Shakespeare's Roman trilogy: Contemporary readings of history and politic

The dissertation interprets Shakespeare's Roman history plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus--in the historical context of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In terms of critical practices, new historicism has influenced the study of Renaissance literature and offered a variety of heterogenous writing practices such as opposition to the compartmentalization of disciplines, attention to the economic and historical contexts of culture, self-reflexiveness about critic's implication in the act of writing about culture, and concern with the intertextuality of texts and discourse.;Opposed to orthodox scholarship, new historicism reconstruct literary texts as historical objects by considering documents and methods previously excluded from traditional literary and aesthetic study and examining the dynamic historical understanding of social and political pressures underlying literary texts. The focus of such works had been on a refiguration of the sociocultural field within which now-canonical Renaissance literary and dramatic works had been originally produced, on situating them in relation not only to various other genres and modes of writing from beyond the literary canon but also to other cultural domains, including the social practices and political institutions of early modern England.;My reading of Shakespeare's Roman history plays is to investigate how the authority treats its antagonistic parties and adjusts its socio-political forces to consolidate its sovereignity in terms of Tudor-Stuart historiography. The Chapter on Julius Caesar explores the Elizabethan-Jacobean political consciousness and the critique of monarchical absolutism; the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra, the matter of the ruler's political corruption as the critique of the emerging Jacobean political culture; the chapter on Coriolanus, the question of class struggle and political dissension as the Jacobean political topicalities.