Includes bibliographical references.

Despite their diversity in tone and subject matter, Shakespeare's four mature tragedies -- Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth -- all have an essential experience in common. Bernard Mc Elroy defines this experience as the collapse of the subjective world of the tragic hero. The world-view of the central character is undermined at a fundamental level; his basic assumption about who he is and what is reality are rendered untenable, and he must struggle to reconstruct his total vision upon some new basis. With his subjective world ruins, the hero undergoes a period of extreme disorientation during which he struggles to reimpose cohesion upon his personal world. Each faces the same problem: how to endure what is, for him, unendurable.

But it makes no sense to study the tragic hero's apprehension of the world without studying the world he apprehends; and each play does delineate a "world," a highly distinct, self-contained version of reality. Therefore the author's approach is to comment on the world delineated by each of the tragedies and then to trace in action the relationship between the world of the play and the subjective world of the hero. This wise and humane book makes good use of recent scholarship, but is wholly original in its central idea. -- Description from book jacket.

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