When I was thinking of writing a biography of Ulysses S.
Indeed, it is mildly depressing to realize that the work of collecting and publishing Washington’s papers is still going on, nearly two centuries after his death, though hardly surprising. Lawrence’s chief activity seems to have been writing letters, and the same is true for John Adams, and, judging by the reviews of Ron Chernow’s Washington, of George Washington in spades. For example, apart from blowing up Turkish trains, T.E.
Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject. Not to argue with Shakespeare, but his Cleopatra is one of the less interesting roles for a woman among his plays (as compared, say, to Lady Macbeth or Portia), and Shaw’s Cleopatra is altogether too slight, innocent and kittenish a figure to have captured or held the attention of a man like Caesar, let alone that of a handsome, virile, and ambitious brute like Mark Antony, while Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra seems merely shrill and vixenish, like a star whose assistant has been a minute late with her morning coffee rather than the coldly calculating ruler of a great power who intends to dominate what we now call “the Middle East,” and to prevent Rome, the “superpower” of its day, from swallowing up her country. With a clear eye, great courage, and formidable erudition, Stacy Schiff has succeeded in removing these and many other misconceptions from my mind, and replacing them with the fascinating portrait of an altogether more substantial woman, albeit one who apparently had enough sex appeal to sleep with the two most powerful and charismatic men of her day, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and bear one child with the first and three with the second. Thatcher (albeit on a much larger scale) with a degree of sex appeal to which Mrs. Extravagant mascara and long false eyelashes are as much a part of my mental image of the queen as her committing suicide by pressing an asp brought to her in a basket of figs against her breast.
Speak the name Cleopatra and I think not at all of the historical figure, still less of the real woman, but of Vivien Leigh at the height of her beauty playing her on stage in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (with Lawrence Olivier as Mark Antony), or on film in Gabriel Pascal’s ambitious “box-office stinker” of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and, of course, Elizabeth Taylor playing the Egyptian queen in Cleopatra, the disastrous 1963 film that cost $44 million (approximately $308 million today) and nearly sank 20th-Century Fox for good.
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