Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Of the many books on Shakespeare's history plays, this is the first conceived in terms of ideas rather than of individual plays, and treating both the English and the Roman plays alike as evidence of the dramatist's point of view. In his wide-ranging and original enquiry into Shakespeare's interpretation of history, Dr Wilders devotes each chapter to an idea which can be discerned in all the history plays. The historical characters are shown to be subject to the changing processes of time which ruin their achievements, and the arbitrary, unpredictable influence of fate or fortune which thwarts their ambitions. The choices they are compelled to make place them in impossible dilemmas: action of some kind is obligatory but no available course is satisfactory. In time of crisis they appeal to God or the supernatural but their prayers are seldom, if ever, answered. The struggles they undergo arise from limitations inherent in the human condition. At times they look back with regret to an imaginary golden age-- such as the days of Edward III or Henry V - to a demi-paradise: the 'lost garden' of the book's title. In developing his theme Dr. Wilders strongly challenges the interpretation of the E.M.W. Tillyard which many students uncritically accept as the 'orthodox' approach to the history plays." -Publisher.

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