SOURCE: “‘Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom’: Antony and Cleopatra in Its Time,” in Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 1991, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Yachnin explores the parallels between Antony and Cleopatra's contrasting of Egyptian past with Roman future and the shift from an Elizabethan to a Jacobean style of rule.

In terms of the political culture of the early Stuart period, Antony and Cleopatra's account of the shift from the magnificent but senescent Egyptian past to the pragmatic but successful Roman future can be seen as a critical register of the symbolic constructions and political ramifications of the shift from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean style of rule. In this paper, I want to suggest that the meanings of the play in 1606-1607 were on the whole more political and certainly more topical than they are now. To locate Antony and Cleopatra in the linguistic...