Wheel of Fire Book

Brutus is confronted with a task from which his nature revolts.
from Brutus and Macbeth


This is a book that I bought half a century ago (more actually) during my brief time as an English major in college. The old edition that I have has an Introduction by T.S. Eliot. I've read some of the essays in here, most recently the excellent "Brutus and Macbeth".

Here's a complete list of the book's chapters.

I. On the Principles of Shakespeare Interpretation.
II. The Embassy of Death: an Essay on Hamlet
III. The philosophy of Troilus and Cressida
IV. Measure for Measure and the Gospels
V. The Othello Music
VI. Brutus and Macbeth
VII. Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil
VIII. King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque
IX. The Lear Universe
X. The Pilgrimage of Fate: an Essay on Timon of Athens
XI. Shakespeare and Tolstoy
XII. Symbolic Personification
XIII. The Shakespearean Metaphysic
XIV. Tolstoy's Attack on Shakespeare (1934)
XV. Hamlet Reconsidered (1947)

Recommended to anyone who's interested enough in Shakespeare that they want to pursue the great interpreters of his plays. I found in my recent read that Knight's essay gave me a whole raft of things to think about in Julius Caesar that I wouldn't have realized on my own.



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