ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Originally published in 1930, The Wheel of Fire is the masterwork of the brilliant English scholar G. Wilson Knight, in which he founded a new and influential school of Shakespearean criticism.

Detailed explanation-2: -The wheel of fire is a traditional metaphor for hell, deriving from the medieval period. Envisioning hell is not surprising for Lear, since Cordelia has only recently rescued him from a hellish existence on earth.

Detailed explanation-3: -Wilson Knight, “King Lear gives one the impression of life’s abundance magnificently compressed into one play. No Shakespearean work shows so wide a range of sympathetic creation; we seem to be confronted, not with certain men and women only, but with mankind… The play is a microcosm of the human race.”

Detailed explanation-4: -A. C. Bradley saw Shakespearean tragedy characterized by the “tragic flaw, ” the internal imperfection in the hero that brings him down. His downfall becomes his own doing, and he is no longer, as in classical tragedy, the helpless victim of fate.