Intended Audience
Please join the English Department in welcoming Professor Roya Biggie, SMCM alumn, for a lecture this Wednesday, April 17 at 4:30 in Upper Montgomery!
Race-Making in Shakespeare’s Egypt: Cleopatra’s Occult Knowledge
In this talk, Professor Biggie examines the early modern paradigm of natural magic in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Beliefs in nature’s enchanted forces shaped English life, evidenced in discourses as wide ranging as Thomas Eliot’s The Castel of Helth (1539) and Gervase Markhan’s The English Housewife (1615). While scholars have documented the prevalence of such beliefs, little attention has been paid to their ancient Egyptian roots and how these sources participated in early modern productions of race. In depicting Cleopatra as a practitioner of natural magic, Shakespeare not only reminds audiences of Egypt’s contributions to this cosmology, but also incites perhaps uneasy cross-cultural identifications. If English racial identity cohered at least partially around shared domestic practices, Shakespeare troubles this particular form of race-making by demonstrating that Europeans, from the continental philosopher to the English housewife, contemplated their worlds with a similar strain of wisdom that guides Egypt’s cunning queen.
Roya Biggie is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of English at Knox College.
She earned her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center, her master's degree from Georgetown University, and her bachelor's degree from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her scholarship has appeared in Renaissance Drama, Early Modern Literary Studies, Early Theatre and in the collections Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance (2022), Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy (2024), and Teaching Race in the European Renaissance (2023). She is currently completing her book manuscript, Sympathetic Ecologies in Early Modern English Tragedies. The project positions sympathy as a vital framework through which the English conceptualized contact across class and racial divides. Research for this project has been supported by the ACLS, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.