After the overdetermined death of Caesar, about which characters within the play and in a much more extensive cultural discourse have talked and interpreted so much, we get a bewilderingly random death. Cinna’s death is thus part of a structural contrast. It is about action without words, or about the failure of language to effect action. Cinna’s attempts to plead for his life are shortened and abrupt – far from the measured eloquence of what we have just witnessed. But the immediate result of Antony’s clever and elevated rhetoric before the Roman citizenry is presented as the barbarity of mob
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