The king my father's wrack

About this book

In The King My Father's Wrack, Stephen K. Land sheds light on the issues of guilt and responsibility built into the structure of Shakespearian drama. In his mature plays, Shakespeare presents moral failure its entailed upon mortality. Dying kings, such as Lear, Richard II, and the ghost in Hamlet, are emblematic of the paradoxical self-frustration of human aspiration. As Land Writes in his preface, "the hero's (or sometimes the heroines) confrontation with human weakness, with the fact of mortality ... became Shakespeare's central concern." In order to study this underlying moral coherence of Shakespearian drama, Land examines the ways in which Shakespeare constructs his stories, comparing the plays with one another and with their chief sources. The result is an overview encompassing all the plays except the early histories and some of the collaborative works. Written ill plain terms and without theoretical assumptions, it will be of interest to all students of Shakespeare as well as to the specialist. --Book Jacket.