Antony and Cleopatra (Vol. 81) | Paul Yachnin (essay date spring 1993)
Paul Yachnin (essay date spring 1993)
SOURCE: Yachnin, Paul. “Shakespeare's Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Antony and Cleopatra.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 33, no. 2 (spring 1993): 343-63.
[In the following essay, Yachnin views Antony and Cleopatra as a critique of absolutist loyalty to the divinely appointed sovereign.]
What might Antony and Cleopatra tell us about English political culture of around 1606, and what might it tell us about Shakespeare's theater's relationship with that culture?1 In this essay, I want to suggest answers to these questions in terms of the new historicist focus on the “theatricality of power and the power of theatricality,” but I want to avoid and critique two related assumptions which, I will suggest, have undermined new historicism's attempts to historicize texts such as Shakespeare's plays. Overall, I want to be able to enlist in...
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