#anyway my hyperfixation on this play goes brrrrrrrrrrr

[butchhamlet]

historical cleopatra was indeed from a greek dynasty! macedonian greek, specifically, descended from one of alexander's men. and you are correct that they went very hard on adopting the culture, but were still greek! and right about the coins! AND right that her great beauty came later! plus their entire family was constantly doing incestuous marriages with each other, not marrying from the populace, so probably historical cleopatra wasn't egyptian at all, yes. (stacy schiff talks about this in her cleopatra biography, if anyone wants more info!)

however! i clarify historical cleopatra because this post by tumblr user butchhamlet, from a book with shakespeare in the title, is about shakespeare's specific version of cleopatra. who is almost definitely a woman of color. i mean, she's described as "tawny" in the first scene of the play, and she refers to herself as "with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black," ie, pinched lovingly by the sun until her skin is black (act 1 scene 5). janet adelman has a great section about this in her antony and cleopatra analysis goldmine, which discusses the fact that 1. "black" didn't always mean literally black in shakespeare's time (it could also just mean "not fair-skinned and -haired"), but also 2. that "the sun makes africans black" was a common trope in early modern england.

how one would literally categorize her race isn't clear because, as you noted, the idea of race was very different back then. but it's pretty clear that her skin is darker than an englishman's. notably, probably darker than antony's, because the play leans hard on portraying cleopatra and egypt as an exotic, sensual, feminine foil to the cold, masculine, passionless rome that octavian rules and antony is dissatisfied with. i don't think cleopatra is a one-note solely-stereotype character (i think she's a great character), but the play absolutely associates her exoticness with sexuality and the ability of the foreign woman to charm and feminize an upstanding warrior man, and that is extremely tied into racial stereotypes, now as it was then.

of course, "exotic" in romantimes could just mean "from anywhere that's not rome," but we are not in romantimes; we are in shakespearetimes! and in shakespearetimes i'd say it's pretty safe to call shakespeare's cleopatra a woman of color, which is what dr. karim-cooper is talking about here.

"But there is something particular about Cleopatra and the imaginative escape she offers for white performers. She presents a fantasy of a stately queen with an erotic power that white actresses can inhabit and take pleasure in without facing any of the difficulties faced by Black women. Like white European colonial settlers, they occupy her character though only briefly. And this is nothing new. In the seventeenth century, one aristocratic woman had her portrait painted as Cleopatra—a performative act in which it was possible to pretend to be the kind of woman she could never actually be within the chaste and virtuous bounds of Renaissance white womanhood. The sitter is identified as Lady Anne Clifford. A Jacobean lady in Egyptian regalia, according to seventeenth-century orientalist notion of national costume, holds an asp above her breast, iconically invoking Cleopatra. For a long time, it seems, white women have stepped into the fantasy of the dark queen. It seems odd that Antony and Cleopatra was not always viewed as one of Shakespeare's race plays. That is changing, finally. If theatre directors continue to centralise whiteness in their readings of the play, however, it in many ways replicates Caesar's triumph over Egypt. We relive Cleopatra's defeat every time we watch a white woman play her—due respect to Dames Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, and Eve Best. But we begin to see more clearly the Egyptian Queen's own prophetic vision as she chose to end her life on her own terms. She imagined herself being performed for years to come by actors who do not resemble her in any way—and that is, for the most part, what has happened."

—Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (emphasis mine)