EL150: Cleopatra as Fortuna

Simonds, ""`To the Very Heart of Loss': Renaissance iconography in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra."

Peggy Simonds reference of Cleopatra as representing the Roman goddess Fortuna fits extremely well with the themes of the play. Fortuna, the goddess of both good and bad luck, is a two-faced seductress who bends the wills of men into taking chances which (more often than not) end up being bad decisions. Simmonds commitment to this claim is astounding considering that she breaks up Fortuna's traits into nine categories, and gives examples (ranging from "okay" to "excellent") for reach one of them.

The strongest example she has is of Fortuna's two-faced persona. My classmates and I said many times both in class and on our blogs that Cleopatra was completely two-faced throughout the play. Half the time she was siding with Antony, telling him how much she loved him and wanted to be with him, and the other half she would sink into this extreme feeling of jealousy and betrayal. She supported Antony, up until she would retreat in battle. And just as Simond's says, Antony takes a risk in trusting her. "More recently," she says, "Michael Lloyd hints that Antony is addicted rather specifically to games of chance, which are mentioned over and over again in the play, and which increasingly cause him to become a pawn of the fickle goddess Fortuna."

After reading this article, I couldn't help but draw similar conclusions about Woody Allen's latest film Match Point, which is a story very similar to that of Antony and Cleopatra. The story revolves around the idea that luck drives every aspect of our lives, and the outcomes of our choices are only determined by chance. It's a story about a man who marries into an English upper class family, only to have an affair with an out-of-work American actress (played by Scarlett Johansson). She, like Cleopatra, is overtly sexual and two-faced. Johansson's character is the embodiment of Fortuna. The parallels between Match Point's aristocracy vs exotic American lower class is very similar to that of Rome vs Egypt. I know this class is Intro to Literary Study (and I keep shifting towards Film Study), I find it important to catch these intertextual references that bridge the gap between Renaissance mythology, Shakespearean tragedy, and modern day filmmaking.