The Wheel of Fire

G. Wilson Knight is one of the great pioneering Shakespeare critics. As he explains in his introduction in the essays in this work he does not speak about Shakespearean 'theatre' about all that has to do with playing the plays. Instead he reads the text, not simply in time, but what he calls 'spatially'. This means in a sense thematically, finding a unity of mood and atmosphere, of motif and meaning. For instance in his provocative reading of 'Hamlet' he sees Hamlet as a kind of sick soul set over against the healthy world of others, including that of usurper Claudius. At Knight sees it Hamlet is the death- obsessed dark dreamer who cannot be saved for life, not even by the love of Ophelia. Knight searches through the play as a whole in order to make Hamlet a character set apart from all the others, the one whose indecision, despair, brooding are signs of his deep disturbance of soul. In another essay in the work Knight compares this moody , despairing Hamlet with the Tolstoy who at the moment of greatest triumph and well- being fell into a depression over his sense of life's meaninglessness. Knight claims that Tolstoy did not ever really get beyond this sense of meaninglessness, while Shakespeare in Lear and other late works does. There are also outstanding essays here on Lear, Othello, Measure to Measure. Shakespeare like all great writers is reinterpreted and added on generation by generation. In his generation Knight made a major contribution to this. His work is still not simply readable but instructive and inspiring.

Knight's theories have become commonplaces. The idea that Hamlet is a bad guy? The theories the Duke of Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens are Christ figures? All those are propounded for (as far as I know) the first time in this eloquent book. Aside from having famous theories, Knight supports his claims, which at first can seem absurd, with mountains of evidence gathered from a fine-toothed reading of the text. He never makes obvious points or fallacious arguments; he starts out by noticing fine details in the text and then draws these into a coherent, convincing whole. I don't agree with every word he's ever written, but all his words are brilliant. Knight is the best literary critic I have ever read, by a wide margin, and this may be his best book.