A New Historicist reading of the lives of two Queens of Egypt: 'Cleopatra' and 'Nazli' as depicted by Shakespeare, Dryden, Rawya Rashed and Rashad Kamel respectively

            This thesis is a new historicist study of selected literary texts that depict Queen Cleopatra VI of Hellenistic Egypt and Queen Nazli Sabri of Modern Egypt, who have been misrepresented by traditional history and literature until present time. The researcher uses the New Historicism theory to determine how there are no objective truths in history and there is no concrete reality of an age. In light of this discussion, the researcher examines Authorial Intentionalism by emphasizing the structural analyses of language, which shape the reader’s perception of both queens in stylistic terms. The researcher, thus, starts her study of Cleopatra and Nazli by applying the New Historicism theory to the selected literary texts, which represent both queens, to deconstruct the traditional opposition between history as factual and literature as fictional and unmask the political ideologies behind Cleopatra and Nazli’s discursive constructions. Translation of the Arabic texts that depict Nazli has been attempted by the researcher, where certain sections have been literally translated so as not to weaken the effect of the Arabic structure. The researcher then draws upon Mailloux’s examination of the temporal reading model to analyze authorial intentionalism in the examination of the texts understudy. Therefore, as the authors of the texts understudy approach their subjects from one of several directions, the researcher proves by comparing between Cleopatra, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1623) and Dryden's All for Love (1677), and Nazli in Rawia Rashed's Nazli: A Queen in Exile (2010) and Rashad Kamel's Queen Nazli: Love and Revenge (2010) how reality is constructed by the free play of institutions and rhetoric among discourses as both queens have been misrepresented in history and literature.