The King My Father's Wrack: The Moral Nexus Of Shakespearian Drama

A study of the way issues of guilt and responsibility are built into the structure of Shakespearian drama. In his mature plays Shakespeare presents human moral failure as entailed upon mortality. Dying kings, such as Richard II, Old Hamlet's ghost, and Lear, are emblematic of the paradoxical self-frustration of human aspiration. In the late plays, the romances, Shakespeare depicts the resolution, the healing of the stricken king. This is an interpretative study of the underlying moral coherence of Shakespearian drama. Written in plain terms and without theoretical assumptions, it will be of interest to the general reader of Shakespeare as well as to the specialist. The author, a Cambridge graduate who studied with Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto, is author of several published works on literature and the history of ideas.