Doing the Numbers: The Roman Mathematics of Civil War in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

This chapter argues that Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, combines a novel perspective on what was at stake in Rome just after Caesar's assassination with an ability to shape civil war into the austerely satisfying trope of number play. Shakespeare's perspective on Roman history, Feeney shows, is not hampered by the Romans' own (Augustan and later) teleology: he presents the history of the Republic as highly contingent.

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