarbus invokes the impossible, phenom-
enological thickness of Cleopatra’s presence: ‘O’er-picturing that Venus where we see/
The fancy outwork nature’. He claims she was that which is beyond those artworks that
themselves go beyond the natural, the things of the world. To ‘o’er-picture’, then, is in

some sense self-congratulatory on Shakespeare’s part: his ability to exceed ekphrasti-
cally his sources (or his source’s sources) in visual art. In so doing, he refutes a common
Renaissance paragon, such as is to be found in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, first
published as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne in 1651, as to the superiority of
painting as representational medium. As if to underline the stakes involved in the
paragon, and simultaneously to underscore the self-conscious investment of her love
narrative in the Renaissance rhetoric of representationality, Cleopatra threatens Isis
that she will ‘give thee bloody teeth/If thou with Caesar paragon again/My man of
men’ (1.5.81–83). Yet, it is an oddly muted paragon that Enobarbus offers: what is
Cleopatra’s ‘o’er-picturing’, but the failure of all mimesis? Coiled within the image lies an
ambivalent self-consciousness at the capacity of poetry to lay bare the mechanism of
desire due to its endlessly iterable ability to fail to convey. In this failure, Shakespeare
locates the reflexive possibility, in poetic writing, of acknowledging a beyond to
symbolic representation, that which Lacan terms ‘the real’. ‘O’er-picturing’ figures the
recurring desirous inscription of absence that Shakespeare adds in adapting North to
the stage. Cleopatra as sublime absence is woven into the texture of the play’s reflexive
meditation of its own punctured topographical structures.
It should be noted that the Aristotelian figuration of desire bound to absence is cen-
tral to the spatial nothing in Antony and Cleopatra. In speaking of Fulvia’s death, Antony
seems to anticipate absence as a figure that facilitates recognition of an object’s value:
‘She’s good, being gone’ (1.2.126). Similarly, Caesar speaks of that which is ‘dear’d by
being lack’d’ (1.4.44). To contextualize Shakespeare’s interest in the complex relation
of desire and nothing-space in the first decade of the seventeenth century, one might
also consider the recurring ‘nothing’ of King Lear. The Tragedy of King Lear, the substan-
tially revised Folio text of the earlier History of King Lear, was probably prepared in
1607/08, contemporaneous with the writing of Antony and Cleopatra. Particularly, the
elaborate poetic depiction of a spatial nothing in Edgar’s verbal sketch of Dover Cliff,
an awesome, vertiginous depth made to protectively deceive Gloucester, into whose
sublime depths Edgar projects ‘deficient sight’ (4.5.27), seems significantly to prefigure
Cleopatra’s spatial absence.5 Relevant too is Coriolanus’ expression of his hatred of
representation, also from this period of Shakespeare’s writing, broached in his claim
that ‘When blows have made me stay, I fled from words’ (Coriolanus 2.2.72). In terming
the poetic retelling of his heroism ‘my nothings monstered’ (2.2.77), Coriolanus—the
man of action—locates in the supplementarity of representation a horrific, unnatural
absence.
One should consider further how a double movement, a carefully doubled coinci-
dence of absences, make Cleopatra’s dramatic subjectivity both an indictment of the
impossibility of representation and, paradoxically, a representation of impossibility.

This is perhaps most usefully expressed, in theory, by Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘sub-
lime art’ as ‘a coincidence between something unthinkable at the heart of the event and
something unrepresentable at the heart of art’ (130–31). For Rancière in the ‘negative
presentation’, of sublime art there is ‘testimony to the Other that haunts thought’, yet
this absence speaks precisely of the situation of representation: ‘the trace of the Other
that haunts it displayed’ (133). I argue the recurring rhetorical tropes of the play’s im-
ages of Cleopatra, paradox and hyperbole, should be read similarly as ‘negative pres-

entations’, careful contortions of signification to evade any positivity of representation.
Consistently, Cleopatra is rendered from a Roman point of view in terms of hyperbolic
paradox: ‘she did make defect perfection’ (2.3.267); ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom
stale’ (2.3.271); ‘vilest things/Become themselves in her’ (2.3.275). The suspension of
conventional significatory logic that symbolization of Cleopatra demands repeatedly
fixes her essence as that which contorts verbal sense, as bound to signification and sim-
ultaneously occupying a liminal zone where signification fades into nonsense. Even in-
voked as material presence, her materiality is bound to an impossible, self-consciously
repetitive, significatory-level paradox: ‘having lost her breath . . . she did . . . breathless,
pour forth breath’ (2.3.266–67). Rather than Janet Adelman’s repeated assertion, in The
Common Liar, that Cleopatra embodies the ‘bounty’ of exotic Egypt, the impossible ex-
cesses of these images indict an insufficiency at the heart of representation. Cleopatra
is Shakespeare’s attempt to bring to representation that which is constitutionally ab-
sented in the practice of representation. Yet, Cleopatra’s mystery, her sublimity, arrives
precisely in the coincidence of her unspeakable essence with Shakespeare significatory
investigation, in figures of paradox and hyperbole, of an absence at the heart of
representation.
The tense that defines Cleopatra’s absence for Enobarbus bears out this reading: that
she ‘beggar’d all description’ must surely mean not that Enobarbus admits to a failure
of language at the enunciative moment (in Rome, as he feeds Agrippa and Maecenas’
fantasies of Egypt). Rather, she was, at the moment of seeing, an object that is, in its
thereness, beyond the ability of language to articulate. Representation is, in her sublime
presence, made self-consciously aware of its limitations. Yet, beyond the desire gener-
ated in her absence from representation, Cleopatra’s sublimity is sustained precisely in
her self-conscious embodiment of this representational failure, in her consciousness of
herself as performative artifice. As partial recognition of this element of her mystery,
Camille Paglia has argued, ‘Cleopatra is an actress . . . the sum of her masks’ (216). One
should consider Enobarbus’ observation: ‘Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this
dies instantly: I have seen her die twenty times’ (1.2.134–35). Here, the resonance of
her dramatic destiny (suicide) with her repeated pantomiming performance of death-
like despair binds an inner tragic depth to her constant ridiculous (and eroticized) re-
flexivity. Figured as absent to representation, she is sublime to the degree that
representationality simultaneously constitutes her very essence.
Cleopatra’s dramatic character and the desire she elicits are precisely located in this
liminal zone, the limit point of the possibility of representation. As such, her eroticized
absence from representational recollection closely parallels Julia Kristeva’s notion of the
sublime object, which ‘dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory’ (Powers 12).6
74 SIMON RYLE
Central to this is the manner in which she introduces desire into the very satisfaction of
desire: ‘she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies’ (2.3.273–74). The paradox of a
simultaneously satisfied/unsatisfied desire allows one to locate Cleopatra’s impossibility
in the absence that undermines her present objectivity. To seize hold of her material
presence, in the satisfaction of desire, is precisely to have her impossible (unpossessable)
essence slip through one’s fingers. To have her is precisely not to have her (as unrepre-
sentable absence).7 She is, as Berowne puts it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘won as towns with
fire, so won, so lost’ (1.1.146). As such, Cleopatra offers an experience of erotic realiza-

tion quite unlike that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, where the object of desire is ‘Past
reason hunted, and no sooner had/Past reason hated’ (129: 5–6). In Lacanian terms, it
suggests Cleopatra not so much as object of desire (which, as in Sonnet 129, is always
ultimately disappointing) but rather as a figuration of das Ding, the void at the heart of
subjectivity around which turns the endless circulation of the subject’s drive.
To articulate the precisely structural nature of the relation that sustains desire in her
absence to representation, one should consider Enobarbus’ verbal failure alongside the
words Lacan uses to begin his introduction to psychoanalysis, screened on French tele-
vision in 1973: ‘I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to
say it all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail. Yet it is through this impossi-
bility that truth holds on to the real’ (Television 4).8 As in the self-consciousness of Lacan’s
verbal failure, as televisual representation that broaches the real that it cannot say, it is
with the void in his image of the failure of language that Enobarbus stokes Roman
arousal. A productive correspondence can thus be drawn with Catherine Belsey’s de-
ployment of Lacan to read literature: ‘Desire subsists as an effect of the signifier, in the
gap . . . it is an effect of absence, but desire is also referential: it inhabits the flesh’ (34).
Belsey develops Lacan’s structurally determined desire as material impossibility, a lack
introduced, via signification, to the flesh. By Belsey’s terminology, Enobarbus’ signifiers
catch Agrippa and Maecenas in their referential web; they invoke desire by binding up
the body with absence. Yet, Enobarbus too is caught. The straightforward soldier is
transfigured; his investment in the space around the absence is eroticized due to the
sublime object he cannot describe.
Founded on a notion of desire as deriving from the absence constituted in the use of
symbolic representation, Lacan’s investigation both parallels Shakespeare’s and pro-
vides a critical language for naming the desire effects of Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet, even
more significant for the study of Shakespeare adaptation, as Friedrich Kittler pertin-
ently notes, ‘Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described posi-
tions in the media system’ (170). In binding his theorization of desire to the
teletechnological medium that gives his investigation its specific form and name, Televi-
sion, the critical language that Lacan provides involves material invocation of precisely
the representational potentiality of relative media forms that concerns adaptation stud-
ies. In the introduction to his Television broadcast, Lacan would draw attention to the
fact that in saying what our language and media (our representational systems) allow us
to say, our subjectivity is spoken into being as absolutely divided from an inexpressible
real. This is why Cleopatra as a limit point of poetic representation—that which for
Enobarbus cannot be described in words—is so pivotal for adaptation studies, and why
she raises, avant la lettre, such Lacanian questions about subjectivity.
THE SUBLIME GAP

It should be noted that the notion of failure coiled within the play’s poetry offers an
answer of sorts to Stephen Booth’s perceptive complaint at Antony and Cleoptra’s invari-
ably disappointing performance actualizations. Booth finds the play’s protagonists are
impossible roles, ‘so constructed as . . . will not allow a responsible actor to deliver’
(554). He has never seen ‘any pair of actors doing what the play does in “being” what
the characters are . . . I cannot imagine how any actors could’ (556). One should also
point out that traditionally critics have praised the play lavishly: Coleridge writes it is

‘of all perhaps of Shakespeare’s plays the most wonderful’ (86); Harrison terms it ‘the
most magnificent of Shakespeare’s plays’ (203); and Knight finds it ‘probably the sub-
tlest and greatest play in Shakespeare’ (199). Yet, twentieth-century performances and
interventions into Shakespeare’s text have, as Booth notes, rarely been successful.
Samuel Barber’s opera based on the play was derided, and not performed for many
years; Charlton Heston said of his film adaptation, ‘the film I cared more about than
any I’ve made was a failure’ (quoted in Rosenthal 3); and Joseph Mankiewicz’s $40 mil-
lion flop nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century-Fox.
Numerous negative critical accounts of stage performances of the roles of Antony
and Cleopatra seem to back up Booth’s thesis. Richard Findlater writes, of the per-
formance history of the play, ‘It is a curious record of defeat’ (quoted in Dusinberre 58).
Booth’s built-in flaw also seems affirmed by Peter Fleming, writing of Peggy Ashcroft’s
‘touchstone’ performance of Cleopatra in 1953: ‘although we hear a great deal about
[Cleopatra’s] infinite variety, we get only brief glimpses of most of its facets: so that
however brilliantly an actress plays the part she is always liable to be accused of leaving
something out’ (quoted in Madelaine 2). The same built-in impossibility of the play’s
roles is posited by Ivor Brown’s review of Michael Redgrave’s performance in the same
play: ‘None, I think, will ever be a complete Antony, poet, pillar of the world, and
strumpet’s fool. Shakespeare made the task impossible’ (quoted in Madelaine 3).
Yet, in addition to performance actualization, the play text itself explicitly recognizes
the failure of the actual physical presence of Cleopatra’s body, in Caesar’s withering
failure to pick her out, on his first alighting in Egypt, from the slaves, servants, and eu-
nuchs who surround her: ‘Which is the Queen of Egypt?’ (5.2.135) Two possibilities
allow one to understand this moment: (1) unlike Enobarbus, Caesar fails to note any-
thing of her supernatural allure, or (2) this is a knowing put down that takes as its raison
d’être refusal of her sublimity. Her failure to be sublime in her present objectivity for
Caesar, the first possibility, is usefully addressed in Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the sublime
object. Žižek uses the term to convey the topographical strangeness of the Lacanian
subject’s desire. Žižek explains that the sublime object
cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and be-
comes an ordinary vulgar object—it can persist only in an interspace, in an intermediate
state, viewed from a certain perspective, half seen. If we want to see it in the light of day, it
changes into an everyday object . . . precisely because it is nothing at all. (Sublime Object 170)
By the terms of Žižek’s interspace, it is the distance of Cleopatra from Rome that gives
poetic images of her their fantasy-sustaining sublime force, just as Caesar’s arrival in
Egypt closes the interspace that sustains her sublimity.9 However, I would argue Žižek’s
76 SIMON RYLE
interspace also more complexly addresses the second possibility, the fragility of the sub-
lime object as representational effect. In this view, Žižek’s interspace models a certain
gap that is constant in the relation of referent and symbolic representation, that gives
rise—due to the social, political, aesthetic, and erotic specificities of a particular dis-
course network recognising, in the splendour of an object, inexpressible material re-
statement of this gap—to a feeling of the sublime. ‘Precisely when we determine the
Thing as a transcendent surplus beyond what can be represented, we determine it on
the basis of the field of representation’ (Žižek, Sublime Object 205). If Caesar consciously

snubs her, in so doing he skilfully initiates the symbolic representation that will allow
him to negotiate and evade all her erotic temptations. In this sense, Cleopatra’s fear that
‘He words me, girls’ (5.2. 224) not only conveys her suspicion of his deceptions but also
further expresses his careful representational diffusion of her sublimity, the manner in
which she is symbolically directed by Caesar to ‘apply yourself to our intents’ (5.2.153).
Caesar’s power is told in the play in the manner by which he manipulates symbolic
representation to position her as merely human, one who needs to ‘Feed, and sleep’
(5.2.219). Shakespeare certainly intends Caesar’s words here to resonate with precisely
the qualities of life by which Cleopatra, moments earlier, has disgustedly urged herself
to suicide, by remarkably conflating life with the consumption of dung (just as Antony
does in the first scene of the play):
it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
[. . .]
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung. (5.2.4–7)
(The resonance with Hamlet’s complaint, from the Second Quarto, further allows Cae-
sar’s words to fix her banal materiality: ‘What is a man,/If his chief good and market
of his time/Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more’. Hamlet 4.3.35–37). As inverse
of Cleopatra’s attempt to sustain a self-image of herself as sublime in suicide, Caesar’s
symbolic mastery closes the representational gap, the interspace, in which her sublimity
is generated.
How can Žižek help in thinking through the struggle of desire and subjectivity in this
representational gap? And particularly, how does Žižek’s interspace, as topography of
the gap, help in relating Shakespeare’s poetry to the affective strategies of Hollywood?
One should understand that, though operating in the psychic realm that Lacan terms
the imaginary, the sublimity effect of Žižek’s interspace is one degree removed from that
which in Lacanian theory fantasmatically determines the subject’s object of desire. For
Lacan, the subject is founded as a disjunction that has been introduced into its or-
ganism by the signifier. Lacan terms this disjunction, or symbolic cut, the Thing (or das
Ding). Desire, though situated in this symbolic cut, is concerned with aiding the subject’s
evasion of his/her discomfiting Thing, its source. To this end, for Lacan, ‘desire is
propped up by a fantasy’ (É 658)10: ‘It is because it wards off this moment of lack that
an image assumes the role of bearing the full brunt of desire’ (É 549).11 In paradoxically
fleeing the truth of its split condition via the desire established by that very condition,
the subject locates a reassuring possible positivity of being in the fantasmatic object of
desire. As I show in the final section of this article, Lacanian film theory has argued that
in patriarchal Western cultures, it is representation of woman that frequently serves to

evade or fill this split.
In a sophisticated variation on desire’s evasions, by the operation of the interspace
the sublime object is an evasion situated precisely in the place of the Thing. The dis-
arming, excessive yet never-present qualities of the sublime object derive from the
power of the Thing, which it simultaneously obscures and draws its power from.
Frances Restuccia writes of the supreme sublimations of courtly love as, for Lacan,
an ‘attempt to colonize das Ding by deliberately raising up an object, the Lady,

to the dignified level of das Ding’ (98). Like the intense unrequited passions
inspired by the impossible, inaccessible Lady of courtly love poetry, it is the rupturing
absence of Cleopatra from the poetic image—a gap in the symbolic that repeats the
subject’s foundational symbolic cut—that properly indicates her as sublimely impos-
sible object of Roman desire.
The interspace structure that the play deploys is crucially connected to the incessant
hopping back and forth between continents, facilitated by the play’s unusually high
number of short scenes (Act 3 has 13 scenes, and Act 4 has 15, in the RSC edition). This
positions Antony and Cleopatra as pre-eminent exemplification of the English early modern
theatre’s disregard for Aristotle’s ‘unity of place’ (as bemoaned by Sir Philip Sidney12). For
this reason A. C. Bradley calls it ‘the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies’ (260).
It is also one reason why the play was very rarely performed in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, when the play’s fractured structure rendered the tradition of lowering
the curtain between scenes extremely clunky. For Paglia, it is just this aspect of the play
that lends Antony and Cleopatra a filmic quality: ‘Shakespeare’s hand-held camera takes to
the air, dominating Western space’ (213). It is perhaps, however, the difficulty of cap-
turing in film space the interspace structure that the play alternatively offers in repeated
poetic images of a ring topography of which Cleopatra’s absence from Enobarbus’ verbal
sketch is a pre-eminent example, that has made film adaptation of Shakespeare’s camera
space so infrequent and unsuccessful. Caesar, for example, figures the image of a material
brace to the political and geographic division separating Antony and himself: ‘What
hoop shall hold us staunch, from edge to edge/O’ th’ world I would pursue it’ (2.2.120–
21). The recurring ‘hollow crown’, of the history plays, whose loss empties Richard II of
his identity (‘I must nothing be’ 4.1.191), has become a knot that would tie together the
Roman Empire. However, as Enobarbus perceptively foretells, the marriage to Octavia,
the proposed ‘band that seems to tie their friendship together’, instead ‘will be the very
strangler of their amity’ (2.6.69–71). Caesar’s sister as hoop has refigured and transformed
the geographic interspace that sustains Cleopatra’s sublimity into Antony’s noose.
The structural impossibility that they are caught in, geographically rendered in the
play’s diegesis, is carefully signposted from their very first dialogue in the play:
CLEOPATRA If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
ANTONY There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
CLEOPATRA I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
ANTONY Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. (1.1.14–17)
The impossibility of reckoning love as quantifiable entity that Antony notes parallels Eno-
barbus’ indescribable Cleopatra. If Cleopatra’s sublime absence from representation in
78 SIMON RYLE
Enobarbus’ sketch is facilitated in the play’s divided geographic setting, the actual die-
getic propinquity of the lovers is marked by a constant squabbling sense that their prox-
imity in actual space is never quite sufficiently able to contain, or stage, the magnificence
that their love should be. When near to the end of the play Caesar comes to Egypt, the
death drive that has silently directed Antony and Cleopatra’s love is brought to crisis
point.13
Following the elucidation that Žižek offers, one might understand that the recurring
critical perception of performance failure comes about due to a fundamental misun-

derstanding of Shakespeare’s intentions. The play’s self-conscious examination of the
bodies that fill its diegetic spaces should be seen as aiming not at staging the mythic
heroes Antony and Cleopatra that critics disappointedly desire.14 Rather, the play actively
seeks to dramatize the psychic complexities of a human organism not quite achieving
that which the mimetic structures of language, and the assumption of identity that
comes with language use, demand. In grand and tragic dimensions, the play’s protago-
nists enact the struggles at the heart of every human. As Philo puts it, ‘Sir, sometimes
when he is not Antony/He comes too short of that great property/Which should go
with Antony’ (1.1.57–59). Though the all-too-human qualities of Antony and Cleopatra
are a commonplace of critical commentary, my concern is the specific manner in which
these representational failures are bound to the desire effects they invoke, and to narra-
tive space, in their embodied failure to fully occupy, or be what they are seen to be from
the ideological positions offered by Egypt and Rome. In failing to invoke Cleopatra,
‘Cleopatra’ binds the reader’s/ spectator’s desire to the impossible poetic image.15
In Žižekian terms, the play’s bodies are very carefully situated at the very
extremity of the interspace, where their sublime qualities are only marginally,
liminally sustainable, and identity collapses into performance.16 For this reason
I would renegotiate Adelman’s claim that ‘Whore or goddess, strumpet’s fool or
Colossus: the play allows no midpoint’ (110). This midpoint is the very site of the
play’s constant struggle with its partial representation of its impossible protagonists,
the border between the interspace and the vulgar reality where the play’s sublime
images disappointingly fail.
The question arises as to why this should affect responses to performance of the play,
and not literary criticism. A key issue is surely Shakespeare’s investigation of the de-
siring body, the physical manifestation of the performance as embodied site of textuali-
zation. Like the crocodile with which Antony drunkenly teases Lepidus, ‘It is shaped,
sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and it moves
with its own organs: it lives by that which nourish it, and the elements once out of it, it
transmigrates’ (2.7.35–37), Cleopatra’s body as sublime object (the fantasy of ‘infinite
variety’ [2.2.272]), the thing that cannot be embodied, is a tautology of the void at
the centre of Roman desire. Like the hyperbolic ‘gap in nature’ (2.2.251) made by
Cleopatra’s royal procession that leaves Antony alone in the market ‘Whistling to the
air’ (2.2.249), the very supernatural force of Cleopatra’s physical allure shows up the
impossibility inherent in dramatic embodiment of character.17 She is a mirage of
the discourse network, a startlingly vivid dramatic ‘subjectivity effect’ (to borrow a
phrase from Joel Fineman) that arises precisely in her acknowledging of herself as
representation. Developing the invocation of Ovid as representational intertext in both
Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in place of the horrific unrepresentable violence
suffered by Lavinia and Lucrece, ‘Cleopatra’ is Shakespeare’s mise-en-abyme representa-
tion of representation in place of the impossibility of representing Cleopatra. As in
Christopher Pye’s recent observation of ‘Shakespearean tragedy as constituted in rela-
tion to its ability to incorporate its own formal limit and vanishing point’ (428), in the
complexities of her own person she collapses Shakespeare’s earlier deployment of
horrific violence as approach to the formal limits of representation.
It is precisely the hyperbolic ‘gap in nature’ that initiates Antony’s desire for her,

which is why Žižek’s return to the interspace, in The Fragile Absolute, to differentiate de-
sire and love, is so relevant to Antony and Cleopatra. Referring to the interspace, Žižek
notes there is ‘always a gap between the object of desire and its cause, the mediating
feature or element that makes this object desirable’. However, in love ‘the very distance
between the object and cause collapses’ (21). Exactly what Žižek means by this collapse
is developed by Alenka Zupančič: ‘In love, we do not find satisfaction in the other that we
aim for, we find it in the space, or gap, between what we see and what we get (the sub-
lime and the banal object)’ (37). One should recall that Lacan writes of the ‘knot of
imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew’ (É 80),18 in which he character-
izes the path towards the Thing at the heart of subjectivity, that is enabled by psycho-
analytic discourse, as ‘love’. In these terms, love, for Zupančič, is that which recognizes
the disjunction between the other and the fantasmatic support that structures the other
as object of desire. Love frees man by releasing him from fantasmatic capture, so
Zupančič’s love arises as awareness of the gap between the fantasmatic object of desire
and the subject’s recognition of vulgar reality. Notably, just this notion of love can
be found in Sonnet 130’s refusal to deploy Petrarchan conceits: ‘My mistress when she
walks treads on the ground/And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare . . .’ (12–13). For
the sonnet’s speaker, it is precisely by the act of stripping away the fantasmatic support
that the unexpected love declaration of the couplet’s first line is enabled. One should
also not pass over, as mere empty exclamation, the reference to a space beyond the sym-
bolic system (‘by heaven’) in Sonnet 130’s association of love with negation (that the
mistress is not, like other epideictic figurations, a ‘goddess’). Just as in Antony’s bom-
bastic invocation of the topographical possibility of love as dependent on ‘new heaven,
new earth’, the thought of the love’s rarity (‘by heaven, I think’) arrives literally from
beyond the speaker’s world. ‘And yet’ might seem to suggest that the speaker conceives
of love arising in this space despite the sonnet’s negations. However, in Lacanian terms,
it is precisely due to the recognition of the mistress as a ‘banal object’ (and not a ‘god-
dess’), that love—freed from ‘imaginary servitude’—descends as if from heaven.19
Sonnet 130’s love is thus is radically unlike Theseus’s complaint in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, especially pertinent to Antony and Cleopatra, that ‘The lover . . ./Sees
Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’ (5.1.10–11). However, Theseus’ complaint, along-
side Sonnet 130, should alert us to two key types of love in play in Shakespeare’s poetry:
the lover who ‘Sees Helen’s beauty’ and the lover whose mistress ‘treads on the ground’.
In fact, a Lacanian typology of these forms of love is to be found in Restuccia’s reading
of Zupančič: ‘To experience “real love” is not to be “dazzled or blinded by the object”—
that would be “sublime love”’ (107). Just as Zupančič’s ‘sublime love’ depends on exactly
the interspace, the nonrecognition of the gap that for Žižek sustains the sublime object,
80 SIMON RYLE
Antony’s love for Cleopatra is founded upon the gap in nature. This enables Antony to
see, as Theseus has it, ‘Helen’s beauty’, and not the vulgar material support for that
beauty: ‘a brow of Egypt’. As this article investigates, it is the impossibility of Restuc-
cia’s ‘real love’ for Antony and Cleopatra, as determined by the structural positions
inscribed in their dramatic subjectivities (they recognise one another as sublime objects
that are constantly failing to achieve sublimity) that defines their love as tragic, marked
from the very beginning by the death drive.20 Disillusioned with Cleopatra and close to
suicide, Antony will finally perceive this empty space, finding that she has led him—

precisely as the shimmering insubstantiality of the sublime object must—‘to the very
heart of loss’ (4.12.31).
CARRY ON CLEO
Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, coming as the culmination of a series of epic Hollywood pro-
jections of the classical world, invokes a hyperbole quite unlike Antony and Cleopatra’s, but
that, like Enobarbus, seeks to offer the Egyptian queen as exotic object of desire. Aside
from the scandalous and reckless erotic glamour of his star Elizabeth Taylor, the spec-
tacular expenditure of Cleopatra was perhaps the factor most diligently documented by
journalists prior to the film’s general release. The production’s awe-inspiring budget
seriously jeopardized Twentieth Century Fox, to the extent that Spyros Skouras, Fox’s
president, was fired by the studio’s board of directors. Yet, the studio’s pre-publicity
repeatedly deployed the film’s $40 million production costs (it is probably the most
expensive film ever made, if the inflation of the dollar since the early 1960s is taken into
consideration), just as expenditure has subsequently occupied a central position in crit-
ical discussion of the film.
In the month of the film’s US release, Life magazine began a ten page photo spread:
‘The most costly . . . movie in history’ (“At Last, Cleopatra!” 72). In much the same vein,
in recent critical work on the film, Maria Silveira Cyrino lists the now familiar anec-
dotal budgetary details (also to be found in Hughes-Hallet, Hamer, Royster, and Wyke):
the $1 million fee for Taylor (for the first time in movie history); 26,000 costumes;
$130,000 for Taylor’s costumes alone; $500,000 for the seven-minute sequence of
Cleopatra’s entry to Rome (which required that the Arch of Constantine be rebuilt in
the film’s Cinecittà Studios in Rome); and $250,000 to build, full sized, the golden
barge by which Cleopatra comes to Tarsus (on screen for less than two minutes), which
serves as my entry point into the intertextual relation of Mankiewicz and Shakespeare.
As a central example of the film’s conspicuous expenditure, the barge sequence is typ-
ical of the surge and splendour that for Vivian Sobchack enabled—phenomenologically
and extra-textually—1950–60s Hollywood’s literalizing material recreation of imperial
scale. However, if the spectacle of excess reworks one element of Shakespeare’s
Cleopatra, I argue that yet more significant is Mankiewicz’s camerawork.
The fact that these anecdotal budgetary details are gleaned from Walter Wanger’s
production diary, My Life with Cleopatra (which sold 136,000 paperback copies in the
month before the film opened) and The Cleopatra Papers, the collected letters of Fox’s
publicists that were published to coincide with the film’s release, indicates Fox’s re-
peated collusive involvement in mass media circulation of the film’s fiscal excesses was
the studio’s major strategy regarding Cleopatra’s publicity. It also situates much of the
more recent critical energy expended on the film, which concentrates heavily on these
extra-filmic budgetary excesses, as (awed or ironic) repetition of Fox’s strategy. This has
unfortunately obscured, as I argue in this section, the significant questions for adapta-
tion studies raised by Mankiewicz’s filmic engagement with Shakespeare’s Antony
and Cleopatra, particularly concerning the reflexively deployed narrative space that
Shakespeare uses to frame the Egyptian queen.
Similarly, there is disarming critical consensus concerning the Cleopatra-like qual-
ities commanded extra-textually by Elizabeth Taylor, and of Taylor’s star behaviour as

dominating the public’s interest in the film. In the words of Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Taylor
‘tempted men away from the nursery innocence of their marital homes, [and] was a
figure of almost universal fascination’ (277). Equally, Bray and Palmer speculate that
what audiences really wanted to see was ‘an on-screen representation of the love affair
that filled the newspapers for months before the film’s release’ (113). Cyrino repeats the
formulation, finding ‘meticulously detailed in the media, Taylor was wrapped in all the
reckless luxury . . . attributed to the ancient queen’ (153). Yet, this repetitive critical
commentary, as with the focus of the most prominent critical studies of the film on
Cleopatra’s expenditure, closely replicates the words of Nathan Weiss, the film’s publicist,
who argued, ‘Everybody, but everybody, will go to see this picture to say that they can
see on screen what’s going on off it’ (quoted in Hallet 292). This recurring critical no-
tion is perhaps most concisely, humorously formulated by Geoffrey O’Brian: ‘The
squandering of millions on an epic that nobody wanted to see was itself the epic that
people wanted to see’ (25). However, in the ingenious reading of the extra-textual ap-
paratus of the Hollywood star system itself as text (a position implicitly invoked in
Weiss’ comment), this recurring critical consensus problematically sidelines the struc-
tural relation that sustains the chimera of desire invested in the object images of the
Hollywood star system, offering a starkly unexamined notion of spectatorial desire.
What, for example, makes Hollywood gossip so fascinating?
Equally, and perhaps yet further significant, is the implicit positioning of the figure
of Cleopatra in this critical consensus. She is at once meaninglessly peripheral to the
actual desire of spectators for Hollywood gossip, and simultaneously, the precise meta-
phor by which the excesses of Taylor and Burton—their heavily publicized drinking,
squabbling, and excessive spending, and the chaotic mess of anguish that no doubt
accompanied both their divorces (they twice married)—take on meaning as object of
scopic desire. ‘Cleopatra’ names the structure of desire generated in extra-textual me-
dia that construct the Hollywood star system, the newspaper reports, TV interviews,
and glossy magazine photo spreads. The critical consensus thus situates the aesthetic
object, the semiological devices of the film Cleopatra that it so frequently passes over in
critical discussion of the media contexts of the film’s production, as itself offering the
key image of the topography of desire that sustained audience fascination with
Taylor/Burton and the film’s lavish fiscal excesses. In its attraction to the fantasmatic
interspace of the Hollywood star system, criticism has missed Cleopatra’s reflexive en-
gagement with this structurally sustained Los Angeles sublimity. Moreover, as I will
show, it has also failed to locate the Shakespearean topography that so significantly
intersects with Cleopatra’s deployment of desire and narrative space in these film
moments.
82 SIMON RYLE
It is the case that the link with Shakespeare has been drawn before. However, if crit-
ics have complained at ‘Mankiewicz’s prosaic approximations of the poetry of Shake-
speare’s tragedy’ (Geist 343) in the film’s screenplay, they have rarely considered
the more impressive significatory expertise in Mankiewicz’s deployment of cinematic
technique to replicate Shakespeare’s poetic effects. Despite the constant critical awe at
Cleopatra’s expenditure, little attention has been paid to Mankiewicz’s cinematic
redeployment of Shakespeare’s diegesis in which the protagonists are bound to viewed
and viewing positions that inscribe desire into the representation of narrative space.

The briefest of gestures towards investigation of this is to be found in Karine Hilden-
brand-Girard’s suggestion that Shakespeare’s ‘texte est transporté visuellment ou refor-
mulé’.21 However, Hildenbrand-Girard offers a rather disappointingly impressionistic
account of the relation she so promisingly identifies, merely claiming of Mankiewicz’s
Tarsus barge sequence: ‘L’arriveé de la reine d’Egypte grise les sens’.22
As one of the major set pieces of the film, details of Cleopatra’s arrival by boat in
Tarsus indicate a significant intertextual relation between Mankiewicz’s film and
Shakespeare’s play. As in Enobarbus’ images, establishing shots show people running
from their work to gather at the seafront for Cleopatra’s arrival, though—parallel spa-
tially to the problem of Cleopatra’s absence—the sequence cannot quite replicate the
hyperbole of Shakespeare’s gap in nature. Equally, the golden crocodiles on her barge
offer careful photographic solidification of Antony’s evasive tautologies delivered
drunkenly on Pompey’s ship. If the purple sails billow with impressive authenticity, one
might note the surge and splendour of Mankiewicz’s sequence must stand in place of
Shakespeare’s anthropomophized elements. The impossibility of photographically ren-
dered ‘love-sick’ winds underscores a key material difference in filmic and poetic space.
Important, then, are the many young men who swim lovingly after the barge, seemingly
literalizing, in Mankiewicz’s sequence, Shakespeare’s water, which is ‘amorous of their
strokes’ (Figure 1). Tellingly, this anthropomorphized element is not a feature of North’s
Plutarch translation and is thus powerfully suggestive of Mankiewicz’s direct relation to
Shakespeare.
It should be acknowledged, too, that both the post-film credits and the handsomely
packaged three-disk DVD note prominently that Mankiewicz’s film is ‘based upon his-
tories by Pluturch, Suetonius, Appian and other ancient sources’. In his earlier Shake-
speare film, Julius Caesar (1953), Mankiewicz also makes use of text from Plutarch,
scrolled across the screen to introduce sequences and make narrative clarifications fol-
lowing cuts from Shakespeare’s text. For this reason, though Cleopatra does not acknow-
ledge its Shakespearean interventions, in returning to Shakespeare’s major source,
Mankiewicz’s film negotiates a remediation that parallels Shakespeare’s transposition
of North’s Plutarch to the stage: precisely, the remediation of which Mankiewicz’s Ju-
lius Caesar is so conscious. To read Mankiewicz’s swimmers as literalizing Enobarbus’
anthropomorphic water ‘amorous of their strokes’, one might argue Mankiewicz is
powerfully influenced by the intertextual proximity of Shakespeare’s poetic images
(Shakespeare as a ghost of sorts, haunting Cleopatra)—rather as Plutarch takes a place in
Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Julius Caesar. This would establish the film at most only
partially as ‘an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works’ (8),
as Linda Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation requires. However, as my introduction
notes, rather than classificatory questions, this article concerns itself with what Mank-
iewicz’s visual track references to Shakespeare’s language reveal (as representative of
film’s impulse to make visual) about Shakespeare’s ‘o’er-picturing’.
Mankiewicz chooses not to replicate the absence of Cleopatra from Enobarbus’ de-
scription, but calling on a strategy of postponement, he delays her presentation to the
cinema spectator by keeping her, for much of the sequence, behind a translucent lace
curtain (Figure 2). In fact, after such an introduction, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra can-
not be but slightly disappointing, that is to say, cannot be sublime (Figure 3).23 The epic

Hollywood film, one might conclude, can describe opulence with significantly more
presence than Enobarbus, calling on more sensory channels—‘more perceptual’ as Metz
has it (409)—yet struggles with the rupturing absence of Enobarbus’ sublime object.24
However, if the presentation of presence is, in some fundamental way, constitutive of
the Hollywood epic, can absence be located in the desires of Mankiewicz’s film?
Perhaps most interesting about Mankiewicz’s unveiling of Cleopatra, for its strategy
of filling the lack which he cannot screen, is a brief reverse shot the sequence supplies
just before Cleopatra’s appearance. In the shot, from Cleopatra’s point of view,
the screen is temporarily overlaid in disorienting proximity by the translucent gauze
Figure 1 Swimming after Cleopatra’s barge [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox,
USA, 1963)]
Figure 2 Cleopatra behind the veil [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
84 SIMON RYLE

Figure 3 Cleopatra revealed [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
Figure 4 Cleopatra’s view behind the veil [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
that has blocked, from the other side, the spectator’s view of her (Figure 4). One should
consider here the work of Mary Ann Doane on ‘the magnification of the erotic’ in clas-
sical Hollywood’s use of veils ‘which intercept the space between the camera and the
woman’ (49). For Doane, the male gaze is ‘activated’ by the veil ‘in the service of the
representation of the seductive power of femininity’ (49). Doane’s mechanism of erotic
magnification seems accurately to express the psychic mechanism invoked by Mankie-
wicz’s delayed presentation of Taylor, a device that to a degree replicates her absence
from Enobarbus’ verbal sketch. However, it does not account for the disorientingly
proximate veil that intercedes between the camera and the point of view of Cleopatra.
In its self-conscious interruption of the unveiling of narrative space, Mankiewicz’s re-
verse veil shot interrupts the specular pleasure promised by the more conventional veil
that obscures the object of desire. The conventional veil that activates the male gaze,
which Doane terms the ‘lust for plenitude . . . that the visible is always lacking’ (45), has
become something quite alternative. In fact, reversing the camera’s view and the mech-
anism of the conventional veil, the shot functions as blockage to the smooth progress of
spectator desire. It interrupts the system of male gazes within the film space directed at
the female erotic object that, in Laura Mulvey’s centrally important study of the male
gaze, align with the spectator’s look to produce visual pleasure (493). The reverse veil
shot thus disrupts the smooth passage of woman represented as erotic object that for
Mulvey sustains the symbolic system (483). Significant to my investigation, the shot also
offers, in terms of cinematic space, a carefully worked intervention into Antony and Cleo-
patra’s topography of desire.
However, first it should also be acknowledged that, such is the convoluted history of
Cleopatra’s protracted post-production, ascribing this kind of effect to Mankiewicz alone
is extremely problematic. Darryl F. Zanuk, who used the colossal financial mismanage-
ment of the film to engineer his appointment as president of 20th Century Fox, fired

Mankiewicz after ten months of filming, and a year and a half of production. This oc-
curred when the director expressed a disinclination to trim his rough cut of the film,
viewed by Zanuck on 13 October 1962, to three and a half hours in length. Zanuck
brought in Elmo Williams, a renowned industry cutter, who arranged the edit to the
required length within forty-eight hours (Geist 330). Though Mankiewicz did eventu-
ally return to the project, to shoot several extra battle sequences in Spain, he claimed to
bitterly regret so doing, expressing extreme dissatisfaction at the final cut of the film, to
the extent of wishing not to be ascribed as director of the film: ‘When he fired me,
I should have stayed fired. It was a mistake to shoot those retakes . . . . Had I stuck to
my guns, I might’ve had a better chance of taking my name off [Cleopatra] as director’
(quoted in Geist 336). The degree of sincerity he here expresses is, however, question-
able. Certainly, Mankiewicz spent three months in Los Angeles, following the retakes,
supervising all post-production phases of the film.
If credit for specific details of the film’s edit must remain uncertain, neither is it ac-
curate to ascribe auteur-like control over the composition of the photographic image to
Mankiewicz. Geist reports Mankiewicz’s frustration at his cinematographer, Leon
Shamroy, who, to all of Mankiewicz’s suggestions concerning an interesting shot or
angle, would claim he had already done it in a previous picture (Geist 336). Unlike
many Hollywood directors of the period, Mankiewicz did not work with a viewfinder,
having looked through the wrong end of one on his first film, Dragonwyck (1946). ‘He
relies heavily on the judgement of his experienced cinematographers’, Geist reports,
‘His instruction to Joseph Ruttenburg, for the conspiratorial sequence of Julius Caesar,
was “Give me a whole lot of goddamned heads”’ (233). For this reason, rather as
‘Shakespeare’ commonly figures as shorthand for the series of collaborative processes
that textual scholarship delineates as responsible for the 1623 publication of the First
Folio,25 my use of ‘Mankiewicz’ in this article should be read as acknowledging the com-
plex studio collaborations involved in producing the texts of classical Hollywood film.
It is important to consider the brief reverse shot from behind the gauzy veil, be it the
work of Mankiewicz or ‘Mankiewicz’, alongside Cleopatra’s image of herself as
‘squeaking . . . whore’, from close to the end of Shakespeare’s play. In the poetic image
she therein offers, Shakespeare’s Egyptian queen contemplates the humiliations she will
suffer should she allow herself to be taken as captive, the only alternative to suicide, to
be made part of a display for the hordes of Rome:
In their thick breaths,
Rank of a gross diet, shall we be enclouded
And forced to drink their vapour. (5.2.250–52)
86 SIMON RYLE
One should note initially how this picture differs from Mankiewicz’s reverse shot: the
manner in which Cleopatra’s concern centres on distaste at bodily expulsion, the breath
of the Roman mob, drawing on the repeated scatological motif, and importance of the
abject in the play, which this article does not have the space to fully develop.26 Such is
the size of the imagined crowd, bodily expulsion becomes for Cleopatra the basis of
Rome’s physical space: in it ‘shall we be enclouded’. Cleopatra’s nauseous disgust
sharpens on her own inevitable breathing in of the Romans’ breath: ‘forced to drink
their vapour’, a disgust that pivots on the ingestatory circulation it invokes (the breath

to be consumed itself is established as ‘Rank of gross diet’). Her choice is strikingly
similar to Antony’s earlier dialectic of love/consumption of dung: ‘Here is my space!/
Kingdoms are clay! Our dungy earth alike/Feeds beast as man’ (1.1.35–37). Beyond
the amazing rejection of life itself that Antony thus situates at the heart of his love is a
certain representational excess, in the odd image expression of that rejection. Disgust
at the consumption of dung, a recurring image in the play, is made by Antony into dia-
lectical other to the otherworldly love of the play’s protagonists. Similarly, as she frames
it, Cleopatra’s choice comes down to self-annihilation or submission to the circulatory
ingestion of bodily waste.
Aside from locating the abject as dialectical other to sublime love, Shakespeare’s lan-
guage makes a manoeuvre, an alternative circulation, that one might productively con-
sider alongside Mankiewicz’s reverse shot: the audience hears, as Mankiewicz’s
spectator sees, a disruptive image briefly from Cleopatra’s eyes. Are our two views from
this privileged viewpoint at all alike? For one, the image from Cleopatra’s view in both
cases works to disrupt the smooth presentation of narrative space. A standard Screen
theory reading of Mankiewicz’s reverse shot might classify it in terms of suture, the com-
plex theory of shot exchanges that weave spectator consciousness into the presentation
of narrative space. By the terms of suture, the evocation of the unseen veiled space
creates a ‘distancing effect’ by making ‘the spectator aware of the collusionary role he
or she plays as voyeur of the image’ (Hayward 354). This reading, I argue, is especially
valid for Mankiewicz’s sequence, which invests so much in the economy of unveiling. In
a similar, but vitally different focus on spectatorship, in Shakespeare’s text, Cleopatra’s
verbal image is notable for the metadramatic tension it deploys. As she queasily im-
agines herself on a platform, surrounded by the hordes, the image she conveys, as crit-
ics often observe, closely corresponds to the physical layout and audience proximity of
early modern auditorium theatres such as The Globe, where the play was probably
first performed. Cleopatra flashes a reflection of her audience, the space external to the
narrative space, in which the rank breath enclouding her emanates from the play’s
Jacobean audience.
If Mankiewicz’s suture alludes to the collusionary role of the cinema spectator, it
certainly does not reflect in this way. Is, then, Metz’s notion of the cinema screen as a
‘strange mirror’, one that lacks only ‘the spectator’s own body’ (410–13), first published
in France fourteen years after Cleopatra was released, the most appropriate theoretical
intervention here? Metz’s strange mirror is closely related to Jacques-Alain Miller’s no-
tion of suture, first delivered in Lacan’s Seminar XI, as that which ‘names the relation of
the subject to the chain of discourse . . . it figures there as the element which is lacking’.
Drawing together Metz and Miller, Stephen Heath finds spectator desire for suture
derives from anxiety generated by the potential for off-screen space in point-of-view
anchoring. For Heath, this is frequently answered by the reverse shot, which, in evok-
ing absent space, takes the form of ‘the surgical joining of the lips of a wound [. . .
by which] the film ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack, which is ceaselessly bound up
in and into the relation of the subject’ (Question of Cinema 13). In the final section of
this article, I develop what Heath means by this lack in the spectating subject. First,
it should be noted how Mankiewicz’s disorienting reverse shot can be read, following
Heath’s elucidation, as positing and refusing to answer the desire by which the

spectator is bound to narrative space. The structural parallel of the two self-
conscious gazes back indicates how Mankiewicz’s sequence allows one to rethink
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Viewed from Mankiewicz’s reverse shot, her poetic allusion to
the play audience serves to suture the wound of her absence from Enobarbus’
verbal sketch. It offers forth an impossible point of view, of space beyond the narra-
tive space: a view from the position of the sublime object.
That Cleopatra’s sublimity is bound up with self-conscious performativity is empha-
sized in the following sequence of Mankiewicz’s film, in which Antony has his first taste
of Egyptian decadence aboard Cleopatra’s barge. The sequence serves as introduction
to the film’s caricaturing of Antony (Richard Burton) as a drunk. The strangeness of
the sequence centres on the role of a Cleopatra lookalike. She is made-up and dressed
exactly as Taylor’s Cleopatra, though with a more revealing lace negligee, an item of
clothing notable for its having the exact same opacity (seemingly, it is of the same ma-
terial) as the curtain that screens Cleopatra in the preceding sequence of the barge’s
arrival (Figure 5). In staging a burlesque of Antony in the carnivalesque representation
of Bacchus, the film seems to make pointedly reflexive extra-filmic references to the
Taylor/Burton star behaviour that captivated the American media and spectating
public, that centrally occupied Fox’s strategy of publicizing the film, and that has sub-
sequently so concerned film critics.27
If the film offers a prescient image of the excesses that would so concern its future
critical reception, the sequence also means Antony’s desire for Cleopatra is introduced
to the film via an obscene satiric pageant initiated by Cleopatra. In so doing, Mankiewicz
Figure 5 A lookalike Cleopatra and Bacchus [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century
Fox, USA, 1963)]
88 SIMON RYLE
pre-empts (by staging them even before the romance has begun) the images that come
to Cleopatra in the final scene of Shakespeare’s play, of her love story transformed to a
farce on the Roman stage, the realization that finally leads her to suicide:
The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Will be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’th’posture of a whore. (5.2.257–61)
In both Shakespeare and Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra one might recognize a degree of

melancholic narcissism in having her conceive of their love as absurd, lustful, and
drunken. In the ‘Notes’ to the Arden edition, Wilders remarks on Shakespeare’s
‘extraordinary boldness’ (291) in the explicit spell-breaking reference to the stage practice
of boys performing female roles at this moment of key affective import.28 The play
effectively acknowledges, in referencing the exaggerated and inaccurate pantomiming
of Cleopatra that Rome hopes to stage, the inevitable inadequacy of its own mimesis—
though some critics posit an extremely talented boy actor would have been required
to make such a daring move. In a way that Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra does not,
Shakespeare’s poetic images again figure the stage body representing ‘Cleopatra’ as the
vulgarity that structurally holds the position of the elusive sublime object. In so doing,
Shakespeare provides precisely the converse to the gap in Enobarbus’ verbal sketch, an
image of the vulgar insubstantiality of the sublime object viewed at the margins of the
interspace.
Reading forward from Shakespeare’s complex topography, Christian Metz’s concep-
tion of the presence of theatrical space, as opposed to the absence of cinematic space,
in “The Imaginary Signifier”, is centrally addressed. The precision of Metz’s sugges-
tion of the ‘true space’ of theatre’s performative inscription, as differing from cinema’s
narrative space and the ‘absence’ (409) of cinematic bodies—a critical position also
affirmed by Shakespearean performance scholar Dennis Kennedy (6)—is sharpened in
the absent-presence Shakespeare affixes imagistically to Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s
poetic images figure the boy actor’s body, like Metz’s cinema screen, as holding the
place of the absence: onto both Cleopatra is projected. For both the cinema and the
theatre, it is with relation to the fantasmatic suture of spectatorial desire that the pro-
jection of dramatic character as imaginary reality therein holds or fails. This is not to
claim that the imaginary effects generated by cinematic and poetic theatrical writing
are identical (my project is to investigate their material differences) but merely that
given sufficient ingenuity (and perhaps also funds) the effects of one can be transposed to
the other—and in so doing, will speak of the relative representational potentiality of the
two representational media. Astrophil’s notion of Stella’s cruelty, in Sir Philip Sidney’s
Sonnet 60, as meaning that her ‘presence, absence, absence presence is’ (13), further
exemplifies how, in early modern verse, there is to be found a more nuanced engage-
ment with presence than in Metz’s notion of theatrical bodies as uncomplicatedly
present.29 Tellingly, in replicating as far as he can the topography of Shakespeare’s
interspace for cinematic space, Mankiewicz offers an absurd portrait of drunken
Burton, and, in an impossible self-satirizing mirror reflection of Taylor as media star, a

whorish actress as Cleopatra’s double. In underscoring Taylor’s extra-diegetic presence,
Cleopatra replicates, or approximates, the reflexive absent-presence of Shakespeare’s
boy-Cleopatra.
If the images of herself as ‘whore’ serve to prepare Shakespeare’s Cleopatra for sui-
cide, significantly in Mankiewicz’s film the satiric representation of the protagonists
functions as enabling condition for the expression of their desire. Bray and Palmer read
the sequence as enabling Antony’s happy reassumption of the phallus: ‘It is only after

he has been ridiculed that Antony reasserts his manhood’ (114). While this may indeed
accurately convey Mankiewicz’s gendered economy of power, to my mind it misses the
key feature of the sequence: Antony’s almost unconscious need to occupy the place in
the centre of the satiric pageant. Powerfully affected by the performance, Antony stum-
bles drunkenly, as if in a daze, through dancing girls who cling at his body. He throws
the actor playing Bacchus from his seat, and sits in his place, pulling the imitation
Cleopatra to his lap and kissing her violently (Figure 6). From this position within the
artifice, Antony gazes back to where he and Cleopatra had been sitting (she leaves
the dinning room while he makes his way through the dancing girls). A shot/reverse
shot sequence here, with a hazy shift in and out of focus to indicate the reverse shot is
Antony’s drunken point of view, again indicates Mankiewicz’s concern to rework
Shakespeare’s absences (Figures 7–9). Extra-diegetic music conveying a mood of
exaggerated anxiousness marks the empty space as pivotal sight for Antony.
Galvanized by the affect-laden spatial absence, Antony strides after Cleopatra, into
her private chamber. For Mankiewicz’s Antony, the absence that facilitates desire is lo-
cated as a suturing reverse shot seen from within the place of the parody. Cleopatra’s
bed is surrounded by curtains of the same translucent material that screened her on the
boat and that covered the body of the imitation Cleopatra (Figure 10). In frustration at
his inability to find the opening, Antony rips open the material (Figure 11). Literally, as
Mankiewicz’s suturing cinematography does in the previous sequence, in a manoeuvre
quite the reverse of Enobarbus’ image absence, he tears through the veil that separates
him from the place of desire.
Figure 6 Antony and the lookalike Cleopatra [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox,
USA, 1963)]
90 SIMON RYLE

Figure 7 Antony’s drunken gaze [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
Figure 8 Reverse shot of Antony’s gaze [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
Figure 9 Cleopatra’s absence [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
There are various questions, centred on the function of woman in representation,

which need to be addressed in the final section of this essay: what economy of gender
representation is shared and what transformed in the response Mankiewicz’s film
makes to Shakespeare’s binding up of desiring bodies and narrative space? How does

Figure 10 Antony approaching Cleopatra’s bed [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox,
USA, 1963)]
Figure 11 Tearing through the veil [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
Hollywood convention make a space for, and contain the extent of, the libidinous economy
of Shakespeare’s poetic images? How does the place of the parody in Mankiewicz’s
film contribute to a reading of Cleopatra’s parodic image of herself and Antony in
Shakespeare’s text? And how does the phallocentric visual pleasure of cinema that
Mulvey terms the male gaze relate to Shakespeare’s poetically figured sublime female?
JOUISSANCE AND WOMAN

The obvious function of Taylor as object of the male cinematic gaze in this sequence
seems powerfully to implicate Cleopatra as instance of the Hollywood system’s mono-
lithic ideological project, in which, for Mulvey, representation of woman as object of
desire sustains the phallocentric order (484–85). However, one should examine further
the absolute alignment of the male gaze with visual pleasure that Mulvey has stressed,
in which woman serves as fetishistic disavowal of lack:
In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated
subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of the potential lack
in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction through its formal beauty and its
play on his own formative obsessions. (485)
92 SIMON RYLE
Certainly, this ideological mechanism seems unproblematically present when Antony

finally rips through to the place of desire. In this sequence, as in Doane’s delineation of
the conventional veiling that elicits the Hollywood male gaze, ‘The veil functions to
visualise (and hence stabilize) the instability, the precariousness of sexuality’ (46). The
‘terror of . . . lack’ as Mulvey puts it, is evaded in the visual pleasure afforded by the
finally presented female object of desire. However, what of the alternative visual fascin-
ation associated with the unnerving reverse shot from within the space of the parody, or
that of the earlier disorientingly proximate veil, that each precede the fantasmatic

pleasure of the male gaze? Do these reverse shots function as delays merely to heighten
the final pleasure of Antony violently transversing the veil? Or, is the conventional
phallocentric ending of the sequence, required by the conventions of classical Holly-
wood (a formal ordering of visual pleasure that should not be overlooked), affectively
less significant than a certain transitory occurrence of the ‘terror of . . . lack’—a scopic
jouissance beyond conventional, phallocentric visual pleasure—invested in these dis-
ruptive reverse shots? And what, for that matter, of the similar topography of radically
alternative narrative space invested in Cleopatra’s image of herself as ‘squeaking . . .
whore’? How is her sublime absence bound to spectatorial fascination in her vulgar
material presence? Disrupting her status as conventional object of desire, I argue
Cleopatra’s sublimity is sustained precisely in the spectatorial jouissance invoked in
the view she offers of herself as ridiculous whore. This jouissance, I further argue, is
transposed, or approximated, in Mankiewicz’s reverse shots.
In this section, I consider film as phallocentric representation via Lacan’s model of
subjectivity, to investigate the relation of gender representation in Antony and Cleopatra
and Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. In concentrating on the disruptions to visual pleasure key
to these texts, Lacan’s topographical notion of jouissance as an approach to the disgust-
ing truth of the Thing is invaluable. ‘To the degree that it involves forcing an access to
the Thing’, Lacan explains, ‘the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us’ (SVII
98).30 Because of its essentially ego-conserving tendencies, in Lacanian theory, desire
comes to be opposed to the excess of jouissance that is aimed at by the drives: ‘desire is
a defence, a defence against going beyond a limit in jouissance’ (É 699).31 Jouissance is
an excess of stimulation, a point beyond pleasure where excitation threatens the ego’s
mastery. Propped up by the fantasy, desire comes to limit and evade the dangerous and
freeing potential of jouissance to approach the subject’s Thing. As Kristeva puts it: in
jouissance ‘the object of desire . . . bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives
up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other’ (Powers 9).
To address the question of visual jouissance as the irresistible-unbearable aim of the
scopic drive (the reason why, for Lacan, ‘all drives are virtually a death drive’ [É 719]32),
and the relation of the scopic drive to the sublime object of the interspace, it is neces-
sary to sketch briefly the model of the masochistic jouissance that is largely barred from
Lacan’s subject.33 The primary stage of subject formation, Lacan repeatedly states, is
the intrusion of the signifier, by which the subject comes into existence by a symbolic
wounding. ‘As an effect of language, in that he is born of this early split’, Lacan writes,
‘the subject translates a signifying synchrony into the primordial temporal pulsation that
is the constitutive fading of his identification. This is the first movement’ (É 708–09).34
In the beginning was the word. He further affirms, ‘The cut made by the signifying
chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the
real’ (É 678).35 The subject is founded as a disjunction that has been introduced into its
organism by the signifier, and is thus ‘an animal at the mercy of language’ (É 525). Like
a parasite, the symbol lodges itself within the organism it divides: ‘he bears within him-
self the worm of the cause that splits him’ (É 708).36 As I have mentioned, Lacan terms
this split the Thing: ‘the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing . . .
the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or hole in the real is iden-
tical’ (SVII 150).37

Importantly connected to film theory, following the symbolic cut, the mirror stage’s
‘imaginary capture by specular reflection’ (É 705)38 is positioned as a ‘secondary
subordination [which] not only closes the first by projecting the topography of the
subject into the instant of fantasy; it seals it, refusing to allow the subject of desire to
realize that he is a effect of speech’ (É 709).39 This formation of the ideal ego based
on the reflected body image allows the alienating imaginary closure of the signifying
cut, an evasion of the Thing at the heart of subjectivity. For this reason, ‘The ego is
thus a function of mastery’ (É 685),40 by which the discomfiting Thing of subjecthood
is evaded.
Vitally, the imaginary joining of the split subject in the defensive mechanism of
Lacan’s desire precisely matches the operation Heath names as suture: ‘Suture names
not just a structure of lack but also . . . a certain closure’ (“Suture”). In Screen theory, as
I have investigated, the desire for the second shot follows the loss of jubilation that
comes to the first, so that the recognition of the film as semiotic system is evaded in
imaginary enclosure within the film world. This enclosure is the impression of reality
generated by the film fiction, as Heath puts it: ‘the imaginary is the specific fiction of
the subject in the symbolic’ (“Suture”). Likewise, with regard to the subject’s psychic
organization, Lacan terms ‘suture . . . a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic’
(SXI 118).41 This means that suture in film theory names the mechanism commonly
followed by the film spectator, in immersing him/herself in the film as reality, as tracing
a path parallel to, in effect a microcosm of, the subject’s maintenance of ego mastery.
Friedrich Kittler has argued the particular cinematic mass deployment of this percep-
tive mechanism led directly to the theoretical concerns of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Suture names why film is so important for, so bound up with, psychoanalytic theory. It
is also why, for Serge Leclaire, the analyst—whose job, in Lacanian terms, is to re-establish
the subject’s awareness of the Thing, to provoke a freeing awareness of the ‘Alienation
[that] resides in the subject’s division’ (É 713)42—is the person who ‘does not suture’
(quoted in Heath, “Suture”). Analytic love, to reference an earlier section in this essay,
undoes suture.
The structural significance of Lacan’s jouissance should be briefly situated in relation
to the field of early modern writing. Important here is Cynthia Marshall’s valuable re-
cent work on the ‘surprising variety of popular texts [that] indicate the considerable
pleasure afforded to early modern audiences by experiences of shattering or dissol-
ution’ (4). As in Kristeva’s understanding of poetry as a unique site of representational
tension, Marshall demands attention be paid to the distinct ‘density and uniqueness of
powerful writing’ (33). She deploys the Freudian model of primal masochism, which
Lacan’s jouissance greatly develops, to read this poetic self-shattering. Marshall stresses
94 SIMON RYLE
the value of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud finds a seemingly para-
doxical tendency in the subject to replay the traumatic moment: a kind of impulse to
self-dissolution, or death drive, at the very core of subjectivity. She also draws links with
Leo Bersani’s notion of the ego, in Freud, as ‘nothing more than a kind of passionate
inference necessitated by the anticipated pleasure of its own dismantling’ (40). (Bersani’s
radical, ‘dismantling’ pleasure is what Lacan terms ‘jouissance’). For Marshall, Freud’s
primal masochism, and Bersani’s reading of Freud, are intimately related to a new
model of subjectivity that arose in the humanism of early modern literature. Not only

was there ‘a drive toward autonomy and individuality inscribed within humanistic
texts, but a regressive pleasure in emotional dispersal was invited by a range of popular
texts’ (34). Studying the range of masochistic literary impulses, Marshall argues that ‘an
“aesthetics of masochism” arises in response to the specifically historical deployment of
subjectivity in culture’ (43). In Lacanian terms, this masochistic impulse positions early
modern literature as centrally concerned with symbolizing the jouissance that would
free or destabilize the grip on the subject of the new phase of emergent, self-fashioned
Renaissance individuality.
In a much broader study, Jonathan Dollimore also uses Freud’s theory of the death
drive to read the strangely frequent representational recurrence of desire intertwined
uncannily with death across Western culture. For Dollimore, for more than 2,000
years of Western culture, ‘The “crisis” of the individual is . . . a recurring instability
deriving from the theological obsession with death, loss and failure . . . it has always
been an integral, facilitating aspect” (xix). However, like Marshall, Dollimore espe-
cially finds that in the Renaissance ‘eros and thanatos began to be associated in new
and disturbing ways’ (62). For Dollimore, a key image of the period’s engagement
with death and desire is Nicolas Deutsch’s Death and the Young Woman (1517), which
depicts a corpse having sex with a young woman. The theme, if not specifically Deutsch’s
image, certainly caught Shakespeare’s attention. Romeo and Juliet (which in many re-
spects offers a youthful version of Antony and Cleopatra’s intense and death-bound love)
personifies death as paramour of Juliet on six separate occasions: ‘My grave is like to
be my wedding bed’ (1.5.135); ‘I’ll to my wedding bed/And death, not Romeo, take
my maidenhead!’ (3.2.36–37); ‘I would the fool were married to her grave!’ (3.5.140);
‘Make the bridal bed/In that dim monument where Tybalt lies’ (3.5.201–02); ‘Death
is my son-in-law. Death is my heir’ (4.5.38); and ‘Shall I believe/That unsubstantial
death is amorous’ (5.3.112–13).43 Romeo and Juliet, like Deutsch’s picture, figures
Marshall’s self-shattering in terms of an uncanny coupling of death and its female
protagonist.
Prefigured by Romeo and Juliet, but perhaps even more delicately poised temporally, is
the eroticized image of Cleopatra’s death as orgasm. ‘Husband, I come’ (5.2.282) she
calls as the asp bites her, merging the resonant early modern pun on la petite mort,
orgasm as death,44 with a symbolic claim (‘husband’) made on Antony for all eternity.
As in the images of Juliet, Cleopatra initially anthropomorphizes death as paramour, in
a vision of masochistic desire: ‘the stroke of death . . . as a lover’s pinch/Which hurts
and is desired’ (5.2.294–95). In so doing, Cleopatra reworks a remarkable image used
by Antony at his own suicide: ‘I will be/A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t/As
to a lover’s bed’ (4.9.99–101). Coppélia Kahn has suggestively proposed that ‘wounds
mark a kind of vulnerability easily associated with woman: they show the flesh to be
penetrated’ (17). Beyond this useful general proposition, in the specific instance of
Antony’s image death is simultaneously eroticized and spatialized as a bed that he runs
towards, while the death wound locates this space within his own simultaneously self-
penetrated/self-penetrating body. The transcendence Cleopatra hopes of death re-
works Antony’s image of eroticized entry into his own death wound. It precisely pivots
perhaps the key question raised by the play on the climactic finale of orgasm at the end
of Cleopatra’s life: does Cleopatra give up All for Love, as the title of Dryden’s Restor-

ation rewriting contends, or, as critics of the play invariably enquire, are her gestures of
love at her suicide rather a strategy for extracting the only meaning left to her from an
otherwise lust-ridden and ignoble failure?45 Stanley Cavell frames the doubleness of
this moment in terms that closely recall the limit point of Žižek’s interspace, finding
‘Cleopatra’s declaring of orgasm’ intertwines ‘the ridiculous and the sublime’ (32). For
Cavell, in eroticizing her death, Cleopatra collapses the tension of sublimity and vul-
garity that sustains her dramatic persona: she enacts and simultaneously invalidates the
love narrative’s claim to otherworldly transcendence.
However, it should not be forgotten that Enobarbus has already ‘seen her die twenty
times’ (1.3.133–34). Cleopatra’s death scene as shattered self is undermined as per-
formative hyperbole by the play’s reflexive engagement with her recurring theatrical
performances of self-shattering. As I have investigated, the play approaches closest to
her sublime mystery in the images that rupture the suture of imaginary identification
and reveal her as symbolic construct. In the pointedly reflexive engagement with her
performance of performance (‘twenty times’) in Cleopatra’s death as climax, Shakespeare
situates the jouissance of her sublimity as constituted above an abyss of theatricality, a
mise-en-abyme of masks. The sublimity of Cleopatra is structured in the self-conscious
theatricality of her death scene, and the simultaneous deferral of spectatorial discom-
fiture in her role as erotic object of desire.
Strikingly, these images (Deutsch’s “Young Woman”, Juliet, Cleopatra) all specifically
figure the impulse to what Marshall terms self-shattering by using women to uncannily
eroticize death. An alternative deployment of femininity can be found in Antony’s
death wound as erotic orifice to be penetrated, materializing in an image of his femi-
nized body his earlier performative emasculation in Cleopatra’s ‘tires and mantles’
(2.5.22). This feminized Antony, who will penetrate his own wound like a lover, thus
uncannily replicates, and eroticizes, Octavius’ notion of Antony as ‘not more manlike/
Than Cleopatra’ (1.4.5–7). But why does woman, or the feminine, so frequently take this
position in the representation? And how does the transhistoric and cross-media
recurrence of woman in this position, in, for example, Mankiewicz’s film, relate to the
reflexivity Shakespeare so carefully situates at the representational approach to jouissance?
With regard to the role the female object of desire repeatedly plays in Western represen-
tation, reproduced in the conventions of classical Hollywood, Heath writes of woman
as ‘the assigned point at—on—which representation holds and makes up lack, the
vanishing point on which the subject that representation represents fixes to close
the division of which it is the effect’ (“Difference” 83). In terms that powerfully recall the
sublimely absent Cleopatra of Shakespeare’s text, Heath hits on the manner by which
Mankiewicz repeatedly positions Taylor as Cleopatra behind the veil, obscured and
96 SIMON RYLE
deflected in reverse subjective shots that both align the spectator’s scopic desire with
Antony’s incipient love for her and disrupt this arrangement. Vitally, Heath stresses it is
this function of woman in representation that serves to suture a division at the heart of
the spectating subject. Just as in the Lacanian topography of desire, where ‘It is because
it wards off this moment of lack that an image assumes the role of bearing the full
brunt of desire’ (É 549), for Heath the woman as spectacle is required to make whole—
to evade the truth of lack—that Lacan terms the Thing at the heart of subjectivity. How-
ever, if the rather totalizingly heterosexualist account of representational desire offered

by Screen theory usefully addresses 1960s Hollywood, in the context of Shakespeare
film, it is important to acknowledge the ‘lovely boy’ that Shakespeare’s Sonnets pursue
representationally, rather as Venus pursues Adonis in Shakespeare’s erotically charged
poem from 1593–94. If the homoerotics and male objects of desire of Shakespearean
representation indicate a frequently more complex negotiation of desire, jouissance,
and sexual difference in early modern poetry than in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood
(Venus and Adonis was the most popular long poem of the Elizabethan age), how does
Shakespeare seem to address Screen theory? Might one argue Cleopatra offers a fascin-
ating exemplification of Shakespeare simultaneously prefiguring, and pointedly evad-
ing, Hollywood phallocentrism? In her person, the mechanism of woman as object of
desire is deployed to facilitate representation and simultaneously to sublimely disrupt
the mechanism of representation.
It is thus via the Lacanian and filmic investigation of questions of desire and nar-
rative space that becomes apparent the need for renegotiating the gender focus of
Laura Levine’s powerful recent engagement with Antony and Cleopatra (Levine is almost
entirely concerned with the representation of Antony’s masculinity). For Levine,
Antony and Cleopatra figures gender in terms that directly contest pamphleteering anti-
theatricalists such as Stephen Gosson and William Prynne. In anti-theatricalist
thinking, the constant danger of the theatre hinges on its potential effeminizing of
masculinity. Gosson feared that exposure to mimed action could dissolve the specta-
tor’s identity, and Prynne described how an actor can ‘degenerate into a woman’
(quoted in Marshall 17).
Levine develops much insight from a central paradox at the heart of the anti-
theatrical position: the implicit admission of the essentially constitutive theatricality at the
heart of gender. As Levine carefully demonstrates, the danger of theatre for the anti-
theatricalists is repeatedly haunted by cautionary fears that ‘adoption of behaviours
appropriate to the opposite sex will transform one into that sex’ (44). Anti-theatricalists,
as such, founded their fear of theatre in an admission of its exposure of gender roles
as fluidly formed by behavioural patterns. Gender had to be defended against the the-
atre because essentially it is theatrically constituted. Theatre was the truth about
gender that the anti-theatricalists could not face. That is to say, Levine’s claim, that
‘Shakespeare simply identifies theatricality as the constitutive condition of existence
itself ’ (46), is a position already implicit in the anti-theatrical fear of theatre. For this
reason, the problem with Levine’s notion of Antony and Cleopatra as an ‘ontological de-
fence’ (46) of theatre, comes in its absolute alignment of Shakespeare’s ontological con-
ception of theatre with the anti-theatricalists. Levine brilliantly argues how the
puritanical Octavius is, in his disgust at Antony’s ‘lascivious wassails’ (1.4.56), and the
spectacle of Antony’s enthronement ‘in the public eye’ (3.6.12), the ‘explicit anti-
theatricalist in the play’ (45). As she potently demonstrates, ‘at the core of Caesar’s
anti-theatricality’, as is evidenced by his need to parade Cleopatra, ‘lies a deeply theat-
rical way of organizing the world’ (65). As such, in Caesar Antony and Cleopatra casts
‘anti-theatricality as a posture’ (45). However, one might ask how in this reading the
play’s implicit position differs—excepting the absence of a polemical tone—from that
of Gosson and Prynne, who, as Levine argues, ‘fear that [. . .] difference exists only in
so far as it is performed’ (58)?

Levine’s repeated centralization of Antony’s character—‘at the centre of the play is a
virtual transformation of the story of the dissolving warrior [emphasis added]’
(50)—implicitly acknowledges a critical focus in essence founded on the paradigms of
the anti-theatrical fear of male emasculation. Unfortunately, this almost complete focus
on Antony’s emasculation at the hands of Cleopatra’s ‘effeminizing power’ (47) causes
Levine to miss the construction and destruction—in Žižekian terms, the interspace—of
Cleopatra as sublime female: the other centre of the play, the centre of otherness so
feared and so irresistible. Levine powerfully depicts the repeated emasculatory gender
bending of the play, perhaps most concisely encapsulated in the image of Antony
dressed in Cleopatra’s ‘tires and mantles’ whilst she ‘wore his sword Philippan’ (2.5.22–
23). Oddly, however, considering her focus on Men in Woman’s Clothing, her study rather
disregards the boy actor playing Cleopatra that the play so pointedly draws attention to.
One might suggest that Levine’s focus demonstrates the potentially impoverishing re-
striction of Shakespeare’s intense concentration of poetic meanings in purely historicist
contextualization. Placed alongside the visual significance Mankiewicz repeatedly
ascribes to the male gaze, which constructs the woman as suture to subjective lack,
Levine’s silences suggest what a film-centred analysis can bring back to Shakespeare.
Mankiewicz’s cinematically self-conscious emphasis on desiring viewpoints demands
and facilitates a topographical re-exploration of the failure of the interspace that is
occasioned by the images that drive Cleopatra to suicide.
It is certainly telling that, for Levine, Caesar desires to parade Cleopatra so as to
evade awareness of his own theatricality: ‘to ignore what is “other” at the heart of [. . .
him]self ’ (66). Troubled by the contradictions of his position, Levine’s Caesar is a
model of Lacanian desire, seeking to evade the radical otherness of his subjectivity by
investing scopically in the woman as spectacle. However, the anti-theatricalist contextu-
alization of the play necessitates a subtle misreading on Levine’s part: ‘If he [Caesar]
fears that Antony can dissipate the boundaries of gender by being “not more manlike
than Cleopatra”, he can have Cleopatra “boyed” in the posture of a whore’ (66). This
assertion misleads at two interpretational levels. Not only does it structurally position
the play’s theatricalization of Cleopatra as merely an answer of sorts to Caesar’s gender
fears concerning Antony. Centrally, it passes over the fact that it is Cleopatra herself,
and not Caesar, who gives life to the parodic image of herself as ‘whore’. Levine is
concerned to assert Cleopatra’s theatricalization of her death as ‘counterperformance
to the one Caesar seeks to stage’ (71), but in her persuasive and telling charactological
analysis Levine misses, or evades, the fact that the reflexively framed image intrusions
of the sublime theatrical female as mere symbolic mechanism come to the play’s im-
aginary diegetic reality from Cleopatra.
98 SIMON RYLE
The disruption of the imaginary suture that the ‘whore’ image affords must be ac-
knowledged as complicatedly bound to the gender questions at hand. Gender as theat-
ricality becomes for Shakespeare the occasion for an instance of poetic jouissance
located in the image of the boy actor whose actual stage presence cannot but fail to
embody the sublime female at the heart of the play’s imagination. More complicatedly
playful than mere contestation of anti-theatricality, the image of Cleopatra with
Antony’s ‘sword Philippan’ offered by that boy involves a double-performative gender
reversal: an image of the absent sublime female whom the boy performatively fails

to embody, herself theatricalizing gender, performing the very theatricality that is
constitutive of her dramatic character in the phallic apparel of a male warrior.46 As
such, Shakespeare seems to have more to say in Antony and Cleopatra about theatre than
that things of the world ‘simply fail to exist apart from their theatricalization’ (Levine 71).
As I have demonstrated, in Shakespeare’s acknowledgement of his theatre’s failure to
bring Cleopatra to the stage, representational failure constitutes her sublime impossi-
bility. Though Levine might here accurately catch Caesar’s fear in his claim ‘the ostentation
of our love [. . .] left unshown/Is often left unloved’ (3.6.52–53), she misses the dialectic
of sublime/vulgarity that is constituted in Cleopatra’s theatricality. Via Mankiewicz
and Lacan, it can be demonstrated that Cleopatra’s theatricality does not merely gen-
erate something ‘simply more “real” than what is not’ (Levine 71). In Lacanian terms,
the mise-en-abyme of masks by which her dramatic character is constructed as an abyss
of theatricality simultaneously approaches and evades a wound at the heart of subject-
ivity, the Thing, upon which performance founds the speaking being.47
I have argued a jouissance that goes to the heart of the spectating subject’s originary
split can be located in Shakespeare’s gender play, which is to be found, replicated, or ap-
proximated in the rupturing reverse shots from Cleopatra that displace the woman as ob-
ject of the male gaze. However, as I have noted, these moments from Mankiewicz’s film
are alternatively ordered, delimited by the phallocentric codes of Hollywood visual
pleasure. This organization is notably to be found in the beautiful corpse of Taylor’s
Cleopatra, who lies at the film’s close in her ornate marble vault, dressed all in gold as Isis
(Figure 12). As the camera recedes from the scene an extra-diegetic voice repeats, in past
tense, the final words of Dollabella and Charmian, deploying folktale codes to divide
Figure 12 Cleopatra dressed as Isis in death [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox,
USA, 1963)]
and distance, suddenly, narration from the mimetic instance. At the same time, this dis-
tancing is underscored visually as the photographic film image becomes a photographic
still that fades into a painted image with the texture of a fresco (Figures 13 and 14). If
this visual-vocal narrative framing emphasizes the fantastic performative excesses of
Cleopatra’s death as self-conscious representation, the idealized and beautiful female
corpse at the centre of the scene closely matches the ‘formal beauty’ of Hollywood
convention that for Mulvey satisfies—and imparts visual pleasure to—the male gaze.
In fact, Mankiewicz comes perhaps as close as he can to replicating in film space

the kind of scene Cleopatra has in mind when she figures her death in the terms of
Figure 13 The camera leaves her vault [Cleopatra (Joseph Mankiewicz, 20th Century Fox, USA,
1963)]
Figure 14 The photographic screen image becomes fresco [Cleopatra (Joesph Mankiewicz, 20th
Century Fox, USA, 1963)]
100 SIMON RYLE
nostalgic longing for recollected narrative space: ‘I am again for Cydnus/To meet Mark
Antony’ (5.2.270–71). Cydnus, site of her first meeting with Antony, of her absence
from Enobarbus’ image of desire, allows her to figure an image of her reunion with
Antony in death—to be the absent object of desire for all eternity. Mankiewicz is not
far from Caesar’s intention, in the final speech of the play, in which ‘She shall be buried
by her Antony/No grave upon the earth shall clip in it/A pair so famous’ (5.2.409–11).
In ordering the removal of her corpse from the stage, Caesar at once clears the way for
the mythic figures that the play has so frequently acknowledged its actors cannot

embody, and simultaneously clips her in his masterful direction of her burial. However,
if Cleopatra’s death fantasy would sustain the interspace, the partial approximation of
this in Mankiewicz’s beautiful corpse should be considered alongside another image of
her death that Shakespeare’s Egyptian queen offers:
On Nilus mud
Lay me stark naked, and let waterflies
Blow me into abhorring [. . .] make
My country’s high pyramides my gibbet
And hang me up in chains. (5.2.56–61)
Punning on the homonym that ‘abhoring’ partially makes with her later figuration of
herself as ‘whore’ on the Roman stage, Cleopatra as decaying flyblown corpse strung
up in chains engages powerfully with the jouissance of representational self-shattering
that Marshall has noted. More than the severely limited and transitory jouissance
of Mankiewicz’s reverse shots, the power of the Thing that lies behind Cleopatra here
supplants her as sublimity that for Enobarbus cannot be spoken.
Calling on the Kantian etymology of the sublime as ‘outrage on the imagination’, for
Žižek a discomfiting jouissance is always-already immanent in the sublime object, in that in
its very excess it is constantly prone to degeneration into abjection. This is why Kristeva’s
notion that ‘all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which . . . desire is founded’
(Powers 5) so intersects with Shakespeare’s sublime Cleopatra (which is why scatology, as
I have elsewhere investigated, is such a key motif in the play). Though Enobarbus has seen
her die twenty times, Cleopatra’s performatively sustained absence as sublimity in the
place of the Thing gives way to the abject, in the image of her corpse: what Lacan terms
the missed encounter with the real (SXI 55).48 As example of the missed encounter, in an
image strikingly like Cleopatra’s, Žižek suggests ‘the palpitation of the raw, skinless red
flesh’ (Metastases 116). Yet, perhaps even more than Žižek’s raw flesh, Cleopatra’s maggoty
cadaver parallels the symbolic cut in the real that Lacan’s subject bears ‘within himself
[as] the worm of the cause that splits him’. Cleopatra invokes spectatorial jouissance by
framing a failure to represent the sublime object as, successively and simultaneously,
absent object of desire, performative artifice, and abjection. Beyond arguing for the con-
stitutive theatricality of gender and identity, the sublime Cleopatra facilitates affective
recognition of the symbolic wound upon which subjectivity is performatively founded.
CONCLUSIONS
For Julia Kristeva, the simultaneous structuring/de-structuring process of poetic lan-
guage (which she terms signifiance) offers—at its most powerful—‘a passage to the outer
boundaries of the subject. Then—and only then—can it be jouissance and revolution’

(Revolution 17). Kristeva’s jouissance as ‘passage to the outer boundaries of the subject’
offers a lucid image of the radical potential of poetry, the jouissance Shakespeare ex-
plores in Cleopatra’s sublimity. In the excess of material degradation heaped upon her
broken flyblown corpse, an image of Lacan’s disgusting Thing supplants her sublime
absence from Enobarbus’ poetic sketch in an alternative ‘outrage on the imagination’.
Alongside Shakespeare’s jouissance, Cleopatra’s financial and visual excesses concisely
indicate the radically changed contexts of our apprehension of Shakespeare. Alongside

Mankiewicz, the Lacanian topography of desire suggests Shakespeare’s strategic posi-
tioning of a discomfiting jouissance—interwoven with spectatorial desire and gender
identity—at moments of the most heightened narrative affect. Despite Mankiewicz’s
replication of Shakespeare’s topographies of desire, Lacanian film theory would seem
to suggest that a mechanism of visual pleasure in Cleopatra serves ultimately to evade
jouissance (just as Mulvey claims of conventional Hollywood).
In this theoretical engagement with Antony and Cleopatra and Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra,
my article has given prominence to Shakespeare’s language, to consider the extent
to which a poetics of representation suitable for reading the technocultural negoti-
ation of adaptation is to be located in the reflexive self-examinations pursued by
Shakespeare’s poetry. This element of literature’s remediation in film adaptation is
broached in the Lacanian stress on the changed media contexts of the teletechno-
logical signifier, to be found, for example, in Jacques Derrida’s notion of culture’s
contemporary televisual ‘return, on a different stage, in new conditions’ (Derrida
and Stiegler 24). As with Lacan, this article takes as operative conviction the import-
ance of paying close attention, just as Shakespeare’s poetry does, to the channels of
representation at our disposal. To this end, my article has worked with the notion
proposed by Friedrich Kittler, in his work on the media revolution of the 1880s, of
a ‘short circuit between brain physiology and communications technologies’ (216), in
which Kittler argues that the media of a particular culture serve as ‘the very sche-
matism of perceptability’ (xli).49 Just as the enclouding breath of the Roman mob
serves to significantly reposition the earlier sublime absence of Cleopatra, so too
Mankiewicz’s film must rework the desires that she invokes for film’s photographic
representation of space.
At this moment of the most heightened affect, bound up with Cleopatra’s decision to
commit suicide, Shakespeare has his Egyptian queen perceive an image of her future
representation, or adaptation, an instance of theatrical reflexivity that simultaneously
sustains and refutes her sublimity. For this reason, a critical approach to the play via
Žižek’s interspace topography usefully places an accent on Antony and Cleopatra’s struggle
towards the expression of its own representational future alongside the play’s spatially
structured desires. This moment introduces into Cleopatra’s theatricality—the per-
formance of performance by which she sustains her sublime absence—an image of the
adaptation to come.
As an example of that adaptation to come, a key quality of Mankiewicz’s film is its
manner of speaking back spatially to the desires of Shakespeare’s images: most specifi-
cally the recognition, in its repositioned parody, that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra immedi-
ately follows her parodic image of herself as ‘whore’ with a spatial shift to Cydnus.
102 SIMON RYLE
In so doing, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Mankiewicz’s film provide precisely the im-
age that is the dialectical other to the gap in Enobarbus’ verbal sketch, an image of the
vulgar insubstantiality of the sublime object viewed at the margins of the interspace.
If Mankiewicz demands attention be paid to Shakespeare’s topographical deployment
of the parodic image, vitally he makes the image into realistic diegetic space. This ena-
bles a suturing reverse shot from inside the image itself: a shot that, in a typically
phallocentric Hollywood manoeuvre, aligns spectator desire for narrative space with
Antony’s incipient desire for Cleopatra. Conversely, in an alternative spatial formula-

tion that is especially telling concerning the relation of the desires and narrative
spaces of cinema and Shakespearean drama, the image of the parody offered by
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra offers a view from outside narrative space, from the scato-
logical crowd. Mankiewicz’s system of reverse shots reworks the sublime absence of
Cleopatra from the poetic image in classical Hollywood terms. Yet, Shakespeare’s own
recurring poetic restatement of this absence explicitly acknowledges and reaches
forward to the repeat performance. The brief burst of jouissance invoked in her alternative,
extra-representational viewpoint elicits affective spectatorial recognition of Cleopatra’s
reflexive theatricality, her performance of performance. The image she there per-
ceives concisely invokes the return to a scene, the repeat look—and adaptation—as
pivotal critical paradigm for naming her endlessly iterable sublimity.
NOTES
1
Unless otherwise stated, all references to Antony and Cleopatra are from Bate and Rasmussen (eds.), 2007.
2
Her ‘scare quotes’ here partially acknowledge some of the problems inherent in this type of classification.
3
At the other extremity of Shakespeare film as academic field, Richard Burt’s interest in ‘Shlockspeare’
(10) is founded on the claim that ‘it is precisely the boundary between hermeneutic and post-hermeneutic
examples of Shakespeare in mass media that is increasingly less clear’ (13). While Burt’s acknowledgement
of the multiplicity of Shakespeare’s mass media afterlives (‘comic books; popular musicals; detective fic-
tion; theme parks; romance novels; hardcore pornography; advertising; cigar brands; science fiction; board
games; gift wrapping paper; greeting cards; shopping bags; T-shirts; beer labels . . .” [5]) cannot but involve
a more culturally nuanced engagement than Kidnie’s ‘work’, unfortunately Burt does not consider Shake-
speare’s own poetic investigations of the limit point of hermeneutics.
4
Like Bevington, North’s translation has her ‘apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus, commonly
drawen in picture’ (quoted in Bullough 274). North certainly catches Shakespeare’s imagination in figuring
the practice of representation to facilitate his representation of Cleopatra.
5
See my articles: “Filming Non-Space: The Vanishing Point and the Face in Brook’s King Lear.” Literature/
Film Quarterly. Ed. Elsie M. Walker. (vol. 34.2), Spring 2007; and: “‘Lest My Brain Turn’: Dover Cliff and
Locating the Other in King Lear.” Langue et altérité dans la culture de la renaissance. Eds. Ann Lecercle and Yan
Brailowsky. Paris: Presses Universités de Paris Ouest, 2008.
6
See Harris on ‘the intolerable vacuum’ (416) of Roman desire.
7
She thus offers an exemplary occasion of desire in Shakespeare that is, as Joel Fineman has noted, ‘the
very literal consequence of figurality’ (n.34, 85).
8
For precision’s sake I diverge slightly from Hollier, Krauss, and Michelson’s translation.
9
John Drakakis suggests ‘She is the way Rome represents its body to itself . . . desire recognizes itself symbolically
through Cleopatra’ (32). Future research might consider this formal mechanism with regard to Maria Wyke’s
study of the repeated appropriation of Cleopatra as key site in the West’s patriarchal-colonial representations
of the (conquered) eternal feminine/Orient (79–80), especially considering that, as Constantine Santas
notes with regard to Mankiewicz’s film, this ‘is the only grand epic of its era whose lead is a woman’ (116).
10
‘[L]e désir . . . se supporte d’un fantasme’ (É 780).
11
‘C’est parce qu’elle pare à ce moment de manque qu’une image vient à la position de supporter tout prix
du désir’ (É 655).
12
Sidney writes in The Defense of Poesy: ‘you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other, and
so mannie other under Kingdomes, that the Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where
he is, or else the tale will not be conceived’. Dr. Johnson finds the play’s ‘power of delighting derived prin-
cipally from the frequent changes of scene’ (406). Sidney’s other major complaint at the theatre of the
time, the ‘mingling of kings and clowns’, suggests an alternative, hierarchical, failure of the interspace.
Erich Auerbach singles out, as decisive mimetic trait, Shakespeare’s ‘extremely close interweaving of . . .
the sublime and the low’ (315).
13
As Denis de Rougemont has it of sublime love (which he terms ‘passionate love’): ‘Unawares and in spite
of themselves, the lovers have never had but one desire—the desire for death!” (46).
14
Dusinberre suggests, ‘Shakespeare in this play is perhaps more experimental in his treatment of audience

reaction’ (63).
15
Significantly, F1 gives no indication for the setting of the play’s scenes. Thus, spatial indeterminacy (and
interspace) is constructed and evaded in characters’ use of ideologized image viewpoints.
16
Laura Levine suggests the play ‘identifies theatricality as the constitutive condition of existence itself ’ (46).
17
As Harris has it, this space ‘provides an enabling figure for the intolerable vacuum into which Roman
desire imperially projects itself ’ (416).
18
‘[C]e nœud de servitude imaginaire que l’amour doit toujours redéfaire ou trancher’ (É 100).
19
In Lacan’s topography, the source of love is ‘the Thing from which man emerges through a cry’ (É 664).
‘[L]a Chose d’où l’homme émerge par un cri’ (É 786).
20
For Richard Boothby, Lacan’s death drive operates at two levels. Within the imaginary realm
(the level of ordinary existence), the death drive produces actual masochistic violence, whereas the
symbolic realm allows a representational mediation of violence (177). ‘[W]hatever is refused in the
symbolic order . . . reappears in the real’ (SIII 13) as the Lacanian aphorism has it. This stratification
is obviously complicated in Antony and Cleopatra’s dramatic representation of the imaginary death drive,
where symbolic expression mediates, representationally, the depiction of an unmediated masochistic
violence.
21
Hildenbrand-Girard, ‘The text is transposed visually or reformulated’ (my translation).
22
Hildenbrand-Girard, ‘The arrival of the queen of Egypt intoxicates the senses’ (my translation).
23
This is not at all to contend Cyrino’s recognition of Taylor as ‘one of the the most astonishingly beautiful
women in the history of cinema’, and as offering, ‘a magnetic, generous performance’ (149). By fixing
Cleopatra photographically, film cannot but operate against Shakespeare’s topographical sublimity based
on absence. It is precisely claims such as Cyrino’s, however, that work to construct an (alternatively struc-
tured) air of rarefied sublimity about the Hollywood star system.
24
This is not necessarily always the case for film. Following what Deleuze terms Bergman’s ‘nihilism of the
face’ (102), one might fantasize an Antony and Cleopatra by the Swedish director in which, at Cleopatra’s
appearance, the celluloid begins to burn . . .
25
See, for example, Michael Bristol’s suggestion that ‘a Shakespearean work is in effect an industrial rather
than individual product . . . Shakespeare would then be seen as something more like a modern corporate
logo or trademark’ (50–51).
26
See my article: ‘“Scatology and Metadrama: Dung and the Self-Conscious Stage.” Language and Identities:
znanstveni skup s međunarodnim sudjelovanjem. Ed. Jagoda Granić. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo za primijenjenu
lingvistiku, 2007.
27
It should be noted that Mankiewicz wrote his screenplay concurrent with filming.
28
See also Stanley Cavell on Cleopatra’s ‘theatricalization of the world’ (31).
29
More space is needed to fully develop this point. Certainly, Metz’s suggestion of the ‘true space’ (409) of
theatre’s performative inscription, as differing from cinematic space, seems problematized by the non-
space of Cleopatra in Enobarbus’ speech. Nonetheless, I find Metz’s notion of the ‘emplacement’ of the
spectator’s ‘presence-absence’ into the film space, due to a particular, uncommon, shot that ‘obliges my
look to stop wandering freely’ (418) instructive with regard to Mankiewicz’s reverse shot from behind the
curtain.
30
‘L’extrême du plaisir, pour autant qu’il consiste à forcer l’accès à la Chose, nous ne pouvons le supporter’
(SVII 97).
31
‘[L]e désir est une défense, défense d’outre-passer une limite dans la jouissance’ (É 825).
32
‘[T]oute pulsion est virtuellement pulsion de mort’ (É 848).
104 SIMON RYLE
33
In sketching the Lacanian model of subjecthood, I refer principally to the three key Écrits published or
presented by Lacan between 1960 and 1964, “Kant with Sade”, “The Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, and “Position of the Unconscious” (the essays that fol-
lowed the seventh seminar: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1958–59). These essays address and revise the 1949
presentation “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, which was commonly used in Screen
theory, following Metz, to delineate the position of the cinema spectator.
34
‘Effet de langage en ce qu’il naît de cette refente originelle, le sujet traduit une synchronie signifiante en
cette primordiale pulsation temporelle qui est le fading constituant de son identification. C’est le premier
mouvement’ (É 835).
35
‘Cette coupure de la chaîne signifiante est seule à vérifier la structure du sujet comme discontinuité dans

le réel’ (É 801).
36
‘[I]l porte en lui le ver de la cause qui le refend’ (É 835).
37
‘[L]’existence du vide au centre du réel qui s’appelle la Chose . . . il y a identité entre le façonnement du
signifiant et l’introduction dans le réel d’une béance, d’un trou’ (SVII 146).
38
‘[L]a capture imaginaire du moi par son reflet spéculaire’ (É 832).
39
‘Ce subornement second ne boucle pas seulement l’effet du premier en projetant la topologie du sujet
dans l’instant du fantasme; il le scelle, en refusant au sujet du désir qu’il se sache effet de parole’ (É 836).
40
‘Le moi est . . . fonction de maîtrise’ (É 809).
41
‘[J]onction de l’imaginaire et du symbolique’ (SXI 107).
42
‘L’aliénation réside dans la division du sujet’ (É 841).
43
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. T. J. B. Spencer. London: Penguin, 1996.
44
In support of this reading, Stanley Wells cites ‘a maid will come with a wet finger’ (1.2.24) from Dekker’s
The Common Whore, 13–14. Of Cleopatra ‘coming’, Wells argues: ‘it would be possible—though, in my
view, highly distasteful—for the performer to speak the word in a manner suggestive of innuendo’ (14).
I would argue the hermeneutic/performance divide implicit in Wells’ response is revealing of precisely the
imaginary subjectivity effect of Cleopatra performed that spectators desire, undermined in the poetry’s
repeated iteration of the failure of performance to embody her sublimity.
45
Criticism of the play in the first half of the twentieth century often sought to adjudicate between a ‘Ro-
man’ and ‘Egyptian’ view of the protagonists. This debate is well summarized by D. A. Traversi: ‘Is Antony
and Cleopatra . . . a tragedy of lyrical inspiration, justifying love by presenting it as triumphant over death,
or is it rather a remorseless exposure of human frailties, a presentation of spiritual possibilities dissipated
through a senseless surrender to passion?’ (235). For sources, see Bullough (218–22).
46
See the frisson of contrasting bodily fantasies that coalesce on the body of the boy actor in Ann Rosalind
Jones and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000,
esp. 211–17.
47
Judith Butler posits just this representational repetition in the assumption of subjective sexual identity, in
her notion of ‘citationality’: ‘To the extent that “I” is secured by its sexed position, this “I” and its position
can be secured only by being repeatedly assumed . . . to “assume” a sexed position is to seek recourse to a
legislative norm . . . “assumption” is a question of repeating that norm, citing or miming that norm’ (108).
As is perhaps clear, Butler’s radical constructivism with regard to sexual identity in Bodies that Matter has
influenced my reading of both Lacan and Antony and Cleopatra (though regrettably there is not the space to
further develop this here).
48
‘[D]u réel comme rencontre . . . est la rencontre manquée’ (SXI 54).
49
Similarly, Peter Wollen writes of the significance of the ‘embedding medium’ as eliciting ‘linguistic
change’ (107). Walter J. Ong develops the concept of the writing as a technology that is ‘interiorized’
(Orality and Literacy 82).
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Adaptation Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.

Antony and Cleopatra, Mankiewicz and the

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*English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Split, Croatia. E-mail: simon.ryle@ffst.hr

© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press.

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pursued a diversifying range of increasingly sophisticated feminist, historicist, materi-

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The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

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impossibility of representation and, paradoxically, a representation of impossibility.

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THE SUBLIME GAP

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in patriarchal Western cultures, it is representation of woman that frequently serves to

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In both Shakespeare and Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra one might recognize a degree of

Burton, and, in an impossible self-satirizing mirror reflection of Taylor as media star, a

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There are various questions, centred on the function of woman in representation,

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JOUISSANCE AND WOMAN

Certainly, this ideological mechanism seems unproblematically present when Antony

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boundaries of the subject. Then—and only then—can it be jouissance and revolution’

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Bernstein, Matthew. Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

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