“Let Rome in Tiber melt”: Hermaphroditic Transformation in Antonius and Antony and Cleopatra

This essay uses Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as a vehicle for considering the connections between the theme of gender fluidity and the practice of literary transformations in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Antonius. The characters in both versions demonstrate the desire for and resistance to transformation, presenting a worldview that parallels Hermaphroditus’s own contradictory hatred of his disempowering metamorphosis and his prayer for anyone who bathes in Salmacis’s fountain to be similarly changed. This contradictory interpretation of the union of opposites serves as a lens through which to understand both plays, which fluctuate between anxieties over female power and recognition of the loss of clear markers distinguishing men and women, Rome and Egypt, conqueror and conquered, original and imitation. The two plays finally reject notions of masculine rigidity in favor of a more flexible view of gender and artistic creativity.