Lost in Translation: Cleopatra, Tamora, and the Gendered Critique of Translatio Imperii in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays

Shakespeare’s so-called Roman plays are bookended by tales of two alien queens: Tamora, Queen of the Goths from Titus Andronicus (1594), and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, from Antony and Cleopatra (1607). By placing these figures in dialogue, we may see how Shakespeare uses them to examine the fundamental English Renaissance intellectual assumption of heirdom from Rome. Both Tamora and Cleopatra emulate, parody, and subvert the cultural and literary ideals of Latinity or romanitas (the term coined by the Carthaginian Tertullian, ca. 205, to describe the constellation of customs and mindsets, mores, associated with the empire).[1] As non-Roman barbarians and as women, they are also excluded from the Renaissance definitions of humanitas as a trans-European elite masculine community of letters bound by a shared classical heritage. They are, to borrow Margaret Ferguson’s term, “daughters of Dido” in that, like Virgil’s queen, they are “emblems for a human departure from a foreordained historical narrative.”[2] That historical narrative is expressed by the phrase translatio studii et imperii, the notion that the study of Latin and the power of empire go hand in in hand, mutually strengthening and justifying each other. Just as Dido is the single greatest threat, politically, militarily and psychologically, to Aeneas’ mission to found the city of Rome in the Aeneid, Tamora and Cleopatra represents threats to the idea of romanitas as a legitimizing cultural foundation for empire. These two Roman tragedies examine, in reverse order, the English Renaissance conception of the Roman empire: its beginning,…