The Historical Myth of Cleopatra in Calderón And His Contemporaries

This paper analyses the treatment of Cleopatra’s myth in five plays —four Spanish and one Italian— of the seventeenth century. The elements used for my analysis are the proverbial beauty of the Egyptian Queen and her suicide. The ways of expressing them provide guidelines to understand the significance of this historic figure and to verify her redemption, a process then in progress on the stage. They are Calderón’s El mayor monstruo del mundo, Marco Antonio y Cleopatra (a play printed in one suelta attributed to Calderón), Rojas Zorrilla’s Los áspides de Cleopatra, Belmonte Bermúdez’s Los tres señores del mundo and Giovanni Delfino’s La Cleopatra. Of the five, perhaps Calderón’s is the least relevant, because in it (unlike the other four) Cleopatra’s story is not the central dramatic point. All others have dramatized it with special emphasis on the beauty of the queen but also highlighting her final sacrifice as an extreme example of love —a clear triumph. The apex in this process of redemption the Egyptian queen is Delfino’s La Cleopatra, where her beauty becomes a moral attribute and her nobility becomes evident in the manner in which she faces death