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 this analysis of Antony and Cleopatra the powerful new historicist practice of interpreting “literary” texts in terms...