Partly Based on the author's thesis (M.A.), University of Colorado, 1962.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 135-138).

"The Shakespearean Kings is an essay at once in the text of thirteen of the plays, history, and politics as an applied art-- an art which is not, after all, very different now than it was in the Sixteenth Century. While urging the essential integrity of the plays and the poet, the author does not try to make Shakespeare fit any of political or religious doctrines either of his age or of our own. In fact Shakespeare tested, and tired of, far more doctrines than most men. William Shakespeare is here seen as a dramatist quick to recognize success, quick to capitalize on it, and quickening also to a sense of the relationship of his country's chaotic past to its fragile present. Understanding, as did few of his contemporaries, the quality of the feudal society to which he devoted his nine great history plays, Shakespeare chose, from the wealth of material before him, the reigns of the kings, weak, evil or both, as the medium through which he gleaned such insight into us all that he remains, uniquely, the poet of whom successive generations do not tire. As his art ripened, he passed from history to tragedy; from the study of the condition of events to the study of the condition of man. Hamlet and Julius Caesar are treated here as those exercises in ultimate futility beyond which lie the secular damnation and transfiguration which Macbeth and King Lear, respectively, represent." -Publisher.

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