Circling the Square: Geometry, Masculinity, and the Norms of Antony and Cleopatra

Mazzio’s chapter demonstrates how writers aligned ideal and potentially replicable masculinities with properties of the geometric square, how Renaissance dramas could expose potentially harmful ideologies of ‘squares’ and ‘squaring,’ and how Antony and Cleopatra offers Shakespeare’s most powerful critique of the normalizing logic of the square. Opening with the etymology of ‘enormous,’ meaning ‘out of square,’ Antony’s description of having ‘not kept [his] square’ while in Egypt with Cleopatra, and the legacy of Aristotle’s ‘square man’ in early modernity, Mazzio then examines productive tensions between the square and circle for exposing otherwise supressed vulnerabilities of ‘normal’ masculinity. For Shakespeare, moreover, the geometric foundations of ‘measure’ and identity in Rome find their origin (not simply opposite) in Egypt, where Cleopatra establishes an alternative geometry of masculinity.