SOURCE: Turner, Frederick. “The Invention of Value: Shakespeare's Fatal Cleopatra.” In Fortier, Feliciter, Fideliter: Centennial Lectures of the Graduate School of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, edited by Lewis Pyenson, pp. 19-63. Lafayette: Graduate School, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1999.

In the following essay, Turner examines the theme of creativity in Antony and Cleopatra. The critic devotes particular attention to the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra; their attempt to devise a new world that, in contrast to the Roman one, would be unpredictable and self-generating; and the rhetorical figures, especially of hyperbole and paradox, that underscore the motif of emerging life.

I. the Laboratory of Creation

At the core of Shakespeare's economic theory is a radical vision of the world as spontaneously generating order, structure, and value in a continual self-metamorphosis. Antony and Cleopatra is a sort of thought experiment, in which the object of study—how emergent structures...