Originally published in 1930, "Wheel of Fire" is the masterwork of the brilliant English scholar G. Wilson Knight in which he founds a new and influential school of Shakespearean criticism.
"This is a reissue of the first of Mr. Wilson Knight's four major volumes on Shakespearian interpretation. Originally published in 1930, The Wheel of Fire inaugurated a new, and still expanding, school of Shakespearian study both throughout the English-speaking world and on the Continent. The approach is essentially imaginative, giving attention not only to character and plot, and indeed especially to symbolic overtone and poetic atmosphere, thereby revealing design and significance where previous commentary had remained baffled, the results being perhaps most valuable with such comparatively neglected plays as Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens. From this treatment the works of Shakespeare emerge less as studies of particular types of character or particular events from an Elizabethan viewpoint than as the products of universal genius concerned with universal themes..."