Jones on Grout (2024)

Holly Grout’s Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France expands the scholarship on Cleopatra’s reception via its focus on French sources while also making the case that Egypt’s last queen had a significant influence on the concept of celebrity as it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France and beyond. Grout focuses her discussion around three figures whom she identifies as examples of “exceptional womanhood” (1): Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker. The volume, however, is far more than a collection of biographical sketches; it explores the creative and performative process that shaped the biographical traditions of these celebrated women. 

Despite the fame of Pascal’s quote in Pensées about Cleopatra’s nose—“The nose of Cleopatra, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed”—there has not been as much attention devoted to the reception of Cleopatra in French works of art and literature as there has been in English or Italian ones, perhaps due to the perennial popularity of Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance painting. For this reason, scholars interested in Sardou’s Cléopâtre and the connections between Cleopatra and early cinema will find this book of particular interest. In addition, Grout focuses as much on performance as on text when discussing drama and ventures further into the worlds of costume and dance than Cleopatra scholars have in the past, making this book particularly appealing to scholars of theater and performance studies. 

Indeed, France is fertile ground for the reception of Cleopatra. A period of intense Egyptomania following Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, coinciding with the pre-World War I rise of France as the hub of the emerging film industry, created ideal conditions for Cleopatra’s story to become an irresistible narrative, particularly in highly visual media such as theater, cinema, and dance. This cultural context, as Grout observes, has features in common with the time in which Cleopatra lived and these correspondences drive much of the book’s analysis.

Grout structures her study in four chapters plus a short introduction and conclusion. The first chapter considers Cleopatra herself and focuses on the ways in which the queen managed her own public image, for instance sponsoring public spectacles and associating herself with the goddess Isis. Grout also credits Cleopatra with leveraging multiple identities (Greek as well as Egyptian, and with ties to powerful men in Rome) to advance her political agenda. For Grout, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, with its reliance on Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s biography of Mark Antony, is the bridge between the ancient sources and the reception of Cleopatra in nineteenth-century France. Her survey of French literary and artistic receptions of Cleopatra, along with a section on costuming Cleopatra, provides a perfect transition to the trilogy of chapters that dive deep into the lives and art of the three modern ‘exceptional women’ who, in various ways, ‘play’ Cleopatra. 

As noted in the book’s introduction, technically only Sarah Bernhardt plays Cleopatra, in the sense that she performs the role on stage. Grout, however, extends Cleopatra to represent a type and the term “play” to encompass the meaning “play with” and, in this sense, Colette (in her role as mummified Egyptian queen come to life in the pantomime Rêve d’Egypte) and Josephine Baker (whose dance performances earned her the moniker “Jazz Cleopatra”) can join the tradition of performers who are in dialogue with Cleopatra and her mythology as they share the medium of the Paris stage. The chapters on the three women are arranged chronologically and also, as it happens, in order of decreasing degree to which they literally represent Cleopatra. There is likely a causal link here as well: once Sarah Bernhardt has created a renowned French Cleopatra, subsequent performers can evoke the Egyptian queen more readily without explicitly acting out her story. 

Each of the three chapters on Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker contains a section titled “Reverberations.” These sections detail the contributions each woman made to inventing the concept of celebrity and provide support for Grout’s assertion that “Hollywood did not create the modern celebrity as we know her; Third Republic France did’ (21). In these “Reverberations” sections, Grout analyzes how each of the women packages herself as “a fantasy of exceptional womanhood” (88) by manipulating her identities in ways that defy characterization and allow her to occupy a space that is at once the Other and “just like us” (127).

The explosion of mass media in nineteenth-century France facilitates both the creation of celebrities and Grout’s analysis of her subjects. New publications created in response to expanding literacy efficiently disseminated the blend of truth and fiction that comprises celebrity biographies and fuel popular obsession with exceptional women like Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker. These publications are also the archival sources upon which Grout relies to produce a compelling volume filled with intriguing details that link performances with broader cultural trends.

Playing Cleopatra is a fascinating study of Third Republic French theatrical performances as well as the history of celebrity. With its extensive endnotes and bibliography, it will be an important resource for scholars of history, French, theater studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and reception studies. The story it tells about Cleopatra, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker is captivating and accessible enough to attract a non-specialist audience as well. This attractive volume contains fourteen black-and-white images and is nearly flawless in production. Overall, the book represents a welcome addition to the study of Cleopatra’s reception and, I hope, one that inspires more scholars to work on Cleopatra in French art and literature.