Publisher's Synopsis
In opposition to the critical positions of new historicists and cultural materialists. This book reaffirms that Shakespeare's plays represent enduring truths of our emotional and spiritual life and that these truths help account for Shakespeare's continuing popularity.;Drawing upon medieval and Renaissance religious ideas as well as both Renaissance and modern conceptions of character. The author explores Shakespeare's dramatization of the emotional and spiritual suffering of the heroes in "Hamlet", "Othello", "Macbeth", and "King Lear". He shows that their profound passions are not infirmities but a testimony to their heroic capacity to suffer and feel. Kirsch suggests that though the range of passions depicted in these tradegies is considerable, in each os them there is a dominant emotional and spiritual focus, a particular and intense state of heart and mind that tends to govern both the hero and the world of the play. He then uses Freud, often inconjunction with Renaissance religious ideas, to understand the dramatic force of these emotional and spiritual states and to show the ways in which they represent realities of our own lives.
