Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" and the New Astronomy (2018)

Notes and Queries, Volume 65, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 81–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjx222

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare follows Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans from 41 BCE up to the founding of the Roman Empire in 30 BCE. The play is as much a tragedy as it is a historical drama and love story, and it has an unusually large variety of sub-themes. One of these is contemporary cosmology, which is consistent with the play’s allusions to Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars. Sacerdoti argues that the play’s "new heaven, new earth" refers to a passage in the Book of Revelations. We propose that Digges’ model of the New Astronomy is a reasonable alternative.

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Work Title Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" and the New Astronomy (2018)
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Open Access
Creators
  1. Peter D. Usher
Keyword
  1. Antony and Cleopatra
  2. Thomas Digges
  3. New Astronomy
  4. Bruno
  5. Infinite Universe
  6. Shakespeare
License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)
Work Type Research Paper
Publication Date March 2018
Deposited July 29, 2019

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    • Notes and Queries, Volume 65, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 81–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjx222
    • In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare follows Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans from 41 BCE up to the founding of the Roman Empire in 30 BCE. The play is as much a tragedy as it is a historical drama and love story, and it has an unusually large variety of sub-themes. One of these is contemporary cosmology, which is consistent with the play’s allusions to Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars. Sacerdoti argues that the play’s "new heaven, new earth" refers to a passage in the Book of Revelations. We propose that Digges’ model of the New Astronomy is a reasonable alternative.
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    • 2018-03
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